Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (27 page)

German Paul Hub, a twenty-four-year-old from Stetten, a village near Stuttgart, volunteered after getting engaged to his twenty-one-year-old girlfriend Maria. He departed for the front on 4 August, writing to his parents: ‘Please keep my washing a little longer, until I ask you for it. Unpack my clothes in the meantime … Maria’s letters are in the engagement case, together with my watchchains and other keepsakes that remind me of the happy times I’ve had with her. Please look after them. I hope I’ll be coming back.’ Like many others, Hub was to be disappointed.

The conflict created some remarkable new allegiances. In the last days of July 1914, British novelist and civil servant Erskine Childers committed high treason. He sailed his yacht
Asgard
into the Irish harbour of Howth,
delivering to militant nationalists a cargo of rifles smuggled from Germany. Yet a month later, the forty-four-year-old Childers was recruited by the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill – who was ignorant of the
Asgard
’s adventures – to become a naval reserve officer and advise on Germany’s North Sea coast. Childers had cruised for years in the Friesian Islands before he wrote his 1903 thriller
The Riddle of the Sands
, the plot of which centred on a German invasion conspiracy against Britain. Now, the author drafted a memorandum for the Admiralty proposing seizure of Borkum and Juist islands as springboards for an amphibious assault on Germany: ‘The plan of invasion up the Ems valley … seems to present the best opportunity of ending the war by a decisive stroke,’ he wrote. He concluded: ‘The writer ventures to hope that he may have the honour of being employed, if the service permits, whether in aeroplane work or in any other capacity, if any of the operations sketched in this memorandum are undertaken.’

On 20 August Childers was taken aboard the seaplane carrier HMS
Engadine
, accepted as an intelligence officer, where his Irish comrades might have been surprised to discover him two days later saluting Admiral Sir John Jellicoe and shaking hands with Winston Churchill on their visit to the ship. He wrote: ‘The atmosphere on board is one of cheerful optimism. It would be ridiculous, though more accurate perhaps, to call it pessimism – so sanguine and jovial is the anticipation of a certain doom in our gimcrack pleasure boat with its popguns and delicate, butterfly planes. But indeed no human being can forecast our destiny because the whole enterprise is new in war: an incalculable experiment.’ Childers was one of a limited number of men of all nationalities enthralled by the notion of playing a part in the twentieth century’s first great conflict, which engaged its most exhilarating new machines, magic carpets to the skies.

3 DEPARTURES

With the exception of Churchill and Haldane, the members of the British cabinet lacked the smallest understanding of military affairs, and knew it. Indeed, in that era politicians of all nationalities expected to leave strategy and military science exclusively in the hands of their soldiers, an abrogation they would lament before they were much older. Asquith would like to have reappointed Haldane, architect of radical and brilliant army reforms in the previous decade, as secretary of state for war. He felt unable to do so, however, because the Lord Chancellor was the victim of a vicious
press campaign led by
The Times
, which damned him as a ‘pro-German’. The appointment was given instead to ‘K of K’ – Field-Marshal Earl Kitchener of Khartoum, Britain’s foremost soldier. This was hugely popular with the public, and the new minister possessed unusual qualifications: partly brought up in Switzerland, he spoke fluent French. In 1870 he had briefly served in a French field-ambulance unit, an adventure cut short when he contracted pneumonia after making a balloon ascent to view the Army of the Loire.

But the grim, austere, taciturn Kitchener also had notable limitations. He was not merely unpolitical, he deplored politicians. Lloyd George wrote of his ‘loud staccato voice’ in cabinet meetings, and of ‘that remote look in his eyes, directed at no one in particular, which was a sure indication of his unease amid surroundings with which he was not familiar. He was sitting in council with men belonging to the profession with which he had wrestled all his life, and for which, in his heart, he had the usual mixture of military contempt and apprehension.’

Kitchener was a loner, unaccustomed to consult with or confide in others, and he did not change his ways at the War Office. He had always thought poorly of France’s forces, telling Lloyd George in 1911 that, in the event of war, the Germans would ‘walk through them like partridges’. He was nonetheless an able soldier, whose great contribution in 1914 was to insist that Britain must plan for a long war. He found himself struggling, almost single-handed, to transform a force of imperial skirmishers into a host fit for continental war. The regulars, reserves, Territorials and a ragtag of militias provided Britain with 733,514 more or less trained men scattered around the world. Everyone recognised that much bigger numbers would be needed, but unfortunately Kitchener bungled the expansion programme. The obvious course would have been to build on the existing Territorial Force framework, but the new secretary for war despised the ‘Terriers’. He decided to ignore them and create a ‘New Army’, whose officers and men would alike be novices. The chaos which followed, and the tribulations which hundreds of thousands of eager young recruits suffered between August 1914 and their immolation in France the following year, make a sorry story.

One among many August volunteers was Robert Cude, a twenty-one-year-old factory worker from South London. He first tried to join the navy, and was sent to Devonport for a trade test, which he failed because of ‘my inability to stomach orders’. With three mates from his factory, he promptly joined the East Kent Regiment. They arrived at its Canterbury depot to find
no food and no quarters, and were obliged to doss down on the barrack square. They were then moved to a camp at Purfleet, where each tent bulged with twenty-two occupants. ‘What a cosmopolitan crew we are!’ wrote Cude. ‘All manner of wearing apparel … Parades every few minutes. Am sick of this playing at soldiers. Dinner comes up. Menu: “Warm water with pieces of a substance which was termed meat floating on top”.’ When Cude and his comrades were given three days’ leave while the authorities worked out how to handle them, one man in five never came back.

Many volunteers were rejected. The writer Jerome K. Jerome, author of the immortal Edwardian romp
Three Men in a Boat
, became an ambulance driver with the French after being denied a King’s uniform – unsurprisingly, since he was fifty-five. An advertisement for potential officers placed by one regiment asserted without embarrassment that ‘preference will be given to public school men of good appearance and address’, but even some such applicants were refused.
The Times
published a letter from joint signatories who called themselves ‘Eight Unattached’. The writers expressed disgust at having been rejected for commissions as too old at thirty-plus, though ‘absolutely fit and game for active service’. They proposed instead to join the ranks, but wished to do so with others of similar social background: ‘all public school men of similar age and qualifications are invited to attend an informal meeting at the address below – 59a Brook Street W – to discuss the formation of a “Legion of Marksmen”.’ Here was the spirit that bred ‘pals’ battalions, which later suffered appallingly in France.

Some patriots decided that if insufficient young men were volunteering for military service, women could ‘do their bit’ by shaming them into doing so. Bernard Hamley was playing golf with a friend on Wimbledon Common, and just congratulating himself on a fine tee shot, when two girls came out of the nearby clubhouse. One said sharply, ‘That was a good shot, wasn’t it? I hope you will be making as good a shot against the Germans,’ before presenting both players with white feathers. The men then identified themselves as officers in the 1st London Rifle Brigade, granted a few hours’ leave of absence. ‘The young females were somewhat crestfallen and made some inadequate excuses.’

Stephen Lang told a woman who gave him a feather in Camden High Street that he was only seventeen, and anyway worked on the railways – a ‘reserved occupation’. The young woman said crossly, ‘Heard that one before,’ and pushed the feather up his nose. A recruiting sergeant to whom Lang gave the same explanation said, ‘Nineteen? That’s a good age.’

‘But I’m only seventeen – born in 1898.’

‘1896 – that’s fine. The war’s the only thing this bastard’s fit for’ – and enrolled him.

Some women were eager to put themselves in harm’s way, but found it hard to identify a role. Gladys Winterbottom was an exception. Her husband Archie was a subaltern with the 5th Dragoons. Impatient with the notion that there could be no place on a battlefield for wives and mothers, she packed her children off to the country and offered herself and the Winterbottom motor car to the Cavalry Division at Aldershot. Maj. Gen. Edmund Allenby, its commander, familiarly known to his staff as ‘the Bull’, found time to sign a testimonial for her on 14 August: ‘This is to certify that I have been driven in motor cars by Mrs A. Winterbottom. I know her to be a thoroughly efficient driver, and I confidently recommend her for employment.’ When the army nonetheless proved unwilling to employ her in the theatre of war, she became an ambulance driver with a British volunteer unit that joined the Belgians, and within weeks was serving under fire.

The allies, as they began to deploy, were fortified by knowledge that they enjoyed a comfortable paper superiority over their enemies. The combined Russian, French, British and Belgian populations of 279 million people were pitted against the Central Powers’ 120 millions; their armies mobilised 199 infantry divisions against 137, fifty cavalry formations against twenty-two. More than half this military strength was Russian, and it was thus that people fantasised enthusiastically about the appearance of some portion of the Tsarist host on west European battlefields.

Dispositions had been settled long before. The Germans dispatched seven armies westwards, to implement Moltke’s variant of the Schlieffen concept, a vast envelopment of the French army designed to achieve its swift destruction. The Austrians sent almost half their soldiers to invade Serbia, the rest to confront the Russians in Galicia, where Russian Poland bordered the Hapsburg Empire. The Serbs prepared to defend their western frontiers against the Austrians. The Russians committed two armies to invade East Prussia, and four more to fight the Austrians. France began to implement Plan XVII; until 6 August, French troops were forbidden to enter Belgium or French aircraft to overfly it, to ensure that the Germans bore indisputable responsibility for breaching the country’s neutrality.

Only Britain dithered about how to commence military operations, just as it had hesitated about whether to fight at all. The cabinet appointed a War Council, which met for the first time at Downing Street, under Asquith’s chairmanship, at 4 p.m. on 5 August. Its immediate dilemma was to decide whether to dispatch the nation’s little army across the Channel. Though Grey and such soldiers as Henry Wilson always intended this to happen, and had promised the French that it would, some important people remained strongly hostile. They believed that the country could, and should, fight an exclusively naval campaign. Much of Britain’s pre-war planning for a continental struggle had focused on waging economic war upon Germany through blockade, but these schemes atrophied, partly because of Foreign Office unwillingness to upset neutrals – and a desire to sustain British trade. Fear of precipitating a disastrous global financial collapse, such as already loomed, was another critical incentive for caution. Moreover, amid a crisis in which the fate of Europe seemed likely to be settled in weeks, there was little interest in a blockade which must take many months to achieve an impact. There were serious proponents of a scheme to exploit the Royal Navy’s command of the sea by putting ashore a landing force on Germany’s Baltic coast, thus opening a second front.

Lord Northcliffe, the most powerful newspaper magnate in Europe, owner of
The Times
and the
Daily Mail
, was at first vehemently opposed to any continental commitment. ‘What is this I hear about a British Expeditionary Force for France?’ he cried to his senior executives. ‘It is nonsense. Not a single soldier shall leave this country. We have a superb Fleet, which shall give all the assistance in its power, but I will not support the sending out of this country of a single British soldier. What about invasion? What about our own country? Not a single soldier will go with my consent. Say so in the paper tomorrow.’ Yet this was a rare moment when the press lord’s assembled editors persuaded him to change his mind: Northcliffe’s newspapers endorsed dispatch of a BEF.

At the War Council meeting of 5 August, some outlandish suggestions were made. Field-Marshal Sir John French profoundly mistrusted Britain’s allies. He hankered after conducting a private British war, as far removed as possible from any activities in which the French army might choose to engage. At Downing Street, he proposed taking up positions around Antwerp. Lt. Gen. Sir Douglas Haig, who would command a corps, wrote following the meeting: ‘I trembled at the reckless way Sir J. French spoke about “the advantages” of the BEF operating from Antwerp against the powerful and still intact German army!’ Haig, who would eventually become the most famous – or notorious – British general of the war, voiced prudent fears about the risk of defeat in detail ‘if we separated from the French at the outset of the campaign’, and expressed agreement with Kitchener that the war would not be short.