Читать книгу Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914 - Max Hastings, Sir Max Hastings, Max Hastings - Страница 20

Across continental Europe, for the last time in history proclamations of war were accompanied musically as well as figuratively by a clarion call. In cities such as Freiburg a trumpeter and a police officer toured the city’s main squares in a chugging automobile, halting at each one to rehearse the tidings. Most of the newly warring nations accomplished the transition from peace with doom-laden efficiency. Lt. Col. Gerhard Tappen, Moltke’s chief of operations, admitted to a ‘peculiar feeling’ as he unlocked the office safe and withdrew Germany’s ‘Deployment Plan 1914/15’, but mobilisation represented the greatest professional triumph of the chief of staff’s career. Before war came, Berlin feared that socialist-inspired rail strikes might cause disruptions, but none occurred. There were few absentees among the four million men summoned to the colours.

Governments’ contingency plans extended well beyond the mechanics of mobilisation. Maurice Hankey, secretary of Britain’s Committee for Imperial Defence, had since 1910 produced annually updated editions of ‘The War Book’. This was a red quarto volume, sub-headed in gold lettering ‘Co-Ordination of departmental action on the OCCURRENCE OF STRAINED RELATIONS and on the OUTBREAK OF WAR’. The latest edition, circulated throughout Whitehall on 30 June 1914, contained 318 grey-blue pages, detailing the responsibilities of every department of state, first in the ‘Precautionary stage’: ‘The Secretary of State [for foreign affairs], foreseeing the danger of this country being involved in war in the near future, decides to warn the Cabinet to this effect.’ The War Book, with gentlemanly circumlocution, stressed the importance of discretion: ‘The Under-Secretary of State specially instructs any member of his staff who may be concerned that the greatest reticence must be observed in regard to the existence of strained relations and all matters relating to precautionary measures.’

Thereafter, the Book catalogued all manner of necessary practical steps, such as the submission to Parliament of a Bill for the control of aliens, introduction of censorship, seizure of enemy merchant vessels, severance of enemy submarine telegraph cables, embodiment of the Channel Islands militia, and notice to neutral powers of an impending blockade of enemy ports. In addressing the management of telegraph traffic, an appendix stated: ‘In order that the greatest number of telegrams requiring Priority over all others should be indicated, it has been assumed … that the war would be one in which the United Kingdom would find herself immediately opposed by the three countries forming the Triple Alliance.’ The War Office was warned: ‘Certain defensive measures against treacherous or surprise attacks become necessary.’ The Admiralty chief censor’s telegraphic address was to be ‘Scoured, London’. The Home Office was instructed to alert chief constables ‘to pay special attention to the movements of suspicious foreigners’. During the first days of August, all this came to pass.

Serbs were dismayed that their country had been obliged to mobilise before the harvest was gathered, instead of waiting for autumn, as at the start of the two previous Balkan wars, when the barns were full. Not only the departure of men caused dismay, but also the spectacle of precious carts and oxen being driven away to the army. Nonetheless, Tadija Pejović remarked that everybody around him was singing, ‘because it is a Serb custom to sing when soldiers go to war’. Young and old alike had little notion how long their adventure might last. Uncomprehending children demanded to know why their homes were being broken up.

Generosity towards the enemy would soon be banished from every belligerent’s public life, but in August vestiges survived. Britain’s National Free Church Council adopted a resolution: ‘The crime and horror of a universal war has fallen upon European civilization. It is useless to seek nicely to apportion blame.’ H.W. Nevinson, Berlin correspondent of the Daily News, wrote of the young Germans whom he had watched march away: ‘finely-built and well-trained fellows they are, of a stock so much like our own at its best’. He applauded the well-tilled countryside, the neat and well-behaved children, and all that Germany had done to advance the world’s progress. In the same spirit, some British academics strove to sustain respect for the country that had now become their mortal enemy. ‘Only ignorance can afford to mock at German culture,’ wrote a Cambridge theologian.

A thirty-one-year-old schoolteacher living near Graz, who kept a diary in which she signed herself simply as ‘Itha J’, was an impassioned Austrian nationalist. She recoiled in disgust when her friend Martha described the bitterness of some men summoned to the colours. ‘I am sorry,’ Itha interrupted stiffly, ‘but it is incomprehensible that any man should complain. I call it cowardice – it could be nothing else.’ This was an age when classicism was an almost universal expression of literacy. Young Edouard Beer, one of four Belgian brothers who joined his country’s armed forces, quoted Caesar with some complacency: ‘Omnium Gallorum fortissimi sunt Belgae’ – ‘The Belgians are bravest of all Gauls’.

Writer Sergei Kondurashkin was holidaying with his family in southern Russia, where he glimpsed a microcosm of his nation’s vast mobilisation: ‘The omnipotent state apparatus of names and numbers was able to search out people even in the remote gorges of Caucasian mountains, beneath the Amanaus glaciers. Couriers came galloping with telegrams for doctors, professors and engineers – everyone to the war! Private rail travel stopped, the post became irregular, and for a time private telegrams were rejected. It seemed that the pattern of ordinary life around us, formed over centuries, was coming to a halt, soundlessly breaking up, as war established its own norms.’

Russia’s mobilised strength was on paper – full potential was never achieved – the largest of any belligerent, but most of those called to the colours had little notion of the cause. One man, Ivan Kuchernigo, described a scene in his village, where a policeman suddenly appeared, knocking on door after door to summon peasants to a meeting. They assembled amid general bewilderment and vain mutual questioning. Suddenly, the village elder called for silence: ‘Here’s what’s afoot boys! An enemy has turned up! He has attacked our Mother Russia – Matushku Rossiiu – and our Father-Tsar needs our help, our enemy for now is Germany.’ A buzz ran through the crowd: ‘It’s the Germans! The Germans.’ The elder shouted for quiet again: ‘OK boys, in order not to lose time messing with lists, whoever feels healthy and able to serve the Fatherland should show up in the office of the District Military Commander in Aleshka, and I advise you to bring with you two pairs of underwear, and they’ll give you anything else there, just do it quick.’ The crowd dispersed to their houses, forgetting work in the fields. Kuchernigo wrote: ‘My God, how many tears were spilled when we had to go.’ His five-year-old daughter sat in his arms, pressing against him and saying, ‘Daddy, why are you going? Why are you leaving us? Who’s going to earn money and get bread for us?’ She embraced and kissed her father, whose own tears were soon flowing. ‘I couldn’t answer her questions, and just answered, “I’ll be home soon, baby.”’

In France mobilisation continued for fifteen days, with draftees reporting by age groups, the youngest first, the oldest last: arrivals at barracks were processed with astonishing speed. From the moment a man was received, inside twenty minutes he was stripped of his civilian clothes, bathed, uniformed and dispatched to his unit. With the reinforcement of its colonial mercenary regiments, most of them North African, France mustered 3.8 million trained soldiers, approximately equal to the forces of Germany. Seventeen-year-old peasant Ephraim Grenadou was attending a wake following the funeral of a young friend when mounted gendarmes trotted into his little town of Saint-Loup in Eure-et-Loir to post a stark white proclamation: MOBILISATION GENERALE. ‘The schoolmaster shouted to us to sound the tocsin. Everyone crowded around the Mairie, having abandoned the fields in the midst of harvesting.’ Men quizzed each other: ‘When are you leaving?’ ‘The second day.’ ‘Me, the third.’ ‘Me, the 25th.’ ‘Oh, you will never go – we shall be back by then.’ Next day Achilles, Saint-Loup’s town crier, toured the community, proclaiming tidings preceded by trumpet calls: ‘Everybody who has good boots should take them. You will be paid 15 francs.’

Two police automobiles brought the order to the church square of Valtilieu in Isère at 4.30 on the afternoon of 1 August. Immediately the local bell-ringer summoned the population; the village teacher described the effect: ‘it seemed that suddenly the old feudal tocsin had returned to haunt us. Nobody spoke for a long while. Some were out of breath, others dumb with shock. Many still carried pitchforks in their hands. “What can it mean? What’s going to happen to us?” asked the women. Wives, children, husbands – all were overcome by anguish and emotion. The wives clung to the arms of their husbands. The children, seeing their mothers weeping, started to cry too.’ Most of the men resorted to the café, to discuss the practical issue of how the harvest was to be got in. The general mood was resolute.

Sergeant Paul Gourdant expressed dismay at leaving behind a bedridden wife and four children; he was distressed that the burden of caring for them would fall on his elderly parents. But religion provided a staff: ‘God gave me strength to put aside all my fears and anxieties and to think only of the defence of my country.’ Henri Perrin, who owned a little ironmongery in Vienne, hastened around the town settling debts, before painstakingly instructing his young wife about the shop’s management in his absence. Then the family fell on their knees and prayed together. The Perrins explained to their two small children that ‘Papa must go away for a while on business for the country.’ At thousands of railway stations, clusters of stoical, anxious or openly emotional relatives surrounded each man as he boarded the train. One shouted gaily, ‘All aboard for Berlin! And what fun we’ll have there!’ André Gide, a spectator, noted: ‘People smiled, but did not applaud.’ Some peasants treated the occasion as a holiday – these young men who had never experienced such an indulgence. A few fled to hide in the woods, but stern womenfolk drove most to report sheepishly to barracks.

Europe’s vast migration created a corresponding social upheaval. ‘So many men have left,’ reported a French regional newspaper, La Croix d’Isère, ‘that an atmosphere of sadness and doom pervades the small towns and villages of the Dauphiné.’ The rector of Grenoble Academy wrote: ‘all along the 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.