THE WAR LEFT what Churchill called a "crippled, broken world." The full death toll cannot be known, because several of the governments keeping track of casualties had dissolved in chaos or revolution by the war's end. Even by the most conservative of the official tabulations—one made by the U.S. War Department six years later—more than 8.5 million soldiers were killed on all fronts. Most other counts are higher, usually by about a million. "Every day one meets saddened women, with haggard faces and lethargic movements," the writer Beatrice Webb noted in her diary a week after the Armistice, "and one dare not ask after husband or son." And the deaths did not end with the war: the Times continued to run its "Roll of Honour" each day for months afterward as men died of their wounds. Except in a handful of lucky neutral countries, on virtually every street in Europe could be found bereaved households where there was, as Wilfred Owen had written, at "each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds."
More than 21 million men were wounded; some carried pieces of shrapnel in their bodies, or were missing arms, legs, or genitals. So many veterans had mangled faces that those in France formed a national Union of Disfigured Men; in Britain, 41,000 men had one or more limbs amputated, another 10,000 were blinded, and 65,000 veterans were still receiving treatment for shell shock ten years after the war.
The toll was particularly appalling among the young. Of every 20 British men between 18 and 32 when the war broke out, three were dead and six wounded when it ended. One of the highest death rates was among those who, like the 18-year-old John Kipling, were born in the year of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. If the British dead alone were to rise up and march 24 hours a day past a given spot, four abreast, it would take them more than two and a half days. Although this book has concentrated on Britain, which lost more than 722,000 men killed (not to speak of more than 200,000 soldiers dead from the rest of the empire), the combat death toll was more than half again higher in Austria-Hungary, nearly double in France (which had a smaller population than Britain), more than double in Russia, and nearly triple in Germany. Of the many million pairs of grieving parents, we will never know how many felt that their sons had died for something noble, and how many felt what one British couple expressed in the epitaph they placed on their son's tombstone at Gallipoli: "What harm did he do Thee, O Lord?"
Parents of men declared missing sometimes could not bring themselves to accept that their sons would never return. "As a mother deprived of both her children through the war, one a naval officer," read a letter signed "Hope" that appeared in the Timestwo months after the Armistice, "may I plead with the Government to authorize a strict search being made throughout the North Coast of Egypt and in the islands in the Mediterranean ... for missing English women and men?...There may be some who have lost their memories, and others who have been rescued by native fisherfolk."
Periodically some event would expose the continent's vast reservoir of grief. When Britain's Unknown Warrior was buried in Westminster Abbey on the second anniversary of the Armistice, across the country, at 11 A.M., crowds stopped in the street, and cars, buses, trains, assembly lines, and even mining machinery underground came to a halt for two minutes of silence. Heard everywhere, however, was the sound of women sobbing.
Higher than the military toll were the civilian war deaths, estimated at 12 to 13 million. Some of these lives were lost to shelling and air raids,
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a much greater number to massacres for which the war was an excuse, like the Turkish genocide of the Armenians, and even more than that to the near-famine conditions that spread through the Central Powers and the lands they had occupied. (Such deaths continued for many months after the war ended, for the Allies maintained the Royal Navy blockade to pressure Germany into signing the Versailles treaty.) And should we not add to the total the toll from other conflicts triggered by the war, like the Russian civil war, whose civilian and military deaths have been estimated at 7 to 10 million?
Should we not also include some of the deaths reflected in the elevated rates of suicide that followed the war? Many things, of course, can contribute to someone's decision to take his or her own life, but sometimes clues point to the war, even to a specific time and place. The Battle of Fromelles, for example, a forgotten sideshow to the Somme, saw more than 2,000 Australian and British soldiers die on July 19 and 20, 1916, in a foredoomed night attack against formidable German machine-gun nests in half-buried concrete bunkers. Brigadier General H. E. Elliott had protested beforehand to Haig—something few dared do—that his troops were being asked to do the impossible. After the battle Elliott stepped between the dead bodies, tried to comfort the wounded, then returned to his headquarters with tears streaming down his face. Fifteen years later, half a world away in Australia, he killed himself.
Some deaths governments barely bothered to count, such as those of underfed African porters, subjected to whippings as punishment, who for years carried wounded men or 60-pound loads of food and ammunition through rain forest, swampland, and savanna. As the fighting moved, some who had first been forced to work for one side found themselves carrying supplies for the other. Of more than two million of these forced laborers, an estimated 400,000 died, mostly of disease or exhaustion—a death rate far higher than that for British troops on the Western Front. With African farmers conscripted as porters and rival armies seizing villagers' grain and cattle, famine spread. Many African women and children were reduced to eating roots and grass before they starved. Their deaths went untabulated, but low estimates put them in the hundreds of thousands.
The war also left a ravaged landscape. The armies of the First World War faced each other on fronts hundreds of miles long, and when they retreated they usually destroyed everything the enemy could use, leaving wells poisoned, roads cratered, fruit trees sawed off at the base, mines flooded, and homes, farms, and factories dynamited into rubble. The Germans left territory twice the size of Massachusetts in northern France—the country's former industrial heartland—in smoking ruins. In tiny Belgium alone, more than 70,000 homes were completely destroyed. In Russia and Eastern Europe it was mostly retreating Russians who did the same to an immensely larger expanse of land.
Beginning in the last months of the war, an even more deadly cataclysm flamed across the world: the great influenza pandemic, whose total death toll is estimated at 50 million or more. Its spread was directly connected with the war, for the first outbreak to attract attention, in the spring of 1918, was at a large army base in Kansas. The following months saw hundreds of shiploads of American soldiers heading to Europe, bringing the disease with them. It spread rapidly from Brest, their main disembarkation port in France. With millions of soldiers sharing cramped quarters in troopships, trains, and huge army camps, the flu could jump from one person to another, with almost everyone in a packed ship's cabin, barracks, tent, or dugout sickening in a day.
The disease swept around the globe in several waves, speeded by the large numbers of troops on the move. In half-starving Germany, some 400,000 people died of influenza in 1918 alone. Most unusually for epidemic diseases, it took the worst toll on the fittest, those aged between 20 and 35, many of whom were soldiers feeling lucky to have survived combat. The human immune system fought the disease by filling the victim's lungs with frothy scarlet fluid, which contained antibodies but which in effect often drowned someone from the inside; healthy young bodies had the best immune systems and so suffered the highest death rate. Hundreds of thousands of young men in uniform on both sides succumbed in 1918 and 1919, as if in the aftermath of a gas attack, their faces quickly turning purple, their mouths, noses, and sometimes ears and eyes oozing blood, strangling to death.
Young men were also in close quarters in prison. The records are incomplete, but influenza was the likely killer of most of the 73 British conscientious objectors who died behind bars, in alternative-service work camps, or soon after their release.
Flu victims came from every level of society. Edward Cecil, who had remained at his post as a colonial bureaucrat in Egypt for most of the war, succumbed to the epidemic a month after the Armistice. His ashes were buried in the family graveyard near Hatfield House, next to those of his mother and father, prime minister in a sunnier time.
Some two months later, the disease claimed a victim from very different circumstances. When Lloyd George had released Alice Wheeldon from prison, she had returned to Derby, frail from her hunger strikes, needing help just to make her way along the railway station platform when she arrived. Although comrades on the left were loyal, neighbors ostracized her, and her secondhand clothes shop failed. Her daughter Hettie, who had managed to avoid jail, lost her job as a schoolteacher. When Sylvia Pankhurst paid the family a visit, she found mother and daughter supporting themselves by growing vegetables on a rented plot, and tomato plants in what had once been the shop window.
Alice Wheeldon died of the flu in February 1919. Winnie—just re-leased from prison—and Hettie were both too ill themselves to come to their mother's burial. A reporter for a Derby newspaper managed to find the unannounced ceremony and wrote a story headlined, "Funeral of Mrs Wheeldon; Sensational Incidents at Graveside; Rhetorical Sneers at Prime Minister."
The disapproving journalist noted that Wheeldon's "severely plain oak coffin" was buried in a manner so "devoid of all Christian ceremony" that not a single one of the 20 mourners wore black. Indeed, Alice's son Willie, only recently released from prison for evading the draft, pulled a large red flag from his pocket and placed it, fluttering in the winter wind, over his mother's coffin. The only recorded speaker was John S. Clarke, whose appearance was all the more dramatic because he was still on the run from the police. Alice Wheeldon was the victim of "a judicial murder," he declared from atop the pile of dirt heaped up by the freshly dug grave. Lloyd George "in the midst of high affairs of State stepped out of his way to pursue a poor obscure family into the dungeon and into the grave."
To cries of "Hear, hear," Clarke continued: "Mrs. Wheeldon was a socialist. She was a prophet, not of the sweet and holy bye and bye but of the here and now. She saw the penury of the poor and the prodigality of the rich, and she registered her protest against it.... If Mrs. Wheeldon could speak ... she would tell us ... to fight more fearlessly than before, so as to obtain that glorious time when peace and joyousness shall fill all life."
The mourners dispersed. The grave was not marked, for fear it would be defaced. Clarke slipped back underground. The following year, Hettie Wheeldon married a labor unionist comrade who had been part of the family's antiwar circle, gave birth to a premature baby who did not survive, and then herself died painfully from a burst appendix. Winnie and Alf Mason emigrated to Australia, to try to rebuild their lives. Willie Wheeldon, unable to regain his prewar job as a schoolteacher, worked in a dairy and then in the Rolls-Royce factory in Derby, but was fired after being active in the union during a strike.
With its economy drained and burdened with huge public debt by the war just ended, Britain was shaken by many more labor upheavals. Workers in Belfast and along the River Clyde went on strike, demanding that the wartime 54-hour work week be reduced to 40. On January 31, 1919, mounted police charged a crowd gathered in Glasgow's St. George's Square, injuring some 40 people. In the resulting uproar, the red flag was briefly raised over the town hall and the authorities panicked. At 10 Downing Street, Milner and his colleagues heard the secretary of state for Scotland say that "it was a misnomer to call the situation in Glasgow a strike—it was a Bolshevik rising." The cabinet swiftly dispatched six tanks and 8,000 troops, who set up machine-gun posts around the city.
Early 1919 saw sparks of rebellion even in the British armed services. Sailors on a Royal Navy patrol ship, the HMS Kilbride, mutinied and hoisted the red flag. Three thousand soldiers marched to the town hall in Folkestone, ripping down a "For Officers Only" sign on a railway station waiting room. Some 4,000 British troops manning the docks, trains, cranes, and warehouses at the French port of Calais went on strike. An enraged Haig demanded "the supreme penalty" for the rebels, but wiser heads restrained him. In other military protests there were more red flags and talk of solidarity with comrades in Russia, but the soldiers' greatest grievance was that they wanted to come home. As troops were demobilized, the demonstrations died away.
Another group of men were also impatient to come home: the more than 1,000 British war resisters still behind bars. Angry that their prison sentences were outlasting the war itself, some 130 went on a hunger strike. Among the voices calling for their release was an unexpected one, that of John Buchan. Unlike the pugnacious, short-fused heroes of his novels, he had a certain generosity of spirit, and once the war ended he drafted an appeal to the prime minister, which many other well-known figures signed, urging that COs be released. "A majority of these men," the petition said, "are sincerely convinced that they have acted under the demands of their conscience and in accordance with deep moral or religious convictions."
By mid-1919 the conscientious objectors were all free. Over the years, as the war's toll sank in, they and others who had gone to jail for their beliefs began to win considerable respect from a public that had once condemned them. Fenner Brockway and several others became members of Parliament. Five years after serving his hard-labor sentence in Pentonville Prison, the journalist E. D. Morel was the Labour Party's chief spokesperson on foreign affairs in the House of Commons. Bertrand Russell continued to write. Several decades after the war ended, his top-heavy thatch of hair now white but as thick as ever, Russell would appear in formal dress in Stockholm as one of the few writers of nonfiction ever to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. A trade unionist named Arthur Creech Jones spent two and a half years in prison as a CO; 30 years later, he was in the cabinet. Ramsay MacDonald, an antiwar Labour MP, had not gone to prison during the war but had been under police surveillance and was repeatedly stoned when he spoke at peace meetings. Angry patriots had even voted to expel him from his golf club. In 1924, he became prime minister.
During 1919, militant labor revolts shook countries around the world, even including orderly little Switzerland, which had its own nationwide general strike. Germany, too, experienced great upheavals, but in the Armistice agreement the Allies had deliberately allowed the German army to keep thousands of machine guns for crowd control. In Berlin, after she took part in a failed general strike and uprising, her petite figure with its large hat and parasol still considered a threat by right-wingers, Rosa Luxemburg was beaten and shot by army officers and her body dumped in a canal. The hope that revolution would spread from Russia to other countries in Europe receded.
One of those who had felt that hope was Willie Wheeldon, who became an early member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Soon enough, however, like thousands of like-minded men and women in Western Europe, he began to think that if he wanted to live in a revolutionary society, he would have to go to Russia. In 1921, at age 29, he emigrated to the nation he was convinced had the best chance of achieving what John S. Clarke, at his mother's burial, had called "that glorious time when peace and joyousness shall fill all life." Learning Russian, Wheeldon became a Soviet citizen, settling in Samara, an old fortress city on the Volga River that the Bolsheviks were turning into a center of new industry, and marrying a local woman. For some years he wrote often to his sister Winnie and her husband Alf. Eventually he moved to Moscow, where he worked as a government translator. Then the letters stopped.
Another place where people hoped to bring a new and different society into being was Ireland, where nationalists were fighting to be free of British rule at last. The militant Irish Republican Army began attacking British troops and police barracks, and John French's forces fought back ruthlessly. In the guerrilla war of ambushes, assassinations, and torture that followed, well over 1,000 people on both sides were killed. With his own narrow vision reinforced by a lifetime in the army, French saw everything in military terms, dismissing officials he considered too soft and urging Boer War—style concentration camps. He also proposed removing all civilians from certain areas where the IRA was active, bringing in warplanes, and establishing what, half a century later in Vietnam, would be called free-fire zones. In December 1919, while he and his bodyguards were driving near Dublin's Phoenix Park, he narrowly escaped death when IRA guerrillas threw grenades at his car and opened fire from behind a hedge.
Adding to French's consternation, among the many supporters of the IRA was his sister. They appear to have broken off all contact at this time, and on her visits to Ireland he had her closely shadowed. "The pore lady was niver foive minutes widout somebody followin' her about, though she doesn't know ut," an Irishman in Cork told a visitor from England. At one point, Charlotte Despard and the Irish nationalist Maud Gonne were speaking to a crowd of sympathizers when French roared past in his motorcade without stopping. The two women traveled the country gathering testimony about violence by British forces. "With her I was able to visit places I should never have been able to get to alone in the martial [law] areas," Gonne wrote to a friend. When they were stopped at roadblocks, "it was amusing to see the puzzled expressions on the faces of the officers ... who continually held up our car, when Mrs. Despard said she was the Viceroy's sister."
Meanwhile, just as after the pancontinental war against Napoleon, the winners gathered in January 1919 to divide the spoils. The number of negotiators and their entourages of secretaries, cooks, valets, translators, messengers, chauffeurs, and guards soared into the thousands—the British Empire's mission alone totaled 524—for many branches of every Allied government wanted a hand in reshaping the world. The Paris Peace Conference lasted, with a few breaks, for a full year, and out of it came a string of treaties and decisions that helped determine the course of the next 20 years and speed the way to a second, wider, more ruinous war. A noble-sounding but ineffectual League of Nations was created to settle international disputes. Everywhere the victors redrew boundaries and from Finland to Czechoslovakia recognized a bewildering array of new countries that emerged from the ruins of fragmented empires. Germany was partly demilitarized and its territory reduced by about 10 percent; it was also burdened with huge reparations payments and the humiliating requirement to formally acknowledge its guilt for starting the war.
The rearranged map was a global one. Germany's possessions in the Pacific and Africa, some of the latter with valuable deposits of gold, copper, and diamonds, were divided among the victors. The Ottoman Empire was partly dismembered and its various Arab lands parceled out, mostly to French and British control. In Paris, among the black top hats and morning coats of the triumphant prime ministers and the battle ribbons and epaulets of the generals, were representatives in more humble attire, coming to plead the cause of various colonized peoples. After all, hadn't the trigger for this war been the invasion and occupation of a small country, Belgium?
These visitors knocked on doors in vain. The Allied rhetoric about self-determination of peoples did not apply to African or Asian colonies, or to Arab territories known to have oil. With all these uppity colonials on hand, it was no wonder that the ubiquitous Basil Thomson was put in charge of security for the British delegation, adding two dozen intelligence agents in Paris to the several hundred already under his control in England and Ireland.
Violet Cecil was also in Paris for much of the conference, because Milner was part of the British delegation—in charge of it, in fact, whenever the prime minister was not in town. Day by day, his diary records how he and other delegates disposed of different parts of the globe, from the Cameroons and German Southwest Africa to the three former Ottoman provinces fatefully cobbled together into the British protectorate of Iraq.
After the bleak years of war, here was a chance for Violet to once again be in the glamorous center of great political events. She rented a house by the Bois de Boulogne, and together she and Milner walked in the park, visited with Lloyd George and Clemenceau, and took in the sights of the victorious city in spring: the captured German guns lining the Champs Élysées; the embassy receptions; the whirl of diplomats, generals, and French aristocrats at dinners and balls; the amateur theatricals—not considered fitting in wartime—that could now be staged by the younger British Foreign Office staff. Military bands were everywhere. Gone were the drab years of wartime restraint; long-stored jewels, pearls, and ostrich feathers adorned women once more. Famous restaurants were restored to their prewar glory, and the delegates from starving Germany—who had guards to protect them from jeering French patriots—were amazed by the array of food at their hotel.
There was, of course, an undertone that no victory celebration could wipe out. The war had been particularly devastating for the extended Cecil family. Of the ten grandsons of Lord Salisbury, the former prime minister, five, including George Cecil, had been killed at the front. Violet again made a pilgrimage to George's burial site, but now, in 1919, she was far from the only Englishwoman visiting a grave—or searching for one in vain. Thousands of British, French, American, and Canadian widows and mothers roamed the former war zone. Hotels were filled with the grieving, and former Red Cross hospital trains had to be pressed into service to house the overflow. Shattered tanks dotted meadows, and everything from cathedrals to farmhouses lay in ruins. Along hundreds of country roads, lined in European style with rows of plane or poplar trees, all that remained were bare trunks, the limbs victim to shrapnel. The mourning women mixed uneasily with French villagers trying to salvage their cratered fields, while police and soldiers tried to keep everyone away from unexploded shells. German POWs, still in custody, were at work clearing the rubble.
A Cecil cousin who survived the war wrote of visiting the Somme battlefield to try to find his brother-in-law's grave: "Everywhere lies the ordinary debris of occupied trenches—bully beef tins, biscuit tins, traces of half-executed meals.... A dented white basin with traces of soapy water stands on a box; shaving tackle all spattered with soil and mud spreads itself upon an improvised table. Something of a meal remains—a marmalade jar with tin plates and rusted knife and fork. A pair of muddy, hardened boots.... Will we find our friend, or do the dead lie too thick—are the crosses too many?"
An exhausted Milner returned to the peace talks seven times (on one such trip taking his first airplane ride), and on June 28, 1919—the fifth anniversary of the assassinations at Sarajevo—in the packed Hall of Mirrors at the palace of Versailles, he was one of the five men who, on behalf of Britain, placed their signatures next to the red ribbon and sealing wax on the final page of the main peace treaty. He and other skeptics had been unable to persuade Lloyd George to ease the harsh terms imposed on Germany. The prime minister had won an election the month after the Armistice by thundering about making Germany pay for the war, and Clemenceau of France was even more vehement. Having seen his country invaded twice in his lifetime, Clemenceau, it was rumored, had asked to be buried on his feet, facing Germany. Both leaders were also prisoners of four and a half years of the greatest political propaganda barrage history had seen: the xenophobic torrent to which Buchan, Kipling, and so many others, along with their counterparts in France, had contributed. All this had forged a public that demanded Germany be punished—and punished painfully. The resulting peace treaty, wrote the diplomat-historian George F. Kennan years later, had "the tragedies of the future written into it as by the devil's own hand."
That Germany and the now vanished Austria-Hungary really had started the war, that they had ruthlessly exploited the territory they conquered, that the Versailles treaty's provisions would be softened later, all made no difference whatever to Germans. The public ignominy of being dictated to by the Allies rankled deeply across the political spectrum, eroding support—just as Ludendorff and von Hindenburg had planned—for the moderate, civilian regime that was forced to accept the treaty, and providing essential grist for the rise of Hitler. As he wrote in Mein Kampf a few years later: "What a use could be made of the Treaty of Versailles.... How each one of the points of that Treaty could be branded in the minds and hearts of the German people until sixty million men and women find their souls aflame with a feeling of rage and shame; and a torrent of fire bursts forth as from a furnace, and a will of steel is forged from it, with the common cry: 'We will have arms again!"'
While Woodrow Wilson is said to have called the struggle just ended the war to end all wars, Milner, grimly realistic, called the Versailles treaty "a Peace to end Peace."
Just as Nazism was to spring directly from the ashes of the war, so was another of the twentieth century's great totalitarian systems. After several years of ruthless combat, the Russian civil war came to an end, and with it the attempt by Allied troops to prop up counterrevolutionary forces. The Bolsheviks began to refer to themselves as communists, and soon no other parties were allowed to exist in what in 1922 became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Although some British leftists of this era, like Willie Wheeldon, saw the Soviet Union as the world's best hope, one person who decided otherwise was Bertrand Russell. He traveled there in 1920 and was dismayed to find a police state where "our conversations were continually spied upon. In the middle of the night one would hear shots, and know that idealists were being killed in prison." Unswayed by the red-carpet treatment he received, he was chilled to hear Lenin laugh at a British socialist "for believing in Soviets without dictatorship."
Sylvia Pankhurst also traveled to Russia in 1920, and also met Lenin, whom she, by contrast, found "more vividly vital and energetic, more wholly alive than other people." She saw the country through totally optimistic eyes, managing to convince herself that in this glorious new society "the Russian people have mostly forgotten the very existence of alcohol." John S. Clarke, who was there at the same time, also fell under Lenin's spell and was able to use his knowledge of circus animals to cure the leader's dog of an unspecified illness.
Plenty of other Western leftists, in eager search for the embodiment, at last, of what Pankhurst once called a "Golden Age" of peace and plenty for all, also found paradise in the Soviet Union. Charlotte Despard was to visit in 1930, by which point Stalin's murderous dictatorship was completely entrenched. She found everything to be splendid: the diet was good, children privileged, education enlightened, orphanages first-rate, and the courts wise and generous. In Soviet prisons, she claimed, the worst punishment "inflicted by a court of the prisoners themselves was to be kept out of the club room for one month."
To give them some credit, John S. Clarke drifted away from his infatuation soon enough, and Pankhurst abandoned hers even more quickly and vocally, dissent getting her expelled from Britain's Communist Party in 1921. But the hunger among leftists to see the Soviet Union as a shining alternative to war-ravaged capitalist Europe remained deep. In the USSR's first decade and a half, tens of thousands of believers in that dream emigrated there from around the world.
Then in the mid-1930s, in what became known as the Great Purge, an increasingly paranoid Stalin ordered waves of arrests, gathering people by the millions into execution cellars or the far-flung prison camps of his expanding gulag. Tapping an ancient vein of xenophobia, the secret police always seized people on the pretext that they were spies or saboteurs for some foreign power, and so the many foreigners who had come to live in Russia were at particular risk. Thousands of them vanished. Government files on the fate of most were not opened until the early 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Among the victims they revealed, arrested on October 5, 1937, and on Christmas Day of that year sentenced to be shot, was Willie Wheeldon.