To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [75]
Additional guests included George G. Moore, French's American playboy housemate from London, who essentially moved into headquarters despite the fact that he was a citizen of a neutral country, and Charles À Court Repington, a fellow womanizer and cavalry enthusiast who was a military correspondent for the Times. At this point journalists were not permitted at the front, but Sir John assured London that Repington was staying with him "in an entirely private capacity." Nor did French lack for female company; during these months a more puritanical general was heard to complain to him, "Too many whores around your headquarters, Field-Marshal!"
For others, the season was more grim. As 1914 drew to a close, Edward Cecil at his post in Egypt received a telegram: "Grave opened George believed identified broken hearted Violet." At Villers-Cotterêts, workmen had exhumed a mass grave that held 98 British soldiers. George's body was identifiable only by the initials on his vest. The bodies of 94 enlisted men were quickly reburied. George and the other three officers got coffins, flowers from the mayor, and a burial in the town cemetery, under a cross with the inscription " Tombés au champ d'honneur" (Fallen on the field of honor), with twenty French officers in attendance. Artillery fire could be heard in the distance.
Knowing where George was buried did little to ease his mother's grief. He had, she wrote, been "thrown like carrion into a pit. When I think of the inhuman waste of a beautiful life I can hardly endure myself or to be a part of a world where such things were possible." Nor did his death bring her any closer to her estranged husband. "You and I can't talk about any of the great vital things without my saying something which might touch upon your religious views," she wrote to him, "so I won't write about the Great Dissolver, Death—we have no common ground at all.... I had written and ... then came your letter with a reference to 'future life' and I felt mine had better go into the fire and the whole subject remain untouched."
Like most Britons, Violet Cecil did not question the aims of the war. As a memorial to George, she wanted to donate something to his old boarding school, Winchester. Her gift was a rifle range. Rudyard Kipling, his bushy eyebrows still black though his hair and mustache were turning gray, gave a speech at the opening ceremony, fired the inaugural shot, and hit a bull's-eye.
After several months of war, the hopes of peace-minded socialists throughout Europe were all but gone. Their dream had dissolved in the face of an ancient and greater force: the deep, instinctive human impulse for solidarity with fellow members of one's tribe—a group most people defined, in this moment of crisis, not by class but by nation. Surprisingly haunting testimony to the strength of this feeling came from someone who largely resisted it, the prominent left-wing editor George Lansbury, who argued that it was nothing less than criminal madness for Europe's workers to be fighting each other at the behest of the ruling classes. Nonetheless, once it became possible for journalists to visit the front, he confessed that "every troop or regiment of troops on the march created a longing in me to get out and march with them. I had no sort of feeling about killing or being killed. There was a sense of danger and service—impersonal service—which, as men swung past, made me wish to be with them." If even a committed antiwar socialist could experience such longing, young Britons without leftist convictions felt it far more, and those speaking out against the war found themselves depressed and isolated.
Among them were Sylvia Pankhurst and Keir Hardie. Although no longer lovers, they still saw each other frequently. He was in despair that all his efforts against war had failed, and she was bruised by her final, very public rupture with her mother