To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [144]
Once home, however, in a most uncharacteristic burst of wishful thinking, Milner told the War Cabinet that "there is a great deal of exaggeration in the talk of revolution and especially about the alleged disloyalty of the army." Despite the railway bottleneck he had seen, he urged his colleagues to do all they could to bolster Russia with more military aid, perhaps accompanied by Allied technicians who could make sure the supplies reached the front and were used. He saw no alternative. An inept ally in the east was better than none, and if the Tsar's army did not have the weapons to keep on fighting the Germans, he reasoned, the danger of revolution would be far greater. "If an upheaval were to take place," he wrote, "its effect on the course of the war might be disastrous."
17. THE WORLD IS MY COUNTRY
BY NOW THE WAR had become the most deadly catastrophe to strike Europe since the pandemic of the fourteenth century, the Black Death. "I did not write the truth to you before," an Indian soldier named Bhagail Singh told his family from the Western Front in January 1917, his words copied by censors monitoring the troops' morale. "Now I write the truth.... Consider us as having died today or tomorrow. There is absolutely no hope of our ever returning.... None will survive. I pass both day and night in lamentation." The next month another Indian wrote: "We are like goats tied to the butcher's stake.... There is no hope of escape."
Unlike the bubonic plague, of course, the cataclysm ravaging the continent was entirely man-made—and the organized opposition remained small. Although deserting soldiers in Russia were voting against the war with their feet, more open protest there was dangerous, and dissenters in most other countries were dealt with no less harshly. Even had there been more freedom for protesters, however, there might not have been many more protests. The war had everywhere unleashed powerful national chauvinism, witch-hunts for traitors, and public fury at any apparent lack of resolve to fight.
Only in Britain was there the political space for a substantial antiwar movement, and yet in early March 1917, just after Milner returned from Russia, several of its members were about to become the subjects of the war's first big show trial. The attorney general, F. E. Smith, had already announced that he would prosecute the Wheeldon case personally. A blood-and-thunder right-winger, Smith was known for his love of brandy and cigars, his wit and his snobbery. A trade union leader newly elected to the House of Commons, who had not learned his way around, once asked him the way to the men's room. "Down the corridor, first right, first left and down the stairs," Smith told him. "You'll see a door marked 'Gentlemen,' but don't let that deter you."
Smith used his influence to get the trial moved from Derby to London, a better place for a public shaming designed to intimidate antiwar forces. "The persons in this case," he declared, "are a very desperate and dangerous body of people ... bitterly hostile to this country, shelterers of fugitives from the Army, and persons who do their best to injure Great Britain in the crisis in which this country finds itself to-day."
Meanwhile, young Willie Wheeldon, on the run as a draft dodger, was captured at Southampton. The public was riveted, making the case a boon for tabloid newspaper sales: eight photographs and a banner headline, "The Lloyd George Murder Plot," filled the front page of the Daily Sketch. In other newspapers, Alice Wheeldon and her two daughters were shown in their long prison dresses, under the eye of a warder in the jail where they were awaiting trial. From their cells, the three women could hear regular reminders of the war: the firing of guns at a nearby artillery officers' academy. "I think this is only one of the convulsive death rattles of Capitalism," Hettie Wheeldon wrote to a friend about