Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

by Max Hastings

  Next day, the War Council authorised the movement to France of a BEF consisting of one cavalry and four infantry divisions. Two infantry form-ations – the balance of the army available for immediate deployment – were temporarily held back for home defence, which included suppression of potential civil disorder among the disaffected working class. In consequence, the BEF’s strength would initially be dwarfed by that of France, and even of Belgium. Nonetheless, this represented the government’s most important strategic decision of the war. Given the instinctive insularity of most British politicians as well as citizens, the inevitability of the country joining the continental land struggle should never be assumed.

  Command of the BEF was given, as expected, to French, a sixty-one-year-old cavalryman of Irish lineage thought to have distinguished himself in the Boer War. He had been messily involved in the ‘Curragh Mutiny’ a few months earlier, during which he resigned as Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Though reinstated, he himself feared his career at an end. The Liberal government and many society wives found Sir John sympathetic, but his qualifications for high command were meagre. A man of strong prejudices but limited intellect, he had never commanded large forces. He spoke scarcely a word of French, though on the continent he would have to work closely with Britain’s key ally. Haig wrote on 11 August: ‘I know that French is quite unfit for this great Command at a time of crisis in our Nation’s History,’ and most of his peers agreed. Wilson would probably have been named as French’s chief of staff – he was the only British senior soldier who enjoyed the confidence of Joffre – but he had been deeply compromised by support for the Orange cause in the Ulster crisis. He was thus obliged to content himself with the curious title of sub-chief of staff, under Sir Archibald Murray.

  Lloyd George later looked back on the discussions and confusions of those days: ‘it was my first experience of the fallibility of the Military Leaders – the stubborn miscalculation, muddle and lack of co-ordination, which resulted in mowing down the flower of the finest armies ever put in the field by France and England’. These were the words of a politician whom the war made extravagantly bitter against soldiers; the Chancellor’s abuse of Kitchener, especially, was overdone. The best that can be said of French was that his subsequent conduct as a commander-in-chief in the field was little more egregious than that of his counterparts of the other European armies, on both sides.

  Kitchener’s instructions to Sir John, issued on 10 August, included a critical passage, which throughout the weeks that followed the C-in-C interpreted as a mandate for pusillanimity: ‘It must be recognised from the outset that the numerical strength of the British force – and its contingent reinforcements – is strictly limited, and with this consideration kept strictly in view it will be obvious that the greatest care must be exercised towards a minimum of losses and wastage … The high courage and discipline of your troops should, and certainly will, have fair and full opportunity of display during the campaign, but officers may well be reminded that in this – their first – experience of European warfare, a greater measure of caution must be employed than under former conditions of hostilities against an untrained adversary.’ In other words, Kitchener knew that the coming collision would bear no resemblance to the massacres he himself had conducted in the Sudan sixteen years earlier, pitting artillery and Gatling guns against Dervish spearmen.

  Late in 1912, after the second Morocco crisis, a Railways Executive Committee had been established, to plan their management in the event of war. This now swung into action with impressive efficiency, transporting the BEF to its embarkation ports. But even as French’s men were being conveyed across the Channel, shielded by the Royal Navy’s protecting guns, wrangling persisted at the War Office about what they should do when they arrived. Kitchener expected the Germans to advance across the Meuse, and thus favoured a British concentration at Amiens, well back from the Belgian frontier. Henry Wilson expressed impatience about the secretary for war’s attitude, writing after a meeting on the afternoon of 12 August: ‘he still thinks the Germans are coming north of the Meuse in great force, and will swamp us before we concentrate’.

  Kitchener’s judgement was correct – indeed, his strategic assessment showed far more powerful insight than that of France’s general staff – but Wilson was justified in asserting that the foremost objective of British forces must be to frustrate a lightning German triumph – a blitzkrieg, though the word had not then been invented. That sultry day at the War Office, Kitchener gave way to Wilson’s view, and agreed that the BEF should advance towards the frontier fortress city of Maubeuge, on the left of the French army.

  All was now movement, haste. The Illustrated London News carried a photograph of horses being collected and branded at the London stables of the big newsagents’ chain WH Smith. Volunteer drill halls and depots were customarily located in city centres, and thus one mobilised battery of Territorial horse artillery drove through the heart of London’s financial district on its way to war. In Paris a fashionable priest, Abbé Mugnier, sat at a café outside the Gare du Nord hearing the confessions of gilded young men leaving for the front: ‘Quick, Monsieur l’Abbé, my train’s nearly due out!’ A visitor at the mansion of Comte Greffulhe at 8, Rue d’Astorg passed in the courtyard a cluster of young men whom he vaguely recognised – then identified as the Count’s footmen, leaving to join their regiments. Within the echoing, deserted rooms where so many glittering parties had been held, he found the house’s master being served a cold lunch brought in from a restaurant by his butler, a last gesture before this man, too, doffed the Count’s livery to join the garrison of Belfort.

  Along thousands of miles of Europe’s railway tracks, trainloads of soldiers rolled at sedate speed towards their appointed battlefields, proclaiming a somewhat affected dislike for the enemy. Frenchmen chalked the sides of their carriages with such slogans as ‘Mort aux Boches!’; British soldiers favoured ‘Hang the Kaiser!’ German troop trains were decorated with freshly cut green boughs. A Freiburger among the crowd watching his city’s infantry regiment march out on 6 August was impressed by the men’s spotless uniforms and looks of determination. ‘Suddenly a cheer: the machine-gun company came … Then the field kitchens … Then the ration- and pack-wagons; all the horses in new livery, all the wagons, all the equipment in top condition. It was a wonderful sight.’ In Schneidemühl Elfriede Kuhr saw the town’s regiment march to the station sturdily singing ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ amid applauding crowds. ‘Shoulder to shoulder they streamed onto the platform like a grey tidal wave. All the soldiers had long garlands of flowers around their necks or pinned on their breasts. Asters, stocks and roses stuck out of the rifle barrels as if they were intended to shoot flowers at the enemy. The soldiers’ faces were serious. I had expected them to be laughing and exultant.’ The German moral code of the day demanded that young women serving at station charity canteens should be chaperoned by older matrons. A local mayor warned censoriously: ‘Behind the army that bears arms follows the army of love.’

  Little Elfriede cried out to a tall soldier leaning out of a window as the train rolled away from the crowd on the platform, ‘Leb wohl!’ – ‘Farewell!’ The man called back good-naturedly, ‘Auf wiedersehen, Mädel.’ In 312 hours 11,000 trains carried 119,754 officers, 2.1 million men and 600,000 horses across Germany to concentration areas on the frontiers of France, Belgium and Luxembourg. The infantry, cavalry and artillery of Moltke’s seven western armies crossed the Rhine bridges in 560 trains a day, each of fifty-four wagons.

  Deep in Russia, Sergei Kondurashkin watched other long trains laden with troops lurch away northwards, carriage buffers bumping against each other: ‘Women bade them farewell with howling and wailing. Weak with grief, they would collapse on each other’s breasts, [crying out]: “Oh, wasn’t he my good one? Wasn’t he my loved one?”’ As the horses and men of the Sumskoi Hussars jingled and clattered through Moscow, a passer-by blessed the soldiers and presented an icon to the officer commanding the m
achine-gun platoon.

  Lt. Vladimir Littauer’s parents lived in St Petersburg, and he had no time to visit Moscow’s central telephone office, the only place from which he might have placed a call to tell them of his departure. In any event, he wrote later, they would have expressed little emotion. Their attitude was that their son had chosen a military career, and part of his contract was to fight: ‘They would simply have wished me luck and said “God protect you.”’ At the station, many horses resisted boarding the dark-red wooden freight cars. But somehow they were loaded and the regiment set off. As successive trains coasted south-west through Rzhev station, Russia’s soldiers bound for the front glimpsed the figure of a white-haired old sergeant who stiffly saluted their occupants, tears pouring down his cheeks.

  There were other lachrymose moments. Prince Lichnowsky cried ceaselessly on leaving the German embassy in London, while the King of Württemberg sobbed as he watched his regiments departing for the front. Winston Churchill cried when he bade farewell to Henry Wilson, en route for France, causing the staff officer to write: ‘I never liked him so much.’ Though some of the British soldiers who set forth were veterans of colonial wars, others knew astonishingly little of their trade. Among the Irish Guards’ officers was Lt. Lord Castlerosse, who had scarcely done a day’s military training in his life: his commanding officer was merely a family friend who agreed to take the young man to war as a personal favour; the Guards made their own rules of enlistment. A British expatriate returning home from Calais passed in the Channel one of the steamers carrying the BEF southwards. He heard a stentorian voice bellow from among hundreds of men arrayed along its rails, ‘We’ll die hearty!’ The Englishman reflected, with the condescension of his age and kind, ‘What splendid phrases this war is bringing forth from the throats of simple men!’

  At 5 a.m. on 3 August, Charles Stein and his comrades of the Belgian Grenadiers were awakened by bugle calls. Two hours later they paraded, and were issued with field dressings. Their colonel addressed the regiment, telling them that it seemed inevitable Belgium must fight to defend itself. As one man, they cried ‘Vive le Roi! Vive la Belgique! Vive le colonel!’ They marched out past crowds of onlookers, some of whom cheered, but others – especially women – cried.

  Nevertheless, battle still seemed an unfrightening and indeed exciting idea. Jože Cvelbar was a promising young artist, now setting off to serve as an Austrian infantryman. He wrote in confusion to a friend: ‘Only God knows if I shall come back; but if I do, it will be as a man. I understand how men grow up in such circumstances … This year, so many things have overwhelmed me. I have awoken from my dreams. I had been planning to travel to Venice.’ Lt. Charles de Gaulle wrote: ‘Goodbye, my rooms, my books, my familiar objects. How much more intense life does seem, and how the smallest trifles stand out in relief, when perhaps everything may be coming to an end.’ But he professed himself undaunted, as befitted a professional soldier, anticipating the ‘unknown adventure’ which he ‘glorified in advance … without horror’. Capt. Plieux de Diusse was one of those who cherished high and joyful illusions: ‘The front – magic words evoking such glory and heroism which combines every finest and noblest human quality. The banishment of self in the interests of defending the nation … It is with barely concealed excitement that I set off.’

  On Sunday, 16 August a jovial, ebullient party, clad in field grey but glittering with orders and decorations, gathered at the Potsdam station to board eleven trains bearing the Kaiser, Moltke and their staffs to a new advanced headquarters at Coblenz. The chief of staff had said a few days earlier, ‘If there is any justice left in the world, then we must win this war,’ and this was still Moltke’s mood. To the disgust of subordinates, in deference to his frail health his wife Eliza and her maid had been given the Kaiser’s leave to accompany them, providing domestic solace for the man who had done more than any other to bring war about. As the carriages slid out of the station on their overnight journey, the uniformed passengers were impressed by the meticulous arrangements – every compartment named, seats for meals allocated as soon as the train set forth. A few, however, were troubled by the extravagant comfort, delicious food and wine. One wrote wonderingly, ‘Are we real warriors, or sybarites?’

  A ten-year-old boy named Yves Congar, who lived just inside the Franco-German border at Sedan, had written exuberantly on 29 July: ‘I can only think about war. I would like to be a soldier and fight.’ Instead, however, a few days later the first brutal manifestations of the reality of conflict descended upon his community: the vanguard of the German host crossed the frontier into France. Those who occupied Sedan pitilessly appropriated cars, horses, wine, food – even domestic telephones. Yves Congar’s father was among those seized as a hostage for the community’s obedience.

  Gingerly toes dipped in the war’s inaugural trickles of blood. The first dead soldier seen by Florence Farmborough, an Englishwoman serving as a volunteer nurse in Russia, was a little officer’s groom named Vasily who expired in hospital after being kicked in the head by his master’s horse as he left for the front. She crept into the mortuary to look at a body ‘so small and thin and wizened that he looked more like a child than a grown man. His set face was grey-white, never had I seen that strange colour on a face before, and his cheeks had sunken into hollows.’ Sugarlumps had been placed on the man’s eyelids, to keep them closed. Henceforward, across the battlefields of Europe, the dead would be denied such refinements. The overture was ended. The fantasies of the first days of war were now overtaken by terrible realities.

  4

  Disaster on the Drina

  The Western Front would become the cockpit of the war, but it was in the east that the killing began, when Conrad Hötzendorf’s Austro-Hungarian army launched its campaign of vengeance against Serbia. In the early hours of 29 July Belgrade’s citizens were awakened by gunfire from the direction of the riverside frontier fortress of Zemun. A few hours later Austrian shallow-draft naval monitors steamed down the Sava and the Danube and began shelling the Serb capital, hitting some buildings near the cathedral. The streets quickly emptied. There was a thunderous explosion as Serbian soldiers detonated charges which wrecked the river bridge linking their country with the Hapsburg Empire. To the engineers’ satisfaction, the rubble fell on an Austrian gunboat, most of whose crew drowned.

  Crowds of would-be fugitives besieged three trains at Belgrade station, raising steam to depart eastwards. When at last they puffed forth, colourfully attired families and their portable possessions crowded even the carriage roofs. Panic broke out when the first train was bracketed by shells from Austrian warships on the river: ‘The sound of gunfire and explosions of shells mingled with terrible crying and screaming from terrified children and women,’ wrote Sveta Milutinović. ‘Luckily no one was hit, because the chief engineer dashed through the killing zone at full speed and then turned towards Topčider … [Meanwhile in Belgrade,] after the first barrage, many women started dressing up their male children in shawls and skirts, believing that enemy soldiers would not mistreat girls.’

  Serb Foreign Office official Živan Živanović wrote: ‘The war that Austria-Hungary declared on Serbia in July 1914 came as suddenly and unexpectedly as any earthquake, fire or great inundation. Did not Serbia, after the Balkan wars, need peace more than ever?’ Such assertions were disingenuous: Živanonić was brother-in-law to ‘Apis’ – Dragutin Dimitrijević, sponsor of Franz Ferdinand’s assassins. Even if the Serbian people did not deserve the cataclysm which descended upon their country following Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war, those privy to the Black Hand’s machinations could scarcely profess injured innocence. But that, of course, is what they did.

  Serbia’s leaders knew they could not aspire to absolute military victory over Austria. If, however, their army could merely stay in the ring until their mighty allies triumphed on battlefields elsewhere, war would be worth something – indeed, everything. A pan-Slav state, Yugoslavia, could rise from the ashes of the Hap
sburg Empire. In schools, children were taught the geography of former Serb lands – Macedonia, Dalmatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia, Banat and Bachka – as part of their own. The view across the Danube, wrote a sympathetic English visitor, ‘is dear to every Serbian, who looks longingly across at his old empire, and the homes of his compatriots dotted among the tender browns and blues and yellows of the plains’. For such things they were happy to fight: an ancient national poem proclaimed ‘I am a Serbian, born to be a soldier.’

  Meanwhile on the other side, the Austrian ruling caste embarked upon its chosen war oblivious of the gulf between its army’s peacock self-image and the sclerotic reality. Alexander von-Brosch Aarenau was a prominent general who had served for years as an aide to Franz Ferdinand. He wrote exultantly on 29 July: ‘More than America, Austria is a country with boundless potential. It has suddenly passed from humiliation and exhaustion, indolence, frivolity and cowardice, into a mood of such iron calm, dynamism and gravity that one becomes very proud of one’s fatherland and its leaders! How impressive was the ultimatum [to Serbia]; how smoothly … mobilisation followed; and now, to render impossible any gratuitous interference despite the growling of the Russian bear, comes the declaration of war – surprising even to a soldier! Each stroke has followed the last in such a fashion that Bismarck and Moltke [the Elder] together would not have been able to conclude matters in a manner more worthy, energetic, and … skilful. Serbia has been caught totally off guard … and now stumbles along with the Great Powers which are completely stunned, and already realise that any intervention would be useless.’ Arenau’s remarks emphasise the complacency with which Austria’s commanders, Conrad foremost among them, viewed the continental catastrophe. Their mood infected ordinary citizens. Sigmund Freud wrote: ‘Perhaps for the first time in 30 years I feel an Austrian, and would like to try again with this Empire, for which there is so little hope. The mood is excellent everywhere. A valiant initiative has had a liberating effect.’