In the same month, however, an incident took place that was to prove decisive in determining the outcome of the war. Over the previous few months Germany had conducted indiscriminate submarine attacks on any ships entering British waters, in an attempt to blockade Britain and starve her population into submission. The strategy resulted in the sinking of several vessels from the United States. The Americans were so incensed by the attacks that, on 16 April, they declared war on Germany. It was hoped that the United States might tip the scales in the Allies’ favour, though it would be months before American men and supplies reached the Western Front.
But as one ally was gained, another was lost. In Russia, the starved and weary population brought down Tsar Nicholas II, in what became known as the February Revolution, and a provisional government assumed power in his place. At first, Lloyd George welcomed the fall of the House of Romanov, and the opportunity to present the war as a moral struggle between the liberal ‘democratic’ Allies and the autocratic Central Powers. Yet Russia’s new government turned out to be unenthusiastic about a military crusade and proposed a peace with no annexations and indemnities.
Lloyd George’s strategy suffered a further blow in April, when the revolutionary Bolshevik leader Lenin arrived in Petrograd, in a train laid on by the Germans, to denounce the imperialist war. ‘The war,’ he declared, ‘is being waged for the division of colonies and the robbery of foreign territory; thieves have fallen out … to identify the interests of the thieves with the interests of the nation is an unconscionable bourgeois lie.’ It was a view that won wide acceptance in Russia, and also among the hungry working classes of Europe. Lenin’s Bolsheviks would become increasingly powerful over the coming months, and in November they would storm Petrograd’s Winter Palace, the seat of Russia’s government, and establish a ‘Soviet republic’. As head of the first ever socialist state, Lenin would end Russia’s involvement in the war by signing a treaty with Germany.
As the revolution unfolded in Russia there was no change on the Western Front. While the imminent arrival of thousands of American soldiers appeared to increase Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig’s confidence, it also prompted him to attempt to finish the job before the Americans reached France, no doubt in order to claim more glory for himself. Haig now believed the British could retake Ypres, march on to the Belgian coast and precipitate the fall of the German front. Lloyd George cautioned him against hubris and hastiness, but Haig silenced the doubters in the government and another bloody battle began, this time at Passchendaele, in July 1917. When the first British assault failed, Haig did not call off the operation, as he had promised; he remained convinced of a ‘tremendous’ breakthrough.
The battle persisted through August, September and October, with no breakthrough. The unseasonably early rains, and the volume of weapons and horses dragged over the terrain, turned the battlefield into a deadly morass in which thousands of soldiers drowned. During the ‘Battle of the Mud’ there were around 300,000 casualties on both sides, and once more the sacrifice of the Allied soldiers achieved little or nothing. Although Passchendaele was eventually taken in November, by a Canadian corps, there was no decisive victory.
By the closing months of 1917 there was no prospect of victory in sight. Because of the German submarine blockade, supplies of wheat in England were running low and compulsory rationing was introduced. The terrifying Zeppelins once more appeared in the London skies, where they were joined by Gotha aeroplanes. As the German aircraft rained down bombs on the English capital, 300,000 of its inhabitants took refuge in the Underground every night. Calls for a negotiated settlement with Germany could now be heard among the people; the campaigners for peace were now as vociferous as the propagandists for war. Numerous Labour supporters wanted to follow Soviet Russia and sign a treaty with the Germans, while Henderson resigned from the coalition in protest at its lack of engagement with European socialism. Even Unionist support for the war appeared to be waning; one leading light of the party warned that ‘prolongation will spell ruin for the civilised world’.
As the war entered its fourth calendar year, there was no enthusiasm for it in England. Events in the spring of 1918 only darkened the mood. The German army, reinforced by soldiers transferred from the Eastern Front as a result of its treaty with Russia, decided to embark on a major offensive to take advantage of its numerical superiority before soldiers from the United States joined the Allies. General Ludendorff’s plan was to break through the opposition and then attack its trenches from behind. It enjoyed an excellent start, when the Germans overwhelmed the British at the Somme and advanced forty miles towards Paris. For the retreating Allies, the situation was desperate.
With American reinforcements still some weeks away, Lloyd George urgently needed more men. His war cabinet decided to impose conscription on Ireland, promising the nationalists the immediate implementation of Home Rule in return. But few Irish people believed Lloyd George’s promise, and many were outraged that he had made Home Rule dependent on the acceptance of compulsory military service. Nationalist opinion was inflamed: leading Sinn Féin politicians, along with the hierarchy of the Irish Catholic Church, pledged themselves ‘to one another to resist conscription by the most effective means at our disposal’. Undaunted, Lloyd George passed the new conscription law, and arrested many of the Sinn Féin politicians on trumped-up charges of collusion with Germany. The arrests only served to further galvanize support for nationalism in Ireland, while attempts by the British administration to implement the conscription law were unsuccessful.
Although there were no reinforcements from Ireland, the Allies managed to survive on the Western Front until the American soldiers started to arrive in the early summer of 1918. Around one and a half million United States troops landed in France, with 10,000 men sent to the Allied front every day. Reinforced by the American contingents, the Allies began a counteroffensive which would see the Germans retreat over all the ground they had taken in the spring. On the first day of the Battle of Amiens in August, a day Ludendorff called ‘the black day of the German Army’, the Allied forces advanced seven miles.
As the Germans were pressed back across France, news reached them that Turkish forces had collapsed in the east, giving the Allies an open road into Austria-Hungary. German soldiers began to surrender and desert en masse, while a German population facing starvation called for the end of the war. Politicians in Germany realized the war was lost. The German generals also reluctantly admitted defeat, but refused to take responsibility for it, thereby propagating the myth that the politicians had ‘stabbed them in the back’ by forcing them to sue for peace. The Kaiser abdicated and a German Republic was proclaimed, while Austria-Hungary disintegrated into numerous individual states.
On 11 November 1918, the German generals signed the Armistice. This agreement ended a global conflict that had lasted over four years, claimed around 18 million lives and left 23 million people seriously wounded, with millions more ill and homeless. The war also put unprecedented strain on the economic, social and cultural fabric of participating countries, as the example of Russia demonstrated. One English soldier, who was lucky enough to return from the front, described the war as ‘the suicide of Western civilization’.
14
The regiment of women
The war had offered abundant evidence that women were neither naturally passive nor destined by their sex to be ‘angels in the house’. During the conflict they had also demonstrated their fitness for ‘men’s work’ – by 1918 female workers were visible in shops and offices, on trams and trains, and in banks and schools. Women now went down mines, drove vehicles and worked on the land. They were employed in the civil service as well as in factories, while hundreds of thousands worked in government-run armaments plants. Many female munitions workers had left their family homes to live in lodgings or purpose-built hostels near the factories, becoming physically and economically independent from their parents or employers. While their earnings lagged far behind those of their male counterparts, women now earned on average twice as much as they had before the war period. For the first time in history, lower-middle-class and workingclass women – the unmarried as well as the married – had money in their pockets.