To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  Much of this was self-consciously an attack on rationalism. The development of psychoanalysis in the years before the war had emphasized that balancing man’s intellect were his subconscious and his emotions. Sigmund Freud above all had criticized the intellectual tendency to suppress or ignore feelings. But even Freud was unprepared for the emotional force of the war’s outbreak. To his surprise he found that his ‘libido’ was mobilized for Austria-Hungary. The war revealed to him how thin was the veneer of culture: he was appalled to discover that civilized states committed horrors and barbarities against each other which they would never have condoned in their own citizens. He could only conclude that many men observed social norms in defiance of their true natures: ‘we are misled’, he wrote in the spring of 1915, ‘into regarding men as “better” than they actually are.’84

  In emphasizing the need to integrate both intellect and emotion by being more aware of the latter, psychoanalysis legitimized a preoccupation with the mystic, the inexplicable. Something of what psychoanalysis was saying had been anticipated by Romanticism, by its emphasis on the worth of the individual and his own creativity, and Nietszche could be employed as a link between the two. By forsaking his desk for action, the writer gathered those experiences which were essential to his creativity. Thus, the seemingly irrational search for danger was rendered rational as a means for emotional and intellectual self-discovery.

  Although the willingness to wage war for many was, therefore, a personal test rather than a national one, the response of the intellectuals went on to emphasize the collective social good which would follow from war’s conduct. Indeed, for men whose inclinations and callings tended to render them solitary, not the least of war’s attractions was its effect in integrating their individual aspirations with those of society as a whole. The idea that the destructive effects of war were beneficial, that war cleansed and renewed society, was one familiar to social Darwinists. Both they and the younger generation of intellectuals were ready to welcome war as driving out decadence: ‘Today’s man’, Dezso Kosztolanyi wrote on 4 October 1914,’— grown up in a hothouse, pale and sipping tea—greets this healthy brutality enthusiastically. Let the storm come and sweep out our salons.’85 Jettisoned were the bourgeois values of the commercial classes: war trampled on their financial calculations, and in clothing their sons in uniform rendered null the niceties of social rank. The individual found fulfilment, not in pursuit of personal profit, but in the altruism and hardness of military service. The causes of war lay, at least indirectly, in the softness and self-indulgence of pre–1914 Europe. ‘This is not a war against an external enemy’ opined the painter Franz Marc, ‘it is a European civil war, a war against the inner invisible enemy of the European spirit.’86 Brooke’s famous description of recruits remains remarkably evocative of the mood—‘as swimmers with cleanness leaping, glad from a world grown old and cold and weary’.

  Less pleasing to the elder statesmen of social Darwinism was the reversal of the traditional hierarchy implicit in this rejection of bourgeois society. Frontline service was a young man’s activity; the middle-aged struggled to be accepted by the army, and in doing so denied the seniority and maturity of their years in pursuit of the fashion for youth. War enthusiasm was an assertion of the values of the younger generation against those of the older. Max Scheler, the German philosopher, declared that the war had rendered the nostrums of the older generation passé, while for their successors it was neither a nightmare nor a burden but ‘an almost metapysical awakening from the empty existence of a leaden sleep’.87 In France in 1913 Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde, under the pseudonym of ‘Agathon’, had published a study of the student generation of 1912: they had depicted their calling to action, to absolutes, to things of the spirit, to order and hierarchy, and their turning away from introspection and relativism.88 The French generation of 1914 was thus given an identity that was specifically opposed to that of their republican and anticlerical fathers.

  However, the conflict of ideas was not one simply between generations but also one between different views of the values which wartime society would elevate. For some the liberation from materialism and from bourgeois nostrums was to be accomplished by a return to a pastoral idyll. Western Europe had still not come to terms with its increasingly urban existence; G. D. H. Cole, Maurice Barrés,  mile Durkheim, Max Weber—all saw city life, with its destruction of community and its erosion of family, as undermining social cohesion. The war, by calling men to a life that demanded physical fitness, to a career spent outside, that tested the individual against the natural elements as much as against the enemy, was consonant with a return to nature. It is striking that writers from Britain, the country that had been most industrialized for longer, were the most expressive of this aspect of war enthusiasm. Officers in autumn 1914 proved acute observers of the countryside through which they were passing, and readily fell back on the terminology and analogies of field sports. B. F. Cummings, whose multiple sclerosis prevented any such escape, used more turbulent imagery in his diary on 30 June 1914: ‘Civilization and top hats bore me. My own life is like a tame rabbit’s. If only I had a long tail to flash it in feline rage! I would return to Nature—I could almost return to Chaos.’89

  Cummings’s threat of violence provides a bridge to a very different vision of society, and one embraced particularly by artists. The avant-garde had already declared war on the existing order before July 1914. The opening manifesto of the Futurists, published in 1909, began with the lines: ‘There is no more beauty except in strife.’ In this and subsequent declamations the Futurists replaced romanticism with industrialism. ‘Let’s kill the moonlight,’ F. T. Marinetti announced; ‘the first lines of the great Futurist aesthetic’ lay in the locomotive, the factory, the products of heavy industry; ‘a roaring motor car, which seems to run on shrapnel, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace’.90 Marinetti lived out his elevation of violence by going to Tripoli in 1911, to the Balkans in 1912, and joining the Italian army in 1915. Although Marinetti claimed that Futurism was an Italian movement, he had published the first manifesto in Paris, and its appeals were to find echoes in German Expressionism and in British Vorticism.

  The Vorticists’ publication Blast, the first number of which was published on 20 June 1914, and whose prime movers were Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, emphasized the unconscious, the ‘crude energy’ of the primitive world, but derived from Futurism its use of machines for subject-matter, and its belief that war’s violence and destruction would be liberating influences. ‘Killing somebody’, Wyndham Lewis wrote, ‘must be the greatest pleasure in existence: either like killing yourself without being interfered with by the instinct of self-preservation—or exterminating the instinct of self-preservation itself.’91

  The paradox was that war, with its bringing of death, was the end of dead life: for Rilke war was ‘a deadly enlivening’.92 It meant the end of art for art’s sake. ‘The fight over words and programmes is over,’ declared Julius Meier-Graefe in the opening issue of an avant-garde publication Kriegszeit, on 31 August 1914; ‘What we were missing was meaning—and that brothers, the times now give us . . . The war has given us unity. All parties are agreed on the goal. May art follow!’93 Thomas Mann had struggled to come to terms with the war; for all his anticipations of catastrophe, he had not reckoned with his imaginings becoming reality. But by September he had identified with the German nation and its people, and in October his ‘Thoughts on the war’ likened the artist to the soldier: both live life with intensity and thrive on danger. The artist—the soldier in the artist—should, he declared, thank God for the collapse of a peaceful world; victory was immaterial; war was a moral necessity, both ‘a purging and a liberation’.94 Nor was this determination to put the war to the service of art simply a manifestation of German Kultur. Across the Channel the elder statesmen of literature, painting, and music, including Edmund Gosse and Charles Stanford, made similar points.95

  Too often conscious of th
eir isolation, intellectuals welcomed the opportunity for incorporation. ‘We were no longer what we had been for so long: alone!’, wrote Max Scheler. ‘The gaps which had opened up, breaking contacts between life’s elements—individual, people, nation, world, God—were closed again in an instant.’96 For Scheler, as for his fellow sociologist Georg Simmel, the war united the demands of the day with the direction of ideas. Poetry, philosophy, prayers, and culture were fused. A new form of society was forged.97 Friedrich Meinecke wrote: ‘Every immeasurable division of labour and distinction of talents and interests, which hitherto had threatened to tear apart our common life and to contract our lives as individuals, brought forth in us benedictions.’98

  The Expressionist painter Max Beckmann, who in 1909 anticipated that war would be a force for regeneration and social reunification, found what he was looking for in the opening stages of the campaign in the east (where he was a medical orderly). Exhilarated by the mood of universal enthusiasm, he concluded on 24 September 1914 that ‘I have in this short time lived more than I have done for years’.99

  Most writers, intellectuals, and artists therefore not only embraced the popular enthusiasm for war but actively promoted it. Stefan Zweig revealed that ‘poems poured forth that rhymed Krieg [war] with Sieg [victory] and Not [necessity] with Tod [death]’.100 The satirist Frank Wedekind, the immorality of whose plays (including Pandora’s Box) had roused official disapproval, delivered a speech in the Munich playhouse on 18 September 1914 vaunting ‘the loyal brotherhood of arms’, the unity of Germany, social democracy, and the imperial high command.101 Those who opposed the war, who resisted the nationalization of culture, the German condemnation of Shakespeare, or the British rejection of Goethe, were few, and most even of them were temporarily carried away by the exuberance of the moment.

  POPULAR RESPONSES

  Historians can too easily fall victim to the testimony of their own kind. The written word, particularly when conveyed with power and elegance, provides accessible and seductive evidence. The temptation is all the greater in relation to 1914, when intellectuals themselves wished to imagine that their ideas shaped the popular mood. Because the young, the students, the educated, the articulate—in sum, Agathon’s subject-matter—staged demonstrations supporting the war, the phenomenon of war enthusiasm can become overblown, with the result that the high-falutin ideas of a minority are projected on to the majority.

  This caveat is important. Genuine enthusiasm was more frequent in towns and among white-collar workers. The largest single occupational group in most armies was the peasantry, and the reactions of agricultural communities to mobilization were less positive. These differences can be exaggerated. Compulsory primary education meant that the populations of at least Britain, France, and Germany, rural as much as urban, were broadly speaking literate. Words were a way of giving the emotions of the individual a common currency. The ‘over-production’ (to use the description of one contemporary commentator) of diaries, letters, and poetry in 1914 is characterized by a shared vocabulary, an approved style, which is itself evidence of the ability of language to pervade, externalize, and universalize the emotions which war generated.102

  Education was also a potent means of creating national identity. Germany’s victory in the Franco-Prussian War was widely interpreted as a triumph of more than battlefield prowess. It was also seen as a reward for modernization, in which educational excellence had played a major part. The effect was not only to promote reform in schools but also to nationalize the curriculum. ‘I seek soldiers,’ the Kaiser told the Berlin schools conference in 1890; ‘we should educate young Germans, and not young Greeks and Romans.’103 Between 1870 and 1914 the pedagogues of Europe began to give instruction in their own national histories as well as in those of the ancient world.

  For France, its recent past—a mixture of revolutions and defeats—was the stuff of continuing political debate. In 1880 the Third Republic signalled its determination to inculcate patriotism through the conceptual legacy of the Revolution. Unable to identify a recent French victory that was the product of a politically safe regime, it settled on 14 July and the storming of the Bastille as an annual celebration of nationhood. An example of domestic strife, in which the army had turned against the government, was not the happiest of precedents. Furthermore, the use of the classroom for the dissemination of the same message aroused the ire of the monarchical and clerical right. But with the passage of time the Bastille Day parade became a vehicle for the integration of the army with the republic. Soldiers found that their values of discipline, order, and devotion to duty were trumpeted as models for emulation by the citizens of the republic. In 1912 the veterans of the Franco-Prussian War, hitherto neglected as the servants of an imperial regime and the victims of defeat, were invited by Poincaré to take part in the 14 July festivities. Ernest Lavisse set about defusing the divisiveness of France’s recent past by constructing a national history which integrated the legacies of both royal and republican regimes. On 28 June 1914 France celebrated the 700th anniversary of the battle of Bouvines.104

  Other states had less difficulty in finding victories which could become the focus of national commemoration. In 1912 Russia honoured the centenary of Napoleon’s defeat with éclat.105 In Germany the anniversary of Sedan could combine the army’s homage to the veterans of 1870 with its celebration of the Reich’s foundation. But after the twenty-fifth anniversary in 1895, Sedan Day declined in significance, and in 1913 was superseded by the unveiling of the massive memorial on the battlefield of Leipzig, significant less for the defeat of Napoleon and more for its part in the evolution of a populist German nationalism. War, argued the most politicized figure in German historical writing, Heinrich von Treitschke, was the key to the creation of the state, and the state was what gave society its shape.106

  Songs, speeches, sermons, parades, and public festivals—these were the means by which words, and the ideas behind them, permeated the consciousness of the illiterate. But it was the printed word which in 1914 possessed a power which it had never had before, and of which the cinema, the radio, and the television would deprive it in the future. The proliferation of schools, which created a market, and the advent of the railway, with its ease of delivery, stimulated the growth of a national press. In Britain Lord Northcliffe’s Daily Mail, which anticipated the war and stoked fears of German militarism, claimed a circulation in 1910 of 900,000.107 The Times, bought by Northcliffe in 1909, followed a similar editorial line, and by reducing its price tripled its circulation early in 1914, and then doubled it again with the outbreak of war.108 In France the leading Paris dailies had national distribution networks. Le Petit Parisien enjoyed a circulation of 1.5 million, and Le Matin and Le Journal 1 million each. Although about 3,000 daily newspapers were published in France, the mass-circulation papers, with their headlines, photographs, and sensationalism, accounted for about 40 per cent of the market. In Germany, by contrast, readerships remained regional or, at best, clearly defined in party and religious terms. Thus, Vorwärts, the SPD’s paper, spoke for the party as a whole, but was only one of ninety-one socialist dailies with a combined readership of 1.5 million. About eighty newspapers were published in greater Berlin, and 4,221—as well as 6,421 periodicals—throughout Germany.109 Russia in 1900 had 125 daily papers; in 1913 it had 856, and those that flourished were overtly nationalistic in tone.110 By 1912 Serbia had 199 newspapers and magazines, and they claimed a total circulation of 50 million copies.111

  In the case of the German press a symptomatic change occurred between the first Moroccan crisis and the events of July 1914. It became increasingly self-referential, with newspapers reporting as news opinions voiced by other publications. Those views were themselves more often the comments of other journalists than of the principal political actors. The press was therefore creating its own reality. The mediation of the newspapers and the gloss which they gave to events themselves helped shape outcomes.

  Although more German papers opposed w
ar than advocated it between 1905 and 1914, significant shifts occurred within that pattern. Less often was war portrayed as an extreme and unique solution to a foreign crisis; hostility to the Entente meant that the nature of the anticipated conflict moved from being a bilateral engagement to a multilateral Weltkrieg. In 1905–6 four major German papers from across the political spectrum advocated peace. In 1911 they had split, both collectively and individually, with the SPD’s Vorwärts opposing war most consistently but even then not continually. By July 1914 the dominant mood was fatalism, a belief that the peaceful conduct of international relations had failed and that war was the sole untested solution. Only 25 per cent of articles published by the four advocated war, but roughly 66 per cent expected that war would be the outcome of the crisis; and although 46 per cent reckoned that the war would be a local Austro-Serb clash, 30 per cent anticipated a major war. Furthermore, these were opinions derived more from the experience of the previous international crises than from the events of July 1914. In the last week, between 26 July and 2 August, an unsurprising 44 per cent of articles regarded war as probable; exactly the same percentage had taken a similar stance from the outset of the crisis, in the week beginning 5 July.112

  At least indirectly, therefore, the societies of Europe imbibed some of the more rarefied thinking about war and nationalism. Furthermore, the campaign for military preparedness was not conducted by the press alone. The significance of the leading German extra-parliamentary groups rose steadily before 1914, and in the latter year the Navy League boasted 331,000 members and 776,000 affiliated members. The claim that these organizations were new in two senses—in that they appealed to the petty bourgeois and that they signalled a form of radical nationalism which ultimately would lead to the Nazis—has been disputed. The combined membership of all these groups, about 1 million in 1914, undoubtedly includes a large measure of double-counting. The Pan-German League, which acted as a sort of holding organization for the others, peaked at 22,000 members in 1901. Moreover, the leadership of the Army League was not petty bourgeois but solidly professional—as well as middle-aged. Its membership rose in step with the agitation for the 1912 and 1913 army bills, and declined thereafter. Nonetheless, such efforts to downplay the significance of the nationalist organizations in Germany neglect the fact that their primary purpose was to mould opinion beyond their own memberships through the instrument of propaganda. Die Flotte, the Navy League’s monthly magazine, had 360,000 readers in 1912, and Die Wehr, the Army League’s equivalent publication, 90,000 in 1913. Further-more, the message of these journals was deeply uncomfortable for traditional conservatism. Increased armaments carried as their corollary tax reform and genuinely universal service. If the membership of the veterans’ organizations, many of whose values stood comparison with those of the extra-parliamentary pressure groups, is added, perhaps 15 per cent of voters were involved, including a large proportion of industrial workers, peasants, and smallholders.113