Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (77 page)

Louis Barthas found himself among soldiers escorting German prisoners on a train across southern France. Newspapers had incited local people to show their feelings towards such ‘monsters with human features’, and at every station furious crowds appeared – women spitting, men brandishing knives and rocks. The same people pressed on the French guards wine and grapes which, as soon as the train moved off, they shared with their charges: ‘this gesture of camaraderie makes up for the odious displays against the unarmed enemy’. Those who had seen the dreadful realities of war recoiled from displays of chauvinism. A Paris music-hall performer who sang a song suggesting that German troops ran away, and that most of their shells were duds, received an icy reception from an audience which included soldiers on leave. More popular French ditties suggested that the real German crime was submission to despotism: one, ‘
Le Repas manqué
’, concerned a supposed invitation to the Kaiser to have dinner in Paris; the chorus went ‘
Nous f’rons des crêpes et t’en mang’ras!
’ – ‘We’ll make the pancakes and you’ll eat them!’

Many women across Europe felt a profound sense of frustration that while their menfolk were winning laurels on the battlefield and receiving popular adulation, their own role was confined to knitting socks and writing letters. ‘We here, far inland, see scarcely anything of the hardships of war,’ wrote Gertrud Schädla in December, ‘beyond worrying about our beloved fighting men.’ Gertrud and her mother spent much of the winter sewing clothes and collecting charity contributions for refugees from East Prussia. Knitting for soldiers became a universal preoccupation, almost a sacred duty, for Europe’s women. Yet the fruits of their labours were sometimes cynically received. Egon Kisch catalogued a consignment which reached his Austrian unit in Serbia in November: ‘warm underwear – of course only knitted nonsense – neatly-embroidered gloves, wristlets with a heart stitched in red, mittens to fit baby elephants, kneepads for storks and similar stuff that the lasses knitted during jolly parties to assuage their boredom or satisfy their pretensions’. Corporal Kisch was grudgingly grateful, but would have preferred cigarettes.

Some women enjoyed first-aid classes, which brought them together. But Graz schoolteacher Itha J wrote on 16 September: ‘Every day there is a weight upon me. What is it? I believe it is a gnawing discontent that during these great times I can do nothing beyond baby-sitting.’ In Britain, even
The Lady
bewailed the limitations on the contributions women might make: ‘Soon all the committees will be formed, the needlework in hand, members of the Red Cross Society ready for the word of command, the chosen nurses away to their places – every woman in the land doing all that is possible for her to do in the way of special work. Yet in spite of everything there will still be in all our hearts a sensation of yearning to do more.’

Mrs Mayne was the wife of a British soldier stationed in Ireland. She herself worked in an East London hostel, coping with a throng of German, Belgian and Scandinavian women caught far from home. The war inflicted on her a profound sense of loneliness and isolation from her husband, while her brothers trained to become soldiers: ‘almost a feeling of suffocation overwhelmed me’. She watched flag-sellers, shoppers and ambulances coming and going in a frenzy of activity. ‘It was all a maze and yet secretly in my heart there was a feeling of pride [in Britain at war] – which now I think was wrong.’ She accepted a post as theatre sister at a British hospital in Belgium, and set off after posting her wedding ring to her husband Gerald for safekeeping. Unfortunately, in the emotionalism of her departure she forgot to enclose an explanatory covering note, causing bewilderment and distress to the ring’s recipient.

At the end of September, a German girl named Helene Schweida made a courageous but naïve attempt to visit the army in France, to see her beloved boyfriend Wilhelm Kaisen. Her progress was arrested by an officer in western Germany who turned her smartly homewards, declaring loftily that only men could approach the theatre of operations. ‘Once again, I forgot that I am a mere woman,’ she wrote bitterly. Yet already, in a fashion that gained momentum with every day of the war, women proved their indispensability as substitutes for men in many roles. Toulouse, along with other French cities, acquired its first women postal deliverers, firefighters and even tram conductors, dubbed the ‘
Ponsinettes
’ because the Toulouse transport company was owned by a M. Pons. Women who took work in armament factories were called ‘
munitionettes
’.

British ambulance driver Dorothie Feilding wrote home from Belgium on 17 October, lamenting her lot: ‘Everything has been chaos & I have had to run the whole damn show. I wish there was a man with a head in charge.
As soon as I get back I shall settle down & marry a big strong man who will bully me. I’m sick of trying to run other people.’ But it is plain that this cry of dismay reflected only momentary exhaustion: for the most part, Feilding, a twenty-five-year-old daughter of the Earl of Denbigh, revelled in the excitements and opportunities her role offered.

At the outset she had been fearful that her volunteer unit would not be permitted to play an active role: ‘Alas I don’t think we women will be allowed to do much actual fieldwork. We will have to be behind most of the time if not all.’ But she soon found herself exulting in her experiences: ‘There’s going to be heaps to do, it’s topping being up near things & so jolly interesting.’ On the night of 8 October, she helped to carry two British casualties three miles back from the trenches. She was unwilling to expose herself, however, to aid fallen enemies: ‘I don’t mind running risks for our men or the French but I’m blithered if I’m going to have holes put in me by a bally Teuton while I pick up their men.’

Women in all the warring nations would soon follow pioneers such as herself, assuming unprecedented authority and responsibility. But some traditional gender roles were slow to change: behind the front in Belgium, nurse Mrs Elizabeth ‘Elsie’ Knocker, a twenty-nine-year-old doctor’s daughter from Exeter, wrote in her diary on 29 September: ‘Sewed a button on the general’s coat – he was charming to me.’

In every country, at first at least, the war increased the symbolic importance of the monarchs in whose names it was supposedly being fought. Austrian newspapers reported with slavish deference a visit by Franz Joseph to the military hospital established in Vienna’s Augartenpalais. Young aristocrat Rüdiger Rathenitz was one of those who met the Emperor: ‘Archduchess Maria Josefa introduced me and he asked about my wound and my unit. The monarch, whom I last saw in 1909 at St Pölten – when I was a pupil in the military school there – was now more stooped than on that occasion, and remained comparatively silent. I was warned … to respond very loudly to his questions. I had brought a Russian haversack, some badges and bullets as souvenirs from the battlefield, and I showed these items to the Emperor … who seemed quite interested.’

Die Neue Zeitung
duly told Franz Joseph’s subjects: ‘The kind manner in which the Supreme Warlord greeted his officers prompted a captain whose right arm had been amputated humbly to beg the privilege of continuing to serve in the army. The sovereign was visibly moved, and gave the loyal officer his promise. In the huge hall in which the monarch stayed for nearly an hour, he spoke to all of the 102 soldiers in their
national languages … which visibly infused his soldiers with happiness.’ Graz schoolteacher Itha J transcribed this newspaper account almost verbatim into her diary, adding her own characteristically sentimental comment: ‘These poor ordinary men will have been infinitely delighted that the Emperor spoke to them. And how many others – even the wounded – will feel jealous of those who received this mercy! – Life is unfair. One is lucky, others are not.’

The monarchs of Europe were not notable for intellect, and some were slow to grasp the vast significance of the course on which Europe was embarked. Douglas Haig wrote on 11 August after lunching with George V: ‘The King seemed anxious, but he did not give me the impression that he fully realised the grave issues for our country as well as for his own house, which were about to be put to the test; nor did he really comprehend the uncertainty of the results of all wars between great nations, no matter how well prepared one may think one is.’ That winter, Haig met his monarch again after he had inspected troops at Saint-Omer, and noticed no great accession of wisdom: ‘The King seemed very cheery but inclined to think that all our troops are by nature brave and is ignorant of all the efforts which Commanders must make to keep up the “morale” of their men in war, and of all the training which is necessary in peace in order to enable a company for instance to go forward as an organized unit in the face of almost certain death.’ The King was at pains to explain away the war roles of his many relatives in the opposing camp. He told Asquith that – for instance – his cousin Prince Albert of Schleswig-Holstein was ‘not really fighting on the side of the Germans’, but merely running a PoW camp.

One night in October Austrian aristocrat Alexander Pallavicini sat next at dinner to the Archduke Karl, who had succeeded Franz Ferdinand as heir-apparent to the Hapsburg throne. Pallavicini recoiled in dismay from his neighbour’s ignorance: ‘It is unbelievable how “out of the picture” he is, because he has so little contact with soldiers. I completely lost my composure when he confidently asserted that the Russians were finished, the war as good as over. He brushed aside all doubts, stood by his statement.’ When Pallavicini said that the war would be decided on the Western Front, where Austria-Hungary must support Germany, the future Emperor’s response emphasised his bovine stupidity: ‘France does not matter to us. We must march against Italy.’

Germany’s ruler, by contrast, already revealed disenchantment with the adventure he had done much to promote. On 25 September, Admiral Albert Hopman sat next to the Kaiser at dinner, and was impressed by a
war-weariness that was already in evidence. Wilhelm spoke of ‘the awful slaughter of humanity’ – ‘
furchtbare Menschenschlächterei
’. It was a little late to indulge such a spasm of sensitivity. Hopman observed bitterly to Admiral Tirpitz: ‘for the last 25 years we have lived with a playful, unreasoning absolutism that found fulfilment in empty appearances and a vain craving for status which the nation indulged for too long. The majority of the people did not want that. But absolutist governance was responsible for our failure to produce statesmen, and instead only bureaucrats and lackeys.’ This was a profound and important statement of how Germany stumbled into precipitating a war, written by an intimate observer of its governance.

As autumn deepened into winter, although the allies were deeply troubled about how they might win the conflict, they became less fearful that they might lose it, as they mobilised their strength increasingly effectively. On the other side, however, in many breasts a worm of apprehension grew. Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote on 25 October: ‘I feel ever more strongly the awful tragedy of our – the German race’s – predicament. It seems to me as good as certain that we cannot prevail against England. The English – the best race in the world – can’t lose. But we can lose and will lose, if not this year then next. The idea that our race should be beaten distresses me terribly because I am completely and utterly German!’

The strident bellicosity of some warriors and their families had ebbed. On 26 September, Austrian schoolteacher Itha J wrote in her diary: ‘Today I visited Dr K and his wife. I was uplifted by the strength of this clever man’s faith. He is convinced that Germany and Austria will prevail, because justice is on their side – If only I could steadfastly believe as much!’ On 10 October Elfriede Kuhr was astonished to hear her grandmother say, ‘Every mother ought to go to the Kaiser and say: “Peace now!”’ The old lady, experiencing the fourth Prussian war of her lifetime, now recoiled in horror at the prospect of almost unlimited bloodshed.

But a November political intelligence report from a workers’ neighbourhood in Berlin’s Moabit district declared that while local socialists might not be enthused about the struggle, they remained committed to it. Freiburg’s veteran lord mayor Otto Winterer told a meeting of a thousand of his most prominent fellow citizens in St Paul’s Hall on 28 September: ‘We are a unified people of brothers, unified as well in answering the question: who bears the blame for starting this war? … All classes stand together, from the princes to the workers.’ Kurt Alexander, editor of the liberal Jewish publication
K.C.-Blätter
, wrote in September, noting that
many Germans accused Jews of not pulling their weight in the war effort: ‘Therefore it is our holy duty to do more than anyone else. Each Jew must attempt to become a hero, whether in battle or in his [civil] occupation is unimportant. The deeds of each Jew must be worth so much that they are written into the history of the German people with golden letters.’ There were as yet only a handful of dissenters, such as Krupp manager Wilhelm Muehlon, a visionary who dreamt of a Europe without frontiers and arbitrated by a common government, who deplored his own country’s warmaking. Muehlon wrote in his diary: ‘Prussia is today only capable of promoting deeper hatred among European peoples and elevating this to pure obsession.’

On 24 October Britain’s
New Statesman
addressed the question being asked with renewed vigour, in intellectual circles at least: ‘Why did we go to war?’ It spoke of widespread opposition to Britain’s alliance with autocratic Russia, ‘and distrust of anything that is supported by the reactionary elements in this country’. Suggestions had been made that the war was deliberately started by reactionary forces to avoid social reform, a war of militarist aggression, and ‘that we are fighting without any real reason simply and solely to please the diplomatists and arms manufacturers’. Rejecting such conspiracist views, the
Statesman
concluded temperately: ‘We know that the mass of the German people did not want war, and those who may be expected to know … are almost unanimous in declaring their conviction that the Kaiser did not want war.’ Britain’s cabinet, Parliament and people ‘consented to war for the sake of Belgium, and no matter what private desires – doubtless numerous and diverse – happen to have been gratified by the national decision, it is none the less true that it was on Belgium’s account that that decision was reached’. The last statement was certainly valid.