To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [142]
To a spycatcher's mind, finding a pretext to arrest the entire household would be a coup indeed. The agents began monitoring the Wheeldon family's mail. The contents of one package that Alice sent to Winnie, who lived with her husband in Southampton, included, they carefully noted, four mince pies, two pairs of socks, and a stuffed chicken. Thanks to the closely watched correspondence, we have a touchingly detailed portrait of life inside this beleaguered family, ranging from everyday human concerns (Winnie wrote to her mother fretting that her menstrual period was late) to what they read, which included socialist newspapers, the NCF's Tribunal, and George Bernard Shaw's play Mrs. Warren's Profession. Even in wartime, life for committed socialists was a life of constant reading.*
One day a Ministry of Munitions secret agent using the name of Alex Gordon turned up at the Wheeldon house claiming to be a "conchie," or conscientious objector, on the run. Ever trusting, Alice put him up for the night and confided in him her worries about the dangers facing her fugitive son. She was trying to arrange covert passage out of the country, she said, for Willie, another draft evader, and Winnie's husband, who also feared being called up. Delighted, Gordon swiftly brought in his immediate superior, Herbert Booth, introducing him as "Comrade Bert," supposedly an army deserter. Although Hettie was suspicious, Alice seems to have believed both men, who then sprang their trap.
On January 30, 1917, Alice, her daughters Hettie and Winnie, and Winnie's husband, Alf Mason, were all arrested, Winnie and Hettie at the schools where they taught. Hettie's astonished pupils watched from a classroom window as plainclothesmen in bowler hats took their teacher away. The family had always known they ran a risk for helping antiwar fugitives, but the charge now made against them left them astounded. It was that all four "did amongst themselves unlawfully and wickedly conspire, confederate and agree together ... willfully and of their malice aforethought to kill and murder." And whom were they accused of conspiring to murder? Headlines on both sides of the Atlantic screamed the shocking news: their targets were Arthur Henderson, a member of the War Cabinet, and Prime Minister David Lloyd George.
For a government eager to disgrace the antiwar movement, there could be no more dramatic charge. The country's attorney general himself went all the way to Derby to lay out the case against the accused at a preliminary hearing. Stunned, the four family members waited in jail for their trial to begin.
The same month the Wheeldons were arrested, the passenger liner Kildonan Castle, in better days a luxury steamer on the run to Cape Town, quietly slipped out of the Scottish port of Oban, escorted by a Royal Navy destroyer. No announcement was made in the press. On board the ship was a high-ranking delegation of British, French, and Italian military and civilian officials, 51 strong. Heading the British contingent, on his first overseas assignment since joining the War Cabinet, was Alfred Milner.
The delegation was on its way to Russia. That country had so far suffered a staggering six million war casualties, Milner estimated. Its huge, clumsy army had been repeatedly and embarrassingly beaten by far smaller numbers of German troops, who now held a wide swath of Russian territory, its grain, coal, iron, and other riches feeding the German war effort. British and French leaders were increasingly exasperated by the sluggishness of their ally. What could be done?
Running a gauntlet of German submarines, Allied ships had been delivering large amounts of equipment and supplies to Russia's Arctic Ocean ports. In two years, for instance, Britain