To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [174]
The brilliant radical theorist Rosa Luxemburg was in a prison in Breslau, cold, ill, and hungry, her hair turning white. She watched grimly as horses drew carts into the prison yard filled with uniforms scavenged from wounded or dead soldiers, sometimes torn by bullets or shrapnel and spotted with blood. The prisoners were put to work cleaning and mending them, so that they could clothe fresh bodies being sent into battle. One day she saw a cart arrive pulled by water buffaloes, war booty from Eastern Europe. "The cargo was piled so high that the buffaloes could not make it over the threshold of the gateway. The attending soldier ... began to beat away at the animals with the heavy end of his whip so savagely that the overseer indignantly called him to account. 'Don't you have any pity for the animals?' 'No one has any pity for us people either!' he answered." Millions more felt the same.
Wartime privations inflamed an angry nationalism in Germany, producing a foretaste of the hysteria that, a quarter century later, would reach a climax of unimaginable proportions. Ominously, making the fraudulent claim that Jews were shirking military duty, right-wing forces demanded and won a special census of Jews in the army. Anti-Semitic books, pamphlets, and oratory proliferated. By 1918, the head of the Pan-German League was calling for a "ruthless struggle against Jews."
The generals, however, worried not about anti-Semitism but about revolution. Emboldened by the Bolshevik takeover in Russia, and tired of endless war and shortages, some 400,000 workers went on strike in Berlin at the end of January 1918, demanding peace, new rights for labor, and a "people's republic." The strikes spread to other cities, and to the German navy, less disciplined than the army, which experienced a series of hushed-up mutinies and protests. In shaky Austria-Hungary the strikes grew far larger, and fractures along ethnic lines began to show: Polish, Serbian, Croatian, and Slovene deputies in the imperial parliament were loudly demanding autonomy or independence. Eight hundred sailors in the Austro-Hungarian navy in the Adriatic mutinied and raised the red flag; the naval command had to dispatch three battleships manned by loyalists to suppress them. The entire precarious empire threatened to dissolve if the war went on much longer. The inhabitants of Germany's other major ally, Ottoman Turkey, were suffering near famine. As the economy spiraled downward, the government recklessly printed huge quantities of paper currency for its war expenses. Hundreds of thousands of Turkish soldiers began to desert, many still armed, to live off the countryside as brigands.
The example of Russia made one thing dramatically clear: whatever happened at the front, a country could also collapse from within. The German authorities declared martial law in Berlin and Hamburg, and conscripted tens of thousands of strikers into uniform. That stopped the unrest for the moment, although at the cost of scattering militant leftists throughout the army. To fend off further strikes, the German military needed a swift, decisive victory. In early March 1918 Haig received an intelligence report that "an offensive on a big scale will take place during the present month."
Inside the fortress-like Holloway Prison in London, Alice Wheeldon's hunger strike finally brought results: she faced down Lloyd George and won. The prime minister's private secretary called the Home Office, an official there recorded, to say that Lloyd George "thought she should on no account be allowed to die in prison." After less than ten months of her ten-year sentence, the heavy doors of the jail swung open and she walked free. Her early release was again proof of the care the British government took to avoid creating martyrs.
Official wariness