To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [140]
As the historian Sheila Rowbotham points out, the agents who penned these reports were often ex—military men who viewed those they were spying on through the lens of their own experience. Accustomed to clear hierarchies of power and orders promptly obeyed, they saw any strike as provoked by a ringleader and not by high rents or low wages. When they looked at bedraggled, anarchic groups of pacifists they imagined a strict chain of command. FBI surveillance reports on the American antiwar movement of the Vietnam era reflect the same mindset.
The militants, the Ministry of Munitions agents claimed, had devised multiple ways of spreading the signal for a strike to start: "a quadruple line of communication was used, one man going by train, a second by motor car and a third by motor cycle," while a telegram was dispatched with the coded message "Come in Chambermaids." The situation, as the agents saw it, was dire: "We are undoubtedly up against a very dangerous and mischievous organisation ... which is, in reality, an industrial revolution."
The reports that flowed to Milner and a few other officials were studded with cryptic mentions of undercover men: "F" and "B" were supplying useful information, and "V" had managed to befriend a particularly dangerous agitator. An agent code-named "George" reported on a meeting in Sheffield where one speaker said, "What the working classes will have to do, is to refuse to go on making tools for the prosecution of the war."
There were indeed many strikes in Britain at this time, but despite what Keir Hardie had hoped for, they were not directed at the war itself. Inflation was taking a toll on wages, and workers were angry at other ways employers were using the excuse of wartime to undo some of labor's hard-won gains. Still, Hardie's spirit was not dead. Even though many opponents of the war were writers and intellectuals, plenty of them came from the working class.
No Oxford or Cambridge or Bloomsbury lay in the background of John S. Clarke, for example, one man the agents were doing their best to keep an eye on. Born in poverty-stricken County Durham, home to the three executed Bantam soldiers in France, he was the thirteenth of fourteen children, only half of whom survived to adulthood. Clarke's family was in the circus. By the age of 10 he was in the ring, doing tricks while riding a horse bareback with no bridle. At 12 he went to sea, witnessing a murder on board a tramp steamer and getting knifed in a pub on the Antwerp waterfront. He jumped ship in South Africa and lived with Zulu villagers for two months before working his way home. Whenever there was no ship he felt like sailing on, he returned to the family trade. One evening, he had to fill in when a drunken fellow performer tripped over a rope and knocked himself out. That was how, at 17, he found himself in the circus ring as the youngest lion tamer in Britain.
The most dangerous thing about a lion, Clarke later wrote, was not its teeth but its claws. One ill-tempered lion seems not to have realized this, and early in Clarke's career it seized his thigh in its mouth. "I never moved, but talked gently until his jaws relaxed, and still talking, I edged away." Clarke's work with a variety of animals left many a scar on his body. Soon he was caught up in the radical movements of the day, getting arrested in 1906, at the age of 21, for taking part