Nonviolence (16 page)

Prophetically, von Suttner had described the atmosphere in the early weeks of the war in
Die Waffen nieder :

Nothing else was spoken of in rooms or streets, nothing else read in the newspapers, nothing else prayed about in the churches. Wherever one went one found everywhere the same excited faces, the same eager talk about the possibilities of war. Everything else which engaged the people's interest at other times—the theatre, business, art—was now looked on as perfectly insignificant. It seemed to one as if it were not right to think of anything else whilst the opening scene in this great drama of the destiny of the world was being played out.

And in this atmosphere the peace movement, along with the peace, all but vanished. Philosopher Bertrand Russell had collected the signatures of more than sixty Cambridge fellows and professors on a petition demanding British neutrality in the event of war. But once war was declared, most of them withdrew their opposition. Russell later wrote of the war: “The prospect filled me with horror, but what filled me with even more horror was the fact that the anticipation of carnage was delightful to something like ninety percent of the population.” Russell's figure was probably exaggerated since it did not take into account the large percentage of the population silenced by the fear of being ostracized, or accused of cowardice or a lack of patriotism.

But as the war plodded on, bloodier and more interminable than anyone had imagined, more and more people spoke out. A coalition of the intelligentsia and the left-leaning labor movement, the same coalition the peace movement had tried to put together in Geneva in 1867, formed. This was especially true in Britain, where the labor movement had the slogan “A bayonet is a tool with a worker on each end.”

In October 1915 the British attempt to break through the German lines at Loos had collapsed after costing 60,000 lives. In January the true nature of the war became clear when the remainder of British, French, Australian, and New Zealand troops sent to attack Turkey were evacuated from the Turkish peninsula of Gallipoli with 250,000 casualties. No weapon or invasion was going to provide an alternative to trench warfare in Europe. For all the new technology, this tactic depended on manpower. After the second battle of Ypres in May 1915, when the Germans first used gas and killed 30,000 British soldiers, the height requirement for British volunteers was lowered from five foot five to five foot three. The British had more volunteers than uniforms and they came in faster than they could be trained. But it was obvious that volunteers alone would not be enough.

For centuries Britain had been engaging in nearly constant warfare without a popular outcry loud enough to stop it because ever since 1660, after a civil war and several decades of protest against
the royal prerogatives of warmaking, the British military had become completely voluntary. The British had learned from their seventeenth-century experience a lesson the Americans did not fully embrace until after the Vietnam War—that wars do not have to be sold to the general public if they can be carried out by an all-volunteer professional military. But in 1916, for the first time since 1660, the British government proposed a draft, and despite its unpopularity, it was passed by Parliament, after much debate and numerous revisions, with only thirty-five dissenting votes.

The Independent Labour Party had been against the war from its outbreak. But once the draft was established, most other labor organizations also voiced their opposition, at least to the draft if not the war. So did many other people. Vanessa Bell, the painter sister of Virginia Woolf, said that the absence of a draft was the one advantage of being British. “But if that goes I don't see any reason for bringing up one's children to be English.” With the draft a whole subclass emerged, often treated more as a subspecies, called the “conchies”—the conscientious objectors.

The dissident voice of the conchies was offensive to the British propaganda machine of war, and so the attention that these 16,500 men received belied the sad reality that they represented less than half of 1 percent of draftees. Those who refused to serve were given five-minute hearings after which they were either granted conscientious-objector status, were sentenced to hard labor in prision, or agreed to go into the military. Those who announced a crisis of conscience after already being shipped to France received worse treatment, such as being chained to a post or artillery wheel for two hours and being put to hard labor in chains. The military authorities felt themselves to be very progressive for enacting such punishments as a replacement for the traditional flogging. Some conscientious objectors were sent to France to be abused.

Many writers volunteered to serve and then wrote of the horrors they witnessed, creating an enduring antiwar literature. Some, such as poets Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen, did not survive the war. Owen died in combat in the last week of the war. Siegfried Sas-soon, who wrote some of the angriest poems, with near-lyrical
passages about uncaring generals and slaughtered youth, was a decorated officer who tossed his Military Cross into the Mersey while on leave, an act that led the War Office to conclude he was “a lunatic.”

The celebrated Bloomsbury Group was famously antiwar, though their stands ranged from that of economist John Maynard Keynes, who supported the government enough to work for it, to that of art critic Clive Bell, husband of Vanessa, who was its most outspoken opponent. He wrote a pamphlet,
Peace at Once,
which he later boasted was gathered and burned in the streets of London by the Lord Mayor. This was only a slight exaggeration. The pamphlet was published by the National Labour Press in Manchester, which was later raided by the Manchester police, leading to a famous freedom-of-the-press case. During the course of the trial the local magistrate had all confiscated material burned, including 1,642 copies of Clive Bell's antiwar pamphlet.

Most wars have shaky rationales, but the justifications for World War I were particularly thin, and Bell disposed of them in fifty-six pages. He argued that the survival of Britain was not at risk, that honor was an absurd reason for killing, that wars do not promote peace or democracy, and, prophetically, that “smashing the Germans” was not a good idea for the future of Europe nor anything that any sane person would want to die to accomplish. He reduced World War I to a squabble between ruling classes:

That the ruling class in Germany would like to smash the ruling class in England, I do not doubt. It is a peculiarity of ruling classes that they want always to be smashing each other. It should be the task of democracies to see to it that they smash nothing more precious.

Standing against the war had a price. In 1917, the British government denied Bertrand Russell a passport in order to prevent him from giving a lecture series at Harvard, and at the same time he was removed from his lectureship at Cambridge. In 1918 he was sentenced to six months in prison for statements opposing the presence of a U.S. military base in England. While serving his sentence
he worked on his later celebrated books,
The Analysis of Mind
and
Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy,
and read some forty books, including Lytton Strachey's now classic biography,
The Eminent Victorians.
Strachey himself had lost his position on
The Spectator
for his antiwar views.

In the United States the antiwar movement flourished until 1917, when the Americans entered the war. Suddenly laws were passed equating the expression of antiwar sentiments with espionage. Those who denounced the war could be sentenced to as much as twenty-five years in prison, yet 142 were sentenced for life and 17 were sentenced to death, though the executions were never carried out. Many thousands were so badly beaten and abused in prison in attempts to force them to change their stance, that at the end of the war only 4,000, about a third of the men who had said they would not serve, remained hard-and-fast conscientious objectors. The government allowed gangs to beat and even tar and feather war resisters and force them to kiss the flag. The American press, like that in Britain, belittled war resisters. Former president Theodore Roosevelt, speaking at the Harvard Club, called them “sexless creatures.” Antiwar movies and books were banned, while people flocked to prowar propaganda designed to instill hatred of Germans.

Even in the early years of World War I stories of low morale were abundant. Corder Catchpool, a British conscientious objector who worked with an ambulance crew, wrote in a letter from France in November 1914 that he saw hope for the world in the attitude of the soldiers. He would talk to them about how the ruling class made the war and they suffered for it. “They almost always see the point,” he noted. When the draft was instituted, Catchpool returned to England specifically in order to refuse it and go to prison. In 1917 he was being guarded by combat veterans with whom he debated. He wrote: “Not one has any delusions left about the war, such as one meets everywhere from civilians at home, and every man of them wants it to end, and doesn't care a toss how it is arrived
at.” By 1917, desertion was widespread in the armed forces of all of the fighting countries.

Finally, an exhausted and bankrupt Germany came to terms while its army still held parts of France, and the war ended without anyone having won a strategically decisive battle. George Bernard Shaw had visited the western front, where he reported that being a soldier was “soulless labor.” He wrote of the average soldier: “He only hands a shell or pulls a string. And a Beethoven or a baby dies six miles off.” According to conservative estimates, ten million had been killed and another twenty million wounded.

IX

The kind of pacifism that does not actively combat the war preparations of the governments is powerless and will always stay powerless. Would that the conscience and common sense of the people awaken!

—ALBERT EINSTEIN,

speech in New York, December 14, 1930

W
orld War I had given war such a bad reputation that, for a moment, most people turned against it. Both youth and veterans groups had large numbers campaigning for peace. Quakers and other antiwar religious groups were expanding in Britain and the United States. The works of European writers and artists, as well as Americans such as Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos, had strong antiwar overtones as did many of the painters such as the German war veteran Otto Dix. The most startling contribution, perhaps the best antiwar novel ever written, was Erich Maria Remarque's
All Quiet on the Western Front,
published in 1929. That year it sold three and a half million copies in German and the twenty-five languages into which it was translated. “It should be distributed by the millions and read in every school,” said the French newspaper
Le Monde.

Remarque was a veteran of the war, and his novel was the simple story of a group of German schoolboys whose teacher instructed them on the value of patriotism and urged them to enlist; after arriving at the front, they endure all the horrors of the war and are killed, one by one.

There was indeed one of us who hesitated and did not want to fall into line. That was Josef Behm, a plump, homely fellow. But he did allow himself to be persuaded, otherwise he would have been ostracized. And perhaps most of us thought as he did, but no one could very well stand out, because at that time even one's parents were ready with the word “coward”: no one had the vaguest idea what we were in for.

For once veterans were telling the truth about the war they fought in and hated. And now the public was not only listening, they were applauding. At the same time more academic writers were publishing exposés—for example, Arthur Ponsonby's
Falsehood in Wartime
and Sir Philip Gibbs's
Now It Can Be Told—
on how the
leaders on both sides had lied to the public. Even Woodrow Wilson, the president who brought the United States into the war, later said, “Is there any man, woman or child in America … who does not know that this was an industrial and commercial war?”

The Permanent Court of International Justice finally opened in The Hague in 1922. The long-awaited international organization, the League of Nations, was established after the war and successfully averted war between Sweden and Finland in 1921 and between Bulgaria and Greece in 1925.

How could populations ever again be duped into such slaughter? How could young men ever again be cowered into killing the way the German boys in Remarque's book were? But four years after
All Quiet on the Western Front
was published, Hitler came to power and ordered the novel burned while its author fled to Switzerland.

Still, antiwar sentiment was running high, especially in the United States. The peace movement was becoming mainstream. Leading scientists such as Albert Einstein were outspoken pacifists. Christian clergy were coming forward to vow that they would never again commit the sin of backing war. In 1935 the Central Conference of American Rabbis mailed a questionnaire asking its membership of Reform rabbis if they would in the future refuse to support any war. Ninety-one said they would, thirty-two agreed with certain qualifications, and only thirty-two said no. Women obtained the right to vote in the United States in 1929, one year after women were granted full rights in Britain. Where women had the vote, especially in the United States, that vote was considered, as it still is to some degree, an antiwar vote. The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, a small group founded in 1915, grew into a major peace organization with 120 branches around the country. College students became vociferously antiwar, organizing large demonstrations.