Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (23 page)

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‘The Superb Spectacle of the World Bursting Into Flames’

1 MIGRATIONS

Across continental Europe, for the last time in history proclamations of war were accompanied musically as well as figuratively by a clarion call. In cities such as Freiburg a trumpeter and a police officer toured the city’s main squares in a chugging automobile, halting at each one to rehearse the tidings. Most of the newly warring nations accomplished the transition from peace with doom-laden efficiency. Lt. Col. Gerhard Tappen, Moltke’s chief of operations, admitted to a ‘peculiar feeling’ as he unlocked the office safe and withdrew Germany’s ‘Deployment Plan 1914/15’, but mobilisation represented the greatest professional triumph of the chief of staff’s career. Before war came, Berlin feared that socialist-inspired rail strikes might cause disruptions, but none occurred. There were few absentees among the four million men summoned to the colours.

Governments’ contingency plans extended well beyond the mechanics of mobilisation. Maurice Hankey, secretary of Britain’s Committee for Imperial Defence, had since 1910 produced annually updated editions of ‘The War Book’. This was a red quarto volume, sub-headed in gold lettering ‘Co-Ordination of departmental action on the OCCURRENCE OF STRAINED RELATIONS and on the OUTBREAK OF WAR’. The latest edition, circulated throughout Whitehall on 30 June 1914, contained 318 grey-blue pages, detailing the responsibilities of every department of state, first in the ‘Precautionary stage’: ‘The Secretary of State [for foreign affairs], foreseeing the danger of this country being involved in war in the near future, decides to warn the Cabinet to this effect.’ The War Book, with gentlemanly circumlocution, stressed the importance of discretion: ‘The Under-Secretary of State specially instructs any member of his staff who may be concerned that the greatest reticence must be observed in regard
to the existence of strained relations and all matters relating to precautionary measures.’

Thereafter, the Book catalogued all manner of necessary practical steps, such as the submission to Parliament of a Bill for the control of aliens, introduction of censorship, seizure of enemy merchant vessels, severance of enemy submarine telegraph cables, embodiment of the Channel Islands militia, and notice to neutral powers of an impending blockade of enemy ports. In addressing the management of telegraph traffic, an appendix stated: ‘In order that the greatest number of telegrams requiring Priority over all others should be indicated, it has been assumed … that the war would be one in which the United Kingdom would find herself immediately opposed by the three countries forming the Triple Alliance.’ The War Office was warned: ‘Certain defensive measures against treacherous or surprise attacks become necessary.’ The Admiralty chief censor’s telegraphic address was to be ‘Scoured, London’. The Home Office was instructed to alert chief constables ‘to pay special attention to the movements of suspicious foreigners’. During the first days of August, all this came to pass.

Serbs were dismayed that their country had been obliged to mobilise before the harvest was gathered, instead of waiting for autumn, as at the start of the two previous Balkan wars, when the barns were full. Not only the departure of men caused dismay, but also the spectacle of precious carts and oxen being driven away to the army. Nonetheless, Tadija Pejović remarked that everybody around him was singing, ‘because it is a Serb custom to sing when soldiers go to war’. Young and old alike had little notion how long their adventure might last. Uncomprehending children demanded to know why their homes were being broken up.

Generosity towards the enemy would soon be banished from every belligerent’s public life, but in August vestiges survived. Britain’s National Free Church Council adopted a resolution: ‘The crime and horror of a universal war has fallen upon European civilization. It is useless to seek nicely to apportion blame.’ H.W. Nevinson, Berlin correspondent of the
Daily News
, wrote of the young Germans whom he had watched march away: ‘finely-built and well-trained fellows they are, of a stock so much like our own at its best’. He applauded the well-tilled countryside, the neat and well-behaved children, and all that Germany had done to advance the world’s progress. In the same spirit, some British academics strove to sustain respect for the country that had now become their mortal enemy. ‘Only ignorance can afford to mock at German culture,’ wrote a Cambridge theologian.

A thirty-one-year-old schoolteacher living near Graz, who kept a diary in which she signed herself simply as ‘Itha J’, was an impassioned Austrian nationalist. She recoiled in disgust when her friend Martha described the bitterness of some men summoned to the colours. ‘I am sorry,’ Itha interrupted stiffly, ‘but it is incomprehensible that any man should complain. I call it cowardice – it could be nothing else.’ This was an age when classicism was an almost universal expression of literacy. Young Edouard Beer, one of four Belgian brothers who joined his country’s armed forces, quoted Caesar with some complacency: ‘
Omnium Gallorum fortissimi sunt Belgae
’ – ‘The Belgians are bravest of all Gauls’.

Writer Sergei Kondurashkin was holidaying with his family in southern Russia, where he glimpsed a microcosm of his nation’s vast mobilisation: ‘The omnipotent state apparatus of names and numbers was able to search out people even in the remote gorges of Caucasian mountains, beneath the Amanaus glaciers. Couriers came galloping with telegrams for doctors, professors and engineers – everyone to the war! Private rail travel stopped, the post became irregular, and for a time private telegrams were rejected. It seemed that the pattern of ordinary life around us, formed over centuries, was coming to a halt, soundlessly breaking up, as war established its own norms.’

Russia’s mobilised strength was on paper – full potential was never achieved – the largest of any belligerent, but most of those called to the colours had little notion of the cause. One man, Ivan Kuchernigo, described a scene in his village, where a policeman suddenly appeared, knocking on door after door to summon peasants to a meeting. They assembled amid general bewilderment and vain mutual questioning. Suddenly, the village elder called for silence: ‘Here’s what’s afoot boys! An enemy has turned up! He has attacked our Mother Russia –
Matushku Rossiiu
– and our Father-Tsar needs our help, our enemy for now is Germany.’ A buzz ran through the crowd: ‘It’s the Germans! The Germans.’ The elder shouted for quiet again: ‘OK boys, in order not to lose time messing with lists, whoever feels healthy and able to serve the Fatherland should show up in the office of the District Military Commander in Aleshka, and I advise you to bring with you two pairs of underwear, and they’ll give you anything else there, just do it quick.’ The crowd dispersed to their houses, forgetting work in the fields. Kuchernigo wrote: ‘My God, how many tears were spilled when we had to go.’ His five-year-old daughter sat in his arms, pressing against him and saying, ‘Daddy, why are you going? Why are you leaving us? Who’s going to earn money and get bread
for us?’ She embraced and kissed her father, whose own tears were soon flowing. ‘I couldn’t answer her questions, and just answered, “I’ll be home soon, baby.”’

In France mobilisation continued for fifteen days, with draftees reporting by age groups, the youngest first, the oldest last: arrivals at barracks were processed with astonishing speed. From the moment a man was received, inside twenty minutes he was stripped of his civilian clothes, bathed, uniformed and dispatched to his unit. With the reinforcement of its colonial mercenary regiments, most of them North African, France mustered 3.8 million trained soldiers, approximately equal to the forces of Germany. Seventeen-year-old peasant Ephraim Grenadou was attending a wake following the funeral of a young friend when mounted gendarmes trotted into his little town of Saint-Loup in Eure-et-Loir to post a stark white proclamation:
MOBILISATION GENERALE
. ‘The schoolmaster shouted to us to sound the tocsin. Everyone crowded around the
Mairie
, having abandoned the fields in the midst of harvesting.’ Men quizzed each other: ‘When are you leaving?’ ‘The second day.’ ‘Me, the third.’ ‘Me, the 25th.’ ‘Oh, you will never go – we shall be back by then.’ Next day Achilles, Saint-Loup’s town crier, toured the community, proclaiming tidings preceded by trumpet calls: ‘Everybody who has good boots should take them. You will be paid 15 francs.’

Two police automobiles brought the order to the church square of Valtilieu in Isère at 4.30 on the afternoon of 1 August. Immediately the local bell-ringer summoned the population; the village teacher described the effect: ‘it seemed that suddenly the old feudal tocsin had returned to haunt us. Nobody spoke for a long while. Some were out of breath, others dumb with shock. Many still carried pitchforks in their hands. “What can it mean? What’s going to happen to us?” asked the women. Wives, children, husbands – all were overcome by anguish and emotion. The wives clung to the arms of their husbands. The children, seeing their mothers weeping, started to cry too.’ Most of the men resorted to the café, to discuss the practical issue of how the harvest was to be got in. The general mood was resolute.

Sergeant Paul Gourdant expressed dismay at leaving behind a bedridden wife and four children; he was distressed that the burden of caring for them would fall on his elderly parents. But religion provided a staff: ‘God gave me strength to put aside all my fears and anxieties and to think only of the defence of my country.’ Henri Perrin, who owned a little ironmongery in Vienne, hastened around the town settling debts, before painstakingly
instructing his young wife about the shop’s management in his absence. Then the family fell on their knees and prayed together. The Perrins explained to their two small children that ‘Papa must go away for a while on business for the country.’ At thousands of railway stations, clusters of stoical, anxious or openly emotional relatives surrounded each man as he boarded the train. One shouted gaily, ‘All aboard for Berlin! And what fun we’ll have there!’ André Gide, a spectator, noted: ‘People smiled, but did not applaud.’ Some peasants treated the occasion as a holiday – these young men who had never experienced such an indulgence. A few fled to hide in the woods, but stern womenfolk drove most to report sheepishly to barracks.

Europe’s vast migration created a corresponding social upheaval. ‘So many men have left,’ reported a French regional newspaper,
La Croix d’Isère
, ‘that an atmosphere of sadness and doom pervades the small towns and villages of the Dauphiné.’ The rector of Grenoble Academy wrote: ‘all along the valley … the once familiar shouts and cries of farmers going to market, of animated “farm talk” in cafés and market squares, has given way to an anxious silence maintained by women, children and old men’. Machinery lay idle and bread ran short, with skilled workers gone and petrol stocks appropriated by the army. In Malleval, a public-spirited motorist siphoned the tank of his automobile, to provide just enough fuel to run a threshing machine for two days to finish the harvest.

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.