To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [195]
With its economy drained and burdened with huge public debt by the war just ended, Britain was shaken by many more labor upheavals. Workers in Belfast and along the River Clyde went on strike, demanding that the wartime 54-hour work week be reduced to 40. On January 31, 1919, mounted police charged a crowd gathered in Glasgow's St. George's Square, injuring some 40 people. In the resulting uproar, the red flag was briefly raised over the town hall and the authorities panicked. At 10 Downing Street, Milner and his colleagues heard the secretary of state for Scotland say that "it was a misnomer to call the situation in Glasgow a strike—it was a Bolshevik rising." The cabinet swiftly dispatched six tanks and 8,000 troops, who set up machine-gun posts around the city.
Early 1919 saw sparks of rebellion even in the British armed services. Sailors on a Royal Navy patrol ship, the HMS Kilbride, mutinied and hoisted the red flag. Three thousand soldiers marched to the town hall in Folkestone, ripping down a "For Officers Only" sign on a railway station waiting room. Some 4,000 British troops manning the docks, trains, cranes, and warehouses at the French port of Calais went on strike. An enraged Haig demanded "the supreme penalty" for the rebels, but wiser heads restrained him. In other military protests there were more red flags and talk of solidarity with comrades in Russia, but the soldiers' greatest grievance was that they wanted to come home. As troops were demobilized, the demonstrations died away.
Another group of men were also impatient to come home: the more than 1,000 British war resisters still behind bars. Angry that their prison sentences were outlasting the war itself, some 130 went on a hunger strike. Among the voices calling for their release was an unexpected one, that of John Buchan. Unlike the pugnacious, short-fused heroes of his novels, he had a certain generosity of spirit, and once the war ended he drafted an appeal to the prime minister, which many other well-known figures signed, urging that COs be released. "A majority of these men," the petition said, "are sincerely convinced that they have acted under the demands of their conscience and in accordance with deep moral or religious convictions."
By mid-1919 the conscientious objectors were all free. Over the years, as the war's toll sank in, they and others who had gone to jail for their beliefs began to win considerable respect from a public that had once condemned them. Fenner Brockway and several others became members of Parliament. Five years after serving his hard-labor sentence in Pentonville Prison, the journalist E. D. Morel was the Labour Party's chief spokesperson on foreign affairs in the House of Commons. Bertrand Russell continued to write. Several decades after the war ended, his top-heavy thatch of hair now white but as thick as ever, Russell would appear in formal dress in Stockholm as one of the few writers of nonfiction ever to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. A trade unionist named Arthur Creech Jones spent two and a half years in prison as a CO; 30 years later, he was in the cabinet. Ramsay MacDonald, an antiwar Labour MP, had not gone to prison during the war but had been under police surveillance and was repeatedly stoned when he spoke at peace meetings. Angry patriots had even voted to expel him from his golf club. In 1924, he became prime minister.
During 1919, militant labor revolts shook countries around the world, even including orderly little Switzerland, which had its own nationwide general strike. Germany, too, experienced great upheavals, but in the Armistice agreement the Allies had deliberately allowed the German army to keep thousands of machine guns for crowd control.