Cat – dear – it is all up. Germany has quenched the last hope of peace by declaring war on Russia, & the declaration against France is momentarily expected … the world is gone mad…
Lord Haldane, deputising at the War Office for the Prime Minister, was described by John Buchan as displaying ‘uncanny placidity’; this was exactly what he had been preparing for. As Secretary of State for War from 1905 to 1912, Haldane had created the General Staff, the Territorial Force, the Special Reserve, the Officers’ Training Corps in schools and universities, and, in 1907, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). Britain was the only country in Europe that did not have conscription. Its small yet professional army had already been on ‘Precautionary Measures’ for a few days, with all regular soldiers recalled from leave.
The first shots were fired between French and Germans at Petit-Croix, near Belfort, on Sunday, 2 August. Imperial Germany declared war on France on the following day. This meant the Germans had campaigns on two fronts: east against Russia, west against France. Because the Germans knew that backward Russia would mobilise more slowly, seven of the eight German armies were dedicated to attacking France first. General von Moltke followed the plan of Count von Schlieffen for his main attack, which was to strike at the heart of France by encircling and seizing Paris. The best way to do this was to drive through the neutral kingdom of Belgium and then wheel most of his armed forces left, to the west of Paris. On 3 August, the Germans demanded free passage through Belgium’s territory. King Albert I and his government refused ‘to sacrifice the honour of their nation and betray their duty towards Europe’. Germany then declared war on Belgium.
Gunfire in Brussels acted as the starting pistol for the UK. The British government now requested an assurance from the German government that Belgium’s wishes be respected. Britain was a signatory to the 1839 Treaty of London that had guaranteed the independence and neutrality of Belgium, and a hostile power just over the Channel in Belgium directly threatened British interests and British shipping. To Bethmann-Hollweg, the German Imperial Chancellor, a treaty about Belgium was just ‘a scrap of paper’; but the British said that their word was binding.
‘The die is cast,’ pronounced The Times first leader on Monday, 3 August: ‘Europe is to be the scene of the most terrible war that she has witnessed since the fall of the Roman Empire.’ John Buchan thought that Bank Holiday Monday was ‘the strangest in the memory of man’:
An air of great and terrible things impending impressed the most casual visitor. Crowds hung about telegraph offices and railway stations; men stood in the street in little groups; there was not much talking but many spells of tense silence. The country was uneasy.
Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, put the case in Parliament and only five MPs voted against war in defence of Belgium. Among them was the dissenting aristocrat and peace campaigner Arthur Ponsonby. The opening chapter of his 1928 bestseller, Falsehood in War-Time, concerns what was not talked about in the parliamentary debate: the secret military arrangements that Britain had made with France in 1911 for seven divisions of the BEF to support the French left and for the Royal Navy to protect the French north coast in the event of a German attack. ‘This commitment was not known to the people; it was not known to Parliament; it was not even known to all the members of the Cabinet.’ Ponsonby argued that Sir Edward Grey’s statement was disingenuous. If these contingency plans had been made public, Imperial Germany might have hesitated instead of precipitately declaring war. For Ponsonby, it was ‘a deplorable subterfuge’ for Grey to insist that Parliament was free to decide.
‘What happens now?’ Churchill asked the Foreign Secretary as they left the chamber. ‘Now,’ replied Grey, ‘we shall send them an ultimatum.’ Grey and Asquith hand-wrote the demand to Imperial Germany between them on the Cabinet table in No. 10 Downing Street. Unless German troops withdrew from Belgium by midnight German time (11 p.m. GMT) on Tuesday, 4 August, Britain would declare war.
Five German armies violated Belgian neutrality around dawn on that day. Although the invasion force of a million men was one of the largest ever seen, Belgian soldiers and the Garde Civique started shooting back. It took eight German divisions finally to reduce Liège by 16 August. Panicky and sometimes drunk German soldiers were so angered by the brave Belgian resistance, so afraid of irregulars or guerrillas without uniforms known as francs-tireurs or free-shooters, and so upset by rumours that captured Germans were being mutilated, that they began burning buildings, using Belgian civilians as ‘human shields’, and bayoneting or shooting them out of hand.
In London, Lord Haldane gave the order to go to war at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, 4 August. The ‘War Book’ was opened. From the chaotic hive of the War Office buzzed out many terse telegrams: MOBILISE, signed Troopers. As this message cascaded from army to corps to division to battalion, all British army reservists were sent further individual telegrams ordering them to report back to their old regimental depots early the following day. Every soldier and staff-officer worth his salt wanted to be in the BEF and see some action before it was all over.
Many remembered the oddly festive mood at the outbreak of war, with patriotic mafficking and crowds singing ‘God Save the King’ outside Buckingham Palace. The society portrait painter Solomon J. Solomon, who had recently been in the Palace doing studies of the royal family for a huge painting for the Guildhall, was in a dull committee meeting of the Royal Academy in Burlington House, Piccadilly, late on the evening of 4 August. A dozen silver candelabra with lighted candles shone on the few council members round the table, under portraits by Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds. They discussed gallery closures and what to do now that the porters were being mobilised. ‘Towards the end of our meeting,’ Solomon recalled, ‘an eerie distant shouting was heard from a howling mass of presumably young people swaying up St James’s Street. It had been announced from Buckingham Palace that we were also to take up arms against Germany.’
In France, Philip Gibbs was chafing at the bit. The Daily Chronicle had sent him abroad as a war correspondent, but the French military authorities stopped him getting to the front. He went west to Nancy and saw French lancers trotting through dust and the horse teams pulling batteries of guns along tree-lined avenues. He watched the French infantry marching off towards the Alsace frontier, wearing kepis and bright horizon-blue coats and baggy red trousers, led by their officers with swords and white gloves. Foch’s staff ordered him back to Paris. Gibbs was not allowed to see the French army being blown away by German howitzers, nor their conspicuous uniforms riddled by machine-gun bullets.
The previous Monday, a grim Lord Kitchener had been on the return journey to Egypt when he was called back to London. ‘Lord Kitchener was more than a national hero,’ wrote Violet Bonham Carter, Asquith’s daughter. ‘He was a national institution.’ Herbert Horatio Kitchener was the general who industrialised British imperial warfare. He was summoned to No. 10 for a Council of War on the Wednesday. His view was that the war would not be won by sea-power alone, but by great battles on the Continent. It would last three years, and take manpower in the millions. Prime Minister Asquith asked him to take on the job of Secretary of State for War. Three days later Kitchener made his first appeal for men to join his ‘New Armies’. Up went vast posters in places like Trafalgar Square, emblazoned with his moustached face and pointing finger: ‘Your Country Needs YOU.’
On Thursday, 6 August 1914, the British Cabinet agreed to send the 100,000 men of the BEF, with Field Marshal Sir John French as commander-in-chief, to the Franco–Belgian border to support the left of the eight French armies, and to face the advancing German right. Protected by the Royal Navy’s warships and wireless-fitted aircraft, packed troopships sailed from Southampton to Rouen and Boulogne over the weekend of 8–9 August. Most of the BEF was safely in position in northern France and southern Belgium by the 20th.
They went with no publicity and no press coverage, because, under Kitchener, British censorship became total. The
Committee of Imperial Defence drafted the first Defence of the Realm Act (DoRA) giving the government extra coercive and censorship powers (‘to prevent persons communicating with the enemy or obtaining information for that purpose’). It became law on 8 August 1914 and was extended or ‘consolidated’, as the term was, several times during the war. New standing orders forbade servicemen ‘to give any military information to press correspondents, military attachés or civilians’.
This news blackout enabled the BEF to move in secrecy without German intelligence also reading about it in the newspapers, but Philip Gibbs recalled how the draconian censorship ‘throttled’ journalism at a stroke: he was actually on the telephone from Paris to the London office when the line was cut off in mid-sentence. Staff journalists now lived the lives of desperate harried freelances, without accreditation or support, ingeniously improvising ways to get their dispatches through, while trying to evade arrest by both French and British military authorities.
Out in the field, Gibbs palled up with two other correspondents, W. T. Massey, whom he called ‘the Strategist’, and H. M. Tomlinson, nicknamed ‘the Philosopher’. In the first two months of the war, these three covered thousands of miles in France and Belgium by train, bus, taxi, and on foot, grasping at straws, or contemplating defeat:
Yet we went on, mixed up always in refugee rushes, in masses of troops moving forward to the front or backwards in retreat, getting brief glimpses of the real happenings behind the screen of secrecy.
Philip Gibbs, The Soul of the War (1915)
Sometimes the reporters had to carry their own copy back to Fleet Street, staying a few hours before crossing the Channel again to France. They wore civilian clothes, had no military passports, and carried bags of money to hire cars at exorbitant prices, to live in hotels and to bribe doorkeepers in the ante-chambers of war. They were still threatened with being shot as traitors. ‘Many [journalists] were arrested, put into prison, let out, caught again in forbidden places, re-arrested and expelled from France.’ Gibbs was himself arrested five times.
The forward thrust of the German forces caused the Belgian, French and British armies to retreat in the first four weeks. German brutalities panicked thousands of civilians into becoming refugees on the roads, or fighting their way on to trains. H. R. Knickerbocker commented:
Whenever you find hundreds and thousands of sane people trying to get out of a place and a little bunch of madmen trying to get in, you know the latter are reporters.
But the journalists did good work. Lloyd George says in his War Memoirs that Kitchener’s military briefings were terse almost to the point of unintelligibility, so the first clear news the British Cabinet itself got about the desperate fighting retreat of the British army was from Arthur Moore’s report in a special Sunday edition of The Times on 30 August ‘that had escaped the censor’. The contagion of fear from the war zone was palpable. ‘The shadow of its looming terror crept across the fields of France,’ wrote Gibbs in 1914, ‘though they lay golden in the sunlight of the harvest month.’
In contrast the Germans wanted both their own and foreign newspapers to trumpet their awesome advance. When the veteran American war correspondent Richard Harding Davis witnessed the German army marching unopposed into Brussels on 20 August 1914, he noticed the disconcerting power of their uniforms to deceive and disguise. Feldgrau (‘field grey’) ‘held the mystery and menace of fog rolling toward you across the sea’:
All moved under a cloak of invisibility. Only after the most numerous and severe tests at all distances, with all materials and combinations of colors that give forth no color, could this gray have been discovered …
After you have seen this service uniform … you are convinced that for the German soldier it is his strongest weapon. Even the most expert marksman cannot hit a target he cannot see … It is the gray of the hour just before daybreak, the gray of unpolished steel … Like a river of steel it flowed, gray and ghostlike.
The News Chronicle, London, 23 August 1914
Nothing galvanises the British quite like being despised by Germans. A canny staff officer at British GHQ put the British Expeditionary Force on their mettle by telling them (untruthfully) that Kaiser Wilhelm II had called them ‘General French’s contemptible little army’. The title ‘Old Contemptible’ became a badge of honour.
My mother’s father, Geoffrey Page, was in that BEF and went off to France with them in August 1914. Second Lieutenant Page, son of the vicar of Mountfield in Sussex and not long out of Sandhurst, was proud, at the age of 20, to be leading fifty or so men of No. 3 platoon, A company, 2nd Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers. When he disembarked in France in 1914 it was his first time abroad and he had never heard a shot fired in anger. For a modern reader, two themes emerge from the diary that he should not have kept: the shock of the new, powerful technologies of twentieth-century warfare – aeroplanes, artillery and machine guns – and the men’s need to find shelter from them.
Early on the morning of 26 August, his platoon had barely scraped lying-down trenches in the stubble and stooks of a wheat field north of Longsart Farm near Esnes when German shrapnel broke over their heads, and machine-gun bullets began chopping up their parapets of dirt and straw. His platoon made their stand at the extreme left of the five-mile British line at the Battle of Le Cateau, from which only nine escaped. In the continuing retreat from Mons to the Marne, Geoffrey Page’s diary shows an obsession with spies, because being seen and spotted brings down violent retribution.
John Buchan’s fiction caught the zeitgeist of 1914, the spy mania and invasion paranoia that marked the start of the Great War, especially along the North Sea coastline between Cromer and Dover. About 120 miles away from the gunfire of Le Cateau, across the English Channel in the seaside town of Broadstairs in Kent, Wednesday, 26 August 1914 was also Buchan’s thirty-ninth birthday. He was recuperating from an attack of duodenal ulcers and writing a fast-paced yarn about the secret forces and hidden hands behind political events, a book which incorporated his own age into its title, The Thirty-Nine Steps.
John Buchan had entered Who’s Who as an undergraduate at Oxford, been an elite administrator in South Africa, written short stories, essays, poems, history and biography, deputy-edited The Spectator, and was now the prospective Unionist candidate for the Parliamentary seat of Peeblesshire and Selkirk. Since 1907 he had also been the literary adviser to the Scottish publishing house of Thomas Nelson and Sons. To keep the presses running, he had agreed to edit and write a weekly illustrated magazine called The War (which folded after six months) as well as almost single-handedly researching and writing a monthly partwork, Nelson’s History of the War, more than a million words of contemporaneous narrative history which ended up as twenty-four red volumes. Buchan (who gave all his profits and royalties from it to war charities) compared himself to Thucydides writing the History of the Peloponnesian War in which he himself was taking part.
In this new thriller, his eighteenth book, the real Broadstairs was transmogrified into ‘Bradgate’ for the dramatic climax. Further up the east coast of England, genteel Frinton-on-Sea in Essex was also in a state of high excitement in early August 1914 when a 15-year-old public-schoolboy called Dudley Wrangel Clarke came back home from the Charterhouse Officer Training Corps summer camp in Staffordshire. Already determined to become a professional soldier, he had not yet developed the talents he would later show as the genius of British deception in WW2. For now the boy was delighted to see soldiers digging up the front for defences and naval destroyers aggressively patrolling the sea, in face of a supposed ‘threatened hostile landing’ in East Anglia. Further north, Great Yarmouth was full of journalists eager to scoop the story of barges imminently expected from the Frisian Islands, packed with pointy-helmeted Huns, grinding on to British summer holiday beaches.
The Royal Academician Solomon J. Solomon, author of The Practice of Oil Painting and Drawing, and a still vigorous and enthusiastic man in his fifties, was spending the summer on the outski
rts of St Albans in Hertfordshire. The war fever of that hot August prompted him to consider how art and painting could help hide things from the eyes of enemy Zeppelins in the skies. In his mother-in-law’s large garden Solomon began furiously experimenting. He used paints and dyes he had bought as well as mud-pies and crushed leaves, staining sheets of butter muslin that he dried on the lawn and the tennis net. Then he hung the results between plants and shrubs or draped them over bamboo canes by trees and hedges, looking down from upstairs at their colours and shadows as the light slowly changed.
In September 1914 Winston Churchill was caught up in his own espionage drama in north-west Scotland. In ‘My Spy-Story’, published in Thoughts and Adventures in 1932, Churchill relates how he went north by special train to the Highlands and was travelling west by car to visit the fleet when the flotilla commodore, who was in the back with the director of Naval Intelligence, pointed out a large searchlight mounted on the turreted roof of a Scottish baronial castle in a deer-forest near Achnasheen. As the car sped on into Wester Ross, they all tried to puzzle out what the device might actually be used for.
At last the road went winding downwards round a purple hill, and before us far below there gleamed a bay of blue water in which rode at anchor, outlined in miniature as in a plan, the twenty Dreadnoughts and Super-Dreadnoughts on which the command of the seas depended. Around them and darting about between them were many scores of small craft. The vessels themselves were painted for the first time in the queer mottled fashion which marked the early beginnings of the science of Camouflage. The whole scene bursting thus suddenly upon the eye and with all its immense significance filling the mind, was one which I shall never forget …*
Churchill's Wizards Page 2