20. BACKS TO THE WALL

IF OBSERVERS ON another planet had been able to look closely at the Earth at the start of 1918, they might have been struck not only by the unusual propensity of its inhabitants to kill one another, but by their willingness to travel huge distances to do so. Never had so many people gone so far to make war. Under British command on the Western Front were troops from Canada, South Africa, the West Indies, Australia, New Zealand, and India—which alone would send nearly a million soldiers overseas to various fronts by the end of the war. Canadian Private John Kerr, who would later win the Victoria Cross, had walked 50 miles from his Alberta farm to enlist; to join a unit fighting in Africa, Arthur Darville Dudley, a British settler in Northern Rhodesia, rode 200 miles by bicycle on dirt roads and paths through the bush. Soldiers from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands found themselves fighting in both East and West Africa as well as in towns in Palestine whose names they knew from the Bible. To help protect Allied shipping in the Mediterranean came a naval squadron from Japan. British troops from Wiltshire and Devon were fighti ng soldiers from Bulgaria—an ally of Germany—in Greece. Later in the year, Africans from the French colony of Senegal would fight alongside soldiers from Serbia. From Egypt, the British brought some 80,000 men to work on the docks at Marseille and elsewhere in Europe. More than 90,000 Chinese did construction work for British forces in France or unloaded supplies at the ports. Other military laborers came from Fiji in the Pacific, Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, the mountains of Basutoland in southern Africa, and the French colonies of Vietnam and Laos. Living quarters for African and Asian laborers behind the Western Front were almost always in fenced-off compounds, an attempt—not entirely successful—to prevent any mixing that might give rise to ideas about equality.

The troops on three continents fought not just in steel helmets but in fezzes, turbans, kepis, and tropical pith helmets. Guns and supplies were hauled into battle by oxen, horses, mules, and trucks in France, by camels in the Middle East, and everywhere by exhausted men. Soldiers succumbed to malaria and sleeping sickness in Africa and to frostbite in the Alps, where the Italians fought from fortifications hacked out of snow and ice. On both sides, the colossal cost of the war was measured not only in human life: British war-related spending had by 1918 reached 70 percent of the gross national product—triple what it had been at the height of battling Napoleon, and higher than it would be in the Second World War. Only huge loans made this possible, and taxpayers in the warring countries would bear the burden for years to come as these were repaid; Britain's national debt, for example, increased more than tenfold during the conflict. And no end was in sight: Lloyd George and other officials would soon be making plans for a war continuing into 1920 and beyond.

For the Allies, the signs were not good. A year before there had been roughly three British Empire, French, or Belgian soldiers for every two Germans in the west. Now, every week, trains were racing across Germany bringing troops no longer needed against Russia—just as tens of thousands of British and French soldiers were being urgently diverted from the Western Front to prop up the collapsing Italian army. By January 1918, therefore, there were some four Germans for every three Allied soldiers in the west. The U.S. Army was not yet much help: although millions of men were being drafted and trained, barely more than 100,000 of them, almost all inexperienced, had made it to Europe. And if casualties continued at the current rate, British forces would need to find more than 600,000 men in the coming year just to replace their losses—far more than conscription could supply. As Churchill put it, "Lads of eighteen and nineteen, elderly men up to forty-five, the last surviving brother, the only son of his mother (and she a widow), the father the sole support of the family, the weak, the consumptive, the thrice wounded—all must now prepare themselves for the scythe." Nonetheless, Haig wanted to launch new attacks in Belgium once the weather allowed. The War Cabinet was dismayed.

Behind the scenes, Milner continued to promote his belief that the real enemy was not Germany but revolutionary Russia, an idea so inflammatory that almost all mentions of it are only in diaries. Writing after a dinner with Milner, a member of the War Cabinet staff predicted that the remainder of the war would be "to decide where the Anglo-German boundary shall run across Asia." A similar note was sounded in the diary of the well-connected writer Beatrice Webb in early 1918, just after she met with Lloyd George: "The EM. and Milner are thinking of a peace at the expense of Russia.... With Russia to cut up, the map of the world is capable of all sorts of rearrangements."

The Germans, however, showed no signs of being interested: they had already beaten Russia and, following the end of the fighting, had helped themselves to a colossal additional expanse of its territory. Why should they share the spoils? They were determined to next achieve a similar victory over Britain and France and dictate a Europe-wide peace. While Milner's imagined rearrangement of the globe languished, the Germans prepared a new offensive.

Although the balance of troops on the Western Front favored Germany, the army high command, which by now was largely running the government, could hear two clocks ticking. They knew that the great battle to decide the war had to be won before summer; otherwise hundreds of thousands, and soon millions, of American troops would join the fight. And in Germany itself there were signs that the country might not be able to hold out long.

Civilians were suffering more painfully than ever. With imports kept out by the British naval blockade, metal was so scarce that everything possible—kettles and cooking pots, doorknobs, brass ornaments, telephone wire, and well over 10,000 church bells—was being confiscated and melted down for munitions. Buried pipes were ripped from beneath the streets. Coal was in short supply, and those waiting in line for it were often shod in cardboard shoes with wooden soles, since scarce leather was saved for soldiers' boots. So many horses had been sent to the front that the Berlin Zoo's elephants were put to work hauling wagons through the streets. Real wages in nonmilitary industries had dropped to almost half of prewar levels. Nitrates once used in fertilizers went into explosives, making food even scarcer. Bread was made from potato peels and sawdust, coffee from bark, and with horsemeat a rare luxury, often the only meat on sale was that of dogs and cats. The rich turned to a thriving black market, while the poor were left to forage in harvested fields and urban trash dumps for whatever scraps of grain or food they could find. Daily calorie consumption was more than halved, which meant that, on average, German adults lost 20 percent of their body weight during the war. In Austria-Hungary, conditions were even worse.

The brilliant radical theorist Rosa Luxemburg was in a prison in Breslau, cold, ill, and hungry, her hair turning white. She watched grimly as horses drew carts into the prison yard filled with uniforms scavenged from wounded or dead soldiers, sometimes torn by bullets or shrapnel and spotted with blood. The prisoners were put to work cleaning and mending them, so that they could clothe fresh bodies being sent into battle. One day she saw a cart arrive pulled by water buffaloes, war booty from Eastern Europe. "The cargo was piled so high that the buffaloes could not make it over the threshold of the gateway. The attending soldier ... began to beat away at the animals with the heavy end of his whip so savagely that the overseer indignantly called him to account. 'Don't you have any pity for the animals?' 'No one has any pity for us people either!' he answered." Millions more felt the same.

Wartime privations inflamed an angry nationalism in Germany, producing a foretaste of the hysteria that, a quarter century later, would reach a climax of unimaginable proportions. Ominously, making the fraudulent claim that Jews were shirking military duty, right-wing forces demanded and won a special census of Jews in the army. Anti-Semitic books, pamphlets, and oratory proliferated. By 1918, the head of the Pan-German League was calling for a "ruthless struggle against Jews."

The generals, however, worried not about anti-Semitism but about revolution. Emboldened by the Bolshevik takeover in Russia, and tired of endless war and shortages, some 400,000 workers went on strike in Berlin at the end of January 1918, demanding peace, new rights for labor, and a "people's republic." The strikes spread to other cities, and to the German navy, less disciplined than the army, which experienced a series of hushed-up mutinies and protests. In shaky Austria-Hungary the strikes grew far larger, and fractures along ethnic lines began to show: Polish, Serbian, Croatian, and Slovene deputies in the imperial parliament were loudly demanding autonomy or independence. Eight hundred sailors in the Austro-Hungarian navy in the Adriatic mutinied and raised the red flag; the naval command had to dispatch three battleships manned by loyalists to suppress them. The entire precarious empire threatened to dissolve if the war went on much longer. The inhabitants of Germany's other major ally, Ottoman Turkey, were suffering near famine. As the economy spiraled downward, the government recklessly printed huge quantities of paper currency for its war expenses. Hundreds of thousands of Turkish soldiers began to desert, many still armed, to live off the countryside as brigands.

The example of Russia made one thing dramatically clear: whatever happened at the front, a country could also collapse from within. The German authorities declared martial law in Berlin and Hamburg, and conscripted tens of thousands of strikers into uniform. That stopped the unrest for the moment, although at the cost of scattering militant leftists throughout the army. To fend off further strikes, the German military needed a swift, decisive victory. In early March 1918 Haig received an intelligence report that "an offensive on a big scale will take place during the present month."

Inside the fortress-like Holloway Prison in London, Alice Wheeldon's hunger strike finally brought results: she faced down Lloyd George and won. The prime minister's private secretary called the Home Office, an official there recorded, to say that Lloyd George "thought she should on no account be allowed to die in prison." After less than ten months of her ten-year sentence, the heavy doors of the jail swung open and she walked free. Her early release was again proof of the care the British government took to avoid creating martyrs.

Official wariness of antiwar forces remained as intense as ever. The 1918 New Year's card sent out by the War Office counterintelligence unit bore the legend "The Hidden Hand" and showed a helmeted, flag-swathed Britannia wielding a trident against the hairy, bearded beast Subversion. Smoke and fire issuing from its mouth, the beast is creeping toward a British fighti ng man, preparing to stab him in the back. In late January, Basil Thomson warned the War Cabinet of "a rather sudden growth of pacifism."

More than 1,000 COs were still behind bars, attendance at peace rallies was on the rise, and, to the government's dismay, the envoy to Britain of what was now known as Soviet Russia, Maxim Litvinov, was eagerly sought after as a speaker by groups on the left. Britons in such organizations could also take some encouragement from comrades in the United States. American radicals scoffed at President Woodrow Wilson's high-flown rhetoric about democracy and self-determination, insisting that the real reason the U.S. was fighting for an Allied victory was to ensure that massive American war loans to Britain and France would be paid back. The U.S. quickly began conscription, and although American war resisters were never as numerous as their British counterparts, more than 500 draftees refused any sort of alternative service and went to prison. The labor leader Eugene V. Debs, for whom Hardie had campaigned years before, left a sickbed in 1918 to give a series of antiwar speeches, for which he, too, was thrown behind bars. The judge told him he might get a lesser sentence if he repented. "Repent?" asked Debs. "Repent? Repent for standing like a man?" Still in his cell in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, in 1920, he would receive nearly a million votes for president on the Socialist ticket.

British officials feared that another "victory" as costly as Passchendaele could put their country, like Russia, at risk of upheaval. As surveillance intensified, the number of agents under Thomson's command grew to 700, though now he had competition from the army. Its own busy operatives produced a voluminous Weekly Intelligence Summary for John French's Home Forces headquarters, with eight categories including "General Public Opinion" and "Acts of Disloyalty." Reports under each heading were contributed by regional army commands around the country, one of which added a ninth category, "Movements of Irishmen." Agents dutifully recorded the graffiti in army latrines; scrawled on the wall of one in Yorkshire was "What the hell are we fighting for, only the capitalists."

At times the writers of these confidential Weekly Intelligence Summaries sounded as if they, like the Bolsheviks, expected revolution to sweep across Europe. "There is scarcely a community or group of people in England now," reported a gloomy officer of the London District Command in early 1918, "among whom the principles of Socialism and extreme democratic control are not beginning to be listened to with ever increasing eagerness.... There is no gathering of working people in the country which is not disposed to regard Capitalism as a proven failure." Accounts of speeches by Sylvia Pankhurst, Emily Hobhouse, and Charlotte Despard appeared in these files: "The whole tone of Mrs. Despard's speech was that of resistance to authority," reported one agent. Those with "sound views" were also duly noted: "Mrs. Pankhurst and Miss Christabel Pankhurst are conducting a patriotic campaign in all the major industrial centres, of which favourable reports have come to hand." With Lloyd George's approval, a group of business magnates had given Christabel £15,000 (more than $850,000 in today's money) for her anti-socialist campaigning.

Sylvia's Workers' Dreadnought was probably the most widely read of the handful of newspapers opposed to the war, and army intelligence agents busily clipped articles from it for their files. She was also involved in a new group, the People's Russian Information Bureau. In contrast to the anti-Bolshevik mainstream press, it promised to put before the public the glorious truth about the Russian Revolution.

But what was that truth? Some of it, despite her rosy vision, was not so glorious. Shortly after the Bolshevik coup, the country had chosen a new legislature in the first real election Russia had ever had. The Bolsheviks won just under a quarter of the vote. But when the legislature met at the Tauride Palace in Petrograd in January 1918, the Bolsheviks and some allies walked out. Troops loyal to them then surged into the meeting hall, turned out the lights, and broke up the gathering. The lights remained out: it would be some 70 years before Russia had another democratically elected legislature. Some radicals in other countries, impatient with the elected parliaments that had embroiled Europe in war, thought little of it, but for many, the euphoria with which they had greeted the Russian Revolution evaporated. In her prison cell in Germany, Rosa Luxemburg was outraged, and railed against Lenin's "rule by terror.... Freedom only for the supporters of the government ... is no freedom," she wrote. "Freedom is always for the one who thinks differently."

Meanwhile, with a surprising absence of fanfare, another legislative body took a step that, if it had occurred before the war, would have been the news story of the year. Britain gave women the vote.

Emmeline Pankhurst was delighted, although she had little to do with getting this particular bill through Parliament. The great step forward, which so many women had worked for, gone to jail for, and in a few cases died for, was part of a comprehensive electoral reform. Among other things, the new law enfranchised almost all men over 21—over 19 if they were in the armed forces. However, given that some half-million British soldiers had so far been killed, many MPs worried that enfranchising all women would make them a majority of voters—something clearly unthinkable. How could that be avoided? Very simply: the new bill enfranchised only women over 30. Nor was even that unconditional: property and other qualifications excluded about 22 percent of these older women.

The women's franchise clause of the bill passed the House of Commons by an astonishing seven-to-one margin. In a Parliament that had long resisted women's suffrage, how could this be? For one thing, giving the vote to almost all men taking part in the war effort made it hard to deny it to women, for so many were making munitions for the front or filling the jobs of men gone off to war, even serving as members of the Ladies' Fire Brigade (albeit discreetly clothed in dresses). And hadn't so many suffragettes, like Mrs. Pankhurst, proved their loyalty to their country in its hour of need? Finally, there was the ominous example of the Russian Revolution. Who knew what pent-up discontents might burst forth violently in Britain after the war? Giving most women the vote would eliminate one of them.

For the people of Russia, the chain of events ignited by their revolution would bring a far bloodier future than the sunlit one its supporters had first imagined. But for the dispossessed in Western countries, wringing concessions from reluctant elites, the specter of that revolution, as an example of what could happen if justice was too long denied, would prove an enormous boon. The women of Britain were among its first beneficiaries.

Ever since the Battle of Omdurman twenty years earlier, Winston Churchill had had a knack for being present at moments that would find their way into the history books. On March 21, 1918, he was using his role as minister of munitions as an excuse to visit the front, and was spending the night at a divisional headquarters in northern France when the long-expected German attack came at last. On high ground, the headquarters overlooked many miles of the front line. "Exactly as a pianist runs his hands across the keyboard from treble to bass, there rose in less than one minute the most tremendous cannonade I shall ever hear," he wrote. The German barrage "swept around us in a wide curve of red leaping flame ... quite unending in either direction."

This was the heaviest bombardment the British army had ever experienced; the writers Leonard and Virginia Woolf could hear it at their Sussex home across the English Channel. An unprecedented concentration of heavy German artillery poured out more than a million shells in a mere five hours—compared to the British taking nearly a week to fire one and a half million before the attack on the Somme. "At half-past four in the morning," recalled one British officer, "I thought the world was coming to an end." The intensity of the barrage rendered some soldiers helpless. "The first to be affected were the young ones who'd just come out," remembered a veteran of this night. "They would go to one of the older ones—older in service that is—and maybe even cuddle up to him and start crying."

The attack came at a bad time, for Haig's troops were in the midst of a complicated reorganization that involved reducing the number of battalions in each division. The German blow also struck at a vulnerable point: spreading their forces thinner, the British had just extended their sector of the front, taking over from the French about 25 miles of trenches, some of them poorly constructed—and with supply roads leading to Paris, not to British bases. Finally, most of the terrible loss of British blood in 1915, 1916, and 1917 had been during British offensives, and after three years without experiencing a major German assault, Haig was overconfident and his defensive positions not as strong as they could have been. Despite information that some kind of attack was coming, he had just granted leave to 88,000 troops.

On the German side, four factors made the attack formidable, only three of which the generals themselves had planned on. The first was surprise: the Germans kept their ammunition dumps covered so they couldn't be seen from the air; assault troops were moved up to the front at night; and, unlike the British offensive at Passchendaele, this one was not preceded by a two-week bombardment that gave ample advance notice. All the artillery fire was packed into those five hours. Second, that fire was staggering: the Germans had quietly maneuvered into position more than 6,400 guns and 3,500 mortars, whose barrage combined high explosives with shells containing poison gas. Mixed with the latter was quick-acting tear gas, which tempted many an unwary British soldier to take off his gas mask and rub his streaming eyes, only to then breathe in the gas that would hours later kill or disable him. Third, the Germans were fighting differently, having put 56 divisions through a rigorous three-week retraining program. Instead of tens of thousands of troops forming an easy target by advancing in plain view in a line abreast across miles of front, men were divided into groups of seven to ten "storm troopers," under officers making decisions on the spot, not following a schedule laid down by generals in the rear. The groups darted forward, using gullies or other natural cover, aiming to slip between British machine-gun posts and overwhelm artillerymen in the rear, who thought themselves out of range of any infantry attack.

That they could succeed so well in this task was due to a fourth factor, the fortuitous assistance of nature. Dense, low-lying fog cloaked the battlefield until midday, allowing the storm trooper teams to reach and cross British front-line trenches while largely unseen by machine-gunners who otherwise would have decimated them. Already dazed by the artillery barrage, most British troops didn't see the Germans until they were close enough to throw hand grenades into British trenches. The Germans had found the most imaginative new tactics yet seen in trench warfare, and they worked. The British trenches rang with panicked cries of "Jerry's through!" By the day's end the Germans had captured more than 98 square miles of ground, and the British were evacuating another 40. Losses of position on this scale had not happened since the rival armies had dug in more than three years earlier.

The Germans knew they had to break one army, the French or the British, and had decided on the latter. The aim was to drive a spearhead deep into British lines and then veer westward, toward the French coast, trapping hundreds of thousands of soldiers with only the English Channel at their backs. Germany's last great gamble had begun, and after this it had no more cards to play. Its cities short of food, its farms and factories stripped of young men, the country was like a bloodied boxer in the final round, risking all his remaining strength on a knock-out punch. General Erich Ludendorff, directing the assault, declared that if victory required it, he was willing to lose a million men. If the offensive failed, he said, "Germany must go under."

At the end of the first day, German losses of 40,000 were—startling for an offensive in this war—almost even with Britain's 38,500. And yet the balance was in Germany's favor, because some two-thirds of its casualties were wounded, many of whom would recover to fight again, whereas a humiliating 21,000 of the British total never would: they had been taken prisoner. The new storm trooper tactics had caught them by surprise. "I thought we had stopped them," said one private, who had been aiming his machine gun forward through the fog, "when I felt a bump in the back. I turned round and there was a German officer with a revolver in my back. 'Come along, Tommy. You've done enough.' I turned round then and said 'Thank you very much, Sir.'"

As British troops retreated, they were forced to give up even the graveyards of men killed in earlier battles. Wounded men filled the hospitals and fleeing French civilians carrying their belongings clogged the roads. "Old women in black dresses there were," remembered one British officer; "bent old men trundling wheelbarrows; girls in their Sunday best—to wear it the best way to save it; farm carts loaded with the miscellany of hens, pigs, furniture, children, mattresses, bolsters; moody cows being whacked and led by little boys." Behind them columns of smoke rose from their farms and villages, torched by Allied soldiers who wanted to leave nothing of use to the Germans.

The Kaiser was delighted. "The battle is won," he shouted jubilantly to a soldier on guard at a railway platform as he boarded his private train. "The English have been utterly defeated!" He gave German schoolchildren a holiday, and presented Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, the supreme military commander, with the Grand Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Rays, a medal last awarded to Marshal Gebhard von Blücher for defeating Napoleon. To General Ludendorff, the actual architect of the attack, he presented an iron statuette of himself. Once again, he could imagine himself as master of all Europe. In Berlin, flags were broken out and church bells rang.

In London, John French used the occasion to urge Lloyd George to fire Haig. From the capital, Alfred Milner traveled through the night to France to survey the damage and report back. Before he left, he dashed off a pessimistic note to Violet Cecil: "The force of the blow was beyond all precedent, even in this war, and beyond expectation." After conferring with British commanders, he joined Haig, French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, and French military leaders for an emergency conference at the town of Doullens, which had seen wars ever since the Middle Ages. As the shaken dignitaries gathered around an oval table beneath a chandelier in the mansard-roofed town hall—Milner with his stern, drawn face, an unsmiling Haig in uniform and boots, and the balding, stocky Clemenceau fearing his entire country might be overrun—it was a desperate scene. The leaders could hear the constant pounding of artillery and the gravelly rattle of British tanks maneuvering into position to guard the town's perimeter against a German breakthrough. Haggard, dust-covered troops were retreating through the streets.

The Germans continued to press forward, although, without the element of surprise, not as swiftly and dramatically as on the first day. Particularly heartbreaking for British soldiers was their retreat over ground they had gained at such terrible cost during the great battles at the Somme and Passchendaele. By early April, German forces had advanced 40 miles, overrunning 1,200 square miles of France—yet still not enough to veer toward the coast as planned—and a shockingly high percentage of British losses continued to be men taken prisoner: 90,000 in just the first two weeks of the offensive. German newsreel cameramen eagerly filmed them, along with newly captured French and Belgian towns. Canisters of film were rushed back to Berlin, and soon evidence of the seemingly unstoppable drive toward Paris was on screens throughout Germany.

The German advance brought another new and terrifying weapon into the war, the first sign of which came two days after the offensive began, when Parisians were startled by a succession of massive explosions, each 20 minutes apart—in front of the Gare de l'Est, by the Quai de la Seine, in the Jardins des Tuileries, in the suburb of Châtillon, and at other widely scattered spots. As buildings collapsed, crushing those inside, people on the street rushed for shelter—but it was unclear what they were sheltering from, for the Germans were some 70 miles away, and there were no airplanes in the clear blue sky. It took several hours and a sharp-eyed French military aviator to discover that Paris was being bombarded by specially manufactured guns mounted on railway cars, their barrels more than 100 feet long. It took about three minutes for each giant shell to cover the distance to the city, climbing to an altitude of 25 miles at the top of its trajectory. This was by far the highest point ever reached by a man-made object, so high that gunners, in calculating where their shells would land, had to take into account the rotation of the Earth. For the first time in warfare, deadly projectiles rained down on civilians from the stratosphere.

When he returned to London, friends found Milner looking pale. He and the rest of the War Cabinet found new troops for Haig, but only by desperate measures: two divisions were recalled from Palestine and one from Italy, and the army lowered the minimum age for the draft to 17½. The government also took a momentous, long-delayed step: it announced it would extend conscription to Ireland. For fear of the response—both in Ireland and among Irish Americans—this had never been done before, but how, people in England now complained, could the army call up even 17-year-olds and let the Irish be exempt?

Over several months, as the British and French held many urgent high-level strategy meetings, Milner spent about half his time in France, ironing out disputes. Few of the two countries' generals spoke each other's language well, and Milner's fluency in French helped; he sometimes interpreted for Lloyd George. Between trips he reported to the King, who at one point invited him to Windsor Castle for the weekend—although of course Violet could not go with him.

In purely military terms, the spring of 1918 was Haig's finest hour. Paradoxically, when the mere appearance of weakness or indecision at the top might have been fatal, the same qualities that had led him to uselessly sacrifice so many British lives at the Somme and Passchendaele—his stubbornness, his unshakable faith in the rightness of Britain's cause, his almost mindless optimism in the face of bad news—proved essential. They made him into the calm, unyielding defensive commander that British troops needed.

The Germans still had many more troops on hand than the Allies, for the collapse of Russia had enabled them to add a stunning 44 divisions—more than half a million men—to their army in the west. In early April, after German forces launched another storm-trooper-led attack near Ypres, Haig issued a dispatch to all his soldiers, drafted with few changes in his own steady, confident handwriting: "Many amongst us are now tired. To those I would say that victory belongs to those who hold out the longest.... Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end."

British troops did indeed feel they had their backs to the wall. Haig's words embodied something else as well, absent from years of earlier exhortations: honesty. To say that "victory belongs to those who hold out the longest" was acknowledging at last that the war would be won not by dramatic cavalry charges, but by attrition. Which army would exhaust itself first? Moving over an already ravaged landscape now freshly gouged by new shell holes, the German advance continued.

In mid-April, as Britain's retreating armies continued to stagger backward under the worst German blows in nearly four years of fighting, Milner became secretary of state for war. His signature now appeared on the condolence cards sent to soldiers' families, below a standard message: "The King commands me to assure you of the true sympathy of His Majesty and the Queen in Your Sorrow. He whose loss you mourn died in the noblest of causes."

The cards flowed out in a ceaseless stream. (Families of officers were notified sooner, by black-bordered telegrams.) But when it came to Stephen Hobhouse's youngest brother, his parents, like so many others, simply received word that in the new German offensive the 23-year-old Paul was "missing, presumed killed." He had been seen fighting, then falling, when his unit's position was overrun. Several months later, the family's hopes were raised when a fellow officer passed on a rumor that Paul was wounded and a prisoner in Germany. With mail going through contacts in neutral countries, Stephen got in touch with a pacifist committee in Berlin. "I was very glad to be able to set on foot by this means a search for my brother Paul. Alas, no trace of him could be found. My poor mother for over six months ... persisted in the fond belief that Paul would return." During that time Margaret Hobhouse never ceased to write letters to her son, although they eventually came back marked "Undeliverable. Return to Sender." Paul's body was never found.

The German attacks of March and April 1918 were a severe setback to the British army but by no means a boost to antiwar feeling. When troops had their backs to the wall, the public showed little desire to question the war's aims. The number of workdays lost to strikes

dropped. "The recent severe fighting on the Western front appears to have had a most salutary effect on public opinion," the Scottish Command told army headquarters in a Weekly Intelligence Summary; in Aberdeen, overage men were volunteering, and a deserter surrendered himself "on account of the gravity of the situation." Another agent reported that "at Liverpool recent events have had a steadying influence on the working man." The intensified fighting produced the same result in Germany, where threats of labor militance temporarily evaporated.

Redoubling his efforts to keep up civilian morale, Rudyard Kipling spoke at munitions factories and barraged high officials with long, detailed memos about everything from mobilizing "parsons and priests" for the war effort to bringing documentary films—he sketched out scenarios for half a dozen—to factories so workers could see the splendid effect of the weapons they produced. The British workman "has a great respect for the gift of the gab," he declared. "...Almost as important as the cinema is the lecturer who accompanies [it].... The munitions workers listen best to a person they consider of their own class." John Buchan's propaganda offensive also aimed at the working class, taking labor unionists on tours of the front line; by mid-1918, more than 1,000 union leaders and rank-and-file members had been on these trips. Union men serving at the front were encouraged to write to their branches back home, especially when strikes loomed; military censors made sure it was the patriotic letters that got through. The jingoistic newspaper John Bull published a cartoon showing a CO sitting comfortably by a hearth, in an easy chair, with the caption "This little pig stayed at home."

In this bleak spring, Bertrand Russell finally joined those Britons in prison. As their excuse, authorities seized on a few sentences in an article in the No-Conscription Fellowship's Tribunal, where Russell predicted that the American troops now starting to arrive in England and France might be used as strikebreakers, "an occupation to which the American Army is accustomed when at home." In court, the prosecutor claimed that this passage would have a "diabolical effect" and interfere with relations between Britain and a key ally. "A very despicable offence," thundered the judge, and sentenced Russell to six months. When he arrived to begin serving his time, Russell wrote, the warder taking down his particulars "asked my religion and I replied 'agnostic.' He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: 'Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God.'"

Officials were so awed by Russell's intellectual stature and aristocratic lineage that, alone among British war resisters, he was allowed to be a "First Division" prisoner—an ancient, privileged status that permitted inmates to keep the tools of their trade, which for him were pen, books, and paper. He was allowed to receive the Times and to have books, flowers, and fruit sent in from outside, and was assigned an extra-large cell and a fellow convict to clean it for him at sixpence a day. Russell had a lively and unconventional love life, and, evading the limits on correspondence, was able to smuggle out letters to two women he was involved with, all the while still nominally married to a third. A set of letters to one lover, a young actress, were in French, which he knew his guards would not be able to read; Russell convinced them that these were historical documents copied from his research materials. A letter to another woman he slipped inside the uncut pages of the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, telling her the volume was more interesting than it appeared. The actress sent him love notes through the "Personals" column of the Times, until Scotland Yard caught on after a "many happy returns" message appeared on Russell's birthday. One of Thomson's sleuths showed up to question her. Always self-disciplined, Russell wrote four hours a day, producing, among other work, 70,000 words of his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy.

Outside prison walls, mounted police broke up a rally in London's Finsbury Park in the midst of a speech by Charlotte Despard. And the authorities were particularly eager to shut down the NCF's Tribunal, which had long been an impertinent voice against the war's madness. Reluctant to tarnish Britain's free-speech image by banning the paper outright, they tried other methods.

At the National Labour Press, where the Tribunal was printed, the police arrived and dismantled the press machinery. The paper switched to a new printer, which was soon raided, and found its presses damaged too. Produced on a small hand press, the paper promptly reap-peared as a one-page leaflet with the triumphant headline "Here We Are Again!!" When the two men who operated this press ran out of type for the large capital letters used for headlines, they borrowed them from friendly fellow printers on Lord Northcliffe's rabidly prowar Daily Mail. For months to come, moving once or twice because of suspicious neighbors, this secret press continued to print the paper, although distribution difficulties—the police were watching the mail—greatly reduced its circulation. Basil Thomson's men never found it.

Trying to figure out where the Tribunal was being printed, agents twice raided the NCF, and watched the office constantly. An impoverished-looking woman with a baby carriage who visited the building every few days, apparently hoping for a handout, never attracted their attention. She was smuggling proof sheets of the Tribunal beneath the blankets of her carriage. Indeed, as one after another of the NCF's male leaders had gone to prison for defying the draft, women had become the organization's backbone. Catherine Marshall, a talented organizer and suffrage movement veteran, was the group's central figure until she broke down from exhaustion in late 1917. Joan Beauchamp spent a month in prison for an article she published as the Tribunal's editor, and Violet Tillard two months for refusing to reveal to police where the paper was being printed.

The COs in prison were getting more restive. In May 1918, following Stephen Hobhouse's example, some COs jailed in Liverpool announced that they would break all prison rules they considered "inhuman and immoral," including the rule of silence. For ten days the prison resounded with talk, laughter, and singing. Then the warders cracked down, moving the men they thought to be ringleaders to other prisons. Some COs went on hunger strikes, only to find themselves force-fed like the suffragettes. Many drew encouragement from knowing that they were not the only political prisoners in Britain. When Fenner Brockway was being punished for the Liverpool protest, he was placed in solitary on reduced rations. One day an older convict, a trusty who did odd jobs around the cellblock, slipped a note into his cell: "Dear Brockway—Just heard you are here. What can we do for you?...We are Irishmen and can do anything you want—except get you out. Have your reply ready for 'Trusty' when he calls to-morrow. Cheerio!"

Among these Irish prisoners was Eamon De Valera, who, a decade and a half later, would become his country's prime minister. With their help, Brockway smuggled a letter to his wife, and then got his hands on what he craved most: newspapers, including the Labour Leader, whose editor he had once been. He retrieved these by lowering a thread from his cell window to which his unseen Irish friends attached the precious cargo. In a corner of his cell out of sight of the spy hole, which now and then clicked open, Brockway devoured the papers. "Only those who have been cut off from family, friends and the world can understand what this meant to me."

Brockway's fellow prisoners were not the only Irish patriots in jail, for Ireland was in turmoil. The execution of the Easter Rising leaders two years earlier had inflamed long-simmering nationalist feeling, and the planned draft of Irishmen seemed like the final blow. Why be compelled to join a war supposedly fought for Belgium's national integrity when exactly that was denied to Ireland? The island's Catholic bishops, never known for their radicalism, issued a ringing manifesto against conscription; Irish trade unions called a 24-hour general strike, and everywhere (except in the Protestant north) factories, newspaper presses, trains, trolleys, and horse cabs came to a halt. Even the pubs closed.

With British troops on the Continent reeling, this new rebellion in Ireland posed a crisis. To contain it, the British cabinet felt it needed an experienced military man with a firm hand. On May 4, 1918, Milner, on behalf of Lloyd George, offered the position of Viceroy of Ireland to John French.

Five days later, the diminutive, bowlegged field marshal took the mail ship across the Irish Sea. Regarding his position as a war posting, he brought with him neither his wife nor Winifred Bennett (although she would later visit many times). Within days of being sworn in at Dublin Castle, he ordered the arrest of an array of independence leaders. Long convinced that his own Irish ancestry gave him special insight, he saw himself as more Irish than the nationalists, regarding them as "people steeped to the neck in the violent forms of crime and infamy and with the smallest possible proportion of Irish blood in their veins." Once this was widely understood, he believed, "The Irish would cast them out like the swine they are."

The Irish, he told Lloyd George, were "like nothing so much as a lot of frightened children who dread being thrashed." With proper discipline all would be well. Basil Thomson made his intelligence network indispensable to the new viceroy, and French was confident he could soon restore order.

The same month French set off for Ireland, Emmeline Pankhurst embarked on a speaking tour of the United States, aimed at encouraging war enthusiasm. Meanwhile, in Britannia, Christabel kept up a steady fusillade of support for her mother while calling for the burning of all socialist books "by the public hangman." On her return from her American trip, Emmeline told an audience at Queen's Hall in London: "Some talk about the Empire and Imperialism as if it were something to decry and something to be ashamed of. It seems to me that it is a great thing to be the inheritors of an Empire like ours."

To Sylvia, the transformation of both her mother and older sister still seemed incomprehensible. "I only look in wonder," she wrote to the banished Adela, in Australia, "and ask myself, 'Can those two really be sane?'"

Meanwhile, the war news grew worse. At the end of May the Germans launched yet another powerful surprise offensive northeast of Paris, preceded by two million artillery shells fired off in less than five hours. In three days, the Germans pushed panicked Allied troops back 20 miles, advancing with such speed that they captured a French military airfield with all its planes still on the ground. The jubilant Kaiser went back and forth from Berlin to the front, inspecting troops in the field, newly captured villages, and the great guns shelling Paris. However, it was not France that the Kaiser saw as the main enemy, but Britain and its empire, in "a conflict between the two approaches to the world. Either the Prussian-Germanic approach—Right, Freedom, Honor, Morality—is to remain respected or the Anglo-Saxon, which would mean enthroning the worship of gold."

With the enemy now only 37 miles from Paris, Clemenceau considered evacuating the city. Parisians fled south by the hundreds of thousands, and high stacks of baggage jammed the platforms of railroad stations. To the government in London, simultaneously dealing with a brewing upheaval in Ireland, the future looked bleak and terrifying. At one point the cabinet discussed evacuating all British troops from the Continent. Fierce backbiting between Haig and Lloyd George and their respective supporters over who was responsible for the British losses spilled over into parliamentary debate and the press. One high-ranking British general lost his job, but Haig once again survived.

"We must be prepared for France and Italy both being beaten to their knees," Milner wrote to Lloyd George in early June while on yet another emergency trip across the Channel. General Sir Henry Wilson, the friend who had been Milner's military counterpart on his 1917 mission to pre-revolution Russia, was now chief of the Imperial General Staff in London and shared Milner's fear of an Allied collapse before the seemingly unstoppable Germans. "What would this mean?" Wilson wrote in his diary. "The destruction of our army in France?"