To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [106]
Meanwhile, at venerable Hatfield House, the seat of Edward Cecil's family, fields and the private golf course were filled with trenches and a man-made swamp to create a maneuvering ground for an experimental weapon under development, the tank. The King himself came one day to watch the enormous machines grind their way across ancestral Cecil land. Most of the great house itself, with its library of 10,000 leather-bound books, marble floors, gold leaf ceilings, and flags captured at Waterloo, had, like many similar homes, been transformed into a convalescent hospital for wounded soldiers, with remaining family members confined to one corner.
The same month as the Easter Rising, Sylvia Pankhurst and her supporters organized an antiwar rally in Trafalgar Square, to which she marched with a working-class group from the East End. Never strong on modesty, she wrote later, "I knew the dear London crowd loved me.... In their jolly kindness some shouted: 'Good old Sylvia!'" At the square itself, though, far less love was in sight. The demonstrators were set upon by right-wing thugs and soldiers wearing the broad-brimmed hats of the notoriously rowdy Australian and New Zealand troops. They tore the marchers' banners to pieces and jeered so loudly that the speakers could not be heard. Other hecklers hurled red and yellow dye. Sylvia tried to speak over the uproar, but her voice was drowned out. Finally two policemen made her leave the platform before the violence got out of hand. From across the Atlantic, where she was in the midst of a North American speaking tour, her mother cabled Christabel: "Strongly repudiate and condemn Sylvia's foolish and unpatriotic conduct.... Make this public."
Sylvia's voice was not alone. A socialist named William Holliday had been sentenced the previous year to three months of hard labor for publicly insisting, "Freedom's battle has not to be fought on the blood-drenched soil of France but nearer home—our enemy is within the gates." Acquitted on appeal, he was arrested again on a pretext and died in prison. Others dared to speak out: the first men refusing the draft, a few trade unionists, a handful of MPs, and some intellectuals, of whom the most prominent—each would later spend months in prison for his opinions—were Bertrand Russell and the distinguished journalist Edmund Dene Morel.
A burly man of imposing dynamism, Morel, for more than a decade before 1914, had been the moving spirit of the century's first great international human rights campaign, against the forced labor system King Leopold II of Belgium had used to draw profits from the Congo, a system Morel had done more than anyone else to expose. He was Britain's most skilled practitioner of what today we would call investigative journalism. After the war began, Morel became a founder of the Union of Democratic Control, a coalition that drew together a number of liberal, socialist, and labor figures and groups who felt that Britain's participation in the war was a huge mistake, possible only because foreign policy was made outside of open, parliamentary control. By the war's end, organizations affiliated with the UDC, most of them local or regional labor union groups, would have a combined membership of more than 650,000. The UDC called for ending the war through a negotiated peace, based on several principles, one of which was that no territory should change hands in a peace settlement without a plebiscite of those who lived there.
Morel poured out an unceasing stream of books, articles, and pamphlets arguing that the war was not due to German aggression alone, but also to various secret treaties and agreements—including the understanding Britain had had with France—and to an uncontrolled arms race. For years before the war, he wrote, the leaders of