Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914

Britain, alone among the belligerents, had no system of universal military service, and thus a relatively small professional army of 247,432 men, of which half was dispersed across the Empire. Unlike the continental powers, which mustered millions of trained conscripts, the British summoned into uniform only a further 145,347 reservists – ex-soldiers contractually liable to recall – and 268,777 men of the part-time Territorial Force. Although the process went relatively smoothly, some men wrenched from civilian life responded with reluctance and even truculence. Captain the Hon. Lionel Tennyson of the Rifle Brigade, grandson of the poet and an England cricketer who had spent the previous winter playing Test matches in South Africa, sentenced fifteen reservists who displayed symptoms of what would later be called ‘bolshiness’ to twenty-one days’ ‘CB’ – Confinement to Barracks. This, he said, ‘quietened them down a bit’.

Austria’s army mustered with Ruritanian incompetence for the war its rulers had willed. Its principal strength lay in exotic parade uniforms and splendid bands. Some of the artillery still had 1899-vintage bronze barrels. The Hapsburgs’ ruling class might enthuse about crushing Serbia, but most of them had traditionally escaped military service, leaving this to humbler folk. Relatively elderly men found themselves dispatched to the front, while fit younger ones were left behind to guard bridges and stations. Early casualty lists showed that among the dead were fathers of families aged forty-two and more. The call-up of doctors caused severe problems, especially in rural Alpine areas where communications were poor and horses, carts and carriages had been commandeered by the army. Conrad deliberately earmarked for his assault on Serbia formations recruited from Slav minorities. A brisk experience of crushing their racial brethren, Vienna deluded itself, would strengthen such Hapsburg subjects’ loyalty to the Empire.

There was some confusion about which nations would take up arms for which side. An astonished Japanese was hugged in a Berlin street, because it was briefly rumoured that his country would back the Central Powers. The same was said of Italy, so that when homegoing Italian migrant workers met Hapsburg troops on their way to the front, the Austrians shouted enthusiastically ‘Hoch Italien!’, and the workers replied with equal warmth ‘Eviva Austria!’ But Italy’s army was in a parlous state. Through most of the pre-war crisis, the country lacked a chief of staff because the incumbent had died on 1 July, and Count Luigi Cadorna was appointed to succeed him only on the 27th. Cadorna promised Italian support to the Germans – then found his pledge disowned by the foreign minister. Italy was interested in fighting only to secure territorial gains – parts of Serbia and Italian-speaking Hapsburg lands foremost among them. A constitutional tangle ensued. King Victor Emmanuel was willing to sign a mobilisation order at Cadorna’s behest, to fight alongside Germany and Austria, but on 2 August the cabinet voted for neutrality. Italy was thus temporarily spared from the looming bloodbath, though many Austrians and Germans expressed disgust at an alleged betrayal.

Europe meanwhile teemed with civilian travellers struggling to return to their home countries. Geoffrey Clarke, an ex-Rifle Brigade officer living outside Paris, recorded a conversation with a railwayman he met on his local station platform. The Frenchman, off to join his regiment, asked where the Englishman was going, and was told he was heading home to rejoin the army. ‘Ah!’ came the warm response, ‘alors, nous serons ensemble.’ He extended a hand, saying as it was shaken, ‘Au revoir, à bientôt.’ Half a million Russian migrant workers had to abandon their summer jobs in Germany. Thousands of German hotel and restaurant staff in Britain trooped aboard ferries bound for neutral Holland. Hundreds of English-language teachers in Berlin, lacking cash, found themselves stranded. Eighty thousand American tourists hurried home, some of them in the steamship Viking, which they clubbed together to purchase. Railway stations were crowded with desperate people of many nationalities. London shoe-shop manager George Galpin had a German neighbour in Wimbledon who left for home just before war broke out. Galpin accompanied the man to Victoria station, where his new enemy joked, ‘Don’t worry too much – I’ll see that you and your family are well treated when we come over to England!’

Peter Kollwitz, younger son of East Prussian painter Käthe, was born into a family dedicated to high art and leftist ideals. The war found him, aged seventeen, holidaying in Norway with three friends. Determined to enlist, they travelled homewards on a train from Bergen to Oslo with English and French tourists who embarrassed them by their friendliness. They eventually reached Berlin, ‘talking excitedly about their new identity as fighters, lit up by sensuality and the thrill of imagined battle’. After some family argument, Peter’s father signed the papers consenting to his underage enlistment, then he and his elder brother Hans departed for barracks, leaving their parents ‘weeping, weeping, weeping’. Peter left for the front, and a grave, bearing in his knapsack his mother’s parting present, Goethe’s Faust.

Some diplomats displayed rash insouciance by continuing to parade their protected status in the spirit of nineteenth-century gentlemen’s wars. In Paris the Bavarian minister was seen dining at the Ritz on the evening of 2 August, while the Austrian ambassador Count Szécsen was insensitive enough to continue taking meals at the fashionable Cercle de l’Union club, much to the chagrin of its members, who eventually closed their doors to him. In Berlin, with reciprocal grumpiness French ambassador Jules Cambon was ordered by the Germans not to send his staff to dine at the Hotel Bristol, because it would be hard to ensure their safety. Cambon lost his temper: ‘Where the devil do you want them to eat? As far as I know, the clientele of the Bristol is made up of well-brought-up people.’ The ambassador telephoned the hotel and asked that food for his staff should be dispatched to the embassy. The manager replied that he would do this only if authorised by the Foreign Ministry. The messy process of burning secret papers occupied Cambon through the evening of 3 August and all next morning, until he and his staff took a train to neutral Denmark en route homewards.

There were flurries of excitement at sea, such as the escape of the battlecruiser Goeben and her light-cruiser consort Breslau eastwards across the Mediterranean, amid epic fumbling by the Royal Navy which enraged Winston Churchill. The German paper the Lokal-Anzeiger reported triumphantly the Goeben’s 2 August departure from Messina: ‘the funnel smoke thickens; across the stillness echoes the noise of anchor chains being hauled up. A crowd, thousands strong, surges towards the harbour; then resounds clearly from Goeben the notes of “Heil dir im Siegerkranz”. Officers and crew line the sides, heads bowed. Three rousing cheers for the Supreme Warlord ring across to the shore, where the crowd remains silent, impressed with the cheerful calm and confidence with which German sailors go forth to fight. Later, there are [false] reports of the wreckage of a British ship being sighted. One thing is certain: they are through!’

And so they were, to the chagrin of the Admiralty in London, after the Royal Navy bungled their pursuit. The two ships were granted passage through the Dardanelles. Once in the Bosphorus, the ruling Young Turks persuaded Berlin to present them, crews and all, to the Turkish navy – a spectacular coup de théâtre. Goeben’s successful defiance of British naval might significantly influenced Turkish opinion towards joining the Central Powers, though more important was the bitterness engendered by decades of British slights towards the Ottoman Empire, among them confiscation of Crete and Cyprus. Moreover, the Turks loathed and feared the Russians.

Among the gravest manifestations of war was the collapse of credit, which created a huge and immediate crisis for the City of London, the world’s financial capital. For days there was real danger of a meltdown of the monetary system. This was averted only by the Chancellor’s decision on 13 August that the Treasury must bear the strain: the Bank of England bought more than £350 million worth of outstanding bills of exchange. The sums were staggering, but this intervention saved the financial system.

2 PASSIONS (#ulink_d9b01306-5755-5e36-802d-8dc08dd3d70f)

Some people responded with serenity to the new circumstance of European conflict. In Schneidemühl, Prussia, twelve-year-old Elfriede Kuhr asked her grandmother if Germany would win. ‘We have never lost a war in my lifetime,’ answered the old woman proudly, ‘so we won’t lose this one, either.’ Her granddaughter was bemused that this supposedly earth-shattering event made little immediate impact on daily life: ‘We eat white rolls and good meat and go for a walk as if nothing had happened.’ It is a myth that most of the belligerents expected a short war. Ignorant people, and even some informed ones, cherished such a delusion partly because economists, with their accustomed paucity of judgement, assured them that Europe would swiftly run out of money. But many thoughtful soldiers of every nation recognised that a general European conflict could be protracted.

In Paris, Faust was still playing at the Opéra, and the press found space to report the death of a child run over by a milk float; a futurist conference continued its debate about the merits of excavating a tunnel under the Channel. But on 2 August the French capital declared a state of siege for the duration: the municipality surrendered to the military all public order responsibilities, with draconian powers of entry, and restriction on assemblies and entertainments. Three days later a law was passed ‘repressing indiscretions of the press in wartime’, forbidding publication of all military information save that authorised by the government or high command. Journalists were barred from entering combat zones. In the months that followed, Joffre, as army commander-in-chief, wielded the powers almost of a national dictator, provoking the envy of his German counterpart Moltke, shackled to the Kaiser. The doors of many Paris businesses bore signs declaring, with a mixture of regret and pride: ‘Maison fermé à cause du départ du patron et des employés sous le drapeau français.’ Cafés and bars now closed at 8 p.m., restaurants at 9.30 p.m. Cavalrymen bivouacked on the boulevards, tethering their horses to chestnut trees. By ten, the most vibrant city in Europe was almost silent.

Germany’s parliament agreed on 5 August to fund a war loan of 5,000 million marks, supported by the Social Democrats, even though most of their members opposed the conflict. War had become an accomplished fact, and thus patriotism trumped former convictions, as it did also in Britain and France. Socialists, sensitive to conservative taunts that they were mere vaterlandslose Gesellen – ‘stateless folk’, felt compelled to rally beneath the flag. Moreover, fear and detestation of Russia were as passionate on the left as on the right. Most Germans sincerely believed that their country was encircled by enemies. The Münchner Neueste Nachrichten reflected bitterly on 7 August about the renewal of all-too-familiar foreign hostility, a ‘hatred against Germanness, this time coming from the east’. The semi-official Kölnische Zeitung declared: ‘Now that England has shown its hand, everyone can see what is at stake: the most powerful conspiracy in the history of the world.’

The newspaper Neue Preußische Zeitung was the first to employ the word Burgfrieden to describe Germany’s new political truce. It derived from a medieval custom, forbidding private strife within the walls of an embattled castle. Now, Burgfrieden became once more a common currency. In the same spirit in France, on 4 August prime minister René Viviani coined a phrase that passed into the French language – l’union sacrée: ‘Dans la guerre qui s’engage, la France […] sera héroïquement défendue par tous ses fils, dont rien ne brisera devant l’ennemi l’union sacrée’ – ‘In the coming war, France will be heroically defended by all its sons, whose sacred union in the face of the enemy will be indissoluble.’ There was much press bellicosity. The clerical Croix d’Isère declared the struggle ‘la guerre purificatrice’, visited upon France as a punishment for its sins under the Third Republic. ‘That was the idea everywhere,’ wrote another contemporary, ‘that war would clear the air, make things pleasanter all around afterwards.’ The socialist paper Le Droit du peuple adopted a phrase: ‘the war for peace’.

In Britain also, reconciliation became a prevailing theme. On 11 August the government welcomed the excuse to remit all suffragettes’ jail sentences. Among the famous Pankhurst family, Sylvia continued to plead for peace, but her sister Christabel and their mother Emmeline denounced ‘the German peril’. The executive of Britain’s Trades Union Congress declared that it identified the war with ‘the preservation and maintenance of free and unfettered democratic government’. More than a few people believed, as do some modern historians, that hostilities with Germany averted a violent collision between British workers, employers and the government.

John Redmond, leader of the Irish Home Rulers, made a supremely enlightened conciliatory gesture when he declared in the House of Commons: ‘there are in Ireland two large bodies of Volunteers. One of them sprang into existence in the South. I say to the Government that they may tomorrow withdraw every one of their troops from Ireland. I say that the coasts of Ireland will be defended from foreign invasion by her sons, and for this purpose armed Nationalist Catholics in the South will be only too glad to join arms with the armed Protestant Ulstermen in the North.’ Redmond sat down to deafening applause, but he proved to have thus forfeited his status as the standard-bearer of Irish nationalism, and destroyed his political career.

Daily Mail executive Tom Clarke wrote in his diary on 5 August: ‘The mock warfare of Ulster is already forgotten. People speak of it in whispers of shame. The history of the past few days is a nightmare … Now we have taken the plunge one feels better already … [The British people] know we are in for a hard thing. They are confident, but not cocky. Everybody is thinking to-day of the North Sea. The decisive battle might be fought there even this night.’ The Times editorialised, in a fashion richer in schoolboy romanticism than intellectual rigour: ‘[The people of Britain] feel and know that they are summoned to draw [the sword] in the old cause – that once again, in the words which King William inscribed upon his standard, they will “maintain the liberties of Europe”. It is the cause for which Wellington fought in the Peninsula and Nelson at Trafalgar – the cause of the weak against the strong, of the small peoples against their overwhelming neighbours, of law against brute force.’

War prompted many acts of private generosity. Some were useful, others not, and most were vulnerable to abuse. A French grandee who donated his cherished motor car to the nation’s service was infuriated to glimpse it in the Rue de Rivoli a few days later, occupied by the minister of war’s mistress. Alois Fürst zu Löwenstein-Wertheim-Rosenberg was a rich German aristocrat with little interest in military affairs, who had previously avoided service. But now, like many of his kind, he offered a splendid automobile to the Bavarian army along with his own services as its driver, in order to have ‘a small share in the national sacrifice’. He also turned his castle at Kleinheubach into a hospital, deemed suitable for ten officers and twenty other ranks, and paid all its expenses. He was given the rank of lieutenant, and after a fortnight’s delay while his overworked tailor made uniforms, set off towards the front.

Rich people not called upon to expose themselves to shot and shell instead offered money to the common weal. King George V’s name led a list of donors to Britain’s ‘National Relief Fund’ with a gift of £5,000, the Queen adding 1,000 guineas. Sir Ernest Cassel and Lord Northcliffe each gave £5,000, Lord Derby £2,000 and lesser folk smaller amounts, but nobody could immediately decide what worthy purpose the cash should be applied to. A Serbian Relief Fund was established, which raised £100,000 by September. The Duke of Sutherland initiated a scheme whereby the aristocracy opened its vast country houses for use as hospitals, but many of the 250 residences offered proved unsuitable because of the inadequacy of their drains. The Duke then went further and announced that he could also deliver a convalescent hospital in London with a full staff ready to receive patients. A sceptical Admiralty official went to investigate, and was astonished to discover that there was indeed a ducal medical support facility in Victoria Street: it had been established on behalf of the Ulster Volunteers, in anticipation of an Irish civil war.

Millions of Germans began to contribute to Liebesgaben – gifts of food, drink, tobacco and clothing for soldiers – but sometimes enthusiasm for aiding the afflicted was deemed to go too far. The Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung warned wealthy women against inviting the children of the poor into their homes, because acquaintance with a living standard so much superior to their own was likely to make humble folk dissatisfied. Some commercial enterprises embraced new opportunities. Courtaulds textile manufacturers advertised waterproof black crêpe ‘for fashionable mourning’. Burberry began to market ‘active service kit’: ‘Every officer will want his Burberry waterproof.’ The tailors Thresher & Glenny did fine business making uniforms, and Ross enjoyed a booming sale of binoculars. A manufacturer of two-seater fast cars recommended them as suitable ‘for officers and others’. In Paris knitwear shops began to offer such unsummery clothing as thick underwear and stockings, appropriate for campaigning. There were complaints that London gunmakers Webley & Scott now charged £10 for a revolver which they had sold in July for only five guineas.

Such ‘profiteering’ provoked public anger. Food hoarding caused some German shopkeepers to close their doors, and almost all to raise prices. In Munich the cost of potatoes doubled, flour rose by 45 per cent, salt trebled. In Hamburg a group of angry women stormed the stall of one alleged profiteer, belabouring its owner with his own sausages. The Deutsche Volkszeitung reported an altercation about potatoes between customers and a woman vegetable-seller demanding twelve pfennigs a kilo instead of the usual six or seven. She declared defiantly: ‘Well, if you don’t like the price I will sell my potatoes to the Russians!’ A minor riot followed, until police rescued her from furious citizens.

Meanwhile, magazines filled their pages with photographs and sketches of soldiers and military equipment. Newspapers carried war news, chiefly spurious, to the exclusion of almost all else. In mathematics classes, children were taught to add and subtract soldiers and ships. Innumerable war poems were written, almost uniformly dreadful: ‘Use me, England, in thine hour of need,’ wrote Elizabeth, daughter of poet laureate Robert Bridges. ‘Give then, England, If my life thou need, Gift yet fairer, Death, thy cause to feed.’ In London Madame Tussaud’s waxwork museum transferred the Kaiser from its Royal Gallery to the Chamber of Horrors. The famous British sense of humour suffered immediate war damage: Bernard Shaw found himself in trouble after penning an article urging both sides to shoot their officers and go home. Libraries and bookshops removed his works from their shelves, while the literary panjandrum J.C. Squire called for him to be tarred and feathered. Shaw remained impenitent, jeering that if the allies were serious about smashing Germany, the rational method would be to kill all its women.

On 2 August, a company of the Sherwood Foresters marched into the Armstrong shipyard on the Tyne and deployed around an almost completed dreadnought. She was destined to become the pride of Turkey’s fleet, and five hundred of the Sultan’s sailors were waiting expectantly aboard an old passenger ship downriver, ready to take her over. Winston Churchill decreed otherwise; the Royal Navy’s need took precedence, and within weeks the Reshadieh, renamed the Erin, joined the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow; a second battleship, the Sultan Osman I, became the Agincourt. Though Britain offered the Turks £1,000 a day for the ships’ use, together with their return or full value at the conclusion of hostilities, Turkish opinion was outraged by the loss of the two vessels, which had been partly funded by public subscription. Inflamed sentiment contributed mightily to Constantinople’s decision, a few days later, to welcome the Goeben and Breslau. Turkish neutrality was obviously precarious.

Europe struggled to adjust to new allegiances and animosities. In Vienna Franz Joseph sought to display the solidarity of the monarchs’ trade union by rejecting a proposal from his War Ministry that the 27th Infantry should drop its title as ‘the King of the Belgians’ Own’; the Austrian 12th Hussars likewise continued to be known as ‘King Edward VII’s Own’. But Britain’s royal family hastily stripped its German relations of British honours: the Kaiser dispatched to Buckingham Palace his uniforms as an admiral of the fleet and field-marshal. There was a rush to rechristen popular venues with patriotic names. Le Jardin du Roi de Württemberg in Nice changed its name to Alsace-Lorraine Square. Berlin’s Grand Café became the Café Unity, displaying a constantly updated war map on its wall and having the latest dispatches from the front read aloud to patrons. Many German restaurants deleted French and English words and phrases from their menus, which confused diners who could not understand what they were ordering when the fare was described in their own language. Meanwhile in France, Pilsner beer was relabelled Bière de la Meuse.

Spy fever overtook Europe. In Münster, a notably Catholic city, civilians seized several nuns as alleged Russian spies; police arrested the civic head gardener four times because he affected a suit of apparently English cut. British newspapers reported from Brussels: ‘five German spies disguised as priests have been arrested here’. Russian agents were alleged to have bombed German bridges and poisoned water supplies, obliging Munich police to tour the streets reassuring the public that it could safely drink from taps. In Belgrade several men were arrested for allegedly making torch signals from the Moskva Hotel to Austrian gunners at Zemun.

Paris’s Hôtel Astoria was closed amid charges that its German manager had installed on the roof apparatus for intercepting French wireless messages; the British ambassador heard a rumour that the man was summarily shot, which he disbelieved, but wrote resignedly that he expected ‘there will be a good many tueries’. A letter was published in The Times alerting readers to the peril posed to national security by prominent British residents of Teutonic origin: ‘During the last quarter of a century, numbers of highly-placed aliens, some naturalized, some not, who are known to be in close communication with German and financial circles, have bought their way into British society.’ The writer urged telephone taps and a close watch on such ‘highly-placed sympathizers’, and ended with a dark warning: ‘I do not wish to be an alarmist, but I know what I am writing about.’ This nasty missive was signed only ‘S’.

In Berlin the famous Danish-born actress Asta Nielsen was walking down the Unter den Linden when she suddenly and incomprehensibly found herself denounced: ‘my hat was thrown down so that my black hair appeared. “A Russian,” I heard someone yell behind me, and a hand grabbed my hair. I yelled, full of fear and pain. In front of me a man turned around and recognised me. He yelled my name to the excited people behind me; they let me go and began to curse each other. One of them started flailing his arms as if he was crazy, and hit one of the others in the face. Blood flowed. “You cannot stay here,” my saviour said. “The people have completely lost their senses. They no longer know what they are doing.”’

Everywhere there was an insatiable hunger for information. Newspapers were torn from vendors whenever a new edition arrived, and café patrons addressed themselves to complete strangers. Rumour ran wild. In St Petersburg, it was said that Emperor Franz Joseph was dead. Austrian soldiers in Mostar heard that revolution had broken out in France, where the president of the republic had been assassinated. Wiseacres on the terraces of Nice predicted that hunger would force Germany to quit the war within weeks. A local resident wrote on 5 August: ‘There is no authentic war news – either by land or by sea: all that appears in the papers is invention.’ In Germany that week the Hannoverscher Courier delivered a vituperative denunciation: ‘Animals! … Yesterday a French surgeon and two disguised French officers attempted to poison fountains with cholera bacilli. They were court-martialled and shot.’ It was also alleged that mobs of Belgians were murdering German civilians: Moltke’s soldiers claimed to have captured a Belgian with his pockets full of German fingers, severed for their rings.

Russians drifted towards local railway stations, where news was likely to come first: papers from Moscow took days to reach remote areas, and contained little of substance when they did so. Country-dwellers wandered out onto highways and quizzed travellers for scraps of intelligence: ‘one was delighted to encounter a simple Cossack’, wrote Sergei Kondurashkin in the Caucasus, ‘and listen greedily to his naïve words, waiting patiently while the millstones of his memory ground slowly into motion’. When two days’ newspapers belatedly arrived, the Kondurashkin family and friends crowded onto the verandah of their holiday dacha twenty strong, aged from eight to sixty, and including children, students, clerks, professors, doctors. One of their number was voted the clearest speaker, and nominated to read the paper aloud to the rest, a Chekhovian moment. He then rehearsed the bleak budget of tidings – declarations of war; German incursions into Poland and Russian moves into East Prussia; the arrival in Warsaw of the first PoWs.

There was intense, almost uniformly ill-founded speculation about what the conflict would be like. German pundits offered especially optimistic predictions: a writer in the Braunschweigische Anzeigen declared that modern weapons and tactics would diminish fatalities: ‘To be sure, some clashes may be notably severe, but it is certain that overall losses will decrease. The vast hordes of men now being mobilised do not face experiences as violent as many people imagine. Battle will be no slaughter’ – ‘Die Schlacht wird kein Schlachten’. There was intense British concern about a supposed German invasion threat, which prompted many civilians to enlist in local rifle clubs. People gaped in wonder at the sight of anti-aircraft guns being mounted on Admiralty Arch and London’s bridges; the navy urged the War Office to deploy some planes in Hyde Park.

Such fears were mirrored across the North Sea. Anna Treplin, living in the German port of Cuxhaven, was alarmed by the prospect of British warships shelling the harbour, and with it the seaside home she and her three children occupied. Just as pre-war British readers had been excited by Erskine Childers’ thriller about the German menace, The Riddle of the Sands, so many Germans had read the mirror-image shocker entitled 1906. This 1905 work by the pseudonymous author ‘Seestern’ – a journalist named Ferdinand Grauthoff – anticipated an Anglo-French naval assault on Cuxhaven, and a gunnery duel between allied warships and coastal fortresses. Frau Treplin decamped to Hamburg with her nerves and her offspring.

The legend that Europe welcomed the conflict is today heavily qualified, if not discredited. Rural communities of all nationalities were stunned and profoundly dismayed; most of those who cheered in the streets were the urban young, without responsibilities. Thoughtful people were appalled. Michel Corday, a French senior civil servant, wrote: ‘Every thought and event caused by the outbreak of war came as a bitter and mortal blow struck against the great conviction that was in my heart: the concept of permanent progress, of movement towards ever greater happiness. I had never believed that something like this could happen.’

But some romantics and nationalists enthused, like the Austrian woman Itha J, who wrote lyrically about ‘the grandeur of the times … the superb spectacle of the world bursting into flames’. Even as she sobbed at the station on 2 August, bidding farewell to her husband, a lieutenant, she rhapsodised about ‘this wonderful young [generation], who depart to face battle and death with laughter and cheering. Nobody shivers, nobody sobs – isn’t such an army ordained to gain victory?’ Germany experienced the most conspicuous surge of euphoria, influenced by the remembered glories of victory over France in 1870. Its Red Cross had to urge people to give soldiers less chocolate, because it was making them sick. On 2 August a journalist on the Tägliche Rundschau wrote: ‘what Germany has experienced in recent days has been a miraculous self-renewal, in which everything petty and alien has been shed; it has represented a supremely powerful recognition of our true self’.

At the Reichstag session of 4 August, Bethmann Hollweg asserted that the date would live for eternity as one of Germany’s greatest. Falkenhayn told the chancellor: ‘Even if we go under as a result of this, it was beautiful,’ and many of his compatriots agreed. On 14 August Bethmann’s secretary Riezler exulted: ‘war, war, the Volk has arisen – it is as if there were nothing there before and now suddenly it is powerful and moving … on the surface the greatest confusion and yet the most meaningful order; by now millions have already crossed the Rhine’. A young girl, Gertrud Bäumer, wrote with a mawkish sentimentality typical of the moment in Germany that war increased the store of love in the world, ‘for it taught one to love one’s neighbour more than oneself’.

In Britain, by contrast, while Norman Macleod at the Admiralty acknowledged a ‘feeling of confidence in Navy & Army & determination to set about the great business as well as possible’, he added, ‘there is certainly no martial ardour. Of course men are enlisting and volunteering fast enough and everybody has become a military and naval expert, but there is an absence of that joy in fighting – glory of battle – which was so marked at beginning of the Boer War and shortly before it – Kiplingism quite forgotten – the horrors of war are not for a moment lost sight of.’ The Economist asserted the grave significance of unfolding events, and their implications for civilisation: ‘Since last week millions of men have been drawn from the field and the factory to slay one another by order of the warlords of Europe. It is perhaps the greatest tragedy of human history … In the opinion of many shrewd judges, a social upheaval, a tremendous revolution, is the certain consequence. It may perhaps be the last time that the working classes of the Continent will allow themselves to be marched to destruction at the dictates of diplomacy and by the order of their warlords.’ The magazine expressed doubts about how Britain’s disaffected working class and alienated Irish subjects would respond to the advent of war. ‘It has been freely stated,’ declared one of its correspondents, ‘that in the North of England there is still a good deal of apathy.’

So there was. Tens of thousands of volunteers quickly offered themselves to the army, but many more potential recruits decided to stay at home. A Mr Doyle of the Manor House, Birtley, in Co. Durham, wrote to the Yorkshire Post: ‘The important work of instructing the public as to the meaning of the war should begin in real earnest. A few days ago, in passing through one of the larger villages, I stopped to see a dozen or so young men who had joined the colours being drilled in a field. Six times as many were lying up against the fence passively looking on. I enquired of one of them, a well set-up, athletic young fellow, why he was a spectator and not a participant. He looked at me squarely and said: “Because it isn’t worthwhile; we could be of no use for six months, and by that time there will be no enemy. Germany will be off the map.” Another young man said: “It’s no business of ours this foreign war. Austria and Serbia should be let fight it out. Germany didn’t want to come in until compelled by Russia, and we should have kept out of it. Anyhow, we’re all right; the fleet will keep us safe.”’

But others were inspired to don khaki. The writer A.P. Herbert, an instinctive iconoclast, nonetheless wrote long afterwards, denouncing the satirical musical Oh, What a Lovely War!, which suggested that he and his generation were ‘duped into the Forces by damsels singing patriotic songs, or bullied in by peremptory posters’. He declared his own lasting conviction that Britain had gone to war for a just cause, and remained impenitent about his own commitment to fight for it. Most British intellectual opinion agreed. Thomas Hardy believed that ‘England was innocent for once … the war began because the Germans wanted to fight.’ Sir Walter Raleigh, Oxford’s professor of history, confided to a friend: ‘I’ve often known this must come when I’ve heard the Germans talk about their destiny and their plans for achieving it. I’m glad I’ve lived to see it, and sick that I’m not in it.’ Many men idealised the prospect of military service, as did C.E. Montague in his autobiographical novel Rough Justice: ‘Always to have just some one plain and not hard thing to do; to be free to give yourself up … to whole days of rude health, to let yourself go, with a will, in the swing of marching, the patterned dances of drills … with the blithe or grave calls blown on bugles to lead you through the busy, easy days.’ Montague was described by a friend as ‘the only man whose hair turned black in a single night through courage’. At the age of forty-seven, though initially opposed to the war, he dyed his white hair black in order to join the Grenadier Guards.

Few families in Britain embraced the coming of war with as much jingo enthusiasm as Robert Emmet’s. He was a rich East Coast American, forty-three years old, since 1900 living and fox-hunting in Warwickshire. His bank-holiday house party at Moreton Paddox was largely composed of cavalry and reserve officers, ‘who worked themselves into a frenzy of anxiety’ lest the government flinch from a declaration of war ‘which appeared the natural and even inevitable reply to Germany’s wanton invasion of Belgium’. The telephone was in constant service, to quiz porters at the men’s London clubs about the latest news. On the following Tuesday Emmet, who had served as a lieutenant with the New York National Guard in the Spanish-American War, took his entire family to London. Installed in their usual quarters at Claridge’s Hotel, he addressed his wife and three teenage sons. He saw only two alternatives, he said: to disappear quietly back to the safety of neutral America, or stay and fight. He made plain his personal view, then invited a vote among the assembled company. His three sons unhesitatingly opted to stay, ‘Their mother, in her turn, courageously voting “aye” as well, the decision being made unanimous by my final vote. A great load was lifted off my mind.’

Returning to Warwickshire that week of the war’s outbreak, Major Emmet hoisted the Stars and Stripes on his lawn. He intended this as a gesture of solidarity with Britain, but the neighbourhood unfortunately misconstrued it. Emmet’s brother-in-law telephoned to say that unless he lowered the flag, it was not impossible that the house would be burned down. People supposed that he was attempting to proclaim his own neutrality and safeguard his property in the event of a German invasion. Emmet was outraged, and persisted in defiance for three days before prudently lowering Old Glory. Soon afterwards he handed over the Paddox to become a hospital, which it remained for the rest of the war, while he himself trained cavalry recruits and his sons enlisted.

Throughout Europe, families adjusted their domestic economies to the prospect of a new austerity. The haste with which staff were shed caused much hardship. Many German women servants found themselves without a place, and were soon crowding around city soup kitchens. Violet Asquith complained to Venetia Stanley about the crass conduct of Lord Elcho, in whose house she and her father spent a weekend. The peer ‘issued an abrupt ultimatum to all his employees servants etc. – to join the Army or leave his service – & has then gone off to London leaving poor Lady Elcho’ – Arthur Balfour’s long-service lover – ‘to cope with the situation – which he created without consulting her in any sort of way. It is too cruel as the people here have hardly heard of the war.’

Shortage of raw materials forced many factories to reduce or halt production, so that in Germany unemployment rose from 2.7 per cent in July to 22.7 per cent in August. Salesmen working on commission saw their incomes vanish. A pastor in Berlin’s Moabit tenement quarter observed that enthusiasm for the struggle was a luxury only intellectuals could indulge. The Rheinische Zeitung noted: ‘a tense mood prevails during the late hours in our working-class districts. There is no noise, no songs. One hears sobbing and sees men looking grave … no strident patriotic slogans, no hurrahs, instead work and sacrifice.’ A journalist visiting the London East End’s Hoxton, ‘a stronghold of penury at all times’, found its people ‘threatened by a very disaster of distress under the shock of war’. There was special hardship in Lancashire, where one-fifth of cotton looms stopped, and a further one-seventh were reduced to short-time working. Over 100,000 cotton workers were idle, with half Burnley suddenly unemployed, and one-third of Preston.

Jewish historian Gustav Mayer on 12 August found his father bewailing the collapse of business at his drapery shop in Berlin’s Zehlendorf. In Freiburg some 10,000 men, much of the city’s workforce, went to the army, so that one firm lost 154 out of its 231 workers; Ditler’s furniture manufactory lost forty-five men, a third of its employees, and a local publisher was deprived of over a hundred, most of them printers. The building trade collapsed almost overnight. Textile and leather-goods manufacturers found themselves suffering acutely from raw-material shortages.

It is hard to overstate the social and economic impact of the mass mobilisation of horses, which created difficulties not merely for agriculture, but for every form of transport. Though the world would soon become motorised, in 1914 horses and oxen were the customary means of moving goods and people anywhere that a train could not go. In the German countryside near Halle, a pastor asserted that farmers were more upset by the requisitioning of their animals and wagons than by the conscription of their workers. In England, too, horses were ruthlessly commandeered, though on a generous scale of compensation – £40 for a troop horse and £60 for an officer’s charger, which enabled some owners to recycle indifferent hunters. Lt. Guy Harcourt-Vernon of the Grenadier Guards wrote home exhibiting a blend of optimism, bewilderment and opportunism: ‘This war ought to end as soon as the Russians march on Berlin say 4 to 6 months, but I hope they won’t bicker over the spoils like the Balkan war. I wonder if they will send us after all. Are they commandeering horses? If so, let “Child” go, but stand out for £60 if they will give it. It is probably more than I shall get any other way.’ At the Tower of London, long rows of purchased horses stood tethered in the moat.

In the harvest fields of the vast Yorkshire estate of Sledmere, on 5 August wagoners were handed mobilisation papers. After serving in South Africa Sir Mark Sykes MP, the local grandee, had become convinced that a future war would expose a shortage of army transport. He thus persuaded the War Office to acquiesce in a scheme whereby his own neighbours’ agricultural workers should be enlisted as volunteer drivers. These men received no military training, but were subject to call-up. Sykes mustered drivers at his own expense, grading them as ‘Wagoner’, ‘Foreman’ and ‘Roadmaster’, with appropriate brass lapel badges. In 1913 the War Office took over responsibility for paying the men annual bounties of between one and four sovereigns. Wagoners called the former ‘the silly quid’, because it seemed so easily earned – by driving a timed run around a figure-of-eight obstacle course at Sledmere. By 8 p.m. on 5 August, more than eight hundred such men had assembled at the Army Service Corps’ Bradford depot, where they drew uniforms and received a little hasty training. Within weeks, most were driving in France.

The war had not been precipitated by popular nationalistic fervour, but by the decisions of tiny groups of individuals in seven governments. In most countries before hostilities began, only small numbers of people attended demonstrations in favour of belligerence, and there is no evidence that these influenced policy. Instead, it was the fact of conflict which precipitated displays of patriotism and rallied societies to their respective causes. Many people who had strongly opposed fighting decided that the debating season was now over: national solidarity had become a duty. A Protestant clergyman in the Black Forest noted that Catholics who had hitherto ignored his existence now greeted him with ‘Hello, pastor.’ Twelve-year-old Elfriede Kuhr, living with her grandparents in Schneidemühl, wrote on 3 August: ‘We have to learn new songs about the glory of war. The enthusiasm in our town is growing by the hour. People wander through the streets in groups shouting “Down With Serbia! Long live Germany!” Everyone wears black, white and red pompoms in their buttonholes or black, white and red bows.’

Field-Marshal Lord Roberts, the British public’s beloved ‘Bobs’, wrote in The Times on 6 August: ‘“my country right or wrong and right or wrong my country” is the sentiment most treasured in the breast of anyone worthy of the name of man’. Even Ramsay MacDonald, the pacifist former Labour leader, urged that ‘those who can enlist ought to enlist and those who are working in munition factories should do so wholeheartedly’. Ritual political reconciliations took place in communities all over France. On 4 August in Paris a message from President Poincaré was read to a packed Chamber of Deputies, calling for an end to the factional and class struggles that had riven the Third Republic. This was received with rapturous applause, followed by handshaking between political enemies. The phrase ‘la patrie en danger’ was heard on many lips, a manifestation of the union sacrée. In France as in Germany, such solidarity was interpreted as a triumph for the political right, reflecting the eclipse of the socialists who had opposed belligerence.

In the first days of August, the Labour Party sponsored ‘Stop the War’ rallies in several British cities and towns. The Fabian Beatrice Webb attended one of these in Trafalgar Square, which was addressed by Keir Hardie and George Lansbury. She found herself untouched by either its manner or its message, writing afterwards: ‘It was an undignified and futile exhibition, this singing of The Red Flag and passing of well-worn radical resolutions in favour of universal peace.’ She noted with approval that even many extreme pacifists ‘are agreeing that we had to stand by Belgium’. Webb nonetheless recoiled from ‘the disgusting misuse of religion’ to stimulate patriotism. She may have been thinking of the Bishop of London, who declared: ‘This is the greatest fight ever made for the Christian religion … a choice between the nailed hand and the mailed fist.’