August [1914]

by Mark Rowe

  In a democracy, the reader of newspaper editorials (let alone the writers) can easily make the mistake of believing that the right to vote men into power every few years, and the freedom to say what you think, also means you can expect those in power to heed what you say. As if those in power, who have worked for years to get there, would ever share decisions - with the ignorant, the uninterested and undecided, and their rivals. Political leaders did not ask for their country’s views by postcard in 1914 for the same reason they do not ask by electronic mail in this century. Even inside the Liberal Government and around it - the friendliest newspaper editors, the king and his courtiers, relatives, friends, officials - few people even got a word with Asquith and the ministers that mattered, let alone had an influence. Richard Holt, as an MP, had some claim to a voice about whether to go to war. Reporters of parliament named him as leader of the Liberal ‘millionaires’ in the Commons, suspicious of big-spending Lloyd George. In 1913 the then war minister Jack Seely had ‘most confidentially’ consulted him ‘about the conveyance of the Army to Armageddon’. As his flippant phrasing suggested, Holt was ‘much amused’. A typical Liberal, he was set against war. His journal entry for the week ending Sunday August 2, 1914, showed his strong views, and that he had absolutely no say in what his government was doing:

  We are all in the midst of the most miserable alarm ... Even a week ago we thought not much of it ... What England will do seems uncertain though it is almost impossible to believe that a Liberal Government can be guilty of the crime of dragging us into this conflict in which we are in no way interested. The fear of war has produced a paralysis of business, the Bank rate being advanced from 3 to 4 per cent of Thursday to 8 per cent on Friday and 10 per cent on Saturday. The stock exchanges in London and all the big towns being closed and also many of the produce exchanges. Today an Echo [in Liverpool?] has been published (how these horrors benefit the press!) and we are told that Russia and Germany are actually at war.

  Holt cursed even the fear of war - the uncertainty, besides the loss of markets and materials - as bad for business, yet was sharp enough to notice that some, such as newspapers, were as quick to profit. In fairness, in the few days of this crisis, a leader only had so many hours awake, only so many people he could take views from. An able leader stayed in power as long as Asquith did precisely because he understood his friends, and enemies, already. Any minister only had so many letters he could sign, only so many meetings he could attend in a day. Lloyd George had enough work keeping the banks in business, Churchill with the navy, Sir Edward Grey urging diplomats to keep what was left of the peace. What was the point in asking for opinions when the crisis changed from day to day, as ever more countries went nearer to war? While the question was always ‘what is best for Britain?’ it changed from ‘how can Britain prevent war?’ to the more realistic ‘should Britain go to war, or not?’

  At least the men at the very centre of power could confer easily. Their work, and lives, did not take them far, physically. Partly, the things they relied on to take in news and send out decisions - letters, telegrams, the telephone - tied them to one place. Partly, keeping to a small part of London kept the rest of the world out. For instance J A Spender, the editor of the Westminster Gazette, wrote in a memoir after the war that he had little time out of his office before war broke out. He had two short talks with Grey:

  I saw him again late in the evening at his room at the Foreign Office on Monday, August 3 and it was to me that he used the words which he has repeated in his book; ‘the lamps are going out all over Europe and we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime’. We were standing together at the window looking out into the sunset across St James’ Park and the appearance of the first lights along the Mall suggested the thought.

  The ‘lamps going out’ is the most famous and powerful metaphor of August 1914; what is striking but seldom noted is that Grey - who was supposed to represent Britain to the part of the world not British - stuck himself in a small patch of central London. Downing Street for cabinet meetings was around the corner; parliament, a couple of streets away. Ambassadors called from their nearby embassies; they, and Grey, did not have far to go for pleasure, even, if they had the time. Regular morning riders in Hyde Park, for exercise, included King George and his daughter Princess Mary; many army officers based in London; and Churchill. Typically politicians lived near Westminster, whether they owned or rented for ‘the season’ of February to July. The Holts usually took a furnished house around Sloane Square. They could give and take invitations to dinners and parties, from a ball at Buckingham Palace downwards. On July 21, 1914 the Holts’ time at 112 Eaton Square ran out and Richard Holt stayed at the Reform Club, for the first time (‘very comfortable’). To reach your club, usually around Pall Mall, you could stroll across the park or take a cab for a shilling; all these were chances to have those more relaxed conversations with fellows, that somehow proved so much more important than formal meetings. You could eat, and gossip with like-minded men - army officers, Liberals, clergy, or Scots. A club was one more way to get on. Even the Communists had a club, in much less fashionable and cheaper Charlotte Street, off Tottenham Court Road, as visited by the socialist Robin Page Arnot. Members’ clubs belonged to the well-off - a club’s annual fee might be more than £100, and it might cost as much again to become a member.

  That instinct to club together was sound, and widespread; even in August, the holiday month; even if it was a forced holiday, because schools and factories shut. Some liked to be alone, fishing on a river bank, but, the Burton Daily Mail claimed on August 1, ‘the great majority of people really like to take their holiday when all holiday places are crowded, simply because they are crowded’. Even at the best of times, mankind had an urge to be ‘in it’, whether a family, an occupational group, or an artistic or sporting interest; or, when abroad, bunching in the same hotel, quarter of a town, or favourite destination (and maybe copying the native French, Swiss or German crowd). Even the single-minded warco Ashmead Bartlett, who left Sofia on Sunday August 2 at 7am, palled up with his own sort, “a German newspaper correspondent whom I had known in the Turkish war. We were the best of friends, sharing our frugal repast together, talking of the past, and of our plans for the future.” Bartlett’s last 100 miles through the hills into Servia took eight and a half hours; at Nish, he heard that Germany had declared war on Russia. When the English abroad in France, let alone Germany, had to face the coming of war, what Bartlett called the ‘longing to reach one’s native land’ would become over-powering; and telling.

  Chapter 7

  The Long Bank Holiday

  Thank God the press keeps us all, even diplomacy itself, well informed if a nation is going to quarrel with us and threaten war. We have at least some time to make preparations ....

  An 1869 paper to the Society of Arts, from Fifty Years of Public Work of Sir Henry Cole (1884)

  I

  When Ashmead Bartlett had left home, one week before, Servia seemed the most important story in Europe. By the time he arrived, it wasn’t. He described Nish as a ‘strange state of affairs’; a country town of 20,000, ‘about the size of Evesham’, only with squalid houses of straw and wood, swelled by another 30,000 - the upper classes, royal court and parliament , newly fled from Belgrade. The locals and émigrés alike paraded through the streets and beside the River Save, like ‘Hampstead Heath on a bank holiday’. Bartlett as an Englishman and a likely ally was welcome. Even so, as a bright and ruthless newspaperman, he faced the facts. He felt ‘tolerably sure’ that Britain and France would fight Austria-Hungary and Germany; the war in Servia would become ‘of mere local importance’; he had to leave at once for France. The only way - in case Italy sided with its allies Austria and Germany - was through the Mediterranean. It meant he had to make for the port of Salonica, in the opposite direction to home. At 1am on the Monday, August 3 he took the train to Uskub (today Skopje, the capital of Macedonia), the same
journey he had made in 1913 to the Servian army headquarters for their war against Bulgaria. His train had to stop to let troop trains pass. Four people filled a hot compartment meant for three, ‘the height of misery and discomfort’, Bartlett moaned. The 140-mile journey took 13 hours. As soon as the reporter’s troubles became his main story, he had missed the story.

  II

  The man paid to follow the news, thanks to his very doggedness, was the wrong side of Europe. Without meaning to, A T Daniel the cycling headmaster found himself in one of the best places in Europe to witness the marching of an army to war.

  From Verdun, after a sleepless night thanks to mobilising troops, he had the choice of turning back, or - like a spy - carrying on along the scenic Meuse valley, parallel to the German frontier about 40 miles away. He carried on. He rode into the town of St Mihiel and ordered lunch at a hotel. Almost all the diners were officers, who stared at him, but Daniel was used to being stared at. He had a good meal, ‘the last for several days’, and paid. Outside, his back tyre was flat. At a repair shop, two gendarmes asked for his papers. He did not have a passport; they arrested him. Daniel managed to convince the magistrate he found himself in front of, Monsieur Roult, that he was who he said he was, a tourist. “I noticed that he laid great stress on the fact that my tickets were issued by Cook, a household word apparently in these remote towns.” The two men became so friendly, they had a drink in a café. Daniel shook hands with nearly all the men in town not mobilised. They toasted his English sang froid, ‘le flegme de la nation’. As Daniel admitted later, ‘it was in fact his ignorance’, not his phlegm, that took him to what would soon become the battlefield.

  So near the frontier, Daniel saw the garrisons of Rheims and Orleans arrive: “... trains came in at intervals of about 15 minutes and in less than ten minutes the men had formed up and started on their march with a heavy and varied kit that a French infantryman carries; all fine men with springing step often singing the Marseillaise with a fierceness that gave it a new flavour to me.” The cheerful, soon to die marchers were, as Daniel wrote, ‘a sight never to be forgotten’.

  III

  The French were rushing to their borders for the same reason the Germans were; because the other side were. As France and Germany each planned one big battle, all hinged on taking as many of your soldiers as fast as you could - by train - to where you wanted to attack. As Daniel saw, the French were hoping to take Alsace and Lorraine back. The Germans were going to attack through Luxembourg and Belgium, making them like two dogs trying to bite the other’s rump. Much has been made of how August 1914 was war by ‘chain reaction’, or ‘railway timetable’, inevitable once one country gave the order to mobilise. The Hull MP and Yorkshire battalion commander Sir Mark Sykes wrote, characteristically bluntly, in a letter of August 1:

  I at last have five min: to spare - at least I have slept - well things look worse and worse - by last night’s paper Germany seems to have taken the plunge - as far as I can see this at bottom is a Russian attack on Germany - whether warranted or no of course no one can tell. I do not see any way to peace unless Russia cease mobilising ...

  A third world war in the 1950s would have been equally by timetable, as sure as a game of snap; if the enemy played one card, you played the other. The planners of atomic war assumed, incidentally, that their war would last a few weeks, much as the leaders of August 1914 assumed. What saved the world from World War Three was the very speed and ease of nuclear warfare, that made it like a shoot-out in an American Wild West saloon. If you truly did not want to die, if you ever spilt a cowboy’s drink by mistake, you made it your business to apologise fast and keep your hands off your holster. In August 1914, by comparison, once a couple of cowboys had fallen out at cards and pulled out their pistols, everyone else urgently - yet taking several days over it - did the equivalent of knocking their chairs over and pulling out their revolvers.

  Then what? A timetable of mobilisation itself did not fight. As Sykes pointed out, the trouble was the lack of a way back to peace. Straight enemies - America and Russia over Berlin in 1961, and Cuba in 1962 - could agree to put away the guns. August 1914 had too many guns pointing too many ways.

  IV

  War began for the same reason as mobilisation; men could not see straight, whether through fear or lack of it. A Tamworth man, H C Mitchell, left London with a friend on Thursday July 30, ignoring the signs of trouble; the closed currency exchange offices at Charing Cross, all the passengers on the boat from Dover to Ostend being German. ‘Full of faith in the power of the English sovereign’, meaning the coin, Mitchell and friend planned ten days in Belgium and the Ardennes. They made it as far as Brussels, where shops and restaurants would not take English money, or Belgian paper money either. As a last resort, the pair went to the travel agent, ‘the mighty Cook’, only to find a crowd of stranded English and American tourists. The Thomas Cook office advised them to go to the national bank. There they found ‘a surging mass of humanity, vainly struggling for gold’, the only thing people trusted any more. Mitchell came by some coins.

  Refugees poured into the city from the German frontier by the hundred, and ‘grim looking Belgian soldiers were marching out by the thousand’. Their light guns were pulled by dogs, “thoroughly imbued with a sense of duty and most apparent enjoyment of their task. It is difficult to say which were the most keen, the men or the dogs.” Mitchell told his story afterwards light-heartedly; he was on holiday after all. He did have a serious near-miss, before he returned to Dover on the Sunday evening, August 2. As in Paris, on Saturday nights it was the custom to sit outside restaurants over wine, and be social. As Mitchell’s friend only spoke English, and Mitchell made a few notes, soldiers and civilians threatened them:

  One man accused me in German of belonging to the fatherland. I replied in German that I did not. Several officers then poured out the vials of their wrath in most voluble French; in vain I tried to stem the tide of their eloquence. A passer by brandishing a stick called us German spies. Then a gentleman who spoke broken English called out spies. I understood. Immediately handing him my notebook, my railway ticket and card, I raised my glass and called out ‘Messieurs, je suis anglais. Vive la Belgique! A bas l’Allemagne, vive la France!’

  The Belgians took their hats off and shouted ‘bravo, vive l’Angleterre!’. It did not make sense that a spy would be so obvious; nor did a few words in the local language prove that Mitchell was not a spy. It only made sense because the angry and frightened Belgians wanted to let out their hatred of the likely German invader on someone.

  Daniel meanwhile, minus bicycle, took an evening train to Chalons, then more trains the next day to Rheims and Amiens. He never saw anyone with, nor anyone asked for, a ticket. Occasional trains passed, full of civilians - Germans, according to Daniel’s fellow travellers, ‘received with grim silence’. As in England at its time of crisis in the summer of 1940, any Frenchman would speak to another: navvy with businessman, private to officer. When a couple said that if and when England saw an advantage, then she would join, they apologised when Daniel, smilingly, said he was a native of ‘perfide Albion’. He then found it wisest to tell any new companions that he was English. None of the French expected England to land an army on the Continent. At most, they hoped the English navy would guard northern France.

  For the previous few years Britain had had an ‘entente’, an ‘understanding’, with France; except that, the Liberal Government insisted, it was free to choose what to do. That begged the question, why have an ‘understanding’ at all? Did the French and the British ‘understand’ the same things? As Daniel pointed out, if Germany had attacked Britain at sea, the French would certainly not have fought on land.

  Belgium made the difference. On the Monday, August 3, the Hull Daily News asked: ‘Why should England fight?’ The old treaty of 1839 that agreed Belgium was neutral gave the right to fight, if someone invaded Belgium; Britain, or anyone else
who cared, did not have to. Two days later, that same newspaper said Britain had ‘got to see it through’; ‘it’ being the hours-old war with Germany, now blamed for trying ‘to fill too large a place in the sun’.

  By August 4 Germany had threatened, and had begun, to invade Belgium and Luxembourg. According to a treaty of 1867, Luxembourg - like Belgium - was neutral. Few people in Britain even noticed Luxembourg, because it did not matter to them; Belgium did. Britain was ready to go to war against Germany not because of anything Germany did, but in case of what it might do. If Germany captured the Belgian and northern French coast, it would become too strong a threat to Britain. Better to fight now, with France, than have to fight Germany alone after it beat France. Hence the British demand on August 4 - though days too late for it to make a difference - that the Germans stay out of Belgium; and when the deadline passed that night, the declaration of war: by Britain, against Germany.