To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [89]
In the East End, Sylvia Pankhurst watched in horror as a mob hustled a baker through the street, his clothes still white with flour but his mouth dripping blood. Another crowd tore off a woman's blouse and beat her unconscious. In vain, Sylvia pleaded with the police to intervene. One night she heard banging on her door. "A man in his shirt sleeves, white and haggard, fell in, a small man with one leg deformed, so that he limped badly. He blurted a plea to telephone, and as I took him upstairs, told me he was from the baker's shop a few doors away, and born in London, though his old parents had come from Germany half a century before."
She went out into the street intending to speak to the crowd, but faltered before the scene of frenzied looting of the baker's home. "The air was filled by ... the noise of knocking and splintering wood. Men were lowering a piano through the window.... [A] woman ran by, dragging a polished table. She rammed it against the pavement in her haste—a leg of the table was smashed, the top was split. Discarding the broken trophy she ran back to secure another."
A locomotive of the London and North Western Railway named Dachshund was quickly rechristened Bulldog. A flurry of tabloid press articles pointed out that Alfred Milner had been born in Germany. One store bought ads to explain that the eau de cologne it sold did not come from Cologne. The hysteria spread into scholarship of centuries past: the editors of the Cambridge Medieval History announced that they would drop all German contributors from their volumes.
Civil liberties eroded. The Defence of the Realm Act, rushed through Parliament with no debate at the start of the war, was continually expanded until it blanketed daily life, from limiting pub hours to allowing censorship of information "likely to cause disaffection or alarm." People could be arrested, have their homes searched and documents seized, all without a warrant. Moreover, a civilian charged with violating certain parts of the act could be tried by military court-martial. In mid- 1915, police raided the offices of Hardie's Independent Labour Party, searched its files, and charged the organization with publishing seditious matter. Though the government failed to win a conviction, it did manage to bar the press and public from the trial.
Under the impact of a series of small strokes, Hardie's brain was starting to go. He sent a note to Sylvia Pankhurst from his latest hydrotherapy spa, misspelling her name and saying that he was leaving shortly "with no more mind control than when I came." His family began to fear letting him go out for walks alone. But Sylvia's sister Christabel showed him no mercy. In a July 1915 issue of her WSPU newspaper, she printed a cartoon showing Kaiser Wilhelm II giving "Keir von Hardie" a bag of gold. Sylvia turned to her mother, begging her to stop such attacks. "He is dying," she wrote. Emmeline did not answer.
At sea, as on land, the proper war of the textbooks was nowhere to be found. The mighty guns of the behemoth dreadnoughts that Britain had invested so many billions in building, and their tens of thousands of sailors, were useless against the real naval threat from Germany, which turned out to be a weapon that neither side had previously paid much attention to, the submarine. (Various pre-1914 British admirals had grumbled that submarines were "un-English," or "the weapon of cowards who refused to fight like men on the surface," or "an underhanded method of attack"; one had called for captured submarine crews to be hanged as pirates.) Germany's small but state-of-the-art fleet of U-boats sent 227 British merchant ships to the bottom of the ocean in 1915. The Royal Navy searched desperately for a counter-weapon.
More bad news also came from the Gallipoli Peninsula, where the Turks were not playing their expected role as Orientals who could be conquered with ease. They had German arms, good discipline,