Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (25 page)

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.”’