November 1918 — One War Ending, Another Continues
JOHN ELLISON gives a history of how the left press reported the end of WW1 and the start of hostilities towards socialist Russia
Morning Star, UK
NEWSPAPER readers in Britain looking back from November 1918 would have appreciated that the balance of military forces on the Western Front, after four years of relative stability, had changed crucially in the Allies’ favour since August, causing the front to move remorselessly eastwards towards Germany’s frontiers.
But readers remained insulated from the human reality of the war’s daily horrors by authoritarian censorship and by unconditional support for the war given by war correspondents and mainstream editors, who were generally even reluctant to draw attention to the decisive role since the summer of the fresh million-plus US army.
In 1936, the then editor of this paper’s predecessor, the Daily Worker, Rajani Palme Dutt summed up the war in his classic World Politics. “The war of 1914 was inevitable in the sense that imperialism could find no other solution for its conflicts … The outbreak of the war … revealed that the world forces unloosed by imperialism had fully outstripped the control of the statesmen of imperialism … The war, once begun, drove forward with its own murderous logic … The Gordian knot … was finally cut by the sword of the revolution … The Russian Revolution ended the war in the East. The German Revolution ended the war in the West.”
An armistice with Turkey — the Ottoman empire — took effect on October 31. Its surviving empire dissolved, with Britain and France eager to digest vacant properties such as Palestine and Syria. Then came an armistice between the Western Allies and Austria-Hungary, just after Hungary had declared itself a separate republic.
A preliminary overture to the US from Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany in early October was succeeded by exchanges of messages and increasing readiness to concede defeat. So, wrote communist journalist Allen Hutt, in his 1937 Post-War History of the British Working Class, “Hapsburg and Hohenzollern followed Romanov into the dust.”
In Britain, at the highest political level, prophecies about when the war would end changed swiftly. At a meeting on October 19 between Prime Minister Lloyd George, War Cabinet colleagues and generals, it was concluded that the war would continue until some time after the commencement after the 1919 campaign. On October 27, Lloyd George and his News of the World proprietor friend Lord Riddell agreed upon “a slight shade of odds in favour of an armistice before Christmas.”
On the 26th, Labour’s weekly Herald, edited by George Lansbury, inserted in its editorial the latest published British weekly casualty list, heading it with the words: “The cost of going on.” The figures were: “Dead — 5,866, Wounded — 29,453, Missing — 1,481.”
The editorial pronounced: “Germany has at last committed what is, in the eyes of our jingoes, the most unpardonable sin. He has left us nothing to fight about.”
Total army casualties so far that year, the War Cabinet, but not the public, was told on November 1, were 800,000.
On November 3, a Sunday, a mass meeting of trade unionists took place at London’s Albert Hall. The Independent Labour Party’s weekly, the Labour Leader commented the following week: “Over an hour before the time of commencement the Albert Hall was packed, there must have been over 8,000 persons present … It was soon obvious that the meeting was more revolutionary than the resolution.”
The resolution certainly called for peace but did not insist on the “left” formula of self-determination of nations and no annexations or indemnities. An amendment proposed to change this state of affairs was refused. Nevertheless, when a speaker declared: “What we want is a Soviet government in Britain, God speed the Social Revolution and long live the Socialist Republic,” he was “vociferously cheered.”
The same day another demonstration for the release of outstanding Scottish socialist John Maclean from his viciously punitive five-year jail term awarded in May for anti-war speeches took place on Glasgow Green. Speakers from four platforms addressed an estimated 25,000 workers.
Maclean, believing that, when in prison on a previous occasion, he had been given drugged food, had been refusing to eat after the privilege of receiving his own food from outside the prison had been withdrawn. The British Socialist Party’s The Call put a question to the “Workers of the World” in the issue of November 7: “What are the workers going to do for John Maclean? Do they know what it means to be forcibly fed through an india rubber tube forced down the gullet? Do they know that food so administered enters the stomach without mastication or mixing with saliva, which are the preliminaries in the process of digestion? Do they know that the absorption of food thus administered causes horrible pain?”
On November 4, an Allied Western Front attack across the Meuse proceeded at the cost of many deaths, including that of Wilfred Owen, the 25-year-old poet responsible for an unforgettable verse record, as yet unpublished, of the horrors and miseries of the Western Front’s trenches, associated with anger about dying for an empty cause.
The German armies still held their retreating line. Kaiser Wilhelm resigned on the 9th and fled to Holland. Germany’s new government, headed by Social Democratic leader Friedrich Ebert, surrendered in the name of an “armistice” on the 11th with Germany’s borders intact.
Germany’s revolt had developed dramatically. On October 24, Germany’s High Seas Fleet had been ordered to make a last-ditch attack against Britain, but an unexpected, unprecedented mutiny of German sailors was the answer. By early November the sailors, not their commanders, were in charge, first in Kiel and then in other centres including Lubeck and Hamburg, joined by factory workers and soldiers.
Among the many anti-war political prisoners released by a troubled government were socialists Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Liebknecht was released on October 23 and welcomed in Berlin by more than 20,000 people and Luxemburg on November 8.
In Berlin on the 9th, from the steps of the imperial palace, Liebknecht announced the establishment of a German soviet republic and, that same day, Luxemburg addressed a mass rally.
But the revolutionary movement had by no means captured control of Germany’s destinies. November’s issue of The Socialist, the Socialist Labour Party’s monthly, which the authorities had been attempting for several months to suppress, considered the implications with insight. “The only danger and weakness inherent in the German revolution is the presence of the moderate Socialists in the Government. They will attempt the same work as Kerensky in the Russian revolution.”
They did so successfully and, tragically and infamously, Liebknecht and Luxemburg were to be assassinated in January.
There was no let-up in the war against Bolshevik Russia, drawing in France, Japan and the US. On November 2 the Herald commented, under the heading Remember Russia: “From Archangel, from Vladivostok, and from Persia, the Allied armies are menacing the Soviet Republic. The pretext of rescuing Russia from German influence is virtually abandoned. The cry is already raised that even if peace comes with Germany, the war against the Bolsheviks shall continue.”
On November 4, the War Cabinet noted that 1,500 men were required in Baku and could be there in a fortnight. On the 10th Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Henry Wilson, recorded a War Cabinet discussion — “The real danger now is not the Boche but Bolshevism.”
On the 13th, the same body decided to proceed with the occupation of the Baku-Batum railway and to maintain both the present Siberia expedition and the occupation of Murmansk and Archangel. On the last-named front, over three days from the 11th, British and allied troops suffered 28 dead in clashes with Bolshevik forces on the River Dvina.
On the 7th, anti-conscription weekly The Tribunal pointed out: ‘Over 2,000 men and women are political prisoners in the gaols of this country. When are they going to be set free?’
Mostly in spring 1919 was the answer, though John Maclean, after a series of large monthly demonstrations, was released — with War Cabinet approval “as an act of grace” — on December 3.
If the world war was over, the title of his pamphlet The War After the War grimly symbolised what would follow.
