by Max Hastings
Quite early in the war, there were signs of a trend which became progressively more pronounced – a decline of social deference, to the dismay of its former beneficiaries. An Englishman who met an old friend from Oxford days lamented: ‘Ten years ago, when I came into a crowded bus, a working man would rise and touch his cap and give me his seat. I am sorry to see that spirit dying out.’ Racial distinctions, however, remained as sharp as ever. The Clarion on 10 October deplored a report that a British general had dined in the same hotel dining room as an Indian prince in uniform without addressing a word to him. On the following night in the same hotel’s smoking room, an eyewitness saw a group of officers likewise ignoring the ‘dusky potentate’. A Clarion columnist wrote angrily: ‘If an Indian Prince is not fit to speak to, why does our King accept his services?’
This was a good question, but not one which the arbiters of British society chose to answer. If pressed, many of them would have asserted that the war was being fought to preserve the standards and decencies of traditional Britain. Almost all the belligerents, indeed, supposed themselves to be upholding conservative social values. Middle-class volunteers for the army raised strong objections, in Leo Amery’s words, to ‘being put down in the barracks next to a couple of lousy and swearing hooligans’. Cyril Asquith, the prime minister’s younger son who later served as an officer in France, described war service contemptuously as ‘fighting barbarians in the company of bores and bounders’. Though shared peril caused some blurring of class distinctions at the front, many middle-class men – and women – found it hard to adjust to being thrust into enforced intimacy with their social inferiors: ‘Never did I expect it would fall to my lot to sleep a whole night under heavy shell fire in a room with common soldiers and all of us lying on straw,’ wrote nurse Elsie Knocker in a Belgian barn. When she accompanied a group of wounded men back to England, they were all obliged to doss down for the night in a Dover hostel, after being refused admission to a local hospital. At Euston station, she had difficulty persuading the authorities to allow her casualties to be laid out in the ladies’ waiting room until their train came.
A few fortunate folk found themselves, by contrast, in environments more comfortable than those to which they were accustomed at home. Austrian peasant Karl Auberhofer, a thirty-four-year-old father of seven mobilised with the Landsturm, was billeted in a luxury hotel in the Tyrol. He marvelled: ‘One can just sit down at a table and be served by a waitress as if one was a nobleman – one doesn’t have to think about anything.’ As Auberhofer was fortunate enough to escape front-line service, he decided that military duty was much preferable to hard labour on his farm. He and his comrades passed their days and nights drinking and gambling with an abandon unthinkable at home. Duty obliged him only to spend two hours a day guarding a railway line, so ‘church parades are our hardest work apart from eating’.
The Lady addressed with sublime condescension the issue of continental refugees in England: ‘English life and ways must seem strange to the many Belgians and French staying here. One thing that the womenfolk sadly miss is the bargaining which is the accompaniment of almost every purchase they make in their respective countries. The fixed price which is the joy of most Englishwomen they regard as a dull arrangement.’ The magazine’s social gossip column picked up the same theme: ‘Among the many who are offering hospitality to the Belgians who have suffered so greatly from the war are Lord and Lady Exeter, who have the Belgian Countess Villers and her five children as their guests at Burghley House, their historic place in the Midlands. Lady Exeter, who has the pretty name of Myra, is very attractive, with fair hair and dark eyes. Turquoises become her, and she owns some beautiful ornaments in these stones.’
The Lady strove to help women address unexpected social problems thrown up by the war. In its ‘Daily Difficulty’ column of 10 December, it raised the dilemma facing a cat-owning woman who houses a dog for an officer setting forth for the front. When the dog starts killing her cats, what should she do? The Lady asserted that she had a responsibility to ensure the dog was properly quartered, but might reasonably seek another home for it. The magazine also reported delicate problems of etiquette facing wives returning from the colonies. It urged that they should not have calling cards printed with their temporary addresses, but instead merely strike through their permanent address on existing cards. They should recognise that established residents of a given community would not call on a newcomer unless introduced by a mutual acquaintance. To facilitate this process, The Lady suggested that newcomers from abroad should post notice of their arrival in a reputable newspaper. The nearest the magazine came to addressing the travails of British menfolk on the continent was in an article on logistics: ‘the task of feeding an army of hard-worked men on a modern battlefield is a truly wonderful achievement – “housekeeping” you may term it, upon a colossal scale. Because we have command of the sea, however, provisioning our Expeditionary Force becomes a fairly easy matter.’ It is unsurprising that many people at home remained blissfully ignorant of the horrors unfolding in France, if they relied on The Lady for enlightenment – and serious newspapers offered little more substantial fare.
Some innocents allowed lingering wisps of humanitarian sentiment to cross the fronts. In Schneidemühl little Elfriede Kuhr wrote in her diary: ‘Sailors whose vessels sink in naval battles must be terribly frightened, because no ship will stop to rescue them. When all those people drowned after the Titanic hit an iceberg, the whole world recoiled in horror. Now, ships sink every day and nobody asks what happens to the crews.’ The little girl and her friend Gretel embraced a personal mission: to tidy and decorate the graves of Russian PoWs who died in the local camp near Schneidemühl, far from their homes.
PoW compounds became popular tourist attractions in rural areas, where foreign visitors of any kind had a curiosity value. The authorities became exasperated by the peasant practice of taking a Sunday family stroll to peer at the inmates through the wire; in Münster an order was published banning all civilians from approaching within six hundred metres of a camp. In German cities, crowds – mostly women – assembled around trains bearing prisoners on their way to PoW camps. Some patriots were shocked by displays of sympathy for the foreigners’ plight: a journalist accused those who indulged in such feelings of succumbing to ‘a degenerate desire for erotic adventure’, and the government threatened to publish the names of these shameless creatures. When it emerged that four nurses at Thionville had become engaged to French PoWs, the German Red Cross was informed by the government that its volunteers would no longer be permitted to visit the compounds.
Any display of sympathy for the enemy became increasingly unacceptable. In Carinthia a Slovenian Catholic priest was imprisoned as a Serbophile for telling his flock: ‘Let us pray for the Emperor and Austria but also for the Serbs to see the light.’ Dr Eugen Lampe wrote gleefully from Hapsburg Ljubljana about news of British defeats: ‘Everyone wishes ill to the British. Bernatorič, whose Jewish establishment called itself “The English Clothing Warehouse”, announces that he has renamed it “The Ljubljana Clothing Warehouse”.’ An English acquaintance of Ethel Cooper, who lived in Leipzig, had a baby by a German man who was killed in France. The authorities refused either to support the child or to allow the woman, as an enemy alien, to take a job. The Oxford classicist Gilbert Murray initially opposed the war, but before long was writing: ‘I find that I desperately desire to hear of German dreadnoughts sunk in the North Sea … When I see that 20,000 Germans have been killed in such-and-such an engagement and next day that it was only 2,000, I am sorry.’
Louis Barthas found himself among soldiers escorting German prisoners on a train across southern France. Newspapers had incited local people to show their feelings towards such ‘monsters with human features’, and at every station furious crowds appeared – women spitting, men brandishing knives and rocks. The same people pressed on the French guards wine and grapes which, as soon as the train moved off, they shared with thei
r charges: ‘this gesture of camaraderie makes up for the odious displays against the unarmed enemy’. Those who had seen the dreadful realities of war recoiled from displays of chauvinism. A Paris music-hall performer who sang a song suggesting that German troops ran away, and that most of their shells were duds, received an icy reception from an audience which included soldiers on leave. More popular French ditties suggested that the real German crime was submission to despotism: one, ‘Le Repas manqué’, concerned a supposed invitation to the Kaiser to have dinner in Paris; the chorus went ‘Nous f’rons des crêpes et t’en mang’ras!’ – ‘We’ll make the pancakes and you’ll eat them!’
Many women across Europe felt a profound sense of frustration that while their menfolk were winning laurels on the battlefield and receiving popular adulation, their own role was confined to knitting socks and writing letters. ‘We here, far inland, see scarcely anything of the hardships of war,’ wrote Gertrud Schädla in December, ‘beyond worrying about our beloved fighting men.’ Gertrud and her mother spent much of the winter sewing clothes and collecting charity contributions for refugees from East Prussia. Knitting for soldiers became a universal preoccupation, almost a sacred duty, for Europe’s women. Yet the fruits of their labours were sometimes cynically received. Egon Kisch catalogued a consignment which reached his Austrian unit in Serbia in November: ‘warm underwear – of course only knitted nonsense – neatly-embroidered gloves, wristlets with a heart stitched in red, mittens to fit baby elephants, kneepads for storks and similar stuff that the lasses knitted during jolly parties to assuage their boredom or satisfy their pretensions’. Corporal Kisch was grudgingly grateful, but would have preferred cigarettes.
Some women enjoyed first-aid classes, which brought them together. But Graz schoolteacher Itha J wrote on 16 September: ‘Every day there is a weight upon me. What is it? I believe it is a gnawing discontent that during these great times I can do nothing beyond baby-sitting.’ In Britain, even The Lady bewailed the limitations on the contributions women might make: ‘Soon all the committees will be formed, the needlework in hand, members of the Red Cross Society ready for the word of command, the chosen nurses away to their places – every woman in the land doing all that is possible for her to do in the way of special work. Yet in spite of everything there will still be in all our hearts a sensation of yearning to do more.’
Mrs Mayne was the wife of a British soldier stationed in Ireland. She herself worked in an East London hostel, coping with a throng of German, Belgian and Scandinavian women caught far from home. The war inflicted on her a profound sense of loneliness and isolation from her husband, while her brothers trained to become soldiers: ‘almost a feeling of suffocation overwhelmed me’. She watched flag-sellers, shoppers and ambulances coming and going in a frenzy of activity. ‘It was all a maze and yet secretly in my heart there was a feeling of pride [in Britain at war] – which now I think was wrong.’ She accepted a post as theatre sister at a British hospital in Belgium, and set off after posting her wedding ring to her husband Gerald for safekeeping. Unfortunately, in the emotionalism of her departure she forgot to enclose an explanatory covering note, causing bewilderment and distress to the ring’s recipient.
At the end of September, a German girl named Helene Schweida made a courageous but naïve attempt to visit the army in France, to see her beloved boyfriend Wilhelm Kaisen. Her progress was arrested by an officer in western Germany who turned her smartly homewards, declaring loftily that only men could approach the theatre of operations. ‘Once again, I forgot that I am a mere woman,’ she wrote bitterly. Yet already, in a fashion that gained momentum with every day of the war, women proved their indispensability as substitutes for men in many roles. Toulouse, along with other French cities, acquired its first women postal deliverers, firefighters and even tram conductors, dubbed the ‘Ponsinettes’ because the Toulouse transport company was owned by a M. Pons. Women who took work in armament factories were called ‘munitionettes’.
British ambulance driver Dorothie Feilding wrote home from Belgium on 17 October, lamenting her lot: ‘Everything has been chaos & I have had to run the whole damn show. I wish there was a man with a head in charge. As soon as I get back I shall settle down & marry a big strong man who will bully me. I’m sick of trying to run other people.’ But it is plain that this cry of dismay reflected only momentary exhaustion: for the most part, Feilding, a twenty-five-year-old daughter of the Earl of Denbigh, revelled in the excitements and opportunities her role offered.
At the outset she had been fearful that her volunteer unit would not be permitted to play an active role: ‘Alas I don’t think we women will be allowed to do much actual fieldwork. We will have to be behind most of the time if not all.’ But she soon found herself exulting in her experiences: ‘There’s going to be heaps to do, it’s topping being up near things & so jolly interesting.’ On the night of 8 October, she helped to carry two British casualties three miles back from the trenches. She was unwilling to expose herself, however, to aid fallen enemies: ‘I don’t mind running risks for our men or the French but I’m blithered if I’m going to have holes put in me by a bally Teuton while I pick up their men.’
Women in all the warring nations would soon follow pioneers such as herself, assuming unprecedented authority and responsibility. But some traditional gender roles were slow to change: behind the front in Belgium, nurse Mrs Elizabeth ‘Elsie’ Knocker, a twenty-nine-year-old doctor’s daughter from Exeter, wrote in her diary on 29 September: ‘Sewed a button on the general’s coat – he was charming to me.’
In every country, at first at least, the war increased the symbolic importance of the monarchs in whose names it was supposedly being fought. Austrian newspapers reported with slavish deference a visit by Franz Joseph to the military hospital established in Vienna’s Augartenpalais. Young aristocrat Rüdiger Rathenitz was one of those who met the Emperor: ‘Archduchess Maria Josefa introduced me and he asked about my wound and my unit. The monarch, whom I last saw in 1909 at St Pölten – when I was a pupil in the military school there – was now more stooped than on that occasion, and remained comparatively silent. I was warned … to respond very loudly to his questions. I had brought a Russian haversack, some badges and bullets as souvenirs from the battlefield, and I showed these items to the Emperor … who seemed quite interested.’
Die Neue Zeitung duly told Franz Joseph’s subjects: ‘The kind manner in which the Supreme Warlord greeted his officers prompted a captain whose right arm had been amputated humbly to beg the privilege of continuing to serve in the army. The sovereign was visibly moved, and gave the loyal officer his promise. In the huge hall in which the monarch stayed for nearly an hour, he spoke to all of the 102 soldiers in their national languages … which visibly infused his soldiers with happiness.’ Graz schoolteacher Itha J transcribed this newspaper account almost verbatim into her diary, adding her own characteristically sentimental comment: ‘These poor ordinary men will have been infinitely delighted that the Emperor spoke to them. And how many others – even the wounded – will feel jealous of those who received this mercy! – Life is unfair. One is lucky, others are not.’
The monarchs of Europe were not notable for intellect, and some were slow to grasp the vast significance of the course on which Europe was embarked. Douglas Haig wrote on 11 August after lunching with George V: ‘The King seemed anxious, but he did not give me the impression that he fully realised the grave issues for our country as well as for his own house, which were about to be put to the test; nor did he really comprehend the uncertainty of the results of all wars between great nations, no matter how well prepared one may think one is.’ That winter, Haig met his monarch again after he had inspected troops at Saint-Omer, and noticed no great accession of wisdom: ‘The King seemed very cheery but inclined to think that all our troops are by nature brave and is ignorant of all the efforts which Commanders must make to keep up the “morale” of their men in war, and of all the training which is necessary in peace
in order to enable a company for instance to go forward as an organized unit in the face of almost certain death.’ The King was at pains to explain away the war roles of his many relatives in the opposing camp. He told Asquith that – for instance – his cousin Prince Albert of Schleswig-Holstein was ‘not really fighting on the side of the Germans’, but merely running a PoW camp.
One night in October Austrian aristocrat Alexander Pallavicini sat next at dinner to the Archduke Karl, who had succeeded Franz Ferdinand as heir-apparent to the Hapsburg throne. Pallavicini recoiled in dismay from his neighbour’s ignorance: ‘It is unbelievable how “out of the picture” he is, because he has so little contact with soldiers. I completely lost my composure when he confidently asserted that the Russians were finished, the war as good as over. He brushed aside all doubts, stood by his statement.’ When Pallavicini said that the war would be decided on the Western Front, where Austria-Hungary must support Germany, the future Emperor’s response emphasised his bovine stupidity: ‘France does not matter to us. We must march against Italy.’
Germany’s ruler, by contrast, already revealed disenchantment with the adventure he had done much to promote. On 25 September, Admiral Albert Hopman sat next to the Kaiser at dinner, and was impressed by a war-weariness that was already in evidence. Wilhelm spoke of ‘the awful slaughter of humanity’ – ‘furchtbare Menschenschlächterei’. It was a little late to indulge such a spasm of sensitivity. Hopman observed bitterly to Admiral Tirpitz: ‘for the last 25 years we have lived with a playful, unreasoning absolutism that found fulfilment in empty appearances and a vain craving for status which the nation indulged for too long. The majority of the people did not want that. But absolutist governance was responsible for our failure to produce statesmen, and instead only bureaucrats and lackeys.’ This was a profound and important statement of how Germany stumbled into precipitating a war, written by an intimate observer of its governance.