Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914. Max Hastings

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ