To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [110]
The NCF immediately dispatched two clergymen to Boulogne.
But would they be in time? While the ministers were crossing the Channel, another message was smuggled out from France, reaching the mother of a Quaker CO named Stuart Beavis. "We have been warned today that we are now within the war zone," he wrote to her stoically, "and the military authorities have absolute power, and disobedience may be followed by very severe penalties, and very possibly the death penalty.... Do not be downhearted if the worst comes to the worst; many have died cheerfully for a worse cause." To the NCF's Tribunal he sent a brief message on behalf of himself and his comrades, ending, "We regret nothing."
While the COs imprisoned in Boulogne awaited their fate, the explorer Ernest Shackleton, long out of touch with Europe, unexpectedly appeared on one of the earth's southernmost islands, South Georgia. His ship had been trapped in Antarctic pack ice, then crushed and sunk. After months of drifting on the ice floes, he and his men had finally escaped to the Antarctic mainland. In search of a vessel to rescue them, he led a handpicked crew of half a dozen in an epic 800-mile journey by small boat across one of the world's stormiest patches of ocean to South Georgia, where there was a Norwegian whaling station. Shackleton had been cut off from the rest of the world for a year and a half. The first question he asked the startled station manager was "Tell me, when was the war over?"
"The war is not over," the Norwegian answered. "Millions are being killed. Europe is mad. The world is mad."
The madness was growing, and not just where rival armies did battle. In the Caucasus, for example, where Russia and Ottoman Turkey were fighting, the Turks had just carried out a forced deportation and genocide against one of their subject peoples, the Armenians, claiming they were in league with Russia. No one knows exactly how many Armenians perished, but most scholars estimate the number at one to one and a half million.
That mass murder stemmed from only one of many ancient ethnic rivalries inflamed by the war. The Ottoman Empire was also unleashing a reign of pillage, terror, and village-burning on its Greek population, leaving thousands dead and hundreds of thousands conscripted as forced laborers. And in the perennial tinderbox of the Balkans, old enmities among Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Bulgarians, and others helped Austria-Hungary carry out a ruthless occupation of Serbia. When the war ended, that tiny country would have proportionately the highest death toll, military and civilian, of any combatant, nearly one out of five of its people. Everywhere, it seemed, the war had undammed reservoirs of hatred long kept in check.
While fighting raged on many fronts on land, in the North Sea the British and German fleets met in the late spring of 1916 for the largest naval encounter of the war, the Battle of Jutland, involving some 250 ships and 100,000 men. "Had we used the Navy's bare fist instead of its gloved hand from the beginning," fumed Kipling, "we could in all likelihood have shortened the war." Yet despite Jutland's being the greatest maritime battle in more than 100 years, this long-awaited encounter between bare fists at sea was as bloodily inconclusive as those in the trenches of France.
Britain's navy suffered from the same peculiar mismatch as the army between firepower and communications. Its massive battleships and battle cruisers could fire salvos of staggering destructive power, each shell weighing nearly a ton. But when it came to sending orders and messages, the admirals remained in the previous century, inexplicably reluctant to use the new wireless sets their ships were