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By Root 1060 0

Second World War. In addition to deliberately shooting more than 5,000 Belgian civilians and setting fire to thousands of buildings, they had poured gasoline into the famous university library at Louvain and burned it to the ground, along with its priceless collection of 230,000 books and 750 medieval manuscripts. Occupation authorities shipped back to Germany money from Belgian bank vaults, machinery from Belgian factories, more than half of the country's cattle, nearly half its pigs, and two-thirds of its horses. Hobhouse was aware of little of this, for she had not been allowed to speak to any Belgians. When, after interrogating her at Scotland Yard, Basil Thomson reported that she had come to "the sort of conclusions the Germans desired her to form," he was largely right.

Although the British government gave her no credit and insisted it had been planning something similar all along, one aspect of her vociferous lobbying paid off: the Foreign Office submitted to Parliament a proposal for a civilian prisoner exchange that seemed drawn from her blueprint. Some months later the British and German governments reached an agreement on the subject. More than that Hobhouse did not accomplish. But however hopeless her lone-wolf diplomacy, and however naive she was about what she saw in Belgium, in the entire course of the deadliest conflict the world had ever seen, she was the sole person from any of the warring countries who actually journeyed to the other side in search of peace.

Those in power dismissed Hobhouse out of hand, but on one man she made a lasting mark. Stephen Hobhouse, the son of a first cousin, was in his early thirties at the outbreak of the war and very much a child of privilege. His father was an MP and a wealthy landowner. Having grown up with a succession of governesses in a grand country house built in 1685, Stephen had been sent off to Eton, where he won a book prize (Deeds that Won the Empire) for his academic achievements, a silver cup for marksmanship, and another for commanding the best-performing section of his battalion of the Eton College Rifle Volunteers. In 1897, the Diamond Jubilee year, the Volunteers marched to nearby Windsor Castle and from its courtyard serenaded Queen Victoria by torchlight.

Then came Oxford, boating on the Thames, shooting parties, London dances during the social season. Once the Boer War began, however, Hobhouse found his "patriotic ardor for the British cause" challenged. "With Emily, in particular, a cousin whom I often saw ... I remember arguing earnestly.... Thus, no doubt, it was that my mind was prepared for the awakening."

This awakening came at the age of 20, after he read a sixpenny pamphlet by Tolstoy he had bought at the Oxford railway station. From then on, Stephen Hobhouse would be an ardent pacifist. He also found himself appalled that, as the eldest son, he stood to inherit his family's "semi-feudal" 1,700-acre estate and would be expected, on his 21st birthday, to make the traditional speech of greeting to its assembled tenant farmers and their families. To an aunt, he wrote, "I cannot make up my mind just how far to compromise in accepting things as they are, and striving after them as they ought to be."

He made few compromises. After renouncing his inheritance, he became a Quaker and ran a boys' club for London slum children. He had suffered a variety of health problems, including two nervous breakdowns and a bout of scarlet fever, but none of this daunted him from moving into a modest cold-water flat in a working-class neighborhood, where he copied his fellow tenants by using a newspaper for a tablecloth. He worked for a Quaker relief mission in Greece and Turkey that aided refugees from the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 and, just as his cousin Emily had in South Africa, saw firsthand the way war could turn farms and villages to rubble.

In 1914, two days before Britain entered the war, Hobhouse heard Keir Hardie make his desperate plea for peace at the foot of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square. The following year he met his future wife, Rosa,