Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (26 page)

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 domestic 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.’

At St Petersburg’s Nikolaevsky, Baltiysky and Varshavsky stations, thousands of men lit candles at the trackside icons as they departed to join their regiments. The Catholic Archbishop of Freiburg spoke to his flock of the war as a
Heimsuchung
– an affliction sent by God to test believers. A chaplain proclaimed stentoriously: ‘Rage over Germany, you great holy war of freedom. Tear down all that is rotten and sick, heal the wounds on the body of our German people and let a breed grow, a new breed, full of reverence for God, faithfulness to duty and brotherly love.’ In the Hapsburg Empire the Bishop of Sekau exulted in a belief that the war would introduce a new (spiritual) order: ‘This is the end of culture without God, without Christ, [and of] high politics without religion.’

The most spectacular displays of apparently spontaneous support for the war took place in Russia. On 4 August the German embassy in St Petersburg was sacked by a mob, a hapless caretaker murdered. To the British correspondent Arthur Ransome, a Russian paraphrased the old Roman pronouncement of Carthage’s doom: ‘
Germania delenda est
.’ Two days later in the capital, a quarter of a million people gathered to sing patriotic songs. Even in provincial cities, far from the metropolitan elite, crowds thronged the streets, some carrying portraits of Nicholas II decorated with flags. ‘Long live the Tsar and the People!’ they cried.

Yet despite such displays of fervour in some cities, not many Russians deluded themselves that the struggle would do them any good: few wars ever had. Scepticism – indeed, cynicism – intensified lower down the social scale. The historian Allan Wildman has written that Russia’s peasants thought it ‘a fruitless venture of the upper classes for which they would have to pay’. Menshikov,
Novoe Vremya
’s chief columnist, wrote: ‘There isn’t nowadays among the masses that faith, that capacity to catch fire, that there was in the days of Suvorov and Napoleon.’ In Riga, alongside celebratory banners appeared others proclaiming ‘Down with the war’.

In some places there were riots to protest against conscription, or at least to vent rage about the incompetence with which it was being implemented. An official telegraphed from Tomsk: ‘Reservists are producing disorder almost everywhere … in Novosibirsk a mob of reservists sacked stores and began to sack the bazaar, the disorders were stopped with the assistance of [troops] … The mobs threw stones at them.’ When
somebody fired a shot which wounded a soldier, troops opened fire on the crowd, killing two civilians and seriously wounding two more. Meanwhile reservists pillaged liquor stores in several villages; some demonstrated furiously for food, and against the requisitioning of their horses, indispensable to agricultural activity.

In Paris, artist Paul Maze reported to the Invalides to volunteer for the army, only to discover that no more men were being immediately accepted. A hoary old sergeant dismissed the crestfallen youth with the words, ‘Why worry? You’ll get all you want before the end.’ Maze, who was bilingual, joined the disembarking British Expeditionary Force at Le Havre as an interpreter, and eventually became a decorated officer. Many young men in all countries, especially artists and writers, were less enthusiastic than curious about the prospect of seeing a battlefield. Viennese-born Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was twenty-five, at first saw it as offering an escape from his own tortured philosophical confusions and uncertainties, intensified by study at Cambridge under Bertrand Russell. He volunteered for military service, and recorded in his coded diary delight at the civilised reception he received. ‘Will I be able to work now??’ he asked himself on 9 August. ‘I am curious about my future life! The military authorities in Vienna were extraordinarily civil. Officials who had to deal with thousands of men every day answered my questions politely and at length. Such things cheer me up enormously; they remind me of the way things are done in England.’ Within days, however, Wittgenstein’s spirits sagged. Dispatched to serve as a searchlight operator aboard the picket boat
Goplana
on the Vistula, he found the company of ordinary sailors not merely unwelcome, but repellent: ‘The crew are miserable pigs! They display no enthusiasm, unbelievable brutishness, stupidity and wickedness! So it is untrue that a shared great cause (the war) ennobles humanity.’