Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

by Max Hastings

  After the first weeks, when many French factories closed for lack of buyers for their wares, the war created feverish new demands which persisted for four years. In Isère, an iron foundry at Renage found itself working around the clock to fulfil government contracts for 10,000 spades and pickaxes a week. A Grenoble engineering factory employed five hundred men making metal trench shelters. Another works in the city was contracted to produce a thousand 75mm shells a day by Christmas 1914, which became 9,000 by 1918; its workforce swelled from eight hundred to 2,750. A local paper manufactory turned to shell filling, doubling its pre-war workforce. There was huge demand for canvas, explosives, leather, canteens, writing paper and pencils, ammunition components, canned food. Supplying such products enriched industrialists in every belligerent nation.

  Chain letters containing prayers circulated, which recipients were urged to pass on to nine others. Churches in every country reported improved trade, though there was little evidence of increased godliness. War made many genteel people, soldiers and civilians alike, who had never in their lives used obscene language in the presence of others, suddenly find themselves in circumstances which caused them to say ‘fuck’. To the dismay of respectable citizens, actions spoke louder than words. Extra-marital sex became an urgent preoccupation of those facing death or enduring separation. As A.E. Housman put it: ‘I ’listed at home for a lancer/Oh, who would not sleep with the brave?’ In Freiburg, in the first eight months of war venereal-disease figures more than doubled, and court convictions for prostitution soared; the experience of most cities was similar.

  Some civilians, especially academics, strove to keep open lines of communication with their peers in enemy countries: this was thought a civilised gesture, emphasising the universality of European culture. In October 1914 Maynard Keynes sent a letter to Ludwig Wittgenstein via neutral Norway, asking the Austrian about the possibility that he might provide a scholarship for a Cambridge logician after the war. Wittgenstein, who was rich, had earlier shown himself a generous benefactor, but now he was crewing a Vistula picket boat. He reacted crossly to receiving a mere business proposal from an old friend ‘at such a time as this’.

  Premature death became a prevailing theme: in every belligerent nation, people grew accustomed to receiving news of a stream of loved ones and friends killed. Sir Edward Grey wrote to a colleague about his soldier brother Charlie, whose arm had just been amputated – ‘we hope to get him home alive’, as indeed they did – and a nephew badly wounded: ‘It is a load of private grief to carry, but others have grief as heavy and heavier.’ The family of schoolteacher Gertrud Schädla in Verden, near Bremen, found themselves unable to face reading the casualty lists published in newspapers – ‘we do not feel strong enough’. They were dismayed by news of the Marne – ‘we had to retreat a little bit in France’. Then, in October, far worse tidings came: young Ludwig Schädla was among the dead. The family’s letters to him were returned by the army, marked tersely ‘Died 4.9’. Gertrud anguished over his fate: ‘Was it an attack on his regiment, or perhaps a shot while he stood alone on guard on a dark night? So many perish – many, many more of our enemies than of our own. Alack, I feel bad for them all.’

  Two days later, on 12 October, her brother Gottfried’s mail was also sent home, marked ‘wounded, whereabouts unknown’. They learned that he too had died, aged twenty-one, eight days after being admitted to a field hospital near Reims: ‘So we have even lost our youngest, our Sonnenschein – “Sunshine”! Death, you are bitter! Wherewith shall we find solace?’ She sought to console herself with the reflection that her brothers were with God. ‘Lord, keep our beloved boys with you. Their struggle came to an end, they grasped victors’ laurels, and we will not wish them back.’

  Families yearned, often in vain, for crumbs of news about the fate of fallen loved ones. A dead French soldier’s wrist identity tag was customarily dispatched to his next of kin with the laconic words ‘Perished on the field of honour’. This practice was known as ‘receiving the medal’. One woman with five children who gave birth to twins soon after her husband departed for the front ‘received the medal’ the same night. It became fashionable to send out mourning cards, such as one for Léon-Pierre-Marie Challamel, pupil at the seminary of Saint-Sulpice, ‘mort pour la France, le 24 Septembre 1914 au combat de Crécy (Somme) à l’âge de 22 ans’. In Verden, Magdalene Fischer, girlfriend of Ludwig Schädla who had perished in France, visited the town photographer in hopes of finding a last picture of him in uniform. Instead, she found only a group shot in which her young man was scarcely visible. Then she discovered that Ludwig’s company commander, Lt. Gatzenmeyer, was lying wounded in a local hospital. He offered some crumbs of information, true or invented, about her lover’s last days. These were more than many families received.

  Because soldiering had been a familiar peacetime occupation for the sons of the British upper classes, losses in France bore heavily upon them. A 19 September fatal casualty list included the names of such gilded young men as Percy Wyndham, Lord Guernsey, Rivvy Grenfell. Asquith enquired about the latter of Venetia Stanley: ‘Did you ever dance with him?’ She must have done. There was hardly a ‘roll of honour’ published that winter which did not mention names familiar to every former debutante. Whatever else was said about the war, it could not be suggested that the British ruling class was skimping its share of the blood price: sixty members of the aristocracy died in France and Flanders between 23 August and 31 December; thereafter the combat mortality rate among the peerage steadied at six a month. A long succession of men who had achieved celebrity in their own gilded little world now secured brief obituaries. Lionel Tennyson wrote on 14 October: ‘Poor Willy Macneil of the 16th Lancers who used to ride Foolhardy in the Grand National was killed quite close to us here this morning.’

  In every country, schools were conscripted to promote enthusiasm for the struggle. Albert Sarraut, France’s minister of public instruction, wrote in a circular to heads: ‘It is my wish that on the opening day of the term, in every town and every class, the teacher’s very first words should raise up all the hearts to the nation, and … honour the sacred struggle in which our forces are engaged … Every one of our schools has sent soldiers into the line of fire – teachers or pupils – and every one, I know well, already bears the proud grief of its deaths.’ André Gide recoiled from such language: ‘A new rubber stamp is being created, a new conventional psychology of the patriot, without which it is impossible to be respectable. The tone used by the journalists to speak of Germany is nauseating. They are all getting on the bandwagon. Each is afraid of being late, of seeming a less “good Frenchman” than the others.’

  French schools were urged to set pupils such essay subjects as ‘The Regiment Departs’, ‘Letter From an Unknown Big Brother Who is Fighting for Us’, ‘Arrival of a Trainload of Wounded Men’, ‘The Germans Have Killed a Small Boy Aged Seven Whom They Found Playing in a field with a Toy Gun’ and ‘The Germans Have Invaded Your Town – Describe Your Feelings’. Geography, headmasters were told, should be based upon an operational map of the war zones, updated daily. Wounded men who returned to teach were deemed to have a specially useful role to play, though this may not have turned out to be that which the Education Ministry intended. German-language lessons were dropped in favour of English, and in the history syllabus there was a new emphasis on Latin and Greek heroes.

  German Abitur certificate exams posed such questions as ‘If life is a struggle, what are our weapons?’; ‘What motivates every German fit for military service to respond to the Fatherland’s call to arms?’ One Berlin school invited essays on the theme ‘the war as an educational force’. In every nation, children were recruited to conduct street collections of metal that might be forged into munitions. Elfriede Kuhr in Schneidmühl was fascinated by the notion that pots and pans she wrung out of her sceptical family could be transformed into bullets. Elfriede’s grandmother complained crossly that all these school collections would be the ruin of he
r.

  Children’s games became strongly influenced by the war. The English toy firm Britain’s manufactured a wide range of model soldiers of the warring nations. In Hamburg, four-year-old Ingeborg Treplin declared her kiddiecar to be a troop transport. When her mother took all three Treplin girls to Hamburg’s Hermann Tietz department store, they found its floor dominated by a vast toy battlefield, adorned with a fortress, French and German soldiers, burning houses and an aeroplane above. Anna Treplin wrote, ‘the children were awed’. The trade magazine of the toy-manufacturing industry, Deutsche Spielwarenzeitung, sought to claim for its fraternity an important role. Toys, it asserted, were no mere luxury products; rather, they ‘inculcated the progress of the war in children’s minds, instilling national feeling, honesty, and patriotism’.

  Though every nation’s children were wooed into the war effort, the commitment of the British public schools was exceptional. In Death of a Hero, Richard Aldington penned a portrait of a typical product of the system – the sort who officered Kitchener’s New Armies – which was entirely cynical but not wholly unjust:

  He accepted and obeyed every English middle-class prejudice and taboo. What the English middle classes thought and did was right, and what anybody else thought and did was wrong. He was contemptuous of all foreigners. He appeared to have read nothing but Kipling, Jeffrey Farnol, Elinor Glyn, and the daily newspapers. He disapproved of Elinor Glyn as too ‘advanced’. He didn’t care about Shakespeare, had never heard of the Russian ballets, but liked to ‘see a good show’. He thought Chu Chin Chow [a popular musical] was the greatest play ever produced … He thought Americans were a sort of inferior Colonials, regrettably divorced from that finest of all institutions, the British Empire … He was exasperatingly stupid, but he was honest, he was kindly, he was conscientious, he could obey orders and command obedience in others, he took pains to look after his men. He could be implicitly relied upon to lead a hopeless attack, and to maintain a desperate defence to the very end. There were thousands and tens of thousands like him.

  R.C. Sherriff, a wartime officer who later became famous as author of the ‘trench play’ Journey’s End, asserted that public schoolboys led men in France not through military skill, for no such accomplishment was needed, but rather by personal example, ‘from their reserves of patience and good humour and endurance’. Both the virtues and the vices of the English public-school system were conspicuous on the battlefields of 1914, and its standard-bearers at home responded with an orgy of sentimentality which rendered even some patriots queasy. The first teacher killed was Lt. A.J.N Williamson of Highgate, whose passing prompted an editorial in The Times Educational Supplement on 22 September: ‘Everybody recognises the fact that the spirit of discipline and sportsmanship inculcated in our schools is bearing rich and glorious fruit on the stern fields of duty, and everyone knows that many of the most stirring and heroic deeds chronicled in the war redound to the credit of young officers whose schooldays ended but a few months ago.’ The October issue of the Eton College Chronicle commemorated with a poem the death of Lt. A.H. Blacklock of the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, who had doffed his tailcoat only the previous summer:

  At the head of your Highland men,

  Charging the terrible wood,

  With only one thought in your dear old head,

  To die as a soldier should.

  By November 1914 Eton had lost sixty-five of its former pupils, Wellington thirty-eight, Charterhouse and Harrow twenty-one each, Rugby twenty. This toll did nothing to stem martial ardour among such schools’ leavers. Lord Cranborne, heir to the Marquess of Salisbury, invited his two friends Oliver Lyttelton and Arthur Penn to stay at Hatfield, the family palace, until the army was ready to accept their services. They passed much of the time shooting, which prompted laughter about another sort of gunfire they would soon experience. A determination to view the play as a comedy persisted through a later spell in France: when Penn was invalided home after being shot in both legs, he added an entry to his gamebook: ‘Beat – Cour de l’Avoue, Bag – Self.’

  In a sixth-form debate at Westminster, the motion ‘It will be disastrous to the world when Arbitration takes the place of War’ was carried by eleven votes to seven, though interestingly another motion – ‘The Kaiser is responsible for the present War’ – was defeated by ten votes to six. Schoolmasters shepherded their former pupils towards the battlefield with a ruthlessness suggesting that they supposed themselves dispatching a cricket eleven to play in the Great Game. On 2 September Dr A.A. David, headmaster of Rugby, wrote to The Times emphasising the moral benefits of volunteering: ‘here is a splendid opportunity of giving a lead to young men of all classes. Here also is a supreme test of school spirit and character … To parents we would recommend a mother’s advice to a hesitating son … “My boy, I don’t want you to go, but if I were you, I should.”’ So extravagant was the sentimentality with which the war was promoted in its early months that in due time, as its human cost soared, a lasting revulsion emerged among some of the audience, who felt that they had been duped. The genuine merits of the allied cause became profoundly tarnished by the baroque language and spurious religiosity with which it was marketed, especially in the eyes of the generation that would do most of the dying that made victory belatedly possible.

  Deepening shadows over their own prospects of survival caused some men to abandon thoughts of early marriage, but persuaded others to seize the moment. The daughter of a friend of parliamentary lawyer Hugh Godley was married on 23 August, and became a widow when her new husband was killed just four days later. A twenty-four-year-old gunner officer named John Peake Knight, DSO, had been engaged to a Miss Olive Knight of Brighton since 1913. In August 1914 they agreed to delay a wedding until the end of the war, but the approach of winter in the trenches caused them to change their minds. Knight was granted a brief leave. The loving couple were joined at St John’s church, Bromley, the groom clad in khaki, as had become fashionable, rather than displaying the glories of full dress uniform. A reception was held at his parents’ house, nearby Sundridge Park; within days, John Knight was back with his battery in France, where he was killed in 1916. Many newspaper accounts reported weddings without receptions or perhaps even consummations, such as that of Miss Joan Jameson to Mr John Farrell of the Leinster Regiment: ‘The honeymoon was to have been spent in Scotland, but the bridegroom had to rejoin his regiment.’

  Amid millions of separations, letters assumed a critical significance in the lives of divided families. Some men wrote home every day they were not in action, and many wives put pen to paper at least as often. Most Europeans were now literate: during the entire 1870 war, the Prussian army in the field received half a million letters and parcels. By contrast, in 1914 that figure rose to 9.9 million pieces dispatched each day to the German army, with 6.8 million coming back. The mere fact of receiving a communication from a loved one was cause for emotion: ‘I received such a long and lovely letter from my husband,’ wrote Austrian schoolteacher Itha J on 19 October. ‘How much we women depend on our beloved spouses!’

  But most writers both at home and in the field found it hard to describe events, and especially to avow passion, in a fashion remotely capable of matching the emotional needs of the recipients. Itha J again: ‘I write a daily letter to my beloved husband. I recount everything that saddens and moves me. Yesterday I had one letter from him, and today two. He writes in a factual, interesting way about his daily doings. At the end, there is always a little [word of] tenderness! I would like less objective description and more tenderness. But he can’t help himself – he must wring every tender word out of his rough heart.’ Some French peasants, transformed into poilus, wrote home to give their womenfolk minute instructions about their farms. One soldier, from Saint-Alban in the Tarn, expressed anxiety about a mare in the stable, and demanded accusingly of his wife: ‘You say that you are not behind [with the tillage] but you do not tell me [how many] sacks of oats and corn you have sown.’ A woman in
Lot-et-Garonne sent a present of pâté to her husband’s commanding officer, hoping desperately that this might persuade him to spare her man from utmost peril.

  ‘It was a polite convention at home, to which men on leave conformed,’ wrote gunner officer Rolfe Scott-James, the author’s grandfather, ‘to respect their supposed disinclination to talk about the war. The real disinclination was that of the people at home to listen. I do not mean that the overseas serviceman was in any degree better or worse than his fellow-countryman at home – only that the latter had turned into one kind of animal, the former into another. If the truth be told, they were not really even in sympathy.’

  Some privileged people found it hard to treat the war with the gravity it assuredly demanded. After a visit to France in October, Violet Asquith wrote to her father the prime minister, describing in tones of teasing gaiety her cross-examination of an old woman refugee ‘in hope of atrocities’: ‘Les allemands se sont mal conduits dans votre village?’

  ‘Très mal – ils ont tout ravagé etc.’

  ‘Ils étaient cruels?’

  ‘Très cruels – ils ont tué un cochon!’

  The questioner expressed relief about ‘the death of a pig having loomed so large in the category of horrors!’ She was too crass to know how large such a tragedy might loom in the economy of a French peasant family.

  Contemporary issues of the society magazine The Lady likewise emphasise the naïveté that persisted in British polite society. On 15 October a correspondent lamented the privations thrust upon the rural upper classes by losing so many husbands and hunt servants to the army. Under the headline ‘Sportswomen and the War’, her letter reported crossly: ‘Troubles at the kennels are unending, for at present no one has got the work in hand. Though Evelyn is down there morning, noon and night, she has not sufficient confidence in her own judgement to keep the men in order. The feeding is a constant bother, for the man who now reigns as feeder is a dirty, slovenly creature who only follows our directions when he is forced to.’