Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914. Max Hastings

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      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.

2 PASSIONS

      Some people responded with serenity to the new circumstance of European conflict. In Schneidemühl, Prussia, twelve-year-old Elfriede Kuhr asked her grandmother if Germany would win. ‘We have never lost a war in my lifetime,’ answered the old woman proudly, ‘so we won’t lose this one, either.’ Her granddaughter was bemused that this supposedly earth-shattering event made little immediate impact on daily life: ‘We eat white rolls and good meat and go for a walk as if nothing had happened.’ It is a myth that most of the belligerents expected a short war. Ignorant people, and even some informed ones, cherished such a delusion partly because economists, with their accustomed paucity of judgement, assured them that Europe would swiftly run out of money. But many thoughtful soldiers of every nation recognised that a general European conflict could be protracted.

      In Paris, Faust was still playing at the Opéra, and the press found space to report the death of a child run over by a milk float; a futurist conference continued its debate about the merits of excavating a tunnel under the Channel. But on 2 August the French capital declared a state of siege for the duration: the municipality surrendered to the military all public order responsibilities, with draconian powers of entry, and restriction on assemblies and entertainments. Three days later a law was passed ‘repressing indiscretions of the press in wartime’, forbidding publication of all military information save that authorised by the government or high command. Journalists were barred from entering combat zones. In the months that followed, Joffre, as army commander-in-chief, wielded the powers almost of a national dictator, provoking the envy of his German counterpart Moltke, shackled to the Kaiser. The doors of many Paris businesses bore signs declaring, with a mixture of regret and pride: ‘Maison fermé à cause du départ du patron et des employés sous le drapeau français.’ Cafés and bars now closed at 8 p.m., restaurants at 9.30 p.m. Cavalrymen bivouacked on the boulevards, tethering their horses to chestnut trees. By ten, the most vibrant city in Europe was almost silent.

      Germany’s parliament agreed on 5 August to fund a war loan of 5,000 million marks, supported by the Social Democrats, even though most of their members opposed the conflict. War had become an accomplished fact, and thus patriotism trumped former convictions, as it did also in Britain and France. Socialists, sensitive to conservative taunts that they were mere vaterlandslose Gesellen – ‘stateless folk’, felt compelled to rally beneath the flag. Moreover, fear and detestation of Russia were as passionate on the left as on the right. Most Germans sincerely believed that their country was encircled by enemies. The Münchner Neueste Nachrichten reflected bitterly on 7 August about the renewal of all-too-familiar foreign hostility, a ‘hatred against Germanness, this time coming from the east’. The semi-official Kölnische Zeitung declared: ‘Now that England has shown its hand, everyone can see what is at stake: the most powerful conspiracy in the history of the world.’

      The newspaper Neue Preußische Zeitung was the first to employ the word Burgfrieden to describe Germany’s new political truce. It derived from a medieval custom, forbidding private strife within the walls of an embattled castle. Now, Burgfrieden became once more a common currency. In the same spirit in France, on 4 August prime minister René Viviani coined a phrase that passed into the French language – l’union sacrée: ‘Dans la guerre qui s’engage, la France […] sera héroïquement défendue par tous ses fils, dont rien ne brisera devant l’ennemi l’union sacrée’ – ‘In the coming war, France will be heroically defended by all its sons, whose sacred union in the face of the enemy will be indissoluble.’ There was much press bellicosity. The clerical Croix d’Isère declared the struggle ‘la guerre purificatrice’, visited upon France as a punishment for its sins under the Third Republic. ‘That was the idea everywhere,’ wrote another contemporary, ‘that war would clear the air, make things pleasanter all around afterwards.’ The socialist paper Le Droit du peuple adopted a phrase: ‘the war for peace’.

      In Britain also, reconciliation became a prevailing theme. On 11 August the government welcomed the excuse to remit all suffragettes’ jail sentences. Among the famous Pankhurst family, Sylvia continued to plead for peace, but her sister Christabel and their mother Emmeline denounced ‘the German peril’. The executive of Britain’s Trades Union Congress declared that it identified the war with ‘the preservation and maintenance of free and unfettered democratic government’. More than a few people believed, as do some modern historians, that hostilities with Germany averted a violent collision between British workers, employers and the government.

      John Redmond, leader of the Irish Home Rulers, made a supremely enlightened conciliatory gesture when he declared in the House of Commons: ‘there are in Ireland two large bodies of Volunteers. One of them sprang into existence in the South. I say to the Government that they may tomorrow withdraw every one of their troops from Ireland. I say that the coasts of Ireland will be defended from foreign invasion by her sons, and for this purpose СКАЧАТЬ