When Nicolson later came into Grey’s office to congratulate him on the success of his speech a miserable Grey did not reply but only banged his fists on a table, saying, ‘I hate war … I hate war.’ Sometime later that evening Grey made the remark which for so many Europeans came to sum up what the war meant. As he looked out the window into St James’s Park where the lamplighters were lighting up the gas lamps, he said, ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.’83 Although Grey later said modestly that he was ‘only the mouthpiece of England’, he had done much to bring Britain to intervention in the war.84 Lloyd George, who had played such a key role in swinging the Cabinet towards war, wrote to his wife in North Wales: ‘I am moving through a nightmare world these days. I have fought hard for peace & succeeded so far in keeping the Cabinet out of it but I am driven to the conclusion that if the small nationality of Belgium is attacked by Germany all my traditions & even prejudices will be engaged on the side of war. I am filled with horror at the prospect.’ Asquith was more prosaic; at his customary bridge game he said that ‘the one bright spot in this hateful war, upon which we were about to enter, was the settlement of Irish strife and the cordial union of forces in Ireland in aiding the Government to maintain our supreme National interests’.85 It is possible, or so many thought at the time, that the Great War saved Britain from a civil war.
In Paris that same Monday evening Wilhelm Schoen, the German ambassador, was struggling to decipher a badly mangled telegram from Bethmann. He made out enough to be able to go immediately to the French Prime Minister with Germany’s declaration of war. The German government claimed that it had been driven to this measure by French advances across the border into Alsace and by vicious attacks by French aviators. One, it said, had even thrown a bomb on a German railway line. (Hitler was to use a similar excuse with as little basis in the truth when he attacked Poland in 1939.) Schoen had a last request – that Germans remaining in Paris be placed under the protection of the American ambassador – and a complaint – that a man using threatening language had jumped into his car on his way to the meeting. The two men parted courteously and in a sombre mood.86 Poincaré later wrote in his diary:
It is a hundred times better that we were not led to declare war ourselves even on account of repeated violations of our frontier. It was imperative that Germany, fully responsible for the aggression, should be forced to admit her interests publicly. If France had declared war, the alliance with Russia would have become controversial and French unity and spirit broken, and Italy might have been obliged by the Triple Alliance to come in against France.87
The following day, Tuesday 4 August, amidst repeated cheers, a message from Poincaré was read to the French parliament. Germany was entirely to blame for the war, he stated, and would have to defend itself before the judgement of history. All French would come together in a sacred union, and this union sacrée would never be shattered. There were no dissenting voices; the Socialist Party had already decided to support the war. When a leading opponent of the left paid tribute to Jaurès, who was being buried that day, saying, ‘There are no longer adversaries; there are only French,’ the chamber erupted into prolonged shouts of ‘Vive la France’.88
The same day the British government sent an ultimatum to Germany that it provide an assurance that it would respect Belgium’s neutrality. There was a deadline of 11 p.m. that evening British time. Since no one expected Germany to agree, a declaration of war was readied to be given to Lichnowsky. Printed telegrams to warn British embassies and consulates around the world that Britain was about to go to war had been in the Foreign Office files for years with only the name of the enemy left out. Clerks spent the day writing in ‘Germany’.
Meanwhile in Berlin that same day, Bethmann was addressing the German parliament to explain that Germany was only defending itself. True, he admitted, Germany was invading the neutral countries of Belgium and Luxembourg, but that was only because of the French threat. When the war was over, Germany would make good any damage. The Socialist Party, which had for so long promised to lead its millions of members in opposition to a capitalist war, joined the other parties in voting for war credits. Bethmann had worked hard to win them over but they had been moving in his direction. On 3 August at a long and difficult meeting of Socialist deputies, a majority had decided to vote for war credits, partly on the grounds that they could not betray their rank and file who were going off to war and partly because they saw Germany as the victim of Russian aggression. For the sake of party unity the rest agreed to go along.89
On the evening of 4 August, even before the British deadline for Germany’s reply had passed, Goschen, the British ambassador, called on Bethmann to request his passport. ‘Oh, this is too terrible!’ exclaimed Goschen as he asked in vain whether Germany could not respect Belgium’s neutrality. Bethmann harangued the ambassador. Britain was taking a dreadful step and all for a mere word, ‘neutrality’. The treaty with Belgium, Bethmann said in words which cost Germany dearly in world opinion, was just a ‘scrap of paper’. Britain, he went on, could have reined in France’s desire for revenge and Russian Panslavism but instead it had encouraged them. The war was Britain’s fault. Goschen burst into tears and left.90 Bethmann could not see that Germany bore any responsibility. He later wrote to a friend, ‘It remains highly questionable whether with reasonable actions we could have prevented the natural French, Russian, and British antagonisms from uniting against us.’91 The Kaiser ranted at Britain’s betrayal and accused Nicholas of ‘unscrupulous wantonness’ in ignoring all Germany’s and Wilhelm’s attempts to keep the peace. Moltke thought that the British had planned the war all along and wondered whether Germany could persuade the United States to come in as its ally by promising the Americans Canada.92
In London the British waited for their 11 p.m. deadline to approach. There was a brief panic in the Foreign Office when someone realised they had made a mistake in the declaration of war on Germany and sent it prematurely to Lichnowsky. An amended declaration was hurriedly drawn up and a junior official delegated to retrieve the wrong document. The Cabinet ministers gathered at Downing Street, most looking anxious and drawn except for Churchill, who looked alert and confident with a large cigar in his mouth. Secretaries waited outside the Cabinet room. ‘At any rate the war can’t last long,’ someone said. Just before 11 p.m. a junior official phoned the Foreign Office to ask if there were any news. ‘No news here or at the German Embassy,’ came the answer. Big Ben started to chime and Britain was at war. Outside, crowds in Whitehall and the Mall linked arms and sang patriotic songs. Churchill dispatched a telegram to the fleet: ‘COMMENCE HOSTILITIES AGAINST GERMANY.’93
The ties that had bound a peaceful and prosperous Europe over the nineteenth century now broke rapidly. Rail and telegraph lines were cut; shipping slowed down; bank reserves were frozen and international currency exchanges stopped; and trade dwindled away. Ordinary citizens scrambled desperately to get home in a world that had suddenly become different. In the German embassy in Paris there was chaos as mothers clutched their crying babies and hundreds of suitcases littered the floor. Perhaps as many as 100,000 Americans were caught on the Continent, often without money because the banks were closed. Many managed to make their way to Britain where Walter Page, the American ambassador, and his staff did their best to cope. ‘God save us!’ he wrote to President Woodrow Wilson:
What a week it has been! … Those first two days, there was, of course, great confusion. Crazy men and weeping women were imploring and cursing and demanding – God knows it was bedlam turned loose. I have been called a man of greatest genius for an emergency by some, by others a damned fool, by others every epithet between these extremes.
The American government dispatched the Tennessee with gold to finance its citizens; the warship also ferried Americans across the Channel from France.94 The ambassadors from the belligerent countries were treated more gently, leaving in special trains, protected by th
e troops of their enemy. Jules Cambon and the Russian ambassador had already left Berlin on the weekend and now on 5 August a shattered Lichnowsky prepared to leave London. ‘I feared he might literally go mad,’ Page wrote to Wilson after seeing him. ‘He is of the anti-war party and utterly failed. This interview was one of the most pathetic experiences of my life …’95
In 1914 Europe’s leaders failed it either by deliberately opting for war or by not finding the strength to oppose it. Over half a century later a young and inexperienced American president faced his own crisis and his own choices. In 1962 when the Soviet Union placed military forces on Cuba, including missiles capable of striking the eastern seaboard of the United States with nuclear warheads, John F. Kennedy was under intense pressure from his own military to take action even at the risk of an all-out war with the Soviet Union. He resisted, partly because he had learned from the previous year’s fiasco of the Bay of Pigs that the military were not always right but also because he had just read The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman’s extraordinary account of how Europe had blundered into the Great War. He choose to open negotiations with the Soviet Union and the world backed away from the brink.
Shock, exhilaration, gloom, resignation: Europeans greeted the coming of the war in many ways. Some found comfort, even inspiration, in the way in which their nations seemed to be as one. Friedrich Meinecke, the great German historian, described it as ‘one of the great moments of my life which suddenly filled my soul with the deepest confidence in our people and the profoundest joy’.96 Henry James, by contrast, wrote in anguish to a friend:
The intense unthinkability of anything so blank and so infamous in an age that we have been living in and taking for our own as if it were of a high refinement of civilisation – in spite of all conscious incongruities; finding it after all carrying this abomination in its blood, finding this to have been what it meant all the while, is like suddenly having to recognise in one’s family circle or group of best friends a band of murderers, swindlers and villains – it’s just such a similar shock.97
Europe’s steps could have gone in other directions but in August 1914 they led it to the end of the path and now destruction faced it.
Epilogue: The War
On 4 August what Theodore Roosevelt called ‘that great black tornado’ broke over Europe.1 Like a sudden summer storm the war caught many by surprise, but there was little attempt, at first, to escape from it. For some Europeans there was relief that the waiting was over, comfort even as their societies pulled together. The European peace movement fell apart along the national lines that had always been there, and across the Continent the socialists joined forces with the middle-and upper-class parties to vote overwhelmingly for war credits. A German socialist felt ‘the terrible tension was resolved … one could, for the first time in almost a quarter-century, join with a full heart, a clean conscience and without a sense of treason in the sweeping, stormy song: “Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles”’.2 Winston Churchill was by no means alone in feeling exhilaration at the drama itself. ‘My darling one’, he wrote to his wife, ‘Everything tends towards catastrophe and collapse. I am interested, geared up and happy. Is it not horrible to be built like that?’3 The majority of Europeans, as far as it is possible to tell, were simply stupefied at the speed and finality with which Europe’s long peace had ended. They accepted the coming of war with resignation and a sense of obligation, persuaded that their nations were the innocent parties under attack from menacing foreign forces.
Although there are many myths about the Great War, in August 1914 the soldiers did indeed tell their families that they would be home for Christmas. At the British Staff College at Camberley where the graduating students waited amidst the usual garden parties, cricket matches and picnics for their orders, word came at last that they were to take up their appointments, most with the British Expeditionary Force that was going to the Continent. The college itself was closed until further notice and its instructors were also given staff posts; the authorities thought there was no need to carry on training more officers for a short war.4 The warnings of experts such as Ivan Bloch and Moltke himself or of pacifists such as Bertha von Suttner and Jean Jaurès that offensives would end in stalemates with neither side strong enough to overcome the other, while societies were drained of their resources, from men to munitions, were forgotten, at least for the time being, as the European powers marched into war. Most people, from those in command to the ordinary citizen, assumed that it would be short, like the Franco-Prussian War, for example, where it took the armies of the German alliance less than two months to force the surrender of France. (That the fighting then dragged on because the French people took up the struggle was another matter.) Financial experts, whether bankers or finance ministers, took it for granted that the war would have to be short: the disruption of trade and the inability of governments to borrow money as the international capital markets dried up would mean that impending bankruptcy would make it impossible for the belligerents to carry on fighting. As Norman Angell, in his Great Illusion, warned, even if Europe was so foolish as to go to war, the resulting economic chaos and domestic misery would rapidly force the warring nations to negotiate a peace. What few realised – although Bloch had – was that Europe’s governments had an untested but great capacity to squeeze resources out of their societies, whether through taxation, managing their economies or freeing up men for the front by using the labour of women, and that Europeans themselves had a stoicism and doggedness which could keep them fighting through the long years to come even as the terrible losses mounted. What is surprising about the Great War is not that European societies and individuals eventually buckled under the strain – and not all did, or not completely – but that Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary endured for so long before they collapsed into revolution or mutiny or despair.
In those first weeks of the war, it looked as though Europe might just be spared its doom. If Germany defeated France quickly, Russia might well decide to make peace in the east and Britain might reconsider its commitment to fight. Even if the French people decided to fight on as they had done in 1870–71, they would in the end be obliged to capitulate. As the German forces poured through Belgium and Luxembourg on their way into northern France, the German war plans appeared to be unfolding as they should. Not quite, however. Belgium’s decision to resist slowed the pace of the German advance. The main fortress at Liège fell on 7 August but twelve more had to be taken one by one. Belgian resistance also meant that Germany had to leave troops behind as it advanced. The German army on the great right wing which was to swoop across the Meuse towards the Channel and then swing south towards Paris and so bring a stunning victory was both weaker and slower than had been planned. On 25 August Moltke, alarmed at the speed of Russia’s advance in the east – with Russian troops overrunning Junker estates and burning the Kaiser’s favourite hunting lodge at Rominten – had ordered two army corps amounting to some 88,000 men to move from the west to East Prussia.5 And the British Expeditionary Force had arrived earlier than expected to reinforce the French.
The German advance slowed and then stopped in the face of Allied resistance. By the start of September the balance was tilting against Germany and the Allies were far from defeat. On 9 September Moltke ordered the German armies in France to withdraw to the north and regroup and two days later he gave a general order for a retreat all along the line. This, although he could not know it at the time, was the end of the Schlieffen Plan and Germany’s chance to defeat France quickly. On 14 September the Kaiser relieved him of his duties on the grounds of health.
The Germans and the Allies each made desperate last attempts to outmanoeuvre the other that autumn. The losses mounted but victory remained elusive. By the end of 1914 265,000 French soldiers were dead and the British had lost 90,000 men. Some German regiments had taken 60 per cent casualties; the German army had lost 80,000 men in the fighting around the Flemish town of Ypres in October alone.6 As winter approached,
the armies on each side dug in expecting to resume their attacks in the spring. Little did they know that the temporary trenches they dug from the Swiss border across the eastern and northern frontiers of France and into Belgium would grow deeper, stronger, and more elaborate and would last until the summer of 1918.
On the Eastern Front, because the distances were so much greater, the network of trenches never developed to the same extent or grew as impermeable, but again the power of the defence to blunt attacks was all too clearly apparent in the opening months of the war. Austria-Hungary suffered major reverses but Russia proved unable to win a decisive victory. In the first four months of the war Austria-Hungary had suffered a total of nearly a million casualties. Although Germany, contrary to what Schlieffen and his successors had expected, had gone on the attack to defeat two Russian armies in the Battle of Tannenberg, victory on the battlefield did not bring the end of the war. Both Russia and its enemies had the resources and the determination to fight on.
There is a story, which may even be true. Ernest Shackleton, the great polar explorer, set off for the Antarctic in the autumn of 1914. When he finally made his way back to the whaling station on South Georgia Island in spring of 1916 he reportedly asked who had won the European war and was amazed to be told that it was still going on. Industries, national wealth, labour, science, technology, even the arts had all been harnessed to the war effort. Europe’s progress, which it had celebrated so proudly at the Paris Exposition of 1900, had enabled it to perfect the means to mobilise its great resources in order to destroy itself.
The War that Ended Peace Page 75