To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [209]
And so, if we could imagine another cemetery, of all those who understood the war's madness enough not to take part, whether just on that Christmas Day or for longer, whose graves might it contain? It would certainly be an international cemetery, for in it would be Eugene V. Debs, whose opposition to the war won him a prison term in the United States, along with other ex-prisoners like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht from Germany and E. D. Morel from England. There would be many soldiers too, from the French troops who mutinied in 1917 and the million or more Russians who, that same year, simply left the front and made the long walk home to their villages, to the German sailors who in the war's final days put out the fires in their ships' boilers and refused orders to go to sea.
Like Sylvia Pankhurst, few in this imaginary cemetery would be saints or paragons of good judgment, but when it came to the war, even someone as indiscriminate in her enthusiasms as Charlotte Despard made a better choice than her brother and those who dutifully marched off to be slaughtered under his command. Emily Hobhouse might have been wildly impractical in thinking that she could single-handedly start peace negotiations in Berlin, but no one else so much as tried. Keir Hardie would be in this cemetery with them, as would his friend Jean Jaurès, though he was murdered just before the war began, and Bertrand Russell, who foresaw with such clarity the shattered world the war would leave. Stephen Hobhouse and the more than 6,000 other British conscientious objectors who went to prison would be here too, with a special place of honor reserved for those taken to France in handcuffs who did not abandon their principles even when threatened with death.
This would be a cemetery not of those who were confi dent they would win their struggle, but of those who often knew in advance that they were going to lose yet felt the fight was worth it anyway, because of the example it set for those who might someday win. "I knew that it was my business to protest, however futile protest might be," wrote Russell decades later. "I felt that for the honour of human nature those who were not swept off their feet should show that they stood firm." And stand firm and honor the best of human nature they did. Their battle could not be won in 1914–1918, but it remained, and still remains, to be fought again—and again. For even a century's worth of bloodshed after the war that was supposed to end all wars, we are painfully far from the day when most people on earth will have the wisdom to feel, as did Alice Wheeldon in her prison cell, "The world is my country."
SOURCE NOTES
With the primary sources quoted here, I have, when possible, indicated the ultimate origin of every quotation. Official documents in the British National Archives I have listed by their file numbers. A full list of departmental letter codes can be found on the National Archives website; the ones that most commonly appear in the notes that follow are HO, the Home Office; WO, the War Office; FO, the Foreign Office; CAB, cabinet papers; and AIR, the Air Ministry, where, for unknown bureaucratic reasons, records of surveillance of British civilians by military intelligence in the latter part of the war came to rest. When I've not been able to look at a document myself and have relied on a secondary source, I have so indicated. However, even the most reliable scholars sometimes give incomplete source data. Where I've not been able to track down the quotation elsewhere, rather than using cumbersome locutions like "Smith to ?, n.d., n.s., quoted in Jones, p. 38," I've simply put "Jones, p. 38."
The edition of Douglas Haig's wartime diaries and letters edited by Gary Sheffield and John Bourne, the most extensive in print, contains slightly more than a quarter of Haig's diaries for this period. When a diary quotation is not to be found