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By Root 1017 0

the Proletariat to the Question of Peace"—which drew seven competing resolutions from a mere 43 delegates. The conference's final compromise manifesto proclaimed, "Down with the war!" and was issued to an uninterested world on May Day. The delegates could only have felt grim as they went their separate ways while workers did their best to kill each other on half a dozen fronts. May Day of 1916 was no advertisement for international proletarian solidarity. One sign of hope flickered briefly in Berlin, however, where the socialist Karl Liebknecht led a small peace demonstration. He was quickly jailed, as was his colleague Rosa Luxemburg. But 50,000 Berlin munitions workers put down their tools on the day of his trial—the first political protest strike in wartime Germany.

Hobhouse's one-woman crusade against Britain's Boer War concentration camps had sent reverberations around the globe; seldom had a single person done so much to put an issue on the international agenda. Now, in the teeth of an immeasurably larger conflict, she hoped to do so again. In June, to the dismay of British authorities, Hobhouse popped up in Berlin, where she met, among others, Foreign Minister Gottlieb von Jagow, whom she had known before the war. Her account of their conversation was colored by wishful thinking, for she came away believing he was prepared to use her as a channel to exchange possible peace terms with the British government. She was hearing no less wishfully, it seems, when she believed two other unnamed "high authorities" who suggested that Germany might be willing to cede Alsace and Lorraine to France in return for peace. Hobhouse also visited a Berlin internment camp for British civilians who had been living in Germany at the outbreak of the war, and talked with von Jagow about an exchange of civilian prisoners.

The day of her return to the British capital, with typical confidence, she telegraphed the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, assuming he would want to hear firsthand the messages she was bringing from Berlin: "Arrive London about midday await kind instructions Westminster Palace Hotel." She waited in vain. But in her determined fashion, she eventually managed to talk with at least one person in the Foreign Office, as well as various MPs, several newspaper editors, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and even her antagonist from South Africa days, Alfred Milner. "A bridge is needed," she wrote to her old friend the Boer leader Jan Smuts, now a trusted ally of the British. "Let me be that bridge. I have begun to build it—and am not afraid to cross it alone to begin with."

When officials seemed disbelieving about Alsace and Lorraine—given that Germany had sent no other such signals—Hobhouse lobbied them instead with a detailed plan for a prisoner swap. Why couldn't Britain and Germany at least exchange all civilian prisoners who were not men of military age? Even the Foreign Office had to acknowledge that this was "quite sensible." She also had ideas about how to partially lift the British naval blockade in a way that much-needed food could reach occupied Belgium. The government had little interest, however, and refused her a passport to leave the country again. Outraged MPs asked in Parliament how this British citizen had managed to spend several weeks in enemy territory. Surprisingly, it turned out that there was no explicit regulation against doing so; one was now hastily issued after the fact. As always, though, the government was wary of creating a martyr. "After a good deal of discussion," Asquith reported to the King, "the Cabinet agreed that it would be inexpedient either to prosecute or to intern her."

Visiting Berlin was not all that Hobhouse had done; she had also taken a two-week, tightly supervised tour of German-occupied Belgium. She reported in Sylvia Pankhurst's Woman's Dreadnought that the German occupation was nowhere near as cruel as the British burning of Boer farms in South Africa. That may have been true, but the Germans had been brutal, prefiguring the Nazis' even more ruthless occupation regimes of the