Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914 - Max Hastings

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valley … the once familiar shouts and cries of farmers going to market, of animated “farm talk” in cafés and market squares, has given way to an anxious silence maintained by women, children and old men’. Machinery lay idle and bread ran short, with skilled workers gone and petrol stocks appropriated by the army. In Malleval, a public-spirited motorist siphoned the tank of his automobile, to provide just enough fuel to run a threshing machine for two days to finish the harvest.

      Britain, alone among the belligerents, had no system of universal military service, and thus a relatively small professional army of 247,432 men, of which half was dispersed across the Empire. Unlike the continental powers, which mustered millions of trained conscripts, the British summoned into uniform only a further 145,347 reservists – ex-soldiers contractually liable to recall – and 268,777 men of the part-time Territorial Force. Although the process went relatively smoothly, some men wrenched from civilian life responded with reluctance and even truculence. Captain the Hon. Lionel Tennyson of the Rifle Brigade, grandson of the poet and an England cricketer who had spent the previous winter playing Test matches in South Africa, sentenced fifteen reservists who displayed symptoms of what would later be called ‘bolshiness’ to twenty-one days’ ‘CB’ – Confinement to Barracks. This, he said, ‘quietened them down a bit’.

      Austria’s army mustered with Ruritanian incompetence for the war its rulers had willed. Its principal strength lay in exotic parade uniforms and splendid bands. Some of the artillery still had 1899-vintage bronze barrels. The Hapsburgs’ ruling class might enthuse about crushing Serbia, but most of them had traditionally escaped military service, leaving this to humbler folk. Relatively elderly men found themselves dispatched to the front, while fit younger ones were left behind to guard bridges and stations. Early casualty lists showed that among the dead were fathers of families aged forty-two and more. The call-up of doctors caused severe problems, especially in rural Alpine areas where communications were poor and horses, carts and carriages had been commandeered by the army. Conrad deliberately earmarked for his assault on Serbia formations recruited from Slav minorities. A brisk experience of crushing their racial brethren, Vienna deluded itself, would strengthen such Hapsburg subjects’ loyalty to the Empire.

      There was some confusion about which nations would take up arms for which side. An astonished Japanese was hugged in a Berlin street, because it was briefly rumoured that his country would back the Central Powers. The same was said of Italy, so that when homegoing Italian migrant workers met Hapsburg troops on their way to the front, the Austrians shouted enthusiastically ‘Hoch Italien!’, and the workers replied with equal warmth ‘Eviva Austria!’ But Italy’s army was in a parlous state. Through most of the pre-war crisis, the country lacked a chief of staff because the incumbent had died on 1 July, and Count Luigi Cadorna was appointed to succeed him only on the 27th. Cadorna promised Italian support to the Germans – then found his pledge disowned by the foreign minister. Italy was interested in fighting only to secure territorial gains – parts of Serbia and Italian-speaking Hapsburg lands foremost among them. A constitutional tangle ensued. King Victor Emmanuel was willing to sign a mobilisation order at Cadorna’s behest, to fight alongside Germany and Austria, but on 2 August the cabinet voted for neutrality. Italy was thus temporarily spared from the looming bloodbath, though many Austrians and Germans expressed disgust at an alleged betrayal.

      Europe meanwhile teemed with civilian travellers struggling to return to their home countries. Geoffrey Clarke, an ex-Rifle Brigade officer living outside Paris, recorded a conversation with a railwayman he met on his local station platform. The Frenchman, off to join his regiment, asked where the Englishman was going, and was told he was heading home to rejoin the army. ‘Ah!’ came the warm response, ‘alors, nous serons ensemble.’ He extended a hand, saying as it was shaken, ‘Au revoir, à bientôt.’ Half a million Russian migrant workers had to abandon their summer jobs in Germany. Thousands of German hotel and restaurant staff in Britain trooped aboard ferries bound for neutral Holland. Hundreds of English-language teachers in Berlin, lacking cash, found themselves stranded. Eighty thousand American tourists hurried home, some of them in the steamship Viking, which they clubbed together to purchase. Railway stations were crowded with desperate people of many nationalities. London shoe-shop manager George Galpin had a German neighbour in Wimbledon who left for home just before war broke out. Galpin accompanied the man to Victoria station, where his new enemy joked, ‘Don’t worry too much – I’ll see that you and your family are well treated when we come over to England!’

      Peter Kollwitz, younger son of East Prussian painter Käthe, was born into a family dedicated to high art and leftist ideals. The war found him, aged seventeen, holidaying in Norway with three friends. Determined to enlist, they travelled homewards on a train from Bergen to Oslo with English and French tourists who embarrassed them by their friendliness. They eventually reached Berlin, ‘talking excitedly about their new identity as fighters, lit up by sensuality and the thrill of imagined battle’. After some family argument, Peter’s father signed the papers consenting to his underage enlistment, then he and his elder brother Hans departed for barracks, leaving their parents ‘weeping, weeping, weeping’. Peter left for the front, and a grave, bearing in his knapsack his mother’s parting present, Goethe’s Faust.

      Some diplomats displayed rash insouciance by continuing to parade their protected status in the spirit of nineteenth-century gentlemen’s wars. In Paris the Bavarian minister was seen dining at the Ritz on the evening of 2 August, while the Austrian ambassador Count Szécsen was insensitive enough to continue taking meals at the fashionable Cercle de l’Union club, much to the chagrin of its members, who eventually closed their doors to him. In Berlin, with reciprocal grumpiness French ambassador Jules Cambon was ordered by the Germans not to send his staff to dine at the Hotel Bristol, because it would be hard to ensure their safety. Cambon lost his temper: ‘Where the devil do you want them to eat? As far as I know, the clientele of the Bristol is made up of well-brought-up people.’ The ambassador telephoned the hotel and asked that food for his staff should be dispatched to the embassy. The manager replied that he would do this only if authorised by the Foreign Ministry. The messy process of burning secret papers occupied Cambon through the evening of 3 August and all next morning, until he and his staff took a train to neutral Denmark en route homewards.

      There were flurries of excitement at sea, such as the escape of the battlecruiser Goeben and her light-cruiser consort Breslau eastwards across the Mediterranean, amid epic fumbling by the Royal Navy which enraged Winston Churchill. The German paper the Lokal-Anzeiger reported triumphantly the Goeben’s 2 August departure from Messina: ‘the funnel smoke thickens; across the stillness echoes the noise of anchor chains being hauled up. A crowd, thousands strong, surges towards the harbour; then resounds clearly from Goeben the notes of “Heil dir im Siegerkranz”. Officers and crew line the sides, heads bowed. Three rousing cheers for the Supreme Warlord ring across to the shore, where the crowd remains silent, impressed with the cheerful calm and confidence with which German sailors go forth to fight. Later, there are [false] reports of the wreckage of a British ship being sighted. One thing is certain: they are through!’

      And so they were, to the chagrin of the Admiralty in London, after the Royal Navy bungled their pursuit. The two ships were granted passage through the Dardanelles. Once in the Bosphorus, the ruling Young Turks persuaded Berlin to present them, crews and all, to the Turkish navy – a spectacular coup de théâtre. Goeben’s successful defiance of British naval might significantly influenced Turkish opinion towards joining the Central Powers, though more important was the bitterness engendered by decades of British slights towards the Ottoman Empire, among them confiscation of Crete and Cyprus. Moreover, the Turks loathed and feared the Russians.

      Among the gravest manifestations of war was the collapse of credit, which created a huge and immediate crisis for the City of London, the world’s financial capital. For days there was real danger of a meltdown of the monetary system. This was averted only by the Chancellor’s decision on 13 August that the Treasury must bear the strain: the Bank of England bought more than £350 million worth of outstanding bills of exchange. The sums were staggering, but this intervention saved the financial system.