To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [88]
Once again Emmeline found herself grandly leading a mass procession of women and marching bands through London to demonstrate before a government ministry. Despite wind and rain, some 60,000 people turned out. This time, however, the British treasury was providing more than £4,000 to cover the cost. Two miles of women in raincoats carried signs such as SHELLS MADE BY A WIFE MAY SAVE A HUSBAND'S LIFE. Costumed women represented different Allied nations; conquered Belgium marched barefoot, carrying a half-shredded flag. Along the route were tables where women could sign up for war-related work. Only a year earlier Emmeline Pankhurst had been in prison for inciting the blowing up of Lloyd George's house, but now both were smiling as they appeared together before the cheering crowd. For months afterward, newspapers celebrated the odd new couple. As one headline put it: "The Ablest Woman, the Ablest Man in England, Once They Were Enemies, War Has Made Them Friends."
The war not only brought poison gas to the Western Front, it brought another previously unimaginable weapon to London itself. When fighting each other in the past, Europeans had generally observed the distinction between soldiers and civilians. Indeed, part of the traditional ideal of a soldier's gallantry was that he should respect even the enemy's women and children. Now, however, with war ever more dependent on the strength of an entire economy, the morale of civilians became a key target.
The first, shocking sign Londoners had that the old rules no longer applied came on May 31, 1915, when incendiary bombs began raining down on the city from the night sky. They were dropped from a zeppelin—a giant airship nearly two football fields long, held aloft by huge bags of hydrogen within its steel frame and floating too high for most British fighter planes to reach. By the end of the war, German raids over England—by more zeppelins and soon by airplanes as well—would kill about 1,400 people and wound some 3,400. Although these numbers pale before the aerial bombardments of later wars, the very idea that explosives could be dropped through the clouds onto homes, farms, streets, and schools hundreds of miles from the nearest battlefield seemed to represent an unprecedented level of savagery. "Barbarous weapons," the Times called the bombs (although few people in Europe had thought it barbarous—or so much as noticed—when before the war France and Spain had bombed rebellious Moroccan villages from the air). No one was emotionally prepared for it, not even soldiers back from the front. An officer on leave in London who took a woman to the theater found himself back at war when a bomb landed nearby, shaking roof plaster onto the audience. "It's no business to happen here, you know," he exclaimed, unnerved. "It's no business to happen here."
One night Bertrand Russell heard a "shout of bestial triumph in the street. I leapt out of bed and saw a Zeppelin falling in flames. The thought of brave men dying in agony was what caused the triumph in the street." Such moments of war hysteria made him feel "the agonizing pain of realizing that that is what men are." In poorer parts of London, crowds rioted after air raids and smashed the windows of merchants of German or Austrian origin, or whose names simply sounded Germanic. German bakers, rumor had it, were putting poison in their bread. The press only fanned the flames of xenophobia.