Fall of Giants

An hour later she went to work, leaving Lloyd with Bernie. There were not many people on the streets: London had a hangover this morning. She reached the office of the National Union of Garment Workers and sat at her desk. Peace would bring new industrial problems, she realized as she thought about the working day ahead of her. Millions of men leaving the army would be looking for employment, and they would want to elbow aside the women who had been doing their jobs for four years. But those women needed their wages. They did not all have a man coming home from France: a lot of their husbands were buried there. They needed their union, and they needed Ethel.

Whenever the election came, the union would naturally be campaigning for the Labour Party. Ethel spent most of the day in planning meetings.

The evening papers brought surprising news about the election. Lloyd George had decided to continue the coalition government into peacetime. He would not campaign as leader of the Liberals, but as head of the coalition. That morning he had addressed two hundred Liberal M.P.s at Downing Street and won their support. At the same time Bonar Law had persuaded Conservative M.P.s to back the idea.

Ethel was baffled. What were people supposed to vote for?

When she got home she found Bernie furious. “It’s not an election, it’s a bloody coronation,” he said. “King David Lloyd George. What a traitor. He has a chance to bring in a radical left-wing government and what does he do? Sticks with his Conservative pals! He’s a bloody turncoat.”

“Let’s not give up yet,” said Ethel.

Two days later the Labour Party withdrew from the coalition and announced it would campaign against Lloyd George. Four Labour M.P.s who were government ministers refused to resign and were smartly expelled from the party. The date of the election was set for December 14. To give time for soldiers’ ballots to be returned from France and counted, the results would not be announced until after Christmas.

Ethel started drawing up Bernie’s campaigning schedule.

{II}

On the day after Armistice Day, Maud wrote to Walter on her brother’s crested writing paper and put the letter in the red pillar-box on the street corner.

She had no idea how long it would take for normal post to be resumed, but when it happened she wanted her envelope to be on top of the pile. Her message was carefully worded, just in case censorship continued: it did not refer to their marriage, but just said she hoped to resume their old relationship now that their countries were at peace. Perhaps the letter was risky all the same. But she was desperate to find out whether Walter was alive and, if he was, to see him.

She feared that the victorious Allies would want to punish the German people, but Lloyd George’s speech to Liberal M.P.s that day was reassuring. According to the evening papers, he said the peace treaty with Germany must be fair and just. “We must not allow any sense of revenge, any spirit of greed, or any grasping desire to overrule the fundamental principles of righteousness.” The government would set its face against what he called “a base, sordid, squalid idea of vengeance and avarice.” That cheered her up. Life for the Germans now would be hard enough anyway.

However, she was horrified the following morning when she opened the Daily Mail at breakfast. The leading article was headed THE HUNS MUST PAY. The paper argued that food aid should be sent to Germany-only because “if Germany were starved to death she could not pay what she owes.” The kaiser must be put on trial for war crimes, it added. The paper fanned the flames of revenge by publishing at the top of its letters column a diatribe from Viscountess Templetown headed KEEP OUT THE HUNS. “How long are we all supposed to go on hating one another?” Maud said to Aunt Herm. “A year? Ten years? Forever?”

But Maud should not have been surprised. The Mail had conducted a hate campaign against the thirty thousand Germans who had been living in Britain at the outbreak of war-most of them long-term residents who thought of this country as their home. In consequence families had been broken up and thousands of harmless people had spent years in British concentration camps. It was stupid, but people needed someone to hate, and the newspapers were always ready to supply that need.

Maud knew the proprietor of the Mail, Lord Northcliffe. Like all great press men, he really believed the drivel he published. His talent was to express his readers’ most stupid and ignorant prejudices as if they made sense, so that the shameful seemed respectable. That was why they bought the paper.

She also knew that Lloyd George had recently snubbed Northcliffe personally. The self-important press lord had proposed himself as a member of the British delegation at the upcoming peace conference, and had been offended when the prime minister turned him down.