To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [165]
An informal truce quickly made its way across much of the Eastern Front: photographs show German and Russian troops fraternizing in no man's land in their heavy winter coats, the Germans in brimmed army caps, the Russians in fur-lined shapkas, and larger groups of men from both sides together in rows, standing and kneeling as if members of a single sports team posing for a portrait. In a Europe exhausted by the war, who knew how easily the revolutionary example might spread?
Without Russia, Alfred Milner feared, the Allies might not be able to defeat Germany. And the spread of revolution could prove a more dangerous enemy to the established order than the Germans. Why, he wondered, should Britain and France not settle their differences with Germany—and then partition Russia among themselves? Britain's share, it hardly need be said, would include the central Asian parts of the Russian Empire that adjoined Persia and Afghanistan, strategic borderlands to India. If Germany was willing—and also willing, of course, to withdraw from France and Belgium—there were many interesting ways in which Russia could be divided. For a full year to come, Milner quietly but doggedly promoted this idea. There is no clear evidence that he or anyone else ever approached the Germans, and his proposal apparently never moved beyond the realm of confidential talk within the British government, but it bears a strange resemblance to the world of abruptly shifting superpower alliances that George Orwell would later imagine in 1984.
Meanwhile, socialists and pacifists everywhere rejoiced at the Bolshevik coup. For the first time, a major power had a regime committed to overthrowing capitalism—and to swiftly withdrawing from the war that for more than three years had been killing off Europe's young men by the millions. "Glorious News from Russia!" read the headline in lion tamer John S. Clarke's Socialist. "May they open the door," Sylvia Pankhurst wrote in her Workers' Dreadnought, "which leads to freedom for the people of all lands!"
No group in Britain received the news of the latest phase of the Russian Revolution with greater joy than the war resisters in prison. Serving his hard-labor sentence at Walton Gaol in Liverpool, the 29-year-old Fenner Brockway was an editor still. Despite the rule of silence, he passed on news of the momentous events in Petrograd to his fellow prisoners in the Walton Leader, one of at least nine clandestine CO prison newspapers. It was written with pencil lead that Brockway and other convicts had smuggled into prison attached to the bottoms of their feet with adhesive tape; each issue was published on forty squares of brown toilet paper. The subscription price was extra sheets of toilet paper from each prisoner's supply. Twice a week, until guards finally discovered it after a year, a new issue of the paper—only one copy, of course, could be "published"—was left in a toilet cubicle the CO prisoners shared. Thanks to information from an imprisoned army deserter, the Walton Leader published one of the few uncensored accounts in Britain of the slaughter at Passchendaele. By contrast, the coup in Russia, Brockway wrote later, made the COs imagine "our prison doors being opened by comrade workers and soldiers."
One event that might bring that great day a step closer, British peace activists hoped, was Siegfried Sassoon's imminent court-martial. But they waited in vain, for the last thing the government wanted was an upper-class war hero turned public martyr. "A breach of discipline has been committed," said a War Office spokesman about Sassoon's defiant open letter, "but no disciplinary action has been taken, since Second Lieutenant Sassoon has