To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  The weaknesses in party politics made pressure groups a more significant feature of debate in Germany than elsewhere. Nonetheless, Britain established its own Navy League in 1893, and it had 100,000 members in 1914. The National Service League was formed in 1902 to lobby for conscription and claimed 270,000 members, including associate members, in 1914.114 Much of the effectiveness of the British groups rested on the fears of a German invasion, preceded by a swarm of German spies and fifth-columnists. Erskine Childers’s Riddle of the sands (1903) has been one of the few lasting works of this genre, but more famous at the time was William Le Queux’s The Invasion of 1910, serialized by the Daily Mail in 1911. The best-known of the French nationalist organizations, Action française, indicates the perils of judging influence in terms of circulation. Action françaises eponymous newspaper, characterized by Vorwärts as offering ‘the most bizarre mixture of intelligence, vulgarity, science, and stupidity’, increased its circulation immediately before the war, but still sold only 31,000 copies in 1914.115 Action française and the others were not without significance, but in explaining war enthusiasm their importance resides in their being part of a much greater whole.

  Alongside them must be placed the youth organizations, frequently paramilitary in nature, which cultivated physical fitness and group loyalty, and so prepared their members for military service. Baden Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts, declared that every boy ‘ought to learn how to shoot and obey orders, else he is no more good when war breaks out than an old woman’.116 Formally speaking, the features that are most striking about these youth movements are the opposite of those of the extra-parliamentary organizations—those of the liberal societies were founded first and even tended to be more openly military.

  In this respect Britain’s principal contribution in international terms, the Boy Scouts, was somewhat misleading. First, they were founded comparatively late, in 1908. Secondly, Baden Powell, himself the hero of the siege of Mafeking in the Boer War, averred that their aims were imperial, to be ‘the frontiersmen of our Empire’, and not military. Plenty of the precepts promulgated in Scouting for boys had warlike applications, but the core activity was what the founder called ‘wood craft’, essentially survival skills for life in the wild. The scouts themselves were organized into small patrols and encouraged to be self-reliant; they were not formed into large groups and drilled in the execution of the tactics of fire and movement.

  Much more overtly militarist, with drum and bugle bands and pill-box hats, were the members of an evangelical organization dating from the 1880s, the Boys’ Brigade. William Smith, its founder, was not only a member of the Free Church of Scotland but also an officer in the Volunteers. The Volunteers were part-time soldiers, organized for home defence, and in 1903 about 8 per cent of British males—including an increasing number of the working class—had gained military experience through service with them.117 When in 1907 Haldane set about the reorganization of the Volunteers to form the Territorial Army, he included provision for the establishment of an Officers Training Corps in schools and universities: accused of fostering militarism in British educational establishments, he replied by saying that militarism already ran high. The evidence generated by the Boer War, both nationally in the demonstrations after the relief of Mafeking, and specifically in the willingness of the Volunteers to serve overseas, suggests that this was fair comment. The recreational appeal of part-time service became the means by which a Nietzschean anxiety to test one’s courage was transmitted into action. On the outbreak of hostilities Herbert Read, a member of Leeds University Officers Training Corps, applied for a Territorial Army commission despite his pacifism; and John Reith, who had joined a Territorial infantry battalion from Glasgow University Officers Training Corps, excitedly greeted the war as ‘an entirely personal affair’.118 By 1914 possibly 41 per cent of all male adolescents in Britain belonged to a youth organization, one in three Oxford undergraduates was a member of the Officers Training Corps, and Cambridge was debating whether service in the corps should be a condition of graduation.

  Increasingly, therefore, concerns about the lack of compulsory military service in Britain came to underpin public support for the more militant youth movements. Unlike Britain, France had conscription, but still feared that it did not have enough men to hold the line against Germany. Therefore, alone of the major powers, it developed its 5,500 societies for the promotion of gymnastics and shooting among the young specifically as a preparation for military service. The army supported the groups from 1895, and in 1905 the government accorded them formal approval as a corollary of two-year service. In 1912 the minister for war, Alexandre Millerand, told France’s schools that, ‘You prepare their minds as well as their bodies with the patriotic duty to love France, to place it above all else, to be ready to sacrifice even their lives’119. In that year the scheme claimed 650,000 members, but in doing so exaggerated its influence: at best only about 14 per cent of all conscripts underwent pre-service training, and in some areas the figure dropped as low as 1 per cent.

  By contrast, Germany’s initial reasons for embracing comparable schemes were domestic. The worries about urbanization, that it was corrupting the young, undermining their health, and drawing them into a world of alcohol, tobacco, and pulp fiction, were ones shared in Britain. But significantly, the first fruits of this fear of decadence and degeneration, a movement to promote gymnastics, were manifest in 1889, the year in which the Second International was founded. The real danger was socialism. In the following year the rehabilitation of the SPD created direct competition for the hearts and minds of Germany’s working-class youth. Karl Liebknecht reckoned that socialism’s window of opportunity was the gap between leaving school at 14 and being called up for military service at 18. The German gymnastics association set out to counter socialism, claiming 400,000 members in 1889, 625,000 in 1899, and 945,000 in 1910. However, some of the members went further, seeing in it a device by which to prepare for and maximize the benefits from military service.

  The military imperative did not assume parity with, let alone primacy over, the political until 1911. The scouting movement, propagated through a bastardized translation of Baden Powell’s book in 1909, emphasized health and hygiene, and had only 14,000 members by the end of 1911. It was more overtly military than its British equivalent, concentrating on marching and group activities rather than the individual and his return to nature, but the indirect effect was to promote these attributes in its rival organization, the Wandervogel. In January 1911 the Prussian minister of public worship and instruction allocated a million marks from the state budget to fund the youth movements. His aims were still domestic, but the response he elicited linked Volkskraft to Wehrkraft. General Colmar von der Goltz established an umbrella organization, the Jungdeutschlandbund. It built on regional intitiatives, particularly in Bavaria, where officers had already begun to involve themselves in the training of Germany’s adolescents. The Jungdeutschlandbund had access to the army’s barracks and exercise areas. Unlike the Boy Scouts, it made clear to parents that their offspring were being prepared to serve Germany in the next war. The movement took its members away most weekends, so rupturing the bonds of family and community (and upsetting the churches). Its marching songs spoke of combat and death on the battlefield. By 1914 the Jungdeutschlandbund claimed 700,000 members. In reality, the active membership may have been as little as 10 per cent of that. Falkenhayn, as Prussian minister of war, was worried that the organization was not getting to those German male youths particularly at risk from anti-militarism. Prompted by the French three-year service law, he proposed to Bethmann Hollweg that, if voluntary enlistment failed, compulsion should follow.120

  Falkenhayn’s desire to extend conscription to Germany’s teenagers in 1913–14 coincided with his ministry’s increasing acceptance that conscription for adults should be truly universal rather than selective. The manpower needs of its war plans had caused the general staff to lobby for a true nation in arms since Sch
lieffen. The Ministry of War feared the radicalizing effects both for the army, not least in the composition of its officer corps, and for society. After all, the classic corollary of military obligations was civic rights. In 1904 it was the SPD’s leader, August Bebel, who declared that his party favoured the full enforcement of universal military service.121 But by 1913 Falkenhayn, smarting from the Zabern affair, saw that conscription could enable the army to strike back; it could militarize society.

  The success of the German armies in 1870 had hallowed a form of conscription which emphasized the principle of universal military service, not as part of a defensive citizen army but within the context of a professional regular army. Military service aimed to internalize values which linked the government, the people, and the nation, and which made the army the school for the nation. Furthermore, the preferred recruit remained the peasant. Thus, that very occupational group least likely to be affected by the other nationalist currents was directly involved in this, the most pronounced form of the subordination of the individual to the state.

  The call-up was a rite of passage, the moment when, probably for the first time, the young man left his family and village to step into the wider world. He departed an adolescent and returned an adult. The sphere which he entered contained comradeship and sexual opportunity; but in forsaking the constraints of parental authority the soldier submitted to the state in its most obvious manifestations. Many remained within the army’s thrall for the rest of their lives. The veterans’ organizations established in Germany to commemorate the dead and to honour the victors of 1870 in due course also accepted those who had completed their service after the Franco-Prussian War and had never seen combat. By 1914 these organizations claimed 2.83 million members. They kept alive the virtues of crown and nation originally inculcated by military service itself. They were opposed to membership of the SPD or of trades unions. They also promoted tension between the generations. First as sons and then as soldiers, those too young to have served in 1870 heard the stories of the heroes of Sedan. They saw the medals on their chests and paid homage at the memorials to their fallen comrades. On the one hand the experience created a social Darwinian fear, that Germany had reached its apogee in 1871 and was therefore in decline. On the other, it fostered rivalry—a need for the young men to prove themselves as valiant in battle as their fathers. Both responses could only, it seemed, be resolved by the next war.122

  The widespread experience of military service already possessed by those mobilized in 1914 is perhaps the single best explanation for the mood of acceptance which predominated throughout Europe. Those passing through the countryside of Germany, France, or Russia in late July 1914 commented not on the enthusiasm of the population but on its calm and quietness. Hysterical crowds, anxious to fight, were phenomena of Berlin, Paris, and Moscow, not of the hinterlands. They were responses to events rather than their precipitants. The very first assemblies in Germany and France, on 24 July, were in Strasbourg and Nancy, both border towns liable to be invaded at the outset of hostilities. Panic buying of food generated long queues; anxiety about savings produced runs on the banks. The time of year helped. Although the weather became cooler after 22 July, the long summer evenings encouraged people seeking mutual reassurance to congregate outside. Above all, crowds were formed by the appetite for news as the crisis unfolded. In Berlin people assembled along the Unter den Linden and the Potsdamer Platz, close to government buildings; in Paris they congregated in the northern boulevards, especially between the Madeleine and the Place de la République, where the main press offices were situated. Another focus were the cafés and bars in which newspapers could be scanned and information exchanged and dissected. The press and the people formed a symbiotic relationship, the latter gathering to buy the latest editions and the former reporting those gatherings and interpreting them as evidence of enthusiasm.123 The reports of the metropolitan papers were then propagated by the local press, so encouraging smaller towns to emulate what was believed to be the example of the capital.124

  Domestically, governments were aware that if the crisis ended in war they needed to be able to command the consent of their populations. Internationally, they were using the responses of the public in their management of the crisis. At the very least, therefore, the crowds were tolerated rather than dispersed. Suggestions that governments went even further and orchestrated them have been made in relation to Russia and Germany, but have not been corroborated by firm evidence.125 That there was manipulation by other bodies is not in doubt. In Vienna its promoters were army officers and in Berlin youth groups, student societies, and the media themselves.126

  The first patriotic demonstrations in Berlin occurred on the evening of 25 July, as the Serb response to the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum brought extra editions of the newspapers on to the streets. Crowds of between 2,000 and 10,000 people formed, making perhaps 30,000 demonstrators in all. Many of them were drunk. They gathered at sites of national commemoration and moved between the embassies of the major powers, singing patriotic songs. Two aspects of this phenomenon were new. In the past street demonstrations were the method of political protest preferred by the urban working class; workers were absent from these crowds, which were made up of students and young members of the middle classes. Secondly, the police, instead of breaking them up, let the demonstrations run their course, the last not dispersing until 3.45 a.m.

  The next day was a Sunday, and as such provided the freedom from work which allowed fresh crowds to form. The other major cities of Germany, some of which witnessed demonstrations on a much smaller scale than those of Berlin on the 25th, saw larger assemblies on the 26th. But most consisted of no more than 200 people, and there was still little feeling evident in the towns and countryside. The crowds were airing their support for Austria-Hungary in its struggle with Serbia rather than seriously contemplating the imminent advent of European war. In France, on the other hand, an awareness of the implications of what was happening was evident from the outset. In 1900 the cry of ‘vive l’armée’ had been deemed anti-Dreyfusard, anti-republican, and indeed—in the view of one newspaper—positively Jesuitical.127 As major crowds formed in Paris for the first time on the night of the 26th, the shout that came up was not ‘vive la République’ but ‘vive l’armée.

  Although demonstrations persisted throughout the week, the resumption of work and the hope that the conflict would be localized at first diminished their scale and promoted their orderliness. On 27 July the Berliner Tageblatt said that it was now time for the rowdy young men who had been on the streets for the past two days to go to bed.128 On Wednesday 29 July Poincaré and Viviani returned to Paris, proceeding in state from the Gare du Nord surrounded by crowds shouting ‘vive la France’. On the same day the report of Russia’s partial mobilization alerted the German people to the dangers of war. The crowds which assembled on the following day were very different from those of 25/6 July. They were drawn from all classes; they were older and less noisy. Although Vorwärts called the idea of war enthusiasm an ‘absurd fraud’,129 enthusiasm was not entirely absent from the major assemblies of 31 July. The Kaiser returned to Berlin to a welcome comparable with that vouchsafed Poincaré two days before. Nonetheless, the mood was no longer buoyed up by the elements of student frivolity that had characterized the first demonstrations. Seriousness was now the keynote. Hoarding was evidence of anxiety, not enthusiasm. In Hamburg, according to Wilhelm Heberlein of the SPD, ‘most people were depressed, as if they were to be beheaded the next day’.130

  The following day, 1 August, crowds assembled throughout Germany, not out of enthusiasm but in nervous anticipation of general mobilization. Indeed, Theodor Wolff, looking back on the anniversary of 1 August in 1919, was persuaded that when the order came what followed was not ‘what one calls mass enthusiasm’ but ‘the release of an enormous inner tension’.131 Some got drunk to dull their pain; others sang hymns; almost all bowed to the inevitable and accepted their patriotic duty. When Hans Peter Hansse
n, an SPD deputy, travelled from Schleswig to Hamburg and thence to Berlin on 2 August, the mood of resignation had deepened. Class distinctions evaporated as people went out of their way to be kind to one another, but he was emphatic that there was no rejoicing and no enthusiasm: ‘over all hung that same heavy, sad, and depressed atmosphere.’132

  In Germany those units that departed first did so in subdued spirits. Many were worried about the economic implications of their absence. Would their jobs remain open? How would their families survive? Would the withdrawal of so much labour from the workforce result in the collapse of businesses and widespread unemployment for those who stayed behind? By late August many of these fears would seem warranted, as urban unemployment rose from 2.8 per cent in June to 23 per cent.133 In rural areas the economic problems were even more immediate. The harvest was still not complete, and the problems of gathering it were compounded by the army’s requisitioning of horses. Regions close to frontiers anticipated invasion, with further depredations likely to be the least of its consequences. The defensive nature of the war seemed all too obvious in south-west Germany, where the sounds of fighting in Alsace were soon followed by the visible evidence of wounded and prisoners of war. Fears in Freiburg, fed by the memory of fighting in the region in 1870–1, dwelt on the atrocities likely to be committed by French African troops. In southern Bavaria some wives committed suicide rather than confront these problems on their own.134