As We Were: The First World War: Tales from a broken world, week-by-week

By David Hargreaves

Fought between 1914 and 1918, World War One – The Great War – was the most titanic and devastating conflict the world had yet seen. Detailing the course of the war week-by-week and the intimate accounts and experiences of soldiers and civilians alike, As We Were offers insight like no other into a war that impacted generations the world over.

• Language: English
• Publisher: whitefox Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Mar 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781913532666

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Bibliography

Dramatis Personae

This list is far from exhaustive, but tries to give a flavour of the eclectic range of people upon whose memories we have drawn. Some are almost embarrassingly well known, and others remain opaque, even as far as their birth dates.

Edith Appleton (1877–1958), diarist and nurse. The tenth of 13 children, she trained at St Bartholomew’s Hospital and served at different hospitals in northern France throughout hostilities. She kept a handwritten diary throughout the war which details all the horrors, including the first use of poison gas, but also records how she spent her time off duty including a number of drawings and many accounts of what life was like for nurses.

Herbert Henry Asquith (1852–1928), British prime minister from the outbreak of war until 1915. His second wife, Margot, née Tennant (1864–1945), was widely feared for her whiplash tongue, but is remembered now for her sparkling wartime diaries. From his first marriage, Asquith was the father of five children, three of whom enjoyed distinguished military careers: Raymond (1878–1916), Herbert Beb (1881–1947) and Arthur Oc (1883–1939). Herbert’s wife, Cynthia, née Charteris (1887–1960), was another sparkling diarist.

Walter Becklade, trooper in the 5th Cavalry Brigade.

Evelyn Blücher, née Stapleton-Bretherton (1876–1960), Englishwoman who married into the Prussian aristocracy and wrote a standard account of life as a civilian aristocrat in Germany during the Great War.

Vera Brittain (1893–1970), VAD nurse, writer, feminist, socialist, and pacifist.

Fenner Brockway (1888–1988), anti-war activist.

Edith Cavell (1865–1915), British nurse who helped some 200 Allied soldiers escape from German-occupied Belgium. She was accused of treason and shot by a German firing squad.

Mairi Chisholm (1896 –1981), Scottish nurse and ambulance driver. Together with her friend Elsie Knocker (1884–1978), she won numerous medals for bravery and for saving the lives of thousands of soldiers on the Western Front in Belgium.

Winston Churchill (1874–1965), first lord of the Admiralty when war broke out in 1914. The next four years saw a dramatic seesawing of his political and personal fortunes. The letters which he and his wife Clementine, née Hozier (1885–1977), exchanged during his relatively brief time in the trenches between 1915 and 1916 are of considerable political and social interest.

Yves Congar (1904–1995), schoolboy living in German-occupied Sedan, in the Ardennes, 10 km south of the border with Belgium. His illustrated diary is an exceptional document by any standards, combining the outspokenness of an observant boy not yet in his teens with patriotic and religious fervour and compassion. Congar was later ordained and died a cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church.

Rowland Feilding (1871–1945), lieutenant colonel, very much the creature of another age, who had already served in the South African and Matabele Wars. The son of a Church of England cleric, and an engineer by profession, he stood out early as an exceptional leader, serving in the Lancashire Fusiliers, and was a colonel in both the Coldstream Guards and the 6th Connaught Rangers. His letters to his wife, Edith, were unguarded (presumably uncensored too).

Ferdinand Foch (1851–1929) became supreme Allied commander-in-chief in late March 1918 until the end of the war.

James W. Gerard (1867–1951), lawyer and diplomat who was US ambassador to Berlin from 1913 until 1917.

Philip Gibb (1877–1962), Henry Nevinson (1856–1941), Charles Bean (1879–1968), Ellis-Ashmead Bartlett (1881–1931), leading British war correspondents, apart from Bean, who was Australian.

Julian Grenfell (1888–1915), officer in the Royal Dragoon, a celebrated poet, and something of a pin up figure in the upper echelons of British society, being both posh and pretty.

Edward Grey (1862–1933), secretary of state for foreign affairs 1905–1916.

Douglas Haig, (1861–1928), commander-in-chief of the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front from late 1915 until the end of the war.

John Hanbury-Williams (1859–1946), head of British military mission with Russian Stavka, enjoying direct access to Tsar Nicholas II.

Maurice Hankey (1877–1963), British Cabinet secretary 1916–1938.

Geoffrey Heinekey, lieutenant in the 2nd Queen’s Westminster Rifles. Chronicler of the Christmas Truce.

Richard Horne, Australian able seaman who participated in the operations to seize German New Guinea in 1914 and was severely wounded in action.

Helena Jablonska, middle-aged Polish landlady and diarist.

Albert Jacka (1893–1932), the first Australian to be awarded the VC during the Great War for his actions during the Gallipoli Campaign. He later served on the Western Front and was twice further decorated. After the war, he returned home, became a local businessman and town mayor, but never fully recovered from the multiple wounds he sustained during the war. He died at the age of 39.

Joseph Joffre (1852–1931), commander-in-chief of French forces in the West, 1914 to 1916.

Mustafa Kemal (1881–1938), eventually Ataturk, founder of modern Turkey.

Horatio Herbert Kitchener (1850–1916), Victorian schoolboy hero, famed for crushing the Mahdi’s forces at Omdurman, but widely feared and execrated for starving the Boers. He became secretary of state for war in 1914. Not someone, from today’s perspective, easy to like or admire.

Piete Kuhr (1902–1989), schoolgirl who started her war diary on 1st August 1914. Kuhr grew up in Schneidemühl, now in Poland. She became an outspoken opponent of war and later used her professional dance career in Berlin as an opportunity to air her convictions. She married a Jew, and was forced to flee Germany in 1933.

Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck (1870–1964), the so-called Lion of Africa, a general in the German army and the commander of its forces in the German East Africa campaign between 1914 and 1918.

Carl Lody (1877–1914), a reserve officer of the Imperial German navy who spied in the United Kingdom in the first few months of the war. Lody was shot at dawn by a firing squad at the Tower of London in the first execution there in 167 years.

Erich von Ludendorff (1865–1937), First quartermaster-general of the German army, 1916 to 1918; fell out spectacularly with Hindenburg after the war. He identified Hitler early as Germany’s nemesis, but had his own violent dislikes, especially Jews and Catholics.

Bryden McKinnel (1889–1915), a captain of the King’s Liverpool Regiment and representative of a very specific type of local Great War casualty – an Anglo-Scot from a privileged upper middle class family, and a proud, brave and committed Territorial soldier who died leading his men on the Western Front.

Richard Meinertzhagen (1878–1967), chief of British military intelligence in Kenya, 1914 to 1916. A relentless and apparently devil-may-care adventurer, the authenticity of some of his exploits has been called into question and there is a suspicion he may have murdered his wife.

Henry Mellersh (1897–1980), lieutenant, author and Old Contemptible.

Vasily Mishnin, Russian soldier and diarist. A 27-year-old conscript from Penza in central Russia, newly married, with his young wife, Nyura, already pregnant. After the war, Mishnin, a furniture salesman, was reunited Nyura, and died in 1955.

Charles Myers (1873–1946), a Cambridge psychologist serving as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps at the Duchess of Westminster’s War Hospital at Le Touquet.

Ernst Nopper, German officer, painter and diarist, stationed in Poland.

Maurice Paléologue (1859–1944), diplomat, historian, and essayist. As French ambassador in Russia in 1914, he supported the Russian mobilisation against Germany.

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), former president of the United States (1901–1909); an outspoken supporter of the Allies throughout the Great War.

Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967), renowned poet and famously brave soldier on the Western Front whose protest against the continuation of the war in 1917 resulted in his admission to Craiglockhart, a military psychiatric hospital.

Robert Saunders, former railway porter, one of seven siblings, who died aged 24 and is buried in Zuydcoote Military Cemetery in France.

Mabel St Clair Stobart (1862–1954), British suffragist and aid-worker, who created and commanded all-women medical units to serve in the Balkan Wars and the First World War. She became the first woman to achieve the rank of major in any national army.

Josef Tomann, Austrian doctor present at the siege of Przemysl.

Stefan Westmann, former medical student present at the Battle of Ypres. Westmann was awarded an Iron Cross First Class. When Hitler came to power he left Germany and set up a successful medical practice in Harley Street as Stephen Westman.

Henry Williamson (1895–1977), rifleman and author of Tarka the Otter and sharp critic of the war.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), immeasurably brilliant Austrian-British philosopher and famously brave officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army who fought in several theatres of war between 1914 and 1918.

Theodor Zeynek (1873–1948), Austrian staff officer. After the war he lived in Prague in his wife’s family home and, amongst other things, translated 37 of Shakespeare’s plays into German.

1

Britain enters the war

4th August – 10th August 1914

We know the bare facts well enough: poor old Franz Ferdinand and his wife, gunned down in Sarajevo on 28th June; six weeks of increasingly tense, ineffectual, diplomatic poker; Germany’s decision to implement the impossibly cynical Schlieffen Plan; most of Europe at war by 4th August. Is that as much as we need to know?

Let us begin with a conceit. Let us consider the first days of the Great War by purging from our minds old newsreel footage, in which the protagonists grin toothily at the camera, or gesticulate jerkily at one another – and all of it in silence. That was the best cinematography could manage in 1914, but the effect risks distorting the truth.

Imagine, instead, that we could magic these days with perfect clarity and coherence. Imagine being able to doorstep Sir Edward Grey on the steps of the Foreign Office, or throw out impertinent questions at the kaiser as he marched down the steps of the Neues Palais at Potsdam. Imagine sending reporters to mingle among the crowds in London, Paris, Berlin and Vienna and tease out of them what we might now call feeling on the ground. Exciting stuff.

In setting out to look at the lives of ordinary men and women in this war, we need to recall that most of us are separated from them by only three or four generations. We might blame the primitivism of early film footage for the fact that they seem so remote, but the shattering facts of four and a half years of the Great War are probably a bigger explanation. To assert our kinship from the vantage point of extended peace and prosperity feels like effrontery, but to do justice to these people we must open our minds to how like us they were. In daring to think of our grandparents and great-grandparents as recognisable versions of ourselves, we are also conforming to Ranke’s exhortation to understand the past as it really was: wie es eigentlich gewesen.

High politics and high drama dominated that first week of the war, encapsulated by the military and civilian mayhem in Belgium, which largely collapsed under the German onslaught following their invasion of 4th August. Britain, which declared war on the same day, despatched an Expeditionary Force in order to help shore up what it could with commendable speed, and a parallel series of onslaughts erupted across the Russian border and in southern Africa. Enthusiasm for the war appeared equally explosive almost everywhere, so it seemed: nations bathed in the rhetoric of patriotic fervour.

Of course, it was never quite so straightforward. For one thing, there had been a lot of hemming and hawing among members of the British government in the days leading up to war. The British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, had had to threaten to resign if Britain didn’t do the decent thing and send troops to Belgium. Had he done so, it seems probable that his boss, Prime Minister Asquith, would have gone as well.

Only thus were they able to corral Cabinet doubters and dissenters into a reluctant acceptance that to fight Germany was a question of survival as well as a debt of honour. On the afternoon of 3rd August, Grey had made a speech in the Commons which Asquith, never one to be lavish with praise, described as,

Extraordinarily well reasoned and tactful and really cogent, so much so that our extreme peace lovers were for the moment reduced to silence, though they will soon find their tongues again.

Grey was no tub-thumper. His fixity of purpose was accompanied by an equivalent sense of foreboding. That evening of 3rd August, watching the lamplighters from his office in Whitehall, he memorably remarked: The lamps are going out all over Europe and we shall not see them lit again during our lifetime.

H.H. Asquith, Liberal prime minister from 1908 to 1916

(Bain News Service/Library of Congress).

The British declaration of war came at 11 p.m. the following evening. In Germany, a few hours beforehand, the ambassador, Sir Edward Goschen, had been confronted by the Chancellor Theodor von Bethmann-Hollweg, reportedly in a state of some agitation. Von Bethmann-Hollweg appeared not to understand why Britain was on the edge of war at all. When Goschen tactfully reminded him that Britain was a signatory of the 1839 Treaty of London, and thus a guarantor of Belgian neutrality, the Chancellor was unappeased:

He said that the step taken by His Majesty’s Government was terrible to a degree just for a word – ‘neutrality’, a word which in wartime had so often been disregarded – just for a ‘scrap of paper’ Great Britain was going to make war on a kindred nation who desired nothing better than to be friends with her…

Hollweg’s vapours were unlikely to win Goschen over, given the horrors now being unleashed on Belgium. Her desperate situation made Asquith’s task of convincing doubters that much easier. On 6th August, he referred MPs in the Chamber to the most pathetic appeal addressed by the King of the Belgians, adding, I do not envy the man who can read that appeal with an unmoved heart.

The German invasion of Belgium early on Tuesday 4th August was a flagrant crime – a breach of international law and an affront to natural justice. The German claim that she had been forced to invade only because otherwise France would have done the same to her was a lie. It was certainly true that France had regarded her nearest neighbour with seething resentment ever since she had been forced to give up Alsace and Lorraine 44 years earlier at the time of the Franco-Prussian war. But the aggressor in 1914 was Germany, and she had no basis to claim provocation.

The lack of natural frontiers between France, Belgium and Germany had long made the Belgians nervous. In Liège, twelve formidable forts had been completed only eight months earlier to ensure the town’s defence. Local forces there now rallied to meet the German threat but, in this instance, David was unlikely to defeat Goliath. The following day, 5th August, saw a direct German assault silence the first of the town’s strong defences, Fort Fléron.

Three more forts fell over the next 24 hours, and the town’s sufferings were compounded when, on 7th August, it endured the first aerial attack of the war following a Zeppelin raid which killed nine people.

Some 70 miles away in Sedan in the Ardennes, an enraged ten-year-old schoolboy (and future theologian and Cardinal), Yves Congar, was filling in his diary:

Liège is not yet taken and one fights the Germans street by street. The Germans have 3,000 dead and they have asked for 24 hours to bury the corpses which are stacked one metre high on the streets.

The German high command seemed unabashed by what they were doing. Moltke, commander-in-chief of the general staff, wrote that same day: Our advance in Belgium is certainly brutal, but we are fighting for our lives and all who get in the way must take the consequences.

Three days later, the town fell to the invaders. The furious pace of the advance was a direct consequence of the famous Schlieffen Plan which required a rapid drive through neutral Belgium and Luxembourg in order to enter and defeat France. Speed was essential in order to defeat France before her ally, Russia, could mobilise her vast army.

However, even by that time, some of the blithe assumptions upon which the plan rested were beginning to look doubtful. The French army, for one thing, was clearly spoiling for a fight. Germany had provided it with an unimpeachable excuse to wreak revenge for its humiliation in 1870 – something which it hoped to realise, above all, in the recapture of Alsace and Lorraine. Within three days of the outbreak of war, the French had invaded Alsace, and they occupied Altkirch and Mulhausen the following day. True, the French had to fall back three days later, but this was not going to be a German rout.

The German high command was also disconcerted by the glee with which London appeared to be abandoning its splendid isolation – which had been the leitmotif of British foreign policy for a century. The first contingents of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) arrived in France on 7th August, with Sir John French as commander-in-chief. What, for the moment, was less clear was exactly in which direction they should then head. Amiens? Mauberge? Even Antwerp? In military terms, perhaps it did not matter too much. The BEF was a minnow – it consisted of four infantry divisions and one cavalry division, running up to a total of 100,000 men. Even the regular British army only consisted of 247,000 officers and men, a third of whom were in India – although that figure could be expanded to nearly three quarters of a million men if you took into account various Reserves and Territorials. By contrast, 4.5 million Germans and 4 million French soldiers marched to war.

Britain’s ill-preparedness for a continental land war had never seemed, in its heyday, to matter much. After all, it had its navy and, theoretically at least, an almost inexhaustible number of native troops should any of its colonies take it upon themselves to get uppity. Now, as Germany appeared to race across Europe, the thought that Britain might need to magic up a whole lot more soldiers began to take hold of those charged with her defence.

Foremost among these was Field Marshal Kitchener, the celebrated late Victorian warrior. The day after war was declared, he was aboard a Channel steamer, on the first leg of the journey back to Egypt, when he was suddenly forced to about-turn and return to London. Asquith asked him to become secretary of state for war. Kitchener was no politician (no administrator either), but he knew a thing or two about duty, and he accepted. In securing the services of Britain’s most celebrated living hero, Asquith had bought the government some valuable time.

Kitchener knew that the pressing need was to get men into uniform, as many of them as possible and as fast as possible. However, his call for New Armies isolated him among many of his new colleagues. At the War Cabinet meeting on the day of his appointment, it was only Kitchener and another army commander, Sir Douglas Haig, who insisted that the war would not be over by Christmas but, rather, would last for years and need millions of men.

Herein lay the genesis of the famous poster – not, in fact, issued until mid-September – in which the moustachioed old warhorse stared out, bulging-eyed, at his countrymen. The public mood was already running ahead of official caution, and Kitchener found himself kicking at an open door: between 4th August and 12th September just under 500,000 young men in Britain joined up, a figure which would grow by year’s end to nearly 1.2 million.

On the day war broke out, the king, George V, confided to his diary: Warm, showers & windy. At work all day… I held a Council at 10.45 to declare War with Germany, it is a terrible catastrophe but it is not our fault…

He wrote, as always, from the heart, and it was not his failing if later generations of readers have frequently found his dullness a provocation. The same diary entry also noted:

When they heard the War had been declared the excitement increased & it was a never to be forgotten sight when May [Queen Mary] & I with David [Prince of Wales] went on to the balcony, the cheering was terrific. Please God that it will be over & that He will protect dear Bertie’s life [An allusion to the future George VI, then serving with the Royal Navy].

The cheering to which he refers may serve as evidence that, at this stage, many young men rallied to the colours because they wanted to, rather than because they felt themselves constrained to do so. The notion that credulous youngsters were duped by a slick publicity machine might seem well-founded, but the evidence for patriotism burning brightly in the breasts of young men all over Britain and indeed across the world is incontrovertible. (Doubtless too, the yearning for adventure was a reflection of the monotony endured by those born without much in the way of wealth or opportunity in the early 20th century.)

The kaiser, Wilhelm II, was also moved by the tremendous events of the times, and enjoying the gust of sudden popularity these had given him. On 4th August, he told a packed Reichstag: I no longer know of parties. I know only Germans and therefore I ask all of you to give me your hands.

Public infatuation with Kitchener probably peaked in 1914 – the enthusiasm was not shared by his Cabinet colleagues

(Look and Learn/Elgar Collection/Bridgeman Images).

In those first heady days of the war, this sort of guff seemed actually to mean something. Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg took the chance to secure a war credit of £265 million, an eye-wateringly large sum. Over-egging the pudding as usual, Wilhelm then told his departing soldiers: You will be home before the leaves have fallen from the trees.

Wilhelm was, for the moment, mainly looking West. By contrast, the Austrian Emperor, Franz Josef, was preoccupied by what was happening in the South and East. Above all, he wanted a reckoning with Serbian nationalists – it was Serbian nationalism which had led to the assassination of his heir six weeks earlier, as he had recently explained to the kaiser:

The bloody deed was not the work of a single individual but a well organised plot… there can be no doubt that its policy of uniting all Southern Slavs under the Serbian flag encourages such crimes… My efforts must be directed to isolating Serbia and reducing her size.

Austria-Hungary was enormous and Serbia pretty tiny, so that sounded simple enough. However, a flavour of the humiliation which would dog the Habsburgs came on 6th August when their forces at Obrenovaks were quickly overwhelmed by Serbs and forced to retreat, losing guns as they went. More troubling still, so far as Vienna was concerned, was the growing realisation that Russia had no intention of allowing Serbia to absorb punishment without offering her assistance.

This was probably the only time in the war in which Russia outperformed expectations. The Tsar had been quicker to match his words with action than had been anticipated, and mobilised his troops at the end of July. Although the kaiser and the German high command had been taken aback, they were more irritated than alarmed. Russia, as everyone knew (or thought they knew) would take ages to get her troops actually moving. The thing was: it didn’t happen like that. The Russian military machine moved, apparently, on startlingly oiled wheels and the First Army crossed into East Prussia on 7th August.

These first days of war saw a host of opportunistic efforts to settle old scores. Just as the French made a lurch in Alsace, so did the Serbs enter Bosnia on 7th August, determined to recover territory annexed by Austria in 1908 – a source of festering resentment for the past six years. A combined British and French force also entered Togoland on 8th August, while the Germans invaded Cape Colony in South Africa on 10th August. The British had never wanted the Germans to get colonial pretensions, and the Germans had never given up resenting this.

Naval strategy in the first days of the war seemed remarkably opaque. For at least a decade, the arms race had focused almost exclusively on building ships that were bigger, faster and stronger than before, especially in Britain and Germany. But now the war had arrived, there seemed to be a lot of head-scratching as to what exactly was to be done. The only clear imperative was to try to knock out any enemy ship before it knocked out yours. It was a curiously reductive way of thinking.

For the British, the first contest along these lines ended badly. On 4th August, German battlecruiser SMS Goeben and light cruiser SMS Breslau bombarded French territory in Algeria. Being new, fast, well-equipped cruisers, their destruction would have been a big relief for British ships in the Mediterranean. Both, however, managed to reach Messina to re-coal before they could be picked off, and arrived in the Dardanelles less than a week later. Here, to the horror of Britain and France, they were escorted by an Ottoman picket boat through the Sea of Marmara towards Constantinople. It was a clear signifier that Turkey was in the clutches of the Central Powers.

Knocking out ships also meant knocking out men. One day into the war, on 5th August, the German minelayer, Konigin Luise, was scuttled in the Heligoland Bight after being damaged by three British ships, amongst them HMS Amphion. The British rescued 46 of the 100-man crew – an early example of the kind of chivalry upon which the British in general and the navy in particular prided themselves. Alas, it did little to help the crew of the Amphion which, the very next day, hit a German mine in the North Sea and sank. Here were the first British casualties of the war: 170 men were killed, 18 of whom were Germans rescued from the Konigin Luise.

Although it would never have been acknowledged, the outbreak of war solved, at a stroke, what was becoming an increasingly intractable political crisis in Britain. For months, Westminster had been brought to a virtual impasse by acrimonious disputes as two bills, for Welsh Disestablishment and Home Rule for Ireland, passed bad-temperedly between Lords and Commons. For this reason if no other, few MPs had given the European crisis much attention until late July. Now, however, the contentions of war implied new priorities and demanded consensus. Many in Britain welcomed that, not least those with an appetite for the amassing of authority at the centre. On 8th August, DORA (the Defence of the Realm Act) was passed, allowing the government, amongst much else, to requisition mines, factories, railways and land. It proved to be no more than the thin end of a very large wedge which, over the next months and years, intruded more and more into civilian life.

For those not oppressed by invasion and enemy occupation, there was excitement too – and this was not just the preserve of the young. A Sussex schoolteacher, Robert Saunders, wrote on 2nd August to his son in Canada:

We have been in a great state of excitement as the reservists are being called up, all the railways are guarded, wire entanglements, trench guns etc., have been hurriedly put up round Portsmouth and even our post office has had orders to keep open night and day. Everything points to the Great War, so long expected, being upon us, so you can picture the restless excitement among all classes.

F.L. Cassel, in Berlin at the same time, also picked up on the excitement. But he noted that the febrile mood could quickly turn nasty:

The streets began to fill with excited people, who were inclined to become the victim of any rumour… Coffee houses were destroyed, e.g. the English café at the Wittenberg Platz, ostensibly because it was alleged that enemy hymns had been played by foreign musicians.

When war threatened to land on one’s doorstep, fear tempered excitement. Henri Desagneaux, a reservist, was ordered to report to his regiment when France mobilised on 1st August:

Paris is in turmoil. The banks are besieged. Emotion is at its peak. It’s every man for himself; you scarcely have time to shake a few hands before having to go home to make preparations for departure.

As the troop trains were loaded at the Gare de L’Est, upper lips seem to have done rather a lot of wobbling: The women are crying, the men too. They have to say goodbye without knowing whether they will ever return.

Safe from invasion, there was perhaps a temptation for Britons, especially for those better educated, to contemplate the prospect of war with Arthurian loftiness. Before the end of July, Siegfried Sassoon had rightly concluded war was coming and, on 4th August, he enlisted as a trooper with the Sussex Yeomanry. A true child of his time and class, his first instinct seems to have been to revel in the beauty of the English countryside:

The Weald had been the world of my youngness, and while I gazed across it now I felt prepared to do whatever I could to defend it. And after all, dying for one’s native land was believed to be the most glorious thing one could possibly do!

This was, after all, the first day of the war. He would have other pre-occupations soon enough.

There were many like him, awash with sentimentality and drama. Walter Limmer, on his way to the front, seems to have been clinically intoxicated when he wrote to his family in Leipzig on 7th August:

Dear Father, good Mother, beloved Brothers and Sisters, please, please don’t think me cruel for saying this, but it would be a good thing if already you too would, with brave hearts and firm self-control, get accustomed to the idea that you will not see me or any of my brothers again. Then if bad news does come, you will be able to receive it much more calmly.

But if we all do come back, then we can accept that joy as an unexpected and all the more gracious and glorious gift of God… We are bound to be victorious! Nothing else is possible in the face of such determination to win. My dear ones, be proud that you live in such times and in such a nation, and that you too have the privilege of sending several of those you love into this glorious struggle.

2

A war of survival

11th August – 17th August

Talk about ducks to water. All Europe (well, nearly all) seemed to be falling into the business of war with alacrity and zeal.

The Germans led the way, of course. For now, war in the West meant war in Belgium. For both nations, the fighting and the dying had begun in earnest – much of it around Liège, upon whose forts the Germans continued to rain terror. Given their thick walls, behind which the Belgians had 400 retractable guns dedicated to blocking their advance, the Germans had either to go home with their tail between their legs, or come up with something a bit special. They opted for the latter, in the form of a huge Krupp 420mm siege howitzer.

In the words of one awed Belgian civilian:

The monster advanced in two parts pulled by 36 horses – the pavement trembled, the crows went mute with consternation… Then came the frightful explosion: the crowd was flung back, the earth shook like an earthquake and all the windowpanes in the vicinity were shattered.

This frightful apparition was known, presumably unofficially, as Dicke Bertha (literally Big Bertha) in an ironic homage to the daughter of the original Krupp industrialist.

Big Bertha didn’t just look the part. As she was hauled into range of the surviving fort, Loncin, the veteran Belgian commander, General Gerard Leman prepared for the last stand. Sealed in behind metal shutters and doors, he was already badly injured, and his troops choking in concrete dust thrown up by earlier attacks and failed ventilation. Bertha duly rained down fire and destruction, the six-foot concrete roof of the fort exploded and 250 soldiers were crushed to death.

Leman was discovered under the rubble, unconscious but alive. He was carried out gently and eventually spoke to his captors: It is as it is. The men fought valiantly.

German General Emmich responded to Leman’s words by refusing to accept his proffered sword, insisting that To have crossed swords with you has been an honour. The war was still enough of a novelty for a few theatrical touches.

Fort Loncin fell on 16th August, following which the Germans continued their forward sweep towards Brussels. The bravery they had seen at Liège had been, for many of them, a sobering experience. It certainly proved inspirational for Belgium’s allies. The whole notion of poor little Belgium, which had first been awoken by unprovoked invasion, gained further traction through the tales of epic, if ultimately futile, resistance.

It was against this backdrop that the rumour mill concerning German atrocities started to gain currency. Many were alleged to have been carried out against unarmed Belgian civilians, although Germans often insisted that brutality existed on both sides. One captured soldier now described what he had seen the previous week:

About noon on 6th August I came to a dressing station set up on a farm… In the house I found about fifteen severely wounded German soldiers, of whom four or five had been horribly mutilated… their eyes had been gouged out and some had had several fingers cut off… The men were still living and groaning…

Although Liège and Brussels dominated the (heavily censored) headlines, there was fighting elsewhere. The German attempt to seize Huy on the Meuse on 12th August was checked at Haelen in an heroic stand during which repeated charges by the cavalry of Georg van der Marwitz were defeated by a single unit. It was brutal stuff: the Belgian commander, De Witt, ordered his men to dismount their horses and greet the German attackers with massed rifle fire. It was virtually an invitation to suicide, since although around 150 Germans were killed, Belgian losses numbered 500. On the other hand, it added a whole chapter to the martyrology of a wronged nation, while serving as a warning to commanders that cavalry in offensive actions was likely to prove ineffective.

The German advance seemed under pressure elsewhere too. Three days later, they were held up at Dinant, a key crossing point of the Meuse. In bitter daylong fighting, they had taken the citadel in the morning, but were driven out only hours later when the French commander, General Charles Lanrezac, ordered bayonet charges straight into waiting German artillery units – another semi-suicidal action, insofar as French losses were frightful but the Germans were flushed out. One of those wounded was a young Second Lieutenant Charles De Gaulle.

The arrival of the British in France this week held out the promise of relief for the beleaguered Belgians. The first big landing took place on 12th August, an event which prompted the British prime minister, H.H. Asquith, to write delightedly to Venetia Montagu, a close friend of his daughter:

There has never been anything more wonderful than the persistent & impenetrable secrecy in which everything both on sea & land continues to be enveloped. Imagine the Channel between Southampton & Havre & between Newhaven & Dieppe swarming now for nearly 3 days with transports: the troops arriving on French soil with no doubt a lot of acclamation: whole regiments of khaki-clad guards & Highlanders, marching as they have been today, thro’ the streets of London with bands playing the Marseillaise, & apparently disappearing into space: and not a word in any newspaper to indicate what is going on.

The PM’s talk of impenetrable secrecy invites, at best, a sardonic smile from the modern reader. At 62, he was in the full flush of infatuation for Stanley, 35 years his junior, to whom in daily letters he entrusted an imprudent mêlée of classified information and unguarded opinion. Asquith’s indiscretions hint at a level of indulgence which, even at this stage of the war, sat uneasily alongside the demands everywhere for personal sacrifice.

One of those sacrifices was that political leaders and top brass in the military all over Europe now came up against one another far more closely than in peacetime. On 11th August, a Press Bureau was created by the British government in an effort to assert a strict control over reporting of the war. Controlling it was newly appointed war minister, Field Marshal Lord Kitchener – a soldier to his bones, even when forced to become a politician. His suspicion of his Cabinet colleagues centred on the fact that they would talk to their wives. Mistresses or muses do not appear to have entered his thinking.

Even at this early stage of the war, there was the usual jostling for preferment and advantage in the highest echelons of the military. The appointment of Sir John French as commander-in-chief had been touched on delicately in a conversation on 11th August at Aldershot between King George V and Sir Douglas Haig. The latter had rather hoped to be given the job himself, and even the circumspection of their discussion, as recorded in his diary, does little to conceal his true feelings:

I told him [the king]… that from my experience with Sir John in the South African War, he was certain to do his utmost loyally to carry out any orders which the Government might give him. I had grave doubts however, whether either his temper was sufficiently even or his military knowledge sufficiently thorough to enable him to discharge properly the very different duties which will devolve upon him during the coming operations with Allies on the Continent.

In my own heart, I know that French is quite unfit for this great command at a time of crisis in our Nation’s history.

The new commander-in-chief arrived in Boulogne on 14th August, two days before Haig, and proceeded to set up his headquarters at Le Cateau. On 16th August, Colonel John Charteris, one of Haig’s senior staff officers, noted:

D.H. unburdened himself today. He is greatly concerned about the composition of British G.H.Q. He thinks French quite unfit for high command in time of crisis…

It wasn’t just French, either.

D.H. thinks Wilson [Sir Henry Wilson, one of French’s Staff] is a politician, and not a soldier, and ‘politician’ with Douglas Haig is synonymous with crooked dealing and wrong sense of values.

Haig’s lack of enthusiasm for the C-in-C was not one-way traffic. French was livid with Haig for agreeing with Kitchener that two infantry divisions, both with very experienced officers, had to stay at home while the rest of the first BEF contingent sailed to France. This was justified on grounds of prudence, but French claimed he had thus been deprived of the manpower which could see the war concluded by Christmas. It was a grudge which rankled, and a belief which persisted.

The extent to which personal animus, or at least score-settling, influenced the conduct of war has perhaps been underrated. We see it in the way in which the French sought during the week to wrest back Alsace and Lorraine, and even more in the unfolding contest in the Balkans. On 12th August, the Austro-Hungarians, who had been massing forces on their southern and western frontier, launched their first invasion on Serbia – something seen by many as a Strafexpedition (Punishment Expedition). Here was a chance to avenge the recent assassination of the Archduke and his wife, and also to kill off Serb aspirations for an enlarged kingdom. The Austrian commander, General Oskar Potiorek, a former Governor General of Bosnia-Hercegovina, had been one of the party travelling in the Archduke’s carriage on that fateful June day in Sarajevo. Since then his line had been to boast that I was spared at Sarajevo so that I may die avenging it!

The fact that Potiorek had been allegedly in charge of security on the day of the assassination would, one might have thought, have encouraged some second thoughts about giving him military command. Despite lacking numbers and guns to match those of their enemy, and despite also the exhaustion of many troops following the recent Balkan wars, the Serbs now put up a terrific fight. Although the Austrians had begun well enough, crossing the river Drina in the west and the Sava in the north, the Serb counter-attack, which began on the night of 15th August, was ferocious. They occupied strong defensive positions high in the mountains, and the Austrian assault on Mount Cer saw them mown down in their hundreds.

Militarily, it was a reverse rather than a catastrophe. Strategically, it hinted that Austria-Hungary might prove more of an albatross to its allies than an opportunity. A quarter of its army was illiterate, and spoke neither German nor Hungarian. Its ethnic fluidity had already proved too much for one young man who, by virtue of his birthplace in Braunau-am-Inn, should have been called to the colours. Adolf Hitler, aged 25 at the outbreak of war, used the fact that he had been living in Munich for the previous year to bolster his credentials to enroll as No. 168 in the First Company of the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry.

The Russians continued for a few days to buck the low expectations placed on them. Having mobilised far more quickly than anticipated, they began a two-pronged attack on the Central Powers through East Prussia and in Galicia, where, on 14th August, they defeated an Austrian army at Sokal. That was the end of the good news, however. Their advance in East Prussia halted three days later when General Rennenkampf’s First Army was surprised by a ferocious frontal attack by General Hermann von Francois’ I Corps. A German force of 18,000 proceeded to inflict heavy punishment on a Russian one of over 50,000 – over 600 Russians were killed and almost 4,500 taken prisoner. The real prize for the Germans was the battle experience and the confidence that, when it came to taking on the Russians, an offensive strategy worked best.

In much of mainland Europe, in which fighting had begun, civilians faced disruption, hunger and violence, In Britain, many were probably more excited than fearful. After all, the nature of the conflict which lay ahead was unknown. But they were anxious to nail their patriotic colours to the mast – to do, in the jargon of the time, their bit. The very elderly and the very young still longed to be of use. Women, as well as sending off their husbands and sons, looked for a role for themselves and new charities of all kinds mushroomed. Mindful that autumn lay only weeks away, women everywhere started an epidemic of knitting in an effort to ensure that brave boys at the front should not succumb to a chill.

The near-universal enthusiasm of the nation to meet the demands of the time made for a heady brew. After many years in which the militancy of the suffragettes had become a serious political concern, Emmeline Pankhurst had halted all suffragette activity for the duration of the war. Many activists wanted to contribute meaningfully to the war effort but, given the extent to which her Women’s Social and Political Union had been prepared to embrace violence, her call to rally behind the war effort took many aback. Many commentators believe that war now gave her a heaven-sent opportunity to retreat from a doomed political strategy without loss of face.

Dissenters to the orthodoxy of patriotic fervour were few and far between. The philosopher Bertrand Russell was one. As a grandson of the Victorian prime minister, Lord John Russell, and an august academic, he was less easily overawed, perhaps. His Letter to the Nation was published on 15th August 1914:

Against the vast majority of my countrymen, even at this moment, in the name of humanity and civilisation, I protest against our share in the destruction of Germany.

A month ago Europe was a peaceful comity of nations; if an Englishman killed a German, he was hanged. Now, if an Englishman kills a German, or if a German kills an Englishman, he is a patriot, who has deserved well of his country. We scan the newspapers with greedy eyes for news of slaughter, and rejoice when we read of innocent young men, blindly obedient to the word of command, mown down in thousands by the machine-guns of Liège.

Those who saw the London crowds, during the nights leading up to the Declaration of War saw a whole population, hitherto peaceable and humane, precipitated in a few days down the steep slope to primitive barbarism, letting loose, in a moment, the instincts of hatred and blood lust against which the whole fabric of society has been raised.

This was all true enough, if not what people wanted to hear. Army recruiting offices continued throughout the week to be overwhelmed by ardent young men, desperate to don khaki. Many had to be told to go home and wait, at least for a few days or weeks. There was nowhere to house them, let alone uniforms or rifles with which to equip them.

The excitement of the time was felt keenly in homes up and down the land, even the most august ones. The prime minister had four sons and, according to a letter written by his daughter Violet to a friend, Father will be asked why he doesn’t begin his recruiting at home… Of her four brothers, the third, Arthur (known as Oc) was 31 years old, unmarried, and so conformed very closely to the kind of demographic Lord Kitchener’s New Armies sought to attract. Nor was he at all reluctant to shirk his responsibility, writing, It is obviously fitting that one of my father’s four sons should be prepared to fight. I cannot sit by quietly reading the papers…

The destination of the other brothers was less certain. Two were married and the other in poor health. True to the spirit of the times, however, Oc, Herbert (Beb) and Cyril (Cys) now signed up for a training course at the public schools camp near Salisbury.

For now, the eldest brother, Raymond, a brilliant barrister, continued his work, but he also planned to enlist. In a letter this week to his wife, Katharine, he captured brilliantly some of the absurdities of the moment:

There is a feeling in the air that everyone ought to make a fuss of some kind. I went up to London… & found it seething with futility. I flung myself with gusto into the maelstrom of mis-directed effort and ostentatious altruism. I put my name down for an organisation… for drilling middle-aged breadwinners out of school hours. Probably the W.O. will stop it, and quite right too.

Then I went to the office of the National Service League, where an enormous staff is employed in rejecting the applications of well-meaning idiots for inappropriate positions – Boy Scouts with fixed bayonets see that one comes to no harm in the lift, and old women fill in innumerable printed forms which old men in other parts of the building tear up. The nett result of my activities was to reject an application by Evan Charteris to be an interpreter and to recommend the immediate deportation of a man who said he had taken part in the Franco-Prussian War…

One of the attractive features of this letter is its sense of detachment – a quality he appears to have inherited from his father. Notwithstanding the cares of office, the old boy (as he was known to his family) found time to write to Venetia Stanley on 17th August, regaling her with tales of his luncheon parties, bridge-playing and golf and (outrageously) the details of Sir John French’s whereabouts: He starts (this is secret) on Friday morning (14th) in a torpedo destroyer for Boulogne.

Most of all, however, he emphasised his adoration – not even the Germans could quell that:

I miss you so much: I only wish you were nearer, & I could see you, even for a quarter of an hour, each day, it wd. make such a difference… I pine for you… Am I a fool? What do you really think? Anyhow I love you.

3

First battles on the Western Front

18th August – 24th August

Taking the battle to the enemy – that was the French way. They even had a name for it: l’attaque à l’outrance.

Having advanced and cut the line between Metz and Strasbourg on 18th August, however, the French faced a powerful German counter-attack near Saarburg and Morhange two days later. The day was remarkable for being the first real exposure to a battle for the commander of the French 20th Corps.

At 63, Ferdinand Foch might have expected to have been able to drift into dignified retirement, but on the day the man – who would, in 1918, become supreme commander – acquitted himself well. Most of the French were driven back across the border, with the loss of 20,000 prisoners and 150 guns, but the rocklike stand of his Corps helped to rescue a grim outcome from being an all-out disaster. Even now, French commanders clung to Plan XVII, which stipulated an attack in the Ardennes, heading towards Neufchâteau. The risks this entailed were augmented by the growing numbers of Germans grouping further north, evidence by which the French commander Joseph Joffre refused to allow himself to be diverted.

He miscalculated, however. When, on 22nd August, they confronted the German centre in the Ardennes, it was to find German soldiers, entrenched in defensive positions, mowing down advancing French troops. The Germans had set up their machine-guns to maximum effect and, humiliatingly, the French were making it too easy for them. The field grey uniforms of the kaiser’s army faded into the landscape, in contrast to the theatrical blue tunics and red trousers of the French, whose officers brandished swords rather than revolvers.

In all, 15 separate battles were fought by the French that day and 27,000 soldiers were killed – the worst daily loss in French military history. These included Foch’s only son and one of his sons-in-law. Unsurprisingly, that rather dampened the spirit of l’attaque à l’outrance. The following day, the French began falling back from the Sambre and Meuse rivers and also in northern Alsace. General Castelnau began a critical defence at the so-called Trouée de Charmes, a gap in French fortifications which stretched from Epinal to Toul, west of Nancy.

The opportunity to exploit this was of lip-smacking interest to the German commander-in-chief, Moltke, who now despatched the 6th Bavarian Army under Crown Prince Rupprecht for exactly that purpose. But the French were determined in their new-found role of defence, and stalled the German assaults on 23rd August, the first day of the battle. By now, any illusions about what cost they might bear in this war had been shed: in just four days, from 20th to 23rd August, their casualties had topped 140,000.

To judge from the sparse column inches devoted to the subject, the British were too preoccupied, or perhaps just too insular, to have shed many tears over the agonies of France. Their commander-in-chief, Sir John French, scarcely offered a corrective to the prevailing view among many officers that Britain’s ally was – at best – a resource to be exploited, rather than a strategic partner. In less charitable moments, of which he had many, he considered them an incubus.

The whole Mons episode feels like a late-Victorian epic – one fought by professional soldiers steeped in the traditions of the 19th century. It was certainly rich in tales of individual heroism. On 21st August, as the British approached Mons, they sent out reconnaissance scouts, often on bicycles. One of these, Private John Parr of the Middlesex Regiment, became the first British fatality of the war, mown down by German rifle fire. The pathos of his death was undeniably intensified by the discovery that he had lied about his age and was, poor sap, only 17. He was buried in St Symphorien, the same cemetery in which – by an extraordinary coincidence – the last British soldier to die, four and half years later, would also be laid to rest.

Confounding those sceptics who believed that aeroplanes were merely a rich man’s folly, the Royal Flying Corps carried out twelve reconnaissance flights, one of which provided the vital intelligence that large German units were threatening to outflank the Allies by moving westwards on the Brussels–Ninove road. One of these pioneering pilots was Lieutenant Charles Bayly, the great nephew of Gordon of Khartoum, a coincidence which, it might have been hoped, sprinkled on the young airman some of the magic dust of Britain’s imperial heyday. Alas, he was now shot down – his body, and that of his co-flier, offering the first (grisly but irrefutable) evidence to the Germans of a British presence on the continent.

French’s hope had been to press north towards Brussels. In the light of information received by the men in their flying machines, however, the BEF was now ordered to dig in and hold the line between Maubeuge and Valenciennes. On 22nd August, they took up entrenched positions along the Mons canal, which followed a pronounced salient north of the town, and prepared to meet the enemy. Their wish was duly granted. Early on 23rd August, 70,000 British soldiers with 300 guns placed along a 20-mile front, commanded by Sir Douglas Haig and Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, faced 160,000 Germans with 600 guns.

They did well. Wave after wave of German infantry advanced, only to be devastated by the accuracy and speed of the British rifle fire. The BEF was a highly trained regular army which had been schooled in the devilishly hard business of firing 15 rounds a minute. For the Germans, it was carnage. So rapid was the rate of fire that many German officers believed it was coming from machine-guns.

Corporal W. Holbrook, of 4th Royal Fusiliers, recalled:

Bloody Hell! You couldn’t see the earth for them, there were that many. Time after time they gave the order ‘Rapid Fire’. Well, you didn’t wait for the order, really! You’d see a lot of them coming in a mass on the other side of the canal and you just let them have it. They kept retreating and then coming forward, and then retreating again.

It wasn’t one-way traffic, however:

Of course we were losing men and a lot of officers, especially when the Germans started this shrapnel shelling and, of course, they had machine-guns – masses of them! – I don’t know how many times we saw them off.

As the day progressed, the BEF inflicted more than 5,000 casualties while suffering 1,850 of their own.

Private John Lucy, defending a position near Mons, recalled the day’s events without cant:

Our rapid fire was appalling even to us. Such tactics amazed us, and, after the first shock of seeing men slowly and helplessly falling down as they were hit, gave us a great sense of power and pleasure. It was all so easy.

Strategically, however, the benefits of the day were thrown into jeopardy when news arrived at midnight that the French Fifth Army had fallen back. An order was issued for the BEF to make a general retreat of eight miles.

The experience of Mons was sobering for many. Corporal Bernard Denmore, 1st Royal Berkshire Regiment, confided to his diary:

23rd August. …The artillery fire from the Germans was very heavy, but was dropping behind us on a British battery… After dark more wounded were brought in from [that] battery. One man was in a very bad way, and kept shrieking out for someone to bring a razor and cut his throat, and two others died almost immediately. I was going to move a bundle of hay when someone called out, ‘Look out, chum. There’s a bloke in there.’ I saw a leg completely severed from its body, and suddenly felt very sick and tired. The German rifle-fire started again and an artillery-man to whom I was talking was shot dead. I was sick then.

Nothing much happened in the night, except one man spent the time kissing a string of rosary-beads, and another swore practically the whole night.

Five Victoria Crosses were awarded during the action at Mons on 23rd August and three more the following day during the mopping-up actions at Audregnies and Landrecies which followed. The first of these – indeed the first of the war – went posthumously to Lieutenant Maurice Dease, a machine-gun officer of the 4th Royal Fusiliers, for his exceptional courage in defence of the bridge at Nimy near Mons. Dease, Irish-born and educated at Stonyhurst, seems to have been the epitome of undemonstrative courage, and died of his wounds.

For the Belgians, the shock of invasion and occupation was increasingly compounded by German reprisals against civilians. Even now, distinguishing between what was true and verifiable and what was propaganda and innuendo remains hard. Shrecklichkeit (the best translation is probably frightfulness) was a deliberate German tactic, and was very freely used when accusing Belgian civilians of being francs-tireurs, of firing on German soldiers, and of mutilating wounded and dead German soldiers. Invading authorities seemed uninhibited when it came to meting out punishment to those they believed guilty of offences, or who merely happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. This week saw the rounding up and execution of civilian men, women and children: six in Warsage, 50 at Seilles, nearly 500 at Tamines.

Most terribly of all, 23rd and 24th August saw 674 killed at Dinant. This seems to have been provoked following opposition to a German raid on the night of 21st August, after which soldiers started burning houses. In the two days of fighting which followed, crossfire between the French and Germans encouraged the invaders to believe that the town was stiff with francs-tireurs. It was the kind of madness which typified a war in which terror triumphs at the expense of cool command. In addition to the body count, 400 civilians were deported to Germany.

At the start of the campaign Moltke had warned that Anybody who in any form participates without authorisation will be considered as francs-tireurs and summarily shot on the spot, which might have sounded more like rough justice than blanket terror. Without a proper chain of command and decent protocols, however, such casual statements could easily spiral out of control. One German soldier’s memory of the training he had received before leaving for the front suggested as much:

At all training sessions we are told about the nastiness of the French, that our wounded have their eyes gouged out, their noses and ears cut off; we are given to understand that we must act without mercy.

There is no doubt that atrocities were committed by both sides. Landwehrmann Alwin Chaton noted on 21st August:

In the course of the street fighting in Charleroi… I saw… a German Dragoon lying in the street about fifty or sixty paces in front of me. Three civilians were near him, of whom one was bending over the soldier, who still kicked with his legs. I shot among them… one fell, the others fled. When I approached I saw the shot civilian had a knife, covered in blood, in his hand. The right eye of