by Hew Strachan
The most striking evidence of an alternative picture, indeed of genuine enthusiasm, was the rush of volunteers to the German colours. Propaganda spoke of at least 1.3 million voluntary enlistments by mid-August: in reality 260,672 men had attempted to join up by 11 August, and 143,922 had been accepted. By the beginning of 1915 308,000 Germans had enlisted voluntarily. The response was most sluggish in Bavaria and Württemberg. Although the real figure for enlistments was significantly lower than was claimed, it remains high for a country with conscription. Germany did, of course, exempt nearly half of its elegible male population from service in peacetime, and it was in part these men on whom voluntary enlistment depended. Not to go was to court social rejection; to go might be the only alternative to short-term unemployment.135 But many were under-age, the youthful students celebrated in wartime propaganda and post-war literature. The schools returned from their holidays between 3 and 12 August. Teachers were amazed by the ‘self-sacrificing love of the fatherland’ shown by pupils they had come to see as materialistic and peace-loving. In all three Berlin schools subject to one annual report the entire top forms, those aged 17 or over, volunteered. The Wandervogel produced disproportionate numbers, and for those rejected on account of their age special ‘youth companies’ were formed.136 Others were of their fathers’ generation, too old to be liable for immediate call-up and too young to have served in 1870. Many of the latter confronted what Paul Plaut, an applied psychologist who gathered evidence at the time, reckoned to be a ‘psychic crisis’: the war shattered the normal tenor of their lives and created a new focus. The positive reaction was to embrace the war. Many of his respondents cited the importance of patriotism, but all of them discounted the phenomenon of war enthusiasm. The most common thread was a sense of duty.137
War enthusiasm in Germany developed during the course of August: it followed the war’s outbreak rather than preceded it. As the enemy took shape, the idea of pure defence on which the war’s immediate acceptance was grounded was moderated. The aims of the war gained in definition, and included objectives which could be defined as offensive and even annexationist.
The sense that the war was a new departure for Germany internally now became common currency for both right and left. Johann Plenge, writing in 1915, said that if there were to be a public festival to commemorate the war, it should be the celebration of mobilization of 2 August—’the celebration of inner victory’. Thomas Mann described this triumph in paradoxes in November 1914, speaking of ‘the brotherly co-operation of social democracy and military authority’, and citing a radical writer to the effect that ‘under the military dictatorship Germany has become free’.138
The SPD was less cynical with regard to such contrivances than might have been expected. Ludwig Frank, who had lobbied for his party’s support for war credits, wrote to a lady friend on 23 August, ‘I am happy: it is not difficult to let blood flow for the fatherland, and to surround it with romanticism and heroism.’139 Frank, a Jew as well as a socialist, was killed in action on 3 September, one of only two Reichstag deputies to fall in the war.
Socialists of middle-class backgrounds may have been more responsive to the opportunity which the war presented for reintegration in German society. But during August the working classes became increasingly proud of their own reaction to the hostilities. Reports of victories began with the (premature) news of the fall of Liège on 7 August; the battles of the frontiers after 20 August produced a sequence of celebrations that climaxed on 2 September, the anniversary of Sedan. Flags, hitherto rarely flown in Germany, and associated in any case with the monarchy, appeared in growing profusion in working-class areas. Deutschland über alles gained in popularity, as did evangelical hymns linking Protestantism with nationality.140 By late August the police in Berlin reported that, despite the worries about unemployment, the mood of the workers was good.141
Feelings in France evolved in not dissimilar ways. Boarding a train in St Etienne on 28 July, Daniel Halévy had watched a young officer taking leave of his parents: he had seen expressions such as theirs only in cemeteries, at gravesides. Regular soldiers were being deployed on the frontiers, but Halévy’s own hopes of peace only evaporated on 30 and 31 July, the days of waiting, which he described as ‘like one endless evening’.142 He called 1 August the end of hope. On the same day Le Temps said the mood in Paris was serious but not sad. Patriotic crowds, mostly of young men and numbered in hundreds rather than thousands, formed in the city’s streets that evening.143 Halévy arrived in the capital on the following day. He observed a man in tears, supported by his friend, a sergeant, on the Pont-Neuf. He described Paris as a scene from the Bible, but of a superhuman Bible which had never been committed to paper: ‘this city of three million inhabitants had received a death blow.’ He acknowledged the mood of resignation, but saw also despair.144 Monsignor Alfred Baudrillart, the rector of the Institute Catholique in Paris, who arrived in the city on the same day, noticed the role that drink had in evoking overt enthusiasm. His verdict on the underlying mood reflected a more fixed resolve: an acceptance of the inevitable and a determination not to give in.145
France differed from Germany in being less industrialized, with fewer large regional cities. Thus, small rural communities were even less touched by the speculation of the press. In the Languedoc under half the population read the newspapers, and much of what it did read was concerned with local reporting.146 When the church bells rang out late on the afternoon of 1 August the peasants were working in the fields, bringing in the harvest. Many assumed that there was a fire. They were put right by the local gendarme or the notice which he had posted—not by the press. As the realization broke, the strongest emotions were shock and consternation. In the villages of the Isère, according to the reports of the local authorities, only 5 per cent of people greeted the war with enthusiasm. This figure rose to 31 per cent in the towns of Grenoble and Vienne. But the key point was that, as in Paris, the general mood was one of resolution.147 An analysis of six different rural departments suggests that 16 per cent of people received the news of mobilization with favour, 23 per cent with sang froid, and 61 per cent with reserve.148 This may not have been the enthusiasm of legend, but nor was it rejection.
The French army had anticipated that 13 per cent of those mobilized would fail to appear. In the event 1.5 per cent were classed as deserters, and many of those proved to be vagrants, mentally deficient, or Bretons who could not read French. The numbers of genuine defaulters—perhaps 1,600 in all—were so few as to make generalizations fraught. Anti-militarism was not a significant factor; religion may have been, as Catholics in particular were alienated by the anticlericalism of the Third Republic, several to the point of seeking out missions overseas.149
Many reservists left for the front immediately. But for others there was more time to come to terms with what was happening. Women were vital in helping men accept their obligations. The search for mutual reassurance drew communities together.150 Even more important was the mood in the barracks themselves. Soldiers had been more aware of the preceding tension, and greeted the war with both relief and optimism: they found the sadness of civilians somewhat embarrassing. It was their positive outlook which swept up the more reluctant reservists.151 By the time of departure enthusiasm was more in evidence: only 20 per cent now manifested reserve, whereas 30 per cent showed sang froid, and 50 per cent favour.152 Etienne Tanty’s company marched off in the early evening of 8 August, and most of his comrades used the afternoon to get drunk. By the time they fell in, two-thirds of them did not know where they were; they could not stand up straight and threw everything into chaos as they struggled to find their equipment. Maurice Maréchal, the cellist, left Rouen at 7 a.m. on the following morning, too early to satiate his anxiety with alcohol. His inner fear competed with the pride generated by the popular acclaim.153 As units marched off to the strains of the Marseillaise and the Chant du départ, tricolours waving over their heads and flowers falling at their feet, public and private
feeelings were fused. Families who said farewell to their fathers, husbands, and sons were sustained by the sharing of the experience and by a sense of fellowship.
These public displays gave substance to the union sacrée, helping to transform what was initially a formula for national defence, a response to a temporary crisis and a term little used by newspapers, into a more sustained effort to put national divisions to one side. The union sacrée could not draw on France’s immediate past: deeply divided by the Dreyfus affair, it nurtured at least two different conceptions of society, one libertarian and egalitarian, and the other hierarchical and authoritarian, the most potent manifestation of this division being the clash between republicanism and clericalism. Baudrillart was abused at the Gare St Lazare and in the street on 2 and 3 August. As August wore on he encountered more tolerance. The government itself, through its prefects and mayors, deliberately promoted the union sacrée at the local level. On public occasions teacher and priest—the representatives of the republic and of Rome—joined together on the same platform for the sake of France. The underlying tensions were not removed, but all sides recognized that the corollary of a war of national defence was a sustained effort to generate national unity: ‘it is vital’, wrote Baudrillart in his diary on 29 September, ‘not to do anything to destroy a union which is so precarious.’154
In Austria-Hungary the army expected one in ten of those called up not to appear.155 On the whole its fears proved unfounded. Some inducement was provided by the fact that mobilization orders were issued in the native tongues of the reservists. In the Austrian lands problems were greatest in Croatia and Slovenia, where between 600 and 700 men deserted. But figures were lower in the Italian-speaking areas of Tyrol and the Adriatic, and in Bohemia fell to only nine. Foreigners proved anxious to demonstrate their loyalty and enlisted voluntarily in large numbers. In Hungary the Magyars used the excuse of mobilization to arrest large numbers of non-Magyars on the basis of a secret list and on the grounds of suspicion alone.156 The immediate effects were less damaging than might have been expected. Romanian peasants in Hungary responded without enthusiasm, but they nonetheless arrived at the depots earlier and in greater numbers than anticipated.157 In Bosnia anti-Serb excesses in the aftermath of the Sarajevo assassinations cowed dissidents.
However, the opportunity to stress the solidarity of the state was not seized. The Reichsrat was not recalled, and the political parties thus evaded any pressure to commit themselves to the defence of the empire in formal terms.158 Much of the evidence of real exuberance in late July derives solely from Vienna. As in other countries, it did not anticipate the war’s outbreak but was a response to it. It therefore rested on the idea of a short, sharp war against Serbia alone, in the hope that it would resolve Austria-Hungary’s internal problems. As the Balkan conflict gave way to a general European war, and as Austria-Hungary confronted conflict with Russia, the enthusiasm of its people ebbed. In Germany and France popular determination deepened during the course of August; in Austria-Hungary it declined. Freud, having joined in the earlier euphoria, found that ‘gradually a feeling of discomfort set in, as the strictures of the censorship and the exaggeration of the smallest successes’ reminded him of the empire’s underlying weaknesses. ‘The only thing that remains real’, he concluded on 23 August, ‘is the hope that the high ally will hack us out.’159
But a war for Germany was not what the Czechs wanted. Many were at least passive supporters of Russia. The mood in Prague was more reserved than that in Vienna from the outset. Both the 1908 and 1912 mobilizations had triggered mutinies in Czech units. On 22 September two Czech Landwehr battalions left the city displaying their national colours and a red flag with the words ‘we are marching against the Russians and we do not know why’. One of the battalions was disbanded in April 1915 after large-scale desertions to the enemy.160 In Bohemia itself a railway strike and popular demonstrations meant that 121 Czech radicals were arrested within a few months, and eighteen of them condemned to death; by the year’s end almost a thousand would be imprisoned.161
In Russia itself the belief that the war could be popular was an important element in sustaining the resolve both of the Tsar and of the council of ministers. The latter had convinced itself from the outset of the crisis, on 24 July, that a failure to support Serbia would foment the prevailing disorder rather than assuage it. When Nicholas II approved general mobilization his own determination, which—particularly in the light of Durnovo’s telling memorandum—was shaky at best, was sustained by the thought that what he was doing commanded popular support.162 Certainly the press across a wide political spectrum commended his actions, and called for national unity.
Superficially the incidence of strikes during July might have suggested that any opposition to mobilization would be focused in the cities. Workers and reservists in Riga paraded with banners saying ‘Down with the war!’ But in some senses socialist activity had exhausted itself by the time mobilization was declared. The responses among the workers of St Petersburg were resigned, if not enthusiastic. This was the mood caught by Marc Chagall in a series of drawings depicting the troops’ departure for the front.163 Overt opposition was a rural more than an urban phenomenon. Surprise, the initial response as elsewhere, generated first stunned silence and then lamentation. But as the news was assimilated, communities were divided more than united by their reactions. In the wake of the 1905 defeat, military reformers had argued that effectiveness in modern war relied on a sense of nationalism. Two-thirds of pre-war conscripts were literate, and their period in uniform became an opportunity to inculcate a loyalty to Russia. On the other hand, an appeal to national unity, even if endorsed in varying degrees and for divergent reasons by the Duma, meant little to a population whose lives were regulated by regional loyalties. Although long used to the state’s conscription of manpower, the peasants were particularly concerned by the economic dimensions of mobilization. On the one hand were their worries for the provision and sustenance of their families; on the other were the shortages of food and accommodation at the collection and redistribution centres for the troops themselves. Calculations as to the scale of the subsequent disorders vary: thirty-one districts in seventeen provinces were affected on mobilization, and a month later the police reckoned that forty-nine out of 101 provinces and oblasts in European and Asiatic Russia had suffered riots. In Barnaul, the authorities lost control of the city for a time, and over 100 died. In four provinces tens of thousands of reservists were involved, and one report put the numbers of dead and wounded at 505 in European Russia alone. On 13 August Maklakov, the minister of the interior, authorized the provincial governors to suppress any disturbances without mercy.164
In the circumstances, the fact that 96 per cent of those mobilized reported for duty represented a successful outcome. Provincial officials orchestrated patrotic demonstrations as units left for the front. And the mood, even if not as resilient as that of France or Germany, hardened as the weeks passed. The Duma’s resolution to support war credits, however much it embraced even more divergent motives than did the comparable votes in Germany and France, at least betokened a political armistice for the time being. Victories against the Austrians, despite the dire reports from East Prussia, fed these different interpretations of Russianness. Major patriotic demonstrations were reported by the police in October, and in the same month popular culture reflected national feeling through circuses, films, and puppet shows.165
Because of its comparatively underdeveloped economy Russia was less exposed to the currents of pre-war nationalism, but its people went to war nonetheless. Belgium was its mirror image; possessed of an advanced economy, its neutrality prevented it being subject to the full force of pre-war militancy. If surprise was a common response to the outbreak of war, then it reached its greatest intensity in Brussels. As late as 28 July the Catholic press supported Austria-Hungary’s handling of Serbia as though the crisis was still localized. The German ultimatum to Belgium and its rejection produced a r
eaction whose spontaneity and scale amazed the gratified government. Belgians were outraged by the Germans’ implication that their honour could be bought in return for financial compensation. Thus, it was the ultimatum rather than the invasion which produced integration. The king became its focus, appealing to a sense of nationhood and history in terms which were effectively novel in Belgian discourse. Belgium’s socialists cleaved to these notions rather than to the International, and Albert reacted by appointing Emil Vandervelde a minister of state on 4 August. Up to 20,000 volunteers joined the army, most for reasons of patriotism rather than economic necessity, and mostly (as elsewhere) from urban rather than rural areas. As Belgium lost its territory it found an identity.166
It is Britain, however, that provides by far the best illustration of the development from war enthusiasm into fighting power. Britain saw its navy as its prime defence; it had no tradition of conscription, and its small army was drawn to a disproportionate extent from the lower end of the working class. Popular militarism embraced many forms before 1914, but they did not include that of being a regular soldier. The army needed 35,000 recruits each year, and yet only once between 1908 and 1913 did it get more than 30,000. Nor was the Territorial Army, which Haldane had grandly portrayed as the nation in arms, committed to home defence, any more popular: in 1913 it was almost 67,000 men below its establishment of 300,000, and it had a 12.5 per-cent annual wastage rate.167