Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914. Max Hastings
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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.”’
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