Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (24 page)

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

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.