August [1914]

by Mark Rowe

  He knew by then that he would be on leave from July 26, and in the Tyrol ‘in little over a week’; only his holiday seemed cursed. His relief at the governor’s office missed a train, and his relief at Berber came down with diphtheria at home. On July 26 he wrote to her that he had been ‘buried under papers and people’ at Berber. He made a rare comment on current affairs:

  The Buckingham Palace show seems to have ended in smoke - and it almost looks as if we might only be saved from civil war by an European one - anyway I don’t believe Asquith and Co will dare force it to a fight in Ulster - I don’t see why the King shouldn’t make them dissolve.

  Frank Balfour - a nephew of the former Unionist prime minister Arthur Balfour - had political work of his own, before he could begin his leave. He had to go 150 miles down the river, pick up camels, and trek back, on the way meeting the local sheikhs and kings. In a letter dated July 28 he told of a perilous and primitive crossing of the Nile. A native, Osman, whose father the British had shot for shooting a colonel in 1885, ‘and the local charon’ - meaning a ferryman, Balfour showing off his classical Greek - paddled with two sticks, ‘to the end of which were bound bits of old sugar boxes’. Balfour, in the bows of the boat, having taken his shoes off in case he had to swim, ‘bailed for dear life’.

  Back on land, a sandstorm blew. Balfour ate what dinner he could in under a blanket hung on the side of a native bedstead; he tied his head in a towel,

  and pretended to go to sleep - after about an hour of that when I was on the verge of being buried alive, Osman came and said there was a house near by - they dug me out and we staggered to it. At least ten men left it as I arrived and they had a fire in the middle of the room for cooking. Further description of the atmosphere is unnecessary - it was better than the sand though, and I slept the sleep of the just till dawn.

  August came as Balfour rode on camels back to Berber. Despite the ‘desperate’ summer heat of midday, when men had to halt, recent rain meant mud even in sandy country, ‘and a camel in mud is the most despicable of God’s creatures’, Balfour reported.

  VII

  The collapse of that Buckingham Palace conference left ‘the country and the Empire with the greatest danger they have known in the history of living man’, the Times wrote rather dramatically on Saturday July 25. Only then did the newspaper turn from Ireland to what it called ‘Europe and the crisis’. In the last 36 hours, it said, ‘a grave crisis’ had arisen, between Austria-Hungary, and Servia, which the Times summed up, as only it could, as ‘a small and excitable Balkan kingdom’. It seemed to the Times even more of a crisis than the ones of 1908-9 (when Austria took over Bosnia, which neighbouring Servia resented) and 1912-13 (when much of the Balkans went to war with Turkey, or each other). The ‘conflagration’, as the Times delicately put it, might catch all the ‘Great Powers’. Most likely to start a war this time was Austria-Hungary, which seemed set on breaking Servia, before Servia broke it. Given this sniff of a war, some reporters would do anything to follow the story - because they had to if they wanted to stay in the job, and because they wanted to.

  The war correspondent E Ashmead Bartlett, for instance, left London on the Sunday, July 26, under orders to cover the Austrian Army. He took the train, running as normal, down the Rhineland to Frankfurt. Germans he spoke to laughed at the idea of European war. Inside Austria, however, he found the railways disorganised. At Vienna he found he would be at least five days behind the armies, and the authorities would not give a time for warcos to leave. Bartlett decided on Monday to try to join the Servian army, at Nish, ‘where I knew I would be welcome, having made the campaign against Bulgaria with the Servians in the previous year’. The Austrians, obviously, would not let him pass into Servia. He would have to take the long way round, first on the 4.50pm to Budapest, crowded with ‘Roumanians, Servians, Bulgarians, Russians, and a conglomeration of Levantines, all seeking to regain their own homes before communication entirely broke down’. If it ever struck Bartlett there was no point heading for a battlefield, if he had no way to tell anyone his news, it did not stop him. The urge of the true reporter, as ever, was to witness - such as Austrian officers leaving for their regiments at the front, and the ladies of Vienna weeping for their husbands. What the newspapers did with his writing, or whether his despatches even reached home, he would worry about later.

  Troop trains blocked the line. The travellers reached Budapest at 10pm. A train was leaving almost at once for Brasso, then on the frontier of ‘Roumania’, now Brasov in the middle of that country. Bartlett, and his baggage, made it - but only as far as a corridor. He had not seen a train so packed since ‘the flight of the entire population of Thrace after the rout of Lule Burgas’, he reminisced. ‘The guard blew his whistle, and we moved slowly out whilst a despairing scream arose from hundreds left behind.’ Bartlett was taking himself hundreds of miles out of his way into one of the most backward parts of Europe. After a sleepless night the train crossed Hungary, stopping at every station, on the Wednesday, July 29. Men had to set off for their regiment as they had been dressed when given the slip of paper of mobilisation: peasants in their smocks, small farmers in riding breeches and bowler hat; clerks with pens behind their ears. All ‘to fight for a cause which not one in ten understood and in which not one in a hundred was really interested ...’ Bartlett raged. “They had ceased to be human beings in the eyes of the Government; they were now so many living creatures capable of bearing arms, mere numbers to be counted and killed like sheep, so that Austrian statesmen could boast that their country could put 1,600,000 men in the field.” Most of the called-up men looked surprised, not anguished, Bartlett reported. “Such is human nature - nothing appeals to the mass of mankind so much as excitement and a change.” Did Bartlett have enough self-consciousness to think that applied to him, too?

  Bartlett changed at Brasso and arrived at Bucharest at midnight. In the Roumanian capital on the Thursday he bought kit - he had left London without any - and asked around. The government was neutral, its army wanted war with Austria. The people, as the ones who would not have to do any fighting, showed how they felt: “Whenever soldiers marched through the streets they were received with tremendous enthusiasm. At night time in the cafés the officers, who always wear full uniform, stuck large bouquets in their buttonholes, and sang patriotic songs.” At 7pm on the Friday, July 31, Bartlett took the train to Sofia. Bulgarians seemed peaceful, Bartlett noted, though (or because?) their small country of a few million had lost the colossal number of 140,000 men in two wars the previous year. At midnight, after well over 1200 miles and five days of more or less non-stop travel, Bartlett pulled into Sofia. “There was no news of any sort.”

  VIII

  At least Bartlett was looking for news. For every other English man and woman on the Continent - whether there for work, or through marriage; usually for pleasure - a time would come when even the blindest noticed that everyone else was changing. It depended on country, as each - first Austria-Hungary and Servia, then Russia, Germany and France - began mobilising. Few ever holidayed in the Servian capital Belgrade, near to the border with Austria, and shelled on July 28. Few English people went further east than the Tyrol, for the reason raised by Ashmead Bartlett’s thousand-mile journey. If you had only one or two weeks away, you could only take the train as far as, say, Switzerland, Marseilles, Dresden or Vienna, or else you would spend half your holiday en route.

  With so much to see and so little time, the Continental holiday did attract the sort of man who would exert himself half to death, take a month to recover, and for the next ten months look forward to the next holiday: men such as A T Daniel, headmaster of Uttoxeter Grammar School in the Staffordshire market town. As soon as school finished for the summer he went cycling in France, leaving his wife behind. On July 31 he wrote to her - clearly having heard that war was looming across the Continent - that war meant at most a heavier income tax and a fall on the stock exchange; a ‘Maf
eking night’ (when, naturally, England won) and a few exciting pictures in the illustrated papers; something distant and theatrical. “Here, with the merest threat, the poor folk see their crops trampled down, thousands of soldiers passing and a bereavement in every family ...”

  ‘Here’ was the far east of France, only 30 miles from the border with Germany, since France had lost Alsace and Lorraine to Germany after the war of 1870. Ever since, France had wanted to fight Germany again, if only someone else would join their side. Late on August 1, in the dark, Daniel reached Verdun:

  ... and I had some difficulty in passing groups of horses that were being brought in by soldiers. The entrance to the town is through many forts and to be quite sure of my way I asked a soldier if that was the proper entrance to Verdun. He rather gruffly told me it was but seemed suspicious. After some trouble I found this hotel and went to bed but did not get five minutes’ sleep. The mobilisation had at last begun and all night long groups of reservists came marching up the stony street singing the Marseillaise with stirring fervour.

  Daniel doubted if anyone slept in Verdun that night, because ‘nearly every ten minutes heavy motor trolleys of ammunition and other warlike gear came rumbling past over the uneven pavement’.

  Chapter 6

  The Island Club

  For some time before the war broke out a belief had been gradually extending and strengthening that modern warfare of any magnitude between the Great Powers was now impossible, in view of economic interdependence among the nations.

  The History of the Great European War: Its Causes and Effects, by W Stanley Macbean Knight (September 1914)

  I

  You could soon see why, within a week, most of the countries on the Continent went to war with each other. Russia was sticking up for Servia, and above all for itself, looking for land from the faltering Turkish Empire. Germany felt it had to stand by its ally, Austria-Hungary. As it had invaded so many neighbours lately and taken land off them, Germany could easily feel ringed by enemies.

  England was an island; which was not the same as saying England had nothing in common with the Continent. Northern France looked much like southern England; the Low Countries, much like the flat eastern counties of England. England had traded with neighbours, and neighbours of neighbours, since before recorded history. Nineteen-fourteen marked 200 years since the first English king of the house of Hanover, the German-speaking George I. For the romantics who still wished for the House of Stuart, some newspapers noted that the rightful ruler was another German - Queen Marie Thérèse of Bohemia, married to Prince Ludwig of Bavaria, who became king of Bavaria in November 1913, in place of the quaintly titled ‘Mad Otto’. She, reportedly, did not wish to be Queen of England.

  Royalty spread family webs across the continent. The German Kaiser Wilhelm II was a grandson of Queen Victoria, the same as the English King George V. The Austrian Franz Ferdinand and his wife had visited England in autumn 1913; they hosted the kaiser a month before their deaths. A German torpedo boat gave a tow as far as the north German island of Borkum to the kaiser’s boat, Meteor; and to Captain Sycamore, a yachtsman from Brightlingsea, Essex, on his way from Denmark to Cowes for the annual ‘week’. A telegram from Berlin on July 27 ordered the Meteor to Cowes, only for headwinds to keep it in port. “I did not believe the German emperor himself expected war with England,” Sycamore told East Anglian newspapers. Even if the captain and the newspapers each puffed up the story, it showed at least the Europe-wide calendar that the cultured and rich lived by - boat-owners, music-lovers, businessmen.

  The rulers of Europe could still clash, despite their shared interests, destinations and backgrounds, just as members of a family could. Yet it’s striking how many middling people, not only the idle rich, had dealings with countries that turned out to be enemies or allies. While Fabians were bathing in the Lakes, Labour politicians were talking with Jaures and their continental equivalents at a conference in Brussels. Bishops were in conference at Constance. English football teams were on tour, and old players were coaching continental clubs. Bretons toured England as sellers of onions, Frenchmen worked in London as cooks, Germans around the country as waiters and pork butchers, Italians as ice-cream makers, Hungarians as violinists. Adventurous young people then, as now, used a musical or other paying talent to see the world; or they gave language lessons to the studious, such as Clifford Gothard. He went to Hamburg in 1911, to learn German, as the language of engineering. Germany even touched William Swift in the village of Churchdown. Cropping up in his diary in the summer of 1914 is a Mr Walker, whose daughter Florence Browne was in a lunatic asylum in Surrey and whose son-in-law had placed a ‘little boy’, presumably a grandson, in a ‘creche infant asylum’ in Munich. In mid-July Mr Walker was planning to take free passage to Hamburg with a ‘sea captain of Mr W’s acquaintance’ and then take the train to Munich to carry off the boy. ‘Seems an awkward business’, Swift noted.

  The English, then, showed themselves as keen as the French or Germans to use other countries - keener, maybe, to leave their weather behind. In March 1906 the shipping company owner Richard Holt and his wife stayed at a hotel in Taormina, in Sicily, which Holt described in his journal as ‘not good and very German, but with the best views of Etna’. As that typically English remark about ‘views’ suggests, the English might travel far for the sake of foreign landscapes, but found the going harder with foreigners. That same month Holt stayed at the Amstel Hotel ‘as usual’ in Amsterdam: “The object of my visit was to try to come to terms with the German Australian Co [company] but their representative, Mr Harms, was impossible: ignorant and grasping.”

  Each side could not help being the sum of their past. Germans had sprawled for centuries from the Alps to the Baltic, and newly united were still finding their political weight. For centuries England had been without land on the Continent, and had made an empire on other continents out of weakness - never something an Englishman would admit, any more than anyone else. To reach England, or leave it, you had to cross the sea for some hours, days or weeks; maybe hazardous, even impossible, in a storm at any time of year. When Louis Bleriot made history by crossing the English Channel in his monoplane in 1909, England could no longer boast of ‘complete isolation’. Maynard Willoughby Colchester-Wemyss made this point in his monthly letter to the King of Siam in June 1914. “The passage from one country by aeroplane to the other through the air is now a matter of daily occurrence, dirigible balloons can easily make the journey and he would be a rash man who would attempt to limit the possibilities that lie before those engaged in the conquest of the air during the next ten years.” The conqueror of the air might be halfway to conquering England.

  Colchester-Wemyss makes an interesting and unusual source. An informed enough man, he was chairman of Gloucestershire County Council, a magistrate, and lord of the manor of Westbury on Severn. By setting out one topic a month, for his Asian reader, he went into detail that news reports and diaries of the day took for granted. He picked up that parliament, and French and Belgian senators, were talking about a rail tunnel under the Channel. This forced the English to ask what they wanted to do with their neighbours, because whereas flying machines were at the mercy of the weather as much as ships, trains would not be. Colchester-Wemyss wrote: “Now of course very large steamers pass across several times in the day, some of them specially constructed to reduce to a minimum the miseries of sea sickness and moving so fast across the Channel that much time would not be gained over a train travelling through a tunnel under the sea.” Even the supporters of a tunnel suggested a dip in it, so that it could be easily flooded; or exploded. You could argue, a tunnel could save England; if England lost control of the sea, and France stayed friendly, England could import the food she needed. “But could we assume France friendly always?” Colchester-Wemyss asked. “No, whatever the commercial advantages ... we must always remember that each generation is in turn trustee only of the heritage o
f England and has no right to take any steps which might deprive England of an incalculable advantage ...”, namely the advantage of being an island, making it much harder for a neighbour to invade. In isolated safety, England could mind its own business or poke its nose into other people’s.

  II

  Geography worked both ways. Being an island made it harder for Britain to fight anyone on land; as the Continental countries knew well. Britain made much of its navy, to hold its empire together and to defend the seas - its borders. Its volunteer armies policed the empire and were in any case a fraction of the conscript armies of France, Germany, Russia, even Austria-Hungary. If Britain had wanted a war with anyone on the Continent, it would have built a larger army; it would have joined in more often in more of Europe’s nineteenth-century wars. Peace for itself and the rest of Europe suited Britain; but as one power after another mobilised for war, would anyone listen? ‘Europe ablaze’, said the Lincolnshire Echo on Monday July 27. “War is not yet declared and a faint hope still persists that it may be avoided ... bellicose enthusiasm prevails in Vienna, Berlin and Budapest ....”

  The next day, the Echo said: “Nobody wants war which can only prove disastrous to all the nations of Europe but then wars are never precipitated, as far as civilised countries are concerned at any rate, through the sheer wanton lust for battle. More often than not they arise through comparatively trivial causes. It can only be hoped that statesmanship will be equal to averting a catastrophe unprecedented in the annals of history ...” The Echo was at best half right. Somebody, plainly, wanted war; Austria-Hungary started it. The Echo in fact managed as neatly as anyone at the time to sum up the chain: if Russia, ‘as head of the Slav nations’ took matters to extremes, Germany would ‘enter the field’ as Austria’s ally. “And France will carry out her obligation by supporting Russia.” Were the ‘trivial causes’ worth a ‘catastrophe’, as the Echo - accurately as it turned out - put it? Three of the four rulers of those countries lost the war: the German kaiser had to leave his country, the Austrian empire split into seven, the Russian Czar Nicholas II was murdered. So much for their statesmanship. Why would they not listen to Britain? Lloyd George in his war memoirs came down on the Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey (by then dead) for his impartial but ‘weak and uncompelling appeals to the raging nations of Europe to keep the peace’. Even Lloyd George sounded as if he believed stronger British appeals would have been compelling. If the British were telling foreigners - from the Irish outward - what was best for the British was best for them, wouldn’t foreigners merely resent it as British hypocrisy, even if the British had a point? In any case, surely the time to appeal for peace was before any ‘raging’? Foreign emperors, the same as Britain’s leaders, did not listen to many people in their own country, let alone anybody else’s.