by Hew Strachan
2
WILLINGLY
TO WAR
WAR ENTHUSIASM
‘My darling One & beautiful—’, Winston Churchill wrote to his wife on 28 July 1914, ‘Everything tends towards catastrophe, & collapse. I am interested, geared-up & happy.’1 The intensity of the July crisis released the adrenalin of the cabinets of Europe. But the statesmen knew that, if war was its outcome, the emotion which fired them would need also to be shared by their electorates. Bülow in 1909 and Bethmann Hollweg in 1912 each expressed the view that wars were caused not by the ambitions of princes and politicians, but by the action of the press on public opinion.2 The evidence to support their belief was sparse. Public opinion had certainly played its part in railroading the British cabinet into war in the Crimea in 1854. However, in Germany’s case Bismarck’s wars had been cabinet wars, at least in their causation. What was true was that the outbreak of hostilities had in turn prompted public demonstrations, both in Prussia and France.3 Popular enthusiasm might not cause war, but it certainly needed to condone it.
The distinction between the feelings of the masses in the lead-up to war and their reactions when the war broke out was particularly important in 1914. It is one which recent historiography has done much to explore. But the historian’s knowledge of what is to come, not only in the war itself but also in the rest of the twentieth century, can make any analysis of the sentiments of 1914 mawkish and maudlin. The contrast, however metaphorical, between a sun-dappled and cultured civilization and a mud-streaked and brutish battlefield can too easily suggest that, if the peoples of Europe were enthusiastic about the war, then they were, at least momentarily but also collectively, mad. It is perhaps more comforting, but equally simplistic, to conclude that war enthusiasm was a ‘myth’, that the cameramen caught images that were unrepresentative or were posed, fulfilling briefs that were themselves directed from on high.
The outbreak of the war has become one of the most unassailable divisions in the compartmentalization of the past. It marks the end of the ‘long’ nineteenth century, which began with the French Revolution in 1789, and it inaugurated the ‘short’ twentieth century, which closed with the end of the Cold War. This sense that 1914 was a break in continuity is not simply a product of hindsight, a manipulation of historians. It was one frequently expressed at the time. Adolf Hitler later recalled that ‘I sank to my knees and thanked heaven from an overflowing heart that it had granted me the good fortune to be alive at such a time’.4 Many people joined the crowds precisely because they felt that history was being made. Indeed, the historians of the day told them that this was the case. Friedrich Meinecke, then in Freiburg, described 1 August 1914 as ‘a new historical epoch for the world’.5 Writing thirty years later, in 1944, and aware not only of what the First World War, but also the Second had meant for Germany, he could still affirm that 3 August 1914 was ‘one of the most beautiful moments of my life, which even now pours into my soul with a surprising suddenness the deepest trust in our nation and the highest joy’.6
What had so moved Meinecke was not the war in the Balkans but the news that all the Reichstag parties would approve war credits. Max Weber too, although hostile to the war in a political sense, welcomed the national effusion which it generated, and which gave the war meaning regardless of its outcome.7 Popular demand may not have caused the war, but once it came, the sublimation of distinctions of class, of politics, and of profession which were the people’s response to it generated its own euphoria. The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, who was a Jew and would become an exile from Nazism, but who, like Hitler, joined the crowds, albeit in Vienna rather than Munich, wrote of ‘a rushing feeling of fraternity’.
Strangers spoke to one another in the streets, people who had avoided each other for years shook hands, everywhere one saw excited faces. Each individual experienced an exaltation of his ego, he was no longer the isolated person of former times, he had been incorporated into the mass, he was part of the people, and his person, his hitherto unnoticed person, had been given meaning.8
Zweig was a middle-class intellectual and Vienna a capital city. But the sensations which he experienced were not confined to such orbits. Louis Barthas, a cooper in Peyriac-Minervois, a socialist and a non-practising Catholic, a father and a reservist, described the response of his village to France’s general mobilization in very similar terms. Brothers who had fallen out were reconciled; mothers-in-law and sons and daughters-in-law, who only the evening before had been at blows, exchanged kisses; neighbours who had ceased all neighbourly relations became the best of friends. Barthas espoused the anti-militarism of his political convictions. But he acknowledged that party divisions were forgotten. The first effect of the war was, paradoxically, to bring peace.9
Nor was hatred of the enemy a primary element in this bonding. The crowds passed by the embassies of enemy powers. While personal encounters remained recent and therefore vivid, the foe could still be an individual. Britons caught in Leipzig at the outbreak of hostilities experienced no personal unpleasantness.10 The first French prisoners of war to arrive in Germany were warmly received by German women, and plied with wine and chocolate.11 The East London Observer on 8 August praised the local German community and reminded its readers that, ‘in the indignation of the moment one must not forget to behave oneself justly, and like a gentleman and a friend’.12 The general feeling in Paris was that the Germans were mad, not bad.13 And in some instances official policy endorsed this restraint. In Berlin films which might arouse violence against foreign residents were censored.14 In Vienna the Entente monarchs even retained their colonelcies of Austro-Hungarian regiments.15
This is not to say that xenophobia did not play its part in the popular response to the war. Indeed, at a passive level it was a powerful force for national integration. Rumour was ‘the oldest means of mass communication in the world’. In the absence of news, gossip was preferable to silence; it was both a cause of communal feeling and its consequence.16 In the towns the press could feed off such chatter and then propagate it. In the countryside things were quieter, and the press less evident and less influential. Traditionally, the peasant’s distrust of ousiders embraced his fellow nationals from other districts. On the outbreak of war such suspicions could be readily subsumed within the hatred of foreigners whipped up by the chauvinism of the urban press.
Widespread migration and European cosmopolitanism meant that the opportunities for active, and frequently misdirected, enmity were numerous. In France Alsatians and Lorrainers were assaulted because of their accents. In Germany a Bavarian woman found herself under suspicion in Cologne, and in Nuremberg Prussian officers were attacked on the presumption that they were Russian.17
The search was not so much for the enemy without as the enemy within: this was the obverse of the solidarity which the war generated. Spies were every-where. In Germany the scare was officially promoted. On 2 August 1914 the public was asked to assist in the detection of the large numbers of Russian agents alleged to be active in the rear, and especially in the vicinity of railway lines. By the following day sixty-four ‘spies’ had been exposed in the railway stations of Berlin alone. All were entirely innocent and the suspects included two army officers. Any form of uniform was deemed to be a disguise, a presumption which proved particularly vexatious for priests and nuns. The report that Frenchmen were driving cars through Germany to deliver gold to Russia stoked the enthusiasm of local governments, which set up their own patrols and roadblocks: a total of twenty-eight people were killed as a consequence.18 The Stuttgart police became more exasperated than most. Clouds were being mistaken for aeroplanes, stars for airships, and bicycle handlebars for bombs. Their director complained that: ‘Our streets are filled with old women of both sexes in pursuit of unworthy activities. Everyone sees in his neighbour a Russian or a French spy and believes himself duty-bound to beat him up—and also to beat up the policeman who comes to his rescue.’19
The German general staff asked the public to sca
le down its efforts on 7 August. But spy hysteria was not simply a response to official promptings. The suggestibility of the British public had already been primed by the novels of Erskine Childers and William Le Queux. These fictions received apparently authoritative corroboration from the British army’s last commander-in-chief and most famous living icon, Lord Roberts, who had said that there were 80,000 trained German soldiers in the country, many of them working in station hotels. By the beginning of September the Metropolitan Police alone had received between 8,000 and 9,000 reports of suspected espionage. Although they deemed ninety of these worthy of further investigation, none was proved to have any foundation.20
In France, where spy mania also developed without government promotion, xenophobia became fused with economic self-interest. As in Britain, the prewar press had carried stories of German espionage. Léon Daudet of the Action française had accused Maggi, an international dairy-products firm with its headquarters in Switzerland, of being a front for a German spy network. Maggi was also a major competitor for smaller French businesses. Maggi’s outlets were pillaged on 2 August, while the police stood by: the action was legitimated on the grounds that the firm was German.21 Such a speedy conversion of enthusiasm into hostility, and of hostility into economic self-interest, required press manipulation. In Britain, although there were isolated attacks on shops owned by enemy aliens in August, there was no major outbreak of violence until 17 October, when it was directly provoked by the arrival of Belgian refugees. Within two days 400 police had to be deployed to keep order in Deptford, and the following weekend comparable demonstrations broke out in Crewe.22
An example of economic opportunism masquerading as war enthusiasm is provided by the small businesses competing in the international market for ladies’ underwear. A Leipzig firm declared in its advertising that Paris corsets were un-German and a danger to the health of German women. Any lady who felt truly German, and in particular those concerned for future generations of Germans, would use only the ‘Thalysia-Büstenhalter’ and the ‘Thalysia-Edelformer’. Wolsey, a British manufacturer, warned the country’s womenfolk that there was ‘a great deal of “unmarked” German made underwear about’, and J. -B. Side Spring Corsets thanked them ‘for their hearty response to an appeal to support the All-British corset movement’.23
With her hygienic German foundation garments in place, the German woman had still to resist the temptation to don the latest Paris fashions. She was warned that shameless French dresses rendered their wearer ‘a caricature of human nature’. By appealing to women to resist what was implicitly a male interest in sexual exploitation, the advertisers were fusing feminism with nationalism. They were also incorporating women in a fight in which they were unlikely to participate directly, but to which their spending power could nonetheless contribute. As the Sunlight Seifenfabrik announced in its promotion of soap in the Neukölner Tageblatt on 4 September 1914, the transfer of its British capital to German ownership was ‘not an insignificant victory in the realm of German economic life’.24
Etymology, so often abused by advertisers, became part of the campaign. The Leipzig corset-makers reminded their readers that clothes were no longer chic but pfiff. In a climate in which German shoppers rejected marmalade as being English and camembert as French, it made business sense to replace cosmopolitanism with nationalism. In Hamburg the Cafe Belvedere was retitled the Kaffehaus Vaterland and the Moulin Rouge the Jungmühle. Customers ate Hühnerragu rather than fricassée, even if they were unsure about its ingredients.25
The changing of names could be more than a pragmatic response to market conditions; it might also be prudent. By the autumn 500 German residents in Britain had discarded their Teutonic surnames for something more Anglicized.26 They included the royal family, who in 1917 became Windsors rather than Saxe-Coburgs, and the First Sea Lord, who in due course ceased to be Battenberg in favour of Mountbatten, and Santa Claus, who was dubbed Father Christmas. Even the capital of Russia was no longer St Petersburg but Petrograd.
Those contemporaries who were able to stand back from such reactions turned to psychology for explanations and rationalizations. Some found it in crowd theory. Gustav Le Bon, who had postulated the existence of a hysterical mass mind in the 1890s, found proof for his arguments in the outbreak of the war. ‘The mentality of men in crowds’, he argued in 1916, ‘is absolutely unlike that which they possess when isolated.’ Beliefs ‘derived from collective, affective, and mystic sources’ swamped the critical faculties of even the most intelligent men. They shaped what Le Bon called the ‘unconscious will’, which, partly because it was inherited and partly because it was common to the nation as a whole, generated illusions which had the force of truth. Some found much of this reasoning persuasive. In 1921 Freud traced the ‘coercive character of group formation’ back to his theory of the primal horde, first developed in 1913.27
Others looked to sex for an answer. War made permissible acts which were in peace considered immoral. Sadism and brutality were part of the individual’s unconscious, now legitimated and given free rein. Herein was the sense of liberation to which the crowds gave vent. The processes of mobilization and recruitment carried the implication that women were only available to soldiers, when in reality they were not available to anyone because the soldiers had to depart for the front. Thus, the lack of sublimation heightened the sexual potency of the situation. The attractions of uniform played their part. Into this mix of fetishism and sexual exploitation the psychologists also injected romance. Wives fell ‘in love with their partner all over again in his new personality, the personality he assumes with his smart uniform, and this pride and love communicate themselves to the man, who departs for the carnage with a light heart.28
The employment of private emotions for state purposes was exposed by an Austrian, Andreas Latzko, in his collection of short stories Menschen im Krieg (Men in battle), published in 1918. In ‘Off to war’ a shell-shocked officer, a composer in civilian life, refuses to respond to the solicitude of his visiting wife. After she has left he tells the other convalescents of a fellow officer’s young wife, commended by the colonel for her pluckiness, her patriotism, and above all her restraint when the regiment departed for the front. ‘My wife was in the fashion too, you know,’ the composer fulminates. ‘Not a tear! I kept waiting and waiting for her to begin to scream and beg me at least to get out of the train, and not go with the others—beg me to be a coward for her sake. Not one of them had the courage to. They just wanted to be in the fashion.’ Thus the greatest disillusionment of the war was not the war itself but the discovery ‘that the women are horrible’. They sent men to war ‘because every one of them would have been ashamed to stand there without a hero . . . No general could have made us go if the women hadn’t allowed us to be stacked on the trains, if they had screamed out they would never look at us again if we turned into murderers.’
Latzko’s sarcasm is vented on a major’s wife who has become a nurse, a role which has given her the opportunity to flirt with lightly wounded officers while raising ‘her high above herself.29 The ambivalence of the nurse’s position is central in understanding this interpretation of the role of women in promoting war enthusiasm. She was urged to be patriotic rather than compassionate, disciplined rather than emotional. Her task was to return men to the firing line, fit to fight; to harden their resolve, not to undermine it. Das Rote Kreuz, the journal of the German nursing movement, told its readers in March 1914 that the most important attribute of mothers in war was the willingness to sacrifice their sons for their country, while that of Red Cross sisters was obedience. The largest German nursing movement, the Vaterlandische Frauenverein, known as ‘the Kaiserin’s army’, had 3,000 branches and 800,000 members in 1914, and in all there were over 6,300 bodies of nurses with 1.1 million members. Even in Britain the Voluntary Aid Detachments, formed under the auspices of the Territorial Army, had 50,000 members by 1914. Many women were being ‘militarized’ before the war: the distinction between th
e private and the public spheres was already eroded.30
The ability of all the belligerents to interpret the war defensively covered over the contradictions which were implicit in the nurse’s vocation and of which Latzko complained. Women as a whole may have been much more dubious about the war than men, and certainly more so than allowed for by Latzko. But the soldier sallied forth to protect his wife and children. Thus a primitive and basic response could be rolled into the patriotism demanded of the modern state. Those women who could rationalized their readiness to let their husbands go as a sacrifice for ‘God and fatherland’; those who could not saw it as an act of self-protection and of maternal responsibility. ‘It is a thousand times better, wrote a contributor to a German magazine on pastoral theology, ‘to [fight for home and hearth] on the frontier and in enemy territory, than to have the enemy enter the homeland and take everything.’31
Most contemporary explanations for war enthusiasm tended to rest on the rationalization of emotions rather than on logic itself. What they reflected above all was surprise—on two counts. The first was surprise that the war had broken out at all. Freud expressed this with his customary clarity in the spring of 1915:
We were prepared to find that wars between the primitive and civilized peoples, between the races who are divided by the colour of their skin—wars, even, against and among the nationalities of Europe whose civilization is little developed or has been lost—would occupy mankind for some time to come. But we permitted ourselves other hopes. We had expected the great world-dominating nations of white race upon whom the leadership of the human species has fallen, who were known to have world-wide interests as their concern, to whose creative powers were due not only our technical advances towards the control of nature but the artistic and scientific standards of civilization—we had expected these peoples to succeed in discovering another way of settling misunderstandings and conflicts of interest.32
