To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [29]
Periodically, Germany needled its rival to the west, France. In 1904, as the last colonial spoils in Africa were being divided up, France made a secret treaty with Spain sharing Morocco between them; the following year, the German Kaiser visited the territory, and from his yacht declared his support for Moroccan independence. It took a months-long international conference of colonial powers to calm the roiled waters.
No formal alliances bound Britain, but a looser set of understandings left no doubt that if the country did join hostilities, it would be on the side of France, and therefore of Russia too. The British government on no account wanted the Germans in control of the continental side of the English Channel, the crucial narrow-necked funnel through which ships going to or from London and many other English ports passed. For this reason Sir John French and other high military officials regularly talked with their counterparts in France about plans for what he believed was the "eventual certainty" of war with Germany. Then, at last, great cavalry charges would strike fear into the German army, while the Royal Navy's powerful battleships pounded German vessels and ports to smithereens.
While French, Haig, and other officers waited for the next conflict to start overseas, another war seemed to be breaking out on the very streets of London. And those waging it were, of all people, women.
Take, for example, the crowd that surged into Parliament Square on a cold, rainy February 13, 1907. To the tune of "John Brown's Body," some 400 women, marching four abreast, lustily sang:
Rise up women! For the fight is hard and long,
Rise in thousands, singing loud a battle song....
Leading the march was none other than French's sister. "I asked myself," Charlotte Despard wrote this year, "'Can this be the beginning? Is this indeed a part of that revolutionary movement for which all my life long I have been waiting?'"
The cause was votes for women, and into it, with the thrill of a new love affair, Despard poured all her energy. To many horrified Englishmen, the new movement did indeed seem revolutionary. Foreigners and the lower classes could always be expected to cause trouble, but women? A double line of policemen was waiting in front of the Parliament buildings while to one side the horses of "London's Cossacks," as the mounted police were known, neighed impatiently.
On similar occasions in recent months, the police had been reluctant to arrest the sister of a famous war hero, and so today Despard had taken the precaution of not wearing her trademark lace mantilla. Instead she donned a "motoring hat," tied on with a headscarf, meant for a woman to wear in an open automobile. As she strode down the wet pavement her face was further disguised by a long veil. When the women, brandishing umbrellas, came up against the phalanx of police, a younger marcher cried out in alarm, seeing Despard squeezed between officers on horseback. "I'm quite safe," Despard yelled back. "I love horses!" To intimidate the crowd, the policemen made their mounts rear. "The women began to fight like tigers and they received and inflicted many bruises...," reported one newspaper. "A dense mass of people swayed and heaved." Some younger women tried to surround Despard protectively, but she angrily waved them off. Amid the shouts of women knocked down and the clatter of horses' hooves on the pavement, a constable grabbed at Despard, ripping off her coat sleeve. Finally, much to her satisfaction, she was arrested, and, along with more than two dozen other women, sentenced to jail. As the leader of the march, she received a longer term than most of the others: 21 days in solitary confinement.
Two days later, her brother was at the Savoy Hotel to chair the officers' banquet that took place each year