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By Root 1011 0

producing munitions in German factories to digging trenches at the front. Often these men and women lived in harsh barbed-wire-ringed camps. Nor were the hands of the Allies clean: like the Germans, they had for decades used forced labor in their African colonies, but now the number of such laborers swelled and their working conditions grew unbearably hard as both sides conscripted huge numbers of African porters to carry military supplies long distances through terrain that lacked roads for vehicles.

Massive civilian deaths and forced labor camps would become all too familiar across Europe only two and a half decades in the future, and one feature of 1914–1918 eerily foreshadowed a still later part of the twentieth century. To prevent civilians in occupied Belgium from fleeing into neutral Holland, in 1915 the Germans lined the border between the two countries with a barbed-wire fence, electrified at a lethal 2,000 volts. Some people succeeded in getting through, but at least 300 died trying.

Unlike other wars before and since, there were no behind-the-scenes peace negotiations while the battles raged. Both sides were committed to fight to the bitter end, and by now, two years into the war, if someone in a prominent position on either side so much as advocated peace talks, it was considered close to treason. When Reverend Edward Lyttelton, the headmaster of Eton, gave a sermon outlining some possible compromises that might end hostilities, the resulting uproar eventually forced him to resign.

For people not in such positions of authority there was, for the time being, a little more leeway. From the beginning, Bertrand Russell had proposed peace terms, such as promising Germany no loss of "genuinely German territory"—as opposed to disputed land like Alsace and Lorraine or an occupied country like Belgium. He suggested that for the future an "International Council" should be set up to resolve disputes before they turned into war. In 1916, he wrote to President Woodrow Wilson urging him to use his influence to start peace talks.

Although Russell had spent most of his life in the rarefied circles of Cambridge and literary London, he discovered, to his surprise, that he had the ability to talk to a far wider audience. In the summer of 1916, he toured industrial and mining towns in south Wales for three weeks speaking in favor of a negotiated peace. Although his steps were dogged by hecklers and by uniformed and plainclothes police, his audiences in this staunchly radical region sometimes reached 2,000 or more and cheered him enthusiastically. When the authorities closed meeting halls to him, he spoke in the open air. After the tour, two Scotland Yard detectives visited Russell at home to inform him that he was banned from giving more such lectures, scheduled in Scotland and the north of England. "It makes my blood boil," he wrote. A War Office official proposed withdrawing the lecture ban, but only if Russell would abandon politics and return to mathematics.

Russell and other war opponents continued to press for negotiations, but one activist did something bolder. In a quixotic effort to actually start them, she went to Germany.

After working with a Quaker relief organization in France early in the war, Emily Hobhouse had provoked the ire of Whitehall by spending several months in Holland doing follow-up work after the 1915 women's peace conference at The Hague. Correspondence and telegrams about denying her a passport and permits for future travel flew back and forth among alarmed British bureaucrats. Violet Cecil's brother-in-law, a high-ranking official at the Foreign Office, in one letter called Hobhouse "a woman known to have indulged in absurd and undesirable conduct."

Always a loner, in late April 1916 Hobhouse was the sole Briton to join socialists from both sides and several neutral countries who met in a hotel at the small Swiss village of Kiental. Mostly sectarian ideologues, few of whom, least of all Hobhouse, represented parties of any size, they spent a week arguing such questions as "The Attitude of