Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (37 page)

Moreover, the Germans’ machinery of command began to expose grievous flaws, and their senior officers failings of judgement and character. Joffre presided over catastrophe in the ‘Battles of the Frontiers’, but at least there was no doubt of his authority over his armies, and close supervision of their operations. Moltke, by contrast, left his subordinates in the field to execute his design almost without intervention or coordination. He sought to make a virtue of delegation, saying that his own most important responsibility was not to micro-manage his generals, but instead to control the Kaiser.

The coming of war had thrust upon Wilhelm the nominal role of Supreme Warlord: the chief of staff was fearful that his master might seek to translate this into a reality; that if he got near the front, he would attempt to meddle with the conduct of operations. Thus Moltke exerted himself to quarantine the Kaiser from battlefield influence. On 16 August imperial headquarters were established in Coblenz, where Wilhelm took up residence in the castle and Moltke’s staff occupied the Hotel Union. His signals chief, incomprehensibly and with serious consequences for command communications, was installed elsewhere, in Bad Ems. Lt. Col. Gerhard Tappen, chief of operations and a key figure, loathed by subordinates for his overbearing manner and unwavering rudeness, urged Moltke to get closer to the action. The chief of staff argued unconvincingly that the intervening countryside was still insecure. In truth, he appeared to see his own function as that of the chairman of a corporate board, rather than as its chief operating officer. The consequence was that Germany’s seven field army commanders in the West were left to conduct the largest military operation in history in the manner each thought best.

Napoleon wrote that the presence of the general is everything, that he is not merely the head but the very all of an army: ‘it was not the Roman army
which conquered Gaul, but Caesar; it was not the Carthaginian army which caused the republican army to tremble at the gates of Rome, but Hannibal; it was not the Macedonian army which reached the Indus, but Alexander’. By 1914, personality had become less important, and mass more so, than a century earlier. But Bonaparte’s thesis was not invalidated. Though the French, in the first three weeks of the war, had made the most disastrous command blunders, the Germans would thereafter emulate them.

For a brief season, however, the Kaiser’s soldiers saw themselves as conquerors, relishing their opportunities to snatch fruits of victory, large and small. On 22 August Pte. Vogel of the Silesian 105th Regiment and two other men of his unit broke into a French grocery store and looted it. Vogel was laden with booty when he met his battalion’s adjutant. ‘What good things have you got in that box?’ demanded the officer. ‘Biscuits,
Herr Leutnant
.’ ‘May I have some?’ ‘Certainly, sir.’ Vogel described how next day six French soldiers advanced into the German lines under a white flag to give themselves up. Most of their comrades, wrote the German, had retired into a nearby forest, leaving behind hundreds of dead who ‘stank like the plague’. But this evidently became Vogel’s own fate soon afterwards, for his diary fell into British hands, its pages soaked in blood.

All the while that the soldiers were struggling around the frontiers, in homes across Europe tens of millions of civilians awaited tidings from the battlefield. Helene Schweida wrote to her boyfriend Wilhelm Kaisen from Bremen on 18 August: ‘We civilians know nothing. After the fevered excitement in the first days of mobilisation, now a quiet has descended. Bremen will soon be a city of women.’ In the first weeks of war, every society experienced successive waves of jubilation and dejection amid news from the front which was scanty and often wildly mistaken. In August, most of the rash rejoicing took place in Germany. On the afternoon of the 21st, news of victories in Lorraine unleashed a round of celebrations in German towns and cities. In Freiburg, for instance, many a house decked itself out with German and Badenese flags, church bells rang, the imperial colours were raised over the cathedral, there was wild cheering in the streets for the Kaiser and the army. Excited crowds gathered around the Victory Monument in the city’s central square.

In France, to an extraordinary degree the population, along with the government and its British allies, were kept in ignorance about what was taking place, the slaughters and retreats. But there were sufficient hints to dismay informed people. An elderly dowager in Nice, disgusted by hearing
reports that the local Provençal regiments were performing poorly in Lorraine, asserted contemptuously that the local male population expected to live on its womankind. British ambassador Sir Francis Bertie wrote on the 16th: ‘I think that the French system of announcing only French successes and captures of men and guns is foolish, for they have no doubt lost many men and some guns and when the truth comes out there will be a great outcry here.’ He added a fortnight later: ‘There is much more description and truth in
The Times
than in any of the French newspapers,’ though this was no high compliment.

Among the first intrusions of war upon the home front was the arrival of wounded men in provincial towns. Grenoble, for instance, received its first trainload on 22 August, and by September the town was caring for 2,000 casualties. Most had been dispatched straight from the front, to be distributed among towns and villages as local authorities saw fit. The high command issued orders that for morale reasons, the civilian population was to have the minimum possible contact with the wounded. But each arriving train was met by crowds of spectators who asked anxious questions, to which shrugs were the most common response. A
chasseur-alpin
said: ‘We soldiers were usually as much in the dark about the military situation as the civilians. Our platoon, our company, our unit, that was all we knew or generally cared about.’

After the first weeks, however, many people were chilled by the swiftness of the ebb of civilian curiosity about the casualties, and sympathy for their plight. In Narbonne, barrel-maker Louis Barthas noted bitterly that when the town’s hospitals overflowed, mayoral appeals for citizens to take wounded men into their homes fell mostly upon deaf ears. The wounded languished for hours on stretchers laid down around the station, no one knowing where to send them. For months the medical facilities of all the belligerents, and especially of the French, were overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of lacerated and maimed men. Many died whom even the crude treatments of the time might have saved, had these been available. But often they were not.

French morale did not collapse following the slaughters of those first dreadful weeks; most of the men of Joffre’s armies remained amazingly staunch. But a new sobriety tempered the spirit of millions. A French officer wrote dryly to an English friend: ‘Self-evidently, what is happening is not taking place in a theatre; the situation and timing of the acts are not regulated by whistle-blast; and members of the audience impatient for
their suppers may find that the action continues a little longer than they would wish … We will fight the enemy to our last man, and to the expenditure of our last
écu
, and rest assured that long before these are reached, Germany will be on its back.’ But as the failed French offensives melted away, Moltke’s great assault gathered momentum. The clashes of mid-August served only as an overture for those of the weeks that followed, that would decide the war.

2 ‘GERMAN BEASTLINESS’

A significant and conspicuously ugly aspect of the first weeks of Germany’s campaign in the west was the misconduct of its army towards civilians, approved at the highest level. The policy of institutionalised ruthlessness which the invaders initiated at Liège was thereafter extended across every area they occupied. Conditioned by their 1870–71 experiences of meeting civilian guerrillas in France, in 1914 they showed themselves obsessed with the alleged threat posed by
francs-tireurs
, in breach of the laws of war. One soldier recorded in his diary near Andenne on 19 August: ‘Our cavalry patrols, we hear, are being shot at in the villages again and again. Several poor fellows have already lost their lives. Disgraceful! An honest bullet in honest battle – yes, then one has shed one’s blood for the Fatherland. But to be shot from ambush, from the window of a house, the gun-barrel hidden behind flowerpots, no, that is not a nice soldierly death.’

An officer’s letter published in the newspaper
Deutsche Tageszeitung
on 19 August said: ‘We have to shoot practically every town and village to smithereens … because civilians, above all women, shoot at the troops as they march past. Yesterday civilians shot at the infantry from the church tower in X, and wiped out half a company of brave soldiers. The civilians were fetched down and executed and the village was left in flames. A woman chopped off the head of an injured Uhlan. She was caught and had to carry the head to Y, where she was killed. My magnificent men are full of courage. They are ardent for vengeance. They protect their officers, and whenever they catch
francs-tireurs
, they string them up from the roadside trees.’ This account seems wildly fanciful, but paranoia about guerrillas was ubiquitous. A German assured some French prisoners they were safe – ‘all soldiers are comrades’ – then brandished his bayonet menacingly as he added, ‘But as for
francs-tireurs
…’

Reports of the enemy’s conduct in Belgium – ‘German beastliness’ – soon made headlines in every allied newspaper. A wounded Irish soldier
in Dover hospital told Asquith, the prime minister, that he had seen with his own eyes Germans driving a screen of women and children in front of their troops. Such incidents occurred, though sometimes witnesses may merely have seen refugees fleeing spontaneously ahead of attackers. Some accounts, however, were grossly exaggerated: there were tales of babies impaled on Hunnish bayonets, of mothers’ hands cut off by Prussian grenadiers. British naval cadet Geoffrey Harper wrote in his diary on 24 August after hearing of atrocities in Belgium: ‘It is utter rot saying that the Germans are “a cultured race” or a civilised race. If the greater part of their army is capable of doing what it is doing, the rest of the race must be the same. From now onwards I shall of course regard every German – man, woman and child, from the Kaiser downwards – not as a poor and uneducated savage, but as a wilful savage.’

There was a fierce argument in Britain’s newspapers about whether its own civilian population should resist if the country was invaded. H.G. Wells and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle urged that it should, but a correspondent to
The Times
strongly disagreed, citing the futility of Belgian civilian resistance, which did no harm to the Germans, but prompted severe reprisals: ‘Let no one doubt what would be the consequences. We should be treated to the ghastly and maddening spectacle of blazing villages, brutal executions, and all the nameless horrors that the retaliation of an exasperated soldiery usually involves.’

Before long, it became known that some reports of German behaviour in Belgium had been exaggerated, or entirely manufactured, for propaganda purposes. A violent reaction followed. An American in Paris one day entered the offices of the Foyer Franco-Belge, a group to which André Gide was giving help, and scornfully offered a large donation if its staff could introduce him to a single child who had been mutilated by the German invaders. This incident followed publication of a newspaper article by Jean Richepin, claiming that the hands of 4,000 children in occupied territories had been cut off by the enemy.

Many British soldiers – at least in the early stages of the war, before gas and protracted slaughter hardened attitudes – respected the Germans as ‘honourable adversaries’. They were disgusted by newspaper atrocity stories, at odds with their own experience. Maj. Bertie Trevor wrote home in September, applauding a sporting enemy: ‘We fought the Guard Corps … a good lot … The German atrocities (so-called) to the wounded are much exaggerated.’ The
New Statesman
declared its scepticism about tales of the enemy’s alleged enormities against civilians: ‘It seems to be
universally the case that, if one’s enemy does not commit atrocities, one has to invent them for him in order to hate him as he requires to be hated.’ Bernard Shaw contemptuously compared the cry of newspapers for German atrocity stories to ‘the clamour of an agonisingly wounded combatant for morphia’.

As late as 1928, Labour MP Arthur Ponsonby published a book entitled
Falsehood in Wartime
, claiming that 1914 ‘atrocities’ were wilful inventions by allied governments, designed to stimulate hatred for the enemy. His work was acclaimed by liberal opinion and became unsurprisingly popular in Germany, where it was later republished by the Nazis. Around Europe to this day, many people believe that allegations of German war crimes had scant basis in reality. The issue became entwined with the post-war British liberal conviction that all the belligerents shared moral and political responsibility for the catastrophe that had taken place, and that all were equally guilty of crimes against humanity.

Such a view is at odds with the contemporary evidence. Modern research shows that, while some press reports of atrocities were fabrications, the German army in Belgium and France indeed behaved with systemic inhumanity. British and French soldiers occasionally executed innocent French and Belgian civilians as spies, but nothing is recorded or even alleged against the Western allies remotely on the scale of German massacres. Obsessed with an alleged threat from
francs-tireurs
, the Kaiser’s army murdered civilians and hostages in large numbers. The most authoritative recent chroniclers of German war crimes, John Horne and Alan Kramer, write: ‘We can state categorically that there was neither collective civilian resistance nor military action by
franc-tireur
units [as there had been during the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian War]. There were a few isolated cases of individual civilians firing on Germans, but none of these incidents provoked mass executions such as those of Dinant, Louvain, or Liège in Belgium and others in France.’