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By Root 1079 0

arguing for more lenient treatment of COs. With Milner pulling strings behind the scenes, in December 1917 some 300 of the more than 1,300 COs in prison were ordered released on grounds of ill health. Stephen Hobhouse accepted his freedom, knowing it was not for him alone. Opposition to the mass release was quelled when it was agreed that Parliament would be asked to disenfranchise, for five years, conscientious objectors who had gone to jail. Milner seems to have deftly engineered this particular bargain, getting his former Kindergarten member who was editor of the Times to produce an editorial on the subject at the right moment.

The Hobhouses were a family in which, Stephen wrote, "differences of outlook were put aside." (And yet, he added, "my father could never quite forget the disgrace that his eldest son had brought upon himself.") His two brothers in the army were both home on leave, and they, Stephen, and his wife spent Christmas together in their parents' house. Paul Hobhouse, although recovered from his wounds, seemed to feel some foreboding. "I thought P. changed in tone—had lost his buoyancy," wrote a relative who saw him just before he departed for the front, "...and was more grave and silent."

Meanwhile, on the other side of Europe, the Christmas season of 1917 saw a landmark in the war. To negotiate an end to hostilities between Russia and the Central Powers, a Bolshevik delegation passed through the Eastern Front under a white flag, near the ancient riverside city of Brest-Litovsk, in Russian territory now occupied by the Germans. Awaiting them in the city's sprawling red-brick fortress was a group of generals in dress-uniform spiked helmets and other officials prepared to negotiate for Germany and its allies. The Bolsheviks ushered into the fortress were unlike any other group of diplomats and negotiators in European history. The Germans and Austrians, the upper reaches of whose diplomatic services were the almost exclusive preserve of the aristocracy, were hard put to contain their astonishment.

Facing the foreign ministers of the two countries across the long negotiating table was a Bolshevik delegation headed by a bearded Jewish intellectual. Educated as a doctor, Adolph Joffe had spent part of his life in exile and, in Vienna, had undergone Freudian psychoanalysis. Another Jew high in the revolutionary movement, Lev Kamenev, was his chief associate. And to even more dramatically show the world that this was not diplomacy as usual, the remainder of the Bolshevik delegation included a worker, a soldier, a sailor, a peasant, and a woman, Anastasia Bitsenko, who had spent 17 years in Siberia for assassinating the Tsar's former minister of war. The elderly peasant, Roman Stashkov, had been included at the very last minute. Joffe and Kamenev, driving to the Petrograd railway station, had suddenly realized that, for political reasons, their delegation had to include a representative of the class that constituted the vast majority of Russia's people. They noticed the unmistakably peasant-like Stashkov walking along the street, stopped their car, found that he belonged to a left-wing party, and invited him along. The bewildered Stashkov, his enormous gray beard untrimmed, sat through the meetings at Brest-Litovsk beneath glittering chandeliers, but could not rid himself of the habit of addressing his fellow delegates, in the prerevolutionary manner, as barin, or master.

On December 15, 1917, the two delegations announced an armistice. The war between the Central Powers and Russia, which had left millions of dead and wounded and tens of thousands of square miles of devastated land, was over. The news reverberated around the world.

Russia and its former enemies immediately began protracted negotiations toward a permanent peace treaty. Hoping to speed the process along, the Germans gave a banquet, one of the more unusual on record. While the diplomats wore their high-collared formal attire and the chests of the German and Austrian generals glittered with medals, the Russian worker delegate, in everyday clothes,