Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (75 page)

Such sentiments were widely shared, until the writer and his comrades reached the Western Front in 1915.

Meanwhile, across the Channel, early in December the French government returned to Paris from its unheroic exile in Bordeaux, which had done lasting injury to the prestige of President Poincaré. Social tensions, in abeyance during the autumn crisis, were resurfacing. The middle class,
many of whom lived on income from property, were increasingly resentful of the enforced moratorium on rent collection. A cartoon by Harmann-Paul depicted a bourgeois kneeling before the prime minister and saying, ‘Take my son for four, five, six years, if you like, but spare, oh! spare my income.’ The rich seemed in no mood to take pity on the poor. A French national fund for the relief of distress collected only £200,000 – a fraction of the amounts raised by such appeals in other countries – of which the Rothschilds contributed £40,000. Paris was cautiously returning to life, with some dressmakers in the Rue de Paix reopening their shops and several theatres giving matinees. But public transport shut down at 10 p.m., and many wealthy Parisians who had fled in August found it more congenial to linger in south or south-west France, out of earshot of gunfire, rather than return to a drab wartime capital.

Some of the rich found their fortunes severely injured by wartime inflation, but businessmen with access to military contracts prospered mightily. In September the French war minister invited industrialists to a meeting in Bordeaux at which he informed them that a shell crisis was looming: within a month, stocks of 75mm ammunition would be down to two rounds a gun. A crash programme was introduced, setting a target of 100,000 shells per day that was only achieved a year later; production of explosives rose in the same period from forty-one tons a day to 255 tons. Specialist workers were hastily recalled from the army to assist in manufacturing war matériel, wearing a red armband adorned with a grenade to show that they were not shirkers. This did not prevent some industrialists from exploiting exemptions to bring home their own unskilled friends and loved ones. Fortunes were soon being made, as household-goods makers turned to producing mess tins, water bottles, spades as well as bombs and shells.

After the first weeks, when many French factories closed for lack of buyers for their wares, the war created feverish new demands which persisted for four years. In Isère, an iron foundry at Renage found itself working around the clock to fulfil government contracts for 10,000 spades and pickaxes a week. A Grenoble engineering factory employed five hundred men making metal trench shelters. Another works in the city was contracted to produce a thousand 75mm shells a day by Christmas 1914, which became 9,000 by 1918; its workforce swelled from eight hundred to 2,750. A local paper manufactory turned to shell filling, doubling its pre-war workforce. There was huge demand for canvas, explosives, leather, canteens, writing paper and pencils, ammunition components, canned
food. Supplying such products enriched industrialists in every belligerent nation.

Chain letters containing prayers circulated, which recipients were urged to pass on to nine others. Churches in every country reported improved trade, though there was little evidence of increased godliness. War made many genteel people, soldiers and civilians alike, who had never in their lives used obscene language in the presence of others, suddenly find themselves in circumstances which caused them to say ‘fuck’. To the dismay of respectable citizens, actions spoke louder than words. Extra-marital sex became an urgent preoccupation of those facing death or enduring separation. As A.E. Housman put it: ‘I ’listed at home for a lancer/Oh, who would not sleep with the brave?’ In Freiburg, in the first eight months of war venereal-disease figures more than doubled, and court convictions for prostitution soared; the experience of most cities was similar.

Some civilians, especially academics, strove to keep open lines of communication with their peers in enemy countries: this was thought a civilised gesture, emphasising the universality of European culture. In October 1914 Maynard Keynes sent a letter to Ludwig Wittgenstein via neutral Norway, asking the Austrian about the possibility that he might provide a scholarship for a Cambridge logician after the war. Wittgenstein, who was rich, had earlier shown himself a generous benefactor, but now he was crewing a Vistula picket boat. He reacted crossly to receiving a mere business proposal from an old friend ‘at such a time as this’.

Premature death became a prevailing theme: in every belligerent nation, people grew accustomed to receiving news of a stream of loved ones and friends killed. Sir Edward Grey wrote to a colleague about his soldier brother Charlie, whose arm had just been amputated – ‘we hope to get him home alive’, as indeed they did – and a nephew badly wounded: ‘It is a load of private grief to carry, but others have grief as heavy and heavier.’ The family of schoolteacher Gertrud Schädla in Verden, near Bremen, found themselves unable to face reading the casualty lists published in newspapers – ‘we do not feel strong enough’. They were dismayed by news of the Marne – ‘we had to retreat a little bit in France’. Then, in October, far worse tidings came: young Ludwig Schädla was among the dead. The family’s letters to him were returned by the army, marked tersely ‘Died 4.9’. Gertrud anguished over his fate: ‘Was it an attack on his regiment, or perhaps a shot while he stood alone on guard on a dark night? So many perish – many, many more of our enemies than of our own. Alack, I feel bad for them all.’

Two days later, on 12 October, her brother Gottfried’s mail was also sent home, marked ‘wounded, whereabouts unknown’. They learned that he too had died, aged twenty-one, eight days after being admitted to a field hospital near Reims: ‘So we have even lost our youngest, our
Sonnenschein
– “Sunshine”! Death, you are bitter! Wherewith shall we find solace?’ She sought to console herself with the reflection that her brothers were with God. ‘Lord, keep our beloved boys with you. Their struggle came to an end, they grasped victors’ laurels, and we will not wish them back.’

Families yearned, often in vain, for crumbs of news about the fate of fallen loved ones. A dead French soldier’s wrist identity tag was customarily dispatched to his next of kin with the laconic words ‘Perished on the field of honour’. This practice was known as ‘receiving the medal’. One woman with five children who gave birth to twins soon after her husband departed for the front ‘received the medal’ the same night. It became fashionable to send out mourning cards, such as one for Léon-Pierre-Marie Challamel, pupil at the seminary of Saint-Sulpice, ‘
mort pour la France, le 24 Septembre 1914 au combat de Crécy (Somme) à l’âge de 22 ans
’. In Verden, Magdalene Fischer, girlfriend of Ludwig Schädla who had perished in France, visited the town photographer in hopes of finding a last picture of him in uniform. Instead, she found only a group shot in which her young man was scarcely visible. Then she discovered that Ludwig’s company commander, Lt. Gatzenmeyer, was lying wounded in a local hospital. He offered some crumbs of information, true or invented, about her lover’s last days. These were more than many families received.

Because soldiering had been a familiar peacetime occupation for the sons of the British upper classes, losses in France bore heavily upon them. A 19 September fatal casualty list included the names of such gilded young men as Percy Wyndham, Lord Guernsey, Rivvy Grenfell. Asquith enquired about the latter of Venetia Stanley: ‘Did you ever dance with him?’ She must have done. There was hardly a ‘roll of honour’ published that winter which did not mention names familiar to every former debutante. Whatever else was said about the war, it could not be suggested that the British ruling class was skimping its share of the blood price: sixty members of the aristocracy died in France and Flanders between 23 August and 31 December; thereafter the combat mortality rate among the peerage steadied at six a month. A long succession of men who had achieved celebrity in their own gilded little world now secured brief obituaries. Lionel Tennyson wrote on 14 October: ‘Poor Willy Macneil of the
16th Lancers who used to ride Foolhardy in the Grand National was killed quite close to us here this morning.’

In every country, schools were conscripted to promote enthusiasm for the struggle. Albert Sarraut, France’s minister of public instruction, wrote in a circular to heads: ‘It is my wish that on the opening day of the term, in every town and every class, the teacher’s very first words should raise up all the hearts to the nation, and … honour the sacred struggle in which our forces are engaged … Every one of our schools has sent soldiers into the line of fire – teachers or pupils – and every one, I know well, already bears the proud grief of its deaths.’ André Gide recoiled from such language: ‘A new rubber stamp is being created, a new conventional psychology of the patriot, without which it is impossible to be respectable. The tone used by the journalists to speak of Germany is nauseating. They are all getting on the bandwagon. Each is afraid of being late, of seeming a less “good Frenchman” than the others.’

French schools were urged to set pupils such essay subjects as ‘The Regiment Departs’, ‘Letter From an Unknown Big Brother Who is Fighting for Us’, ‘Arrival of a Trainload of Wounded Men’, ‘The Germans Have Killed a Small Boy Aged Seven Whom They Found Playing in a field with a Toy Gun’ and ‘The Germans Have Invaded Your Town – Describe Your Feelings’. Geography, headmasters were told, should be based upon an operational map of the war zones, updated daily. Wounded men who returned to teach were deemed to have a specially useful role to play, though this may not have turned out to be that which the Education Ministry intended. German-language lessons were dropped in favour of English, and in the history syllabus there was a new emphasis on Latin and Greek heroes.

German
Abitur
certificate exams posed such questions as ‘If life is a struggle, what are our weapons?’; ‘What motivates every German fit for military service to respond to the Fatherland’s call to arms?’ One Berlin school invited essays on the theme ‘the war as an educational force’. In every nation, children were recruited to conduct street collections of metal that might be forged into munitions. Elfriede Kuhr in Schneidmühl was fascinated by the notion that pots and pans she wrung out of her sceptical family could be transformed into bullets. Elfriede’s grandmother complained crossly that all these school collections would be the ruin of her.

Children’s games became strongly influenced by the war. The English toy firm Britain’s manufactured a wide range of model soldiers of the
warring nations. In Hamburg, four-year-old Ingeborg Treplin declared her kiddiecar to be a troop transport. When her mother took all three Treplin girls to Hamburg’s Hermann Tietz department store, they found its floor dominated by a vast toy battlefield, adorned with a fortress, French and German soldiers, burning houses and an aeroplane above. Anna Treplin wrote, ‘the children were awed’. The trade magazine of the toy-manufacturing industry,
Deutsche Spielwarenzeitung
, sought to claim for its fraternity an important role. Toys, it asserted, were no mere luxury products; rather, they ‘inculcated the progress of the war in children’s minds, instilling national feeling, honesty, and patriotism’.

Though every nation’s children were wooed into the war effort, the commitment of the British public schools was exceptional. In
Death of a Hero
, Richard Aldington penned a portrait of a typical product of the system – the sort who officered Kitchener’s New Armies – which was entirely cynical but not wholly unjust:

He accepted and obeyed every English middle-class prejudice and taboo. What the English middle classes thought and did was right, and what anybody else thought and did was wrong. He was contemptuous of all foreigners. He appeared to have read nothing but Kipling, Jeffrey Farnol, Elinor Glyn, and the daily newspapers. He disapproved of Elinor Glyn as too ‘advanced’. He didn’t care about Shakespeare, had never heard of the Russian ballets, but liked to ‘see a good show’. He thought
Chu Chin Chow
[a popular musical] was the greatest play ever produced … He thought Americans were a sort of inferior Colonials, regrettably divorced from that finest of all institutions, the British Empire … He was exasperatingly stupid, but he was honest, he was kindly, he was conscientious, he could obey orders and command obedience in others, he took pains to look after his men. He could be implicitly relied upon to lead a hopeless attack, and to maintain a desperate defence to the very end. There were thousands and tens of thousands like him.

R.C. Sherriff, a wartime officer who later became famous as author of the ‘trench play’
Journey’s End
, asserted that public schoolboys led men in France not through military skill, for no such accomplishment was needed, but rather by personal example, ‘from their reserves of patience and good humour and endurance’. Both the virtues and the vices of the English public-school system were conspicuous on the battlefields of 1914, and its standard-bearers at home responded with an orgy of sentimentality which
rendered even some patriots queasy. The first teacher killed was Lt. A.J.N Williamson of Highgate, whose passing prompted an editorial in
The Times Educational Supplement
on 22 September: ‘Everybody recognises the fact that the spirit of discipline and sportsmanship inculcated in our schools is bearing rich and glorious fruit on the stern fields of duty, and everyone knows that many of the most stirring and heroic deeds chronicled in the war redound to the credit of young officers whose schooldays ended but a few months ago.’ The October issue of the
Eton College Chronicle
commemorated with a poem the death of Lt. A.H. Blacklock of the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, who had doffed his tailcoat only the previous summer:

At the head of your Highland men,

Charging the terrible wood,

With only one thought in your dear old head,

To die as a soldier should.