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