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By Root 1107 0

Both had been restlessly anticipating this moment for years. Even before Britain declared war, Milner had been pressing friends in the government to send troops to France. When the declaration finally came he said, "It is better to have an end of the uncertainty." Kipling claimed to have only two frustrations now: that he was too old to fight, and that John, just turning 17, was too nearsighted. But perhaps if the war lasted long enough that barrier could be overcome.

An everyone-at-your-posts order meant that Violet Cecil's husband, Edward, back in England on leave, was promptly recalled to Egypt, which would leave her free to spend more time with Milner. But her 18-year-old George, unlike John Kipling, was heading for the front, his battalion of the Grenadier Guards among the first British units ordered to France. Violet and her daughter Helen handed baskets of fruit through a window as the troop train began to move; soldiers cheered; a band played "Auld Lang Syne"; and his mother had one last glimpse of George's "flushed, excited face thrust out of the window." For the first time ever in Helen's sight, Violet burst into tears.

Milner soon went to stay with her at Great Wigsell; the army had requisitioned his own country house as an officers' barracks. (Enlisted men slept in rows of tents in his fields.) We do not know what he said to her, but he may well have reassured her that at least George was in the best of hands, of officers who had proven their mettle in the Boer War, where he had known them. For in charge of the corps of two army divisions of which George's battalion would be a part was Sir Douglas Haig. And commanding the entire 75,000-man British Expeditionary Force being rushed across the English Channel was Sir John French.

8. AS SWIMMERS INTO CLEANNESS LEAPING

THE NEWS THAT armies were on the march spread instantly throughout the continent, from Trafalgar Square to Nevsky Prospekt. At Saint-Malo on the coast of France, a picturesque walled city in Brittany, townspeople and summer vacationers gathered somberly to hear the mayor read Germany's declaration of war. Among the crowd was a fugitive from British justice.

In the preceding months, Emmeline Pankhurst had tangled with the authorities more furiously than ever, and they had begun using a new legal tool against her. To deprive suffragettes on hunger strikes of their martyrdom, the government was applying a law called the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act, which everyone immediately rechristened the Cat and Mouse Act. Any hunger-striking suffragette would be released when she became weak, allowed to re-cover, and then rearrested as many times as necessary for her to serve her sentence.

A court had sent Pankhurst to prison the previous year because one night several suffragettes had slipped into a country house being built for Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George and planted a bomb, whose blast destroyed five rooms. Pankhurst had not known about the bombing beforehand but promptly gave it her enthusiastic blessing. As a result, she was found guilty of "wickedly and maliciously" inciting "persons unknown" and given three years' penal servitude.

Declaring herself to be "a prisoner of war," she repeatedly went on hunger strikes, and the government repeatedly released and rearrested her. During her most recent imprisonment she had reached a new peak of defiant fury, and was put into solitary confinement for a week, accused of insubordination, using offensive language, and striking a prison officer. Released, she was ordered to return to prison once again on July 22, 1914. Instead, pale and emaciated, she had fled across the Channel to recuperate in the company of the exiled Christabel. British officials must have expected both mother and daughter to be ardent opponents of the war; indeed, on its very eve, as ultimatums filled the air of Europe, Christabel was quick to declare that war would be "God's vengeance upon the people who held women in subjection."

But as soon as actual fighting began, everything changed: Emmeline