Ring of Steel
Page 10
The ultimatum issued by Austria-Hungary to Serbia had not been viewed favourably in the SPD. The Hamburger Echo, one of the local party newspapers, spoke for most German Socialists when it observed that the Habsburg note looked ‘very similar to an intentional provocation for war’.56 Unlike Socialists in Austria, where the immediate partial mobilization and imposition of emergency laws ruled out organized opposition, the SPD did have a little time to react. On 25 July the party’s executive committee appealed for mass meetings ‘to express the unshakeable desire for peace of the class-conscious proletariat’.57 The German government permitted these to go ahead, on condition that they were held in closed rooms, not on the streets. The response was impressive. In Berlin alone, thirty-two meetings were held, with over 100,000 attendees. Across the Reich, at least 288 anti-war gatherings took place in 163 towns and cities, mostly between 28 and 30 July. Three-quarters of a million Germans participated. The Socialist press wrote of halls so full that crowds were left standing outside, unable to enter. In a few places after the meetings, the ban on street protests was disregarded, and spontaneous marches began into city centres. In Berlin on the evening of 28 July, between 1,000 and 2,000 anti-war demonstrators made their way to Unter den Linden and confronted patriots in a ‘singing war’. The workers’ ‘Marseillaise’ briefly drowned out ‘The Watch on the Rhine’ before they were dispersed by mounted police. Stuttgart and Düsseldorf saw particularly violent clashes with security services. Generally, however, the meetings were quiet, even subdued. The SPD’s principal hope was that Germany’s leaders could still restrain their warmongering Habsburg ally. Speakers rarely criticized the government. No advice was proffered to listeners on how to resist if hostilities did break out; the party itself had no plan for protests or strikes. Some on the right of the party, such as Mannheim’s Reichstag deputy Ludwig Frank, told their audiences that if it did come to war, they would have to fight.58
The countryside, where around a third of Germans, over half of Austrians and three-fifths of Hungarians were employed in agriculture, saw less public drama than the cities in the last week of July.59 There were no crowds here, no marchers, no patriotic songs or anti-war speeches. It was harvest time and people were busy. In some remote and poorly connected parts of the Habsburg Empire, there was even surprise at the mobilization. In Tyrol, far from Serbia and Russia, villagers working in the fields were sometimes astonished when summoned by church bells. They rushed back expecting a fire, and instead were dismayed to be told of mobilization.60 Such parochialism was probably exceptional, however. There had, after all, been high tension across the Empire in the weeks following Franz Ferdinand’s death. What was common to the rural communities of this diverse land was the despair and fear felt at news that their men and horses would be called up for war. When a trumpeter shattered the peace of the Sabbath in Zabłotów, an east Galician shtetl of 4,775 souls that was the childhood home of Manès Sperber, the news that he brought was generally considered disastrous. Some young men were gung-ho, but the women wept and rushed to the community cemetery, where, Sperber remembered, they ‘begged the dead for help, asking them to intercede with the Almighty’.61 The reaction was hardly better hundreds of kilometres to the west in Austrian Silesian Jabłonków, a market town of just under 4,000 people, mostly Polish but with a German minority and a smattering of Czechs and Jews. As Father Dominik Ściskała, one of the town’s Catholic priests, recorded vividly in his diary:
For us in Jabłonków, the first visible sign of the serious situation was news of the announcement of general mobilization, put up in the window of the post office at 3.30 p.m. on 31 July. The marketplace immediately teemed with people. Groups formed, animatedly discussing the significance of the moment. Men predominated. Everyone realized that the situation was dangerous. All were seized by a strange fear of the unknown, great and threatening. Enthusiasm, which newspapers from a few towns are reporting, was not and is not present here.62
In Germany, most of the rural population was similarly depressed and frightened. There, as in the towns, the anxiety had begun with the issuing of the Habsburg ultimatum on 23 July and climbed in the subsequent week. Ruth Höfner, from the village of Sakrau in Upper Silesia, recalled how during the last days of July, ‘great disquiet ruled, the people stood in the street and didn’t want to work’.63 The signs that war was imminent multiplied rapidly from 31 July, as first the ‘State of Imminent War’ was proclaimed and then, a few hours later at 4 p.m., the ‘State of Siege’ regime was imposed, which enabled the suspension of constitutional rights and permitted the military to issue orders to local civilian administrations. The announcement of mobilization, issued at 5 p.m. on the following day and reaching most rural communities that same evening, was seen as a catastrophe. Karol Małłek, a farmhand from the Masurian village of Brodowen, described how ‘everybody cried and wailed’.64 That the coming of war should cause particular upset in communities like Sakrau and Brodowen, both close to the Russian frontier, should come as no surprise. Both Höfner and Małłek fled their homes; Höfner had left, with her weeping mother, in an overcrowded train early on the morning of 31 July. Yet reactions to mobilization were not much less anxious in relatively safe regions. ‘Hearts were filled with dismay and horror,’ wrote one policeman in Ering, a village situated well out of harm’s way in the south of Bavaria. ‘All merrymaking was ended at a stroke. People spoke from this time only about the war and about how now to organize domestic and family matters.’65
While the coming of a European conflagration was seen almost universally as a catastrophe, with few exceptions the German and Austro-Hungarian peoples, like those within the Triple Entente, did not regard it as the fault of their own governments. Emperor Franz Joseph, in his appeal ‘To my People’, explained the war with Serbia in fundamentally defensive terms: ‘After long years of peace, the intrigues of a hate-filled opponent force me, for the preservation of my Monarchy’s honour, in defence of its reputation and political power, and in order to secure its rights, to grasp for the sword.’ The old Emperor reminded his subjects that it had taken far more than one murdered archduke to provoke this war. ‘A criminal activity reaches across the border to undermine the foundations of public order in the south-east of the Monarchy,’ he warned them. The Serbs had long sought ‘to shake the people . . . in its loyalty to dynasty and Fatherland, to mislead the rising generation of youth and to incite wicked acts of madness and high treason’. Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, a result of a ‘methodically prepared and executed conspiracy’, was only the latest ‘visible bloody trace of those secret intrigues’. The time had now come for action. Austria-Hungary’s ‘moderate and just demands’ had been rejected by the Serbian government. ‘Thus,’ explained Franz Joseph, ‘I must intervene to win through force of arms the guarantees that are essential to secure for my states internal tranquillity and a lasting external peace.’66
Awkward debate about whether Serbia’s response to the Habsburg ultimatum had in fact been sufficient to make war unnecessary was avoided by delaying the text’s publication. It appeared in newspapers only on Tuesday, 28 July, the day of the Monarchy’s declaration of hostilities.67 For good measure, fabricated news of a Serb attack on Habsburg forces a day earlier at Temes Kubin was also publicized, although contrary to what is sometimes assumed, this was never a central plank in the Austro-Hungarian justification for war; Minister President Tisza publicly dismissed it on the day that it was supposed to have taken place as ‘an incident of no significance at all’.68 There was very little time for people to question the only partially justified official interpretation of events, as already on 28 July reservists began hurrying to their units. The partial mobilization against Serbia, designed to raise two-fifths of Habsburg military strength for an invasion, embraced corps based in Bohemia, Dalmatia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and parts of Hungary including Budapest.69
For other Austro-Hungarians and for the German public, the focus now shifted to Russia. The governments and bourgeois
press of both Central Powers stressed the desire for ‘localization’. Whether war would spread across Europe, people were told, ‘depends on decisions in St Petersburg’.70 Reich Germans’ accounts testify to the overwhelming stress felt during the second half of the week as reports of Tsarist military preparations mounted. These were, as one Berlin student later put it, ‘tense days, the worst that I experienced’.71 On Thursday, 30 July, Germans awoke to news of Russian partial mobilization against Austria-Hungary. In the early afternoon, there was a scare when one of the capital’s newspapers, the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, keen to get a scoop, erroneously announced German general mobilization. The report was rapidly withdrawn but other unsubstantiated rumours of assassination, military preparations, even of a German ultimatum to Russia, were quickly passed from mouth to mouth. People waited nervously. Most hoped that a diplomatic solution might still be found; it was common knowledge that the Kaiser was in contact with the Tsar. There was also anger. A sailor, Wilhelm Wagner, travelling that day by rail for a last visit to his parents, noted in his diary how his carriage was full of ‘lively discussion, in which Russia was dealt with harshly’.72 As evening drew in, the newspapers were reporting: ‘Still No Decision’.73
The following two days, the final forty-eight hours before the cataclysm, were decisive for the internal state in which Germany entered the First World War. On the afternoon of Friday, 31 July, rumours, this time accurate, of Russian general mobilization signalled that the country was under threat of invasion. The mood in Berlin that day was different from previously – still very nervous, serious, but as the announcement of the ‘State of Imminent War’ became known, now demonstratively patriotic. Wilhelm II had cut short his North Sea cruise and returned to the capital at around 3 p.m. After the ‘State of Siege’ was declared an hour later, a large crowd of between 10,000 and 40,000, consisting mostly of middle-class Berliners of all ages, gathered before the imperial palace. At 6.30 p.m. the Kaiser came out onto a second-floor balcony, to tell his people why Germany may have to fight: ‘envious rivals everywhere drive us to legitimate defence. The sword has been forced into our hand.’74 His message of a conflict imposed on a reluctant Reich resonated with the popular mood and was reinforced by newspapers that evening, which damned the Tsar and his general mobilization for destroying all efforts at mediation. The ultimatum sent to Russia ordering that it cease all military preparations within twelve hours was not looked upon hopefully. The Kölnische Zeitung, one of the country’s foremost newspapers on foreign policy, pithily summed up the situation in its headline: ‘The Russians Want War’.75
This understanding of the coming conflict as fundamentally defensive was the precondition for a solidarity that became manifest on 1 August 1914. The crowds gathered early that day in cities across Germany, waiting, mostly sombrely, to hear whether Russia had backed down. For a long time no news came. Finally, shortly after 5 p.m., the mass of people gathered around Berlin’s imperial palace were told by an officer that the Kaiser had ordered the mobilization. There was a momentary silence. Some then cheered, others started to sing ‘The Watch on the Rhine’. It was no coincidence, however, that at this point of crisis most in the crowd sung not a patriotic refrain, but instead took up a Lutheran hymn:
A mighty fortress is our God,
A trusty shield and weapon;
He helps us free from every need
That hath us now overtaken.
In other towns and cities, Germans overwhelmingly reacted to the news of mobilization, at least in public, calmly and seriously. Many, after the tension of recent days, even experienced it as ‘a deliverance from the terrible pressure’.76 There was some loud patriotism expressed in pubs, cafes and on the streets. Cheering marchers again circulated in the centres of big cities like Hamburg and Frankfurt am Main. In Berlin a noisy patriotic procession wound its way to the Chancellor’s offices. People, particularly middle-class people, spoke of ‘enthusiasm’. Yet what really impressed that evening was the solidarity that they sensed. ‘Poor and rich shake hands, speak together in the streets,’ observed one woman in the university town of Heidelberg. ‘All are unified in the thought: hold together, come what may.’77 Exactly this idea was expressed most famously by the Kaiser, when he stood on the balcony again at 7.30 p.m. before the crowds surrounding his palace and, thanking them for their affection and loyalty, said:
In the battle now lying ahead of us, I see no more parties in my Volk. Among us there are only Germans, and if some of the parties in the course of past differences turned against me, I forgive them all. All that now matters is that we stand together like brothers, and then God will help the German sword to victory.78
There were clear limits to this unity. The Kaiser’s talk of forgiveness betrayed his determination to maintain his position of power within the Reich; even if Germans were to become brothers, he still saw his role as the imperial father figure. The Social Democrats had their own reservations. Bourgeois press attempts to frame the nation as united in ‘war enthusiasm’ were categorically rejected; the mass attendance of anti-war demonstrations earlier in the week proved their point. Yet the middle classes themselves were less enthused than anxious, serious and ready to uphold the national interest, which on 1 August meant protecting home territory from Russian invasion. This was an idea around which Germans of all classes could unite; as the Ruhr workers’ paper Volksblatt declared on that day, ‘the German Social Democrats are ready to the last man to repel an attack’.79 War enthusiasm, had it been the main drive, would probably not have carried the German war effort beyond August 1914. The desire to defend the homeland, on the other hand, proved a remarkably stable base on which to mobilize a people.
MOBILIZATION
Military mobilization changed the face of central European societies with bewildering speed. Millions of men were immediately drafted. The Habsburg army expanded from a peacetime strength of 450,000 to 1,687,000 troops in three and a half weeks. Its German ally achieved in just twelve days an even more dramatic increase, from 808,280 to 3,502,700 soldiers. Already by the middle of August 1914, around a quarter of Austro-Hungarian men aged nineteen to forty-two and one in every three German men aged seventeen to forty-five were with the colours.80 Reservists often had only a few days, in Germany sometimes no more than twenty-four hours, to set their affairs in order and say goodbyes before leaving for barracks. Younger men hurried to see parents, bid farewell to work colleagues, perhaps, once in uniform, had a snapshot taken with a sweetheart as a keepsake for the front. The happily married couple spent a final, precious evening together. There were practicalities to organize: farmers issued last-minute instructions to their wives, men rushed to purchase essentials for active service. Officers, in particular, had much to do to put their kit in order. Departure was never easy. As Major Artur Hausner, who had served since 1897 in the Habsburg army, confessed in his diary on 27 July 1914, even for professional soldiers who had spent their lives training for this moment, ‘the possibility that one will never again see those he most loves constrains the feelings of enthusiasm’.81
The mood in Austria-Hungary and Germany at war’s outbreak was defined by two intertwined emotions. Fear was the first, and it was endemic. The second, which developed to a great extent in reaction, was a feeling of communal solidarity. Fear is the more straightforward to explain, for its causes and the ways in which it was expressed were similar in both countries. Above all, as Hausner hinted, people were afraid of the loss of their own or close relatives’ lives. Although only the old could remember the last European wars fought by these states, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and the Habsburg anti-insurgency campaign in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878–82, there was little naivety in either society about the coming conflagration. Men and their families prepared for the worst. Church attendance surged, especially in Catholic regions. In Jabłonków, Father Ściskała reported a ‘remarkable crowd’ in his church on 1 August, the day after general mobilization was ordered in Austria-Hungary. ‘Whole packs of men de
parting for the army come to confession. And in the evening till late into the night prayers and singing reach the town from roadside crosses and chapels. War teaches people to pray.’82 The Socialist workers who populated Germany’s major cities were less likely to turn for comfort to religion, but they too held few illusions about modern battle’s lethality. ‘All have the feeling of heading straight for a slaughter house,’ wrote one Social Democrat after he observed reservists departing in Bremen.83 Whether in town or countryside, Monarchy or Reich, contemporaries everywhere agreed that this was a time of tears. ‘Little could be heard but shouting, sighs and weeping’ when men left Sibiu, in Transylvania. As middle-aged reservists gathered with their families south of Cracow, there was ‘a good deal of crying and whimpering’.84 Deep sadness and fear was also on display at German railway stations. ‘Seeing the men depart is quite awful,’ wrote one girl helping out at a refreshment stand on Cassel station during mobilization. ‘Some have tears in their eyes when they look at their women and children staying behind, and to see all the tearful faces of those staying behind is too terribly sad!’85