Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  Sassoon’s letter was read into the parliamentary record on 30 July; but the row he hoped to provoke (and which, egged on by Lady Ottoline and others, he had been encouraged to believe would make waves) did not happen, which prompted him to throw the ribbon of his MC into the Mersey. Robert Graves, who served with him, called him a ‘silly old thing’. Graves added that his brother officers in the Royal Welch Fusiliers agreed with Sassoon but felt what he had done was ‘not quite a gentlemanly course to take.’3 Rather than court-martial him, and following interventions from Eddie Marsh, Churchill’s former private secretary and Rupert Brooke’s literary executor, and Graves, the War Office instead treated Sassoon as a psychiatric case. He was sent to Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh, to be treated for neurasthenia, or shell shock, by the leading expert in the study, W. H. R. Rivers. It was there, on 17 August 1917, that he met Wilfred Owen, whom he influenced as a poet and with whom he became friends. Sassoon gave Owen a critique of his most celebrated (and then unpublished) poem, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’; and after the war would do much to promote Owen’s work and establish his reputation as possibly the greatest of all the British war poets, Owen having been killed in action seven days before the Armistice. Sassoon returned to the Western Front in 1918, having spent much of his time in Craiglockhart writing poetry: Rivers, an officer in the Royal Army Medical Corps who realised his role was to restore the men he treated to a mental state in which they could return to the front, feared his psychological discussions with Sassoon were turning him into a pacifist. Whether Sassoon himself was a pacifist is a moot point. Unlike some Craiglockhart alumni – notably Max Plowman, whose memoir A Subaltern on the Somme would appear in 1928, who was dismissed from the Army when he refused to return to the trenches – Sassoon did go back to fight. But then Plowman, although a volunteer, had had ethical qualms about joining up in 1914, whereas it is clear from Sassoon’s writings that he felt a moral commitment to stay in the fight with his comrades.

  Pacifism was becoming ever more rife in the labour movement, and presented a difficult challenge for Arthur Henderson as Labour’s man in the War Cabinet. MacDonald, in a Commons debate on 12 February about financing the war, gave the impression that he spoke for the whole Labour Party when saying the government should conscript money from the rich just as it had conscripted men for the war. He correctly predicted that debt would be the main problem facing the country once hostilities ceased; but the case for a negotiated peace, not debt, was his main point. The new German submarine policy meant ‘killing became murder’, and the Germans had indicated that ‘all humanitarian considerations must be put upon the scrap-heap’: in his view, the only sort of war that would be prosecuted now would be one of utter barbarism.4 He wanted ‘a peace by consent of the people that have hitherto been at war’.5 He believed the Germans were beaten in the west, and the fight now was in Eastern Europe: a view he shared with the prime minister. But he sought an alternative to fighting: ‘If negotiations can do it, it should be done that way—and by negotiations I do not suggest that the Foreign Secretary should address a Note to Berlin, but I mean simply that diplomacy should use the opportunities which it now has got and that it should keep on defining its position, expounding its position, removing misunderstandings … our Foreign Office should show the same activity which our Army in the field is showing.’6 In a fight to the finish, he predicted, America would crush Europe economically, using its enormous resources to maintain and expand its foothold in markets it had entered during the war. But he added: ‘To me, “finish” is the securing of the maximum political result from the minimum military effort, although that minimum may be a very big one. If the House does not do that, if we simply gamble the future of Europe and throw away the prospect and the guarantees of the future of Europe, in view of the position in which we are now, do not let us delude ourselves that we are fighting the last of the wars, because we are only fighting one of many which are still to come.’7

  This incensed MacDonald’s colleagues. George Wardle, who became leader of the parliamentary Labour Party when Henderson moved to the War Cabinet, denounced him in the Commons two days later, saying that whomever he spoke for, it was not Labour. He called his speech ‘amazing’, and not approvingly.8 The most recent Labour conference, in January, had ‘inflexibly resolved to fight until victory was achieved,’ supporting Henderson’s motion saying so by 1,850,000 to 300,000.9 Wardle said: ‘Negotiations, definitions, expounding positions, will not remove the misunderstandings which have arisen in this War. A nation guilty, as Germany was in this War, of an unprovoked attack upon Belgium, a nation guilty of Zeppelin outrages and of murder on the high seas, is not going to be deflected from its purpose by explanations and by expounding positions. Was such a futile policy as that ever proposed in this House?’10 Wardle stressed there would be a price to pay if the Allies withdrew from the war at this stage: ‘But what about the danger if Constantinople is allowed to remain in the hands of Germany, for it is practically in the hands of Germany now? What, if we leave this War unfinished, without a military victory, and we leave Germany in possession of Middle Europe, with a straight run from Berlin to Bagdad, and with the East in her possession? I think we shall have sown the seeds of future wars there with a vengeance, indeed—a vengeance which not only our children but our children’s children will have to pay for.’11

  His was a bravura description of the patriotic impulse that still, in the third year of war and after appalling losses, fired millions of Britons to continue making sacrifices, and eloquently expressed why so many Britons still wished to wage war on Germany:

  We did not go into this War willingly. We did not seek it. It was forced upon us, and to talk about making peace until Germany has given up the war aims with which she set out seems to me an impossible position for anyone who loves his country to take up. To me fighting to a finish and victory do not mean the same thing as they seem to mean to the hon Member. They mean to me much more. They mean the defeat of the war aims of Germany. They mean the destruction of the vilest plot that ever disgraced humanity. They mean chastisement for crimes which will remain for ever an indelible stain on the page of history. They mean, first, a military victory, and then a reasonable and a settled peace.12

  He dismissed MacDonald’s assertion that this should be the ‘last war’. ‘We cannot rule the future. We can fight as far as we can to make this the last war, but it does not rest with us to say that it shall be the last war. We can only take care that in the settlement, as far as possible, we shall do our part to remove the causes of future war; but if it is necessary in order to do this to talk Germany into peace, I for one refuse to accept such a statement. Germany cannot be talked into peace … the hon Member’s speech had no relation at all to the facts as they now stand.’ Labour’s fissures, of which this episode was a salutary example, suited Lloyd George very well.

  However, within months, the prime minister felt it necessary to counter growing cynicism by reiterating the case for war. In Glasgow on 29 June 1917 he gave an idealistic view of Britain’s war aims. Serbia and Belgium needed their independence restored and their people compensated; the Turks had to surrender Mesopotamia and Armenia; Prussian military power was to be destroyed and the German government democratised. The British would negotiate only with a German leadership radically unlike the one that started the war: and victory was assured. However, he deluded himself on one key point. Playing to the gallery in a socialist heartland, he predicted a resurgent Russia ‘more formidable than ever, because in Russia in future the whole of her power will be cast on the side of liberty and democracy and not of autocracy.’13 A little later, at Dundee, he stuck to his theme, seeking to raise morale by saying the government would punish food profiteers – official figures would show in July that food prices had risen by 104 per cent since before the war. He claimed, rashly in view of the food situation, ‘there are no privations in this country. There are in Germany, and there are in Austria, and they are still fighting.’14 The
British had deep reserves to use up before seeing any danger of defeat.

  Henderson’s ability to rein in MacDonald and the pacifist wing of his party was handicapped by his being absent for much of the summer of 1917 on a mission to Russia, to make contacts with the Russian provisional government, under Alexander Kerensky, that had displaced the Tsar, with the aim of persuading Kerensky to keep Russia in the fight against Germany. He then went to an international socialist meeting in Paris. There, he participated in a discussion about whether to attend a pacifist conference in Stockholm, called by leftists from neutral countries in Scandinavia and Holland, at which socialists from enemy nations would be present. Suspicions about Henderson’s commitment to the war were further deepened by the fact that he had gone with MacDonald, who was to most of the British public the incarnation of pacifism, at a time when Britain was fighting for its life. On 1 August, having returned to England, Henderson was excluded, to his outrage, from a War Cabinet meeting that discussed whether he should be allowed to go to Stockholm. He forced himself into the room and told his colleagues their behaviour was an insult to him and to the working class. The minutes stated that ‘no slight had been intended.’15 His colleagues’ fear was that the socialists in Stockholm – which would include Russians, keen to get out of the war – would seek a negotiated peace that would not deliver the decisive victory to which Lloyd George and his colleagues were committed.

  That evening there was a vigorous debate in the Commons about why so senior a minister should have gone abroad on non-ministerial business with a notorious pacifist. Lloyd George urged MPs not to rush to judgement. Anxious to retain the support of organised labour, he had no desire to see Henderson, its political leader, humiliated. Henderson had a poor reception when he tried to explain himself. He pointed out that he remained secretary of the Labour Party and had duties to discharge in that capacity. However, that remark was met with ‘ironical cheers’.16 Public feeling was that the conference would give British leftists a measure of communication with citizens of an enemy country – Germany – which would be illegal; although any Germans they met in Stockholm would have no power to change anything. Lloyd George hoped Henderson would think better of it.

  In the event, Henderson did not. On 10 August the Labour conference voted by more than three to one to be represented at Stockholm. Henderson had failed to argue to his members that they should not attend – the view of the War Cabinet and all Allied governments – but in any case Henderson had by this point decided to resign. Lloyd George, however, was so angry that he dismissed him, writing him ‘an extremely trenchant but not too grammatical letter’ that Curzon had to edit and ‘soften’ before the War Cabinet agreed to its dispatch; but Henderson had in any case decided to resign.17 Lloyd George claimed Henderson’s ministerial colleagues had been ‘taken completely by surprise’ by his speech, and told the errant Labour leader so in his response to his resignation.18

  The mood of rage is detectable in the War Cabinet minutes for 10 August, which contain the note: ‘The Secretary was instructed not to summon Mr Henderson to future meetings of the War Cabinet, nor to circulate War Cabinet documents to him.’19 The Times credited Henderson with being an ‘honest patriot’ undone by ‘stupid conceit’, which was harsh: he had a duty to his country, but also, pursuing that duty, to maintain his party’s cohesion.20 George Barnes, Labour MP for the Gorbals and since the previous December minister for pensions, replaced him. Ironically the Stockholm conference was, in Mrs Webb’s words, ‘a fiasco’, thanks to a lack of unanimity about the future conduct of the war, posturing Russian revolutionaries and in-fighting within delegations.21 But pacifism was growing in Britain just when the maximum war effort was vital: Henderson, in the Commons on 13 August, emphasised that had he resigned before his party conference the pacifist vote would have been even higher.

  Henderson’s experience in Russia convinced him that a constitutional and democratic socialist alternative to Bolshevism had to be established; though ironically this would entail his leading the Labour Party in a more hard-line direction, and create even greater scope for conflict with a wartime government dominated by Tories. This change of tone necessitated a new structure and constitution for the party, about which Henderson had his first meeting with TUC representatives in September 1917. Out of office, he worked almost full-time on the party’s plan for the future, aware that the large number of working men, and women, who would be on the electoral register after the Franchise Bill passed – an increase from around 8 million eligible voters to 16.3 million – would put new demands on the party, and provide new opportunities. He told Scott of the Manchester Guardian that Labour might put up as many as 500 candidates at the next election, though once the Bill was on the statute book he revised down the estimate, in a speech at West Bromwich on 9 February 1918, to between 300 and 400.22 His energy, decency and competence were a loss to Lloyd George.

  The Labour Party’s new constitution, in which Sidney Webb, the leading Fabian, played a major role as draftsman, included a section that, seventy-five years later, would represent a red-in-tooth-and-claw past that had to be disavowed: the so-called Clause IV. It seems to have been Webb’s work, and the uncompromising language of his draft showed that the Liberal Party could not, without abandoning its own deep-seated principles, match his vision of socialism. Webb had long pressed the Fabian view that the middle class (of which he was a member), like the working class, had a vested interest in pursuing the socialist ideal, and reflected this by his reference to the desire ‘to secure for the producers by hand or brain the full fruits of their industry, and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible, upon the basis of the Common Ownership of the Means of Production and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.’23 Not only did this begin to separate the Liberal Party from working people, but it also announced that Labour aspired to be more than a party of manual workers, extending its ideas of radical socialism to those who did not earn their living by physical labour: something of which The Times remarked: ‘the eventual consequences will be far-reaching.’24 The newspaper cast doubt, though, on the willingness of those who profited by their brains to join the Labour Party, not least because of the difficulties of dividing up the spoils of their talent.

  Most of Labour’s new ideas – and the constitution settled in the winter of 1917–18 – were rooted in the pacifist movement, and dependent on the doctrine of the Union of Democratic Control, formed in 1914 in the Morrells’ house in Bedford Square by Labour pacifists such as MacDonald. Among the Liberal intellectuals sympathetic to the UDC was Bertrand Russell, another prominent pacifist. He had shown little inclination to be silenced on the issue since his brush with the law the previous year. His high-minded approach to any question caused him to disdain some of his confrères, who he thought spent more time squabbling about which of them should lead the pacifist movement than about how actually to achieve its aims. ‘Nevertheless, they were all there was to work with, and I did my best to think well of them.’25 The paradox of Russell’s pacifism had been his feeling in 1914 that ‘for several weeks I felt that if I should happen to meet Asquith or Grey I should be unable to refrain from murder.’26

  He claimed to have felt ‘tortured by patriotism’ and to have longed for Germany’s defeat: ‘Love of England is very nearly the strongest emotion I possess, and in appearing to set it aside at such a moment, I was making a very difficult renunciation.’ He had disregarded his love of country and acted upon a compulsion to protest because ‘the massacre of the young wrung my heart.’27 He had organised a branch of the UDC at Trinity College, Cambridge, where dons and undergraduates had shown an interest in the ideas: nonetheless, he admitted feeling surprised when, having said in a speech: ‘it is all nonsense to pretend the Germans are wicked’, the whole room applauded him.28 For Russell, Cambridge in the early phase of the war was a comforting escape from reality. His mentor George Santayana consoled him, not least b
ecause ‘he had not enough respect for the human race to care whether it destroyed itself or not.’

  That, though, had been before the Lusitania, after which Russell began to be shunned. On Lady Ottoline’s advice, he overcame his despair by visiting destitute Germans, in the months before they were all interned. Another of her circle, D. H. Lawrence, befriended Russell only to question his supposed pacifism: ‘Your basic desire is the maximum of desire of war, you really are the super-war-spirit … as a woman said to me, who had been to one of your meetings: “It seemed to me so strange with his face looking so evil, to be talking about peace and love. He can’t have meant what he said.”’29 Russell, in turn, thought Lawrence a fascist after conversations they had about the lectures Russell was preparing, which subsequently appeared as Principles of Social Reconstruction. ‘Gradually I discovered that he had no real wish to make the world better, but only to indulge in eloquent soliloquy about how bad it was.’30

  Russell would have been impressed to know that in July 1917 the War Office director of recruiting had told his superiors that the system of recruitment since the Military Service Act was ‘thoroughly bad’, not least because of the arbitrary operation of tribunals that heard appeals from men who did not wish to fight. ‘The injustices that were being perpetrated daily’, Robertson recorded, ‘were, in his opinion, undermining the morale of the nation and fanning the embers of pacifism.’31 He cited an example: ‘In Wales eleven Tribunals had recently refused to continue their duties on the ground that elderly married men were being taken while young men were left in civil life.’32