Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  Yet any conscientious objector who gave anything other than a religious reason for not wishing to fight was treated peremptorily. When Reginald Allen, chairman of the No Conscription Fellowship, told the City of London tribunal on 10 April that, ‘as a socialist, he considered his life and his personality sacred’, the military representative said the Act only recognised religious motivations. The chairman did at least offer Allen an exemption to do work of ‘national importance’; Allen refused.266 The argument continued over whether, as Samuel had put it, ‘a moral objection is as good as a religious objection’. Some exemptions were easier to obtain than others: the Cambridge tribunal, supplied with expert evidence by John Maynard Keynes, agreed that Professor A. C. Pigou, head of the economics department at the university and identifier of the Pigou effect, a classical economic theory about how equilibrium is restored during a period of deflation, should be exempted. It is not recorded whether Keynes – who came violently to disagree with Pigou’s theories – told the tribunal Pigou had used his private means to fund some of Keynes’s research. Pigou volunteered as an ambulance driver during university vacations, and became renowned for his coolness under fire.

  As conscientious objectors were shipped to France to serve in working parties behind the lines, and those who refused were jailed, more stories of their ill-treatment were raised in Parliament, to the embarrassment of a government still dominated by Liberals. The rough handling often began before they got into the Army’s clutches: there were complaints about high-handed tribunals and men being mocked for their religion. The military representative on one tribunal asked a conscientious objector: ‘Could he explain the text in Numbers “Shall your brethren go to war, and shall ye sit here?”’267 The objector’s wife was asked by the same man to comment on the text ‘vengeance is mine’, which she completed with ‘saith the Lord.’

  There was particular anger about the use of a punishment known as ‘crucifixion’ – Field Punishment No. 1, introduced nearly forty years earlier when flogging had been abolished – in which men were for long periods chained to a wall with their arms raised above their heads, causing many to faint. MPs were concerned that this ill-treatment was not being handed out just to the lower orders, but to men such as themselves. Philip Morrell proclaimed that ‘when you have, as you have now, over 1,000 men of the highest character and the best education, many of them in good positions, all of them well known, who are willing to undergo arrest and become criminals rather than take part in a war which they say is against their conscience, the problem is a very serious one, and it is time that it should be dealt with in a serious spirit.’268 At Cambridge in March 1916 seventy-two university men appeared before the local tribunal, which granted most of them exemption from combatant service only. One man said he ‘would rather see England physically ruined than morally ruined, and therefore he could take no part in ejecting any foreign invader.’269 George Sutherland, a maths and physics master at Harrow, appealed to his local tribunal not to be made to join the Royal Army Medical Corps, as he felt its main purpose was to put men back into the firing line as quickly as possible; and he could not himself take a life. ‘You don’t think murderers’ lives should be taken by the state?’ he was asked. ‘No, the duty is to convert them,’ he replied.

  Even overage men who shared these views were subject to harassment: Bertrand Russell, aged forty-four, was invited to lecture on mathematics at Harvard in the autumn of 1916, but the government refused him a passport, claiming it would not be in the public interest to grant him one – fearing what he might say about the war and conscription once out of British jurisdiction, in a land where his words would be highly publicised. Then his college, Trinity, banned him from lecturing in Cambridge. Nor was it just distinguished public figures who were penalised. Government employees, from civil servants to postmen, who professed a conscientious objection were made to forfeit their pensions.

  Russell worked almost full-time for the rest of the war in the anti-conscription cause. He claimed that as Asquith was about to leave for Dublin after the Easter Rising, he and several others went to see him – Russell and he were old friends through the Morrells – to demand that thirty-seven conscientious objectors who had been sentenced to death be reprieved. Russell recalled that ‘it had been generally supposed, even by the Government, that conscientious objectors were not legally liable to the death penalty, but this turned out to be a mistake, and but for Asquith a number of them would have been shot.’270 The men had been sent to France and, refusing to fight once there, were court-martialled. Haig also took the credit for reprieving them, but may have done so on Asquith’s instructions. However urgent the need for soldiers, the propaganda effect of shooting thirty-seven non-combatant men in cold blood for refusing to fight would have been catastrophic.

  Many who sought exemptions did so because their livelihoods would be threatened by service, or their employers sought it for them for the same reason: most such pleas were dismissed. A music-hall turn, Whit Cunliffe, won a four-month exemption because of his charity work, performing for wounded soldiers. Some who simply wanted to evade service, and could not prove a conscientious objection on religious grounds, went to extreme lengths to escape the draft. A carpenter was fined £10 in June 1918 for deliberately maiming himself to avoid service by sawing off two fingers; others posed as deaf and dumb, and one was recorded as dressing in women’s clothing to avoid detection. However, with call-up papers occasionally being sent to babies, blind men and soldiers, many idlers and shirkers must have thought attempted evasion worth trying.271

  Yet there was plenty of evidence that the caprice of the tribunals could also lead to leniency. Esher wrote to Asquith from his Scottish house, the Roman Camp at Callander in Perthshire, to say that in rural areas tribunals ‘all proceed on the assumption that a man’s first duty is to his business, whether it is that of a farmer or an employee in any trade that he mainly runs … This view is quite natural when it is realised that the Tribunals are composed of the applicants’ neighbours, and the military representative is also a neighbour and possibly a friend.’272 He told Asquith he had watched sixty cases, most of which led to deferrals. ‘It is the line of least resistance for any committee.’ Auckland Geddes, who would serve in the Lloyd George coalition, told Repington that ‘there were vast numbers in the mines who were not working full time, and should either do so or come out and fight.’273 Robertson gave Repington an ‘extreme case’ of a tribunal in an agricultural district that had exempted all but six out of two thousand men.

  IX

  At Bangor in North Wales on 6 May 1916 Lloyd George sought, if not to rebuild bridges with his fellow Liberals, then to justify himself: ‘You must organise effort when a nation is in peril,’ he told his audience. ‘You cannot run a war as you would run a Sunday school treat, where one man voluntarily brings the buns, another supplies the tea, one brings the kettle, one looks after the boiling, another takes round the tea-cups, some contribute in cash, and a good many lounge about and just make the best of what is going. You cannot run a war like that.’274 But if Asquith thought he had neutered his enemies by agreeing to compulsion he was wrong. On 3 May Gwynne, intriguing more violently than ever, wrote to Derby: ‘For heaven’s sake come out on Carson’s side against Squiff. Don’t mince matters … [with Asquith] we can’t hope to win the war.’275

  As so often since August 1914, military matters were not the government’s only problem. Industrial action in munitions factories on the Clyde, political in inspiration rather than over pay or conditions, was so severe that on 28 March, when Lloyd George was in Paris, Miss Stevenson wired him to return urgently because the strikes ‘are assuming alarming proportions, and no-one will take any responsibility for drastic action.’276 The Clyde Workers Committee – previously known as the Clyde Labour Withdrawal Committee – had called strikes on what Addison said were ‘trivial grounds’.277 Agitation was manufactured over dilution, with self-appointed workers’ representatives demanding the right to
interview other workers without the permission of managers and during working hours. Under the DORA regulations, men who refused to work were ‘deported’ to other parts of Britain and kept under effective arrest, pending promises of good behaviour that would allow them to be returned to their homes and to factories. Carson argued that they were guilty of high treason and should be treated accordingly; and such was his influence that Addison promised to consider the matter.

  The union to which the strikers belonged, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, disowned them, declared the strike unconstitutional and denied them strike pay: that had immediately got 360 men back to work. Arrests continued: agitators were told they could put their case before the Clyde Commissioners, appointed for that purpose. An uneasy truce was brokered, but the main influence on the strikers was the active resentment of most of their fellow Glaswegians, some of whom suggested Clydeside be put under martial law.

  These were not the only trials. In the first six days of April there were nightly Zeppelin raids on England, and on 2 May the east coast would be bombed again. On 2 April 108 men were killed in a munitions factory explosion at Faversham. On 25 April German battle cruisers bombarded Lowestoft and Yarmouth. Losses at sea were rising: during April 140,000 tons of British shipping were lost, thirty-seven vessels being sunk by submarines and six more by mines. On 24 March a cross-Channel steamer from Folkestone to Dieppe, the Sussex, was torpedoed by the Germans with the loss of between fifty and eighty lives, one of them Enrique Granados, the renowned Spanish composer; injuries to American passengers inflamed opinion in the United States, forcing the Germans to promise there would be no repeat of the incident. The Sussex’s bow was blown off and it was towed stern first into Boulogne.

  The vulnerability of shipping also raised the problem that would dominate British life for the rest of the war: a shortage of food. There had been a bad harvest in 1915, and submarine attacks meant imports (on which pre-war Britain, its agricultural industry in steep decline, had come to depend) slumped. Some goods became unobtainable, and queues outside grocers’ shops commonplace, destabilising morale. Newspaper editors were called to Whitehall in late April and asked to show restraint in mentioning shipping losses and the consequent food shortages. Because Northcliffe – whose newspapers had come closer to prosecution under DORA for their perceived defeatism than he perhaps realised – despaired of politicians taking this or any other crisis in hand unless spurred on by the press, the Daily Mail discussed the problem openly on 4 May. Northcliffe told Wells that ‘one strong man who would order the people to eat less would effect the desired result – or it might be achieved by a very rigorous campaign of publicity by speech and newspaper.’278 The price of milk rose to 6d a quart; the press, scenting profiteering, advised consumers to shop around, and to patronise dairies selling it more cheaply.279 Demands grew for the government to control the milk price, in the interests of child health; yet another measure offensive to Liberal sensitivities.

  The government was forced, by the effect of the war on society, to respond to a debate about whether venereal diseases should be notifiable: men returning from France with one variety or other of such afflictions caused not just a predictable scandal among a civilian population yet to adjust from Victorian attitudes, but an epidemic among those who had been intimate with the returning heroes. A Royal Commission on Venereal Diseases was established, and it advised against making them notifiable, in case the problem was driven underground and became worse. Unfortunately, such measures would prove insufficient.

  With fuel, like food, running short, the cabinet agreed in early May to introduce a measure discussed before the war, but dismissed as eccentric: the introduction of British Summer Time. Asquith was the only sceptic in the cabinet, but acquiesced, and a resolution in the Commons on 8 May was passed by one hundred and seventy votes to two, and the law was in place by 21 May. As well as providing this ‘extra’ hour of daylight – in high summer it would now become dark in London by 9.30 p.m. instead of 8.30 p.m., which was expected to save £2.5 million in lighting costs alone – Parliament decided to scrap the bank holidays at Whitsun and in early August for the duration. It began to appear as though there was no area of human existence in which the war would not force new accommodations, even including the hours of daylight.

  CHAPTER 5

  RISING

  I

  As the conscription debate neared its end, news reached London of a significant military reverse far away from Flanders. There had been a military campaign in Mesopotamia since the autumn of 1914, and an attempt to take Baghdad in early 1916 led to defeat and disaster. Major General Charles Townshend, an egomaniac and womaniser who had routed 4,000 Turks the previous October, now found himself and his 20,000 Anglo-Indian troops surrounded by Ottoman forces at Kut-al-Amara, 100 miles south-east of Baghdad. A relief force under Sir Fenton Aylmer had been defeated at Shaikh Sa’ad in January. On 29 April Townshend surrendered after a siege of four months. An estimated 4,000 British wounded died because of a lack of hospital ships; 13,000 Allied troops were taken prisoner. The defeat had two consequences: it gave Asquith an excuse to move to the conscription of married men, and it necessitated a Mesopotamia commission which, like that already running on the Dardanelles, would allocate responsibility for the debacle. Chamberlain, as India secretary, technically oversaw the operation. Although he had demanded better medical facilities for the troops, conscious of the deaths in the Crimea sixty years earlier before Florence Nightingale’s arrival, he would be forced to resign. There had been a shocking rate of attrition for which someone had to pay. After the Dardanelles, it was another serious setback for those who had advocated an eastern strategy: and the stalemate in the west showed no sign of being broken either.

  It was at this stage of massive national self-doubt that a grave challenge arose far nearer to home. Asquith’s attempts to paper over the cracks in Ireland by propitiating John Redmond soon after war broke out, and defying the Unionists to cause trouble in a time of national peril, seemed to have worked. However, republicans could not countenance Asquith and Redmond’s deal. There was, by August 1914, a fundamental schism among those who wanted Ireland to govern itself. Constitutional Nationalists, led by Redmond, believed that by loyally fighting for Britain, with whom they would retain an association after Home Rule, the right to govern themselves would be granted out of gratitude. Republicans wanted no association with Britain. They saw Germany as the potential conqueror of their ancient enemy, and longed for a German victory: England’s difficulty was once more Ireland’s opportunity. It was the same mentality that sent Éamon de Valera, when Taoiseach, to the German embassy in Dublin in 1945 to offer his condolences on the death of Adolf Hitler.

  How far the republicans would go to pursue their aims was clear from 13 September 1914, when Sir Roger Casement, a former consular official (for which services he had been knighted) and Ulster Protestant, met Franz von Papen, the Kaiser’s military attaché to the United States, in Washington and asked for German support. What C. P. Scott, a convinced Home Ruler, called the ‘treasonable’ Irish press whipped up pro-German feeling from the start of the war; though the principal target was Redmond and the Nationalists, not the British government.1 Nationalists believed German money was subsidising republican papers, notably the Irish Volunteer, given out free of charge. T. P. O’Connor, a leading Nationalist politician, told Scott that ‘in the south and west the Sinn Féiners told the peasants that they were only asked to enlist in order that they might be conveniently killed off.’2 On 9 September representatives of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and James Connolly, the socialist leader of the Irish Citizen Army, met to evaluate the opportunity the war provided to strike at British rule. Connolly’s aims were further reaching than most: he wanted to bring down capitalism itself.

  On the eve of Asquith’s speech in Dublin on 25 September 1914 that, like so many given by British politicians, made the mistake of seeing Irish considerations as very much secondary to the wa
r effort, Eoin MacNeill, a former civil servant, and six other leading republicans issued a statement condemning Redmond for his pro-British attitude; it mentioned that but for his unavoidable absence abroad, Casement, by now a significant figure in the republican movement, would also have signed. Groups of volunteers, modelled on the British Army, had been drilling since the spring of 1914; but after the outbreak of war the movement split, with the Nationalist Volunteers following Redmond and in many cases joining the British Army, and a small minority identifying with the republican movement. They became known as the Irish Volunteers, and branches of Irish Volunteers were quickly established in areas where no volunteer group had previously existed. Each man was told to buy his uniform and rifle; women were encouraged to join and support the movement; MacNeill was appointed chief of staff.

  The Irish Volunteers came to be known by their detractors as ‘Sinn Féiners’, even though the original Sinn Féin, moribund for several years, had subscribed to passive and not armed resistance and, according to the policy of Arthur Griffith, its leader, had sought a type of dual monarchy for Ireland and Britain. Within a month 13,000 men had joined; 8,000 were regularly drilling and the group was thought to have 1,400 rifles.3 Bizarrely, there was no licensing system for firearms in Ireland, hence their proliferation and the inability of the authorities to control them. Although measures allowing the police to seize arms were effected under DORA in December 1914, the Irish Volunteers were allowed to grow permissively, as was the continued and largely unimpeded smuggling of arms into Ireland. The number of National Volunteers shrank after the split of August 1914, not least through some joining the British Army. That the movement became moribund and collapsed was an awful portent for Redmond, the Nationalists and their politics.