To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [87]
Ferocity about the war could be heard everywhere. "Kill Germans! Kill them!" raged one clergyman in a 1915 sermon. "...Not for the sake of killing, but to save the world.... Kill the good as well as the bad.... Kill the young men as well as the old.... Kill those who have shown kindness to our wounded as well as those fiends who crucified the Canadian sergeant [a story then circulating].... I look upon it as a war for purity, I look upon everybody who dies in it as a martyr." The speaker was Arthur Winnington-Ingram, the Anglican bishop of London.
In Parliament, Hardie kept up a stream of critical questions, though he had never really recovered from his stroke. Several times he collapsed from exhaustion, and physician MPs had to come to his aid. At home in Scotland he tried a favorite cure of the day, hydrotherapy, but being dipped in cold baths did little to revive him. He kept on writing and speaking against the catastrophe that was steadily eviscerating his life's work. How, he asked, could Britain say it was fighti ng for freedom when it was allied with tsarist Russia?
Despite weakening physically, he went to Norwich for a conference of his Independent Labour Party. The streets were filled with soldiers and the city was blacked out at night. Suddenly permission to use the meeting halls the party had booked was denied. Dissenting churches stepped forward, and local Unitarians and the breakaway Primitive Methodists offered their buildings instead. On the last evening, Fenner Brockway remembered, "The little hall was crowded to suffocation and the lights were dimmed. Hardie's bushy white hair and his white beard shone out in the darkness with almost phosphorescent radiance. His head was held high, defiantly; his voice was strong and deep.... His voice nearly broke when he spoke of the tragedy of Socialists murdering each other."
Resolutions passed at the conference had no effect, for most other left-wing and labor groups in Britain backed the war—as did many ILP members. One former comrade who turned against Hardie was the Scottish suffragette Flora Drummond, though before the war she had named her son Keir Hardie Drummond. Ruptures with old friends and his worsening health were too much for him. He would, Hardie announced, no longer attend parliamentary debates and was returning to Scotland. "Ten million Socialist and Labour voters in Europe," he lamented, "without a trace or vestige of power to prevent war!"
Still unable to use his hand, he dictated a letter to Sylvia Pankhurst, saying that he was clearing out his London lodgings. There was a painting of hers, he said, that he could not bring himself to part with, but he wanted to return her letters to him. "They are well worth preserving...," he wrote, seeming to look ahead to his own death. "You could use your discretion as to which are most worthy of being kept and published, and which should be destroyed. I have not now the capacity for dealing with such a matter."
They saw each other one last time, at Hardie's tiny London flat. She found his voice "low and muffled.... We were tongue-tied as never before, I struggling dumbly, desperately, to maintain my slender self-control.... Keir in his agony, mysterious, unkenned, seemed to loom over us like some great tragic ruin." As Sylvia tried to keep back tears, Hardie said to her, "You have been very brave." In the end, she did not destroy the letters; both of them, it seems, wanted posterity to know of their love.
Sylvia's mother and sister, meanwhile, had become a kind of private War Propaganda Bureau of their own, incessantly beating the drum for battle and demanding that the government put women to work in the jobs of men who had left to join the army. An article of Christabel's on the subject caught