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 Despite colorful anti-Bolshevik speeches by the minister for war, Winston Churchill, Britain had withdrawn its troops from Arctic Russia.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.
Indeed, for some months the British people were not told that their army was fighting in Russia. The government made misleading statements to the effect that troops there were only protecting our property, organising orderly withdrawal, or on standby. The clear implication was that they were not in action against Red forces.
That this was exposed as a lie is in no small measure thanks to William Williams.
“Hey,” he said to no one in particular. “Look at that. Thanks to William Williams.”
The men at his table crowded around to look over his shoulder. His cellmate, a brute called Cyril Parks, said: “That’s a picture of you! What are you doing in the paper?”
Billy read the rest of it aloud.
His crime was to tell the truth, in letters to his sister that were written in a simple code to evade censorship. The British people owe him a debt of gratitude.
But his action displeased those in the army and in government who were responsible for secretly using British soldiers for their own political ends. Williams was court-martialled and sentenced to ten years.
He is not unique. A large number of servicemen who objected to being made part of the attempted counterrevolution were subjected to highly dubious trials in Russia and given scandalously long sentences.
William Williams and others have been victimised by vengeful men in positions of power. This must be put right. Britain is a country of justice. That, after all, is what we fought for.
“How about that?” said Billy. “They say I’ve been victimized by powerful men.”
“So have I,” said Cyril Parks, who had raped a fourteen-year-old Belgian girl in a barn.
Suddenly the newspaper was snatched out of Billy’s hands. He looked up to see the stupid face of Andrew Jenkins, one of the more unpleasant warders. “You may have friends in high fucking places, Williams,” the man said. “But in here you’re just another fucking con, so get back to fucking work.”
“Right away, Mr. Jenkins,” said Billy.
Fitz was outraged, that summer of 1920, when a Russian trade delegation came to London and was welcomed by the prime minister, David Lloyd George, at number 10 Downing Street. The Bolsheviks were still at war with the newly reconstituted country of Poland, and Fitz thought Britain should be siding with the Poles, but he found little support. London dockers went on strike rather than load ships with rifles for the Polish army, and the Trades Union Congress threatened a general strike if the British army intervened.
Fitz reconciled himself to never taking possession of the late Prince Andrei’s estates. His sons, Boy and Andrew, had lost their Russian birthright, and he had to accept that.
However, he could not keep quiet when he learned what the Russians Kamenev and Krassin were up to as they went around Britain. Room 40 still existed, albeit in a different form, and British intelligence was intercepting and deciphering the telegrams the Russians were sending home. Lev Kamenev, the chairman of the Moscow soviet, was shamelessly putting out revolutionary propaganda.
Fitz was so incensed that he berated Lloyd George, early in August, at one of the last dinner parties of the London season.
It was at Lord Silverman’s house in Belgrave Square. The dinner was not as lavish as those Silverman had thrown before the war. There were fewer courses, with less food sent untasted back to the kitchen, and the table decoration was simpler. The food was served by maids instead of footmen: no one wanted to be a footman these days. Fitz guessed those extravagant Edwardian parties were gone for good. However, Silverman was still able to attract the most powerful men in the land to his house.
Lloyd George asked Fitz about his sister, Maud.
That was another topic that enraged Fitz. “I’m sorry to say that she has married a German and gone to live in Berlin,” he said. He did not say that she had already given birth to her first child, a boy called Eric.
“I heard that,” said Lloyd George. “I just wondered how she was getting on. Delightful young woman.”
The prime minister’s liking for delightful young women was well-known, not to say notorious.
“I’m afraid life in Germany is hard,” said Fitz. Maud had written to him pleading for an allowance, but he had refused point-blank. She had not asked his permission for the marriage, so how could she expect his support?
“Hard?” said Lloyd George. “So it should be, after what they’ve done. All the same, I’m sorry for her.”
“On another subject, Prime Minister,” said Fitz, “this fellow Kamenev is a Jew Bolshevik-you ought to deport him.”
The prime minister was in a mellow mood, with a glass of champagne in his hand. “My dear Fitz,” he said amiably, “the government is not very worried about Russian misinformation, which is crude and violent. Please don’t underestimate the British working class: they know claptrap when they hear it. Believe me, Kamenev’s speeches are doing more to discredit Bolshevism than anything you or I could say.”
Fitz thought this was complacent rubbish. “He’s even given money to the Daily Herald!”
“It is discourteous, I agree, for a foreign government to subsidize one of our newspapers-but, really, are we frightened of the Daily Herald? It’s not as if we Liberals and Conservatives don’t have papers of our own.”
“But he is contacting the most hard-line revolutionary groups in this country-maniacs dedicated to the overthrow of our entire way of life!”
“The more the British get to know about Bolshevism, the less they will like it, you mark my words. It is formidable only when seen at a distance, through impenetrable mists. Bolshevism is almost a safeguard to British
