Meanwhile, every soldier in the British Expeditionary Force was given a personal message from Lord Kitchener, the victor of Omdurman and now secretary of state for war, an exhortation about honor, duty, and country that reflected his famous puritanism—and the army's fear of venereal disease: "Keep constantly on your guard against any excesses. In this new experience you may find temptations both in wine and women. You must entirely resist both temptations, and, while treating all women with perfect courtesy, you should avoid any intimacy."
The army Britain fielded in France was not large—when war broke out there were more soldiers on active duty in India than in the British Isles—but the men who began landing on August 9, 1914, in Boulogne and Le Havre were met with a delirium of cheers, ships' whistles, showers of blossoms and candy, and mugs of cider brought by some of the women with whom "intimacy" was to be avoided. Some troops who had served in India greeted the French in the only foreign language they knew, Hindi. Soldiers were rushed to the front by freight train and even by red double-decker London buses that had crossed the Channel with them. The positions they were ordered to defend against a much larger German attacking force were around the Belgian city of Mons, where the Germans had not yet crossed the frontier into France.
The very surroundings hinted that a new, industrialized kind of war was in the offing, for this would be the first time the British army fought in an industrial region. Enlisted men from the working class found themselves surrounded by exactly the world—blast furnaces, factories of grimy brick, drab workers' housing, coal miners emerging from underground with blackened faces—that many of them had joined the army to escape.
Sir John French caused consternation when he impulsively suggested deploying his troops not according to plans British and French generals had carefully worked out over the years, but at the Belgian port of Antwerp, where the remnants of that country's army had retreated. He was overruled, but cabinet ministers were left shaking their heads in dismay. It had not occurred to him that the sea approach to Antwerp, up the Scheldt River, required a long transit through the waters of neutral Holland. Nor, it soon became apparent, was he going to have an easy time getting along with his French counterparts. "They are a low lot," he wrote to Kitchener, "and one always has to remember the class these French generals mostly come from." Worse yet, in the excitement of leaving London for the first British military expedition to the mainland of Western Europe since Waterloo, French's headquarters left its codebooks behind.
All this made no difference to his troops. They loved the short, buoyant field marshal, who wandered around his headquarters after hours in a blue dressing gown, whistling. Their confidence in him was not shared, however, by an ambitious subordinate, General Sir Douglas Haig. "In my own heart," Haig confided to his diary just a week after the war began, "I know that French is quite unfit for this great Command." He strategically voiced the same "grave doubts," he recorded, to someone he had lunch with that day, King George V.
The British Expeditionary Force included four infantry divisions of up to 18,000 men each, and one cavalry division of some 9,000 men. Officers' swords were freshly sharpened. Because of their horses, which had to be hoisted into and out of the holds of vessels in slings, the cavalry took up a disproportionately large amount of space in ships crossing the Channel, and then trains heading to the front. Newly landed in France, his bowlegged gait visible in newsreel films, French inspected two of his infantry units, which he thought looked "well and cheery." In Paris, shouts of " Vive l'Angleterre!" came from thousands of throats when he arrived at the Gare du Nord. President Poincaré was disappointed to discover, however, that despite his name, the jovial British commander spoke little French. (The field marshal himself believed otherwise. Reportedly, he was addressing one group of French officers when he heard several of them call out, "Traduisez!" [Translate!] He tried to explain that he was already speaking their language.)
While inspecting his units, French was happy to run across men who had served under him in the Sudan, India, and South Africa. His gray mustache and ruddy face became a familiar sight as he spoke before ranks of soldiers, sometimes supporting his short, 61-year-old figure by leaning on a gold-plated walking stick. Kitchener, who was receiving intelligence on a huge buildup of German troops, peppered French with anxious messages. But the field marshal was not worried. "I think I know the situation thoroughly," he replied, "and I regard it as quite favourable to us." After dining at the Ritz in Paris, Sir John noted in his diary, "The usual silly reports of French 'reverses' were going about. All quite untrue!"
In these early weeks he remained remarkably focused on the appearance of his troops—and little else. "I saw the 4th Brigade (Scott-Kerr) file by on the march," he recorded, "—they looked splendid." Among the soldiers marching past in that unit was George Cecil. His battalion had landed at Le Havre to cheers from local fishermen, marched through sunbaked cobblestone streets, then boarded a train for Belgium. Although George doubtless would have been deeply embarrassed, his mother had written to his commander, Brigadier General Robert Scott-Kerr. She was more fearful of her son's health, Violet Cecil told him, "than I am of the bullets," and asked that an older officer keep an eye on him. "At 18 to undergo such a strain as this campaign seems to me excessive," she complained. By August 23 his battalion had moved into position among the slag heaps and coal-mining machinery near Mons—sights that were surely as exotic to him as they were familiar to many of his unit's enlisted men. German observation planes could be seen in the sky and the roads were crowded with refugees. Charged with defending a bridge, George's company pulled up paving stones to build barriers against the German attack expected at any moment. In one of the weekly letters she dutifully wrote to his father, Edward, in Egypt, Violet passed on news from George: "He said that up to date it had all been the most glorious fun."
On the other side of the English Channel, a different sort of conflict loomed. Until now, England had known Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst as the most radical of firebrands. Some weeks after the war began, however, the two of them called a large WSPU rally at the London Opera House on "The Great Need of Vigorous National Defence Against the German Peril." The theater was decorated with the flags of the Allies, including that anathema to the left, the double-headed eagle of tsarist Russia. For Christabel, it was her first public appearance since fleeing the country several years before, and the enthusiastic crowd sang "For She's a Jolly Good Fellow." Sylvia, torn and dismayed by the widening political gulf between them, was in the audience: "The empty stage was hung with dark green velvet. She appeared there alone, lit by a shaft of lime-light, clad in her favourite pale green, graceful and slender. Her W.S.P.U. adorers filed up and presented her with wreaths. She laid them in a semicircle at her feet." Militant women, Christabel told the crowd, should now turn their energy to arousing the spirit of militance in men. When someone shouted "Votes for women!" she retorted, "We cannot discuss that now." She called on the government to mobilize women for the economy in order to free men for the front.
"I listened to her with grief," Sylvia wrote, "resolving to write and speak more urgently for peace." Afterward, she gingerly went backstage to see her sister, but it felt as if "an impenetrable barrier lay between us." When their mother joined them, Emmeline and Sylvia "exchanged a brief greeting, distant as through a veil," before parting ways. From the crowd waiting outside the opera house, as divided as the Pankhurst family, rose competing cheers of "Christabel!" or "Emmeline!" and "Sylvia!"
Before an audience in Glasgow a few weeks later, Sylvia became one of the first suffragettes to speak out against the war. She also published in Woman's Dreadnought, the newspaper she had been putting out in the East End in competition with Christabel's WSPU paper, a proposal for a thousand-strong "Women's Peace Expeditionary Force" that would march under a white banner with a dove on it into the no man's land between rival male armies. She also reprinted part of a speech by the antiwar German socialist Karl Liebknecht on how imperiali
st rivalry had caused the war. And she was one of more than 100 British women who signed an open letter, circulated by Emily Hobhouse, addressed to German and Austrian women. "Do not let us forget our very anguish unites us.... We must all urge that peace be made.... We are yours in this sisterhood of sorrow."
The other two Pankhursts took quite a different path. With the full blessing of the British government, Christabel set off on a six-month lecture tour of the United States, aimed at persuading Americans to join the war on the Allied side. Emmeline, meanwhile, took to the lecture circuit in England, putting the power of her commanding presence behind the war effort. "I want men to go to battle like the knight of old," she demanded, "who knelt before the altar and vowed that he would keep his sword stainless and with absolute honour to his nation." In Plymouth she told a cheering crowd, "If you go to this war and give your life, you could not end your life in a better way—for to give one's life for one's country, for a great cause, is a splendid thing."
For someone who, only two years before, had thrown rocks through the windows of 10 Downing Street and talked contemptuously of war as something male, this was the most dramatic of transformations. Scarcely less astonishing was the ferocity of the split within a family that for years had campaigned and gone to jail together and, in the case of Emmeline and Sylvia, shared the excruciating hardships of prison hunger strikes. What accounts for it?
Sylvia's antiwar stance was certainly of a piece with her socialist politics and with the beliefs of her former lover, Hardie, but her mother's newfound ardor as a British patriot was more mysterious—and, indeed, it shocked many of her WSPU followers. One reason for Emmeline's war fervor was undoubtedly personal: as a teenager, she had spent several years at a girls' school in Paris, gaining a lifelong love of all things French and a suspicion of Germany. But beyond any such feelings and the tribal allure of wartime patriotism lay another motive for her and Christabel's volte-face. To embrace the war wholeheartedly, and publicly place themselves at the service of the British government, was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to leave the political fringe where their unpopular campaign of rock throwing and arson had put them and step into an honored position at national center stage. In this grave crisis, they knew, the government would be delighted to have the country's most conspicuous dissidents rally round the flag. And, to give them their due as political crusaders, they surely also knew that doing this could bring them closer to their great goal of winning women the vote.
In late 1914 it was easy enough for a reasonable person to support a war against Germany, which seemed bent on dominating Europe. Stopping Germany might seem a moral imperative, albeit a tragic and regrettable one, given the inevitable bloodshed. Millions of quite un-militaristic people in Britain felt this way. But now that Emmeline and Christabel had decided to back their country's war effort, to do so with the slightest ambivalence or nuance was for them unimaginable. Theirs was a world of good and evil, with neither subtleties nor paradox, and they had only withering scorn for anyone who didn't agree with them. In the next four years they would take their full-throated vehemence to lengths that would startle even their allies.
When the family divided, no one suffered more than Sylvia, for whom her mother's new patriotic zeal seemed a betrayal of everything the Pankhursts had once believed in. To Emmeline, of course, what was deplorable was Sylvia's position—which she shared with her exiled sister Adela in Australia: "I am ashamed to know where you and Adela stand," Emmeline wrote to her daughter. They would seldom communicate again.
For weeks after the war began, the British public read few details about the actual fighting. Many people simply went about their business as if it were peacetime; Charlotte Despard, for example, noted in her diary having "tea and conversation" with Mr. and Mrs. Gandhi at a London hotel. The first real news came like lightning flashes in a darkened sky on August 30. In a special Sunday edition of the Times, its correspondent wrote of
a retreating and a broken army.... Our losses are very great. I have seen the broken bits of many regiments.... Some [divisions] have lost nearly all their officers.... The German commanders in the north advance their men as if they had an inexhaustible supply.... So great was their superiority in numbers that they could no more be stopped than the waves of the sea....
To sum up, the first great German effort has succeeded. We have to face the fact that the British Expeditionary Force, which bore the great weight of the blow, has suffered terrible losses and requires immediate and immense reinforcement. The British Expeditionary Force has won indeed imperishable glory, but it needs men, men, and yet more men.
That final paragraph had actually been written by the nation's chief press censor, and it had just the effect he intended: over the next two days alone, recruiters swore in 30,000 new volunteers.
British soldiers, George Cecil among them, first came under heavy German fire at Mons on August 23. Faced with infantry attacks and a colossal rain of artillery shells, Sir John French ordered his troops to withdraw after a day in which the British suffered 1,600 dead and wounded. Many a single hour later in the war would claim far more casualties than that, but to the newly arrived army, the toll was unexpected and staggering. Since transport was mostly horse-drawn, the battle also left fields and roads strewn with panicked, wounded horses. For the next 13 days, the British did little but retreat through the scorching summer heat—a chaotic, precipitous flight back across the Belgian border, through northern France, and finally to the southeastern outskirts of Paris. Soldiers slept a few hours a night, if at all, by the roadside or in farmers' barns. Desperate to get rid of anything that slowed them down, officers ordered the disheartened troops to abandon excess equipment and supplies; pursuing Germans were thrilled to come upon large piles of ammunition, new boots, canned food, clothing, sides of beef. The long retreat was one of the most drastic in British military annals.
While it was under way, French repeatedly squabbled with his subordinates. "Sir John as usual not understanding the situation in the least," wrote his deputy chief of staff in his diary. "A nice old man but absolutely no brains." He spent comparatively little time at his headquarters, leaving its officers frustrated as he dashed about by car or on horseback, seeking the personal contact with soldiers that he craved. "I met the men and talked to them as they were lying about resting," French recorded. "I told them how much I appreciated their work and what the country thought of them.... The wonderful spirit and bearing they showed was beyond all praise—½ a million of them would walk over Europe!" Nothing daunted the field marshal, not even news of new German divisions appearing nearby. He remained almost farcically ebullient in the face of disaster: "Perhaps the charm of war lies in its glorious uncertainty!"
No one on either side was prepared for the fighting's deadliness. Like the British, recent German and French experience of war had been of minor colonial conflicts with badly armed Africans and Asians: Erich von Falkenhayn, soon to be chief of the German general staff, had helped suppress the Boxer Rebellion in China, and Joseph Joffre, the French commander in chief, had led an expedition across the Sahara to conquer Timbuktu. Neither side had spent much time on the receiving end of fire by machine guns or other modern weaponry. The new generation of long-range, fast-loading artillery, for instance, could leave your troops under a downpour of shells from guns miles away and out of sight. "Louder and louder grew the sound of the guns," wrote one British officer of the German attack, "...under a sky of brass, shaking with the concussion of artillery, now a single heavy discharge, then a pulsation of the whole atmosphere, as if all the gods in heaven were beating on drums the size of lakes." Even as they rolled back the British, the Germans, too, seemed totally surprised by the effect of massed fire from clip-loading repeating rifles directed at them. The 15 rounds a minute these weapons could fire took a fearsome toll among dense rows of troops. "The Germans just fell down like logs," remembered a British soldier of one skirmish.
Worrying about her brother, Charlotte Despard trie
d to see the news from France in the best possible light: "It is with keen admiration but a constriction of heart that I read of my Jack's splendid despatch of the retreat," she wrote in her diary. British cabinet members, on the other hand, saw nothing splendid and felt that French had retreated farther and faster than necessary. They were shocked to find that the field marshal now wanted to pull back more than a hundred miles from the line of battle, to refit and reorganize his battered divisions. French's compassion for his bloodied and exhausted men had overwhelmed his already limited sense of military strategy. To withdraw from the front now would leave a desperate France feeling abandoned by its ally at its moment of greatest danger. Kitchener hastily boarded a British cruiser
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