March 2, 2011
In World War I, nearly as many British men refused the draft - 20,000 - as were killed on the Somme's first day. Why were those who fought for peace forgotten?
(Adam Hochschild)
An early autumn bite is in the air as a late, gold-tinged afternoon falls over the rolling countryside of northern France. Where the land dips between gentle rises, it is already in shadow. Dotting the fields are machine-packed rolls of the year's final hay crop. Up a low hill, a grove of trees screens the evidence of another kind of harvest reaped on this spot nearly a century ago. Each gravestone in the small cemetery has a name, rank, and serial number; 162 have crosses and one has a Star of David. When known, a man's age is engraved on the stone as well: 19, 22, 23, 26, 34, 21, 20. Ten of the graves simply say, "A Soldier of the Great War, Known unto God." Almost all the dead are from Britain's Devonshire Regiment, the date on their gravestones July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Most were casualties of a single German machine gun several hundred yards from this spot, and were buried here in a section of the frontline trench they had climbed out of that morning. Some 21,000 British soldiers were killed or fatally wounded that summer day, the day of greatest bloodshed in the history of their country, before or since.
From a nearby hilltop, you can see a half dozen of the 400 cemeteries where British soldiers are buried in the Somme battlefield region, a rough crescent of territory less than 20 miles long, but graves are not the only mark the war has made on the land. More than 700 million artillery and mortar rounds were fired on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918, and many failed to explode. Every year these leftover shells kill people. Dotted through the region are patches of uncleared forest or scrub surrounded by yellow danger signs in French and English warning visitors away. More than 630 bomb-disposal specialists have been killed in France since 1946. Like those shells, the First World War itself has remained in our lives, below the surface, because we live in a world so much formed by it.
The war's destructiveness still seems beyond belief. In addition to the dead, another 36,000 British troops were wounded on the first day of the Somme offensive. But worse was yet in store. "No, we do not pardon," Adolf Hitler fulminated soon after the war ended, "we demand - vengeance!" Germany's defeat, and the vindictive, misbegotten peace settlement that followed, irrevocably nurtured the seeds of Nazism, of an even more destructive war 20 years later, and of the Holocaust as well. The war of 1914-1918 was, as Simon Schama has put it, the "original sin" of the 20th century. Even the victors were losers: how could France, for example, be considered victorious when half of all Frenchmen aged 20 to 32 at the war's outbreak were dead when it was over?
Inaugurating industrialized slaughter on a scale previously unknown, the First World War remade the world for the worse in every conceivable way.
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What kings, emperors, and prime ministers did not foresee, many others did. From 1914 on, tens of thousands of people in all the belligerent countries believed the war was not worth the horrendous cost in blood, and some anticipated with tragic clarity at least part of the nightmare that would engulf Europe as a result. Moreover, they spoke out at a time when to do so took great courage. In Germany, antiwar radicals like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were sent to prison - as was the American socialist Eugene V. Debs after he left a sickbed to give a series of speeches when the United States entered the conflict. The judge told him he might get a lesser sentence if he repented. "Repent?" asked Debs. "Repent? Repent for standing like a man?" More than 500 American draft resisters went to prison.
Or consider a scene that unfolded a few weeks before that notorious first day on the Somme, not far away. In the spring of 1916, Britain had begun conscription, and some 50 men who were among the first to refuse it were forcibly inducted into the army and transported, some in handcuffs, across the English Channel to France. Family members and fellow pacifists were horrified. When questioned about the men, Lord Derby, director of military recruiting, declared that "if they disobey orders, of course they will be shot, and quite right too!"
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It was in Britain that significant numbers of war resisters first acted on their beliefs and paid the price. They did not even come close to stopping the bloodshed, but their strength of conviction remains one of the glories of a dark time. By the conflict's end, more than 20,000 British men of military age would refuse the draft. Many, on principle, also refused the noncombatant alternative service offered to conscientious objectors, and more than 6,000 served prison terms under harsh conditions: hard labor, a bare-bones diet, and a strict "rule of silence." This was one of the largest groups ever jailed for political reasons in a Western democracy. War opponents behind bars also included older men - and a few women - as well. If we could time-travel our way into British prisons in late 1917 and early 1918 we would meet the nation's leading investigative journalist, a future winner of the Nobel Prize, more than half a dozen future members of Parliament, one future cabinet minister, and a former newspaper editor who was now publishing a clandestine journal for his fellow inmates on toilet paper.
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When Rev. Edward Lyttelton, the headmaster of Eton, proposed some possible peace terms, the resulting uproar forced him to resign. From Parliament to pulpit, ferocity reigned. "Kill Germans! Kill them!" raged one clergyman in a 1915 sermon, "... not for the sake of killing, but to save the world... Kill the good as well as the bad... Kill the young men as well as the old... I look upon it as a war for purity. I look upon everybody who dies in it as a martyr." The speaker was Arthur Winnington-Ingram, the Anglican Bishop of London.
A West End theater put on a play mocking pacifists, called The Man Who Stayed At Home. Women stood on street corners handing out white feathers, an ancient symbol of cowardice, to young men not in uniform. Recruiting posters appealed to shame: one showed two children asking a frowning, guilty-looking father in civilian clothes, "Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?" (Bob Smillie, leader of the Scottish mineworkers, said his reply would be: "I tried to stop the bloody thing, my child.")
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Part of [Bertrand] Russell's intellectual bravery lay in his willingness to confront that last set of conflicting loyalties. He described himself poignantly in the autumn of 1914 as being "tortured by patriotism... I desired the defeat of Germany as ardently as any retired colonel. 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." What left him even more anguished was realizing that "anticipation of carnage was delightful to something like ninety per cent of the population... As a lover of truth, the national propaganda of all the belligerent nations sickened me. As a lover of civilization, the return to barbarism appalled me. As a man of thwarted parental feeling, the massacre of the young wrung my heart." Over the four years to come, he never yielded in his belief that "this war is trivial, for all its vastness. No great principle is at stake, no great human purpose is involved on either side... The English and French say they are fighting in defence of democracy, but they do not wish their words to be heard in Petrograd or Calcutta."
Antiwar beliefs were tested most severely by the mass patriotic hysteria of the war's first months. "One by one, the people with whom one had been in the habit of agreeing politically went over to the side of the war." How hard it was, Russell wrote, to resist being swept away "when the whole nation is in a state of violent collective excitement. As much effort was required to avoid sharing this excitement as would have been needed to stand out against the extreme of hunger or sexual passion, and there was the same feeling of going against instinct." One night 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."
By the beginning of 1916, in response to recruiting drives, posters ("Don't Lag! Follow Your Flag!"), and music-hall songs ("Oh, we don't want to lose you, but we think you ought to go"), 2.5 million volunteers had enlisted in the British military. But as battles on the Western Front devoured men by the hundreds of thousands, compounded by similarly bloody operations like the disastrous Gallipoli landing in Turkey, the army's appetite for bodies was such that Britain finally began a draft.
The authorities started raiding soccer games, movie theaters, and railway stations to round up military-age men who were not in uniform. A pamphlet by "A Little Mother" typically declared that "we women... will tolerate no such cry as 'Peace! Peace!'... There is only one temperature for the women of the British race, and that is white heat... We women pass on the human ammunition of 'only sons' to fill up the gaps." It sold 75,000 copies in a few days. "The conscientious objector is a fungus growth - a human toadstool - which should be uprooted without further delay," screamed the tabloid John Bull. In April 1916 the major group backing resisters, the No-Conscription Fellowship, or NCF, drew some 2,000 supporters to a London meeting hall while an angry crowd milled about in the street outside.
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Not only soldiers perished in this war, for the conflict erased the traditional distinction between soldiers and civilians. Total war among industrialized economies meant that everybody was fair game, and each side tried to starve the other into submission. German U-boats torpedoed Allied and eventually neutral ships (which brought the United States into the war) carrying food and supplies to France and Britain. Meanwhile, the Royal Navy threw a tight blockade around Germany and its allies, sealing them off from all imports of food and fertilizer. Bad harvests in central Europe compounded the food shortages, and often the only meat on sale in Germany was that of dogs and cats. A foreign visitor described what happened when a horse collapsed and died on a Berlin street one morning: "Women rushed towards the cadaver as if they had been poised for this moment, knives in their hands. Everyone was shouting, fighting for the best pieces. Blood spattered their faces and their clothes... When nothing more was left of the horse beyond a bare skeleton, the people vanished, carefully guarding their pieces of bloody meat tight against their chests."
If there were ever a war that should have had an early, negotiated peace, it was this one. After all, before it began the major powers had been exchanging royal visits and getting along reasonably well. In public, at least, none of them claimed a piece of another's territory. Germany was Britain's biggest trading partner. But once the conflict was on, neither side was willing to consider anything but total victory. From the beginning, Bertrand Russell had ceaselessly proposed peace terms. He suggested that a future "International Council" resolve disputes before they turned into war. In 1916, he wrote to President Woodrow Wilson, urging him to use his influence to start peace talks, but with no result. Sometimes, however, encouragement came from unexpected sources. In December of that year, Russell received a letter that began, "Tonight here on the Somme I have just finished your Principles Of Social Reconstruction... It is only on account of such thoughts as yours, on account of the existence of men and women like yourself that it seems worth while surviving the war... You cannot mind knowing that you are understood and admired and that those exist who would be glad to work with you." The writer, 2nd Lieutenant Arthur Graeme West of the 6th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, was killed by a sniper's bullet three months later, at the age of 25.
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It was not only draft refusers who were locked up. In the spring of 1918, Russell himself was sentenced to six months for writings the authorities deemed subversive. When he arrived to begin serving his sentence, the warder taking down his particulars "asked my religion and I replied 'agnostic.' He asked how to spell it, and then remarked with a sigh: 'Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God.'"
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After the bloodshed had continued without respite for three years, dissenters like these were joined by an unexpected voice that rang out from the very highest reaches of the country's hierarchy. Lord Lansdowne was a great landowner and former viceroy of India, minister for war, and foreign secretary. His doubts about battling to an unconditional victory began after the Somme. Very much a man of his class, he was particularly appalled by the number of British officers slain. "We are slowly but surely killing off the best of the male population of these islands..." he wrote. "Generations will have to come and go before the country recovers from the loss."
When the shocked London Times refused to publish it, an open letter from him appeared in the Daily Telegraph on November 29, 1917, laying out some proposals for a negotiated peace. "We are not going to lose this War," Lansdowne wrote, "but its prolongation will spell ruin for the civilised world, and an infinite addition to the load of human suffering which already weighs upon it... Just as this war has been more dreadful than any war in history, so, we may be sure, would the next war be even more dreadful than this." Nearly three decades before Hiroshima, he prophetically sensed something about the future: "The prostitution of science for purposes of pure destruction is not likely to stop short." Lansdowne was attacked by many former colleagues, and in their confidential reports on the public mood, undercover intelligence agents began speaking darkly of "Lansdownism."
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Bertrand Russell, who had recently completed his prison term, walked up Tottenham Court Road and watched Londoners pour out of shops and offices into the street to cheer. The public jubilation [because of armistice] made him think of the similar mood he had witnessed when war was declared more than four years earlier. "The crowd was frivolous still, and had learned nothing during the period of horror... I felt strangely solitary amid the rejoicings, like a ghost dropped by accident from some other planet."
Fonte:
http://theamericanscholar.org/i-tried-to-stop-the-bloody-thing
