Fall of Giants

CHAPTER FORTY – February to December 1920

The Aldershot Military Detention Barracks was a grim place, Billy thought, but it was better than Siberia. Aldershot was an army town thirty-five miles southwest of London. The prison was a modern building with galleries of cells on three floors around an atrium. It was brightly lit by a glazed roof that gave the place its nickname of “the Glasshouse.” With heat pipes and gas lighting, it was more comfortable than most of the places where Billy had slept during the past four years.

All the same, he was miserable. The war had been over for more than a year, yet he was still in the army. Most of his friends were out, earning good wages and taking girls to the pictures. He still wore the uniform and saluted, he slept in an army bed, and he ate army food. He worked all day at weaving mats, which was the prison industry. Worst of all, he never saw a woman. Somewhere out there, Mildred was waiting for him-probably. Everyone had a tale to tell of a soldier who had come home to find that his wife or girlfriend had gone off with another man.

He had no communication with Mildred or anyone else outside. Prisoners-or “soldiers under sentence” as they were officially called-could normally send and receive letters, but Billy was a special case. Because he had been convicted of betraying army secrets in letters, his mail was confiscated by the authorities. This was part of the army’s revenge. He no longer had any secrets to betray, of course. What was he going to tell his sister? “The boiled potatoes are always undercooked.”

Did Mam and Da and Gramper even know about the court-martial? The soldier’s next of kin had to be informed, he thought, but he was not sure and no one would answer his questions. Anyway, Tommy Griffiths would almost certainly have told them. He hoped Ethel had explained what he had really been doing.

He received no visitors. He suspected his family did not even know that he was back from Russia. He would have liked to challenge the ban on his receiving mail, but he had no way of contacting a lawyer-and no money to pay one. His only consolation was a vague feeling that this could not go on indefinitely.

His news of the outside world came from the papers. Fitz was back in London, making speeches urging more military aid for the Whites in Russia. Billy wondered if that meant the Aberowen Pals had come home.

Fitz’s speeches were doing no good. Ethel’s “Hands Off Russia” campaign had won support and been endorsed by the Labour Party. Despite colorful anti-Bolshevik speeches by the minister for war, Winston Churchill, Britain had withdrawn its troops from Arctic Russia. In mid-November the Reds had driven Admiral Kolchak out of Omsk. Everything Billy had said about the Whites, and Ethel had repeated in her campaign, turned out to be correct; everything Fitz and Churchill said was wrong. Yet Billy was in jail and Fitz was in the House of Lords.

He had little in common with his fellow inmates. They were not political prisoners. Most had committed real crimes, theft and assault and murder. They were hard men, but so was Billy and he was not afraid of them. They treated him with wary deference, apparently feeling that his offense was a cut above theirs. He talked to them amiably enough but none of them had any interest in politics. They saw nothing wrong with the society that had imprisoned them; they were just determined to beat the system next time.

During the half-hour lunch break he read the newspaper. Most of the others could not read. One day he opened the Daily Herald to see a photograph of a familiar face. After a moment of bewilderment he realized the picture was of him.

He recalled when it had been taken. Mildred had dragged him to a photographer in Aldgate and had him snapped in his uniform. “Every night I’ll touch it to my lips,” she had said. He had often thought of that ambiguous promise while he was away from her.

The headline said: WHY IS SERGEANT WILLIAMS IN JAIL? Billy read on with mounting excitement.

William Williams of the 8th Battalion the Welsh Rifles (the “Aberowen Pals”) is serving ten years in a military prison, convicted of treason. Is this man a traitor? Did he betray his country, desert to the enemy, or run from battle? On the contrary. He fought bravely at the Somme and continued to serve in France for the next two years, winning promotion to sergeant.

Billy was excited. That’s me, he thought, in the papers, and they say I fought bravely!

Then he was sent to Russia. We are not at war with Russia. The British people do not necessarily approve of the Bolshevik regime, but we do not attack every regime of which we disapprove. The Bolsheviks present no threat to our country or our allies. Parliament has never agreed to military action against the government in Moscow. There is a serious question as to whether our mission there is not a breach of international law.