Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914. Max Hastings

Burberry began to market ‘active service kit’: ‘Every officer will want his Burberry waterproof.’ The tailors Thresher & Glenny did fine business making uniforms, and Ross enjoyed a booming sale of binoculars. A manufacturer of two-seater fast cars recommended them as suitable ‘for officers and others’. In Paris knitwear shops began to offer such unsummery clothing as thick underwear and stockings, appropriate for campaigning. There were complaints that London gunmakers Webley & Scott now charged £10 for a revolver which they had sold in July for only five guineas.

      Such ‘profiteering’ provoked public anger. Food hoarding caused some German shopkeepers to close their doors, and almost all to raise prices. In Munich the cost of potatoes doubled, flour rose by 45 per cent, salt trebled. In Hamburg a group of angry women stormed the stall of one alleged profiteer, belabouring its owner with his own sausages. The Deutsche Volkszeitung reported an altercation about potatoes between customers and a woman vegetable-seller demanding twelve pfennigs a kilo instead of the usual six or seven. She declared defiantly: ‘Well, if you don’t like the price I will sell my potatoes to the Russians!’ A minor riot followed, until police rescued her from furious citizens.

      Meanwhile, magazines filled their pages with photographs and sketches of soldiers and military equipment. Newspapers carried war news, chiefly spurious, to the exclusion of almost all else. In mathematics classes, children were taught to add and subtract soldiers and ships. Innumerable war poems were written, almost uniformly dreadful: ‘Use me, England, in thine hour of need,’ wrote Elizabeth, daughter of poet laureate Robert Bridges. ‘Give then, England, If my life thou need, Gift yet fairer, Death, thy cause to feed.’ In London Madame Tussaud’s waxwork museum transferred the Kaiser from its Royal Gallery to the Chamber of Horrors. The famous British sense of humour suffered immediate war damage: Bernard Shaw found himself in trouble after penning an article urging both sides to shoot their officers and go home. Libraries and bookshops removed his works from their shelves, while the literary panjandrum J.C. Squire called for him to be tarred and feathered. Shaw remained impenitent, jeering that if the allies were serious about smashing Germany, the rational method would be to kill all its women.

      On 2 August, a company of the Sherwood Foresters marched into the Armstrong shipyard on the Tyne and deployed around an almost completed dreadnought. She was destined to become the pride of Turkey’s fleet, and five hundred of the Sultan’s sailors were waiting expectantly aboard an old passenger ship downriver, ready to take her over. Winston Churchill decreed otherwise; the Royal Navy’s need took precedence, and within weeks the Reshadieh, renamed the Erin, joined the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow; a second battleship, the Sultan Osman I, became the Agincourt. Though Britain offered the Turks £1,000 a day for the ships’ use, together with their return or full value at the conclusion of hostilities, Turkish opinion was outraged by the loss of the two vessels, which had been partly funded by public subscription. Inflamed sentiment contributed mightily to Constantinople’s decision, a few days later, to welcome the Goeben and Breslau. Turkish neutrality was obviously precarious.

      Europe struggled to adjust to new allegiances and animosities. In Vienna Franz Joseph sought to display the solidarity of the monarchs’ trade union by rejecting a proposal from his War Ministry that the 27th Infantry should drop its title as ‘the King of the Belgians’ Own’; the Austrian 12th Hussars likewise continued to be known as ‘King Edward VII’s Own’. But Britain’s royal family hastily stripped its German relations of British honours: the Kaiser dispatched to Buckingham Palace his uniforms as an admiral of the fleet and field-marshal. There was a rush to rechristen popular venues with patriotic names. Le Jardin du Roi de Württemberg in Nice changed its name to Alsace-Lorraine Square. Berlin’s Grand Café became the Café Unity, displaying a constantly updated war map on its wall and having the latest dispatches from the front read aloud to patrons. Many German restaurants deleted French and English words and phrases from their menus, which confused diners who could not understand what they were ordering when the fare was described in their own language. Meanwhile in France, Pilsner beer was relabelled Bière de la Meuse.

      Spy fever overtook Europe. In Münster, a notably Catholic city, civilians seized several nuns as alleged Russian spies; police arrested the civic head gardener four times because he affected a suit of apparently English cut. British newspapers reported from Brussels: ‘five German spies disguised as priests have been arrested here’. Russian agents were alleged to have bombed German bridges and poisoned water supplies, obliging Munich police to tour the streets reassuring the public that it could safely drink from taps. In Belgrade several men were arrested for allegedly making torch signals from the Moskva Hotel to Austrian gunners at Zemun.

      Paris’s Hôtel Astoria was closed amid charges that its German manager had installed on the roof apparatus for intercepting French wireless messages; the British ambassador heard a rumour that the man was summarily shot, which he disbelieved, but wrote resignedly that he expected ‘there will be a good many tueries’. A letter was published in The Times alerting readers to the peril posed to national security by prominent British residents of Teutonic origin: ‘During the last quarter of a century, numbers of highly-placed aliens, some naturalized, some not, who are known to be in close communication with German and financial circles, have bought their way into British society.’ The writer urged telephone taps and a close watch on such ‘highly-placed sympathizers’, and ended with a dark warning: ‘I do not wish to be an alarmist, but I know what I am writing about.’ This nasty missive was signed only ‘S’.

      In Berlin the famous Danish-born actress Asta Nielsen was walking down the Unter den Linden when she suddenly and incomprehensibly found herself denounced: ‘my hat was thrown down so that my black hair appeared. “A Russian,” I heard someone yell behind me, and a hand grabbed my hair. I yelled, full of fear and pain. In front of me a man turned around and recognised me. He yelled my name to the excited people behind me; they let me go and began to curse each other. One of them started flailing his arms as if he was crazy, and hit one of the others in the face. Blood flowed. “You cannot stay here,” my saviour said. “The people have completely lost their senses. They no longer know what they are doing.”’

      Everywhere there was an insatiable hunger for information. Newspapers were torn from vendors whenever a new edition arrived, and café patrons addressed themselves to complete strangers. Rumour ran wild. In St Petersburg, it was said that Emperor Franz Joseph was dead. Austrian soldiers in Mostar heard that revolution had broken out in France, where the president of the republic had been assassinated. Wiseacres on the terraces of Nice predicted that hunger would force Germany to quit the war within weeks. A local resident wrote on 5 August: ‘There is no authentic war news – either by land or by sea: all that appears in the papers is invention.’ In Germany that week the Hannoverscher Courier delivered a vituperative denunciation: ‘Animals! … Yesterday a French surgeon and two disguised French officers attempted to poison fountains with cholera bacilli. They were court-martialled and shot.’ It was also alleged that mobs of Belgians were murdering German civilians: Moltke’s soldiers claimed to have captured a Belgian with his pockets full of German fingers, severed for their rings.

      Russians drifted towards local railway stations, where news was likely to come first: papers from Moscow took days to reach remote areas, and contained little of substance when they did so. Country-dwellers wandered out onto highways and quizzed travellers for scraps of intelligence: ‘one was delighted to encounter a simple Cossack’, wrote Sergei Kondurashkin in the Caucasus, ‘and listen greedily to his naïve words, waiting patiently while the millstones of his memory ground slowly into motion’. When two days’ newspapers belatedly arrived, the Kondurashkin family and friends crowded onto the verandah of their holiday dacha twenty strong, aged from eight to sixty, and including children, students, clerks, professors, doctors. One of their number was voted the clearest speaker, and nominated to read the paper aloud to the rest, a Chekhovian moment. He then rehearsed the bleak budget of tidings – declarations of war; German incursions into Poland and Russian moves into East Prussia; the arrival in Warsaw of the first PoWs.

      There was intense, almost uniformly ill-founded speculation about what the conflict would be like. German pundits offered especially optimistic predictions: a writer in the Braunschweigische Anzeigen declared that modern