Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (74 page)

As early as 16 September, when the war was only six weeks old, André Gide reflected upon ‘the impossibility of keeping oneself in a state of tension (which is after all artificial) as soon as nothing in the immediate surroundings motivates it. X goes back to reading, to playing Bach, and even to preferring the fugues with a joyful rhythm.’ He recorded the expostulations at a railway station of an enraged woman, confronting staff who pleaded military imperatives to justify train delays: ‘I am beginning to have enough of your war!’

Citizens of all the belligerent nations learned to live with a new, sombre and restrictive normality, which would persist for more than four years.
The Economist
deplored the draconian powers conceded to government by Britain’s emergency regulations, some of which continued to be used and abused by ministers for decades after peace came. Germany imposed an order prohibiting the speaking of English in public places, which was matched by a German-language ban in St Petersburg. Defiance on the telephone invited a fine of 3,000 roubles, while people reckless enough to engage in German conversation face to face were notionally liable to deportation to Siberia. But such edicts were matched by a characteristically Russian carelessness about enforcement: moneyed Germans continued to live comfortably enough in the Tsar’s capital, where on 14 November they held a banquet at which the Kaiser’s health was drunk.

In every country many people strove to ‘do their bit’; but others stayed at home, some with good reason. Marcel Proust was physically quite unfit for military service, and anyway concluded that in uniform he would be an inconvenience. ‘I ask myself,’ he said to a friend, ‘what chaos I might not introduce into the services.’ People fortunate enough to be spared from attendance on the battlefield addressed domestic concerns. In late
September, the vineyard-owners of Bordeaux reported a fine start to the grape harvest, and speculated that 1914 claret might match the magnificence of 1870, a precedent few Frenchmen welcomed. In Austria there was a winter fashion for
Kriegsblusen
and
Kriegshüte
– ‘war blouses’ and ‘war hats’. Wearing such garments, unbecoming as they appeared, was thought patriotic, a gesture of solidarity with soldiers at the front. As prosperous households curtailed menus, more because of a shortage of kitchen staff than – as yet – a shortage of food,
The Lady
advised its genteel British readers: ‘The second course – pudding – is especially looked forward to by the younger members of the family. If the dinner is to be reduced to two courses, the choice by them would fall on meat and pudding, or fish and pudding, and would not be in favour of fish and meat with the pudding left out.’

Many businessmen treated the war as an exasperating intrusion. The letterboxes of Europe filled with bad-tempered correspondence between commercial men and industrialists deploring shipments delayed and sales cancelled. The boss of a small company near Ulm wrote in August complaining of the ‘unfortunate irruption of war’. On the 20th, German motor manufacturer Wilhelm Maybach wrote to his son Karl, lamenting the poor quality of a technical drawing the young man had produced: ‘even if the war often distracts our thoughts, it provides no excuse for allowing such a serious matter as an [engine] transmission to suffer’. The British became obsessed by fears that spies were passing their secrets to Germany by carrier pigeon. This alleged menace caused the prosecution and imprisonment of several enemy aliens. For instance, Anton Lambert of Hermit Row, Plaistow, in East London, was given six months’ hard labour for having twenty-four pigeons in his possession without a licence; the birds received a capital sentence.

Soaring prices, especially of food and notably in Germany, became a chronic blight which bore heavily upon the poor. Soup kitchens were established in many cities, to feed those who had suddenly lost their livelihoods. In France, a moratorium on rents was imposed. Each family whose breadwinner had gone to the army was paid an allowance of 1.25 francs a day, plus 50 centimes for each child below sixteen. In a society in which the 1911 average daily wage varied between 3.72 francs in the Vendée and 7.24 francs in Paris, some families found themselves better off with a man in the army. The government recognised this, but considered the price worth paying, to sustain morale. The British were less generous: after two months of war, at a time when a judge received a salary of £5,000 a year
and the permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office was paid £2,500, the cabinet voted on war widows’ pensions. Churchill suggested a figure of 7
s
.6
d
. a week; others proposed 6
s
.6
d
. Lloyd George, the chancellor, argued for five shillings, and this lower figure was accepted.

Hardship and suffering on the home front were most unequally distributed. The poor, and especially those dependent on consumer industries, such as the furniture-makers of Shoreditch and the piano-builders of Islington, underwent severe hardship. Many families resorted to pawn-brokers in order to feed themselves; the better-off sold furniture and bicycles. Music halls were badly hit, accelerating the trend for their conversion into cinemas. Meanwhile the more affluent complained bitterly about the shortage of servants, but had no difficulties in securing nourishment: the menu for the 9 November Lord Mayor’s Banquet in London featured turtle soup, fillets of sole, mutton cutlets, baron of beef, casserole of pheasant, smoked tongue, charlotte russe and meringues.

In the autumn, the government was dismayed by reports of indigence and alcoholism at the bottom end of society. One report stated: ‘the excessive drinking among women continues, and there is said to be a great deal of begging’. The War Office asked police to keep an eye on the welfare – and implicitly also, the chastity – of absent soldiers’ wives, a role they were understandably reluctant to accept. By Christmas, conditions were somewhat improved. Army spouses were being paid separation allowances, and employment was picking up. With more money about, the jewellery trade, which had slumped in the autumn, began to revive. Women started to take on men’s jobs, a trend that would grow apace. Where in 1914 there were only a thousand woman railway clerks, four years later there would be 14,000.

Shipowners, millers, corn and sugar merchants prospered. Many factories were converting production lines to manufacture weapons, ammunition or military equipment, some of it esoteric, such as wooden saddle-trees shaped by former cabinet-makers. Kitchener stunned Sir Edward Grey by demanding that the Foreign Office source and supply 10,000 live goats a month to meet the ritual dietary requirements of Indian troops in France. Though the goats were not forthcoming, an acceptable substitute was found. But the general pace of economic mobilisation was sluggish, and in 1915 the shell shortage exposed by the Northcliffe press would reveal its inadequacy.

Some British trades unionists, who had been persuaded to suspend shop-floor hostilities in August for the sake of national solidarity, were
losing patience with their truce. They saw their employers garnering handsome profits from the conflict, and found no reason why they should not do likewise. The
Shop Assistant
on 12 December denounced ‘that spurious patriotism’ which regarded any ‘militant attitude [from] which friction would arise between employer and employee’ as betrayal of country. Almost three million working days would be lost to industrial disputes in 1915, 2.4 million in 1916, more than five million in 1917, rising to close to six million in 1918. These figures, in years of acute national peril, emphasise the depth and bitterness of Britain’s social divisions. Workplace recalcitrance struck a persistently discordant note in the British war effort, albeit less violently and dramatically manifested than were similar sentiments in Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1917–18.

The word ‘
Durchhalten
’ – ‘holding out’ – was much used in Vienna newspapers, though an increasing number of people asked what they were holding out
for
. Austrian women were advised that vigorous chewing of food released more nutrients; the virtues of blackberry tea were extolled, and householders were urged to trim and peel vegetables as little as possible before cooking. Most commodities remained readily available, but bread supplies soon became erratic. Food rationing was introduced to Germany and Austria in 1915, to France only in 1917 and to Britain in the following year. But shortages and price inflation were endemic much earlier: French people complained bitterly about the poor quality of their bread.

Many people around the world debated how they might make a profit from the war, including several national governments. Turkey joined the Central Powers on 29 October, having extracted what seemed a handsome price from Germany in both cash and military aid. Turkey’s rulers saw an opportunity to end the Ottoman Empire’s diplomatic isolation: they were rash enough to believe that Germany would assist Constantinople’s ambition to regain mastery of the Balkans. On the other side of the world the British wobbled about the merits of Japan entering the allied camp, and became thoroughly sceptical when it was pointed out that Tokyo’s interest was driven solely by its imperialistic ambitions. But the Foreign Office’s change of heart came too late: on 23 September Japan declared war on the Central Powers. It thus became one of only two combatants – the other was Italy in 1915 – to join the struggle for explicit territorial gains. With modest British help, Japanese troops promptly attacked and captured the German enclave of Tsingtao on the Chinese coast, displaying an energy and tactical ingenuity their Western allies might profitably have emulated.

The Marquis of San Giuliano, Italian ambassador in London, told his French counterpart without embarrassment in October 1914 that three factors influenced the Italian debate about entering the war: morality, advantage and readiness. The Italian army was still unprepared to take the field, and the Rome government invited tenders from the belligerents to discover which would pay best for Italy’s support. Sir Francis Bertie wrote contemptuously: ‘The Italians imagine themselves to be much superior to the ancient Romans and destined to be the great Mediterranean power and the possessors of Tunis, Malta, Egypt and the Turkish islands.’ In the following year Italy joined the allies, in return for agreed territorial gains, a transaction that reflected discredit on both contracting parties, and colossal folly by the Rome government.

Some neutral countries, the United States, Holland and Norway prominent among them, were already profiting mightily from the freedom to exploit commercial markets perforce neglected by the belligerents. By 1918 several Norwegian shipping fortunes would be made, though half the country’s merchant fleet was eventually sunk by U-boats. In the United States, at the outbreak of war President Woodrow Wilson called on Americans to remain neutral in heart as well as law, but after some initial government alarm about the potential of the war to damage the US economy, they quickly realised that the struggle opened prodigious industrial and trading opportunities, especially after the August opening of the Panama Canal.

At a personal level, war profiteering became a Europe-wide phenomenon, and an Austrian was responsible for one of its more imaginative manifestations. Otto Zeilinger, burdened with a languishing scythe-manufacturing business at Knittelfeld, conceived the idea of converting the premises into a commercial prisoner-of-war camp. On 6 September he wrote to the authorities proposing a deal running until July 1915, which was as long as even this optimistic entrepreneur expected the war to last. There was tough haggling about prices: Zeilinger eventually accepted a rental of 25 crowns for every square metre of barrack space. He was entrusted with several hundred Russians as free labour to build huts, and by December was playing host to 20,000, with an additional contract to feed them.

At a humbler level, in France it proved necessary to place
laitiers
– milk-sellers – under police supervision, when it was found that 58 per cent of milk sold was being diluted with water from public fountains. In a dexterous coupling of social service and commercial opportunism,
advertisements in French, addressed to Belgian refugees, began to appear in
The Times
, most offering furnished houses to rent: ‘
maisons meublées à louer
’. The newspaper announced: ‘in view of the large number of French and Belgian subjects in England, advertisements will be translated, free of charge, by
The Times
staff, on request’. Among other visible manifestations of the new world, from October London streetlamps were painted over, for fear of an air attack such as had already befallen several European cities. Londoners of all classes found the blackout bewildering and indeed distressing, especially when the winter passed without German intrusions.

Middle-class civilians, by contrast, considered a display of optimism a patriotic duty. ‘Life in London appears to be not merely normal, but even unusually gay,’ wrote a journalist in the week before Christmas. Some embryo soldiers acknowledged the same imperative. A recruit to Kitchener’s New Armies, training in conditions of acute discomfort and maladministration in southern England, nonetheless wrote almost euphorically in the
New Statesman
about his early experiences in khaki:

I have been too exhilarated to think. I have certainly never in my life experienced more continuous cheerfulness and – in the truest sense of the word – more happiness than in these three months. The sense of physical fitness; the exhilaration of a collective regimental life; the constant opportunities for the formation of new friendships with men of widely varying experiences; the congeniality of a life which is communistic in just the aspect in which communism is convenient and stimulating … and last and least the humorous aspects of one’s own and one’s comrades’ activities all combine to expel the baneful elements of existence. I may possibly live to think differently; but at the present moment, assuming this war had to come, I feel nothing but gratitude to the gods for sending it in my time. Whatever war itself may be like, preparing to fight in time of war is the greatest game and the finest work in the world.