Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914. Max Hastings

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СКАЧАТЬ wireless messages; the British ambassador heard a rumour that the man was summarily shot, which he disbelieved, but wrote resignedly that he expected ‘there will be a good many tueries’. A letter was published in The Times alerting readers to the peril posed to national security by prominent British residents of Teutonic origin: ‘During the last quarter of a century, numbers of highly-placed aliens, some naturalized, some not, who are known to be in close communication with German and financial circles, have bought their way into British society.’ The writer urged telephone taps and a close watch on such ‘highly-placed sympathizers’, and ended with a dark warning: ‘I do not wish to be an alarmist, but I know what I am writing about.’ This nasty missive was signed only ‘S’.

      In Berlin the famous Danish-born actress Asta Nielsen was walking down the Unter den Linden when she suddenly and incomprehensibly found herself denounced: ‘my hat was thrown down so that my black hair appeared. “A Russian,” I heard someone yell behind me, and a hand grabbed my hair. I yelled, full of fear and pain. In front of me a man turned around and recognised me. He yelled my name to the excited people behind me; they let me go and began to curse each other. One of them started flailing his arms as if he was crazy, and hit one of the others in the face. Blood flowed. “You cannot stay here,” my saviour said. “The people have completely lost their senses. They no longer know what they are doing.”’

      Everywhere there was an insatiable hunger for information. Newspapers were torn from vendors whenever a new edition arrived, and café patrons addressed themselves to complete strangers. Rumour ran wild. In St Petersburg, it was said that Emperor Franz Joseph was dead. Austrian soldiers in Mostar heard that revolution had broken out in France, where the president of the republic had been assassinated. Wiseacres on the terraces of Nice predicted that hunger would force Germany to quit the war within weeks. A local resident wrote on 5 August: ‘There is no authentic war news – either by land or by sea: all that appears in the papers is invention.’ In Germany that week the Hannoverscher Courier delivered a vituperative denunciation: ‘Animals! … Yesterday a French surgeon and two disguised French officers attempted to poison fountains with cholera bacilli. They were court-martialled and shot.’ It was also alleged that mobs of Belgians were murdering German civilians: Moltke’s soldiers claimed to have captured a Belgian with his pockets full of German fingers, severed for their rings.

      Russians drifted towards local railway stations, where news was likely to come first: papers from Moscow took days to reach remote areas, and contained little of substance when they did so. Country-dwellers wandered out onto highways and quizzed travellers for scraps of intelligence: ‘one was delighted to encounter a simple Cossack’, wrote Sergei Kondurashkin in the Caucasus, ‘and listen greedily to his naïve words, waiting patiently while the millstones of his memory ground slowly into motion’. When two days’ newspapers belatedly arrived, the Kondurashkin family and friends crowded onto the verandah of their holiday dacha twenty strong, aged from eight to sixty, and including children, students, clerks, professors, doctors. One of their number was voted the clearest speaker, and nominated to read the paper aloud to the rest, a Chekhovian moment. He then rehearsed the bleak budget of tidings – declarations of war; German incursions into Poland and Russian moves into East Prussia; the arrival in Warsaw of the first PoWs.

      There was intense, almost uniformly ill-founded speculation about what the conflict would be like. German pundits offered especially optimistic predictions: a writer in the Braunschweigische Anzeigen declared that modern weapons and tactics would diminish fatalities: ‘To be sure, some clashes may be notably severe, but it is certain that overall losses will decrease. The vast hordes of men now being mobilised do not face experiences as violent as many people imagine. Battle will be no slaughter’ – ‘Die Schlacht wird kein Schlachten’. There was intense British concern about a supposed German invasion threat, which prompted many civilians to enlist in local rifle clubs. People gaped in wonder at the sight of anti-aircraft guns being mounted on Admiralty Arch and London’s bridges; the navy urged the War Office to deploy some planes in Hyde Park.

      Such fears were mirrored across the North Sea. Anna Treplin, living in the German port of Cuxhaven, was alarmed by the prospect of British warships shelling the harbour, and with it the seaside home she and her three children occupied. Just as pre-war British readers had been excited by Erskine Childers’ thriller about the German menace, The Riddle of the Sands, so many Germans had read the mirror-image shocker entitled 1906. This 1905 work by the pseudonymous author ‘Seestern’ – a journalist named Ferdinand Grauthoff – anticipated an Anglo-French naval assault on Cuxhaven, and a gunnery duel between allied warships and coastal fortresses. Frau Treplin decamped to Hamburg with her nerves and her offspring.

      The legend that Europe welcomed the conflict is today heavily qualified, if not discredited. Rural communities of all nationalities were stunned and profoundly dismayed; most of those who cheered in the streets were the urban young, without responsibilities. Thoughtful people were appalled. Michel Corday, a French senior civil servant, wrote: ‘Every thought and event caused by the outbreak of war came as a bitter and mortal blow struck against the great conviction that was in my heart: the concept of permanent progress, of movement towards ever greater happiness. I had never believed that something like this could happen.’

      But some romantics and nationalists enthused, like the Austrian woman Itha J, who wrote lyrically about ‘the grandeur of the times … the superb spectacle of the world bursting into flames’. Even as she sobbed at the station on 2 August, bidding farewell to her husband, a lieutenant, she rhapsodised about ‘this wonderful young [generation], who depart to face battle and death with laughter and cheering. Nobody shivers, nobody sobs – isn’t such an army ordained to gain victory?’ Germany experienced the most conspicuous surge of euphoria, influenced by the remembered glories of victory over France in 1870. Its Red Cross had to urge people to give soldiers less chocolate, because it was making them sick. On 2 August a journalist on the Tägliche Rundschau wrote: ‘what Germany has experienced in recent days has been a miraculous self-renewal, in which everything petty and alien has been shed; it has represented a supremely powerful recognition of our true self’.

      At the Reichstag session of 4 August, Bethmann Hollweg asserted that the date would live for eternity as one of Germany’s greatest. Falkenhayn told the chancellor: ‘Even if we go under as a result of this, it was beautiful,’ and many of his compatriots agreed. On 14 August Bethmann’s secretary Riezler exulted: ‘war, war, the Volk has arisen – it is as if there were nothing there before and now suddenly it is powerful and moving … on the surface the greatest confusion and yet the most meaningful order; by now millions have already crossed the Rhine’. A young girl, Gertrud Bäumer, wrote with a mawkish sentimentality typical of the moment in Germany that war increased the store of love in the world, ‘for it taught one to love one’s neighbour more than oneself’.

      In Britain, by contrast, while Norman Macleod at the Admiralty acknowledged a ‘feeling of confidence in Navy & Army & determination to set about the great business as well as possible’, he added, ‘there is certainly no martial ardour. Of course men are enlisting and volunteering fast enough and everybody has become a military and naval expert, but there is an absence of that joy in fighting – glory of battle – which was so marked at beginning of the Boer War and shortly before it – Kiplingism quite forgotten – the horrors of war are not for a moment lost sight of.’ The Economist asserted the grave significance of unfolding events, and their implications for civilisation: ‘Since last week millions of men have been drawn from the field and the factory to slay one another by order of the warlords of Europe. It is perhaps the greatest tragedy of human history … In the opinion of many shrewd judges, a social upheaval, a tremendous revolution, is the certain consequence. It may perhaps be the last time that the working classes of the Continent will allow themselves to be marched to destruction at the dictates of diplomacy and by the order of their warlords.’ The magazine expressed doubts about how Britain’s disaffected working class and alienated Irish subjects would respond to the advent of war. ‘It has been freely stated,’ declared one of its correspondents, СКАЧАТЬ