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By Root 1212 0

and sister. The written record is scanty, but they seem to have offered each other some solace during what must have been, for each, the worst winter of a lifetime. One night when Sylvia was giving a speech, she received a telegram from Hardie telling her to pay no attention to press reports that he was ill—which sounds like a desperate plea for her to do just the opposite. As soon as the meeting was over she rushed to his flat and found that he had been escorted home after having had a seizure in the House of Commons. Near the end of the year he suffered a stroke, as if his body were reflecting the grief he felt at the war. He was only 58, but, his writing arm now paralyzed, he had to compose by dictating. For a time he was not even able to take his daily walk.

Sylvia worked on in the East End, ceaselessly badgering officials at every level. In this time of emergency, why not impose government controls on prices? Why not nationalize food supplies? Immersed in the war of daily life, she saw the war in Europe as the enemy of all she had been trying to do. To read her autobiographical account of these years, The Home Front, is to enter the trenches of down-and-out London: women getting by on their husbands' paltry military pay and allowances (a mere extra twopence per day per child at the start of the war), women crowded out of hospital beds needed for wounded soldiers, a blacksmith with nine children and no work because so many horses had been commandeered for the army. The book is humorless, intense, and long-winded; you cannot imagine her bursting into song, as Hardie, in better days, had been wont to do.

Yet she did amass some solid accomplishments in a difficult time, when the nation was focused on war against Germany and not against poverty at home. She opened a garment workshop and a boot-making co-op, upending tradition by paying women the same wage as men. She took over a pub, the Gunmaker's Arms, renaming it the Mothers' Arms and installing a Montessori nursery school. Many of its pupils had fathers at the front; soon there would be others whose fathers were jailed war resisters. When women and children were evicted by their landlords, if no shelter could be found, she took them into her own home. On one occasion when no midwife was available, she assisted at a birth. And throughout this time she edited one of the few newspapers in Europe where voices dissenting from militarism could be heard.

The year's end brought no improvement to conditions in the East End—or at the front. Every British soldier, however, received an embossed brass box of cigarettes, pipe, and tobacco (or another gift for nonsmokers, such as spices for Indian troops) and a Christmas card from the royal couple, showing the Queen in broad choker necklace and crown and the King in his field marshal's uniform. In Haig's headquarters, they celebrated Christmas well, with turtle soup and other delicacies; Leopold de Rothschild sent the general some prized 1820 brandy and more than 50 pairs of fur gloves for him to distribute as presents to his staff. In the trenches, however, a very different sort of Christmas was under way.

South of Ypres, where the British and Germans faced each other across the white-frosted fields of Flanders, as northern Belgium was known, Christmas morning dawned cold and foggy. Looking at one section of German trench, British soldiers noticed that a wooden board had been hoisted with the words "You no fight, we no fight." From another trench farther down the line, a German officer emerged with a white flag. On the British side, some soldiers of the Queen's Westminster Rifles climbed out of their trench, waved, then jumped back in. When no shots were fired, they emerged a second time and began a cautious, unarmed advance into no man's land. "Suddenly from the enemy hurrahing was heard," a German soldier wrote to a socialist newspaper in Berlin, "and, surprised, we came from our mouse-holes and saw the English advancing towards us.... They had no rifles with them, and therefore we knew it could only be a greeting." Soon a German