Authors: Jennifer Hobhouse Balme
This peace offer was leaked to the press in the Netherlands before reaching Allied hands so there was no way that the matter could be kept from the public. US Ambassador Gerard, felt that the terms would be impossible for the Allies to accept as they would leave Germany ‘immensely powerful’ and ready to take up arms again at any time.
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Leonard Hobhouse, however, felt it was the beginning of the end. ‘Though,’ he added gloomily to his son: ‘one could never tell with a firebrand like Lloyd George.’
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At about this time President Woodrow Wilson was asking the belligerents about their war aims with a view to offering mediation. This caused some consternation among the Allies who did not really want American interference. In any case they rejected the German peace initiative. Wilhelm was then reported to have grown very angry, declaring Germany must fight to the end, annex Belgium, subdue France and so on.
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Charles Trevelyan, a founder member of the UDC, was sending messages to America to encourage President Wilson. Wilson had come to believe the Germans were prepared for peace ‘without victory’ but changed his mind when the Germans announced they were going to greatly increase submarine warfare and bring it into the Atlantic.
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Germany hoped to starve Britain out. There were great losses with food shortages and so on felt in England. However, contrary to German expectations, Britain did not fall, and in April 1917 the Americans came into the war on the Allied side.
Early in March Emily received the sad news from Isabella Steyn that her husband, the former President of the Orange Free State, had died. Emily said she greatly missed him:
As one I so truly honoured and admired … [She was feeling much for South Africa that day] with the tidings of the loss of the transport in a channel fog with 615 poor Zulus on board … I do so hate this bringing over of those poor fellows … [she had heard that her friend General Smuts was on his way to London. He had been in command of the Imperial Army in Tanganyka, East Africa – formerly a German colony – and was to attend the Imperial War Conference in London] Fancy his sitting alongside Milner
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… The wheel of time brings curious changes and one hardly knows where one is.’
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When Jan Smuts arrived, Emily immediately implored him to work for a negotiated peace.
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Victory is a Will o’ the Wisp enticing both sides to their doom … Be our help and saviour dear Oom in this grave and terrible hour. You can see more clearly than most … Every principle of humanity calls us to stop this slaughter. War is the wrong way of settling differences – and indeed it never settles anything for long. In the end you must come together and discuss matters and use reason and goodwill; therefore do that now before greater disaster and bloodshed occurs.
Emily wanted to go to Germany herself and believed she could find out what Germany wanted and help resolve the issue. ‘Let me be the bridge,’ she implored: ‘It need never be known … I ask nothing better in life …’
But Smuts, in spite of his position or because of it, would not or could not do anything. He was much in demand as a speaker and as a conciliator, and is also credited with starting the British Royal Air Force.
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In June 1917, he was invited to join the British War Cabinet.
Thanking Smuts for a book of speeches on 12 July 1917, Emily wrote that she was glad to have it:
… in recollection of your English visit and shall value it as your gift … I don’t agree with all of it as you know but like the Curate’s Egg
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feel they are good ‘in parts’, and where good, very good …
As to Bethmann Hollweg if you and your government are trying to oust him I think you are making a very great and first class mistake and if you are sending emissaries to Germany to stir up internal trouble to that end it is a still greater error … Leave them alone and they will democratise themselves. Do you want an extremist in like von Tirpitz or even von Bülow [not the same man Emily mentions below]?
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She had faith in Bethmann Hollweg and again wanted to go to Germany.
Many in Germany wanted peace. Matthias Erzberger, a member of the Catholic Centre Party, proposed and carried in the Reichstag on19 July 1917 what was called a non-binding ‘Peace Resolution’. However, as it left no room for annexations Bethmann Hollweg felt unable to support it and resigned.
Erzberger believed that economics was the solution. Following the vote he went to Zurich. In the
Neue Züricher Nachrichten
, copied by
The Times
, 30 July 1917, it was reported that he said: ‘If I could only have an opportunity of talking with Mr Lloyd George, or Mr Balfour [now Foreign Minister] or their trusted representative we could in a few hours reach an understanding as to a basis for peace which would enable official negotiations to begin immediately.’ Erzberger said the new Chancellor’s mission was peace. However, Britain still believed that the ‘knock-out blow’ was the only option and was not to be tempted.
In an undated letter to Smuts, which looks more like a draft and which Emily said she found in her coat pocket, she said: ‘Let me talk to Herr Erzberger and then put it in official hands. So great is the need, I urge this at the risk of wearying you …’.
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Emily was soon pursuing another idea and on 29 August wrote to Smuts:
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‘I want your help about something good and saving – not destroying.’ She wanted parole for Baron von Bülow, who was interned in an officers’ camp, although he was a civilian. She said she would supervise his parole: ‘Nothing but good would come of granting him this alleviation.’ She would, in fact, have liked to be allowed to organise ten-day furloughs for all internees ‘suffering from mental trouble at the stage when it could be arrested!’ The futility of it all irked her. She said what many others will have felt: ‘the blood-stained weeks creep on – the world is weary – the winter is dreaded …’.
About this time, talks about peace were going on at a conference in Austria–Hungary. Possibly Emily knew some of the delegates from her time in Rome. In 1915 she had been in contact with the Austria-Hungarian envoys and had hoped to go to Galicia – then part of Austria-Hungarian Empire, now part of Poland and the Ukraine.
We are not sure what Emily’s thought was but, probably realising that Smuts was unlikely to help, she appealed directly to Lord Milner as the leading member in the War Cabinet, to forward an offer of services to the Prime Minister.
But instead, Milner put her letter in Smuts hands and he did not support her. She was bitterly disappointed. It was Michaelmas Day 1917 (29 September)
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and she prefaced her letter to Smuts: ‘St Michael fought the dragon and prevailed’ and with a quote from Psalms 55 (v.12 and 14), the psalm of the day: ‘For it is not an open enemy that has done me this dishonour for then I could have borne it, but it was even thou my familiar friend whom I trusted.’ It was a long letter answering him point by point: ‘You do not know me – never did – therefore you cannot judge for what I am fitted …’
Although nothing was done with Emily’s suggestion, later in the year Smuts was sent to try and negotiate, but it seemed Austria–Hungary was too closely tied with the fortunes of Germany for anything to come of it.
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On 6 January 1918, which Emily underlined as Epiphany she wrote Smuts a letter which she marked as private:
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Dear Oom,
You ask – is there no ‘Hand Outstretched’ any more? Surely there is, were there but the disposition to seize it. Take for instance the Pope – yet he was scorned and ignored. Now again he speaks and I find his Xmas speech to his Cardinals full of wise things. I begin to agree with him that (as he words it) there will be no peace till ‘men turn again to God’. Avoiding religious formulas such as his and others similar to it, it is more and more impressed upon me that what must take place is the underlying change of attitude typified by that and kindred expressions.
She went on to say that nations as well as individuals needed to humble themselves, had to own error – had to confess it openly, had to admit their aims and demands were not always right, had to learn to live and let live: ‘Russia, through her idealists, has pierced the heart of the matter.’ She saw that: ‘Peace will not come through Victory but that Victory will come through peace.’ The Russia of Lenin was suing for peace, and a very harsh peace it turned out to be. Lenin later annulled this Treaty of Brest Litovsk. Emily said: ‘Brush aside efforts for diplomatic triumphs, take the stand on the broad basis of truth and principle.’ She raised three things that were needed to be accepted:
1. Acknowledge that guilt lies equally among all.
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2. Meet and discuss on equal terms.
3. No nation deserves to gain anything by the war.
If this were done, she said, ‘Militarism would be defeated in its ends in all countries and a Community of equal nations would arise from the wreckage.’ She said she had preached this doctrine since October 1914 – ‘in season and out of season’.
For the rest of the war, Emily continued to press for a negotiated peace but one must surmise her efforts were limited. She presented some lectures in the country about a League of Nations. Her feelings were for internationalism and for the people. She was harsh on those who could not accept her view and they were harsh on her. Perhaps it was because in war people are so polarised they forget that in the past they were friends. Emily tried to show that in many cases the enemy was not as bad as suggested. In the Second World War, the Nazis could take the blame: before there was no such designation and people were afraid to blame the Prussian Junkers outright. At the end of the war there was a move to hang the Kaiser, but he was safely in Holland and the Dutch refused to deport him.
One negative trait in Emily’s character was that she could exaggerate in trying to simplify a situation, as she did in giving Dr Page, the American Ambassador, the impression that she was part of a committee working for the internees, whereas she had no official position (though she did not say that she had). This was a tendency that Leonard was wary of and which the Foreign Office did not like. When, in December 1916, there was a question of a piece in an American paper which did not sound right, it questioned her through the Press Bureau and after she denied having given an interview to that paper,
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it told the British Ambassador in Washington that he need not take her denial too seriously – which does seem rather unnecessary.
Emily knew her brother very well and no doubt hoped at Bude in the summer of 1916 that he would be turned around to support the peace initiative, but it was not to be. It was a daring plan which might have been worked out in many different ways. Leonard was much more hopeful in the case of the Kaiser’s peace plan at Christmas.
In late September 1918, Ludendorff had told the Kaiser that they were in a militarily impossible situation and must have peace. At the same time, in his autocratic way, he said that the government must be reformed. A new Chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, was brought in. Prince Max at once set about asking the Americans to arrange an armistice, and also to reform the government, which he wanted to do, with the ‘majority’ Socialists taking a part in the running of the country for the very first time.
On 28 October the sailors in Kiel mutinied. They wanted peace and bread. Events followed quickly with the kings – rulers – of many of the twenty-eight states of the German Federation abdicating – that is except for the Kaiser. He was also King of Prussia, the biggest state, and held on for the time being.
There was revolution. The parties on the left side of the majority Socialists wanted a republic, Bolshevik-style. By 11 November, when the war ended, streams of red Bolshevik flags were flying in Berlin and other cities; the Kaiser was gone as was Prince Max, who had resigned. His job was taken on by Frederich Ebert, a democrat of the SPD – the majority Socialist Party. He was joined by Hugo Haase of the left-wing Independent Socialist Party. Because of ideological differences such a union could only be unhappy.
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On 11 November the Allies celebrated peace with great rejoicing. The Germans too were pleased with peace – and the reform of government – but as they contemplated those red flags, they must have wondered whether they were living in a Bolshevik state or a democratic republic – and what the future would hold.
The sequel to the present story will be told in
Living the Love
, for peace did not come quietly to the invalid Miss Hobhouse. Her sympathies were soon aroused by the plight of starving people in Europe. There was the ‘Russian Babies Fund’ which she started; then the Swiss railway workers who were bringing half-starved Austrian children to recuperate with Swiss families in the Alps found they were short of money and it was suggested they appeal to her, so she started a fund to help them and soon expanded this program to help German children as well. Germany and Austria were very short of food and Emily went on to provide a feeding program for 11,000 half-starved children in the industrial city of Leipzig. People in South Africa raised money to help her.
Emily Hobhouse could not save the world but she did her personal best to bring healing and reconciliation between peoples.
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Lord Milner had been High Commissioner when Emily first went to South Africa in the Anglo-Boer War. He had originally supported her. Smuts had worked with Milner after that war. Lloyd George, who appreciated Milner’s organisational abilities, brought him into the War Cabinet as Minister without Portfolio.
**
This refers to a humorous joke in the magazine
Punch
about an insecure curate breakfasting with his bishop
.
*
Under the Treaty of Versailles Germany was forced to accept a War Guilt clause. For many in Germany this was the most contentious issue.
1
. Clark
Kaiser Wilhelm II
p. 324
2
. TNA CAB 23 1
3
. Gerard,
My Four Years in Germany