Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I 9780674061170

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DANCE OF THE FURIES

DANCE OF THE FURIES EUROPE AND THE OUTBREAK OF WORLD WAR I

Michael S. Neiberg

the belknap press of harvard univ ersit y pres s Cambridge, Massachusetts London, En­gland 2011

Copyright © 2011 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Neiberg, Michael S. Dance of the furies : Europe and the outbreak of World War I / Michael S. Neiberg. p.  cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-04954-3 (alk. paper) 1. World War, 1914–1918—Causes.  2. World War, 1914–1918—Diplomatic history.  I. Title. D511.N347  2011 940.3′11—dc22   2011001209

For my parents, Larry and Phyllis Neiberg, with love

CONTENTS

Introduction

1

1 A Clap of Thunder in the Summer Sky

10

2 Background to Sarajevo, 1905–1914

36

3 The Delivery of the Austro-­Hungarian Ultimatum

66

4 Drifting into War against Her Will

93

5 The Coming of a Great Storm

121

6 Our Families Will Be Their Victims

150

7 Hardening Attitudes

180

8 An Evil Dance of the Furies

208

Conclusion

234

Notes  239 Acknowledgments  285 Index  287 (Illustrations follow page 120)

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INTRODUCTION

In June 1914, journalist, amateur historian of the Balkans, and keen observer of European affairs Herbert Adams Gibbons was considering leaving France and returning to his native United States. He decided to postpone his departure to spend one last calm, uneventful summer in the Paris he and his wife had come to love. As always happened with the approach of July and August, activity in the city would gradually slow to a crawl, leaving him with fewer stories to cover and more time to enjoy one final idyllic French summer. He and his wife planned to spend most of July in the cap­ital; at the end of the month they would follow the city’s residents on their annual pilgrimage to the mountains or the beaches for a month’s carefree vacation. Then they would return to the United States to live for the first time in more than two de­cades. On the last day in July, Gibbons and his wife were in Brittany lazily enjoying the sea breeze; even as they relaxed, however, the machinery of war was already in motion. Although Gibbons noted that none of the residents or vacationers he spoke to were interested in the news or cared “how Servia answered the ultimatum of Austria-­Hungary, or what the German ambassador at St. Petersburg was saying,” France and Europe had just a few hours of peace remaining.1 Gibbons saw no need to take any precautions other than to withdraw a bit more money from the bank and to talk with his wife about what they would do should an early return to Paris seem prudent. Even at so late a date, war still seemed to him highly unlikely. He told a friend: “I have been waiting twenty-­five years for your European war. Many a time it has seemed as imminent as this. But it will not come! . . . The diplomats will fume and fuss. But they know better than to plunge their countries into a colossal struggle that will ruin Europe and set back civilization.”2 Little did Gibbons know just how

1

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quickly those same diplomats in whom he placed such faith were to prove him wrong. About 900 miles to the northeast of where Gibbons was writing these thoughts in his journal, C. E. Cooper, known to her friends as Ethel, was in Leipzig stocking up on coal in response to rumors that its price was about to soar. She had come to Germany from Australia and had made a life for herself as a musician. Like Gibbons, she decided that despite the increasingly gloomy tone of the newspapers in late July, she would remain in Leipzig, a city she loved and a place where she had many friends, as well as a pet crocodile that lived in her bathtub. She, too, discounted fears of war, writing in her diary on July 31 that “perhaps next week we shall all be laughing at our precautions.” In almost exactly the same spirit (and on the same day) as Gibbons, she also wrote that war would be “such a terrible waste of life and energy” that no one in a position of authority would dare risk it.3 Neither Cooper nor Gibbons noted any enthusiasm from their friends or neighbors for war. I chose the experiences of Herbert Gibbons and Ethel Cooper to begin this book in part because both had ample opportunity and resources to leave Europe at the end of July if they had wanted to do so. Neither did, because neither had any reason to believe that a war, and certainly not a prolonged war, would needlessly disrupt their lives or cause them to do anything more drastic than keep a bit more cash and coal on hand. In the manner of an approaching natural di­sas­ter like a flood or a storm, the crisis required a bit of reasonable preparation and some due vigilance, but nothing much more. Like the Europeans among whom they chose to live, Cooper and Gibbons were stunned when the relatively minor diplomatic crisis that began in Sarajevo in late June led to a continental war. Once that war began, their options for getting out of Europe dwindled quickly, but neither wanted to leave their new homes at a time of crisis and during such a profound moment in his­tory. Most people took comfort from the assurances of amateur strategists and those with friends in high places that no war could possibly last more than a few months at the most. Nevertheless, the war changed the lives of an entire continent in a flash. Cooper, now de­ fined as an “enemy alien” inside Germany, had far fewer options than Gibbons, but both were quickly constrained by the momentous events occurring around them. By Christmas 1914 both Gibbons and Cooper had experienced five 2

INTRODUCTION

months of a war whose ferocity and expense (human and material alike) no one could have predicted. Both had lost friends and knew others so dazed by what they had seen on the battlefield that they seemed like completely different people. Both had seen thousands of lives permanently destroyed by the events of the war’s first few months. Individual stories are often more poignant than statistics. An En­glish acquaintance of Cooper’s, for example, had had a baby with a German man, but the couple had never married. The German was killed in the war’s first weeks, but the government refused to support his now fatherless child because the mother was from an enemy country. Nor would it allow the mother, now an enemy alien, to apply for permission to work. Cooper thought the poor woman’s plight summed up both the idiocies of governments and the ways that the war threatened the lives of ordinary people, like the now helpless baby, who had done nothing to cause it.4 She herself had been twice ordered to move to a location at least twenty miles from a city (the crocodile went to live at the Leipzig zoo) then twice been permitted to return if she promised to report to the local police headquarters two times per week. She was also forbidden to speak En­glish on the telephone or in the street. Just before the holiday season she looked back with great sadness at the massive changes she had seen since late July: It is nearly Christmas, but even here it will be very little kept this year—nobody has any heart for it. . . . I suppose there used to be a time of peace and quiet, when the world ­wasn’t in flames, and when one had something better to do than spend one’s days tramping backward and forward to the police court to report oneself, and helping one’s friends, who are turned out of [their] place, to pack. But I have forgotten what that time was like!5 Cooper was one of the lucky few Leipzig residents who was not also in mourning for a dead brother, father, or husband. As an American, Gibbons had more freedom of movement than Cooper. In November, he used his press credentials to arrange a trip to Switzerland, Germany, and Austria-­Hungary, returning to Paris just as Ethel Cooper was writing her observations on Christmas in her Leipzig apartment. “I came back with a heavy heart,” he wrote, “for I realized now that the war would be long, and that the suf­fering of these past months is not to be compared with that through which Europe has to pass in the year 1915.” He thought that the tragedy of suf­fering in Germany and Austria-­Hungary was the same as that in France and that “the whole of 3

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this war” could be summed up in three words: “­women in tears.” He spent Christmas day in Paris’s cold, sad Église St. Sulpice listening to Mass inside a church devoid of men but filled with sobbing ­women in mourning clothes. This book is the story of people like Gibbons, Cooper, and millions of others who lived their lives far from the arenas of diplomacy and military strategy. It is not my intention to assign blame for the causes of the war to one nation or another. I concur with the general consensus of historical opinion that the blame for the outbreak of the war rests with a small group of German and Austrian military and diplomatic leaders who badly misread the situation in 1914 and resorted far too quickly to war as an option. It is not my intention for this book to be read as implying any moral equality in the events that led to war in 1914. In my view, the elites in Berlin and Austria (and to a lesser extent St. Petersburg) were the only ones who truly did want war. The leaders of both France and Britain took all reasonable steps to avoid the conflagration. This book shows another side to the outbreak of war in 1914 beyond the worlds of diplomacy and military planning. Since 1914 historians have focused most of their efforts on the group of perhaps two dozen men in Vienna, Berlin, Paris, London, and St. Petersburg who made the fateful and misguided decisions that tore the continent apart and, in the pro­cess, ruined the very monarchical system that had led Europe to war in the first place. To date, we have only a limited un­der­stand­ing of what the rest of Europe was thinking, how it was reacting, and how a focus on ordinary people might give us a new perspective on this crucial event. This book hopes to fill that vacuum and in doing so provide some new ways to see the seismic events of that fateful summer.

People’s Wars and Cabinet Wars In 1890, German General Helmuth von Moltke (the uncle and namesake of the general who led Germany’s invasion of Belgium and France in 1914) cautioned that “the age of cabinet war is behind us—all we have now is people’s war. . . . woe to him who sets Europe alight, who first puts the fuse to the powder keg.”6 Much like the contemporary remark from German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck that “some damn fool thing in the Balkans” would start the next war, Moltke’s words have been seen as a warning from his­tory. They have also been used to justify the acts of 4

INTRODUCTION

politicians; if World War I really was a people’s war de­cades in the making, then politicians and cabinets could hardly have been expected to stop it from happening. But, as this book will show, World War I was not a people’s war, at least not in August 1914. Its origins and its outbreak were the products of a classic cabinet war. V. R. Berghahn estimates that Kaiser Wilhelm II consulted approximately twelve people on the decision to go to war. “Neither party leaders nor the representatives of economic pressure groups,” he argued, “were drawn into the secrets of the court, the German foreign of­fice, and the General Staff.”7 Across Europe, even se­nior government of­fi­cials were kept in the dark about the critical decisions leading to war. The Russian ambassador to Germany was not even informed of his country’s decision to mobilize for war; he learned about it from an incredulous German diplomat who confronted him in the hallway of the foreign ministry building.8 None of the great powers held plebiscites, or­ga­nized parliamentary debates, or even bothered to consult public opinion. As in Italy, where public opinion was seen as “tiresome,” people across the continent were kept in the dark.9 It is time to bring their voices back into the story of the First World War. This book makes six central arguments. First, I argue in the pages that follow that few Europeans expected a war and even fewer wanted one. Europe was not a place of white-­hot nationalist passions looking for a spark like the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand to set it alight. Virtually no one in Europe sought war as a way to correct supposed inequities stemming from the turbulent nineteenth century or as a way to adjust borders. Even in France, there was no desire for war to avenge the loss of Alsace-­Lorraine. Almost all memoirs, diaries, and letters from the period expressed extreme shock, sadness, and fear at the outbreak of war. I am not the first to make this argument; scholars such as Jean-­ Jacques Becker, Jeffrey Verhey, and Adrian Gregory have done so for spe­ cific places.10 This book, however, shows how wide and pervasive such sentiments were across the continent. It also argues that the very faith that people like Gibbons had in the system reassured them that some supranational group of diplomats or socialists would stop any crisis before it broke out into a war that Gibbons rightly feared would “ruin Europe and set back civilization.”11 The failure of those systems to prevent wars as they had in the past was one of the first great disillusions of 1914. Second, a focus on nationality at the expense of other sources of identity clouds our un­der­stand­ing of the war. A vision of Europe as a place of 5

DANCE OF THE FURIES

hermeneutically sealed nation-­states each with a single way of viewing the world sim­pli­fies but at the same time badly distorts the picture. To be sure, people of European nations came together in the face of a common threat, but they did not stop being socialists, farmers, Catholics, or members of the middle class even as they did so. To understand their reactions and responses to war, we must see them in all the com­plex­ity in which they saw themselves. We must not reduce them to national stereotypes or generalize too much about their beliefs. As this analysis will show, Europeans experienced the war in broadly similar ways. Class, gender, and ethnicity were just as im­por­tant as nationality in un­der­stand­ing the wartime experiences of individuals and groups. Here I have been heavily in­ flu­enced by historians who have developed the so-­called transnational turn, which argues that nationality must be seen as just one of many factors in his­tory.12 This book does not deny the importance of nationalism. It does, ­however, tell the story of a continent that had economic, cultural, and personal links that easily transcended borders and diplomatic alliances. Europeans from 1871 to 1914 shared a basic culture, and most of the continent’s major po­lit­i­cal movements (such as socialism, anarchism, and democracy) were continental, not national. Social and cultural movements like anti-­Semitism, militarism, and pacifism were also transnational. It may have been inevitable that men went to war as members of nations in 1914, but the homogeny of their uniforms should not make us forget that they iden­ti­fied themselves in myriad ways. Nor should it allow us to reduce the men and ­women who lived through the war to overly simplistic generalizations. Third, the people of Europe accepted the necessity of war primarily because they believed their wars to be defensive. For France and Belgium this belief came naturally and easily as soon as their territory was invaded. Even in Germany and Austria-­Hungary, appropriately considered today the key aggressors of the war, fears of a “Slavic horde” commanded by the reactionary and murderous Czar Nicholas II descending upon democratic and freedom-­loving so­ci­e­ties were suf­fi­cient to mobilize the German and Austro-­Hungarian people for war. Russian armies invaded East Prussia at the same time that German armies invaded Belgium. The atrocity stories in the German and Austrian newspapers in 1914, therefore, featured not German brutality in Belgian towns like Louvain but Russian atrocities committed on German soil as well as in Austrian Poland. Thus could thirty internationally respected German theologians 6

INTRODUCTION

i­ssue an Address to Evangelical Christians Abroad to decry what they described as “unnamable horrors” committed by the Allies against Germans.13 It is not my point to compare or even to analyze atrocities; rather, I argue that stories of atrocities (both real and embellished) motivated Europeans to fight to defend their homelands, believing their cause to be the most just of all: self-­defense against an aggressive and barbaric invader.14 For the French and the British the barbarian at the gates was German; for the Germans and the Austrians he was Russian. Either way, the prospects of invasion and occupation were suf­fi­ciently frightening to impel so­ci­e­ ties to commit to fight­ing a total war. Fourth, disillusion with the war and the lofty rhetoric governments used to support it was well in place by the end of the war’s first year. Europeans had become deeply suspicious of the reasons for going to war and the heavy-­handed actions of their governments to prosecute it. Verdun, the Somme, Passchendaele, and other industrial slaughterhouses lay in the future, but we must not forget that 1914 saw the highest casualty rates of any year of the war. Men died by the tens of thousands in the war’s opening months, causing widespread shock and trauma in communities not adjusted to the realities of warfare. Allegations of mismanagement, corruption, and war ­profiteering were commonplace before the war was even a few weeks old, causing many to question the beliefs they had held upon the war’s outbreak. As early as the end of August, for example, a group of German soldiers told a Belgian woman with whom they had been billeted that they “would never have fought if they had not believed Germany to have been attacked.” The attack they thought they were defending came from Russia, but instead they found themselves in Belgium, fight­ing people who had done them no harm at all. The soldiers concluded, fatalistically, that Belgian civilians and German soldiers alike were “the victims of German militarism.”15 Their disillusion was widely shared across Europe and had parallels in all the belligerent states. Fifth, given their presumption of a brief, defensive war, the people of Europe responded with determination, if not enthusiasm, to the call to arms. They had not been consulted about the war, but their consent was vital to its prosecution. Even pacifists and socialists accepted (if often reluctantly) their government’s pleas for unity and support in a moment of existential crisis. Their consent, however, was based on the un­der­stand­ ing of a short war necessary for the defense of the homeland against an unjust invasion. It was also based on the belief that the burdens of war 7

DANCE OF THE FURIES

would be shared equally. Well before the end of the year, it had become obvious to all that the presumptions of August 1914 had been inaccurate at best, the product of willful lies at worst. The middle chapters of this book are an examination of the ways that the bargains forged in the crisis weeks of 1914 came apart by the end of that year, with tragic consequences that continue to echo down to the present day. Sixth, despite their concerns and suspicions, so­ci­e­ties kept fight­ing. Their reasons for doing so included a desire to avenge the losses of 1914, the quite real threats to their existence that remained from foreign armies, and an awareness that the hatreds unleashed by the war as early as the end of its first month made anything short of total victory or total defeat unthinkable.16 Governments, moreover, had by then taken heavy-­ handed actions that made any and all public opposition to war virtually impossible. Two points should be highlighted here. First, these pro­cesses were at work in all the belligerent countries; although the enemy in question of course changed, the impact of the war on Europeans was broadly similar regardless of one’s homeland. Second, the hatreds that came to the surface in 1914–1918 were an effect, not a cause, of the outbreak of war. In other words, men came to learn to hate their enemies both as a consequence of pro­pa­ganda and, more immediately, as a way to avenge the deaths of friends, relatives, and comrades. Those hatreds did not exist in 1914, or were at the very least in­suf­fi­cient to cause a war.17 Individuals and so­ci­e­ties had few options other than to keep fight­ing even if they doubted the of­fi­cial explanations or were astonished by the sac­ri­fices that the war had already demanded. Whatever the likely cost of victory, Europeans understood in an instinctive way that the costs of defeat would be much higher. German artist Käthe Kollwitz, who was to produce one of the most emotional artistic representations of the war in memory of her son Peter (killed in October 1914), captured this irresolvable dilemma in a letter written on September 30: “One cannot hold on to any illusions any more. Nothing is real but the frightfulness of this state, which we almost grow used to. In such times it seems so stupid that the boys must go to war. The whole thing is so ghastly and insane. Occasionally ­comes the foolish thought: how can they possibly take part in such madness?” Yet Kollwitz knew the answer: “they must, must!” because the defense of Germany required it, even if the awareness of that reality only led to greater despair for the future.18 Throwing down arms and hoping the other side would do so as well was simply not an option. Nor could the two sides find any common ground for a negotiated settle8

INTRODUCTION

ment. Continuing the war, all realized, was horrid and probably futile, but it was the best of a tragically bad set of choices. This book focuses mainly on the letters, diaries, and journals of ­Europeans written in 1914 as well as their recollections after the events as recorded in both published and unpublished materials. The sources are  mostly, but not exclusively, from members of the middle class, although many of the writers took careful notice of what was happening in working-­class and rural districts. They are also mostly written by people from Germany, France, and Britain, as well as by Americans who found themselves in Europe at the outbreak of the war. Other writers came from Denmark, Russia, Austria, and elsewhere across the continent. Despite my best efforts, I have found no way to create a fully representative sampling of sources, so I have gone where the sources have taken me. Although I would have liked more sources from eastern Europe and from members of the working class, the source base is wide and diverse enough to permit me to draw the conclusions presented here. I hope that this book might inspire those with appropriate linguistic skills and historical background to complement what I argue in the pages that follow.

9

1 A CLAP OF THUNDER IN THE SUMMER SKY

June 28, 1914, has become one of the most im­por­tant dates in European his­tory. Within a few remarkably short weeks the events of that day became intimately connected to the onset of a war affecting millions of people in all of the great (and many of the lesser) powers. In retrospect it became easy for Europeans to see that fateful day as the watershed between a peaceful, bucolic, and unusually pleasant summer that represented all that was good about Europe, and the beginning of an immense tragedy that revealed all of the continent’s worst traits. Baron Beyens, the Belgian minister to Germany, later recalled the events of that day as “an unexpected thunderclap in the midst of a calm summer’s day.”1 Similarly, Johan Wilhelm von Löwenell Brandenburg-­Hohenzollern, a hard-­ line German nationalist, wrote that the day seemed “like a peal of thunder reverberating in a clear sky.”2 The storm that followed that first clap of thunder was so destructive that it is hardly surprising that months or even years later people were careful to record where they were and who they were with when they learned that a presumably deranged Serbian nationalist had assassinated the heir to the throne of Austria-­Hungary and his wife in the provincial town of Sarajevo. Few people at the time, however, had any inkling that the incident would have international repercussions. Even fewer recorded any hint of concern or trepidation that war might result. As the young Viennese intellectual Stefan Zweig later noted, “only a few weeks more and the name and fig­ure of Franz Ferdinand would have disappeared for all time out of his­tory.”3 The thunder analogy that Beyens and Brandenburg used was entirely appropriate as a metaphor for un­der­stand­ing the initial responses of ­Europeans to the assassinations in late June and early July 1914. But a clap of thunder might or might not portend a destructive storm. Dark 10

A CLAP OF THUNDER IN THE SUMMER SKY

clouds might just as easily rumble harmlessly away into the distance. At the time of the assassination, the latter seemed a much more likely result. To the vast majority of Europeans, the murder of the archduke and heir apparent to the Austro-­Hungarian throne seemed a minor, almost insig­ nifi­cant event. Europeans in June 1914 had many more im­por­tant issues to be concerned about, including the looming threat of civil war in Ireland, a series of labor strikes in Russia and Germany, the “suffragette campaign of civil disobedience, hunger strikes, and arson” in Britain, and the salacious murder trial of the wife of an im­por­tant French politician. George Barnes’s comment that in Britain that fateful June “we were . . . engrossed up to our eyes in domestic affairs” could stand for the entire continent.4 In more ways than one, the Balkans seemed to be a long way off. On a more personal level, people were thinking about summer vacation plans and looking forward to enjoying some time on the seashore or in the mountains. The assassination hardly seemed im­por­tant enough to force people to consider a change of plans. Vera Brittain later recalled that she could not understand how “a Serbian bomb hurled from the other end of Europe at an Austrian archduke” could possibly impact her plans to attend Oxford in the fall. She was so unconcerned about the incident that she even got the method of the assassination wrong. Her thoughts quickly returned to the normal thoughts of young people in summertime, namely, friends, plans for the future, and, in her case, ­tennis.5 Concern about the thunderclap passed quickly when the skies seemed to grow no darker as a result. Most people, like Vera Brittain, went simply and easily back to their daily lives, safe in the assumption that the storm would pass them by. French writer Claire de Pratz, then vacationing in Brittany, considered the assassinations completely “remote from all thought of a general European war,” yet she still could not help feeling a twinge of anxiety that Austria might use the incident as a pretext for starting a war in the Balkans. A fellow vacationer whose newspaper she had borrowed calmed her down by dismissing her fears and telling her, “I cannot see the slightest connection” between “this purely local crime” and a larger European crisis. Certainly, she said, France and Germany had nothing to do with any complications that might result. 6 Another brief Balkan crisis might ensue, but almost no one thought the storm surge would reach anywhere near Berlin, Paris, or London. Europeans like de Pratz and her fellow vacationers had been enjoying particularly 11

DANCE OF THE FURIES

pleasant weather that summer and few people saw in the assassination any reason to worry. Nor were the leaders of the great powers overly concerned. Ferdinand Foch, the commander of a critical French corps positioned along the German border, did not hesitate to go to his estate in Brittany, coincidentally not very far from where Claire de Pratz was enjoying the sea air, to spend what he expected would be a restful and uneventful summer. Similarly, British Foreign Minister Sir Edward Grey saw no reason to delay a planned fishing trip. Several military and po­lit­i­cal leaders were in fact vacationing in soon-­to-­be enemy countries. Nevertheless, they, too, saw no reason to alter their plans. Serbian Army Commander General Radomir Putnik had been in an Austrian spa on June 28, four of his se­nior of­fi­cers had been in Hungary, and Russian General Alexei Brusilov had been vacationing in Germany.7 None of them saw any reason to hurry home. Brusilov noted no sig­nifi­cant change in attitude among Germans toward him or Russia more generally as a result of the incident. Public opinion in Germany, he noted, “was revolted by this act of terrorism, but no one suspected that the assassination would provide an excuse for the ghastly World War which ev­ery­one expected but dreaded.”8 If some soldiers and statesmen had expected war at some point in the future, they surely did not think that the assassinations of the archduke and his wife were the omens that the day was near. That an Austro-­ Hungarian politician was shot and killed came as a bit of a shock to most, but not really much of a surprise to anyone. Political violence in the Balkans was nothing new. The region had recently experienced two bloody wars (in 1912 and 1913) that had left ethnic and national hatreds at a boiling point but had hardly impacted the lives of people outside the ­region. Political assassination had also been a common feature of the region. The Serbian royal family itself had come to power by means of an unusually bloody coup in 1903. Both King Alexander and Queen Draga had been hunted through the royal palace, murdered, disemboweled, and their mutilated bodies thrown from a second-­story window. That such regicidal violence might repeat itself in 1914 surprised no one. On hearing of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, En­glishman Charles Carrington recorded, “There was always trouble in the Balkans, and what could you expect of the Servians who had murdered their own king and queen with particular brutality only ten years ago.”9 Nor were assassinations uncommon in the Europe of that era. Vienna had recently witnessed the murder of a “very prominent and vastly popu12

A CLAP OF THUNDER IN THE SUMMER SKY

lar” Social Democratic Party deputy by the brother of one of his rivals from the Christian Socialist Party; the funeral drew 250,000 mourners.10 Other recent assassinations on the continent included the president of France in 1894; the premier of Spain in 1897; the empress of Austria in 1898; the king of Italy in 1900; the king of Portugal in 1908; another premier of Spain in 1912; and the king of Greece in 1913. None of those assassinations had brought war, nor had they even disrupted summer vacation plans. Moreover, the archduke’s assassination had occurred in Bosnia, a province the Austro-­Hungarian Empire had provocatively annexed in 1908. Austria-­Hungary, which was populated mainly by ethnic Serbs, had maintained an internationally recognized right to occupy and administer the province by virtue of a treaty signed in 1878. Serbian nationalists were angry not just at Austro-­Hungarian rule over their kinsmen but also by Austro-­Hungarian control over the region that offered Serbia the most ef­fi­cient access to the Adriatic Sea. In 1908 Austria-­Hungary annexed the province outright because, in their eyes, a firmer hand was needed to deal with Serbian desires to foment anti-­Austrian feeling there. To most Serbs, however, the annexation of Bosnia continued to rankle for years afterward. The archduke’s visit to Sarajevo struck many of them as a blatant statement of Austro-­Hungarian willingness to rub salt in the wound. Franz Ferdinand’s visit, moreover, came on St. Vitus Day, a Serbian holiday of remembrance for the nation’s humiliating battlefield defeat at Kosovo Polje in 1389. That battle had led to Ottoman control of the region and was a particularly emotional moment in Serbian his­tory. Franz Ferdinand, many Serbians believed, had made the visit to sym­ bolically assert Austro-­Hungarian authority in the region; the empire intended, they felt, for the timing to antagonize and irritate Serb nationalist sentiment. To inflame matters further, the court announced that Franz Ferdinand would review Austrian army maneuvers while in Bosnia. The visit therefore appeared to have military as well as po­lit­i­cal sig­nifi­cance. Thus even if Europeans did not see the provocation of visiting Bosnia on St. Vitus Day as jus­tifi­ca­tion for murder, they could at least see how such an ill-­timed visit might have led a hotheaded young Serb to avenge his nation’s honor by killing the archduke and his wife. Almost all initial reports suggested that the assassin, nineteen-­year-­old Gavrilo Princip, had acted alone and was most likely mentally unstable. In reality, Princip had planned the assassination carefully down to the last detail and had worked hard to become an expert marksman. Initial reports did not sug13

DANCE OF THE FURIES

gest a grand plot that reached to of­fi­cials in the Serbian government, in large part because the act appeared terribly amateurish. Princip had, in fact, only found himself in a position to commit his crime because the first attempt (which he had also planned) had failed and Franz Ferdinand’s driver had taken a wrong turn later in the day. Princip’s act was not that of a lunatic, but a belief in his insanity allowed Europeans to dismiss the assassinations as either an anomaly or the latest dramatic act out of the internecine Balkans. “Those Balkan nations can never keep quiet,” noted one French woman whose comment re­flected the most common response of Europeans.11 Most saw the assassinations as another turn in the long, bloody cycle of violence for which the Balkans had justifiably become well known. To Europeans the assassination was therefore just another event in the seemingly endless brutal his­tory of a region where “crises and wars had been perennials for a generation.”12 Most people and editorial pages therefore dismissed the incident as “just the latest in a long series of Balkan flashpoints” in an “area of the world where ‘civilization’ had not yet completely taken hold” and regicide was still a respected means for solving po­lit­i­cal prob­lems. The latest Balkan crisis con­fi rmed a general view of the area to most people who did not live there as “a backward region determined to destroy itself.”13 It was certainly not a region worth risking a war to defend.

“Live for Our Children!” To the extent that people thought about the murders of the archduke and his wife at all, they thought of them in personal, not po­lit­i­cal, terms. June 28 was not only the anniversary of a Serbian military defeat but also the wedding anniversary of Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie. However much people may have disagreed with (or been totally ignorant of) their politics, the couple made for sympathetic victims. Ferdinand had married Sophie despite her lack of what members of the Austro-­Hungarian royal family considered appropriate aristocratic credentials; although she was from a well-­known family, she lacked the requisite ancestral connections to the Habsburgs needed for marriage to an heir apparent to one of ­Europe’s oldest royal houses. The two lovers had kept their relationship a secret for almost two years; when they did reveal it, the result was a major scandal in the courts of Europe. The scandal in­ten­si­fied when Franz Ferdinand announced that he ac­tually intended to marry his lover not14

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withstanding the fact that in the eyes of the Viennese court she was a commoner. Most members of the Austrian court and aristocracy saw the marriage as another snub at Viennese custom and tradition from the dif­fi­cult and irascible Franz Ferdinand; consequently, Sophie was never welcome at court and Franz Ferdinand himself was often known as “the loneliest man in Vienna.” Emperor Franz Joseph had only agreed to the marriage if Ferdinand renounced any royal title or prerogative for Sophie and any resulting children. Neither the emperor nor any other members of the immediate royal family attended the wedding ceremony. On that fateful Sunday in Sarajevo, the couple traveled together in an open automobile because they were forbidden to ride together in a closed horse-­drawn carriage. The latter was considered a royal conveyance; the former was not. The personal dimensions of the assassination of the couple whose great love story had been continental news at the turn of the century were, for many people, much more interesting than the po­lit­i­cal aspects. The couple had defied the stultifying conventions of the outdated royal system and in modern fashion had married for love. They had also left behind three young photogenic children (ages ten to thirteen), who were now orphans, both to their parents and to the Habsburg system of which they could never be a part. Newspapers were careful to play on this theme, knowing that the family angle would help sales more than the ­po­lit­i­cal; they reported on Sophie’s insistence on accompanying her husband through the streets of Sarajevo despite pleas from security of­fi­cials for her to remain safely at City Hall until the public functions were over. She supposedly had said, “As long as the archduke shows himself in public today, I will be with him.” The papers also reported Franz Ferdinand’s last words as “Sophie, Sophie, ­don’t die. Live for our children!”14 Although Franz Ferdinand did not see eye to eye with his uncle, the eighty-­four-­year-­old Austrian emperor Franz Joseph, on po­lit­i­cal or matrimonial matters, there was considerable sympathy across Europe for him as well. On the throne since 1848, he was Europe’s oldest and long­ est-­serving monarch and had developed a public image as a kindly old gentleman in his declining years. His life had been marred again and again by po­lit­i­cal violence and personal tragedy. His brother, Maximilian, had died at the hands of a firing squad in Mexico in 1867, and his only son had died as part of a mysterious murder-­suicide involving the young daughter of a se­nior Austrian diplomat. Details of the incident, which took place in Franz Joseph’s own hunting lodge, were never fully 15

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revealed and remain murky to this day, but the death of their son visibly shook both the emperor and the empress. Perhaps most tragically, his popular but deeply unhappy wife (known as the “most beautiful and most melancholy royal personage in Europe”) had been stabbed to death while on vacation in Geneva in 1898 by a deranged Ital­ian anarchist who had used a homemade knife he had fashioned out of a file and a piece of firewood.15 The sympathy that came to Franz Joseph as a result of these tragedies helps to explain why the emperor was personally popular even among groups in the empire that disliked the politics of his court. It also explains why the Irish Times downplayed the assassination as merely “another tale of blood in the annals of the ill-­fated House of Hapsburg” before relegating the story to the back pages.16 Regardless of any po­lit­i­cal sentiments, sympathy for the elderly emperor was widespread as violence and tragedy once more intruded upon his increasingly solitary life. In Germany, the British chargé d’affaires reported “great and universal sympathy” for his presumed loss.17 The London newspapers equally “poured out their sympathy upon Austria and vied with each other in expressing their detestation of the assassins.” They also noted a “passionate feeling of pity for the aged Emperor-­King in his crowning sorrow.”18 The sympathy may have been genuine, but it was quite unnecessary. It quickly became obvious that the royal court itself seemed none too distressed at having lost one of its own. General Oskar Potiorek, the man in charge of the security detail at Sarajevo, had reportedly reacted to the assassination by saying to his staff, “Gentlemen, this is a terrible misfortune. Nevertheless, one must eat. Let’s go to luncheon.”19 In fact, most se­nior members of the Austrian royal court seemed relieved to be rid of the “authoritarian, choleric, and xenophobic” Franz Ferdinand.20 They were also glad to be rid of his morganatic wife and his po­lit­i­cal schemes for giving the Slavs more of a voice in the empire’s po­lit­i­cal system. Reports of lax security at Sarajevo (there were just 120 police of­fi­cers and soldiers to protect the couple during such a controversial visit) had even prompted suspicions of a palace coup orchestrated by the archduke’s enemies in his own court.21 By all indications, the assassination had not even unduly disturbed Franz Joseph himself, who in the end decided neither to meet the train carrying the bodies back to Vienna nor even to attend the funeral. London Times journalist Henry Wickham Steed, who did attend the funeral, was shocked at how informal and quick the ceremony was. He reported 16

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that Franz Ferdinand was “buried like a dog,” and newspapers also reported the Austrian court’s decision that the devoted couple would not even be buried near each other because Sophie could not be laid to rest in a royal crypt like her devoted husband.22 The royal viewing lasted less than fif­teen minutes, the couple’s children were forbidden to attend because they were not themselves royal, and the bodies were taken to their graves, without of­fi­cial escort, in a railway car attached unceremoniously to the end of a milk train.23 Franz Joseph’s unwillingness to attend the funeral had personal and po­lit­i­cal dimensions. He saw the assassinations as “divine punishment” for his decision to allow Franz Ferdinand to marry beneath his station, notwithstanding the unusual conditions the court had attached. Those conditions, Franz Joseph had always worried, might not survive much ­longer than the emperor himself if his successor later chose not to abide by them. Now the prob­lem had been solved once and for all by a higher hand. “God,” Franz Joseph believed, “had restored once more the sacred principle of legitimacy” by removing Franz Ferdinand and his family permanently from the line of succession and thereby eliminating any chance of his children’s one day acceding to the throne.24 Whether or not Franz Joseph saw Gavrilo Princip as the hand of God, the lack of concern with which the emperor regarded the incident hardly made Europeans worry about po­lit­i­cal consequences. The dynastic politics in Vienna, therefore, were less im­por­tant than the message that the royal reaction to the assassination sent to the rest of the continent. If the Austrians themselves were so dismissive of (indeed, by many accounts, ac­tually relieved by) the assassination, then there was little reason for others to be unduly concerned or even saddened by an incident that was clearly more of a family tragedy than a dynastic one. The royal mood seemed to re­flect that of the empire more generally, where people were “shocked but not stricken” over the death of a dif­fi­ cult  and controversial archduke.25 The British ambassador to Austria-­ Hungary noted that “almost all sections of the population” were “blindly incensed against the Servians” for such a shocking act of violence, but he also observed that there was little sense of crisis and no talk of war. The newspapers agreed. The Vienna Neue Freie Presse on July 2 opined that “wars of revenge are today, when the great interests of the people are decisive, out of the question.” Along the same lines, Budapest’s semi-­of­fi­cial Hirlap newspaper argued that “there is no ground for anxiety as to war” because “the monarchy will know how to maintain its prestige without 17

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wishing to resort to war.” A day later, the British ambassador reported that “most of the reasonable papers take the line that it would not be politic to take Servia as a whole to account for the crimes of a small band of degenerates who draw their inspiration from pro-­Serb headquarters in  Belgrade.”26 His choice of language is illustrative: it is a long way from drawing inspiration to taking orders. Without evidence to the contrary, Europeans assumed that Princip and his coconspirators had acted alone. Nothing in the days following the assassinations changed people’s minds. Two weeks later, by which time most people had already lost interest in the story, there was still no obvious link between Princip and the Serbian government, and certainly no solid evidence to prove such a link. The Vienna Zeit thus concluded that the crime was the act of “a few fanatical Serbian nationalists” and urged the government to take a moderate stand. Rumors of a conspiracy reaching to the highest levels of the Serbian government abounded, but the Neue Freie Press urged calm and argued that “without full proof we may not accuse and blame.” Even if such proof came to light, few people thought war was likely to result. The Neues Politisches Volksblatt on July 11 captured the mood thus: “no reasonable man seriously thinks of becoming involved in an armed con­flict with Serbia. . . . we want no war, not even a victorious one.”27 These conclusions were consistent with those of a study of public ­opinion in Europe that determined that although the Austro-­Hungarian people were angry at Serbia for fueling the hatreds that had led to the assassination, they stopped well short of wanting war to settle the issue. The Vienna correspondent of Vorwärts, Germany’s socialist newspaper, noted that people in the Austrian cap­ital “were not greatly moved, [and] that there was little feeling of sorrow or sympathy.” Samuel Williamson agrees, concluding that the reaction of the Austro-­Hungarian people to the assassination “had been one of acknowledgement but not of deep mourning or even a curtailment of regular activities.”28 The British minister in Hungary reported to his government that the day after the assassination “all amusements went on as usual” and that there were large crowds at the horse races.29 Judgments like these helped ev­ery­one rest more easily in the belief that the crisis would not produce any major consequences. In the Hungarian portion of the Dual Monarchy, Franz Ferdinand had been particularly unpopular. His plan to reform the dualist system of the Austro-­Hungarian government into a trialist system to give more 18

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voice to the empire’s Slavs threatened to reduce Hungary’s voice from one vote in two to one vote in three. Hungarians, moreover, had shown very little enthusiasm for Austria’s Balkan adventures and had held out the hope that maybe the assassinations would make Austrian politicians less eager to throw their muscle around in the volatile Balkan tinderbox. Some Hungarian leaders, like István Tisza, were afraid (justifiably, as it turned out) that the assassinations might inspire “the warmongers in Vienna” to take an even harsher line with Serbia, but otherwise Hungarians paid little attention to an event that they expected would have scant impact on their lives once the original shock had dissipated. 30 The farther one moved from Belgrade, Vienna, and Budapest, the less concerned people became about the situation. Most Germans had paid minimal attention to the Byzantine and violent world of Balkan politics, and those who had had done so “with a certain repugnance.”31 In Munich, Franz Schoenberner noted that he and his friends “hardly had taken notice of the fact that, somewhere in the Balkans, an Austrian archduke had been murdered by Serbian pa­tri­ots.”32 In Baden, bands performing concerts in the park stopped playing for a while when the news passed through the crowd, but “there was no particular shock or dismay” in the audience, nor was there any excessive show of sympathy for the victims. “Two hours later signs of genuine mourning were no ­longer to be seen. The throngs laughed and chattered and as the evening advanced music was resumed.”33 At the spa at Kissingen, middle-­class vacationers “remained unperturbed and continued their treatment.”34 Similarly, in Freiburg, near the French border, the news created just “a momentary stir” and “life in town quickly returned to its routines.”35 Sarajevo seemed too far away and the violent nature of the Balkans too removed from the pleasant summer evenings for people to dwell on the assassination for long. Reactions in Great Britain were similar to those in Germany. In ­London, the assassination created “no more audible effect than a tenor solo in a boiler shop.” Charles Seymour thought he knew why: “Few En­ glishmen had heard of the Archduke and fewer still could locate the provincial cap­ital (Sarajevo) on a map.”36 As if to prove Seymour’s point, E.  F. Benson recorded this exchange with a friend who had just seen the news: “Hullo,” he said. “An Archduke was assassinated yesterday. Franz Ferdinand.” 19

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“What an awful thing!” said I. “Who is he? And where did it happen?” “He’s the Emperor of Austria’s heir,” he said. “He was attending maneuvers in Sarajevo.” “Never heard of it.” The two looked up Sarajevo to satisfy their curiosity and discovered that it was in Bosnia: “That was all: we did not allude to it again.” Another Briton recorded that “the news that an Austrian Archduke (one of so many, and none of them known to us) had been murdered at a place called Sarajevo (which was equally unfamiliar) made little impression on our minds.”37 On a trip through London a few days later, Benson observed that the city “did not much concern itself” with the assassination because it had happened so far away and “the last few weeks of the season were on.”38 Britain had much more immediate domestic issues to discuss. Foreign affairs hardly rated any sustained interest at all. The Nation on June 30 noted derisively, but probably accurately, that “Parliament gave nearly as much time on Monday to its annual survey of foreign affairs of a world-­ wide empire as it bestowed on the municipal dispute between Purley and Croydon.”39 Most Britons who cared at all about the incident sympathized with the victims, who had made a popular tour of the United Kingdom the previous year. They also looked with “derogation and contempt” at the uncontrollable Serbs and the idea of regicide as a means of po­lit­i­cal change.40 The British press, ironically in view of future events, was almost entirely sympathetic to the Austrians, as were Prime Minister H. H. Asquith and the British royal family, all of whom made public gestures of support to the Austrians.41 Asquith himself referred to Serbia as “a wild little state . . . for which nobody has a good word.”42 But few Britons cared much at all for the Balkans, and the Nation was undoubtedly right to conclude that municipal disputes were sig­nifi­cantly more im­por­tant to Britons than the assassination in Sarajevo. To be sure, no one in the British government or in British society more generally expected a major international crisis to follow. In France and Italy, the assassinations barely merited discussion in the newspapers, let alone the often more im­por­tant venues of town squares, cafés, and homes. If the Balkans seemed far away to Germans, they might well have been on another planet as far as most people in France were 20

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concerned. Many Frenchmen felt some sympathy for Serbia and its nationalist aspirations, but none supported po­lit­i­cal assassination by individual Serbs as a means to achieve it. Most im­por­tant, few thought that the incident meant anything to France. “Meager dispatches” from the Balkans usually failed to find im­por­tant places in the newspapers, and Frenchmen generally ignored the issue in favor of seemingly much bigger local news items.43 One wealthy Frenchwoman who had just purchased a château in the quiet fields of Picardy responded to news of the assassination by writing, “Poor beautiful Duchess! If only she had remained an obscure little Countess Chotek!” She thought the assassinations might lead to a few days of turbulence on the Paris stock market but expected nothing more serious to result.44 Further east in Metz, one of the cities the Germans took from France in 1871 and a place where such events might be expected to receive sensationalist coverage, the assassinations barely merited a mention in either the French-­ or the German-­language press.45 Many people outside the big cities had “if anything only a remote inkling” that any event of special sig­nifi­cance had happened at all.46 Compton Mackenzie was in Italy when the assassination occurred and recalled a friend glancing over the newspaper and reporting on the big news of the day: the fireworks show planned for the night had been postponed for three days because of weather. Almost as an afterthought he added that “some Austrian archduke has been killed somewhere.”47 There were even those who thought that the death of the archduke might turn out to be a positive step for peace in this troubled region. Franz Ferdinand’s death also meant the end of his controversial po­lit­i­cal schemes. Now that he would not succeed to the throne on the death of the aged Franz Joseph, the more moderate and popular archduke Karl became next in line. Karl’s reputation as an intelligent, humane, and flex­i­ ble person stood in marked contrast to the image of the austere and unpredictable Franz Ferdinand.48 With Karl on the throne, many assumed, Austria-­Hungary would seek a less inflammatory foreign policy. Thus did the Austrian military attaché in Paris note on July 4 that his French counterparts thought that “with the disappearance of his Imperial and Royal Highness a source of constant uneasiness has vanished.” In Italy, where Balkan machinations were slightly more immediate, many informed people similarly “have regarded the elimination of the late Archduke as almost providential.”49 Sigmund Freud told one of his patients that the assassinations might be good for Europe because “If that Arch21

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duke had lived to sit on the throne . . . war with Russia would have been inevitable.”50 British diplomats were sympathetic to the argument as well. The British ambassador in Russia, George Buchanan, wrote to Arthur Nicolson that the general feeling among se­nior British of­fi­cials was “relief that so dangerous a personality should have been removed from the throne.”51 Henry Wickham Steed, who had known Franz Ferdinand, was among those who thought the assassination more likely to lead to peace than to war. Steed thought the archduke was “an incipient madman” whose mental “malady was already so far advanced as to cause serious doubt whether he was sane.”52 These attitudes, of course, were limited to those people with diplomatic connections. Most of Europe reacted with more indifference than relief.

Fleet Week, Garden Parties, and a Quiet Summer Ahead In Germany and Great Britain, this event that would soon lead to war between the two powers paled in comparison to an atmosphere “thick with brotherly love” between the German and British fleets at Fleet Week in Kiel.53 The week, which had begun on June 24, showed no signs whatsoever of tension between the British and German fleets. As a sign of how far tensions had abated in recent years, the kaiser had boarded a British warship wearing a British admiral’s uniform, an honor that came from a  title given to him by his grandmother, Queen Victoria. Sailors from the two nations entertained one another with drinking, dancing, boxing, and a “boisterous Saturday night which melted into the Sunday of Sarajevo.”54 Plied with beer and food from both navies, the sailors and their of­fi­cers got along so well that it seemed all hints of the Anglo-­German naval rivalry of previous years had disappeared. Winston Churchill, who was present at Kiel, later described the mood: Some of the finest ships of the British and German navies lay at their moorings side by side surrounded by liners, yachts, and plea­ sure craft of ev­ery kind. . . . Officers and men fraternized and entertained each other afloat and ashore. Together they strolled arm in arm through the hospitable town, or dined with goodwill in mess and wardroom.55 22

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The American ambassador to Germany, James Gerard, was with part of the kaiser’s of­fi­cial party at Kiel when the news of the assassination arrived. He noted that “all the diplomats and notables whom I met during the afternoon and evening seemed to think that there was no chance that the tragedy at Sarajevo would lead to war,” not even to a local war between Austria-­Hungary and Serbia. German Prince Henry made a public display of toasting the health of the visiting British admiral and the British fleet to calm any lingering worries.56 News of the assassination broke the jovial spirit and “stunned” German and British of­fi­cers alike at Kiel, but only temporarily. Most of the enlisted men were either too drunk or too indifferent to even notice. Out of respect for the dead couple a few garden parties were cancelled and the kaiser himself left Kiel early, presumably to prepare to go to Vienna for the funeral (in the end he decided not to go because the Austrian emperor was not attending). The assassination cast a temporary air of “gloom and foreboding” over the celebrations at Kiel, but it did not dampen the friendship between the En­glish and the Germans. Men in both navies spoke enthusiastically about rumors that the Royal Navy would soon repay the hospitality of their new German friends. The assassination had created consequences at Fleet Week no graver than the cancellation of a few parties. One observer with close connections in both countries noted, “I am quite sure not a soul of us held himself capable of imagining that, because of that remote felony, Great Britain and Germany would be at war five weeks later.”57 Ambassador Gerard kept a close eye on the reactions of Germans for his dispatches to the State Department in Washington. He reported no cause whatsoever for alarm. In Berlin “no one seemed to think that the murders at Sarajevo would have any effect on the world.” He also attended a weekend shooting party in Silesia and found none of the par­ ticipants worried about any serious consequences resulting.58 Germany seemed to be paying little attention to the assassinations. The same could be said of Russia, where V.  I. Gurko noted that “most people did not ­consider it (the assassination) an incident of international sig­nifi­cance.” When he told his dinner companions of his worries of “serious events” resulting from the incident, they all “expressed extreme amazement” at his concerns.59 In the words of one observer of European public opinion, “Not a ripple, or a storm cloud, was seen anywhere on the surface of the water or in the sky” within a few days of the event. 60 German newspapers across the po­lit­i­cal spectrum demonstrated the 23

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same attitude of calm or indifference. Even the Morgenpost, a usually reliable organ for the aggressive Pan-­German Party, “expressed the hope,” on July 5, “that Vienna would not lose its head.” The liberal Frankfurt Zeitung agreed, as did the socialist Vorwärts. German newspapers and public opinion alike had become decidedly anti-­Serbian, but “certainly did not demand an aggressive policy on the part of Germany or a free hand for the ally on the Danube.” Austria would surely make a response, but Germans expected that it would be mea­sured and proportionate to the lone act of a madman. 61 The most im­por­tant international group on the continent in 1914, the socialists, was hardly worried either. As we will see, the prob­lem of war and how to prevent it had been an im­por­tant item on the agenda of international socialist gatherings for years. Socialists in all European countries feared the day that war might break out between cap­italist regimes and lead to the pointless deaths of thousands, or even millions, of members of the international working class. In 1914, the socialist parties of Europe claimed 4,200,000 members, or more than double the number they had had just four years earlier. They also boasted more than 700 deputies in parliaments across the continent. Their strong stance against war and their vigilance against the militarist plots of cap­italist regimes, they believed, had been responsible for much of that growth. Thanks in large part to their own careful analysis of international affairs over the past few years, socialists across Europe believed that in spring 1914 “ev­ery­thing pointed to a quiet summer ahead.”62 There were no serious flashpoints that needed monitoring, and the largest concern of internationally minded socialist deputies involved the need to resolve a doctrinal debate between Polish and Russian socialists. In May 1914, just a few weeks before the assassinations, the French journal Socialisme et la Lutte des Classes had taken note of the pa­cific mood: “Wherever one looks one is aware of the international détente. . . . For years hardened chauvinists and militarists have tried to force upon us the conviction that war is imminent, that it will start in the [coming] spring. War has not started and it appears that peace will not be disturbed, that it will last.” In the same month, the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouv­ rière (SFIO) praised German socialists who “fight unceasingly against insatiable militarism and disastrous war and for mutual un­der­stand­ing and lasting peace between France and Germany.”63 French and German socialists had even been talking openly about jointly urging their governments to pursue an entente across the Rhine to match the Anglo-­French 24

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one across the En­glish Channel. 64 Nor was this hope merely a product of socialist utopian thinking. Many nonsocialists also had faith in the international worker’s movement to prevent war. Ford Maddox Ford recalled thinking shortly after the assassinations, “‘Oh the socialists and Labour will stop a war. They are the tail that wags the Liberal dog all the world over.’ And I really believed it.”65 But there was no war yet to stop, and few socialists could conceive of a way that the death of Franz Ferdinand might lead to one. News of the assassination “caused little stir among socialists” and did nothing to change the optimistic international mood on the left. German socialist Julius Braunthal, a witness to the events of 1914 and later a historian, wrote that “it seemed incomprehensible that over Austria’s quarrel with Serbia Germany would risk the leap into the darkness of a war against Russia, France, and Britain. [Socialists] did not think that there would be a European war, they did not think that any war could come out of the Sarajevo incident.”66 French socialist leader Jean Jaurès, arguably the most in­flu­en­tial socialist politician in Europe, agreed, telling an audience that it was impossible that “France should become involved in wild Balkan adventures.”67 He also dismissed the assassination as one more “rivulet [joining] the stream of blood that has flown in vain on the Balkan peninsula.” His German counterpart Friedrich Ebert agreed, telling a crowd that the assassination would not have any international repercussions. The Austrian socialist leader Viktor Adler saw no reason even to consider a postponement of an international socialist meeting due to take place in Vienna in August. 68 Thus while the intensity of interest in the assassination varied somewhat in relation to an individual’s politics or distance from the scene of the crime, reactions were remarkably similar across the continent. The vast majority of people, no matter where they lived or what their po­lit­i­cal ideology, either ignored the incident or downplayed its sig­nifi­cance. Almost no one saw how so obscure an incident might lead to greater complications within a matter of weeks. Some, like the young German Herbert Sulzbach, noted in his diary that “what follows from this is not clear. You feel that a stone has begun to roll downhill and that dreadful things may be in store for Europe.” Yet Sulzbach’s diary made no more mention of foreign affairs for three weeks. 69 French writer André Gide, who kept a detailed set of journals through this period, made no mention of the incident at all. Later in the summer, foreign affairs came to occupy much of the journal, but in late June and early July the pages were filled not with 25

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worries about international tensions or the Balkans but with concerns about the quality of his piano playing and the activities of his pet birds and cats.70 The same is true of En­glishman Arnold Bennett, who had been on friendly terms with many im­por­tant French and British journalists, diplomats, and statesmen. He nevertheless made no mention of the assassinations or of the diplomatic crisis in Europe until late July.71 Wilfrid Scawen Blunt frequently saw key British decision-­makers like Edward Grey, David Lloyd George, and Winston Churchill that fateful summer, yet he made no mention of the Balkan crisis in his detailed diary until July 26.72 Nor were these observers alone; many diarists saw little reason to dwell on the assassination, which in any case had quickly begun to fade from the news and daily conversation. A few people did have a sense of foreboding and an awareness of the dangers that might result. Often, however, they had trouble convincing their friends to accept their point of view, and, like Claire de Pratz in Brittany, they too gave up worrying. One person who clearly saw the danger was H. G. Wells, who had tea with his friend R. D. Blumenfeld on the day of the assassination. “While we were talking news came that Austria’s Crown Prince and his wife have been assassinated by a Servian,” Blumenfeld recalled. Wells told Blumenfeld that he feared the assassination “will set the world alight.” Although prophetic, Wells was hardly representative. Blumenfeld’s response was more in line with the mood of Europe. He told Wells, “I ­don’t see why the world should fight over the act of a lunatic.”73

Murder, Mutiny, and the Media Remarkable as it seems today, news of the assassination had trouble competing for space in daily newspapers. Across the continent, but especially in France, readers were transfixed by the murder trial of Henriette Caillaux, who had begun an affair with the controversial French politician Joseph Caillaux while he was prime minister and still married to his first wife. The two later made their affair public and married, but even in France the scandal had given Caillaux’s many opponents another avenue of attack against him and his tax policies, even after his government fell. Among those opponents was Gaston Calmette, editor of Paris’s in­flu­en­ tial daily newspaper Le Figaro. In early 1914 Calmette was determined to force Caillaux out of his current position as fi­nance minister. He uncovered a letter (sold to him, 26

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some said, by the Caillaux’s maid) indicating that to help out some business associates, Caillaux would secretly arrange for the rejection of a tax bill that he was in fact supporting in public. Calmette published the letter and others like it that tarnished Caillaux’s reputation. To add even more fuel to this already hot fire, the letters also implicated several members of  French high society who were Caillaux’s po­lit­i­cal and fi­nan­cial allies. Calmette also obtained love letters the couple had exchanged which, while less po­lit­i­cally damaging, were nevertheless embarrassing, especially given the way the Caillaux relationship had begun. Henriette Caillaux was incensed at the publication of the letters and, rumor had it, her husband’s unwillingness to settle this matter of honor by challenging Calmette to a duel. So she took matters into her own hands, demanding a meeting with Calmette on March 6, 1914. She calmly walked into his of­fice, tried to convince him to stop publishing letters harmful to her husband’s lofty po­lit­i­cal ambitions, then, seeing that words were not working, she pulled out a pistol and shot him dead. She then dropped the gun and waited for the police to arrive. She freely confessed to the crime and showed no remorse at all.74 The scandal had ev­ery­thing an already sensationalist media could possibly have asked for: it combined po­lit­i­cal intrigue with romance, betrayal, violence, and celebrity. Many of the witnesses, character references, and other key fig­ures in the trial were among the nation’s most powerful politicians and financiers. President Raymond Poincaré himself took the highly unusual step of giving a deposition. The trial, which began on July 20, revealed all sorts of salacious po­lit­i­cal and personal information about some of the most famous people in France. At one point in the proceedings, there were indications that Le Figaro had in its possession deciphered German telegrams taken from Caillaux’s home, indicating that Joseph Caillaux may have been sloppy with sensitive material.75 His proconciliation stance with Germany during diplomatic crises over the years opened him up to charges that something much more sinister than sloppiness explained his possession of the telegrams. Caillaux’s opponents were not shy about adding allegations of treason to the already spicy mix the trial had created. Henriette Caillaux originally pled guilty, claiming that she had been willing to do what she saw as necessary to defend the honor of herself, her husband, and her family. One of France’s best-­known criminal defense attorneys, however, took up the case and developed a new strategy. He argued that Mme. Caillaux could not be held responsible for the crime 27

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because her female emotions had gotten the better of her reason. The crime was therefore one of passion, not premeditation. In essence, he was arguing that she was not guilty by reason of temporary insanity, a defense never before tried in France.76 Compared with all of this scandal and high drama, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in faraway Sarajevo stood no chance of grabbing front-­page headlines. Newspaper readers across France opened their dailies looking for the latest developments in the trial, not the news from the Balkans. It was the Caillaux trial that had pushed news from the Balkans out of the newspapers in Metz. As a result, for the French, the “intricacies of international diplomacy probably escaped all but the most attentive reader.”77 The salacious news on the front page was just too juicy, and sensational daily reports on the prog­ress of the trial made for much better gossip and café speculation than Balkan diplomacy ever could have. Until the very end of July, the Caillaux trial continued to hold the attention of readers in France and beyond, unwittingly distracting people from the crisis brewing across the continent. On July 28, the jury returned its verdict. It found Henriette Caillaux not guilty of a crime she had herself admitted to committing. The all-­male jury bought her lawyer’s argument and concluded that she could not be held responsible if her powerful female emotions had gotten the better of her feeble female reason. The verdict was generally accepted across France, and although Joseph Caillaux had resigned his position as fi­nance minister, he remained a prominent and controversial politician. He even returned to government in the 1920s, by which time his conciliatory attitude toward Germany in the prewar years (and during the war years as well) had become an asset instead of the liability it had been from 1914 to 1918. Those Europeans who were more concerned about politics than about high society scandal in June 1914 turned their eyes not toward Vienna and Sarajevo but toward Dublin and London. In late June 1914, those predicting an imminent war thought in terms of a civil war in Ireland. The Home Rule crisis had been reaching a boiling point over the summer. In 1912, the Liberal government had fi­nally decided upon Home Rule for Ireland in the hopes of find­ing a workable compromise to a longstanding prob­lem, but pressure from the ­Unionist opposition had delayed the implementation of what many Prot­es­tants derisively called “Rome Rule.” Home Rule would have given the Irish Parliament control over all Irish domestic affairs, while keeping foreign and military policy in the hands 28

A CLAP OF THUNDER IN THE SUMMER SKY

of the parliament in Whitehall. Prot­es­tant ­Unionists had been arming and recruiting to resist the mea­sure while Catholic Republicans were preparing to fight for the island’s complete in­de­pen­dence from London. Matters seemed to be coming to a head as a result of an extraordinary decision of the anti–Home Rule of­fi­cers of the British Army. With the implementation of Home Rule (and the empowerment of the Catholic majority of the island that would ensue) imminent, the of­fi­cers decided to take matters into their own hands. They expected to receive orders to disarm tens of thousands of paramilitary Ulster Volunteers as a prelude to the smooth implementation of Home Rule, but many of the of­fi­cers themselves came from Prot­es­tant Anglo-­I rish families with links to the Volunteers. In March 1914 more than fifty of­fi­cers stationed at the Curragh Barracks announced that they would not take action against the Ulster Volunteers and, effectively, that they would not enforce Home Rule in Ulster even if ordered to do so. The British government was not accustomed to such disobedience from its of­fi­cers. Outraged British government of­fi­cials deemed the events at Curragh a mutiny, although the of­fi­cers were quick to point out that they had not (yet) ac­tually disobeyed any orders. Instead of committing open acts of disobedience, they were willing, as a matter of honor, to accept dismissal from the army rather than to carry out orders they deemed distasteful. The “mutiny” (or “incident,” depending on one’s point of view) grew, and soon as many as one hundred British of­fi­cers threatened to resign if the men at Curragh were disciplined in any way.78 The Daily Mirror was suf­fi­ciently alarmed to use the headline “Is This the Eve of Civil War?” for its March 23 edition.79 The crisis in Ireland grew more tense as the spring turned into summer. General Sir Henry Wilson, himself more than sympathetic to the Curragh of­fi­cers, thought that any use of the army in Ireland would split it “top to bottom” and that the crisis would have severe repercussions across the army and the empire.80 The secretary of state for war and the chief of the Imperial General Staff (future British Expeditionary Force Commander Sir John French) both resigned, but the po­lit­i­cal shake-­up did little to calm fears of an imminent civil war. Equally worrisome was the ability of the British Army to essentially abrogate a law by the mere threat of noncompliance. In the summer of 1914, Ireland seemed to be a powder keg awaiting a spark from almost any direction. The Ulster Volunteers stood ready to fight the government to prevent Home Rule, the Irish Republican Broth29

DANCE OF THE FURIES

erhood stood ready to fight it from the other side of this dangerous po­lit­i­ cal spectrum to gain complete in­de­pen­dence, and the army was now a wild card that might or might not obey the government. On July 26, Scottish troops opened fire on a crowd in Dublin as part of an operation to catch illegal gun runners. They killed four Dubliners and wounded more than forty others, leading one Briton to fear that the killings marked “the first blood of the civil war.”81 Little wonder, then, that those Europeans more inclined to read the po­lit­i­cal pages than the society pages were worried about consequences from the situation in Ireland, not Bosnia. Britons, of course, were especially concerned about the consequences that might arise from the Irish crisis. R. D. Blumenfeld, who had tea with H. G. Wells the day of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, noted that although the two talked briefly about the Balkans, Ireland was “still uppermost” in ev­ery­one’s minds. As late as July 24, he recalled a dinner party where the crisis in Ireland was the only subject of discussion. “Continental affairs,” he recalled, were “not discussed.”82 Writer Compton Mackenzie arrived in London from the continent shortly after the assassination to find cricket the main topic of conversation. In an attempt to steer the discussion to more serious matters, he told his friends, “I am worried about this war.” One of them replied, “This Irish business?” When Mackenzie told his friends that he was worried about the situation in the Balkans, they dismissed his concerns. “Nobody I met,” he recalled, “would consider a European war even a remote possibility.”83 If there was any positive aspect to the Irish crisis it lay in the diplomatic un­der­stand­ing that Ireland was a British concern, not a European one. Germany or some other country might try to use the incident to win a small diplomatic victory or to take advantage of Britain’s distraction, but no nation would unduly involve itself in the internal affairs of another. Ireland was therefore “En­gland’s prob­lem.” No matter how tense Irish events might become, it was unlikely that the prob­lems would spread to the continent or to the European powers’ colonial empires. With so many other crises to worry about, interest in the assassination, destined to become such a crucial event in retrospect, rapidly faded from view. Even in the Balkans, passions had largely calmed down in just  over a week. By July 7, anti-­Serbian demonstrations had stopped in Vienna and public concern there had moved on to other issues. 84 In Germany, “the excitement of the Berlin newspapers suddenly abated” in the first week of July, and the newspapers reported that Kaiser Wilhelm would still take his summer vacation cruise as planned. “We breathed 30

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more freely,” noted one observer, because the cruise “was a sign that the storm clouds that had nearly burst over Serbia were also passing off from the Danube Valley.”85 Across the Rhine in France, the Nation reported on  July 6 that “fear of complications between Austria and Serbia appears unfounded.”86 On the same day, the highly respected veteran diplomat Arthur Nicolson told the British ambassador in Vienna that nothing would come of the incident. Four days later the editor of the Westminster Gazette said that the issue was “of no interest to Britain or Russia.”87 These observations re­flected the mood in the British media. The London Times had featured the assassination in its headlines of Monday, June 29, but by the following day the story had already moved back to pages seven and eight. There it stayed throughout early July, with most of the media attention being placed on the details of the funeral rather than on concerns over any international implications. On July 6, the editors of the Times decided that the assassination was no ­longer a matter of  “European sig­nifi­cance.” In mid-­July the story disappeared entirely for several days until July 16, when the paper encouragingly reported that Viennese stock traders felt “more cheerful” about the future of the stock market there.88 Financial repercussions seemed sig­nifi­cantly more im­por­tant than po­lit­i­cal ones, and the Times devoted considerably more space to the consequences of po­lit­i­cal uncertainty for the Vienna stock markets than to any other possible fallouts. No serious discussion of war appeared in the newspaper until July 22, the day before Austria-­Hungary delivered its fateful ultimatum to Serbia. Across the En­glish Channel, the Paris daily Le Temps followed a similar line. As in London, the assassination was front-­page news on June 29, but in Le Temps the story was placed alongside (and in the same font size as) an item about President Poincaré’s decision to attend the Paris Grand Prix with his wife. By July 1, stories related to the assassinations were off the front pages; the lead foreign affairs story that day involved the improvement of relations between Russia and Britain. By July 6 news from Vienna and Sarajevo had all but disappeared. From July 11 to July 23 the paper covered the Balkan situation only once. There was far more coverage of debates on the new fi­nance bill than on foreign affairs, and starting on July 21 Le Temps did begin to run special supplements to the daily papers on a matter of great interest to its readers. The subject, however, was not the situation in the Balkans but the trial of Henriette Caillaux. The Balkans even failed to make much of an appearance in the paper’s regular foreign affairs section. Every issue of Le Temps featured a front-­ 31

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page “Bulletin de L’Étranger” in the leftmost column. In the first week of July the Home Rule crisis in Ireland occupied the column more often than did the Balkan crisis. Throughout the month the Balkans were pushed out of that column by such riveting stories as the language question in Belgium, the foreign policy of Sweden, British Foreign Minister Edward Grey’s view of the situation in the Far East (the paper did not even think it necessary to ask him about the assassinations in Sarajevo), and France’s role in the upcoming San Francisco World’s Fair. Only on July 25 did the Balkan crisis return to a place of prominence in Le Temps’ coverage of foreign affairs.

A Sunny Summer on the Seaside As late as mid-­July, there seemed to many people no crisis to speak of at all. Mildred Aldrich, still enjoying the calm and tranquility of her house near the Marne River, made no mention of any crisis in her letters and wrote to a friend in the United States on July 16: “Absolutely no news to write you, unless you will consider it news that my hedge of dahlias, which I planted myself a month ago, is coming up like nothing else in the world but Jack’s beanstalk.”89 Another American expatriate drew a similar conclusion, noting that just a few days after the assassination calm returned to Europe and “the work of the world moved on in superficial normalcy.”90 British MP Arnold Stephenson Rowntree, who made no mention of the assassinations in his regular letters to his wife in York, saw nothing at all unusual in hosting thirty German university students at his club on July 9. Two weeks later, he kept a lunch appointment with the German industrialist Frederick Merrttens, and the two barely discussed politics.91 Even if they had, the conversation would have focused on Ireland; the Balkan crisis did not appear in Rowntree’s correspondence until July 28. The only remote signs of distress came from the saber rattling of nationalist and right-­wing newspapers inside the Austro-­Hungarian Empire. It was evident, however, that the right-­wing newspapers did not speak for the majority of Europeans. The socialist Hungarian newspaper Népszava called such reporting “devilish” and “vampire bloodlust.” In Hungary, the more centrist newspaper Az Újság, which had close links to many se­nior government of­fi­cials, noted on July 10 that “if we were to ask the people of the Monarchy whether they want war, or the martial 32

A CLAP OF THUNDER IN THE SUMMER SKY

warmongering policy [of the ultranationalist media], we are sure that only a negligible number of them would answer ‘yes.’”92 While most Europeans naturally and easily went about their daily lives unconcerned about any aftershocks from the assassinations, a few looked ahead to a possible Austro-­Hungarian response. Those familiar with European diplomacy knew that Austria-­Hungary would have the customary opportunity to demand compensation from Serbia if it could be proved that the Serbian government had directly or indirectly played a role in the murders. Austria-­Hungary might reasonably expect to make some minor claim to territorial or monetary compensation. On the other hand, the crime had happened on Austrian soil and might therefore be handled as an entirely domestic matter. In that case, as in the Irish Home Rule crisis, “no other government . . . would wish to interfere” and the event would remain, in the parlance of the time, localized.93 To take the incident outside the boundaries of the empire would require evidence that the Serbian government had been directly involved. The Austro-­Hungarian government had no such evidence that would meet with international approval. What exactly the Austrians might demand from Serbia even if they could provide evidence of Serbian complicity remained primarily a matter of conjecture and speculation. Almost all European observers who paid any attention to the issue expected the Austrians to demand only minor compensation and to be content to be rid of the troublesome issue once and for all. Any effort to punish Serbia too harshly or to do so without proof would likely result in negative consequences for Austria-­Hungary, but in mid-­July people were thinking  more in terms of bad press than military action. For that reason, Austro-­Hungarian of­fi­cials began ultimately unsuccessful attempts to bribe French and Ital­ian journalists to write stories flattering to the Viennese point of view. International opinion would inevitably line up against the Austrians if they tried to use the assassinations as an excuse to annex even more Balkan territory. Henry Wickham Steed of the London Times and J. A. Spender of the Westminster Gazette both observed that the British public would not support an Austrian power grab or any mea­sures inconsistent with “the simple act of justice”; in other words, the Austro-­Hungarians could do what was necessary to find any other members of the plot to kill the archduke, but they could demand little compensation. Neither Steed nor Spender, however, thought an Austrian response, even if it proved 33

DANCE OF THE FURIES

to be harsher than jus­ti­fied by the evidence, had the potential to spark v­ iolence. An observer of editorial opinion in France agreed, noting that “a state which, rightly or wrongly, is suspected of endangering peace, whether intentionally or only even by its general policy, will always be charged with aggression by the newspapers here.”94 Reactions were largely the same in Germany, where newspapers supported Austria’s right to press for minor compensation, but nothing more. Except for the chauvinists on the extreme right, few people in Europe expected a confrontation. London foreign of­fice of­fi­cials told Steed on July 21 that “we have no proof whatever that Germany is not pa­cific; rather the contrary.” When Steed told the of­fi­cials of his concern that an Austrian demand for compensation might lead to complications in the European diplomatic scene that could possibly result in war, the of­fi­cials politely told him that he was “off [his] head.”95 Even people inside the Dual Monarchy hoped for a decent, reasonable, and ultimately peaceful solution. Austria’s Neues Politisches Volksblatt argued that “certainly we must demand satisfaction and guarantees for the future. But these demands need not lead to a breach of relations [with Serbia].” The London Times Vienna correspondent praised the “correct” attitude of people in and out of government alike in seeking a reasonable and peaceful so­ lution.96 Thus regardless of nationality, opinions in Europe were broadly similar. Optimism reigned that the Austro-­Hungarian response would be ­judicious and proportionate. On July 18 the German government announced that the British had indeed extended an invitation for the German Navy to make a friendly visit to En­gland in August to repay the hospitality of Fleet Week at Kiel. By that point “the electric shock of Sarajevo” had long since “spent its force” and the Balkans were no ­longer news in either Berlin or London.97 On vacation on the Belgian coastline in Ostend at the same time, the Austrian Stefan Zweig observed “all nationalities . . . peacefully assembled” and enjoying the sea with “the same unconstraint [that] reigned as elsewhere.” No one of any nationality spoke seriously of war or international consequences. “We had been familiar with these diplomatic con­flicts for years,” Zweig noted; “they were always happily settled at the last minute, before things got too serious.”98 In a similar vein, newspapers “ignored the crisis until the last minute, not because they were naïve regarding international events, but because of lessons learned from recent his­tory.”99 Those lessons from recent his­tory gave Europeans all the faith they 34

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needed that the assassinations would not lead to war. From 1905 to 1914 Europeans had seen much bigger crises come and go. The powerful forces that had resisted war over the last de­cade, they assumed, would interact again to stop this relatively minor Balkan incident from getting out of hand. Three weeks after the archduke’s death, virtually no one in Europe feared that the skies would darken or that the thunder would return.

35

2 B ACKG ROUND TO S AR A JE VO, 19 05 –1914

In early July 1914 the traditional European diplomatic system would, in just a few days’ time, undergo the worst failure in its his­tory. It was soon to produce a crisis that would lead Europe down a spiral of four years of unprecedented carnage. Yet to most Europeans at the time, the secret world of diplomacy and backroom deals was, if not exactly in tune with the democratic spirit of the age, nevertheless a source of strength and an im­por­tant counterweight to war. In the past de­cade (and even before) crises large and small had come and gone on the European stage. Tensions had risen and nationalists in all countries had at one time or another clamored for war, but the system had in the end worked, and the diplomats had managed to avoid the need to call in the generals. Europeans in July 1914 had seen crises much larger and much more directly connected to the fundamental interests of the great powers resolved peacefully by this system. They had no reason to believe that the current, relatively minor, crisis over the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and his wife would be any different. Diplomacy is by its very nature a secret pro­cess that takes place outside the public gaze. Even in democratic states like France and Britain, diplomacy was handled by a small number of men from elite backgrounds who played the game according to a set of unwritten rules that only they fully understood. To the vast majority of Europeans, the diplomatic pro­ cess was a distant and furtive one that defied efforts to make sense of it. Most Europeans understood that their nations were part of large international alliance systems, but the exact terms of the alliances were secret. Interested Europeans knew, however, that the alliances were defensive in nature, and that they were designed to be deterrents against any possible aggression by one state against another. European diplomacy from 1815 to 1914 had produced far more suc36

BACKGROUND TO SARAJEVO, 1905–1914

cesses than failures. Within Europe it had most often acted as a force of stability, peace, and containment of local crises. It had sometimes even turned long-­standing and bitter enemies into newfound friends, as the Entente Cordiale between Britain and France had done in 1904. It also tied together vastly divergent systems such as republican France and autocratic Russia. All these accomplishments, it seemed to Europeans in 1914, had created a system of safeguards that helped to support peace and encouraged diplomatic rather than military solutions to continental prob­lems. Rarely did such diplomatic deals greatly impact the daily lives of Europeans. There were, however, periodic episodes of crisis that brought diplomacy and foreign affairs to the forefront. Until 1914, they had all been resolved peacefully by a conservative system that seemed to most Europeans to value negotiation and diplomacy over confrontation and war. Moreover, in recent years, an international socialist movement had also developed that believed itself to be an im­por­tant force against war. A number of checks built into the system thus served as brakes on the ambitions and aggressiveness of any single ruler or state. To most Europeans, the continent had never seemed better suited to withstand small crises than it did in July 1914.

The Peace Kaisers Then as now, many Europeans saw the monarchical system as a relic of a bygone age, if not an outright hindrance to po­lit­i­cal, social, and economic prog­ress. The extensive trappings and unlimited claims to power of the European royal houses (Kaiser Wilhelm, for example, claimed to rule as “an instrument of the Lord”) struck many middle-­class liberals and working-­class socialists as ill-­suited to the modern age.1 The destruction of the Habsburg, Romanov, and Hohenzollern dynasties was to become one of the most im­por­tant po­lit­i­cal out­comes of the war after the crisis of 1914–1918 proved to be too much for the monarchies to handle. Many Europeans also decried the monarchs’ over-­reliance on their roles as commanders-­in-­chief of their armed forces. Kings, emperors, kaisers, and czars all derived at least part of their power and authority from the close connections they had to their armies and navies. Soldiers in all the monarchical states swore allegiance to the monarchs personally, and no proper set of annual army maneuvers was complete without the par­tic­i­pa­tion of the monarch on the winning side in the culminating 37

DANCE OF THE FURIES

mock battle. The outlandish uniforms the monarchs wore underscored this close iden­ti­fi­ca­tion between monarch and military, as did their own public statements. Wilhelm had once said, “We belong to each other, I and the Army; we were born for each other.”2 It is easy to look back at the spiked helmets and rows of military medals and see a system that had become overly militaristic and too tightly connected to the desires of the so-­called war parties in Europe. Wilhelm had a well-­earned reputation for occasional outbursts of inflammatory language and acts of reckless diplomacy. His dispatch of a telegram to Boer leader Paul Kruger congratulating the Boers for their repulse of the Jameson raid in 1896 irritated the British without helping German diplomacy. Wilhelm had also boldly proclaimed himself the protector of Islam, an act of arrogance that the British saw as a thinly veiled threat to their empire in India. In 1908, in one of his most controversial acts, he had given an ungracious and provocative interview to the Daily Telegraph in which he had insulted the British and clearly stated Ger­ many’s desire to challenge Britain’s position in the world: Germany is a young and growing empire. She has a worldwide commerce which is rapidly expanding, and to which the legitimate ambition of pa­tri­otic Germans refuses to assign any bounds. Germany must have a powerful fleet to protect that commerce and her manifold interests in even the most distant seas. She expects those interests to go on growing, and she must be able to champion them manfully in any quarter of the globe.3 Nevertheless, many Europeans in 1914 saw the monarchs not as forces for war but as forces for peace. Conservative, oppressive, and an­ tidemocratic they may have been, but their reigns seemed to have proven that they were not inclined to upset the system by fight­ing wars. Even Kaiser Wilhelm, who was the most outwardly militaristic of all the Eu­ ropean monarchs, had been on his throne since 1888 without having started a European war, although, especially in his youn­ger years, he had occasionally played dangerous and risky games in his foreign policy. Robert M. Barry, who wrote a flattering study of German society just before the war, noted that Wilhelm had sometimes “rattled [his sword] ominously in its sheath,” but in the end, “during his reign of more than twenty years the sword of Germany had not once been drawn.”4 Baron Beyens, the Belgian minister to Berlin, agreed, observing that Wilhelm enjoyed the company of military men but was not himself warlike. Bey38

BACKGROUND TO SARAJEVO, 1905–1914

ens thought that Wilhelm “does not possess the martial spirit inherent in several princes of his house.” The German kaiser was, in his view, “fond of the barracks, without having a taste for the battlefield.”5 The proof to many was the kaiser’s willingness to tone down both his actions and his rhetoric since the domestic and international backlash that had followed the Daily Telegraph scandal. He was even on the list of finalists for the 1914 Nobel Peace Prize. 6 Although the kaiser had his fair share of critics, he also had a large number of international admirers before 1914. American reporter A. Maurice Low wrote “one long eulogy” about the still living kaiser in 1906 (after the peaceful conclusion of the first Moroccan crisis), praising him as essentially a man of peace, and while he is not afraid to fight, he knows the cost of war, and that the nation victorious pays a price almost as heavy as the nation defeated. . . . When the his­tory of this period of the German empire is written, it may be discovered that William the Second was a man who spoke for the future to hear. Then it may be understood that his in­flu­ence was for peace and not for war; that he spoke with a purpose; that he heard the voice of humanity; that he was one of the positive forces of his time. The kaiser, Low felt, was unlike his warlike Hohenzollern ancestors; his “title to greatness,” moreover, was that of the “dower of peace.”7 Wilhelm had taken pride in his reputation as a force for peace acting to restrain the passions of the nationalist press and the aggressive militarism found in the German aristocracy and personified in the kaiser’s own son, Crown Prince Wilhelm. Like Barry, Beyens thought that Wilhelm “liked to rattle his saber, [and] always at the wrong moment,” but that the rattling was for domestic po­lit­i­cal purposes, not martial ones, because Wilhelm “had no inborn love of war.”8 In the end, the kaiser’s behavior had served as a reassuring force for peace: “for 25 years,” Beyens wrote, “William II kept the promise that he had made to the German people, at Bismarck’s advice, in his first speech from the throne—the promise that he would have a peaceful reign.”9 When French visitors to his court praised the peaceful attitude of Germany toward France, Wilhelm often told them to enjoy it while they could because he would not live forever. His son, with his closer connections to German ultranationalists, had taken a much harsher line on foreign policy than had his ­father. 39

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Nor were Wilhelm’s peaceful intentions merely rhetoric. In 1903, for example, Wilhelm had acted to discourage the growth of anti-­British feeling in the German industrial class and in the media. The British newspaper the Forum praised the kaiser for working hard “to stem the rising tide of national bitterness” in his country; some En­glish observers thought that his ultimate goal was not to go to war with Britain but “to detach En­gland from her friends” to foster an Anglo-­German alliance.10 They worried that the supposedly shrewder German diplomats would outmaneuver their British counterparts, but the ultimate goal of German behavior, they feared, was not war. It was instead to cultivate an Anglo-­German alliance and a mending of the abiding antagonisms left over from the Kruger telegram and German support for the Boers during the South African War of 1899–1902. Another British periodical described the kaiser in 1905 as bombastic, cunning, and opportunistic, but ultimately afraid of war.11 Andrew Carnegie, who dedicated much of the final years of his life to the cause of peace, found the kaiser to be “a wonderful man, so bright, humorous, and with such a sweet smile. I think he can be trusted and declares himself for peace. . . . [I] can’t help liking him.” Carnegie also referred to the kaiser as Europe’s “apostle of peace.”12 Wilhelm himself was fond of telling visitors who pessimistically predicted war in the near future that they may be right, but that war would not happen so long as he was still on the throne. In 1912 he demonstrated that he might indeed have outgrown his youthful impetuosity when he “­adopted a far more peaceful attitude” than his chancellor and government at the outset of the First Balkan War.13 The warlike caricatures of Wilhelm that emerged from the drawing boards of allied propagandists during the war years therefore captured a view of the kaiser that sat at odds with the impression that many had of him in 1914. A German editor who knew him well thought that he had “no warrior’s spirit” and was “firm in his will for peace.”14 The British ambassador to Germany reported in 1904 that “the Kaiser is pa­cifically inclined. . . . It would take a great deal to drive him into war.” He enjoyed a reputation as a man not of war but of art and faith: “He painted, he arranged ballets, he designed a chapel for one of his castles, he took part in an archaeological excavation in Corfu.”15 But he did not seek wars. Many Germans who knew Wilhelm in the years before the war dwelled upon (and sometimes bemoaned) his overwhelmingly “peaceable inclinations.”16 They feared that foreign powers would take advantage of the kaiser’s kindness and outspoken desire to avoid war. Some Americans 40

BACKGROUND TO SARAJEVO, 1905–1914

who knew him agreed. As late as August 17, 1914 (that is, two weeks after the war had already begun), Edward House told American Ambas­ sador to Germany James Gerard that Wilhelm might be the European leader most open to ending the war through binding arbitration. “The Kaiser has stood for peace all these years,” House wrote, “and it would not be inconsistent with his past life and ser­vices to be willing now to consider such overtures.”17 The peculiar inclination of Europeans to make the kaiser the single person most criticized over the war after 1914 came at least in part from the sense of betrayal they felt. No other individual came in for such a level of criticism and ridicule, even among those who knew full well just how isolated Wilhelm really was from the pro­cess of major decision making (especially on military matters) in his own empire. In their eyes, the “kaiser of peace” who had worked so dili­gently to restrain the militarists in Germany had revoked his past promises for peace and had instead launched a brutal war of naked aggression. Paul Miliukov, one of the kaiser’s staunchest Russian admirers, developed a “hatred for the German emperor for his deceptions” after 1914.18 In the words of one British publication from 1919, “We were all deceived by Germany. Nearly fifty years of peace had blinded us to fifty years of relentless preparation for war.”19 To cite one final example, in early August Georgina Lee wrote in her diary (intended to explain the war to her then infant son when he grew up) that the kaiser had “thrown off at last the mask of peacemaker he has worn for ten years and shown himself in his real light.”20 Similarly, images of Wilhelm’s cousin Czar Nicholas II were more nuanced in 1914 than they would become in subsequent years. Nicholas had a reputation across Europe as the most reactionary and most brutal of the European monarchs. He had also fought a bloody and ultimately unsuccessful war against Japan in 1904–1905. But there was another side to Nicholas. In 1898 he had led an international movement to create a disarmament conference aimed at limiting military spending and the impact of war on civilians. His call had been warmly received across the continent. Vienna newspapers called it “beautiful music over the whole earth.” Others praised the czar’s call as offering “deliverance” from the armaments manufacturers who perpetuated a deadly system for their own commercial ­profit. One Belgian newspaper went so far as to claim that in the future the czar would be known as “Nicholas the Pacific.”21 In honor of the man who “became the hero of the disciples of peace,” an international disarmament conference opened in the Hague on the 41

DANCE OF THE FURIES

czar’s birthday, May 18, 1899.22 Although it failed to live up to its high expectations, from 1898 to 1905 Nicholas still stood out as one of the world’s leading proponents of peace. Many skeptics doubted his motives, assuming that Russia was trying to retard military spending and innovation so that it did not fall even further behind the other great powers. Others, however, believed that he was genuinely terrified by the prospect of a general European war. The continent’s most highly respected pacifist, the Czech-­born baroness Bertha von Suttner (winner of the 1905 Nobel Peace Prize) believed in the czar’s sincerity and admired him as one of the world’s great pacifists.23 Regardless of his motivation, the fact remained that the czar had sponsored the era’s first major international peace conference. It had not yielded ev­ery­thing Nicholas had hoped for, but it had gotten the countries talking and had produced bans on expanding (or dum-­dum) bullets, the use of balloons as weapons platforms, and asphyxiating gases. It had also reinforced the Geneva rules on maritime warfare. The czar’s unsuccessful war with Japan and his brutal suppression of protests at home severely undermined his stature as a European statesman. A January 1906 cartoon in Punch showed the czar standing with one arm leaning on a smoking machine gun. Calmly surveying the bodies of dead protestors around him, he declares, “Now I think the way is clear for universal suffrage.” The caption sardonically reads, “Peace Reigns in Moscow.”24 The brutality of the czar’s treatment of his po­lit­i­cal foes, his support of the anti-­Semitic pogroms, and his ultimate failure to implement promised po­lit­i­cal reforms reinforced the negative images of him across Europe. Nevertheless, his stature as a man of peace was, paradoxically, bolstered by the unsuccessful war with Japan. The czar was a moving force behind another large disarmament conference, held at the Hague in 1907. The invitations to the conference came from the czar himself, and many in Europe concluded that his military’s maladroit performance in the war against Japan (and the domestic revolution that had come from it) had in fact made the czar much less inclined to embark on foreign adventures in the future. In other words, the Russo-­Japanese War might, ironically enough, make Russia a more, not a less, peaceful nation, especially in regard to the other states of Europe. In any case, it would be many years before a rebuilt Russian army and navy could do much more than lick its wounds and recover from the shock of such a massive defeat. The outbreak of war in 1914 revealed how out of touch and incompe42

BACKGROUND TO SARAJEVO, 1905–1914

tent the monarchs of Russia, Germany, and Austria-­Hungary truly were. The point nevertheless remains that in 1914 the monarchs themselves ­appeared as forces for peace, not war. As Europe was racing toward war in 1914, German teacher Philippe Husser noted in his diary that the czar was the only man who could “say the decisive word in favor of peace.” At the same time, German socialists, no great friend of the kaiser’s government, were convinced that Wilhelm was a force for peace, as proven by his stance during the Balkan wars.25 Although most Europeans mistrusted the autocratic tendencies of Kaiser Wilhelm, Czar Nicholas, and Emperor Franz Joseph, all three could rightly claim that their reigns (of 26, 20, and 66 years, respectively) were overwhelmingly characterized by years of peace, not war. Moreover, all three could claim, with some jus­ tifi­ca­tion, that they had helped to manage crises, seek avenues of peaceful resolution, and restrain the nationalists and hotheads in their own countries. Franz Joseph had stated repeatedly throughout his reign that “it is  the duty of kings to keep peace,” and his­tory had seemingly borne him out.26 Beyens later recalled that the outbreak of war showed that in the years 1905–1914 “too much con­fi­dence was placed abroad in the pacifism and sincerity of William II.”27 The same might well be said for his fellow monarchs. That the deception had come from men who had taken such pride in the peaceful nature of their reigns up to that point made the ­betrayal seem all the more bitter, not just to their enemies, but to many of their fellow countrymen as well. Although they received a justifiably large share of the blame for the war after it began, in 1914 they were often seen as cornerstones of a conservative European po­lit­i­cal system that occasionally rattled swords but knew how to manage continental crises without recourse to war. Events since 1905 seemed to many Europeans to demonstrate the fundamental soundness of a system that could not avoid tension, but which always managed to deal with that tension well short of war.

The Morocco Crises of 1905 and 1911 The most serious prewar crises occurred in Morocco, where an ambiguous French colonial position and German desires for an Atlantic port combined to create a dangerous mix. It is not the point of this study to review the timelines or the behind-­the-­scenes diplomatic negotiations of the two Moroccan crises. The importance of the crises to Europeans in 43

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1914 was less about what had happened than about what had not happened. In both cases tensions had risen and fallen over the span of several weeks before a relatively amicable solution was reached. In short, the system had worked. The true importance of the crises therefore lay in the way they established a pattern by which Europeans came to understand diplomatic events. The pattern contained three critical points. First, the crises were long, drawn-­out affairs that featured spikes of heightened anxiety as well as long periods of relative inactivity. The first Morocco crisis lasted more than a year, from March 31, 1905, to April 7, 1906. The second Morocco crisis (also known as the Agadir crisis) lasted from July 7 to November 4, 1911. Much like the earlier Fashoda crisis (September 18, 1898, to March 21, 1899), these diplomatic showdowns took time to resolve. As a result, they often had trouble holding the public imagination. Societies and individuals simply could not put their lives on hold while awaiting a resolution that might not come for months and was unlikely to have a direct impact on their daily lives. Second, the crises usually involved an outside or “disinterested” party heading up the ultimately successful negotiations. The two disputing parties agreed to arbitration by the disinterested party, a key concept of the Hague peace conferences.28 The arbiter pledged not to seek any gain for  itself, thus staking its claim to being disinterested, and the parties agreed to abide by whatever decision it reached. Those decisions normally involved trade-­offs or the awarding of compensation, in the form of either territory or trade concessions. Third, and most im­por­tant, all of the crises were resolved peacefully. In most cases, the two sides eventually found a compromise that left them equally pleased (or displeased) and, most critically, allowed for a resolution well short of war. The 1905 Morocco incident was resolved by the Algeciras conference, which American President Theodore Roosevelt, acting as the disinterested arbiter (a role he had played to help end the Russo-­Japanese War as well), helped facilitate.29 The final terms of the Algeciras deal limited French in­flu­ence in Morocco by maintaining the sultan as an in­de­pen­ dent ruler. Morocco thereby became a French protectorate rather than a French colony. As a consequence of that decision, Germany was denied the right to build an Atlantic port in Morocco (a right the sultan was more than willing to grant, especially after Wilhelm made a highly visible state visit), but France had no right to exclude other European powers from economic exploitation of Moroccan raw materials on equal terms. 44

BACKGROUND TO SARAJEVO, 1905–1914

All sides thus got something that they wanted but were denied ev­ery­thing that they wanted. Nationalists and leaders in both countries fumed over what they did not get, but diplomats and journalists understood the rules of the game. Kaiser Wilhelm, angry at Britain’s support for France’s position, claimed that Germany was being encircled by hostile powers. He knew, however, that the Algeciras deal had provided him with enough concessions to make his meddling in North Africa ben­e­fi­cial, while at the same time ­giving him and the German people an honorable way out of the con­ flict without a war that he certainly did not want. The same could be said of all the other major powers as well. The deal was standard European great-­power diplomacy: by agreeing to arbitration and negotiation the parties involved had resolved a minor crisis, ev­ery­body walked away from the table with a tangible gain (even the sultan, who kept his nominal in­de­pen­dence), and no one had to resort to armed con­flict. There the Moroccan situation might well have remained if the French government had not tried to push its luck. In May 1911 it sent troops to Fez to put down riots and local disturbances. The French action struck most Europeans inside and outside France as a clear violation of the Algeciras deal because it threatened the sovereignty of the sultan and “blatantly flouted” the spirit of previous agreements.30 En­glishman Wilfrid Scawen Blount noted in his diary that the “invasion” of Morocco by French forces was “a scandalous affair,” not, of course, because of the effect it had on Moroccans, but because it threatened to upset the calm of the continent and start a new round of diplomatic confrontation. 31 The German government responded to the French action with a move of its own that was, according to one historian, the next step in a series of decisions characterized on all sides by “bungling, confusion, and lack of co-­ordination.”32 Despite the fact that no German rights were threatened by French troops going to Fez, the Germans sent the gunship Panther to the Moroccan port of Agadir on July 1. The Panther was a small, insig­ nifi­cant ship with just two guns and a crew of 125 men; it was “unlikely to strike fear into the hearts” of anyone in Europe or Morocco, but the gesture struck many British and French nationalists as needlessly provocative.33 A new round of debates and diplomatic maneuvering thus began, but the exact sig­nifi­cance of the new crisis escaped most Europeans, for whom Morocco was far away and insig­nifi­cant to their lives. Even in France, the country most directly impacted, most people “did not want to 45

DANCE OF THE FURIES

be concerned” about another backwater issue just before the summer holidays; one observer described French public opinion as “undecided” because the public “does not understand very well what it is all about.”34 To most, it seemed that the Germans were eager to use the incident as an excuse to open up a new round of arbitration in the hopes of gaining a quick and easy score, most likely better trade terms or the long-­sought-­ after right to build an Atlantic naval base. Germany, French public opinion concluded, had made an effort “to take a seat at the [Moroccan] table without being invited.”35 Its behavior was clearly outside the bounds of the rules of the game, but it was not cause for serious alarm. Thus began several months of playing the diplomatic game once again. As ordinary Europeans went about their daily lives, they followed the twists and turns of the diplomatic discussions in their daily newspapers alongside the much larger global news stories of the day, including renewed Anglo-­Russian tension over Persia and the revolutions in Mexico and China. To most people, however, the Agadir issue was clearly of minor importance. Outside of the extreme nationalist right in France and Germany, no one sought an escalation of the crisis. The kaiser told his advisors “at an early stage that he would not consent to any mea­sures he considered likely to lead to war,” and the French ambassador to Russia told his Russian colleagues that French public opinion “would hardly understand a . . . war occasioned by a colonial question like Morocco.”36 From London, Blunt noted on July 20 that people there “­don’t believe in war as a possible thing concerning En­gland.”37 Germany would be en­ti­ tled to what journalist J. A. Spender called “a return blow” for the “very clumsy” French march on Fez, as long as that blow was proportionate to the relatively minor harm Germany had suf­fered.38 Tensions rose at the end of July and into August, in part owing to a speech given by David Lloyd George at Mansion House on July 22 in response to more clumsy German foreign policy. A week before, German Foreign Minister Alfred von Kiderlen had agreed to give France a free hand in Morocco, but he insisted that France cede all its possessions in the Congo as compensation. The demand created a stir because the Germans appeared to be insisting on far too much compensation for France’s dispatch of troops to Fez; in other words, the “return blow” was too strong. Even many Germans (including the kaiser, who berated Kiderlen behind closed doors for his extravagant demands) thought the conditions too steep. Nevertheless, they were now on the table and would need to be 46

BACKGROUND TO SARAJEVO, 1905–1914

either rejected, at the risk of offending German sensibilities, or used as a basis for negotiation. In his speech, Lloyd George pledged that Britain had to maintain its “great and beneficent position” in the world for the good of all mankind. In the most provocative part of the speech, he warned that the great powers had to recognize British interests. They could not treat Britain “as if she were of no account in the cabinet of nations.” Although he never mentioned Germany by name, it was clear that he had the Germans in mind when he concluded by saying that “peace at that price would be a  humiliation intolerable for a great nation like ours to endure.” The speech seemed to indicate British willingness to push the Morocco issue, and Britain’s desire to deny Germany an Atlantic port or gains in Africa, to the brink of armed con­flict. But in his speech Lloyd George also indicated his support for “all means which would lead to the settlement of international disputes such as those which civilization has set up for the adjustment of differences” between nations. “I rejoice in my heart,” Lloyd George continued, at the prospect of “a more just arbitrament than that of the sword.”39 While French diplomats read his speech as support for their hard line against their German counterparts, most saw it for what it was, a card to be played in the great diplomatic game. Lloyd George was simultaneously demanding that the Germans take British desires seriously and, more im­ por­tant, making it clear that Britain did not want war over a question like Morocco. There is little evidence that anyone in Europe wanted a war. French public opinion was opposed to even the middle step of sending a warship to the North African coast to shadow the Panther for fear of escalating the crisis into an armed con­flict.40 British public opinion re­flected a similar sentiment; thus neither government sent warships to the region because to have done so would have increased tensions even further and would likely have met with sig­nifi­cant public resistance. Europe’s socialist parties led the opposition to an escalation of the tensions in Morocco, although they were hardly alone in their views. As a demonstration of their opposition to the elevation of an insig­nifi­cant issue like Morocco to an international crisis, French and German socialists held a joint rally one week after Lloyd George’s Mansion House speech. They shook hands, gave joint declarations, and demonstrated “a stirring show of solidarity” at a moment when tensions were still rising.41 At the 47

DANCE OF THE FURIES

height of the crisis, French socialist leader Jean Jaurès published articles simultaneously in L’Humanité, the French socialist newspaper, and in Vorwärts, the German socialist newspaper, urging workers not to be lured by the crisis into false feelings of nationalist sentiment. He criticized French foreign policy for posing a “threat to Germany and to peace” but also blamed the German government for the provocative dispatch of the Panther to Agadir.42 The socialists of France and Germany did more than just write articles to express their desires for peace. On August 4, the French Confédération générale du travail held a massive rally in Paris to which German workers were invited. In September and October further rallies demanding peace were held in Berlin and Paris. Vorwärts boldly claimed 200,000 attendees at one of the rallies, but they were clearly exaggerating; nevertheless, even the police fig­ure of 60,000 attendees is impressive. A rally a few weeks later in Paris drew at least as many demonstrators as that in Berlin. The rallies demanded a de-­escalation of the crisis and insisted on an adherence to arbitration rather than war as a means of solving the Morocco question. The threat of a general strike to stop mobilization and war was never far behind the words and actions of the rallies. One of the French rallies was explicitly or­ga­nized around the possibility of German and French workers declaring simultaneous strikes to prevent war. “Like their German brothers,” L’Humanité declared on September 25, French workers were telling their government “that they want peace.”43 The Morocco crisis served to bring German and French workers closer together, with La Guerre Sociale arguing that Franco-­German labor solidarity against war would force the diplomats on both sides to recognize the amity between the two peoples and sign an entente cordiale across the Rhine to match the one across the En­glish Channel.44 Few people on either side wanted war, but the stirrings of the nationalist press and rumors about the secret deals that might be under discussion had created a situation that could spiral into something more dangerous. Labor agitation (especially cross-­border labor agitation) and the possibility of a wave of disruptive strikes posed an ominous threat that worried conservatives much more than the question of who had control of minimally ­profit­able economic rights in Morocco. The unity of the working classes had already led the French radical Gustave Hervé to praise the German working class as “the principal bastion of peace” against the presumably promilitary German elite.45 48

BACKGROUND TO SARAJEVO, 1905–1914

The rising tensions also made Europeans realize how ridiculous a war over such a minor issue would be. The editor of the Berliner Tageblatt, Theodor Wolff, noted that the Agadir crisis was fundamentally “a question of business advantage, but no businessman will risk a million marks [to fight a war] when the utmost he can gain by doing so is a hundred.” Wolff had watched a “third-­class diplomatic deal” turn unnecessarily into a “first-­class tragedy” in a region where neither side had any interests worth a major diplomatic showdown. Wolff had even watched a se­nior diplomat stare “curiously at the map of North Africa, as, like most other people, he really had not the slightest notion what sort of place Agadir could be.” Nobody, he thought, wanted war, but the crisis had caused diplomats to start “sliding on the ice.”46 The sliding had to be stopped before another unforeseen turn in the crisis caused even greater troubles. Thus the diplomats set to work to cut a deal consistent with the “morality of the day,” meaning that they had to find a way to neutralize and diffuse the situation while saving face on all sides.47 The diplomats were willing to sac­ri­fice a great deal to get an agreement finalized and thereby prevent further escalation or misun­der­stand­ing. The British were even willing to acquiesce in the German construction of a nonmilitary port on the Atlantic coastline. Talks went on into August and September, occasionally producing seeming breakthroughs, only to seize up into stalemate once again. In mid-­September, American President William Howard Taft offered his ser­vices as a mediator, a move that none of the Europeans welcomed because no one could predict what the Americans might decide. Both Britain and Russia urged the French and Germans to cut some sort of compromise and get the tiresome issue settled once and for all. Given all these factors, the great powers decided to solve the prob­lem with compromises and a face-­saving trade of relatively insig­nifi­cant African territories. The Germans understood that they had painted themselves into a corner and dropped their demands for a port in Morocco. They also recognized the existence of a French protectorate in exchange for a guarantee of equal trading rights. As an ostensible mea­sure of compensation for these concessions, France gave Germany part of French Congo in exchange for part of German Togoland. In effect, the two powers traded meaningless distant possessions so that both could return to their peoples and claim victory. The kaiser knew better. He commented that the exchange meant only a trade of “Negroes deprived of cultural and technical needs, and lacking the means to buy our products.”48 Nev49

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ertheless, the deal got all sides what they needed: a way out of a situation that was bene­fiting no one except the nationalist hotheads on both sides of the Rhine. Although the diplomats fumed about who had gotten the better of whom, and nationalists on all sides claimed that their country had been humiliated, the vast majority of Europeans were sat­is­fied with the peaceful resolution of a crisis that had spun needlessly out of control. The French newspaper Le Siècle’s French and German correspondents agreed that “the mass of Germans and Frenchmen are sat­is­fied with this peaceful solution.” The Lyon Républicain understood well enough what had happened but tried to put a positive face on it, likening the deal to the “intelligent peasant” trading a set of bad lands [Congo] for “others which would round out his chief holding [Morocco].” The deal passed the French Parliament by a margin of 393 to 36.49 In Germany the deal had broad support in the Reichstag, although the German system did not require parliamentary rati­fi­ca­tion as in France. When news of a deal arrived in November 1911, the International Socialist Bureau (ISB) welcomed it as both jus­tifi­ca­tion of the socialist faith in arbitration and the power of the socialists to force their governments to solve crises peacefully.50 As a gesture of conciliation, Kaiser Wilhelm dined at the French Embassy in Berlin shortly after the deal was finalized and convinced French Ambassador Jules Cambon of his sincere desire for a détente between the two countries that would keep minor squabbles like Morocco from growing into major crises.51 What mattered to most Europeans was not which diplomat came out with his reputation enhanced or which strip of African swamp was the most valuable. What mattered was that the diplomats and statesmen of the continent had not lost their heads over a crisis in a “Moroccan port no one had ever heard of” and had managed to resolve yet another minor crisis peacefully. Then, “as suddenly as it had arisen, the crisis had blown over.” In short, the system had worked and no one would have to fight over issues they did not understand and places they had never visited. While in retrospect the Agadir crisis sometimes appears as a crucial step along the road to the war of 1914–1918, it was not seen that way at the time. Quite to the contrary, its peaceful resolution augured well for the peaceful resolution of other such crises in the future. En­glish observers even concluded that the nonviolent end to the crisis showed that “German foreign policy had turned over a new leaf and become cooperative.” 50

BACKGROUND TO SARAJEVO, 1905–1914

Most im­por­tant, “life went on as before.”52 Another minor crisis had passed peacefully.

Crises in Libya and the Balkans More crises were not long in coming. Partly out of anger that it had not been cut in on the Agadir deal, Italy demanded compensation in Libya, then a loosely administered province of the Ottoman Empire. The Ital­ian government dispatched a fleet to Tripoli in September 1911 to the nearly universal condemnation of the great powers. This provocative act threatened to upset the balance of power so soon after the resolution of the Agadir crisis. None of the great powers had any desire to risk another major crisis over Ital­ian adventurism; nor did any of them then seek the dissolution of the tottering Ottoman Empire that Ital­ian pressure might precipitate. Consequently, the governments of the great powers neither chose sides in the con­flict nor offered their ser­vices as mediators. The indifference of the governments matched the general indifference of the European people. Few of them had any interest in getting involved in the war to defend the rights of Libyans or to oppose what was obviously naked Ital­ian aggression. Nevertheless, socialists and syndicalists sympathized with the efforts of Ital­ian syndicalists (among them a young Benito Mussolini) to stop the war by striking and thereby paralyzing the Ital­ian railroads and ports.53 Antiwar activists also drew inspiration from efforts like those of the ­women of Romagna, who laid their bodies across railroad tracks to prevent troop transports from heading to their ports of embarkation.54 The International Socialist Bureau declared the Ital­ian move into Libya to be “an act of brigandage.” Since none of the great powers seemed willing to do anything to stop the war, the ISB decided to “take charge of the direction of (the) anti-­war movement” itself. Socialists planned to call “a revolutionary general strike” in all the great powers to force their governments to take the Ital­ian situation seriously. In their eyes, the issue was not just Italy but the need “to prevent con­flicts or to bring about their early termination” through the use of strikes and other forms of disruption.55 The threat of these strikes, they hoped, could force governments to settle matters at the bargaining table instead of on the battlefield. The ISB called on its newspapers across Europe to denounce the Ital­ ian incursion and urge the great powers to use mediation to resolve it. If 51

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not settled, they argued, the con­flict “threatens to unleash the scourge of a world war” or vast increases in armaments spending, which socialists saw as just as dangerous to the future peace of Europe. On November 5, 1911, the same day that Italy passed a decree declaring its suzerainty over Libya, the ISB or­ga­nized antiwar demonstrations in all the European cap­itals.56 Early the next year, the German Socialist Party, the SPD, or­ga­ nized a new round of protests and explained the need to do so in universalist terms: The anti-­war protest is not a platonic peace demonstration, nor merely an expression of sympathy for the victims of the madness of our own rulers. It is our own affairs, the most urgent affairs of the German proletariat that are at stake. All foreign entanglements, however distant the country, all colonial acquisitions, even if seemingly peaceful, are today a threat to the peace of Europe, and, for the German people in particular, they constitute a threat.57 In other words, workers had not just the right but the responsibility to remain vigilant and endeavor to prevent war whenever and wherever it threatened to break out. Events on the battlefield, more than events in ISB meetings, determined the course of the war. Inside Italy, the war sparked protest against a con­flict that was supposed to have lasted four weeks but had instead dragged on for nearly a year.58 Moreover, the war was costing an already cash-­strapped Italy almost three times per month what the government had budgeted for the entire con­flict, causing serious economic hardship at home. No one expected the natural resources or new markets of Libya to come close to paying off even a fraction of that cost. The war had also inspired a Balkan League, initially consisting of Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Montenegro, to prepare for a war to evict the Ottomans from southeast Europe. On October 8, 1912, Montenegro took advantage of Ottoman distraction in Libya and declared war, sparking the First Balkan War. Each side therefore had powerful motivation to seek a deal. None of the great powers proved willing to mediate, so the two sides opened direct negotiations in Switzerland. In the resulting deal, the Ottomans retained nominal suzerainty over Libya, but in all other ways the region became a de facto Ital­ian colony, though the Ital­ians had tremendous dif­ fi­culty enforcing their will on local rulers. The Ital­ians also agreed to pay an indemnity to cover Ottoman economic losses as a result of the war, an implicit acknowledgment of the illegitimacy of Ital­ian aggression.59 52

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Although they had no real right to do so, the socialist parties of Europe congratulated themselves on having brought the war to an early end. They believed that the mere threat of a general strike had forced Italy and the Ottoman Empire to come to the bargaining table, thereby avoiding the risk of the con­flict’s spreading across the continent. The SPD made large gains in the 1912 German elections, gains they credited to their having presented themselves as “the party of peace.”60 Jaurès, too, claimed credit for the socialists, saying at the end of the Ital­ian war, “International socialism, which alone from the start of the Moroccan crisis has seen the threat [of a war], pointed to it, and de­fi ned it in detail, must use all its energies and make ev­ery effort to save Europe and the whole of humanity from the most terrible catastrophe.”61 The self-­congratulation may not have been entirely jus­ti­fied, but the action of the socialists across Europe against the Ital­ian war in Libya provided them with a model for the next great crisis. The Balkan League’s declaration of war against the Ottoman Empire touched off two wars in that volatile region. Unlike the Ital­ian war, a crisis in the Balkans had the potential to spread like wildfire through a tinderbox that touched on the interests of at least three great powers, Austria-­Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Russia. As a result, the great powers could be expected to utilize the full strength of their diplomatic system to prevent or contain hostilities. European socialists were not willing to trust the great powers to prevent a spreading of the Balkan war into what Jaurès warned could become “the most terrible holocaust since the Thirty Years War.”62 They planned to use the same methods they had used during the Ital­ian war, namely, the threat of a general strike to force international arbitration. Governments would, in the words of the ISB, “fear the pressure of revolutionary agitation” and steer clear of direct involvement in the con­flict. An October demonstration in Berlin against the war drew almost 250,000 people. 63 The ISB also called an international meeting at Basel, Switzerland, to  discuss strategy and show socialist solidarity. Representatives from twenty-­three countries met on November 24–25, 1912, and declared their joint commitment to “the salvation of peace and civilization,” a sentiment con­fi rmed in a written declaration released at the end of the meeting. 64 The Basel meeting resulted in “a powerful demonstration of the unity of the socialist movement in the anti-­war struggle” and inspired the socialists to work even harder both to prevent the war from spreading 53

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and to force the great powers to mediate an end to it. 65 Socialist deputy Alexandra Kollontai left the meeting thrilled that the socialists had conveyed “the need to frighten Europe, to threaten it with the ‘red spectre’ revolution in case the governments should risk war.” She was convinced that they had succeeded. “I am still dizzy with all I have lived through,” she wrote. 66 Many socialists believed that their threats and unity had in fact made a future general war impossible. The Basel declaration proclaimed that “the fear of the ruling classes of a proletariat revolution . . . has proved to be an essential guarantee of peace.”67 German socialist Hugo Haase argued in November 1912 that the unwillingness of the people of Europe to consider allowing their governments to intervene in the war in the ­Balkans had prevented the expansion of that war: “If war is made unpopular, if the great masses of the people look upon it with loathing and abhorrence, [then] governments will be chary of it.” Peace rallies drawing tens, even hundreds, of thousands of people were routine occurrences, and French socialist Edouard Vaillant grew so intoxicated with the socialists’ presumed power to stop war that he declared, “What has been up to now nothing but a wish, has become a possibility, and the [Socialist] International’s duty [to stop war is] an imperative duty.” Strikes and the mere threat of strikes, he believed, could be used “to make war impossible.”68 It was not just socialists who opposed potential intervention in the Balkans. Gaston Calmette, the soon-­to-­be-­murdered editor of the conservative Le Figaro wrote that “France has no part at all in the present dif­fi­culties in eastern Europe. This must not be forgotten: none of her  interests are involved.”69 Although most Frenchmen and Germans sympathized with the desires of peoples in the Balkans for in­de­pen­dence from the Ottoman Empire, no one of any po­lit­i­cal persuasion wanted war to achieve it. Aurore in November 1912 captured the mood of France and the entire continent thus: “Public opinion fears war and especially it would not understand why we should be drawn into it. . . . We do not want to fight for Albania and the Balkans.”70 Kaiser Wilhelm agreed, announcing, “I shall not march against Paris and Moscow for the sake of Albania.”71 Similarly, surveys indicated that the idea of a war for the Balkans was “revolting to public opinion” in France and elsewhere. In August 1913, French parliamentarian Gabriel Travieux told his colleagues, “War? Does anyone think of it? No, I have nowhere observed it. The noise of 54

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Balkan cannons has not disturbed our peaceful fields.”72 The Balkans were too far away and too insig­nifi­cant to merit much attention from the European people. They were, in the words of Austrian socialist Otto Bauer, “nations without his­tory” and therefore not worth the blood and trea­sure of civilized states.73 Nevertheless, unlike in Libya, the great powers saw the need to intervene in the Balkans lest the situation get out of control. They held over sixty of­fi­cial bilateral and multilateral meetings to discuss the state of affairs and found that their interests generally lined up: they did not want the war in the Balkans to spread, and (with the exception of Russia) they did not want to see the Ottoman Empire dismantled. The British government, as the most disinterested of the great powers, hosted a high-­level conference in May 1913 that con­fi rmed Albania’s in­de­pen­dence and denied Serbia the outlet to the sea it had demanded. The conference failed on one level, as hostilities soon began anew, but it succeeded on another as the great powers had come together as a single unit to stand for peace. Most im­por­tant, no matter who claimed the credit for ending the Balkan wars, their containment to the Balkans stood as another shining ­example of the system’s working. The Socialist International received serious consideration for the 1913 Nobel Peace Prize in recognition for its efforts to contain both the Ital­ian and the Balkan wars; the prize even­ tually went to Belgian socialist Henri La Fontaine for his advocacy of international treaties demanding mandatory arbitration of international disputes. Even what we would now call nongovernmental or­ga­ni­za­tions played a key role in promoting peace. The Carnegie Endowment for Peace sent high-­level representatives from Russia, the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, and Austria-­Hungary on a mission to the Balkans in search of ways to mediate and arbitrate the con­flict.74 The Russian representative, liberal politician Paul Miliukov, declared that the “interest of Europe was peace” enforced through “broadening the scope of compulsory arbitration.” He was elated that an international group had come together “to keep the con­flict from spreading . . . a heartening sign that appreciation of peace was gaining ground in Europe.”75 The peaceful resolution of the Balkan wars proved to the scholar Emil Daniels that “at the moment the ruling powers of the great states were all working towards European peace.” British diplomat Arthur Nicolson drew exactly the same conclusion. The great powers had wisely brought the wars to a rapid end and had done so without the con­flicts’ spreading beyond the Balkans themselves. Daniels was suf­fi­ciently optimistic to 55

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term the era he was living in “the age of détente” and to conclude that the great crises of the past few years had proven beyond a doubt that all the great powers shared a common desire for peace and for the creation of international mechanisms to reduce the risks of war in the future. Like his German contemporary Victor Klemperer, he was convinced of the “impossibility of a European war” in an era marked by such genuine convictions in favor of peace.76 “Impossible” was also the word used by Sebastien Haffner when he dismissed war fears as late as August 1, 1914.77 Similarly, the seeming success of the system in containing and ending the Balkan wars lulled many into thinking that a general war had now become, according to an ISB declaration of early 1913 re­flect­ing the general sentiment of Europe, “impossible.”78 As Calmette observed, the Balkan crisis had even “brought [France] into perfect harmony with Germany,” something that had not happened for more than forty years.79 The French socialist Albert Thomas was so con­fi­dent that joint efforts in the Balkan wars would open a new era of Franco-­German cooperation that he traveled to Germany and worked out joint wording for an international socialist statement opposing an increase in armaments spending in both nations. It was published simultaneously in L’Humanité and Vorwärts on March 1, 1913: “At a time when the governments of France and Germany are preparing to submit new legislation that will further increase their vast military expenditure, the French and German socialists regard it as their duty to close ranks more firmly than ever before to fight jointly against these mad machinations of the ruling classes.”80 German socialist Ludwig Frank went one step further by boldly proclaiming, “We (socialists) are the guardians of peace.”81 Socialists in all countries also jointly supported the substitution of citizen-­based militias for long-­serving professionals as the basis for continental armies along the lines of Jaurès’s 1911 book L’Armée Nouvelle (The New Army). Militias, socialists argued, would be well suited for defensive, but not for offensive, war. The system would therefore discourage foreign adventures and strengthen home defense, the true purpose of armed forces. British labor leaders, who normally avoided continental issues, also became involved. In June 1913 the Transport Workers Federation issued a resolution advocating “a general stoppage of work among all transport  workers who are engaged in the transportation of munitions of war” in future international crises as a way to force states to resolve disputes by arbitration instead of war. Shortly thereafter, German socialist Karl Legien and French socialist Léon Jouhaux together attended a 56

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trade ­union conference in Manchester dedicated to the issue of the general strike. At the same meeting, Liverpool dock workers sponsored a motion proposing “common international action in the event of war being forced upon us.” The meeting ended with a pledge to set the issue of “how best peace may be maintained by the combined actions of the nations” as the main item on the agenda of the meeting of the International Socialist Bureau scheduled to open in Vienna on August 3, 1914. 82 Jaurès was thrilled with what he saw in the international socialist ­response to European militarism. He was, however, concerned that the system might be working too well. If Europeans believed that war had truly become impossible, then they might relax their guard. In April 1913 he wrote: “Europe has been afflicted by so many crises for so many years, it has been put dangerously to the test so many times without war breaking out that it has almost ceased to believe in the threat.”83 But Jaurès’s concerns could not diminish the optimistic hope of a peaceful future. Not one, but two systems, the conservative diplomatic system and the socialist international system, had worked to contain local crises and keep them from developing into the general war that all Europeans feared. The system had been tested multiple times and had on ev­ery occasion passed with fly­ing colors. The situation led the vast majority of Europeans to assume that it would pass any future tests as well. “One crisis had followed another,” noted one observer of European affairs, “but they always seemed to end in smoke.”84 War struck most western Europeans in the first half of 1914 as “a candidate for eventual extinction” or at least to relegation to “less civilized parts of the world” like the Balkans. E. L. Woodward, a professor at Oxford, later re­flected that the institution had less than a half dozen men who thought that the Morocco crises or the Balkan wars were sig­nifi­cant events for the continent. Historian Alfred Toynbee noted that any “talk of the danger of war was greeted with amusement.”85 In 1914, Morocco and the Balkan wars were, if anything, symbols of the strengths of the European system, not its impending demise.

Alsace-­Lorraine and the Zabern Affair Even if the system could contain occasional flare-­ups like Morocco, several abiding prob­lems still threatened the peace of Europe. If a spark in a relative backwater like Morocco or the Balkans could produce a major diplomatic crisis, then issues closer to home might be expected to have an 57

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even greater potential impact. Foremost among such issues was the question of Alsace and Lorraine, the two provinces the Germans had taken from France in 1871. To be sure, the issue remained an emotional one for French nationalists, who never tired of speaking of the “lost provinces,” but by 1914, Alsace and Lorraine had been German for more than forty years. Over those four de­cades, the issue had lost much of its ability to motivate Frenchmen or to become a central element in the national po­lit­i­cal debate. Revanche, or the spirit of revenge, had long since left the consciousness of most Frenchmen. One French army of­fi­cer thought that the issue of Alsace-­Lorraine was for “des rares exaltés” only.86 Ian Ousby agrees, arguing that “diehard, militarist revanchistes were always comparatively thin on the ground” in the years preceding the war.87 The issue had little pull outside the circle of conservatives and nationalists in Paris, for whom continued German possession of Alsace-­Lorraine remained a vivid and ever-­present symbol of the failures of the Third Republic. In the provinces, however, few people cared about the loss of distant “German” provinces they had never visited in any case. Jean-­Jacques Becker analyzed local reports from instituteurs on the July crisis from six French départements and found that the issue of Alsace-­Lorraine hardly fig­ured at all. In Haute-­Savoie, the topic never appeared in even a single report. In the Côtes du Nord, mentions of Alsace-­Lorraine appeared in only 4.4 percent of all reports.88 This indifference had a long his­tory. As early as the 1890s, surveys of French opinion done by the Mercure de France found young people already looking upon the issue of Alsace as a “historical event.” A twenty-­ four-­year-­old told the survey’s interviewers, “I do not think that this question interests the youth of today or the country, nor does it interest me.” Even older respondents agreed with the sentiment that regaining Alsace and Lorraine would not erase the humiliation of the “greatest military collapse recorded by his­tory.” At the same time as the surveys were conducted, parties of the French left and center of­fi­cially renounced war as a means for the recovery of the two provinces. These attitudes, moreover, solidified over time. In 1908, the nationalist newspaper La Patrie observed that “the dismemberment is an event as distant as the Seven Years War” for most Frenchmen.89 David Starr Jordan, the first president of Stanford University and president of the World Peace Foundation, toured Alsace and Lorraine in 1913 and also spent time in France talking to Frenchmen about the Alsace-­ 58

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Lorraine question. He concluded that the issue of revanche had “slowly waned as the new generations have come and gone.” Complicating the picture even further, Alsatians were obviously not waiting with bated breath for the French to come and rescue them. Jordan observed that “there is scarcely any part of Europe where the war spirit is lower or the war maker less in evidence” than in Alsace.90 Alsatians wanted not reuni­ fi­ca­tion with France but cultural and po­lit­i­cal autonomy within the German empire. Their ideal was home rule on the Irish Nationalist model, whereby the German government would decide diplomatic and military matters while the local government decided matters of culture, education, and language. Alsatians, he found, objected not to being part of the German state but to what they saw as the forced Prussification of their own distinct culture. As an Alsatian folksong of the time said: “Français ne peux/Prussien ne veux/Alsatian suis.” (“French I cannot be. Prussian I do not want to be. Alsatian I am.”) Jordan claimed to have met just two people who thought a war might resolve the question of Alsace-­Lorraine. Others thought that “if France should gain Alsace by war, it would only be the beginning of another war, and so on without end.” France’s allies, moreover, would surely not go to war to support France’s reacquisition of the provinces, though Germany’s allies would be bound to come to the defense of their ally if France were the aggressor. Thus a military solution was out of the question. As to the issue of identity, Jordan found that most Alsatians (with the exception of those Germans who had moved there since 1871) tended to identify with neither France nor Germany. “We have endured the Huns, the Vandals, and the Pandours,” commented one Alsatian, “and Alsace is still Alsace.”91 The region, Jordan concluded, was tied to France by culture, to Prussia by government, and to Bavaria by economics. Above all, it was Alsatian and ultimately belonged to neither France nor Germany. Decades before the establishment of the European parliament in Strasbourg, Jordan found Alsatians arguing that Alsace should aim to become a bridge between the French and German worlds as “part of the cement which should bind continental Europe into one system of good-­will. This is the dream of the future.”92 Jordan also concluded that “no considerable body of rational men in either France or Germany desires war or would look upon it otherwise than as a dire calamity.” Nationalists in both countries were using Alsace to serve their own ends, ultimately complicating and confusing the prob­ lem. Nationalists in Germany, he felt, were doing their cause more harm 59

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than good by trying to Germanize (or, in the Alsatian mindset, Prussianize) the Alsatian population. For their part, French chauvinists were interested not in Alsace-­Lorraine itself but in using its loss to denigrate France’s republicans for not doing enough to erase the humiliation of the Franco-­Prussian War. In any case, Jordan concluded, the French right is  “relatively harmless .  .  . for [its] in­flu­ence on politics is limited and ­waning.”93 He found instead broad support in France for Marcel Sembat’s proposal to exchange a renunciation of all French claims to Alsace-­ Lorraine for a permanent disarmament pact with Germany. In that way, Alsace-­Lorraine could be neutralized as a possible reason for a future con­flict. Effectively, that neutralization had already occurred. By 1914, Alsace and Lorraine had long ceased to be a reason for war between France and Germany. Ian Ousby argued that by 1910 even discussing Alsace-­ Lorraine in French po­lit­i­cal circles as a casus belli against Germany “was impolitic and undesirable on any count.”94 Writer Rémy de Gourmont was more blunt, stating that he would not give the little finger of his right hand for Alsace-­Lorraine, because he needed it to write, nor would he give the little finger of his left hand because he needed it to flick cigar ash from his pants.95 Most Frenchmen were not so crude. They still regretted the loss of Alsace and Lorraine and desired their ultimate return to France some day, but not through violent means. One German diplomat noted after a tour of the French countryside in 1913 that “the wound of 1871 still burns in all French hearts, but no one is disposed to risk his or his sons’ necks for the question of Alsace-­Lorraine.”96 France would not soon forget the humiliating loss of territory, but nor would it seek war as a means to right the wrong. Some held out the hope of one day trading a distant part of France’s African or Asian empire for Alsace-­Lorraine, but most came to accept the loss, if reluctantly. If the issue of Alsace-­Lorraine was a dead letter in European foreign affairs, it was nevertheless the scene of a major scandal with international implications in 1913. Like most scandals, it began with a minor issue then soon ballooned into something much more serious. In Zabern (in French, Saverne), a small Alsatian town near Strasbourg, a German lieutenant had used the derogatory term “Wackes” in referring to the locals and had supposedly promised his men ten marks if they shot a socialist in the event of a disturbance. He later struck a local shoemaker who had physical disabilities. Local protests against the arrogance of the lieutenant soon began, and the army responded by charging into the crowd. In the grand scheme of European crises, the incident “was trivial, even 60

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funny.” It might have been about nothing more than “the right of a twenty-­year-­old lieutenant to make an ass of himself in public.” But the German Army was not willing to let it go at that. Superior of­fi­cers refused to punish the lieutenant and objected to what they thought amounted to allowing “the citizens of an obscure garrison town in Alsace to set the limits of permissible behavior” for German soldiers.97 They responded to the outrage by hiding behind an obscure 1820 Prussian law allowing the highest military authority in a town to supersede civil authority in the event of a local disturbance. Seen in this light, the army claimed, the lieutenant’s actions were justifiable as acts of self-­defense. The backlash to the army’s ridiculous defense of its behavior touched off a scandal that bore many similarities to the Dreyfus Affair in France and the Curragh Incident in Britain. Across Germany citizens reacted angrily to the arrogance of the lieutenant in particular and the army in general. American Ambassador James Gerard observed that “a great outcry went up against militarism, even in quarters where no socialistic tendencies existed.”98 The result was a “major constitutional crisis” over the issue of the power of the army within Germany.99 A Reichstag debate soon ensued that was decidedly hostile to both the army and the Prussian methods that underlay it. When one centrist accused the army of losing the loyalty of Alsatians through its brutal behavior, he was wildly cheered. The army’s actions were compared with those of “Cossacks in the streets of St. Petersburg,” and shouts of “We are not Russia!” were commonplace during the debate.100 The Zabern Affair resulted in the first Reichstag vote of censure against a sitting government in German his­tory. In an effort to head off the vote, which was nonbinding but would still have been an embar­ rassment for the chancellor, he removed the garrison from Zabern, reassigned its of­fi­cers to disparate parts of the empire, and took the 1820 law off the books. Nevertheless, the motion condemning the behavior of the German government in the Zabern Affair passed 293 to 54. Many deputies even committed the unprecedented act of not rising when the kaiser came to the Reichstag to ceremonially end the year’s session. The repercussions went well beyond Germany. Although the impotence of the Reichstag was once again revealed, it was also true that the elected representatives of the German people had voted overwhelmingly against militarism. Their views represented those of the German people more generally, though a slim majority of Prussians lined up firmly behind the army. Gerard concluded that the affair “warned the government and military people that the mass of Germans were coming to their 61

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senses and were preparing to shake off the bogy of militarism and fear, which had roosted so long on their shoulders like a Prussian old man of the sea.”101 Gerard and others across Europe took hope from the Zabern Affair that Germany was turning away from its militarist past and embracing a more peaceful future. Just as the Dreyfus Affair in France had sig­nifi­ cantly reduced the power of militarists in that country, so, too, might Zabern reduce the power of German militarists. No one expected the change to happen overnight, but the militarists in Germany had at last been challenged and the majority of the country had united to express a desire to see the army play less of a role in domestic politics. Like other recent scandals, this one seemed to point to a more peaceful and less militarist future for Europe.

The Strength of the European System On August 2, 1913, exactly one year before the outbreak of the war, Ford Madox Ford (born Ford Madox Hueffer) heard a friend opine that war between Britain and Germany was less than one year away. Although incredibly prophetic, the comment struck Ford as wildly off the mark: I screamed with laughter. It was almost too good a joke. I knew Germany as well as it was possible to know a country; I had lived there for long periods; I had even at one time contemplated settling in Germany for good. . . . If I had two settled convictions they were those of pity for the distress of the German people and absolute belief in their love of peace. . . . Nothing in the world would ever make the German people go to war. The authorities might wish it, but the people would refuse.102 Although his vision was later proved wrong, it captured the mood of Europeans in 1913 and early 1914. As the diplomatic crises of the preceding de­cade seemed to show, governments might rattle sabers for the goal of seeking diplomatic advantage in faraway places, but they would never go to war unless their very survival was at stake. The two great checks on war, moreover, had seemed to function well in the past ten years. The diplomatic system had proven capable of resolving crises without recourse to war, and the pa­cific mood of the European people, re­flected in the huge electoral gains for socialists in France and Germany, had mitigated calls from ultranationalists to turn issues like the Balkans or Alsace-­Lorraine into existential questions demanding war. 62

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For all its tensions and all its faults, the system Europeans had observed from 1905 to 1914 seemed to justify Ford’s outburst of laughter. Nor was Ford alone in his optimism. Veteran British diplomat Sir Arthur Nicolson believed that the crises of the past few years had made the ­system even stron­ger and had shown its basic soundness. As 1913 turned into 1914 he optimistically proclaimed that the continent could look forward to years of “such calm waters.”103 Problems might occasionally arise, but the Europeans had developed a system to deal with them without the risk of war. Even the crash of a German zeppelin and military airplane on French soil in 1913 had failed to ignite any sig­nifi­cant concern on either side of the Rhine.104 Indeed, the system had worked so well to resolve minor crises that it seemed to be bearing fruit in the larger ones as well. In January 1914 French President Raymond Poincaré, a darling of the French nationalists, became the first French head of state to dine at the German Embassy in Paris in forty years. The event made news across Europe and resulted in a concrete achievement: a Franco-­German agreement on railroad investment in the Ottoman Empire, including the famous “Berlin to Baghdad” railway line. The German ambassador to France was so pleased with the dinner that he wrote: “the desire for military revenge, as it was incor­ porated in Boulanger and Déroulède, is a stage that has passed. It exists to-­day, to be sure, but only in a theatrical sense.”105 The success of the French left in the May 1914 elections (largely based on their opposition to the extension of conscription from two years to three years) seemed to con­fi rm the ambassador’s judgment and pointed toward a more peaceful and cooperative future.106 Even as strong a nationalist as the German Johan Wilhelm von Löwenell Brandenburg-­Hohenzollern could report at the end of 1913 that “the horizon looked clear” even if several unresolved issues remained as potential prob­lems down the road.107 Stefan Zweig, an Austrian Jew, marveled at the “game of bluff” that the diplomats played “at Agadir, in the Balkan War, [and] in Albania,” but he retained con­fi­dence in the system. He kept faith that in future crises “reason would balk the madness at the last minute.” The system could in the end be counted on to work if any hot-­headed nationalist or militarist tried to start a war: We relied on Jaurès, on the Socialist International, we believed that the railroad men would rather tear up their tracks than transport their comrades to the front as so much cattle to be slaughtered, we counted on the ­women, who would refuse to sac­ri­fice their chil63

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dren and husbands to Moloch. We were convinced that the spiritual and moral forces of Europe would reveal themselves triumphant at the critical moment. “I did not believe that war would come,” he concluded.108 French Ambassador to Germany Jules Cambon even dreamed that the current era of rapprochement might lead to a permanent agreement between France and Germany. “The majority of Germans and Frenchmen want to live in peace, that cannot be denied,” he noted. Just as the Fashoda crisis with Britain in 1898 had begun over a colonial dispute and resulted in a diplomatic agreement (which Cambon’s brother, Paul, had negotiated), so, too, might Morocco. With Germany’s willingness to leave the French “the defi­nite masters of Syria” (a consequence of the railroad deal) and French willingness to renounce war as a means for recovering Alsace-­Lorraine, there were no abiding reasons for con­flict between the two states.109 At the end of 1913, “Franco-­German relations were on a better footing than for years.”110 Nineteen-­fourteen could only bring more good news. Nationalist politician Friedrich Naumann stated during the opening of the 1914 session of the Reichstag that “the air has become cleaner, the outlook has become clearer,” largely because of the peaceful resolution of the Balkan wars.111 From En­gland, F. A. Robinson noted that “the man in the street” was “as optimistic as ever.” Catriona Pennell’s observation for the United Kingdom could well stand for the entire continent: “Any awareness of a possible ‘future’ war was accompanied by a sense that the current crisis would pass, just like the previous altercations such as the Agadir crisis in 1911 and the recent Balkan crises.”112 Contemporary observations from the continent support Pennell’s argument. Georg Brandes, a Dane who spent much of 1913 traveling back and forth between France and Germany, found the mood the same on both sides of the Rhine: “Just as nine-­tenths of the population of France wishes to maintain peace and is willing to prove this by its actions . . . the majority of Germany’s thrifty population no doubt feel that there is nothing to be gained by a war with the western neighbor.” The only people desiring an escalation of tensions, he thought, were the se­nior leaders of the military, large industrialists, and chauvinistic journalists in both countries. “As a rule,” he wrote as part of an exchange with editors at France’s Le Courrier newspaper in March 1913, “only of­fi­cers and ammunition makers wish war.”113 The only real dangers, he felt, came from the ability of leaders to “excite war enthusiasm” among their populations. Still, he 64

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was reassured by the working classes of both France and Germany, which were directing “all their efforts” toward “maintaining peace.”114 His view was shared by American Robert J. Thompson, who had spent the years 1902–1912 living in En­gland, France, and Germany. At the end of that time, he had served as a consul in the border town of ­A ix-­la-­Chapelle (Aachen), and had therefore had many opportunities to observe French and German public opinion. He found attitudes in both countries to be pa­cific. On returning to the United States in July 1912, he told a Houston newspaper that “there is no general wish for war in Germany.  .  .  . The substantial interests of Germany—manufacturing, education, professional—do not want war; they deplore the possibility of it.”115 There were plenty of other positive signs to indicate the prevailing peaceful views of Europe. The Twentieth International Peace Congress opened in the Hague in August 1913, continuing the tradition begun by Czar Nicholas II in 1899. This time, delegates dedicated a new Palace of Peace built with fi­nan­cial support from Andrew Carnegie.116 In the May 1914 French parliamentary elections, parties supporting the extension of conscription to three years lost a remarkable fifty seats, a result understood across Europe as French rejection of militarism. By the time 1913 became 1914 even “the tremors caused by the Balkan wars appeared to subside.”117 As evidenced by the celebrations at Kiel, Anglo-­German relations had also improved “largely as a result of the co-­operation between London and Berlin during the Balkan Wars,” which had helped convince Britons of the essentially pa­cific nature of German foreign policy after years of increases in naval expenditures.118 The successes of the European system, which “had kept the peace in a  dozen earlier disputes,” combined with the generally peaceful mood that prevailed in Europe, help to explain the calm, even blithe, attitude of many Europeans toward the crisis occasioned by the assassination of the archduke in Sarajevo.119 The resolution of so many past crises struck Europeans as “a good sign that .  . . Europe had passed the test,” and across the continent “all sorts of things were said in praise of the ‘concert of Europe.’”120 The great-­power system had “clicked into place” when it needed to and could be counted on to do so again in the future. The notions that the system worked became “more deeply entrenched each time they were proven correct.”121 By July 1914 Europeans had seen the great powers manage numerous incidents before. Surely the crisis over the assassination of the archduke, if it could even still be called a crisis, would be resolved as well. 65

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As late as the third week of July 1914, news from the Balkans remained on “the inconspicuous centre page” of newspapers in most European cities. Those who had been carefully following European diplomacy over the past de­cade knew, however, that the crisis resulting from the assassination of Franz Ferdinand was probably not quite over yet.1 Europeans who could still be bothered to care about the fourth major incident in the Balkans in just six years expected the Austro-­Hungarian government to make some sort of formal response to the assassination of the archduke.2 Most anticipated an Austro-­Hungarian response based on genuine anger at the alleged (if not yet proven) involvement of Serbian government of­fi­ cials in the plot to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand. People familiar with European diplomacy expected the Austrians, who for the first time in years could legitimately play the role of victims, to use the incident as an excuse to demand some concessions from Serbia and thereby make some cheap cynical gains out of this latest round of regional tension. As one close observer of the situation noted, “I thought that the Austrians would use the murder as a convenient pawn in a long diplomatic game that would continue for the next 14 or 15 years.”3 Another observed that the new crisis would be “very awkward, another crisis of which one had hoped to have seen the last.” But he was reassured that it would not result in war. “No doubt it would be settled somehow like all the others,” he concluded.4 Whatever they chose to do, the next move in the game clearly belonged to the players in Vienna. According to recent precedent, the Austrians had a wide range of options on the table. Austria might claim money or territory from Serbia, setting off another round of Agadir-­like diplomatic dealings, but then the issue would fade as the others had faded. The Austro-­Hungarian government might also ask a third party to arbitrate 66

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and then accept whatever outcome resulted; given that Austria-­Hungary was itself a great power whose interests had to be taken more seriously than those of Serbia and given that Austria-­Hungary could paint itself as the victim, the Dual Monarchy could reasonably expect an arbitrator to rule in its favor. The Austro-­Hungarians could thereby expect to make a minor gain at Serbia’s expense and resolve the crisis with honor. Because Austria-­Hungary was a great power with experience in such diplomatic matters, Europeans assumed that it would play by the rules, especially given the obvious lack of any real sense of tragedy felt within the empire in the wake of Franz Ferdinand’s death. Playing by the rules meant first and foremost moderating demands and making no sudden or unpredictable moves. The rules dictated that the response from Vienna would be “as reasonable as it was tardy” so as not to unduly upset the situation in Europe.5 All early signs indicated that the Austrians intended to follow the rules. The editorial staff of the London Times reprinted a dispatch from the Vienna Neues Wiener Tageblatt assuring the British people that “no Austro-­Hungarian diplomatic step would interfere with [Serbia’s] sovereignty or exact anything like a humiliating retribution.” The Times staff prepared its correspondents to cover a crisis that promised to be long and com­pli­cated. The journalists assumed that the “diplomatic exchanges between Austria-­Hungary and Serbia would inevitably occur and would necessarily be protracted,” but they saw the risk of war as minimal. Before the dispatch of the ultimatum, the Times had taken a pro-­Austrian stand and had even praised the Austro-­Hungarian government for acting “with self-­possession and with restraint.”6 Until July 23, the incident seemed to be following a predictable pattern of past crises almost perfectly. But the pattern was about to undergo a dramatic change. Without consulting anyone except their German counterparts, the most se­nior ­of­fi­cials in the Austro-­Hungarian government had decided to push for much more than minor compensation. The assassination had convinced many Austro-­Hungarian of­fi­cials that war with Serbia at some point in the near future was now inevitable and that the current crisis presented Austria-­Hungary with favorable conditions under which to fight it. The foreign minister, Leopold Berchtold, and even the pa­cific emperor Franz Joseph himself grew more receptive to the cries from extremists like Army Chief of Staff Franz Conrad von Hötzendorff, who saw this incident as jus­tifi­ca­tion for his long-­standing advocacy of a punitive war against Serbia; now the war could be depicted as a quest for justice instead of an 67

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Austrian power grab. In Conrad’s eyes, the assassination was a chance to settle old scores with Serbia; it represented to him “the last link in a long chain. It was not the deed of an individual fanatic. . . . It was the declaration of war of Serbia against Austria-­Hungary.”7 Moderates inside the government were persuaded to support a harsher line by promises from the highest levels of the Austro-­Hungarian regime that any war would be short, contained to the Balkans, and would not result in Austrian annexation of any Slavic territories. 8 The Austrians knew, however, that a war with Serbia would run the risk of Russian involvement. They therefore sought support from Germany, whose government issued the now famous “blank check” of support on July 6. It pledged that Wilhelm II would “faithfully stand by Austria-­Hungary, as is required by the obligations of his alliance and of his ancient friendship.”9 Nothing in the memorandum explicitly referenced military support, and the obligations of the alliance required Germany to come to Austria-­Hungary’s aid only if it were attacked by an outside power, most likely Russia. German leaders advised their Austrian counterparts to issue an ultimatum to Serbia “without delay” and to ignore or forestall any efforts by an outside party to push for mediation or arbitration.10 This note from Germany was enough to convince the Austrians that they would at least have German diplomatic support, and possibly military support as well. For their part, the Germans had determined that time was not on their side. Their military analysts had concluded that the Russians would be fully recovered from the di­sas­ter of the Russo-­Japanese War by 1917. With French money, the Russians were in the pro­cess of completing a more sophisticated railway network designed to speed up mobilization and military deployments. Fear of the Russians played a much greater role in German thinking than did fear of the French, although the Germans always assumed that war with one meant war with both. Russian autocracy and pan-­Slavist ideology appeared to Germans across the po­ lit­i­cal spectrum as “the principal danger” to their national security. This fear, and the racialized tones in which it was set, had a long his­tory and was much more im­por­tant to German thinking than were fears of France. Even August Bebel, the father of German socialism, had long pledged to put “my rifle on my old shoulders” and lead socialists to war if Russia attacked.11 Senior leaders in the German military and government understood the depths of this Russophobia and counted on it in their 1914 decision 68

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making. The July crisis seemed to them the ideal time to pursue a policy of brinkmanship. If the Russians backed down, then Austria-­Hungary would be free to crush Serbia, thereby extending the Triple Alliance’s power and prestige in the Balkans. If the Russians chose to fight, then the German government could depict them as the aggressors, enabling the Germans to defend any action they took as defensive in nature. July 1914, German leaders assumed, was as fortuitous a time to go to war as they could reasonably expect: Russian modernization plans were still three years from completion; the Austro-­Hungarians still seemed to be the victims of Serbian terror; and, by happy coincidence, the French president and prime minister were out of Paris.12 This opportunity, they assumed, would never come again. All these calculations and decisions, of course, happened in secret. The people of Europe were neither informed nor consulted about them. Outward signs in the days before July 23, moreover, gave little indication of what was to come. The kaiser’s departure on his annual summer cruise in the Baltic Sea reassured most people on the continent that the crisis must be easing; otherwise the kaiser would have remained in Berlin.13 Indeed, such was exactly the message German statesmen intended to send even as they were playing a risky game of po­lit­i­cal brinkmanship. The calm on the surface masked Austrian and German machinations to force the issue at a moment that they felt gave them the best chance of success. Instead of playing another pawn in the game they were planning a daring move designed to win the game in one masterstroke. The document that the Austro-­Hungarian government fi­nally delivered on July 23 stunned most who read it. It had been delivered not to a third party with an eye toward arbitration but directly to the Serbian government. It was, moreover, clearly written with the intention of changing the rules of the game itself. Austria-­Hungary appeared to have no real interest in opening good-­faith negotiations. The ultimatum came as such a surprise to Europeans in large part because it so clearly ignored the rules of the game in both form and substance. Veteran Belgian diplomat Baron Beyens, a man who had seen his fair share of European crises, thought it was a “bolt from the blue” and “more alarming than anything we had dared to imagine” because of both its severity and the reach of its demands.14 British Foreign Minister Sir Edward Grey called it “the most formidable document I have ever seen addressed by one state to another that was in­de­pen­dent.”15 Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov reportedly said upon seeing it, “C’est la guerre européenne.”16 69

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The ultimatum certainly represented a break from recent diplomacy. It made a series of harsh demands including Serbian suppression of anti-­ Austrian pro­pa­ganda, the dissolution of a major Serbian nationalist group, the dismissal from government ser­vice of Serbian civilian and military of­fi­cials who had been connected to anti-­Austrian pro­pa­ganda, the tightening of border controls (ostensibly to prevent weapons from being  smuggled into Austro-­Hungarian territory), and the arrest of two Serbian of­fi­cers the Austrians believed were linked to the plot to assassinate Franz Ferdinand. The ultimatum also demanded that Serbia allow Austro-­Hungarian of­fi­cials to par­tic­i­pate in all Serbian investigations. Most shockingly, the ultimatum gave Serbia just forty-­eight hours to agree to all the conditions or Austria-­Hungary would declare war. The Austro-­Hungarian government seemed to be trying to force the customary months or years of diplomatic wrangling into just two days, leaving little time for the usual antiwar safeguards built into the European system to work. The conditions in the ultimatum struck most Europeans both inside and outside of diplomatic circles as far too harsh. Asking a state to allow foreign of­fi­cials to intervene in its internal investigations amounted to an abrogation of that state’s sovereignty. The tight deadline for a response also struck many as designed to pin Serbia into a corner unnecessarily. As the Agadir crisis and others had shown, the resolution of diplomatic con­ flicts normally took months, even years, to achieve. Two days simply did not give the system enough time to work. The timing of the ultimatum also seemed suspicious. July 23 roughly coincided both with the return of thousands of Austro-­Hungarian soldiers from harvest leave and the return of French President Raymond Poincaré and Prime Minister René Viviani from their state visit to Russia. The French leaders would thus literally be at sea when the ultimatum reached the diplomatic desks of Europe and therefore unable to consult either their own ministers or their Russian allies. Nevertheless, Europeans had trouble seeing how the latest twist in the crisis would lead to war. Most people in Britain, France, and Germany still tended to see the situation as a Balkan issue unlikely to impact their countries. Richard Stumpf was a young sailor on board the German battleship Heligoland off the Norwegian coast when the first of­fi­cer informed the crew of the delivery of the ultimatum. “At the present time,” the of­fi­cer told his men, “there is no need to worry in the least over this.” The ship made no plans to alter its mission or head back to port in Germany (a disappointed Stumpf, eager for some excitement, remembered 70

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thinking to himself “how unfortunate”). The Heligoland did pull into port in Norway the next day for a scheduled shore leave. There Stumpf saw that the newspapers were taken up with other news: “150,000 workers in St. Petersburg were on strike. The rebels in Ulster had launched an attack in Ireland. The Parisian mailmen were on strike.” Given the disruptive domestic situations across Europe, Stumpf concluded that no  country “would risk going to war” and therefore war would be averted.17 J. A. Spender, a journalist for the liberal Westminster Gazette, saw matters in a broadly similar way. He thought that the harsh tone of the ultimatum had left Europeans “puzzled,” especially because the past few weeks had been so calm. That such threatening news from the Balkans had now returned for even a few days struck him as “incredible and impossible.” Britons, like Germans and Frenchmen, believed that the collective actions of their governments would “save them from so outlandish an adventure as taking sides in a Balkan quarrel.” The possibility of a  general European war resulting from an “Austro-­Serbian quarrel” seemed to him “very remote.”18 Most saw Austria-­Hungary’s demands as but another piece to be played in a game that would probably last for many months. Even se­nior military of­fi­cers had trouble linking the ultimatum to a larger risk of war. The ultimatum appeared to them as a powerful early move, and one likely to start a new phase in the crisis, but few saw how far the Austro-­ Hungarian and German governments were willing to push the issue or how it could possibly lead to a general war. Alfred Knox, the British military attaché to Russia, was on leave in En­gland when news of the ultimatum was issued: It was recognized, of course, that the situation was critical, but it had been critical in 1908 [during the Austro-­Hungarian annexation of Bosnia] and 1912 [during the Balkan wars] and nothing had come of it. Like nine out of ev­ery ten of­fi­cers, I had believed for eigh­teen years in the reality of the German menace, but one’s fears had been treated with such consistent contempt by the great and wise that we had begun to hope that we might after all prove to be the lunatics we were represented to be, and that Germany might forebear from pushing matters to the extreme. Knox, in other words, still retained his faith in the European system to contain or prevent a war. He was so sure that the situation would not result in war at any time in the near future that he chose to return to Russia 71

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overland through Germany rather than by sea. He was concerned that he saw no men working in the fields from his train window, a sign that perhaps they were reporting to their regiments. On the other hand, he was reassured that he had passed no troop trains either, indicating that the crisis had not reached the point of military mobilization.19 Observant Germans saw the issue in much the same way; they were concerned but at the same time certain that the crisis would not in the end lead to war. Berliner Tageblatt editor Theodor Wolff’s train might have passed Knox’s as it carried German vacationers like himself to seaside resorts in Holland. Wolff noted on July 27 that Germans were not worried about the ultimatum, as evidenced by the carefree attitude he saw among vacationers. He noted that “holiday trains were packed to over­ flowing as usual, people were swimming and sun bathing at the seaside.” Nevertheless, because he was a newspaper editor and the news struck him as being “of rather a grave nature,” he got his family settled at their hotel and returned to Berlin. There he met with German Foreign Minister Gottlieb von Jagow, who put Wolff at ease, telling him that “the diplomatic situation was very favorable” to peace and that, in his opinion, none of the great powers wanted war. “I do not regard the situation as critical,” Jagow assured him. Jagow also told Wolff that there was no reason for him to ask his family to cut short their vacation and return to Germany.20 Jagow, thought Wolff, was still expecting another long, drawn-­out crisis on the Agadir model. Jagow’s view was widely shared among people in all the great powers. Yet another diplomatic crisis was the worst scenario that most Europeans were expecting. On July 27, Liberal MP Christopher Addison spoke calmly of “complications” arising from the “Austro-­Servian affair,” but he stopped well short of believing that war might be one of those com­ plications. Two days later he was already writing in a more optimistic tone.21 His fellow Briton Ford Madox Ford noted that “it was impossible to think of war” in July 1914. War was to him and his friends “one of those impossible things that we left out of our calculations altogether. It was like the idea of one’s own personal death which one dislikes contemplating and puts out of the mind; but it had—the idea of war—none of the inevitability that attaches to the idea of death.”22 The words of the diplomats and statesmen, as well as the daily newspaper reports, con­fi rmed the views of most Europeans that the crisis would be long and would eventually be resolved peacefully. Aurore on July 25 urged Serbia and Austria-­Hungary to be patient while the rest of 72

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Europe “set to work [to] impose peace.” The next day another French daily, Matin, also supported great-­power arbitration and argued that Germany’s role in the crisis “had no other purpose than to facilitate the cooperation of the great powers for the maintenance of peace.” This belief was underscored by the German ambassador to France’s note (published in several French newspapers on July 27) that French and German statesmen were working together “in a most friendly spirit and in a sentiment of peaceful solidarity [toward] the means which may be used for the maintenance of the general peace.”23 The system seemed to be clicking smoothly into gear once again. German soldier Werner Beumelburg thought that the aggrieved Austrians had ev­ery right to issue the ultimatum, but that the great powers would see to it that war did not result. He believed that Britain and Germany on  the one hand, and Britain and Russia on the other, were working ­together “in common” behind the scenes to defuse the crisis. Germany, he assumed, had no desire to bear responsibility for a “great global conflagration” and was working to open lines of communication between the Austro-­Hungarian and Russian governments.24 He would surely have been shocked to learn what was really going on in Berlin and Vienna. To most Europeans, ignorant of the decisions being made on their ­behalf, the system could be trusted and, if given time, would surely find a  way to avoid war. Even radical German socialist Rosa Luxemburg thought as late as July 28 that “Wilhelm II was a factor favoring peace,” and her fellow socialist Hugo Haase argued that government of­fi­cials and Germany’s chief industrialists wanted peace not war.25 Given their desires for peace, a way would surely be found to prevent this latest round in the crisis from precipitating a war. Their views, however, did not keep socialists from criticizing both Austrian foreign policy and German support for it. Vorwärts on July 24 described the ultimatum’s demands as “more brutal than any ever made upon a civilized state in the his­tory of the world, and they can be regarded as only intended to provoke a war.”26 The war Vorwärts feared was still, at this stage, a regional con­flict between Austria-­Hungary and Serbia. Also as in the Agadir and Balkan crises, the manifest desires of the European people for peace suggested that the diplomats would have no choice but to work to curtail the extremists. Writing about the ultimatum’s harsh tone, Beyens thought that “public opinion in Europe could not grasp the need for such hectoring methods of obtaining satisfaction [from extremists], when there was no case for refusing discussion on the 73

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normal diplomatic lines.”27 Eduard Beneš, who had studied in France and Germany, noted the genuine desires for peace and opposition to the “pro­ pa­ganda of revenge” in both countries, but especially in France. When he heard about Serbia’s response to the ultimatum on July 26, he saw no reason that it should lead to war, and especially no reason that France and Germany might be dragged into it: “I was convinced that a way would be found to adjust matters and avoid war.”28 Frenchman Emmanuel Bourcier, a ten-­year army veteran who had seen crises come and go, agreed. “War in our century! It was unbelievable. It seemed impossible. It was the general opinion that again, as in so many crises, things would be arranged.” He and his friends “trusted that some happy chance would, at the last minute, discover a solution.”29 Writing from Vienna, Sigmund Freud bemoaned the disruption that the crisis was causing to the international travel plans of his fellow psychiatrists, but predicted that things “might be in order again” after no more than two months of diplomatic haggling.30 The people of Europe looked on anxiously, but they neither panicked nor demanded war as a way to solve the prob­lems raised by the ultimatum. In France, newspaper coverage of what most still called “the Austro­Serb con­flict” competed unsuccessfully with news of the fallout from the Caillaux trial until the very end of the month. One study of Grenoble concluded that most people there remained unconcerned about a crisis that they believed was being stoked by chauvinistic journalists. The left-­ leaning republican newspaper Petit Dauphinois on July 27 told its readers that it was “very premature to fear a European war.”31 Some newspapers hardly considered the crisis worth covering. La Semaine Financière ran only one story on the ultimatum during the week of its delivery, and that story con­fi rmed the sentiment of most French analysts that any war that might result would be contained to the Balkans, be brief, and have little impact on French fi­nan­cial markets.32 The crisis was still seen as a Balkan issue; Europeans were sure that any war would be a third Balkan war, not a continental or world war. To the extent that French newspapers were interested in the Balkans, it was to urge caution and underscore how tangential the crisis was to French interests. On July 29 Aurore urged the French government to keep the channels of communication open with Vienna and reminded Frenchmen that France had no po­lit­i­cal or moral obligations to Russia unless that country were attacked by Germany or Austria-­Hungary. Nor did the crisis seem to be generating a marked rise in nationalist sentiment. The British ambassador to France reported to the foreign of­fice on July 29 that 74

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“French public opinion up to the present is disinclined to allow itself to be worked up to warlike excitement.” The Journal on July 27 reported that a French nationalist had stood on a street corner shouting “À Berlin!” but that passersby had just stared at him “with curiosity.”33 As France still concerned itself with the Caillaux trial, Britain remained focused on the unresolved tensions in Ireland. R. D. Blumenfeld recalled a dinner party he attended the day after the ultimatum made news: “Continental affairs not discussed, although Austria will probably declare war on Servia tomorrow.” The main topic of conversation was the “inevitable” civil war that all the diners expected to break out in Ireland at any minute as a result of the Bachelors Walk shootings in Dublin the week before.34 The London Times on July 27 reported that “there can no ­longer be the slightest doubt that the country is now confronted with one of the greatest crises in the his­tory of the British race.” The crisis the paper mentioned, however, was Ireland, not the Balkans. 35 Similarly, Alfred Knox found that Ulster was still “uppermost” in people’s minds on the day he left London to return to Russia. 36 Wilfrid Scawen Blunt thought that Austria-­Hungary and Germany were pushing matters as provocatively as they were only because Britain’s “Irish troubles” might limit its willingness to arbitrate. His friends disagreed, arguing that an agreement was inevitable because “Germany is afraid of war.” In any event, they all agreed that the Balkans were far outside Britain’s sphere of in­flu­ence and therefore direct British involvement in the region’s internecine politics would be “too stupid, even for [Foreign Minister Sir Edward] Grey,” a man Blunt had known for many years and someone he saw often during those weeks.37 Some even thought the crisis in the Balkans might be good news for Britain. On July 25, Prime Min­ ister H. H. Asquith told Lady Ottoline Morrell, a liberal pacifist, that the Balkans might distract British attention from Ireland for a few days, which, in his view, was “a good thing.” Asquith, she noted, “did not seem worried” about her fears that the Balkan crisis might develop into a more serious situation than Ulster.38 En­gland’s John Bull was character­ istically more blunt, publishing a full-­page poster reading, “To Hell with Servia!,” a sentiment that the paper claimed expressed “the point of view of millions of his fellow countrymen.”39

European Reactions to the Ultimatum Reactions to the latest turns in the Balkans did not follow national or ­alliance lines. Many Germans of all po­lit­i­cal persuasions mistrusted 75

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Austro-­Hungarian intentions and condemned the ultimatum. Vorwärts on July 25 called it a “frivolous war provocation.” A mass demonstration in Berlin on July 28 opposing Austro-­Hungarian foreign policy resulted in “heavy clashes with the police which gave rise to grave apprehensions about what was in store in the event of war.”40 On July 27, the Berlin ­correspondent of the London Times reported “really remarkable optimism” in the cap­ital that war would be averted. The next day he wrote that “Germany is certainly, and no doubt sincerely, working for peace.”41 Some even wondered if the evidently pa­cific-­minded German people would follow the government if it held to a hard-­line policy likely to risk even a small war between Austria-­Hungary and Serbia. Most im­por­tant, German newspapers shared a consensus that the demands of the ultimatum were too punitive because the Austrians had still not proven Serbian government complicity in the crime. The Frankfurt Zeitung called the ultimatum “harsh and dictatorial,” and the conservative Morgenpost noted that the ultimatum was “sharper in form and content” than most Germans thought reasonable. The Berlin correspondent of the London Times concluded that most people in the German cap­ital believed that the “dispute is genuinely an Austro-­Serbian one and would be localized.” Other observers of German opinion noted an unwillingness among the people to risk a war that might result in even more Slavs being added to “our already half-­Slav ally.” German newspapers largely supported the idea of a British-­led mediation effort as the best way to resolve the crisis.42 Opinion in Britain and Germany shared many common features. Both had originally seen Austria-­Hungary as the aggrieved party in the crisis, but the harshness of the ultimatum made Serbia appear as a genuine victim of unnecessarily aggressive Austro-­Hungarian actions. The Morgenpost, which had previously supported Austria-­Hungary, changed its tune on July 27 when the Austrians refused to accept the Serbian reply. “The assassination of Franz Ferdinand,” the editors wrote, could not be used “as a pretext for the assassination of a nation.” The Berlin correspondent of a Vienna newspaper argued that the view in the cap­ital was that the Serbian response had been suf­fi­cient and that it promised “peace, after all.”43 Theodor Wolff, whose family was still enjoying the sea air in Holland, agreed, noting that the reply was “astonishingly submissive.”44 Liberal papers like the Manchester Guardian urged Britain to wash its hands of the entire situation if the Austro-­Hungarians could not accept the reasonable Serbian response. “We care as little for Belgrade, as Belgrade [cares] for Manchester,” noted the paper’s editors.45 76

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The Norddeutsche Zeitung and the London Times condemned the ultimatum in equal terms. Both also condemned what they suspected were efforts by the Austro-­Hungarian government to in­flu­ence the monarchy’s newspapers to print anti-­Serbian stories. Doing so threatened to stoke the fires of public opinion unnecessarily. As the Times warned, “popular feeling might get out of control, and some frontier incident [might] lead to catastrophe.”46 The diplomatic system, the newspapers argued, would work best if national passions were kept to a minimum and the crisis could be resolved with reason instead of emotion by people experienced in such matters. Almost all observers of German and British opinion noted a distinct lack of desire for war among their people. 47 Even inside Austria-­Hungary there was at first wide variation in the responses to the ultimatum. The Hungarian and Slavic parts of the Dual Monarchy were decidedly less enthusiastic about risking war than was the Austrian part. Moderate newspapers connected to Hungarian liberals cried out against Vienna’s “unreasonable and unfortunate foreign policy [that] has made the whole world around us hostile to the ­monarchy.” A few days later, when war with Serbia seemed inevitable, the same paper wrote, “Even if the war is victorious, we are going to pay the price with a nation’s greatest trea­sure, human life, the life of the young. . . . We are not, we cannot be, enthusiastic about this war.”48 Hungarian poet Endre Ady’s work “Remembering a Summer’s Night,” written on the night Austria-­Hungary declared war on Serbia, decried the “horrid, bloody nuptials” the war would bring.49 Most of the ethnic minorities in the empire were horrified at the ultimatum and the local war they expected to follow. Michael Karolyi told an audience that “the Serb and Hungarian peoples want to live in peace and could live in harmony with one another.” He remained con­fi­dent that the Austro-­Hungarian Empire would avoid war and the possibility of internal disintegration that could result.50 Hungarian Prime Minister István Tisza was more blunt, warning Emperor Franz Joseph that war might spark revolts in Transylvania and elsewhere.51 The empire’s Czechs proved especially reluctant to fight for the goals of the German elites in Vienna, whom they associated with absolutism, expansion, oppression, and Prussian-­style militarism. The Czechs had a reputation for lacking Sinn für Militär (military acumen) that led Austrians to denigrate them as “the ‘worst,’ the ‘most treacherous’ Slavs of the monarchy.”52 But even laying aside the mythic Slavic link between Serbs and Czechs (a sentiment that hardly motivated Czechs), the Czechs saw no connection between themselves and an Austrian war in the Balkans. 77

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There is also evidence that even many ethnic Germans inside the empire thought their government had overplayed its hand. To be sure, most were convinced of the guilt of the Serbian government and wanted to see some mea­sure of punishment exacted. Nevertheless, the French ambassador in Vienna noted that public opinion in the cap­ital was “startled by the sudden and exaggerated nature of the Austrian demands.” Austrian socialists led the opposition, with the Arbeiter-­Zeitung on July 25 announcing in a leading editorial that “we refuse ev­ery responsibility for this war; solemnly and decisively we charge with it those who, on the one side as on the other, have plotted it and wished to unchain it!”53 As the next chapter will show, socialists were quick to see the dangers that the ultimatum might produce. From France, Jean Jaurès, who “could not believe, after two Moroccan crises and two Balkan wars, that the ­latest Austro-­Serb imbroglio would fi­nally shatter the peace,” nevertheless saw the danger even before most of his colleagues did. Two days ­after the ultimatum’s delivery he blamed “the imperialism of France, the crude ambition of Austria [and] the devious policy of Russia” for the ­crisis. They had all, he argued, “con­trib­uted to this horrible state of affairs.” Even in the face of these powerful forces, though, he believed that the same socialist movement that had prevented war in the past could do so again in this crisis if socialists could “rally to the forces for good, the forces for prog­ress, which are our only barriers against the flood of barbarism” that imperialism, cap­italism, and national ambition had created.54 The options Jaurès was then considering included calling a general strike, which he openly discussed at a rally in Paris. Nor were the socialists only speaking for the left. On July 25, the ­normally right-­leaning Kölnische Zeitung supported socialist plans for antiwar rallies, saying that such rallies “have the approval of the German bourgeoisie.” The German people, the newspaper noted, had no interests worth fight­ing for in the Balkans. “No one here wants war and cursed be those who have conjured up this horrible evil.” The liberal Berliner Tageblatt and the conservative Morgenpost agreed, arguing that socialist demonstrations would help rein in extremists inside the German government who might seek to push the Balkan situation too far.55 The normally progovernment Berlin Post and Rheinisch-­Westfälische Zeitung (based in Essen) both denounced “the German empire’s being drawn into an Austrian war of conquest,” and Vorwärts demanded that “not one drop of blood from one German soldier should be shed in the name of power-­ hungry Austrian warlords or for imperialist ­profiteers.”56 These opinions 78

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spanned the range of po­lit­i­cal opinion. Even in Germany, there was hardly a wave of public opinion taking unwilling leaders along with it toward war.

Options Other Than War In the years before the war, Europeans had experienced a bizarre mixture of pessimistic certainty in the inevitability of war on the one hand, and an equally optimistic certainty on the other hand that war had become an  impossibility in the modern world. Those subscribing to the latter ­belief had two recent popular books on their side. Both I. S. Bloch’s Is War Now Impossible? (1898) and Norman Angell’s Great Illusion (1910) made powerful and popular arguments that war in the future had become too expensive for governments to afford.57 Both were widely read and translated and both spent time on best-­seller lists. They helped to in­ flu­ence an entire generation to believe that wars were, in the words of Stefan Zweig, “barbarous atavisms” like “witches or ghosts” in which no thinking or educated person believed.58 Both Angell and Bloch argued that war had become prohibitively expensive and that therefore governments would shy away from armed con­ flict or risk ruin. As historian G. P. Gooch noted in his book History of Our Time (1913): “It is the achievement of Bloch and Norman Angell to have shown that even a successful con­flict between modern states can bring no material gain. We can now look forward with something like con­fi­dence to the time when war between civilized nations will be considered as antiquated as the duel, and when peacemakers shall be called the children of God.”59 Bloch in particular painted a vivid and bloody picture of a prolonged war caused by the dominance of defensive weapons. Such a war would bankrupt treasuries long before any decisive battlefield outcome. Angell’s more mea­sured and dispassionate analysis claimed that the economic interde­pen­dence of the great powers made war such an unreasonable and even counterproductive activity that governments would, in the future, avoid it because they would understand its futility. Shades of both arguments remained powerful in 1914. Two books by Oxbridge professors published early in the year called war “irrational and vain” and concluded that in the future disputes would be resolved by arbitration because states would see it as a more cost-­effective method of con­flict resolution. 60 French economist Charles Richet published a study estimating that a major war would cost each great power the astonish79

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ing sum of $50,000,000 per day. Stanford University Chancellor David Starr Jordan deduced that such fi­nan­cial implications alone would ensure peace. “What shall we say of the Great War of Europe,” he wrote just months before the war, “ever threatening, ever impending, and which never ­comes? We shall say that it will never come. Humanly speaking, it is impossible.”61 Jordan’s con­fi­dence was based largely on the economic arguments of Angell, Richet, and others. French consul Paul Claudel, then living in Hamburg, blithely ignored the crisis because he was con­fi­ dent that “commercial self-­interest would restrain Germany.” He retained his con­fi­dence for a few more days until he was “astonished” to see the word War in the headlines of his morning newspaper. 62 Even after the outbreak of war seemingly disproved the core tenets of Angell’s thesis, economists continued to argue that the high costs of war would limit its destructiveness. At the end of 1914, French Finance Minister Alexandre Ribot told the British that the war would have to end by July 1915 because at current rates of spending all governments would soon be fi­nan­cially exhausted. The Journal of the Royal Statistical Society and L’Economiste Français drew almost exactly the same conclusions, both predicting in early 1915 that the war would bankrupt at least one of the powers by the end of July. 63 Although the events of 1914 proved both wrong, the ideas of Bloch and Angell still held sway over many Europeans in the years (even the weeks) before the outbreak of the war. They led people to assume that the economic structure of Europe would act as yet another brake on war. Europeans following the crisis closely spoke of grave consequences coming out of the ultimatum, but few of them expected a general European war. As Bernadotte Schmitt argued, Austria-­Hungary still had yet to prove to most Europeans’ satisfaction the complicity of the Serbian government in the assassination. As such, the Vienna government had also “not proved the necessity of going to war” and would have to seek a peaceful resolution or risk being diplomatically isolated. The condemnation of the ultimatum from newspapers across the continent, including most of those in Austria-­Hungary’s allies Germany and Italy, proved that such an isolation was already under way. Schmitt noted that German and Austro-­Hungarian agents were frustrated that they could not bribe even normally pliant Ital­ian editors to write favorable stories on the ultimatum because of their outrage, a sure sign of Austria-­Hungary’s unpopular position. 64 Most Europeans thought that even if a war did result, it would be a lo80

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calized con­flict fought between Austria and Serbia. Such a war need not involve any of the other great powers. Consequently, the crisis might follow the pattern of the Italo-­Libyan War and the two Balkan wars. Beyens met with members of the Krupp industrialist family on July 28 and found them thinking only in terms of a brief Austro-­Serbian war. Russia, they believed, would not involve itself in the crisis directly, and therefore Germany and France would have no reason to do anything but watch carefully from the sidelines. A general war, they believed, would not result because none of the great powers (except, of course, Austria-­Hungary) was directly involved. 65 Similarly, American ambassador James Gerard found that German statesmen were “still optimistic” that a general war could be avoided as late as July 31. 66 Some people had trouble even seeing the possibility of a localized war coming out of this crisis. Russian Interior Minister V. I. Gurko noted that his friends “expressed extreme amazement when I pointed out in a dinner speech that Europe was on the eve of serious events.” Outside the circle of urban middle-­class people to whom Gurko was speaking, the crisis was even less im­por­tant. In the countryside, he noted that Russians were “as calm as ever, though the papers were filled with Austria’s arrogant ultimatum to Serbia and the possible approach of a world con­flict.” Still, no one seemed willing to take the crisis too seriously or expected any dramatic events to happen in the near future. 67 Another observer of the Russians noted the “remarkably indifferent” attitude most displayed toward what they still understood to be an “Austro-­Serb con­flict.”68 Even some of the major events in the crisis failed to shake Europe from its general indifference. Serbia’s response to the note, in which it accepted all the conditions except one, even failed to make headlines in the London Times, which was still too concerned about events in Ireland to devote major attention to the Balkans. All the letters to the editor in the paper on that day not dealing with purely domestic issues dealt with Ireland. 69 In the Balkans themselves, tensions began to rise after Serbia refused to accept the ultimatum in full. Although the Serbs accepted all of the ultimatum’s demands except one, public opinion in Austria-­Hungary grew incensed. Jonathan French Scott, who conducted an exhaustive study of public opinion in the 1920s, described the result as an opening of the flood gates and a “psychotic explosion” of anti-­Serbian anger inside the empire. The center and right urged the government to take a firm stand and insist on complete Serbian acceptance of the ultimatum, although 81

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Scott argued that their ultimate goal remained Serbian diplomatic humiliation, not war. The Vienna correspondent of a Dresden newspaper reported on July 27 “enthusiastic support” for the government from all classes, but also believed that the Austro-­Hungarians saw their quarrel as a “private affair” with the Serbians, not as something connected to a larger European crisis.70 Despite news that struck some as increasingly gloomy, there were still many options other than war that might resolve the dispute. Arbitration remained the preferred solution for most people because it would bring with it the joint authority of all the great powers. It therefore had the possibility not only to avoid bloodshed but also, if all the great powers could agree on main points, to lay the seeds for a long-­lasting and comprehensive solution. As in the Fashoda and Morocco crises, arbitration might even create the conditions for a new era of un­der­stand­ing between powers great and small. Arbitration might not even require the cooperation of all the great powers. British diplomats believed that the Balkan wars had been mostly resolved through direct discussions with their German counterparts. That experience seemed to demonstrate to them that “a general war could [in the future] be averted by co-­operation between Great Britain and Germany, and by that alone.”71 Thus even if Austria-­Hungary proved to be intransigent and France or Russia unwilling, the British and Germans, both of whom could reasonably claim to be disinterested in the latest Balkan crisis, could put pressure on the government in Vienna to ease its demands. This strategy, of course, presumed that the German government was interested in arbitration; the mixed signals from Berlin left German attitudes in some doubt, but recent precedent seemed to suggest that the Germans would come around to support arbitration in the end. If arbitration or mediation proved not to be a viable strategy, there were still other approaches that might help Europe avoid a general war. One option involved the so-­called Belgrade halt. Given the general attitude among most Europeans that a great power like Austria-­Hungary would have to come out of the crisis sat­is­fied, all the great powers could be expected to support Austro-­Hungarian desires to make reasonable gains at Serbia’s expense. Even if some of the great powers sympathized with Serbia’s plight, Serbia was still a small power and few of the great powers would be likely to anger another great power on its behalf; German support for Austria-­Hungary meant that Britain, France, and Russia risked offending not one but two great powers if they stood by Serbia too firmly. 82

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The Serbs, however, were proving unwilling to make any further concessions. Thus came the idea of the Austro-­Hungarian Army’s occupying the Serbian cap­ital of Belgrade as a way of enticing the Serbs to take a more conciliatory line. To be sure, this option was less desirable than arbitration, but it struck many as a step short of the wider war that no one wanted. The highly regarded military correspondent of the London Times, Charles Repington, was present at a meeting “during the last days of July” at which the kaiser’s close friend, Colonel von Leipzig, presented an offer proposing that Britain accept “the occupation of Belgrade by Austria as a satisfaction to her, and that operations should then cease pending an arrangement.” The kaiser had used this friend as an unof­fi­cial liaison on diplomatic missions before, and his sudden appearance in London helped to convince many Britons that the Germans were sincerely looking for a way to avoid war. Repington himself believed that both the colonel and the kaiser were opposed to war and that the offer came as a way for Wilhelm to undercut the extremists in his own government and to make sure that Europe was not inadvertently drawn into a war that was in no one’s interest. Repington passed the offer to members of the British cabinet, some of whom were receptive to a solution on such a model.72 Even many Russians were willing to accept such an outcome, despite the supposed pan-­Slavic ties that bound Serbia to Russia. Paul Miliukov, a leader of the liberal Kadet Party, was one of many in­flu­en­tial Russians who thought that “Serb ambitions were not necessarily Russian interests,” and that Russia’s real interest lay in avoiding a war it was not materially or morally ready to fight. As long as he believed that Germany showed the same “determined commitment to peace” that it had during the Balkan wars, Miliukov and his party were willing to go along with an internationally monitored Austrian occupation of Belgrade.73 Most Europeans with a knowledge of the Balkans understood that Russia’s supposed religious, ethnic, and cultural ties to Serbia only went so far. At the governmental level, the Russians were frustrated by the unwillingness of Serbian leaders to follow their advice over the preceding few years to take a less incendiary attitude in their foreign policy. The Serbs, for their part, were angry at Russia’s insistence on Serbian conciliation during the Austrian annexation of Bosnia and during the Balkan wars. True to the pattern, in July 1914 Russian leaders originally pressed Serbia to “accept any Habsburg demands that were compatible with its in­de­pen­dence.”74 Although Russian support for Serbia was later taken for granted as a cause of the war, neither side in 1914 fully trusted the other. 83

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Much of the reason for the reluctance of the Russian government to back the Serbs more fully was the obvious lack of any real sense of pan-­ Slavic feeling among ordinary Russians. Russian intellectual M.  M. Kovalevsky noted that a lecture in St. Petersburg on Jean-­Jacques Rousseau had drawn 2,000 people, but one on the politics of the South Slav states had drawn fewer than 150. “For all the talk of neo-­Slavism and the fears it generated abroad,” Kovalevsky was amazed at “how insubstantial was real interest in it or the Balkans in Petersburg educated society.”75 Even Sergei Sazonov, the Russian foreign minister, told a colleague on July 27 that “he had no feeling for the Balkan Slavs,” who had been a “heavy burden” on Russian foreign policy.76 In the Russian countryside, pan-­Slavism had no pull at all. Even after the Austrians began their war against Serbia, few Russians were interested in going to war. According to W. Bruce Lincoln, ordinary Russians had little un­der­stand­ing about what distinguished Germans from Frenchmen, or Frenchmen from Austrians, or Austrians from Serbs; nor did they care. For them, all foreigners were nemtsy—a term derived from the Russian verb meaning to become dumb— and they had little interest in them. Serbia was unknown. That its cap­ital city continued to shudder under Austrian bombardment was of no more concern to them than what might be happening on the surface of the moon.77 Mythic pan-­Slavic links notwithstanding, Russia might have accept a limited punishment of Serbia. “Russia,” Miliukov wrote, “had to guide herself only by Russian interests, and these . . . differed from the interests of the Balkan nations.” If Russia determined that its interests required selling out Serbia, then it would do so. Miliukov fully expected the Russian government to force Serbia to accept the ultimatum in full if it became the only way to preserve peace. He also believed that cousins Wilhelm II (whom he called the “Friedenkaiser,” or Kaiser of Peace) and Nicholas II would work together for peace. Although he and his party disagreed with many of Nicholas’s policies, they still believed in his “firmness and [the] persistence of his intentions to preserve peace” even if the price of peace required forcing Serbia to back down.78 Russia, Miliukov and others believed, could accept a localized war in the Balkans, even if it led to a moderate Serbian defeat. At any event, Miliukov expected the Russian government to work to keep the war localized.79 “Russia,” he had concluded, “would not allow itself to be sucked into a possible war as 84

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a protector of Serbia.” The Balkan state, he felt, “must be made to understand that Russia would not fight for her.”80 Miliukov’s analysis implied that Russia had no substantial interests of its own in the crisis. Russian leaders at this stage still seemed to think that the Austro-­ Hungarian government would eventually either back down or at least moderate its demands. Just as Miliukov had faith in Wilhelm and Nicholas, Sergei Sazonov still had faith in Franz Joseph, who, he believed, would hesitate to darken the last years of his life by bloodshed. The innocence of the Serbian government of any complicity in the Sarajevo murders was so clear that we still believed that the Austro-­ Hungarian government would be obliged to withdraw its accusation against the Serbian authorities of participating in the crime of a fanatical youth—a crime, moreover, which could be of no bene­fit whatsoever to Serbia. The European system, he still thought, would come together once more to avoid a “terrible storm.”81 Even in Austria-­Hungary, where public opinion was the most belligerent of any of the great powers, most people expected a peaceful resolution. Because the great powers had no fundamental interests at stake, Austrians presumed, they would promote negotiation and arbitration. Austro-­Hungarian newspapers noted France’s lack of warlike intentions, with the Hungarian Pester Lloyd telling readers (no doubt accurately) that “the great majority of the French people was opposed to shedding blood for Serbia.” The Neue Freie Press also took comfort from the fact that “the peaceful attitude of the tsar is well known.” Russia, the paper believed, could have no sympathies for the “murderers of princes” and had no interest in conquests in the Balkans. Russia would, therefore, “work for peace in Belgrade.” Even the socialist press, which was normally critical of Austro-­Hungarian policy, believed that a general war could happen only if Russia willed it. But the czar, the Arbeiter-­Zeitung argued on July 26, would not “plunge Europe into the calamity of a world war” for the “sake of her wretched prestige.”82 All the major newspapers of the empire took the peaceful intentions of the governments of the great powers for granted and assumed they were working together to resolve or contain the crisis. Socialists saw the implications of the ultimatum more quickly than did most other po­lit­i­cal parties, although they too did not see the danger of a general war at first. As the next chapter will show, they eventually 85

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mobilized international resources to stop the war that they feared might result from reckless diplomacy. Nevertheless, even they were unable at first to see a direct link between the ultimatum and a general European war. Douglas Newton argued that the ultimatum created “no feeling of impending doom” among socialists because they “were so used to long, drawn-­out periods of crisis.” On July 26, Jean Longuet, the editor of L’Humanité, wrote to leading Austrian socialist Karl Kautsky that the situation was “grave” but that no action was needed before the expected Vienna meeting of the International Socialist Bureau in early August.83 Viktor Adler, founder of the Austrian Social Democratic Party, noted that the ultimatum did not itself change his party’s optimism. “The vast majority of comrades,” he recalled, “absolutely refused to believe in the possibility of war.”84 His French and German counterparts agreed. On July 25 Jaurès warned that Europe “has never in forty years been in a more dangerous and a more tragic situation,” but at that point, he still remained con­fi­dent that war would be avoided. On the same day, the German Socialist Party decried “the war mongers’ criminal intrigues” but con­fi­dently stated that any war that might result would remain localized to the Balkans. European socialists monitored the situation, but they were, as a group, much less apprehensive than they had been during either the Agadir crisis or the Balkan wars.85 Indeed, as late as July 28 the Balkan crisis seemed to be far less sig­nifi­ cant than those previous crises. French socialist Charles Rappoport accompanied his colleagues on a train trip from Paris to Brussels to attend an international socialist meeting in the Belgian cap­ital. He watched as the socialist delegates engaged in “animated and varied” conversation on a number of subjects. Nevertheless, as he later re­flected with some surprise, “there was no mention of war” or of the Balkan crisis; the delegates had other, seemingly more im­por­tant, issues on their minds. Alfred Rosmer, also on the train, noted that as the delegates left Paris “the [Balkan] situation seemed less serious” than it had been over the past few days. Although Austria seemed bent on attacking Serbia, “there was [still] talk of mediation and it seemed as though the general conflagration would be avoided.”86 British socialists moved with the same lack of urgency as their continental comrades. On July 27, W.  C. Anderson proclaimed that “there will, I believe, be no war. Nothing, at any rate, in the nature of an extended warfare.” The Leeds Trade Council met two days later but did not 86

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discuss the Balkans. The London Trade Council barely mentioned the Balkans the next day, and the Liverpool Trade Council discussed it only long enough to decide who they might send to a “stop the war” meeting tentatively scheduled for the following week. The Balkans were clearly a secondary prob­lem at most; the crisis rated exactly one line in the meeting’s minutes. Keir Hardie, a well-­respected socialist and MP from Scotland, urged his comrades as late as July 29 not to alter the agenda of the Vienna ISB meeting because of the crisis. “The items on it,” he said, “are of lasting interest whereas the [threat of] war may pass.”87 European pacifists did not even call for meetings to discuss the situation until the declaration of war from Austria-­Hungary to Serbia was announced. 88 Until then, nothing more than a repeat performance of the Agadir drama seemed likely to result.

The Twists and Turns of European Diplomacy Just as the Agadir crisis and others had been characterized by ups and downs, so, too, did Europeans understand that the news from Vienna might change from day to day. Bad news in the morning papers might even be negated by good news in the afternoon papers. André Gide’s journal, once it began to dedicate itself to the crisis instead of to his pets, follows this roller-­coaster ride. On July 26 (the day that news of Serbia’s response to the ultimatum made the French dailies) Gide wrote that “ev­ ery­one is so nervous that when they heard the fire alarm many people took it for the call to arms.” But his neighbors soon calmed down and Gide’s journal returned to a discussion of piano playing. The next day’s papers brought the apparent good news that “Serbia is giving in” to most of the Austrian demands and so war would likely be avoided. As a result, he remarked on “a certain easing of the strain this morning.”89 In his barracks, French soldier Marcel Riegel took all the news in stride, knowing that “this was not the first time in the last few years we had heard similar noises.” Just as those crises had passed, so did Riegel expect this crisis to pass as well.90 A further reason for optimism on July 27 centered on an announcement that the Russian, French, Ital­ian, and German governments had all accepted arbitration in principle. Consequently, “for a moment the tension was relaxed.” The next day, Hillaire Belloc watched British warships moving toward the En­glish Channel. The sight, however, caused him no particular alarm as “nothing was further from my mind” on that day 87

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“than war and armament.”91 At the same time, German socialist leader Hugo Haase was still convinced that his government was working for peace as it had in past Balkan crises, and in Paris Jane Michaux noted in her journal that “people seem rather optimistic and do not believe that Europe will go to war on account of Serbia.”92 One German soldier stationed near Mulhouse went to see an artillery demonstration at his barracks because, he noted, “I may never have the chance again to see artillery in action.” Only later did he re­flect that “none of us soldiers had any idea of the approaching menace of war.”93 This mood of calm and optimism was threatened when the Austrians remained stubbornly determined to fight despite Serbian capitulation on all but one of their demands. In the final three days of July even the recently optimistic Jane Michaux, a Parisienne with pro-­German feelings, recorded in her journal that “this war is inevitable because Germany is the stron­gest power and wants it at all costs.”94 Optimism turned to pessimism at the same time in Germany, although the guilty party seemed to  be France, which refused to restrain its Russian ally. One German with pro-­French sympathies watched as a crowd on July 31 painted over all French names on street signs and seized all French-­language publications. Just three days earlier he had thought that the local newspaper had caught the mood of the town with its headline “Must We Go to War? And against France?” How quickly the mood had changed.95 This rapid turn from optimism to pessimism seemed all the more shocking owing to the relatively good news of the previous days. The ups and downs caused almost as much stress to Europeans as the prospect of war itself. Walter von Rummel noted at the end of July that the oppressive strain and uncertainty could become so unbearable as to make people almost wish for war. “No matter what grave and even graver things may come, the last weeks, and especially the last days [have been] unbearable. The leaden nightmare grew hourly more oppressing.”96 E.  J. Dillon, a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, saw the same trend in Vienna. He was in the Austrian cap­ital when the ultimatum was delivered and found some people almost hoping for war, not because they wanted violence, but because they were tired of the constant cycle of crisis and calm: “Almost ev­ery­body [inside the Austrian elite] hoped that the long-­threatening storm will burst, not because the national sentiment has suddenly grown bellicose, but because the people are sick to death of the periodic crises which throw public and private life out of gear, paralyze trade and commerce . . . and are then settled for a couple of months or years only to 88

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break out anew.” Still, like most others in Vienna, Dillon fully expected that “war would be averted” in the end.97 Even the announcement of Austria-­Hungary’s declaration of war against Serbia on July 28 “took both major Viennese parties by surprise.”98 They were expecting a renewed round of negotiations, not war. From London, the daily letters of Liberal MP Arnold Stephenson Rowntree to his wife in Yorkshire follow the same pattern. The Balkan crisis did not appear in his letters until July 28, when he described the mood as “very uncertain” but favorable to peace. Although he feared that an Austro-­Serbian war was just days away, Ireland was still, in his mind, the more im­por­tant crisis. Any war in the Balkans, he presumed, would be limited and local. In any case, the news seemed to be getting better. “I think there is no doubt that the [chance] of keeping European peace is distinctly better than yesterday,” he told his wife that day. The next day, however, the mood changed and the situation in the Balkans had suddenly become “very grave.” On July 30 bad news from the continent had fi­nally surpassed Ireland as the main topic of conversation at dinnertime meetings of the Liberal Party’s Foreign Affairs Group. Half the members urged Britain to take a hard line against Germany in the hopes of keeping the Germans from pushing for war. The other half, including Rowntree himself, hoped the government would resign rather than be pressured into risking a war not in Britain’s interest.99 To cite one more example of this roller-­coaster ride of emotions, Theodor Wolff thought most Germans were still unconcerned about the ­Balkans on July 25. That day, he saw a small group of students yelling prowar slogans but noted that passersby were “plainly puzzled by these New Year’s rejoicings out of their time.” The next day brought news that the Russian foreign minister and the Austro-­Hungarian ambassador had held productive talks in Moscow; thus “the general impression is favorable.” A friend of his who was a Berlin banker took the ups and downs of the news in stride: “I have seen so many of these crises come and go, and I ­don’t believe there will be war this time either.” Like the rest of his fellow Germans, Wolff was reassured by the Serbian reply on July 27.100 On the evening of that same day came a British offer to mediate the crisis. A reassuring speech by Sir Edward Grey had reached the Berlin newspapers and “made a strong impression” on all. Informed opinion in the cap­ital suggested to Wolff that the Serbian reply had removed any reason for Germany to go to war and had probably done the same for Austria-­Hungary, too. Grey’s offer thus gave the powers the most logical 89

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and obvious way out of the crisis. Nevertheless, two days later came the surprising news that both Germany and Austria-­Hungary had of­fi­cially rejected the British offer. The feeling in Berlin then turned to “helplessness in the presence of the onward roll of events,” a theme that was to be common in the days to come.101

Watching for Storm Clouds Public opinion across the continent remained essentially pa­cific until the last minute. Jules Hedeman, the Berlin correspondent of Matin, wrote on July 30, “I repeat. Germany does not desire war. She desires it less today than yesterday, and yesterday less than the day before yesterday.” On the same day the Petit Parisien called talk of war “monstrous” because of the “peaceful purposes” displayed by people across Europe.102 Nor did the Germans, who had obviously given diplomatic support to Austria-­ Hungary, seem a threat to the general peace. “Germany barks,” a saying in Britain went, “but does not bite.”103 Uncertainty was beginning to develop at the very end of the month, although even then war seemed far from inevitable. Claire de Pratz was still on vacation in Brittany in late July and noted that few of the locals expressed any great interest in the news from the Balkans as late as July 29. Reflecting her concerns from the time she first heard of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, she deduced that the Austrians had been plotting to start a war for weeks. Nevertheless, she assumed that their plotting might still fail as “it seemed at that moment almost incredible that a great European con­flict should result from so small a cause.” She grew worried enough to have “a fairly large sum” withdrawn from her Parisian bank and sent to her in Brittany just in case the crisis should get more serious, but she found just one person who shared her fear that war might result. Her British friends were even less fearful than her French friends. They “did not appear to think that war for France would inevitably follow even yet, and considered it improbable that in such circumstances En­gland would be implicated.” When she disagreed and told her friends that the situation was more serious than they realized, they “considered my judgment hasty, and refused to believe war possible.”104 British and French vacationers and locals alike had little idea that they were just a few short days away from the onset of the very war they refused to believe was possible. This inability of Europeans to foresee the true proximity of the cri90

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sis was both a function of their un­der­stand­ing of the recent past and an im­por­tant reason that the war, when it did begin, came as such a shock. Only after Austria-­Hungary’s rejection of the British offer of mediation did the news from the Balkans become the lead story in the London Times, fi­nally displacing the news from Ireland. Only then did the newspaper’s editors believe that the situation had become “undoubtedly serious.” The Serbian reply, they felt, had gone “far towards meeting the demands of the Austro-­Hungarian note,” but Vienna had rejected it nevertheless. The editors feared, however, that the next step in the crisis would not be war but a rupture of diplomatic relations between Russia and Austria-­Hungary as a way for the former to protest the latter’s actions.105 The news soon took another sharp turn for the worse. Europeans were “startled” (E. J. Dillon’s words) to learn on July 29 that Austria-­ Hungary had declared war on Serbia instead of continuing to pursue a diplomatic solution. The news broke the mood of the previous days, which the London Times editorial staff had seen as “perceptibly less threatening.” Within hours, the situation began to look gloomier “almost with ev­ery telegram.”106 Rumors began to spread that the Russians might begin to mobilize their large armies, a move sure to bring Europe to the brink of the general war ev­ery­one feared. Only then did a majority of people begin to sense that war might result, whether or not the vast majority of Europeans wanted it. On that day, Mildred Aldrich, an American expatriate who had sought quiet and calm in a house near the Marne River, fi­nally mentioned the crisis in her letters back to the United States: It looks, after all, as if the Servian affair [is] to become a European affair. . . . It seems the so-­called “alarmists” were right. Germany has NOT been turning her nation into an army just to divert her population, nor spending her last mark on ships just to amuse herself. . . . It is hard to realize that a big war is inevitable, but it looks it.107 Nevertheless, even at this late date all was not yet lost, although matters were looking decidedly less certain. Austrian Stefan Zweig was in Ostend at the end of July. He met a group of Belgian soldiers who had been ordered to report to their units. Confused as to why they should receive such an order, Zweig asked them what they were preparing for. When one of them informed him that they were planning to defend their homeland against a potential German invasion, Zweig shouted to them, 91

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“Nonsense! You can hang me to this lamp post if the Germans march into Belgium.”108 The crisis, he thought, had little to do with Germany and even less to do with Belgium. On the same late-­July day in Savoy, American expatriate Elisabeth Marbury saw French soldiers talking excitedly to one another, but she assumed that they were nervous about the upcoming autumn maneuvers. The thought that they might be planning for war struck her as “impossible” because she had already “dismissed the possibility of any very serious cataclysm” resulting from the crisis.109 People in western Europe remained overwhelmingly optimistic that a deal would still be reached. Neither Germany nor France nor Britain was directly impacted by the bad news from eastern Europe; thus the great powers still had many more motivations to work for peace than to seek escalation of the tensions. As late as July 27 the Manchester Guardian opined that “diplomacy would have all the time needed to localize this latest Balkan war where it belonged, in the Balkans.” Even two days later, the arch­bishop of Canterbury was taken aback when he learned that Margot Asquith (wife of the British prime minister) had advised her sister not to go to France and had asked her daughter to come home from Holland. Until then, he had had no reason to take the situation in the Balkans seriously.110 Then the crisis seemed to strike with a powerful, and surprising, force that left people disoriented and worried for the future. E. F. Benson noted that until the very end of July “this sense of security remained firm. Then came the first tremors of the solid earth, faint, but felt in the foundations in the house.”111 He ended his memoirs there, with a troubling image of a great natural di­sas­ter about to strike the European house. He was not alone in viewing the coming catastrophe as a natural di­sas­ter, or, as the French L’Ecole Emancipée (a newspaper for teachers) put it, a “bolt of lightning.”112 Like a natural di­sas­ter, the war was about to strike with little warning and little time for people to prepare for its consequences.

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Matters grew more serious on July 25, when Austro-­Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph authorized his army to invade Serbia. Serbia had accepted all but one of the demands in the Austro-­Hungarian ultimatum, and diplomats across Europe were urging patience, but the extremists inside the Dual Monarchy had decided to go to war regardless. Mobilization was to begin within three days. The delay was not intended to leave open the possibility of diplomacy; it was meant instead to allow the remainder of men on harvest leave to return to their units and to ensure that the French president and prime minister had left Russia after their regularly scheduled state visit. At noon on July 28, the Austro-­Hungarian declaration of war against Serbia was issued to the world, and Austro-­Hungarian artillery pieces began shelling Serbian positions.1 Unlike the first two Balkan wars, the current war threatened to create immediate ripple effects far beyond the Balkans because it marked the first time that a great power had fought on European soil since 1877, when Russia and the Ottoman Empire had gone to war in this same Balkan region. Grave though the situation was, exactly what, if anything, the Austro-­Hungarian declaration of war meant to the rest of Europe remained far from clear. Few people cared enough about Serbia’s plight to go to war because of it. Even after the ultimatum’s delivery, a Montenegrin statesman told two French journalists that the Balkan peninsula ­resembled a “volcano with three smoking craters,” only one of which had  been formed by “Austria’s anti-­Serb policy.” The other two, the Greco-­Turkish rivalry and “the thorny Albanian question,” struck him as equally likely to produce hostilities in the future.2 Even after the Austro-­Serbian war had begun, most careful observers saw no reason for the con­flict to spread. From Berlin, Baron Beyens wrote that “the hostilities will be brief and should not stretch across the Dan93

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ube,” the river that flowed through both Vienna and Belgrade. Beyens was much less concerned about the Austro-­Hungarian declaration of war than he had been at the height of the Agadir crisis of 1911 because Austria-­Hungary remained the only great power with interests directly at stake. He still thought that Great Britain would mediate an end to localized hostilities long before a general war resulted.3 From London, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, never short of commentary to confide to his diary, took the news in stride: “Belgrade has been bombarded, and it is all but certain that there will be a war, but not for us.”4 There was still no reason to presume that the Austro-­Serbian war meant a general war. Even the aggressive Austro-­Hungarian general staff seems to have expected to avoid a general war, although clearly an element of wishful strategic thinking was involved. Austro-­Hungarian leaders hoped to crush the Serbs with a bold and overwhelming opening campaign that would present the world with a fait accompli in the Balkans. Some of­fi­ cials in the foreign ministry most responsible for creating the crisis thought that a declaration of war was “not more than an extreme form of pressure to obtain a diplomatic surrender from Serbia” before any shooting started.5 Conrad, however, desperately wanted war. He counted on German diplomacy to isolate the Russians and keep the diplomats of Europe from seeking any “last minute opportunity to avert war” and rob Austria-­Hungary of the great victory he anticipated. Conrad appeared so certain that the Russians would stay out of the war that he had “ordered no precautionary mea­sures at all on the Russian frontier” despite the still unsettled position of the Russians. 6 These events, however, did not necessarily mean that a general war was imminent; nor did they seem to frighten Europeans unduly. As the last chapter showed, most people outside the Balkans saw the days of July 27 to July 29 in an optimistic light. British MP Christopher Addison, for example, wrote on July 29 that “the general impression seems to be that the European situation is a bit easier,” possibly because the newspapers had just reported an Austrian announcement that the Dual Monarchy did not seek any Serbian land as compensation.7 The Petit République also reported optimism on July 29, holding out hopes in the “calm attitude of France and Germany, who still watch with folded arms and sword in sheath.” The Paris correspondents of both the Manchester Guardian and the London Times described the mood in the French cap­ital as pa­tri­otic but, above all, peaceful. Lord Bertie, the British ambassador to France, wrote in his diary on July 27 simply, “There is no war fever here.”8 French 94

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attitudes at this stage were broadly similar to those in Britain. Neither country’s population felt any direct connection to the hostilities in the Balkans. It was even possible for some people, especially in Britain or in remote countryside locations on the continent, to remain unconcerned about the crisis at all. As late as July 31, F. H. Willis, a British hatmaker, “noticed a  paragraph [in the local newspaper] announcing that the visit of the ­Burghers of Boulogne to Hastings had been cancelled ‘owing to the in­ ternational situation.’ This was the first time that I became aware that there was an international situation.” Even on that late date sales of ferry tickets to the continent were still strong, and the Daily Mirror reported that the August holiday season was “likely to be the biggest in living memory.” The En­glish Channel coastal resort of Brighton was a “ceaseless stream of humanity” from the train station down to the shore and the famous pier.9 As late as August 3, Vera Brittain could remark in her diary, “I do not know . . . how we all managed to play tennis so calmly and take quite an interest in the result. I suppose it is because we all know so little of the real meaning of war that we are so indifferent.”10 Frank Laird, a soldier in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, similarly reported that he felt “no suspicion” that war was near, even at the very end of July.11 Nor were calm and complacency prevalent only in the relatively isolated British Isles. On July 31, Claire de Pratz received a letter from a friend in Paris to whom she had confided her fears of an impending war. Her friend wrote back to her: “I assure you that you are needlessly anxious. . . . If you saw Paris as it is now, so calm and so evidently unexpectant of war, you would have no fear. Surely you must be surrounded by people who in­flu­ence you strongly. . . . You are probably living among a set of very simple people who allow themselves to be frightened by the tone of the newspapers.”12 The same day she visited a neighbor who was busy preparing dinner for her grandchildren. When she mentioned “this coming war,” the neighbor replied, “‘This coming war?’ You surely ­don’t think that!” Her reaction made de Pratz think that “the idea [of war] had only just struck her.” When de Pratz reiterated her fear of war, the neighbor told her, “Calm yourself, my friend; I think you are making yourself unnecessarily unhappy.”13 Although many people tried to go on with their lives and pretend that all was well, the situation had grown potentially grave. Unlike in the ­Agadir crisis, a great power had ac­tually gone to war. Fears of complications arising from the outbreak of even limited hostilities began to grow, 95

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though most people in Britain, France, Germany, and even Russia still saw no immediate reason to expect war. The situation had, however, fi­ nally become serious enough to make people worry for the future. Russia had already announced a “period preparatory to war,” which allowed it to begin mobilizing more than 1.1 million troops, although these troops were in army corps on the Austro-­Hungarian border only. Whether this action marked the start of hostilities or was just another card in the great diplomatic game no one knew, but it certainly woke many people to the seriousness of the situation. From her hilltop house on the Marne, Mildred Aldrich wrote to a friend on July 29: “The tension here is terrible. Still, the faces of the men are stern, and ev­ery one is so calm—the silence is deadly. There is an absolute suspension of work in the fields. It is as if all France was holding its breath.”14

Russia Mobilizes France, as well as the rest of Europe, did not have long to hold its collective breath. The great bombshell ev­ery­one had feared struck on July 30, when the Russians announced that they were mobilizing their armies in full. The implications of that decision were easy for all to see. A Russian mobilization might well force Germany to follow suit. If Germany threatened Russia, then France would probably be obliged to mobilize as well. Italy, bound by alliance obligations to Germany and Austria-­Hungary, might also mobilize. In this way, Europe might end up fight­ing a general war over the Balkan crisis after all, despite the obvious lack of a direct connection between the great powers and what most people in Europe were still, as late as July 31, calling “the Austro-­Serb con­flict.”15 Most Russians, even those in the army, were befuddled by the announcement. Some tried to understand the momentous decision to mobilize as a response to Austro-­Hungarian aggression. General Mikhail Bonch-­Bruyevich received news of mobilization but noted quizzically that “no one knew who the enemy would be.” Not until two weeks later did he learn that his country was to fight Austria-­Hungary and Germany. He explained this strange situation to his men by “stressing the fact that Russia had stepped on no one’s toes, had not started the war, but had merely stood up for . . . a kindred people . . . who had been the victim of an armed assault.” In his own mind, however, he was not sure who the aggressor had been in the Balkans, and he also observed that the veterans 96

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in the army were clearly unconvinced by his speech.16 Nicholas Golovine noted the contrast between 1914, when Russians believed in the “peaceful feelings” of their government, and 1904, when Russia had been the clear aggressor in the war against Japan. Belief in Russia’s innocence, not mythic pan-­Slavic links to Serbia, he felt, had been the “vital stimulus” that convinced Russians of the worthiness of their cause.17 Russia’s decision had impacts across the continent. American writer Edith Wharton had been traveling through France as these events transpired. She arrived in Paris on July 31 and found that the mood had changed in the few days she had been out of the cap­ital. Although optimism still reigned at this late date, largely owing to abiding con­fi­dence in  the European diplomatic system, anxiety was clearly building. She noted that the air was thundery with rumors. Nobody believed them, ev­ery­ body repeated them. War? Of course there ­couldn’t be war! The Cabinets, like naughty children, were again dangling their feet over the edge; but the whole incalculable weight of things-­as-­they-­ were . . . continued calmly and convincingly to assert itself against the bandying of diplomatic words. Wharton believed that “no one in France” wanted war and that people were certain that “diplomacy could still arrest the war.”18 On July 30 her fellow American expatriate Mary King Waddington arrived in Paris and thought she noted a heightened sense of excitement at the Gare de l’Est, but a French of­fi­cer she spoke with told her she was overreacting.19 Perhaps the of­fi­cer had not yet heard the big news of the day, or perhaps he did not see the threat that it posed. News of the Russian mobilization reached London July 30, the same night that Mrs. Waddington arrived in Paris. The news caused the Manchester Guardian to become the first British newspaper to suggest that Britain might have to go to war. At this late date, the newspaper fi­nally became aware that the new geopo­ lit­i­cal situation had created the possibility that Germany might attack France; in that case, Britain might be legally or morally obliged to declare war in support of France. The paper dismissed the defense of Belgium as a possible British motivation for war, arguing that the 1839 international treaty that guaranteed Belgium’s neutrality “afforded all the protection she [Belgium] needed.”20 Germany, the paper assumed, would respect the treaty to which it was a signatory, especially since Belgium clearly had no 97

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interests in the Balkan crisis. As such, Germany could pose no real threat to Belgium and thus could not use the Belgian coastline to threaten British domination of the En­glish Channel. The Guardian was not the only newspaper to see the new danger. The news of Russia’s mobilization caused an instant evaporation of optimism among the journalists at the London Times. Military correspondent Charles Repington reported in the next day’s edition that the “general situation this morning is one of unparalleled gloom” in part because of  the expectation that Germany would mobilize to meet the Russian move.21 In the foreign ministry in Germany, the country where people felt most threatened by the news, the report of the mobilization created a “silence like that of a house in which someone lies dead.”22 As the editors at the Times understood, the possibility of a chain reaction of mobilizations meant that governments could now promote almost any decision or action they might take as being necessary for the defense of the homeland against an aggressive enemy. The news from Russia thus revolutionized the crisis. No ­longer was the con­flict about who had been behind the assassination of an obscure archduke or what sort of dip­ lomatic compensation Austria-­Hungary might have the right to claim. Now the con­flict was about the essential right of peoples to defend themselves and their homes against an enemy. Governments would now need to do ev­ery­thing in their power to fulfill their primary duty of defending national territory. As early as July 28, French Chief of Staff Joseph Joffre had begun to demand the right to dispatch units to the border; as soon as he heard of the Russian mobilization he also began demanding that France order a general mobilization without delay.23 All of these actions, he argued vehemently, were necessary to ensure the protection of French soil.24 People in all countries argued that they were on the side of the right and acting not out of any desire for war or conquest, but for the most noble reason of all, self-­defense. Thus did Paul Doumerge, a French pastor, say on July 30 that “there is in our souls . . . the clear certitude that France did not want this war, that she had hoped for peace until the last minute and had worked for peace.”25 French soldier Emmanuel Bourcier, who had for most of the crisis shared the general sentiment that war would be avoided in the end, blamed the kaiser not just for risking war against France but for “hurling” his own pa­cifically minded people into a “horrible adventure” that was “destined to hasten their fall rather than assure their triumph.”26 From the United Kingdom, Georgina Lee wrote in her 98

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diary that Sir Edward Grey deserved to be remembered as “one of the most patient Peacemakers the world has ever known” for his efforts to avoid war, but she also noted that “if we fight, it is because we shall have been dragged in” through German aggression against British allies.27 These sentiments were widespread. On July 31 Claire de Pratz talked with two brothers in Brittany. Both were fishermen who hoped war would not come. The older brother told her, “We none of us want war. We ­haven’t been expecting it. The fellows in the harbor all say that, and God knows it’s true enough.” Nevertheless, the youn­ger brother was quick to add that “if war is forced upon us by the beastly Boches . . . then [we’ll say] ‘allons-­y donc’ [let’s go] like a single man.” The next day she wrote that France was belatedly waking to the fact that it must prepare to fight because “secretly Germany had long been alert and prepared, and . . . France would be attacked before she was ready.”28 Similarly, in Germany, whose army was secretly preparing for a preemptive war against Belgium, Luxembourg, and France, people unaware of this planning understood their war as defensive. The Berliner Tage­ blatt wrote, “One thing can be said of the German people with absolute certainty. We ­didn’t want a war and we have done ev­ery­thing in our power to prevent it.”29 This newspaper and others took their cue from the  kaiser, who saw Europe as a place dominated by powers wanting to encircle Germany. To American Ambassador James Gerard, Wilhelm blamed the En­glish, “an obstinate nation,” for the menacing approach of the war. Although he surely either knew better or had deluded himself to a remarkable degree, the kaiser told Gerard that “the En­glish changed the whole situation” by refusing to state publicly their intention to remain out of any continental war. “They will keep up the war,” the kaiser bemoaned.30 The kaiser and the German elite held particular venom for En­gland, but for most Germans the main threat came from reactionary Russia. Germans argued the need to defend their advanced and civilized society against the autocracy of the czar, but racially tinged fears of Slavic hordes were rarely far from the surface. One German observed that Germany’s war against “a horde that is formed and maintained by despots” was in fact a war for the future of Europe. Socialist Hugo Haase agreed, calling Germany’s war against the Russians “necessary for the freedom of our peoples and [their] future.”31 The great size of the Russian forces worried Germans, who argued for a rapid mobilization out of fear that Russian armies would overwhelm smaller German ones. Prowar (or promobiliza99

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tion) Germans terrified moderates with lurid tales of the imminent invasion of Germany by Slavic hordes. According to Frederic William Wile, who was then living in Berlin, this ploy, which he called “the Cossack bogy,” was remarkably effective in in­flu­enc­ing Germans to support the war of conquest that the German generals had been planning all along. Prowar Germans argued that while Wilhelm II was “working for peace,” the Russians had been planning for war all along. As they told the tale, “The Czar’s hordes were gathering on the Eastern frontier, preparing to launch a murderous burglarious attack on innocent, defenseless, peace-­loving Germany.” A terrified Germany, which already knew of the Russian mobilization of 1.1 million men on the Austro-­Hungarian border, “swallowed it whole.”32 Indeed, of­fi­cials in the German government saw Russia’s mobilization order as “a favor” that St. Petersburg had inadvertently done for them. Even though many of those same of­fi­cials believed that “Russia does not intend to wage war, but has only been forced to take these mea­sures because of Austria,” the Germans could use the Russian mobilization as a pretext “to gear the masses at home towards the idea of a defensive war against the deadly enemy in the east.”33 Now even Germany, whose armies were even then making final preparations to invade two neutral countries as part of the most audacious war plan in his­tory, could depict itself as fight­ing an essentially defensive— and therefore just—war.

The Rise of Patriotism in the Face of the Enemy In all countries, the seemingly menacing threat of invasion by a hereditary enemy led to a general rise in pa­tri­ot­ism. The willingness of people to bury partisan and class differences in the face of the shared national emergency was a source of both pride and amazement to many Europeans in all nations. Marc Bloch marveled at the “surge of democratic fervor” that he witnessed as war approached.34 Similarly, Hanna Hafkesbrink, a native of Koblenz, thought that war enthusiasm, to the extent that it existed at all, was less about a genuine desire for war than about an “ecstatic expression of happiness over the sudden and unexpected experience of national solidarity.” She argued that this shared national willingness to meet an unjus­ti­fied attack by a common enemy (in the German case the enemy was almost always understood to be Russia) explains the “paradoxical simultaneity of hatred of war and enthusiasm at its outbreak” as expressed by thousands of ordinary Germans. She cited several 100

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examples of this phenomenon, including this passage from Rudolf Binding: “A great belief-­fulness (Gläubigkeit) came over the people and even the Fatherland itself was less the object of this enthusiasm than the belief in a common destiny which lifted people up and made them all equal. No one wanted to be more than the next one. On the streets and in the squares people looked each other in the eye and rejoiced in the community of feeling.” Even a pacifist internationalist like Stefan Zweig could say that in Vienna hundreds of thousands felt what they should have felt in peace time, that they belonged together. A city of two million, a country of nearly fifty million, in that hour felt that they were participating in world his­tory, in a moment which would never recur, and that each one was called upon to cast his infinitesimal self into the glowing mass, there to be purified of all selfish­ness. All differences of class, rank, and language were flooded over at that moment by the rushing feeling of fraternity. Strangers spoke to one another in the streets, people who had avoided each other for years shook hands, ev­erywhere one saw excited faces. 35 Also from Vienna, Sigmund Freud wrote that “for the first time in thirty years I feel myself to be an Austrian and feel like giving this not very hopeful empire another chance.”36 An observer of events in Hungary noted that the shared sense of threat brought to the empire a unity that “long de­cades of nationalist pro­pa­ganda had never accomplished.”37 Such attitudes were based on the unspoken presumptions that the nation faced a common, existential crisis. They also assumed that sac­ri­fices would be borne equally and that government of­fi­cials would renegotiate social contracts to re­flect the new spirit of the people. All these illusions were to be short-­lived, with fatal consequences for several of the wartime governments, including that in Vienna. In Germany, another state whose government was not to survive the next four years of war, the Russian menace led to a shared consensus that military efforts were necessary for self-­defense. Herbert Sulzbach, who confessed that he ­didn’t understand what was happening around him, nevertheless re­flected the general tone of Germans. On August 1 he wrote: “Try as I may I simply can’t convey the splendid spirit and wild enthusiasm that has come over us all. We feel we’ve been attacked, and the idea that we have to defend ourselves gives us unbelievable strength. Russia’s dirty intrigues are dragging us into this war. . . . Is it all real, or just a 101

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dream?”38 Sulzbach also had more personal concerns, as his brother, then living in London, was unsure if he could make it back to Germany. Like most Europeans, the Sulzbach brothers found themselves in the middle of events they could neither fully understand nor control. Not ev­ery­one was swept away by the winds of nationalism and fear. Jean-­Jacques Becker found that half of all the departments in France experienced at least one antiwar demonstration in the days just before war broke out. As we will see below, many of these were or­ga­nized by socialists, but Becker found examples or­ga­nized by people belonging to more centrist po­lit­i­cal groups. Paris alone had sixty-­seven such demonstrations, almost all of them on July 31 and August 1, and many of them attracting crowds numbering in the thousands. Berlin witnessed eigh­teen “heavily attended” antiwar meetings on July 28 alone. 39 Becker noted that the tone of most of these meetings was supportive of the efforts of the French government to maintain peace. As such, the government saw no need to take any mea­sures to prevent the demonstrations. It could bene­fit from the rallies by arguing that the French people understood that it was doing all it could to secure peace. The demonstrations followed themes such as “À bas la guerre” (“Down with war”) and “Guerre contre la guerre” (“War against war”) because the demonstrators believed that war was being forced upon France by the imminence of German mobilization. At a rally in the department of Calvados in Normandy on July 29, for example, speakers told the audience that “the efforts of the government tried to assure the maintenance of the peace.” Becker argued that the Calvados meeting was representative of similar meetings across France and that such progovernment attitudes made French of­fi­cials believe that the public would overwhelmingly support a war of national defense.40 The gathering storm clouds put socialists in a bind. On the one hand, they had a long, proud his­tory of working together across international borders to prevent war. The Agadir crisis, the Italo-­Libyan War, and the Balkan wars seemed to have proved to them that they were the continent’s main force for peace. On the other hand, the International Socialist Bureau was not an international body per se, but was instead a federation of socialists constituted around autonomous national delegations. It was also a po­lit­i­cal or­ga­ni­za­tion given to long-­winded speeches, extended meetings, and often intense doctrinal debates. As such, it was ill-­suited to act quickly or to enforce a shared consensus on national chapters. Nevertheless, the ISB was the only international or­ga­ni­za­tion that saw 102

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the threat of war and mobilized international resources in an effort to stop it. Jaurès had been at the center of an international socialist movement to prevent war that dated to the 1890s. Until 1907 that effort had been primarily dedicated to reducing expenditures on armaments, both because of the threat an armed Europe posed to peace and because of the concentration of wealth inherent in armaments spending. Spurred on by the first Moroccan crisis in 1905, many socialists had begun to discuss international cooperation among socialist parties “as soon as secret or public moves give rise to fear of a con­flict between governments and make war possible or probable.”41 Underlying all these efforts was a general assumption among socialists that war bene­fited only cap­italists. “Do you know what the proletariat is?” asked Jaurès rhetorically in early 1914. “Masses of men who collectively love peace and abhor war.”42 Rallies like one in Vienna during a diplomatic crisis over Albania in 1913 that had drawn 100,000 workers “chanting against war” gave Jaurès and others con­fi­ dence that the working class could stop a war if given time to or­ga­nize.43 One frequently discussed option to prevent war was a general strike enacted concurrently by socialists across the continent. First put forward as early as 1891, the idea was always controversial. For some socialists, the general strike risked tying the socialist movement, then seeking ways to work within democratically elected governments, to more radical ideologies like anarchism and syndicalism.44 Others thought that socialists should continue to devote their efforts to reducing armaments. The most radical socialists, many of them from anarchist and syndicalist backgrounds, even argued that war might bene­fit the working class because a war would “arouse the masses po­lit­i­cally and . . . hasten the overthrow of cap­italist rule.”45 In 1907, an International Socialist Congress at Stuttgart ­adopted the general strike as of­fi­cial policy. Jaurès had personally persuaded the German delegation of the value of the general strike with an impassioned speech calling for “a centralized drive for peace” and telling the German socialists, “It is you, the workers, the wage-­earners of the city, who can, who must spearhead the drive!”46 The Stuttgart conference’s final statement called on workers to do ev­ery­thing they could to prevent war. Should it break out anyway, workers were “to intervene in favor of its speedy termination and with all their powers,” a thinly veiled reference to calling a general strike to stop the machinery of war. Similar resolutions that passed in Copenhagen in 1910 and Basel in 1912 af­fi rmed the gen103

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eral strike as “particularly efficacious” in forcing states to use arbitration to avoid war. The Copenhagen resolution proclaimed that “or­ga­nized socialist labor was the sole guarantor of universal peace.”47 The idea of joint socialist action gained power after the Agadir crisis, and the Balkan wars had seemingly proved that, in the analysis of the Basel conference, “the fear of the ruling classes of a proletarian revolution as a result of world war has proved to be an essential guarantor of peace.”48 There were prob­lems with the general strike, not least of which was the dif­fi­culty of getting socialist parties across the continent to agree to joint action. Jaurès and others also worried about backlash from national governments, which could easily paint supporters of a general strike as traitors and subversives. Thus they preferred to use the general strike as a sword of Damocles, an ever-­present threat that they might dangle over the heads of the cap­italist class, but one that they hoped never to have to use. Few socialist leaders expressed much fear that workers would not follow their call for a general strike, however. Assuming as they did that the working class naturally supported peace, they believed wholeheartedly in the willingness of the workers to take an active role in maintaining that peace. Nevertheless, there was an enormous loophole in socialist arguments about war and defense. Almost all socialists and pacifists accepted the right of a people to defend itself against unprovoked aggression, especially if the aggressor used secret treaties to justify its war or promoted militarism. As Barraute de Plessis summed up the position of pacifists in 1909: “No one has the right to allow justice to be destroyed because of fear of a struggle. A brave man does not look for an argument with his neighbor, but if the latter attacks . . . he must defend himself with any and all means available.”49 Socialists in all nations supported the right of a state to defend itself if attacked. Jaurès and others had long since rejected the Marxist orthodoxy that the worker had no homeland. Jaurès himself saw no contradiction between socialism and pa­tri­ot­ism, especially in France, a nation that he believed “could never commit an irrevocable sin against humanity” because “the cause of France was that of civilization as a whole.”50 The idea was not limited to France. Socialists in all European countries fully accepted the right, even the necessity, for workers to fight to defend their homes and their beliefs. They also believed that socialists had the right to fight a war against a militarist state seeking to destroy socialism; German socialists in particular feared an attack from czarist Russia that would 104

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lead not only to the defeat of Germany but also to the suppression of German socialism. As early as the 1893 Socialist Congress in Zu­rich, German delegates had expressed the concern that a general strike “would put the country where socialists were most powerful [Germany] at the mercy of the country where socialism, as a movement, was most backward [Russia].”51 In July 1914 this fear dominated German socialist and pacifist thinking. A German socialist delegation defended mobilization by expressing its concern that a Russian general strike could not stop the Russian Army from going to war and crushing German socialism. Therefore a European-­wide general strike might “ensure the defeat of the country whose proletariat is the best or­ga­nized and the most loyal in implementing the decisions of the [Socialist] International to the advantage of the least socialist, least disciplined.”52 Echoing the words of the 1893 congress, the delegation argued that if German socialists obeyed the International’s call for a general strike but the Russians did not (or if that general strike proved ineffective), then German socialists would be at the mercy of what one German socialist called “bloodthirsty czarism.”53 Thus did the SPD delegates in Freiburg pledge that in the event of “real danger, [the party] will be surpassed by no one in its willingness to sac­ri­fice.”54 German pacifists, for their part, “admitted the probity not only of defensive war and armed sanctions, but any war waged in the name of a just cause.”55 French pacifist and socialist thinking was nearly identical. Jaurès himself understood the German concerns and shared many of them; as he wrote on July 18, 1914, “There is no contradiction between the maximum effort for peace and, if we should be invaded, the maximum effort for national in­de­pen­dence.”56 A foundation thus existed for socialists and pacifists to accept war under the condition that they were fight­ing a defensive war and that the war was one of national survival. Wars of self-­ defense and preservation, in their eyes, were not the same as wars of colonialism or expansion. In 1914 socialists were still praising the general strike as, in the words of a French resolution early that year, “the most workable of all means in the hands of the workers to prevent war and force international arbitration” of disputes. At the same time, socialists recognized that the “duty of self-­preservation was paramount, because the survival of humanitarian ideals depended on the existence of strong socialist parties.”57 Socialists understood two separate threats to their self-­preservation. The first came 105

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from those inside their countries who might blame the general strike for a nation’s defeat in war and thus seek to dismantle socialist parties from within. On July 30, students in Freiburg, Germany, threw rocks at the of­ fices of the socialist newspaper branch for publishing an antiwar editorial from Rosa Luxembourg.58 In France, Jaurès had long been tarred as “the Prussian Jaurès” by the French extreme right for his advocacy of a rapprochement with Germany.59 The ultraconservative Charles Maurras went as far as to say that “Jaurès is Germany.”60 This vilification in­ten­si­ fied as war approached and was soon to have fatal consequences. The second threat came from an invasion by an outside army that could destroy socialism from without. Thus the Socialist International understood that the best way to avoid war was through “mass demonstrations during a period of protracted crisis so as to forestall any premature mobilization or declaration of war.” But once a war began, socialists had to rally to the defense of their nation, and therefore the International had “long abandoned any thought of action after the outbreak of a war.” The goal was to prevent war from starting, not to undermine the nation’s efforts to defend itself in a moment of life or death. 61 Only the most radical socialists advocated a general strike to shut down a war once it had begun, and even they realized the futility of the tactic as a means of stopping a con­flict already under way. The wars that socialists most often envisioned mobilizing their efforts to oppose were wars of expansion and conquest like those in Morocco. Although they often spoke of the danger of a European war, they generally believed that the Agadir and Balkan crises had awakened Europe to the danger. They also believed that their own actions had worked to prevent war and could do so again if another con­flict threatened. As we have already seen, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand caused no particular alarm among socialists. Austria’s Viktor Adler later recalled that “the vast majority of comrades . . . absolutely refused to believe in the possibility of war,” even after hearing of the delivery of the Austro-­Hungarian ultimatum. 62 As late as July 30, Jean Jaurès still believed that “this will be like Agadir. There will be highs and lows. But things must work themselves out.”63 Nevertheless, Jaurès quickly saw that the ultimatum had the potential to change the situation for the worse. On July 25, he warned that “Europe has never in forty years been in a more dangerous and a more tragic situation.” Still, he expected the crisis to last a long time, and like most Europeans, he expected that it would eventually be resolved peacefully. 106

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To ensure the localization of the war, European socialists scheduled a meeting in Brussels for July 29. By that time, Austria had already declared war on Serbia and blood had already been shed. The goal of the Brussels meeting, then, was to prevent the con­flict from spreading outside the ­Balkans. Almost all the delegates arrived in Brussels con­fi­dent that the crisis, which still had no direct impact on Britain, France, and Germany, would remain localized. Jaurès and his German counterpart Hugo Haase opened the proceedings with a public embrace, “con­fi rming by this gesture the alliance against war.”64 Only Austria’s Viktor Adler came to Belgium “convinced that it was impossible to do anything against the war.” Although he was later proven right, to most of the delegates he seemed “exaggeratedly pessimistic,” and his negativity struck the delegates as “out of place.” Adler’s own son, who was also a delegate at the meeting, thought his father had misread the situation in Europe and was unnecessarily gloomy. Delegates from all European countries argued that their governments had given them assurances of their peaceful intentions. Jaurès announced that he had personally spoken with French Prime Minister René Viviani, who had af­fi rmed that “the French government desires peace and is working for the maintenance of peace.”65 The French delegates believed that Viviani had made a promise not to declare war unless France itself were attacked. German socialist Hugo Haase had the same impression of his government, telling the delegates, “I am absolutely convinced that our government has had no part in the quarrel.”66 Governments that truly desired peace, both men assumed, would willingly agree to arbitration and thereby avoid the danger of the Austro-­Serbian con­flict’s developing into a general war that was not in the best interests of anyone. As long as Germany and France remained at peace, the chances of avoiding a catastrophe were still excellent. Nor did the delegates believe that their countries’ par­tic­i­pa­tion in international alliances committed them to war. All alliances were defensive in character and none bound a state to support an ally that acted as the aggressor. In any case, Europeans were accustomed to thinking of the ­alliances as forces for stability that “neutralize the ambitions of individual states and thereby war threats are minimized or silenced.”67 Jaurès pledged that France would not support Russia if Russia rejected arbitration and attacked Germany. Nor would the Franco-­Russian alliance bind France to support czarist aggression in the Balkans. “We know but one 107

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treaty,” he proclaimed, “the treaty that binds us to the human race.” Haase made a similar statement, announcing that “secret treaties do not pledge the proletariat.”68 The German delegates were certain that only a Russian attack on Germany could bring German workers to support war. Even then, they saw no reason to fear a war with an obviously peaceful France. 69 When pressed by German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, Haase had said before leaving for Brussels that German workers would not go to war for Austro-­Hungarian greed, but he added that the German socialists would “take no steps that might give the Russians an excuse to carry out their aggressive intentions.”70 Jaurès, Haase, and the other delegates at Brussels began their deliberations from two presumptions. First, they believed that socialists were the only people in Europe who could reach across borders to try to prevent war. As Jaurès had written in L’Humanité on July 18, the threat or use of a general strike by socialists across Europe had as its goal the substitution of arbitration for warfare. Only a mass strike in all the belligerent countries, he believed, could force the great powers to go to the negotiating table. Second, and equally im­por­tant, Jaurès knew that once war began, the socialists would lose all their power. “Once war has broken out,” he wrote, “we can take no further action.”71 Even as radical a newspaper as La Guerre Sociale noted on July 28 that “between Imperial Germany and Republican France, no hesitation, our choice is made.”72 Socialists understood that war would bring out the nationalist impulses in ev­ery­one, including the workers, and that war would also mean a vast increase in the power of governments to manipulate information, marginalize opponents, and mobilize resources. The early days of the war between Austria and Serbia showed the pattern at work. An editorial in the Vienna socialist newspaper, the Arbeiter Zeitung, on July 28 proclaimed: “Comrades! Show that our ranks do not wish to desert and that men of class warfare too can stand by the flag unto their last breath. . . . because then we shall be strong enough to create a new Austria after the war . . . a homeland of free nations and fertile ground for the liberating work of the proletariat.”73 Nevertheless, a general war was still far from the minds of the delegates at Brussels. Ukrainian delegate Angelica Balabanoff later recalled that at the end of the first day of the Brussels meeting, “even the most far­sighted had no conception of the dimension or the proximity of the catastrophe.” Belgian Emile Vandervelde agreed, noting that “optimism con108

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tinued to prevail.” Several of the delegates decided to hold an ad hoc meeting in Paris on August 9 to discuss the situation further, indicating that they felt no imminent threat of war. On the next day, July 31, one of the delegates announced that “the threat of a European war is no ­longer imminent. . . . As the situation is now developing the crisis might last days or even weeks.”74 Unaware of the critical decisions then being made in Berlin, Vienna, and St. Petersburg, the delegates had no way of knowing how quickly events were about to transpire. They still believed that the leaders of the great powers wanted peace, and they could not imagine governments risking a continental war over the fate of Serbia.75 They also believed that they had plenty of time to find a peaceful solution. Delegates began planning meetings and rallies for the middle of August. They also took comfort from reports of antiwar demonstrations in all the European cap­itals that were attracting tens of thousands of people. More than 70,000 people had attended one such rally in Berlin, giving the socialist delegates reason to believe that they spoke for the European working class.76 Socialists left Brussels on July 31 still believing that no war was imminent. They did not even discuss a common plan that they might implement in the event that hostilities began because they could not foresee such an event happening before the next regularly scheduled meeting in Vienna in late August. Jaurès praised “the heroism of patience” just before leaving Brussels.77 The key to preventing war, socialists believed, was to force arbitration through the threat of a general strike. In 1914, their great chance to force arbitration had come, but they had not had time to put their theories into place because events moved with dizzying speed. None of the Brussels delegates “suspected that a European war was imminent” even though it was just hours away. As Robert Smillie, a British miners’ ­union leader, recalled in late August, “with a speed unknown in the past his­tory of the world the war dogs were let loose, and within a few days the fiat had gone forth, and five front rank nations were at war. So rapidly did events follow each other that all the forces which usually make for peace were paralyzed.”78 Critics after the war who wondered why international socialism had failed to stop war in 1914 missed the point. Men like Jaurès had long foreseen that a war for national survival was not only permissible for socialists to fight but also just. Socialists had never questioned the right of workers to defend their homes and had never planned to resort to sabo109

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tage to prevent the state from fight­ing a jus­ti­fied war. Jaurès himself on July 31 supported France’s taking “all necessary precautions” for its self-­ defense.79 Thus socialist support for war in 1914 violated neither socialism’s genuinely felt internationalism nor its equally sincere opposition to unjust war. Support for a war of defense against autocracy and militarism was entirely consistent with de­cades of socialist thought on war. Socialist leaders understood clearly that once the guns began firing, workers would mobilize and join the ranks to defend both their po­lit­i­cal ideology and their national allegiance.

The Confusion of Late July Efforts by conservative diplomats and socialist delegates to understand, much less control, events were hamstrung by the frenetic flurry of confusing and contradictory news coming from all corners of Europe. Much of this news was inaccurate and incomplete. German newspapers on July 25 and 26, for example, all reported that the Serbians had rejected the Austro-­Hungarian ultimatum in toto. The Berlin correspondent of a Vienna newspaper told a colleague that Serbia had, in fact, accepted all but one of the ultimatum’s demands and that peace should result; nevertheless, false reporting had led to a wave of pro-­Austrian sympathy in Berlin, complete with an impromptu performance of the Austrian national anthem by a band in a local park.80 Such emotional genies were not easily put safely back into their bottles. To cite another example, on July 30 special editions of Berlin papers hit the streets at 2 p.m. announcing that the German Army was mobilizing. An hour and a half later, a new special edition appeared recalling the first and apologizing for the “gross piece of misconduct” by some unnamed source for the false alarm. Then came news the next day of the German announcement of a “state preparatory to war.” The announcement left Berlin crowds confused because no one knew what the phrase meant. The best guess of Berliners was that the statement was designed to give the government the power to prevent a run on the banks in the event of public panic. 81 Most im­por­tant, after weeks of calm, almost indifferent, news coverage of the Balkans, Europeans were suddenly flooded with news reports about events like the Austro-­Hungarian declaration of war, the partial Russian mobilization, and the socialist gathering in Brussels. Arthur Sweetser, an American reporter for the United Press in London, recalled the last days of peace as pure mayhem for journalists: “Ultimatums, mobilizations fly­ing back and forth, flashing from cap­ital to cap­ital, jam110

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ming one on top of the other over the wires, editions tumbling out as fast as the presses could turn them off, the whole world in tumult—Great God, what would be the next news ticked off?”82 Little wonder, then, that many Europeans had a dif­fi­cult time just figuring out what was happening. Wherever the news could not answer people’s questions or address their anxieties, rumors filled in the gaps. Emmanuel Bourcier was one of the many Europeans who noted that “many rumors sensational and con­flicting” flew around Paris in those days, adding to the confusion.83 One study of the European media during the crisis emphasized that after July 28 “events moved so rapidly that journalists had some dif­fi­ culty in keeping up with them.” Consequently, “their reports and comments were confused, hastily written, and often contradictory.” The reporters sensed the “hopelessness, uncertainty, confusion, and grasping at straws that were the inevitable consequences of working in the dark.” Their readers were even more confused, as were those peasants and farmers who were working in their fields at peak harvest season and thus often away from newspapers for days at a time. 84 In the French village of Nan­ teuil de Bourzac in Gironde, farmers were so focused on bringing in the harvest that they had only “a remote inkling” of the crisis as late as July 31. On that day a telegram arrived at the prefect’s of­fice inexplicably announcing the imminent requisition of cattle, horses, and motor vehicles.85 There was, however, still no order for mobilization; nor was there a declaration of war. To Berliners and other people in larger communities with better access to the news, the tenor of the crisis seemed to change with truly shocking speed. Instead of the prolonged Agadir-­like crisis that most had ­anticipated, the Balkan crisis had begun to produce news (most of it menacing) at an astonishingly fast pace. Bourcier noted that events confounded Europeans because they “followed one another with astonishing rapidity.”86 Europeans were not accustomed to diplomatic crises following such a pattern. The sudden speed of events con­trib­uted greatly to the sense of confusion, disorientation, and helplessness that many people felt as they watched a seemingly insig­nifi­cant crisis balloon into a possible continental war.

The Death of Jaurès The news got sig­nifi­cantly worse on July 31. That day Jaurès, having just returned from Brussels, tried to meet with se­nior French government of­ 111

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ficials to “find out whether France and En­gland together can’t start up negotiations again.” In the Chamber of Deputies, he tried to persuade his colleagues not to support Russian aggression and to work instead for arbitration and peace. In the early evening, however, news came that Germany had issued an ultimatum to St. Petersburg demanding that Russia stop its mobilization within twelve hours or face a German declaration of war. The Germans also issued an ultimatum to the French government to announce within eigh­teen hours whether or not France would par­tic­i­ pate in a Russo-­German war under the present circumstances. As a guarantee of French neutrality, the Germans made the outrageous demand that France surrender to Germany the powerful fortresses of Verdun and Toul, two key lynchpins in the French national defense scheme. The demand meant war. Jaurès was crushed and looked to a friend as if he had been “hit with a sledgehammer.” He knew that French leaders would have no choice but to reject the German demand and order mobilization as a means of preparing for the defense of France. Speaking of the French cabinet, he told a socialist colleague, “You know, if we were in their place, I do not know that we could do anything more to assure peace.”87 Jaurès still hoped that British mediation might give Europe a last-­second stay of execution, but he was now fully alert to the immense dangers Europe faced; nevertheless, he was not yet ready to give up hope or surrender his beliefs. Recalling Emile Zola’s famous tract from the era of the Dreyfus Affair, Jaurès proposed writing what he called a “new J’accuse” that would reveal the “ineptitude” and “militarism” across Europe that was threatening the peace. Having that day failed to persuade the French ministers to keep up the struggle for arbitration, he hoped to appeal directly to the peace-­loving people of France “to turn the tide of his­tory” before it was too late.88 He and a small group of fellow journalists from L’Humanité went to a crowded café near their of­fices (and adjacent to the building where Zola had written “J’accuse”) to dine and plot strategy for that night’s work. Jaurès sat with his back to an open window facing the street on a hot, humid night. Shortly after he fin­ished his meal, a “half-­witted fanatic driven to action” by the antisocialist attacks from the right-­wing press fired two shots into Jaurès.89 The great hero of French socialism and one of the most respected politicians in Europe slumped to his left and died before medical help could reach him. The news spread across Paris and then across Europe like wildfire. The assassination of Jaurès was an infinitely more stunning and sadden112

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ing event than the assassination of Franz Ferdinand had been just over a month earlier. Anatole France wrote upon hearing the news, “My heart is breaking. . . . My grief is smothering me.”90 Even Jaurès’s po­lit­i­cal foes, most of whom nevertheless respected him, grieved. French nationalist Maurice Barrès and President Raymond Poincaré, both of whom disagreed strongly with Jaurès on po­lit­i­cal issues, sent letters of condolence to L’Humanité for publication and also wrote privately to Jaurès’s widow. Poincaré called the assassination “an abominable and stupid crime.”91 Pacifists then and later depicted Jaurès as the last hope for peace in a world sinking toward war. Margaret Pease, one of Jaurès’s En­glish admirers, wrote in 1916, “There were thousands all over Europe who knew that Jaurès was the leader who might have shown the way through the dark mazes in which we are now wandering.” She saw Jaurès as the first casualty of the Great War, writing, “He fell first.”92 Similarly, a French trade ­unionist said that the assassination had deprived Europe of “this far-­sighted genius” at the very moment the continent most needed him. En­glishwoman Lady Ottoline Morrell called him “the only man in Europe who could have headed a strong Peace Party.”93 But had he lived, it is by no means evident that Jaurès would have ­ opposed French entry into the war. Believing that France had done all it could to prevent war, and believing that socialism was mortally threatened by Prussian militarism, Jaurès would likely have rallied socialists to defend the sacred soil of France. At Jaurès’s funeral, Léon Jouhaux, the leader of the Confédération générale du travail, France’s largest trade ­union, told mourners, “Jaurès even now tells us to do our duty—to go on  the fields of battle with the ardent wish of repelling the aggressor, ­carrying in our hearts not the hatred of men but of imperialism which wished to oppress us.”94 From the other end of the po­lit­i­cal spectrum, Poincaré wrote that Jaurès “had helped the government in its diplomacy and, if war breaks out, he would have been among those who would have known how to do their duty.”95 The death of Jaurès quickly struck Europeans in all nations and of all po­lit­i­cal persuasions as an ominous sign for the future. Marc Bloch recalled that he did not fi­nally become convinced of the inevitability of war until he heard of Jaurès’s death.96 Stefan Zweig, still vacationing in Ostend, noted that the assassination convinced people ev­erywhere that war was inevitable. The news was like “an icy wind of fear” blowing over the beach. The hotels rapidly emptied, the trains filled up, and “even the most optimistic began to pack their bags with speed.” Zweig himself left Os113

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tend for Vienna, although he later recalled that no one thought for even a second that a German invasion of Belgium was possible.97 For some, Jaurès’s assassination symbolized the moment when senseless violence pushed aside the last vestiges of reason and rationality. Even though the events that would lead Europe to war had already occurred and there would have been little Jaurès could have done to stop them, he has come to stand for the hopes of millions of people in all nations for peace. But at the time, the most im­por­tant ramification of Jaurès’s assassination lay in the responses of the French left. Rather than blame the French right for its vitriolic prewar attacks against Jaurès, the left announced that the assassination would not change the support of socialists for a war to defend France. Even the radical syndicalist Gustave Hervé, who had once claimed that the French flag was fit only to be planted on a dunghill, exclaimed, “They have assassinated Jaurès, we shall not assassinate France.”98 His words helped to calm fears that a fracture in the French polity might leave France weakened in its hour of peril. By supporting France and its war efforts, Hervé and others on the moderate left were not betraying deeply held beliefs; nor were they swept up in a wave of blind nationalism. By pledging not to “assassinate France,” they were promising to abide by Jaurès’s vision and honor his legacy. The defense of France, they believed, was just not only on nationalist grounds but on humanitarian grounds as well. In July 1914 more than ever, the world needed the ideals of French humanism and socialism, the very same ideals that they believed the kaiser’s armies wanted to destroy. Under these circumstances, war remained a horrid reminder of the failures of the European po­lit­i­cal system, but it was preferable to giving in to a Europe dominated by militarism and autocracy. Jaurès, as much as anyone, would have understood and supported the logic.

Drifting Closer toward War The only way fully to understand the behavior of Europeans in the last few days of peace is to comprehend both the speed of events and the universal belief in all countries that their war was a justifiable, defensive struggle against an aggressive enemy. When at last it became evident that war was inevitable, most Europeans greeted it with a sense of resignation and determination rather than enthusiasm. The rapidity with which events developed played a large role in the sense of confusion and disorientation that characterized the last few days of peace. Wilfrid Scawen 114

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Blunt, who until the last minute believed Britain would stay out of the war, noted on August 5 that “the thing has been decided faster than we imagined,” and Mary King Waddington wrote in her diary that “this iniquitous war had come so suddenly that we are all bewildered.”99 Even though they were physically closer to these major events, the French were just as surprised by them. Paul Valéry left for a vacation in Spain on July 29 without even thinking to bring along the military papers he would need in case of mobilization.100 From his home in Nîmes in southern France, Alexis Callies noted that as late as August 2, people who believed that events would work themselves out were still in the majority; his best friend was among those who, even at that late date (when German armies were already entering Belgium and had in fact already killed a French soldier), believed that war would not result.101 Across France in Brittany, Claire de Pratz made the same observation, noting that a majority of people there on August 1 did not think that war would break out.102 In Berlin on the same day Wilhelm von Stumm, the head of the po­lit­i­cal section of the foreign ministry, told a friend that “we may still come through without war.”103 Optimism and the hope for peace died hard. People in Britain, those Europeans most distant from the con­flict, had the hardest time awakening to the threat of war. On August 2, H. G. Wells still found it “impossible” to think in terms of a major con­flict between Britain and Germany. Later in his autobiographical book Mr. Britling Sees It Through, Wells had his narrator describe his feelings just before the outbreak of the war: “They may fight in the Balkans still; in many ways the Balkan states are in the very rear of civilization, but to imagine decent countries like this or Germany going to bloodshed!”104 Also on August 2, a reverend in Torquay told his congregation, “A week ago, little did we imagine the calamities which have come so suddenly upon the continent of Europe.”105 Punch noted in early August: “Four weeks ago we stood on the verge of the great upheaval and knew it not. We were thinking of holidays; of cricket and golf and bathing, and then we were suddenly plunged in the deep waters of the greatest of all Wars.”106 Another Briton who was in fact playing cricket when he heard that war had begun could not believe that “all this was really happening.” “It had come so suddenly,” he noted, that “the whole thing had seemed too fantastic to be taken seriously.”107 Optimists continued to take heart from the hopeful proclamations of  politicians. On August 2, French President Raymond Poincaré an115

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nounced that France would mobilize its armies, but he sounded a calm and positive tone. “Mobilization is not war,” he proclaimed. “In the present circumstances, it seems, to the contrary, as the best means to assure peace with honor.”108 From her vacation locale in Brittany Claire de Pratz heard people expressing the same thoughts, with one person telling her, “There have been instances when a country has mobilized its troops merely as a threat.”109 The cricket player cited above similarly thought as late as August 1 that “the crisis was just a crisis” and that the lack of more ominous news in the morning papers “might mean that the worst was already over.”110 Europeans also knew that Wilhelm II and Nicholas II were exchanging friendly telegrams.111 The correspondence between the two cousins and monarchs reinforced the image both men still enjoyed as supporters  of peace. Ten telegrams crossed paths from Potsdam to St. Petersburg  from July 29 to August 1. The telegrams included language that probably sounded like diplomatic double speak to insiders, but it reassured most Europeans. Disagreements notwithstanding, the telegrams talked of “conciliatory and friendly” exchanges. On July 29, Nicholas suggested turning the “Austro-­Serbian prob­lem” over to the Hague for mediation, exactly the outcome for which most Europeans had hoped. On the next day Nicholas praised Wilhelm’s role of “mediator, which I greatly value.”112 Even if Europeans did not know the full texts of the telegrams, their very existence seemed to suggest that the system might still work because the monarchs still sought peace. After news of the telegram exchange was made public on July 29, the London Times praised the “pa­ cific leanings” of both monarchs, and on August 1, the Pall Mall Gazette argued that “the Emperor William and his advisers have labored for peace.” The notion of the kaiser and his cousin as deserving to be counted “among the peacemakers” (in the words of the Daily Express) endured until the outbreak of war.113 As late as August 4, rumors spread through Paris that the kaiser was “demoralized [and] shut up in his palace” because he had been unable to prevent a war that he had resisted with all his might.114 There were even still some optimistic signs in the daily newspapers.115 The London Times, which had begun to adopt an interventionist stance, argued on July 31 that “murders, ultimatums, and mobilizations [are] not war.” As late as August 3, by which time the machinery of war was well past the moment when it might yet have been stopped, the Times Paris correspondent felt that in the French cap­ital people still held out the hope that war might be avoided, especially if Britain “makes some decla116

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ration similar to that made by Mr. Lloyd George at the Mansion House during the Agadir crisis.”116 As proof that the reporter may have read the mood of the city accurately, André Gide noted in his journal on the same day the rumor that the German ambassador was still in Paris and that therefore there would be no war between the two countries because the lines of communication were still open.117 Belief that reason must win out in the end also died hard. Pastor Otto Ocker, living near Hanover, recalled “that none of us seriously thought a general war would happen because none of us thought any world power capable of taking on such a responsibility.”118 As it had before, Ocker believed that the system would find a way to step back from the brink just in time. French soldier Marcel Riegel shared Ocker’s optimism, believing that “the diplomats would take care of ev­ery­thing,” and holding on to that belief until the moment he heard of Germany’s declaration of war against France. Then he forced himself to face “the great duty” and “primordial reason for soldiers to exist,” namely, “to defend our homeland . . . against an enemy who wants to invade our territory.”119

A Cruel Test Once these fading hopes were dashed and war began, people in all the great powers stood ready to face it clear in the knowledge that their own governments had done all they reasonably could to avoid the con­flict. Believing that they had been forced into war, they con­fi­dently entered into it with a firm belief in its righ­teous­ness. The nationalist French daily La Presse argued on August 1 that “no one in France has desired war,” but given that, in the newspaper’s view, Germany had forced war on France, “it will be accepted as a cruel test.” The more left-­leaning Aurore noted the next morning that “war has begun; it is not our fault; our conscience is clear.”120 To cite one further example, a newly called-­up French soldier told a British journalist, “We have not nursed the spirit of revenge, God knows. We have worked for peace and lived for peace and hoped for peace. But fate has willed. . . . [that] we must strike.”121 Nor were sentiments any more aggressive in Germany. Ludwig Quidde tried to assure his French comrades that “no one in Germany wanted or  expected war with France,” but that Russia had forced Germany’s hand.122 Karl Alexander von Müller agreed, recalling, “The feelings of the whole German population at the outbreak of this World War .  .  . [were] deeply and honestly dominated by the necessity to fight, against their will, a defensive war, a forced war against enormously superior en117

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emies.”123 The centrist Deutsche Zeitung made a similar case, arguing that “we must not concede our powerful neighbor [meaning Russia, not France] the advantage of even one second. Further hesitation means national di­sas­ter.”124 A newspaper in Cologne reassured its readers that Germany could go to war with a clean conscience because “the Russians brought on the war.”125 Werner Beumelburg blamed France, recalling in his memoirs (whether out of ignorance or out of the general confusion of those chaotic days) that French mobilization had preceded German mobilization and that therefore France had forced Germany into war.126 Thus even in Germany and Austria, whose governments had carefully planned and plotted the war, people believed firmly in the defensive nature of their effort. The Berlin Zeitung put the onus on France, writing on July 31, “There is still time for France to change her mind, but in a few hours it will be too late.”127 The Kölnische Zeitung told its readers that both France and Russia had invaded Germany first.128 Other German papers reported that France had invaded Belgium, that France had bombarded Nuremberg, and that French aviators had killed eigh­teen people during a raid on a hospital in Mulhouse.129 In Vienna, newspapers argued that “Russia calls forth the European war. . . . unhindered by scruples or notions of culture” in order to “impose its will on humanity.” The Neue Freie Presse was more dramatic, recalling Vienna’s defense of Christendom against the Turks in 1683: “European civilization [was defended] on the walls of this city. At that point, such was our historic fate, and so it is again.”130 The willingness of Germans in particular to accept this version of events emanated partly from a long-­standing awareness of German of­fi­ cials of the need of “so formulating the casus belli that the nation will take up arms enthusiastically and with one accord.” Building on “very real” German fears of czarism and Slavic hordes became a central element in the German government’s prewar plans to prepare the German people for war.131 While France was “a minor menace” in the minds of most Germans, hatred of “bloody czarism” was common to all po­lit­i­cal parties in Germany and became the cornerstone of all national defense plans.132 In the eyes of many Germans, France’s greatest crime was not its desire to recover Alsace-­Lorraine but its alliance with a reactionary and degenerate regime. Thus in the eyes of many Germans, France was an enemy by virtue of its choice to ally itself with Russia, making a war against France justifiable as well. In En­gland, similar attitudes of fight­ing a war of necessity prevailed. The Times editorial on August 2 read, “Nobody wanted war; [but] no118

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body would shirk from war if the continental position demanded it.”133 The rector of St. Ann’s, Reverend David Dorrity, told his pa­rish­ioners on the last Sunday before the war to “fight if you must, not until you must.” Like many Europeans, he was committed to doing all he could to avoid war. Once war began, however, and he was convinced of his country’s innocence in its beginning, he was prepared to do all he could to see it to a successful end. Socialist and pacifist Hannah Webster Mitchell recalled a wave of antiwar protest meetings in her native Manchester in the days before the war began. Nevertheless, once the war started those same protestors were “on the recruiting platform before the week was out.” Even Mitchell herself, who urged her son not to join the army (unless it was in a medical unit), was caught up in the spirit and began to write encouraging letters to soldiers shipping off to the front.134 This “war enthusiasm” should be read not as a pent-­up desire among the people of Europe for war but as the determination of people to fight a foe that would not respond in kind to what they believed were the sincere efforts of their own nation to work for peace. Thus the observation of the Manchester Guardian’s Berlin correspondent that “Germany is really drifting into war against her will” could well stand for an entire continent that was going to a war its people firmly believed they had no role in starting.135 Thus no matter where one lived, the response was the same. People went to war believing that their government had no choice but to fight a war of self-­defense. Jane Michaux in Paris noted that war would cause “violent anguish” but believed that France had no choice but to fight because otherwise “there will be nothing left of France.”136 Georges Cle­ menceau, in his newspaper L’Homme Libre, noted that “it is clear we are fight­ing for the very existence of our country. That is the situation we now face.”137 In strikingly similar terms, a German of­fi­cer described the outbreak of war as “a bad dream” but dedicated himself to fight­ing it because “now it was a question of bare survival.” A Berlin daily wrote, “It’s a matter of our entire future, our national existence. Germany cannot and must not perish, for with it would perish the light of the world and the bulwark of righ­teous­ness.”138 Similarly, Sebastian Haffner understood the war as starting because “the French think only of vengeance, the En­glish envy our commerce and the Russians are barbarians.”139 In all cases, people faced war with, in the words of one soldier, “the conscience of being right” because they believed that someone else was responsible for its outbreak.140 Notions that the war was happening without anyone really being re119

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sponsible for it were common, as expressed by Charles Repington, who wrote that “war had been expected for so long, and so many crises had been successfully overcome by diplomacy, that it came in the end like a thief in the night, quite unexpectedly.”141 The kaiser, himself one of the people most responsible for the diplomatic bungling that had led to war, carefully used the passive voice when telling his subjects late on the evening of July 31 that “the sword is being pressed into our hand,” although he reassured Germans that he expected the government to “succeed at the last moment to bring [our] enemies to reason.”142 Indeed, the passive voice was a common linguistic way to assign blame for the war to other, often ambiguous forces. King Wilhelm of Württemberg told his people that “we have been forced to take up arms to protect our honor. We have tried very hard to keep the peace,” and King Ludwig of Bavaria similarly announced that “our neighbors have ruined all efforts to preserve our peace. . . . we have been forced to take up the sword in our hands.”143 Mary King Waddington also reported a French woman telling her, “This wicked war has been so forced upon us that we must win.”144 Exactly what this new war might bring or what it all might mean ­remained a matter of great uncertainty. The Times noted that even several days into the war, people in Britain remained “confused,” an understandable response given the rapidity of events and the tangential nature of the Balkans to the daily lives of most Europeans.145 Several people, however, had seen the rise of national passions since the ultimatum’s delivery and had noted the advancement of modern weaponry over the previous de­cade. They were far from optimistic about what was to come if the two forces came together. On July 30 Mildred Aldrich wrote, “It will be the bloodiest affair the world has ever seen—a war in the air, a war under the sea as well as on it, and carried out with the most effective man-­slaughtering machines ever used in battle.”146 On July 31, Vorwärts warned of a war that would “turn all of Europe into a massive battlefield, a vast hospital, bringing death and destruction to millions, massive unemployment, hunger, sickness, and misery.”147 The same day André Gide confided to his journal his fears that Europe was “getting ready to enter a tunnel full of blood and darkness.”148 Rudyard Kipling was less poetic yet no less fearful for the future. His diary entry for August 4 read, “Incidentally, Armageddon begins.”149

120

Franz Ferdinand with his children. Most Europeans outside of po­lit­i­cal and diplomatic circles knew little of the archduke’s po­lit­i­cal views. If they knew him at all, it was as a royal who had married for love and was a dedicated family man (Library of Congress).

Child refugees from the Balkan Wars highlighted the cruelty of modern war, but most contemporaries outside the Balkans preferred to take the good news that the European diplomatic system had prevented the con­fl ict from spreading (Library of Congress).

Carnage from the Balkan Wars at the Battle of Adrianople. Before 1914, many Europeans assumed that such bloodshed, while common in uncivilized places like the Balkans, would never occur between developed states like Britain, France, and Germany (Library of Congress).

A suffragette under arrest in London in 1913. Domestic issues like the suffragette campaign occupied far more media attention in the years before the war than did diplomatic and military matters (Library of Congress).

French President Raymond Poincaré was a native of the “lost province” of Lorraine and a favorite of conservatives. Nevertheless, he did not seek the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine by means of force; nor he did want war in 1914 (Library of Congress).

Kaiser Wilhelm (third from left) and his sons. Crown Prince Wilhelm, to the kaiser’s right, is wearing the death’s head shako. He was far more aggressive and militaristic than his father, who often told people to enjoy the peace of his reign while it lasted (author’s collection).

Archduke Karl became the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne after the death of Franz Ferdinand. Politically connected people in Europe saw Karl as a calmer, more moderate presence than Franz Ferdinand and hoped he would give the Balkans a greater chance at peace (American Review of Reviews, August 1914).

British Prime Minister H. H. Asquith’s Liberal Party was generally opposed to British intervention in the European crisis until Germany’s invasion of Belgium. Like most Britons, Asquith had initially seen little connection between his country and an Austro-Serbian con­fl ict (Library of Congress).

French diplomat Jules Cambon worked to end diplomatic tensions with Germany as his brother had successfully done with Britain. He was among the many se­nior European diplomats who saw no reason for a European war (Library of Congress).

Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph was the long­est-serving monarch in Europe. His reign had been characterized by years of peace, and most Europeans believed that he would not want to end his time on the throne with a war (Library of Congress).

Jean Jaurès, a French socialist deputy who garnered tremendous respect among working- and middle-class people across Europe. His assassination was far more shocking and troubling than that of Franz Ferdinand had been (Library of Congress).

Londoners gather near Downing Street to get the latest news. Media reports from the time often depicted such crowds as enthusiastic for war, but letters and memoirs paint a different picture (Library of Congress).

A run on a Berlin bank at the outset of the war. To prevent a fi­nan­cial collapse, banks limited the amount of money customers could withdraw and often stopped personal loans, causing tremendous anxiety among already confused people (Library of Congress).

German socialist and ­Reichstag member Hugo Haase tried to or­ga­nize ­opposition to the vote for war credits in 1914. When the Russians mobilized their armies, however, he reluctantly changed his mind and voted in favor of the credits (Library of Congress).

Buglers in Belgium announce the start of war. In an era before radio and television, communities learned about mobilization from church bells, buglers, even flags (American Review of Reviews, September 1914).

The aggressive German war plan required the invasion of neutral Belgium and Luxembourg. It also required the invasion of France, even if the cause of the war had little or nothing to do with that country (U.S. Army Center of Military ­H istory).

This poster urges East Prussians to defend their homes against the Russians. While atrocity stories in French and British news­papers focused on German crimes in Belgium, German news­papers featured equally lurid stories of Russian crimes in the east (Library of Congress).

“The Only Road for an En­glishman.” Germany’s invasion of Belgium changed British attitudes overnight and made British par­tic­i­pa­tion in the war inevitable. The Germans badly misjudged the importance of British belligerence when making their war plans (Library of Congress).

Germany’s pillaging of Louvain became shorthand in the British media for all of Germany’s war crimes. British troops briefly reoccupied the town, allowing them to amass photographic evidence of the destruction (Library of Congress).

One of the most famous posters of the war, this one urges ­A mericans to buy war bonds by showing a German soldier dragging away a young girl while ­B elgium burns in the background, proving how powerful images and ideas of 1914 ­remained throughout the war (Library of Congress).

“War is the national industry of Prussia.” This drawing ties a 1788 quotation to alleged German plans for European domination. A quotation from General Pétain at the bottom underscores the essentially defensive nature of the French war (Library of Congress).

Drawing depicting a scene from the of­fi­cial Belgian report of the atrocities in ­ ouvain. Atrocity tales like these fanned the flames of anger in all the belligerL ent countries (Library of Congress).

Catholic churches became a prominent target of German soldiers, who were often told that priests and nuns were poisoning water supplies and mutilating ­G erman dead and wounded (Library of Congress).

Parisians examine a model trench dug to protect the city from the oncoming Germans. Expecting to fight in Alsace or Germany, the French government had made few serious provisions for defending the cap­ital (author’s collection).

Refugees from Belgium and northern France brought with them horrific stories of their experiences. Tales of atrocities spread like wildfire, often with sig­nifi­cant embellishment along the way (Library of Congress).

“A Quick Change of Front.” The dizzying speed of events forced changes to daily life that few could have anticipated. In this cartoon a perfectly innocuous German delicatessen undergoes a radical transformation so as not to be seen as an enemy institution (Punch, August 19, 1914).

A Québécois recruitment poster using the destruction of Reims to appeal to potential soldiers. Recruitment in French-Canadian areas proved to be far weaker than Canadian of­fi­cials anticipated (Library of Congress).

One British method for increasing enlistment involved allowing men to sign up with their pals and remain with them for the duration of the war. As a result, most British battalions raised in 1914 had a distinctly local or occupational characteristic (Library of Congress).

Because of the intense censorship and virtual ban on combat zone photographs, cartoonish images, like this one showing the first German battle flag taken by French soldiers, were all that many readers had to understand the nature of combat (Library of Congress).

German soldiers in Brussels. Germany quickly reordered Belgian society, even changing the time to German time. In this picture only soldiers are allowed on the street; city residents must remain on the sidewalks (American Review of Reviews, December 1914).

The war impacted children as well, although this cartoon is mainly lampooning the wave of spy mania that gripped Europe in the war’s opening weeks, placing innocent people under suspicion that often led to incarceration (Punch, October 21, 1914).

Russian prisoners of war following the capture of the fortress of Przemysl. None of the combatants was prepared for the enormous numbers of prisoners who fell into their hands (Library of Congress).

German soldiers in their trenches in the first winter of the war. Soldiers serving in these trenches knew that the war would not end as quickly as many civilians and se­nior military of­fi­cers predicted (Library of Congress).

“La Petite Guerre” equates a children’s snowball fight with the war on the western front in the first winter. Although this cartoon does not indicate it, thousands of children spent Christmas as orphans (Library of Congress).

German soldiers in the Argonne forest in the war’s first winter. Most Germans expected to be in Paris by the first winter, but instead they found themselves fight­ing a two-front war with no end in sight (Library of Congress).

This British poster appeared after German warships shelled several undefended coastal cities shortly before Christmas. Note the little girl with her doll in front of what one presumes was once her home. Incidents like these raids made hatred of the enemy less abstract (Library of Congress).

5 THE COMIN G O F A G R E AT S TOR M

News of mobilization orders and declarations of war arrived in communities across Europe with a furious flurry in the first days of August. Given the speed and suddenness with which the Balkan crisis had developed into a general continental con­flict, Europeans understandably received the news of war with a great deal of surprise and confusion. The reactions of Europeans to the outbreak of war, like the reactions to the ­assassination of Franz Ferdinand and the delivery of the Austro-­ Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia, show remarkable similarities across national borders. Although the enemy changed from country to country, the responses were largely the same. For most Europeans, the dominant emotions were fear, dread, and a terrible sense of uncertainty. Until the last minute, Europeans continued to hope that war would still somehow be avoided. A report from Charente in southwest France noted, “Even though the news in the last days of July was alarming, the peaceful population of the countryside did not believe in war; it is with a real stupor that the order of mobilization was received.”1 Another European, living near what was soon to become the western front, read the news in disbelief: War is declared! Up to the last minute I would not believe it. Is such a thing possible in this century? Even these last few days I felt perfectly con­fi­dent—we have been on the verge of war so many times before this, but the danger has always been averted by means of diplomatic parleys. I thought that in our day and generation disputes were settled in that way, without bloodshed, as a matter of course.2 One French soldier who had just begun his military ser­vice remained unconvinced that even the news of mobilization might be a signal that war 121

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was approaching. He told a friend that he “could not really believe that the statesmen of Europe would allow war to happen” over so minor a cause. He was so convinced that peace would win out that he pledged to buy three bottles of champagne for each of his friends “if the regiment so much as left its barracks.”3 Most Europeans had dif­fi­culty adjusting to the idea of a general war sparked by an issue as insig­nifi­cant as the Balkans. Just a year earlier, H. G. Wells had predicted a world war, although he expected it to begin in the 1950s. He nevertheless thought as late as August 2 that it was “impossible that the two countries [En­gland and Germany] would be involved in a major con­flict with each other.” His frequent predictions of war notwithstanding, he was stunned when the war ac­tually started: “I will confess I was taken by surprise by the Great War yet I saw long ahead how it would happen. . . . I let my imagination play about it, but at the bottom of my heart I could not feel it would really be let happen.”4 German soldier Herbert Sulzbach was just as surprised, confiding to his diary, “That word ‘mobilize’ it’s weird, you can’t grasp what it means.”5 Another German soldier stationed in Alsace noted that the men in his barracks were “struck deaf and dumb” when their sergeant announced the news of war. “War? Where? Against whom?”6 Over the border in France, Claire de Pratz spoke for millions across Europe when she remarked, “Few of us indeed were ready for this sudden upheaval of our own souls, for few of us had perceived what was about to happen.”7 Struck by the sudden and still unexpected news of war, Europeans commonly likened the outbreak of hostilities to a natural di­sas­ter. In France, Jules Isaac, still in a state of disbelief that Europe was ac­tually going to war, wrote that war “seems to fall upon the world like an avalanche,” an image also used by an En­glishman on the same day.8 Emmanuel Bourcier and Léonie Godfroy both referred to a “thunderclap” that augured a dangerous and unpredictable storm; German pastor Otto Ocker wrote of a “bolt of lightning in a cloudless sky”; and Elisabeth Marbury, an American living in France, spoke of “a great storm.”9 Marbury’s fellow expatriate Edith Wharton used the natural di­sas­ter analogy three times, calling the outbreak of war “a monstrous landslide” that “had fallen across the path of an orderly laborious nation, disrupting its routine, annihilating its industry, rending families apart, and burying under a heap of senseless ruin the patiently and painfully wrought machinery of civilization.” She also compared the announcement of war to a “maelstrom” and a flood that caused “a sudden rupture of a dyke.”10 Eric 122

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Fisher Wood, then living in Paris as a student at the École des Beaux Arts, described a sudden storm that created a “vortex of rushing events” from which no one was safe.11 These images of natural di­sas­ter were common throughout Europe. In Russia Sergei Sazonov invoked the image of a “terrible storm” disrupting the calm European skies, and Evelyn Blücher wrote of a “thunderstorm which has broken so suddenly.”12 Vera Brittain also thought of the start of the war as a “quite unexpected” storm, and her fellow Briton James Lawson wrote about “a bolt from the blue.”13 Similarly, Johan Wilhelm von Löwenell Brandenburg-­Hohenzollern thought the news of war was “like a peal of thunder” and a “flash of lightning” that came with little warning.14 From the relative safety of neutral Holland Henry Van Dyke described a “tempest.”15 In Munich, Franz Schoenberner drew an analogy to an earthquake from which it was impossible to escape.16 Echoing Isaac’s imagery from France, the Vossiche Zeitung called the outbreak of war an “avalanche that could not be halted.” Arthur Ruhl, an American then in Belgium, and Frank Laird, a soldier with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, also conjured up images of avalanches.17 Other writers spoke of “tormented forms of threatening clouds,” “a terrible war cloud,” a “volcano on which we have slumbered for years,” and a “storm” that would sweep away all “existing landmarks.”18 Analogies to natural di­sas­ter were so frequent and so widely shared that they suggest a common European way of comprehending the catastrophe that had befallen the continent. Like a natural di­sas­ter, the war had struck quickly, threatened to leave an unpredictable swath of destruction in its path, and left people helpless before events much bigger than themselves. Also like a natural di­sas­ter, the start of war had overwhelmed the ability of people and communities to cope on both a material and a psychological level. Perhaps most im­por­tant, un­der­stand­ing the war as a natural di­sas­ter left its exact causes ambiguous; just as no one was really to blame for a flash of lightning that set a dry forest on fire, no one (at least no one in one’s own community) was to blame for Europe’s going to war. As in a natural di­sas­ter, the best one could do was to prepare, help one’s neighbors, and deal with the deadly aftermath. Like a flood or a disastrous storm, war was not to be welcomed but endured. In an age before mass communications, people learned of the mobilization orders and declarations of war in a wide va­ri­ety of ways. In large cities, newspapers, posters hurriedly pasted on walls, and word of mouth were the most common methods. Eric Fisher Wood read the news in the 123

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Paris dailies just as his shipment of American newspapers arrived from the other side of the Atlantic. The contrast in tone between the two was striking: One realizes just how quickly [war] has come when in the American mail yesterday morning a copy of the New York Times dated only ten days ago devoted just a column and a quarter to the subject of possible friction between Austria and Serbia. When that newspaper left New York the whole world was at peace, but while it was crossing the ocean war has overwhelmed all of Europe.19 In the countryside, however, such methods of spreading critical information were too slow. Most commonly, the news of mobilization or war was announced by the tolling of church bells that called people to town squares. In many towns, the bells rang out a preplanned tocsin indicating momentous news. In others, the bells rang as quickly as the bell ringer could pull the cords. In the town of Granon in the French Alps, Emilie Carles heard the bells tolling an unfamiliar pattern and “wondered why they were ringing like that.” When a gendarme explained to the assembled crowd that the bells were announcing mobilization and war, she noted that the people in her town were “totally unprepared to hear the news.”20 Cardinal Alfred Baudrillart heard the bells in a village near Evreux and assumed that they signaled a baptism or death about which he had been uninformed.21 Elisabeth Marbury was in nearby Savoie when she heard the bells tolling in a pattern that the locals had not heard since 1870. They told her that the tocsin meant a “cry to arms.”22 Henriette Cuvru-­Magot heard bells as well and poetically likened them to “a funeral knell that strikes terror into ev­ery mother’s heart. The great grief that has stricken the earth is borne from village to village on the church bells like a single long sob.”23 French corporal Albert Cottereau, living in Normandy, noted that the sound of the tocsin “agonized” his home town.24 In the small French village of Vatilieu, two police cars drove into the town square; the policemen called for the bell ringer and told him to sound the tocsin. Workers and peasants came into the square puzzled by the seeming sense of urgency. A local teacher described the scene: Nobody spoke for a long while. Some were out of breath, others dumb with shock. Many still carried their pitchforks in their hands. “What can it mean? What is going to happen to us?” asked 124

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the ­women. Wives, children, husbands, all were overcome by anguish and emotion. The wives clung to the arms of their husbands. The children, seeing their mothers weeping, started to cry too. All  around us was alarm and consternation. What a disturbing scene.25 In Beaurepaire, another teacher noted that the sad sound of the bells turned the mood in town to that at a funeral: “Our small town appeared to be in mourning.”26 Frederic Hamilton sounded a similar note from the town in Normandy where he heard the tocsin “sounding like the knell of hope,” and in Picardy, Marquise de Foucault thought the bells sounded “solemn and melancholy.”27 Mildred Aldrich lived in a rural area near the Marne River far from church bells. She learned of the order for mobilization on the morning of August 1, when “the garde champêtre,—who is the only thing in the way of a policeman we have—marched up the road beating a drum. At ev­ery crossroad he stopped and read an order.”28 On the Breton coastline, news of critical importance to the community was signaled by the hoisting of flags near the shore so that fishermen at sea could read them from binoculars and know how to respond. Mobilization meant the hoisting of three flags, in this case two red and one yellow. The exact order of the flags signaled which ships should come to port immediately and which should stay at sea to continue to fish. Claire de Pratz saw the flags, knew what they portended for this quiet village, and could see in their colors only “Blood, Fire, Blood!” The thought that war was imminent struck the community “like the blow which stuns one when, after having watched long beside the deathbed of a beloved friend, Death at last arrives.”29 Funereal images, like images of natural di­sas­ter, were common reactions to the news of war. The citizens of Freiburg, Germany, might have had reason to suspect ominous events when banks stopped lending money and many shops stopped taking paper money on July 30. The next day brought rumors of war and an “oppressive anxiety” to the town. Definite news of war fi­ nally arrived at 6 p.m. on August 1, when a policeman and a man blaring a trumpet drove through town squares. Local of­fi­cials arranged a parade to the local victory monument, but the mood in the town remained more serious than joyous as people tried to discern the consequences of the news for their families and their community. 30 Marc Bloch was vacationing in Switzerland and saw no reason to return to France even after learn125

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ing of Austria-­Hungary’s declaration of war against Serbia. On July 30, however, came news that Swiss reservists were being called up to guard against the possibility that one of the great powers might violate Swiss neutrality. Only then did Bloch and his family hurry back to Paris. They arrived at the Gare de Lyon and soon learned the shocking news of the assassination of Bloch’s “idol,” Jean Jaurès. 31 For military professionals the orders to mobilize came with much less shock. One Russian of­fi­cer knew that “my going to war sooner or later was expected: this was what I had been trained for; there was nothing extraordinary about it.” His memoirs make no mention at all of the causes of the war; to him, war was merely a test of his, and his unit’s, professional acumen. Whom he was to fight and where he was to go remained unclear. He only learned that mobilization had ac­tually turned into war when he read a poster in a town he and his men passed through on their way to a still undetermined location. 32 German sailor Richard Stumpf was surprised to hear of the mobilization order on August 1, but he was not disappointed. That morning, he had arrived with his ship in Wilhelmshaven to find that “no one any ­longer believed that there would be a war.” Full of youthful exuberance, he returned to his ship frustrated, thinking, “all this excitement for nothing.” At 5:30 p.m., however, he heard an of­fi­cer read the order to mobilize for a war against Russia. Stumpf was crestfallen, noting that “a war with Russia will not give our navy much to do. This is not a worthy opponent for us.” The Russians, he believed, were an “apathetic, stupid mob who do as they are commanded.”33 Rumors that Britain had also declared war on Germany soon followed, lifting Stumpf’s spirits. Britain, he thought, had always felt “jealousy over our economic prog­ress” and had “stabbed us in the back with premeditation” while German eyes were fixated on the threat from the east. In doing so, he believed, the British had turned their backs on the links of race and culture that bound Germany and Britain together, choosing instead the “pursuit of Mammon that has deprived that nation of its senses.” Instead of depressing Stumpf and his comrades at the thought of a ­longer, deadlier war, Britain’s declaration underscored in their minds the righ­teous­ness of their cause. Britain’s support of France and Russia seemed to prove the contention of German nationalists that the nation’s enemies had truly conspired to encircle and strangle Germany. Germany’s war seemed to Stumpf defensive and, therefore, jus­ tified. 126

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At the professional level, Stumpf’s captain and of­fi­cers were much more enlivened by the prospect of war with Britain, both because the Royal Navy was the enemy for whom they had trained and because of their hatred for such a “false and treacherous” foe. “We shall show them what it means to attack us,” announced the captain, underscoring his essentially defensive un­der­stand­ing of Germany’s position. There was no mention aboard the ship of the German invasion of Belgium, although there were (unfounded) rumors of British air raids along the German coastline that further reinforced the image of Britain’s making premeditated attacks against Germany. 34 Stumpf and his comrades thus went to war believing more than ever in the righ­teous­ness of Germany’s cause. A German foreign of­fice of­fi­cial made a similar argument to an En­ glishman he had known for thirteen years just before the latter left the country for Holland. The British, he claimed, had committed “race treason” in declaring war: “Never as long as they live, will Germans forgive the perfidy of the British government in betraying the common blood in favor of uncivilized pan-­Slavism. It is the most criminal faithlessness in the world’s his­tory, this taking advantage of our dif­fi­culties to vent long pent-­up spite against the German commercial rival.” The of­fi­cial did not once mention the German invasion of Belgium, nor did any of the German news reports on the British declaration of war. 35

Just Wars The belief in a defensive war dominated the thinking of civilians and military personnel in all countries. Media reports in Germany of British and French air raids were fabricated, but by the time they had been disproved, they had already served their purpose. On August 3, Theodor Wolff, the long-­serving editor of the liberal Berliner Tageblatt, heard reports of French air raids in Bavaria and cross-­border attacks by French soldiers. Wolff’s newspaper then received an of­fi­cial bulletin from the government noting that “France has thus opened the attack on us and produced a state of war. The safety of the Empire compels us to resist.” Wolff printed the bulletin but learned soon after that the raids had never happened.36 By then it was useless to print a retraction because the nation was in the full swing of mobilization. Thus even while German armies were beginning to execute their extremely aggressive war plan, Germans still believed in the defensive nature of their struggle. Surrounded by enemies willing and eager to strike 127

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an essentially pa­cific Germany, they believed, the state was jus­ti­fied in taking any action for self-­preservation, even declaring preemptive war or conquering new territories. As one German of­fi­cer noted: What matters is not who declared war, but who was obligated to do so; ev­ery German wanted peace, the emperor more than anyone. ­Didn’t he say so 100 times? . . . We did not want conquests; we want them today, it is true, but this is the fault of our enemies who, in obliging us to struggle for our own in­de­pen­dence, have dem­ onstrated to us that annexations are indispensable to our security. Germany was attacked by a band of brigands. She is defending herself.37 Thus the need for self-­defense morphed seamlessly into jus­tifi­ca­tion for an aggressive, offensive war of conquest. Soldiers and civilians alike in all of the great powers were bolstered by the firmly held conviction that they were fight­ing a war of defense and that their own government had “exhausted ev­ery means for the main­ tenance of peace.”38 As one report from the French countryside noted, “France did not want this war; she was attacked. We will do our duty.” A teacher from the same area revealingly noted, “We know how different attitudes would have been if France had declared a war of provocations and conquest.”39 Albert Cottereau’s captain told his men upon their departure, “We did not want this war, but we will not submit to enslavement; they attacked us and we will defend ourselves.”40 Even the radical newspaper Le Bonnet Rouge urged support for a defensive war: “France did not want this war, the government resolutely af­fi rmed its pa­cific intents. If, by some calamity, someone wishes to perpetrate this most monstrous crime against civilization, all Frenchmen will know how to do their duty.”41 In Germany, too, both of­fi­cial and unof­fi­cial depictions of the war described it as one of self-­defense. Germans understood that “a nation who is attacked is a nation whose quarrel is just, and there will be no German who is not absolutely convinced that the Fatherland needs his help, and will give it without stint or expectation of reward.”42 Both the German media and the German government succeeded in convincing the populace that the war was a “Russian-­provoked” affair. Other reports were carefully crafted “so as to place the onus for the outbreak of hostilities upon En­gland.”43 In announcing on August 4 that German socialists “in this hour of danger” would not “leave the Fatherland in the lurch,” 128

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socialist Hugo Haase, a close friend of Jean Jaurès, blamed “Russian despotism [which] was threatening the freedom of the German people.”44 Confident that their government’s intentions had been peaceful, civilians were willing to rally to the flag and soldiers were willing to give the state their full support. German socialists, who had only recently worked with their French and Belgian colleagues to try to stop the war, noted that “Russia’s frivolous conduct, its provocative mobilization, could be answered in no other way than with a declaration of war.” Socialists were “now united with all other German citizens in the belief that there can be no higher goal, no greater duty, than the defense of the Fatherland.”45 The same attitudes prevailed in France as well. One townsperson in Tuillins noted, “We are no ­longer in doubt that Germany wants war and that she is taking advantage of the [Balkan] situation to invade us and impose her will on the European population. If it does turn out to be war we will be equal to the task and all Frenchmen without exception will rise to defend the country, sustained in the knowledge that we are fight­ing for liberty.”46 Georges Clemenceau wrote that France’s cause was the cause of all humanity; “by defending ourselves, we become the champions of the cause of all mankind” by defending the principle of democracy and the rule of law.47 These attitudes were suf­fi­cient to produce consent for war in August 1914, but consent should not be confused with enthusiasm.

Carried Away into a Whirlpool Much of the enthusiasm that the news of war unleashed had little to do with any desire on the part of European men for combat. Few men spoke eagerly of giving their lives for the state and fewer still spoke eagerly about taking life in the name of the state. Those who did express joy or happiness at the outbreak of war hoped that the con­flict might be a transcendent force uniting people behind a single cause. Hanna Hafkesbrink described this phenomenon as “elation over the merging of the individual into the whole.” As people from different regions and classes came together and subsumed their mutual suspicions beneath a defensive pa­tri­ otism against a threat that, like a natural di­sas­ter, menaced them all equally, the war seemed to have created a clear and sharp break from the old order to the new. A young German soldier noted that “a revolutionary spirit pervaded the barracks” in the early days of August. The men who joined his regiment “felt ourselves lifted above all the prejudices and pettiness of home and family environment” in favor of what seemed to be 129

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a truly higher and nobler ideal.48 A native of Leipzig remarked that the “heady days of August” had produced “a single great feeling of moral elevation, a soaring of religious sentiment, the ascent of a whole people to the heights.”49 Intellectuals were particularly prone to seeing war in idealized terms. Ernst Jünger spoke of the war as being like a blacksmith “that will pound the world into new shapes.” His countryman Thomas Mann later had cause to regret thinking, “Thank God, the soldiers had come to put an end to the rotten old world with which we were fed up.” At the time, however, he believed that war could cure Germany, and Europe more generally, of some of its ills. French intellectuals, too, spoke of the war’s bringing “resurrection” (Maurice Barrès) and “regeneration” (Paul Claudel) to so­ci­e­ties that had grown, in En­glishman Rupert Brooke’s famous phrase, “old and cold and weary.”50 The early war enthusiasm of the intellectuals was sincere, but to borrow from the words of Jeffrey Verhey, it was “an enthusiasm which required no sac­ri­fice.”51 Nor were all intellectuals carried away by the emotions of August. Romain Rolland, a Frenchman who watched events unfold from Switzerland, wrote in his diary on August 3, “I want to die. It is horrible to live in the middle of this demented humanity and to be present, powerless, at the fall of civilization. This European war is the greatest catastrophe in his­tory in centuries, the ruin of our sacred hopes in the fraternity of man. The worst part is the sense that not only is there no prog­ress, but that we have ac­tually taken a step back.”52 Rolland, however, was in the minority in early August. Once the war demanded true sac­ri­fice the ideas of the intellectuals quickly changed. There was a great deal of naiveté about early prowar attitudes; one German volunteer compared the excitement of war to that at Christmas. Countless young men spoke of adventure or even of war as a chance for an August vacation in the countryside.53 Several peasants welcomed the chance the war gave them to get away from the commune and see the world.54 Undoubtedly, they expected the war to be over long before they saw combat. Emotions clearly overcame reason, although it often took some time for men to become aware of how fully they had been carried away. Gustave Le Bon, the famous French social psychologist whose 1895 work on the psychology of crowds had argued that groups often behaved irrationally, understood the mood of August 1914 as proving “how feeble a role reason plays in human action.” Once this mood evaporated, men were frequently embarrassed and confused about how easily they had 130

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been led away by the mass emotion of the crowds. German Ernst ­Troeltsch later recalled being “carried away into the whirlpool” of emotions of those heady August days, and Ludwig Marcusse later “found his 1914 pa­tri­ot­ism hard to explain.”55 Russian liberal Paul Miliukov noted sadly that the outbreak of war proved that “reason does not suf­fi­ciently rule the world.”56 However embarrassing these emotions later turned out to appear, in August 1914 they were powerful if at the same time a bit surprising. The shared sense of emergency brought people together amid a common sense of danger and sac­ri­fice. French soldier Louis Gillet had hoped war would not break out, but once it had he thought it would be “beautiful to fight” because France could do so “with pure hands and an innocent heart.”57 Gillet would later lose his illusions, but when the war began his firm belief in the justice of France’s cause helped to steel him for a war he did not want. Mildred Aldrich, always a careful observer of the mood in France, noted that the outbreak of war had produced “a sort of stupor,” but once the shock wore off, she saw a sight she had not expected to see in her lifetime: “Here is a nation—which two weeks ago was torn by po­lit­i­cal dissent—suddenly united, and with a spirit I have never seen before. . . . I rather pity those who have not seen it.”58 Across the Rhine near Berlin, a minister in a working-­class suburb noted the same sentiments in a neighborhood not normally characterized by pa­tri­otic displays: “out of the windows flags are hanging . . . an amazing picture for those who know the conditions. Usually there is not a single flag on, for example, the Kaiser’s birthday.”59 The war’s ability to unite people regardless of politics or class seemed to be one of its few redeeming values. Enthusiastic attitudes were not, however, the norm. People in all the great powers of Europe greeted the news of war with acceptance, but also with tremendous sadness. Although they were soon to go to war with one another, the reactions of people across the continent showed much more similarity than difference. In Berlin on August 1, Frederic William Wile, an En­glishman with pro-­German sympathies, observed “an atmosphere of sadness and grim reality” as people silently read of the mobilization of the German armies. He noted that people did not speak to one another but were instead “immersed in anxious re­flection” as they tried to understand what was happening. 60 Grim was also the word Elisabeth Marbury used to describe the emotions of French citizens in Savoie. 61 In the neighboring department of Hautes-­A lpes “men did not say a word; ­women and children cried.”62 In the area around Toulouse, Antoine Bieisse witnessed 131

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similar scenes: “ev­ery­one is sad, commerce has stopped. . . . In families, one sees tragic sights. Women in tears embrace their men.” Only children, he thought, were happy because they were free from the reprimands of their distracted fathers. 63 The same sentiments prevailed in Germany. “I shall never forget the sight,” remarked a Reichstag member, of “pale, serious men, dully resigned; ­women dissolved in tears; young couples who, without thought of those around them, tightly embraced each other; sobbing children—all feeling themselves caught by the in­flex­ible and inevitable grip of fate.”64 In the countryside of almost ev­ery great power, peasants failed to share in the enthusiasm shown by some city dwellers. In Russia, a former minister, V. I. Gurko, thought that the outbreak of the war had “aroused neither pa­tri­ot­ism nor indignation among peasants or workers.” Allan Wildman also observed that Russian peasants “regarded the war as a fruitless venture of the upper classes for which they would have to pay.”65 Similarly, in the German countryside, farmers “seemed to have turned to stone” on hearing of the outbreak of war. In the rural parts of Bavaria, where regional loyalties and Catholicism undercut German nationalism, the outbreak of war “caused great dismay in ev­ery quarter,” and, as another German remarked, “the wives of men liable for military ser­vice expressed their misery in no uncertain terms.”66 In France, a fisherman’s wife remarked, “The truth is that we ­don’t own anything and that my husband is defending the property of those who do.”67 Although enthusiasm for war was uncommon in rural areas everywhere, only in the Russian countryside was there sig­nifi­cant active opposition to the war. Even there “the conviction that Germany had been the aggressor” and a belief in the presumably “peaceful feelings of the Russian government” were the “vital stimulus” that made Russian consent for war possible. 68 In the Russian countryside, as in rural areas across the continent, an un­der­stand­ing of the war and its meanings was thin on the ground. Peasants, according to Russian General Yuri Danilov, “hardly understood what they were going to war for. Its aims were not clear to them.” Colonel B. A. Engelhardt, who studied the Russian Army for the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, concluded that “from the beginning . . . the Russian peasant served unwillingly.”69 General Alexei Brusilov concurred, noting that peasants arriving in the army had not the slightest notion what the War had to do with them. Time after time I asked my men . . . why we were at war; the invari132

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able senseless answer was that a certain Archduke and his wife had been murdered and that consequently the Austrians had tried to humiliate the Serbians. Practically no one knew who these Serbians were. They were equally doubtful as to what a Slav was. Why Germany should want to make war on us because of these Serbians, no one could say. The result was that the men were led like sheep to the slaughter without knowing why.70 Another Russian general agreed, noting that “the Russian people wanted this war no more than any other people.”71 Nor was the middle class any more enthusiastic than the peasants; the army was “flooded with requests and petitions to grant exemptions from ser­vice” from men who thought Russia’s cause not worth fight­ing for.72 Russia experienced a limited “wave of mobilization riots” in the early days of the war. More than 100 people were killed at one such riot, and at another protestors destroyed an induction center.73 More than 225 people were killed in all, including 60 policemen.74 The government moved quickly to stop the sale of alcohol to conscripts and added more police to areas near induction centers, but the demonstrations continued.75 Russian conscripts, notes one scholar, knew that “war had always meant sac­ ri­fice and loss, and not many regular Russians believed that this one would turn out any differently.”76 Protests notwithstanding, most Russians supported the soldiers, if not the war, and in the end only 4 percent of Russians failed to report. Danilov thought that only the traditional obedience of the Russian peasant drove men into the army. Although Russians were “wont to do ev­ery­ thing their government ordered them to do,” obedience did not mean enthusiasm or iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with the cause. The same observer argued that men were mostly interested in protecting their homes, not the czarist ­system, and saw military ser­vice as a cross to bear “patiently and passively.”77 British Ambassador Sir George Buchanan understood the thin Russian support for the war and wondered “what would be the feelings of these people for their ‘Little Father’ were the war to be unduly prolonged.”78 He was soon to find out.

Controlling Information and Images of the Enemy Beliefs in the justice of a defensive war bolstered Europeans and drove them to support a war whose causes were not entirely clear to most of 133

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them. Governments did what they could to sustain and manufacture consent in order to maintain these beliefs. They tried, for the most part successfully, to control the flow of information; Roger Chickering argued, for example, that the German government had used “skillful manipulation of the news” and “selective release of diplomatic documents to convey the impression that Germany’s mobilization was only a response to the aggression of Russia and its western allies.”79 On August 1, as Germans were still trying to get accustomed to the idea of war, the German government had already begun to implement the Prussian Siege Law of 1851 that permitted military of­fi­cials to “suspend fundamental civil liberties such as freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of association. Henceforth these liberties were subject to the capricious whims of the military authorities.”80 The Austro-­Hungarian government had by this point already taken steps to assume control over newspapers and other media. Starting on July 28 the government reserved the power to seize presses of any newspaper that did not conform to censorship laws. Before it fell victim to this law, the Hungarian socialist newspaper Népszava published an editorial reading, “This war brings with it the entire weight of the emergency law and all criticism must fall silent for a time.” Nevertheless, the paper had one last act of de­fi­ance in store, warning that “these hard times of af­flic­ tion will pass and then we shall again tell our opinion frankly and bluntly about all that has happened and is happening.”81 In the meantime, however, the press could say nothing and could offer no voice against the of­ ficial government statements. Similarly, in Russia, the moderate newspaper of the Kadet Party was suspended for the first three days of the war for arguing that Russia should work to localize the war to the Balkans. Publication resumed only when the paper published an editorial stating that “whatever our attitudes toward the internal policy of the gov­ ernment, our first duty is to preserve the unity of the country.”82 This newspaper was one of eighty that the Russians shut down once the war began.83 Governments also took less coercive mea­sures to in­flu­ence public opinion. The selective release of of­fi­cial documents represented one passive way to in­flu­ence public opinion. Wildly exaggerating the enthusiasm of people’s response to the war was another. The German government, working with willing newspapermen believing themselves to be helping the war effort, reported that 1,300,000 Germans had volunteered for military ser­vice in the first week of war; the ac­tual number appears to 134

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have been closer to 185,000 men, of whom 143,922 were ac­tually accepted.84 Government agents in the Habsburg Empire were widely suspected of giving workers the day off and even paying people to bolster the numbers at prowar rallies. One journalist in Budapest reported, “I could observe it for many days how the scum of the population, for a daily payment, shouted on the streets of Budapest. . . . I can assert that in Budapest masses or­ga­nized and paid by the police demanded the war.”85 Orlando Figes has also provided evidence that the crowds attending rallies in St. Petersburg on August 2 were heavily supplemented by students and government workers ordered to attend. 86 Such methods were generally unnecessary because governments did not need to rely on either persuasion or coercion to force Europeans to comply. Believing that they were directly threatened and that the fight­ing would be bloody but short, Europeans willingly gave governments the consent they needed to prosecute the war. Such attitudes were not to survive the war’s first autumn, although they proved suf­fi­cient to lead Europeans of all nations and all po­lit­i­cal persuasions to support a war they saw as essential. If hatreds among Europeans were in­suf­fi­cient to create a war, once unleashed the war produced suspicions and hatreds aplenty. In many cases, these attitudes built on prewar foundations that were themselves not deep enough to create a desire for war. They did, however, offer explanations for why the war had begun, and, more im­por­tant, they placed the blame for the war firmly on the enemy. As a result, the war’s outbreak “in­ten­si­fied” the “highly de­spi­ca­ble words, metaphors, and images” that people had seen about their enemies.87 In the new environment, people were inclined to see the worst in their new foes. Michael MacDonough confided to his diary on the day he learned of the invasion that “Germany has always been disliked and distrusted for her bullying policy of saber-­ rattling, the mailed fist, the goose-­step, and the spiked helmet—symbols of violence and brute force. Indeed she has been suspected for years of looking forward to a war with Britain.”88 Before the first week of August such ideas were rarely expressed either in public or in the con­fi nes of individual diaries. After August 4, they became commonplace. The Westminster Gazette’s J. A. Spender noted that “for nine En­glishmen out of ten” the German invasion of Belgium “was not only for us the clear casus belli, but the clinching evidence of the aggressive intention of what had come before.”89 Punch put the case more directly, arguing that “the revelation of the black soul of Germany is the 135

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greatest and the most hideous surprise of this month of months.”90 Germany’s “malignant minds,” it seemed, had shown their true selves and now had to be defeated by force of arms.91 Similar moods prevailed in France, where Olivier Guilleux noted that the outbreak of war created “a hatred of Germany” in the words and the eyes of his neighbors, who prepared to “accept a war of necessity” against a nation that was capable of launching an unprovoked assault.92 In the allied countries, particular venom was reserved for the kaiser, once seen by many as a bulwark of peace. Local reports from French communes noted that Wilhelm II’s decision to launch a preemptive war had made him the single individual most demonized and blamed for the war. From the southern department of Gard, one report noted that the kaiser “must be a barbarian to dare to provoke the nations to war. . . . He deserves to die.” Another report from Charente, northeast of Bordeaux, noted that “the indignation against the kaiser, the author of this war, is general.”93 British journalist Henry Woodd Nevinson, who had known the kaiser during his time as a journalist in Berlin, believed that the war represented the triumph of “malign distrust and hatred upon a disposition [the kaiser’s] naturally open-­hearted and alive to friendship.” Nevinson thought that the kaiser had not wanted war and still wanted to be known to posterity as the Friedenkaiser; with the outbreak of war he was instead doomed to be ridiculed and demonized.94 As early as the war’s first few days, feelings were turning harsher and more bitter. Each side blamed the other for the unleashing of a war that no one had wanted and for causing the disruptions and dislocations that the war was rapidly bringing. As the war turned more bloody and more destructive, these feelings deepened and created genuine hatreds that had not previously existed. People in France and Britain saw massive German support for the kaiser’s war of aggression as evidence that the distinctions inside Germany between militarists and nonmilitarists were merely superficial. They soon concluded that they would need to defeat all of Germany, a nation that now appeared to them as “still what [it was] fif­ teen centuries ago, barbarians who raided our ancestors and destroyed the civilization of the Roman Empire.”95 In loaded sexual terms, Reymond Recouly described Prussia as “the male organ of Germany” that had militarized the essentially peaceful non-­Prussian parts of the empire.96 Such sentiments do not appear in any of the letters or diaries examined for this proj­ect until the war had begun because they were a product, not a cause, of the war. As the following chapters will show, by 136

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the end of the war’s first year, desires for vengeance and genuine enmity had developed, with lasting and terrible consequences. For socialists in all countries still stunned by news of the assassination of Jean Jaurès, the “surprise effect of the war” was “universal.” The outbreak of war had a “traumatic effect” on international socialist parties who saw their worst nightmares coming true; more im­por­tant, perhaps, they knew that they were now powerless to prevent it. German socialists had little choice but to resign themselves to the reality of war and make a public statement of support for a defensive war. That statement was careful not to promote an aggressive war of conquest, but to proclaim that socialists would do nothing that might “lead to the working class struggling defenselessly in want and misery,” a thinly veiled reference to what a Russian conquest might mean for German workers.97 European governments remained concerned about the potential response of socialist parties. Socialists were concentrated in large cities, precisely the places where strikes could do the most damage to mobilization. Ten of the fourteen deputies from Paris’s “red belt” of working-­class suburbs were socialists. Berlin’s six electoral districts had all returned socialist majorities in the last elections before the war, ranging from 55 percent to as high as 90 percent; the Social Democrats bragged after that election that “Berlin is ours.” Adding to government insecurities was the fact that 62 percent of Parisians and 60 percent of Berliners were born outside these cap­itals.98 Conservatives often alleged that foreign in­flu­ ences con­trib­uted to the growth of socialism and radicalism of all kinds. Nowhere in Europe did socialists have as much support yet as little formal power as they did in Germany. Judging by the number of votes received in parliamentary elections, German socialists had more support from their electorates than did their peers in any other European country. Nevertheless, because the Reichstag was so weak in the face of the chancellor and kaiser even in peace time (and especially so in war time), it remained far from clear how the socialists might use their in­flu­ence. The German government understood the need to depict the war as a defensive struggle in large part to compel socialist support. Bethmann-­Hollweg, the German chancellor, knew that a Russian declaration of war was crucial to this pro­cess. Unless Russia declared war first, he wrote, “I shall not have the Social Democrats with me.”99 Conservatives like Bethmann-­Hollweg feared, and many socialists hoped, that the socialists might be able to use their in­flu­ence with the workers to in­flu­ence events. Socialists had the option of calling a general 137

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strike, although, as we have seen, they had already discarded this tactic out of fear of exposing Germany to the Russian hordes. As the party declared in rejecting a general strike, “much, if not all, is at stake for our people and our freedom if the Russian autocrat, who is stained with the blood of the best among his own people, is permitted to win.”100 Even the Belgian socialist Emile Vanderveld, whose small nation was facing an unprovoked invasion from the Germans, understood that German socialists had no choice but to reject the general strike because to strike “would have given their country over to Cossack invasion. . . . We do not blame them. But we, who are defending our in­de­pen­dence, are inflexibly resolved to defend it to the end.”101 German socialists might, however, have still opted for local strikes or the largely symbolic gesture of voting against war credits, as Russian socialists in fact did. Kaiser Wilhelm was concerned enough about the socialist response to threaten on July 29 to declare a state of emergency and “have the [socialist] leaders arrested, the lot of them.”102 On August 4, however, the German Socialist Party voted in favor of credits for the war. We should not, however, assume that the decision was based on any great enthusiasm for the war or for Germany’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in it. The statement of the German socialists that accompanied the casting of their votes quite clearly expressed their anger and frustration. It merits a lengthy quotation: This is a fateful hour. The consequences of the imperialist policy which brought about the era of competitive armaments and aggravated the antagonisms among nations, have come upon Europe like a tidal wave [note the natural di­sas­ter imagery]. The responsibility for this di­sas­ter falls upon those who have inaugurated and supported that policy. We refuse to accept any such responsibility. We Social Democrats have combated against this fateful development to the limit of our strength. Up to the very last hours we have worked for the preservation of peace, in especially close cooperation with our French brethren. . . . In agreement with the International, we condemn all wars of conquest. We demand that, as soon as our safety is assured the war be terminated by a peace which makes friendly relations with our neighbor countries possible. We hope that the cruel lesson of war will arouse in many more millions of people a horror of war and will convert them to the ideals of so138

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cialism. Guided by these considerations, we vote for the war appropriations.103 We should therefore be careful about attributing war enthusiasm even to people who voted for war credits. The socialist statement, moreover, quite clearly expressed the desires of the party for a war of self-­ preservation against the Russians only. French socialist André Latrelle later recalled the mood of his party members in France as re­flect­ing the  same attitudes. The working class and peasants, he thought, were “horror-­stricken” by the idea of war, but they knew that they “confronted a war which they were sure France had not wanted” and therefore supported the party’s decision to offer its full strength to the war effort.104 French socialists often went a step further, tying the goals of socialism to the his­tory of France. Taking their cue from the martyred Jaurès, they contended that the defense of France and the defense of socialism were one and the same. Jean Longuet argued on August 2 that “if France is invaded, socialists will be the first to defend the France of the Revolution, of democracy, of the Encyclopedia, of 1793, of 1848!” On August 8, taking a clear swipe at German socialist support for a war that had produced a brutal invasion of Belgium, L’Humanité argued that the Socialist Party could not support a war that attacked a peaceful people, but the paper offered its support to French soldiers, noting that “our sympathies are with you who are defending the soil of liberty.”105 The high level of support that even the left gave to the war came as quite a relief to those on the right who, having heard the tough talk from socialists and syndicalists in the years before the war, had feared widespread civil disobedience. The French government had assembled a list of 2,500 people “likely to disrupt a general mobilization.” The list, known as the Carnet B, was shared with local law enforcement of­fi­cials. Upon mobilization, the people on the list, most of them anarchists, syndicalists, and socialists, were to be immediately arrested.106 But the wide support for a defensive war shown by the socialists led Interior Minister Louis Malvy to ignore the advice of the war ministry, which had demanded an immediate implementation of the Carnet B. Instead of mass arrests, the French government ordered the detention of just 59 people, most of them foreigners who had publicly called for insurrection.107 The vast majority of the people whose names were on the Carnet B rolls volunteered for the French Army before the end of the war. 139

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The Short-­War Syndrome Europeans were also sustained by the nearly universal belief in a short war, a phenomenon that Latrelle observed as common among French workers. Russian General Mikhail Bonch-­Bruyevich, “like so many of­ ficers,” left his winter uniforms in his barracks because he shared the general consensus that the war could not possibly last ­longer than four months. “As a matter of fact,” he later recalled, “I left my comfortable flat in Chernigov in the same condition as I would have done before leaving on a few days’ mission.”108 A friend of Compton Mackenzie told him not to bother to seek an of­fi­cer’s commission because “the whole business will be over by February at the latest,” at which time he would still be in training.109 He would therefore never get to France. Thousands of young university-­educated men hurriedly enlisted in a “socially exclusive unit as a private soldier” instead of seeking a commission out of fear that they would miss the war because of the time needed to complete requisite training.110 Robert Graves enlisted expecting the war to be over by Christmas, or at least some time after the start of the university term. “I hoped that it might last long enough to delay my going to Oxford in October,” he later recalled, “which I dreaded.”111 In France, informed opinion predicted a war of no more than five or six months. Only pessimists thought it could last any ­longer. One prefect told people in his town that “the war cannot last. Nobody doubts that. It has become an axiom. Officers, parliamentarians, economists, publicists, all say it, all write it.”112 In Germany, Elly Heuss-­K napp found it hard to get people to con­trib­ute to a Red Cross fund because they saw no need to donate money for supplies for a war that would end in a few weeks.113 Workmen repairing the windows on the new home of the Marquise de Foucault reassured her that they would be back when the war ended, surely before it became cold enough for her to need the new windows.114 Russian Interior Minister V. I. Gurko heard local of­fi­cials promise people a war of no more than six weeks and found it “dif­fi­cult to persuade these gentlemen to consider the possibility of a lengthy war.”115 Even if they had discussed a long war, it is likely that “lengthy” would have meant six months to a year at the most. The inability of Europeans to envision a prolonged con­flict set people up for considerable shock as summer turned to fall and fall turned to winter with no end to the killing in sight. Expecting a bloody, but short, contest of wills, Europeans prepared to deal with the di­sas­ter as best they could. There is little to suggest, how140

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ever, that most of them did so eagerly. The wars they envisioned fight­ing were necessary wars of self-­defense, not wars of conquest. André Gide, who described the mood in Paris in early August as one of “loathsome anguish,” saw a workman at a Paris train station shout, “All aboard for Berlin! And what fun we’ll have there!” Parisians, he notes, stared quiz­ zically at the man and a few smiled politely, but no one applauded or cheered.116 Hans Peter Hannsen observed a remarkably similar scene at a train station in Berlin, where “a small group commenced singing a couple of pa­tri­otic songs, but they elicited no response.”117 Enthusiasm, to the extent that it existed at all, clearly had its limits. Departures were among the saddest moments of 1914 and stood in marked contrast to the high ideals and rhetoric of government of­fi­cials. Even on those rare occasions when cheering crowds gave departing soldiers wine, chocolates, and flowers, saying goodbye to loved ones was torturous. In Berlin there was “amazingly little . . . pomp and circumstance” at the train stations, but plenty of sorrow. Soldiers took part in “heart-­rending little tragedies . . . as fathers, mothers, wives, sisters, and sweethearts bade a long farewell to the beloved in gray.”118 At Paddington Station, Georgina Lee watched “numbers of weeping ­women .  .  . file down towards the exits, accompanied by a small son or an old man trying to console them.”119 A British private who might have been one of those departing soldiers at Paddington wrote to his local newspaper, “You readers who have never felt the loving arms of your little children round your neck, or the loving embrace of your wife, cannot understand the feeling. You readers who have felt them understand.”120 Departing soldiers, those men most likely to do the fight­ing and dying, were often among the least enthusiastic. Even when they understood the need to fight, they saw it as tragic and senseless. “I curse war,” noted Jules Émile Henches as he left to join his regiment on August 2. “I can find only in my horror suf­fi­cient hatred to do my best.” Henches clearly believed, as did most of his fellow Europeans, that his country had not sought war but had been forced to fight by the aggression of another: “I think that Germany must be humiliated. The easiest means to do so is by force of arms.”121 However sad they may have been, soldiers also fell back on their concept of duty. Marc Bloch observed that the soldiers leaving stations in Paris “for the most part were not hearty; they were resolute, and that was better.” He knew that the men were hiding a “sadness that was buried in our hearts,” a sadness that “showed only in the red and swollen eyes of many ­women.”122 Another French soldier similarly re­ 141

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flected that “you see only serious men, moving calmly in groups,” with a  shared desire to do their duty, but displaying no particular enthusiasm.123 Few soldiers showed any particular desire to go to war. A German soldier, due to leave the army in six weeks, noted “a feeling of great depression” among the men at the thought of war, especially since the mobilization orders had not speci­fied who the enemy was to be or where they were going. He also noted that the songs the men sang were not celebrations of pa­tri­ot­ism but wistful songs of leave-­taking.124 Departures near Hanover were filled with “warm tears of goodbye,” with men and their families sustained only by the shared conviction that they would all be together again for Christmas.125 That sentiment sustained thousands of people across Europe; when it, too, proved to be a casualty of war, the disillusion was overpowering.

Britain and Belgium, France and Alsace-­Lorraine The mobilizations on the continent divided British opinion. Few Britons were eager for war, and most still held out hopes that a peaceful solution would somehow be found. Abiding tensions in Ireland, the suffragette movement, and myriad local issues still dominated discussions in many households. Henry Wickham Steed, a journalist for the London Times, bemoaned the “ignorance in which public opinion in Great Britain and the Dominions had been left as to the true situation in Europe.”126 Consequently, news of war surprised Britons even more than people on the continent. Even in the military town of Aldershot the announcement that war had begun on the continent left people “dumbfounded.” No one knew for sure what the causes of the war were or even who was fight­ing whom: “There was no of­fi­cial information and no reliable news. No one could guess how the war would affect their lives and no one knew what should be properly done.”127 There were arguments for British intervention based on the need to uphold the European balance of power, to support France, and to protect British interests, but few of these arguments convinced most Britons that war was the only option left. Steed observed that the British people “could not grasp the immensity or the intensity of the con­flict to which they were committed.” He also believed that only a handful of Britons could have articulated the country’s alliance commitments or its pledges to maintain the neutrality of Belgium. The British, he concluded, were 142

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“unmilitary of mind and ignorant of European affairs.”128 Symbolically, Foreign Minister Sir Edward Grey, the man most responsible for British relations with the great powers of Europe, had set foot on the continent only one time; the British may have rejected splendid isolation as a policy, but its mindset still held tremendous pull. To most Britons, the crisis still seemed to be about the Balkans. When Charles Carrington announced his intention to enlist in the event of war, his uncle screamed at him, “Fight as a volunteer for the Servians? What nonsense!”129 Riding home on a tram on August 3, journalist Michael MacDonough heard a woman tell her husband, “But why should we? What have we got to do with it?” He thought her sentiments expressed the general mood of London.130 News that the Germans had invaded neutral Belgium arrived on August 4 and instantly changed British attitudes. One British newspaper noted that the change in public attitudes had come so rapidly that “it is almost impossible to believe that it can be real, and one feels that one must wake up presently to find that all has been a hideous dream and life is quiet and serene once more.”131 The revolution in British attitudes had something to do with Britain’s honor-­bound commitment to the 1839 treaty guaranteeing Belgian neutrality, but that treaty, which the kaiser famously dismissed as a “scrap of paper,” was not enough to bring Britain to war. As Nevinson noted, “we had remained unmoved when much bigger scraps of paper were torn up.”132 Nor were most Britons worried as much as they might have been about the geopo­lit­i­cal implications of a German conquest of the Flemish coastline; General Sir Henry Wilson had observed just before the war that even the British of­fi­cers he was training for war on the continent paid little attention to “a funny little country like Belgium, although most of them may be buried there before they are much older.”133 Symbolically, at the town of Worthing on August 4 a band in the main square rallied the crowd by playing the national anthems of the allied countries, but had to skip the Belgian anthem because none of them knew it.134 Defending Belgium on the basis of an obscure treaty could not have motivated the average Briton to fight a war. Germany’s invasion of Belgium did, however, underscore to Britons the kind of enemy they were facing. An attack on an obviously neutral nation that could not possibly pose a threat to Germany seemed to demonstrate the cruel intentions of a militaristic nation that had been secretly waiting for a minor crisis it could exploit for the ignoble purpose of conquest. Robert Graves recalled being “outraged to read of the Germans’ cynical violation of Belgian neu143

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trality.”135 As Steed observed with a quite ironic association of Prussia and France, the German invasion of Belgium had changed the way Britons looked at the war; it had now become in their eyes “a struggle between two incompatible concepts of civilization, between the Prusso-­ Napoleonic and the Christian, between the militarist and the Liberal. Germany had become virtually pagan, worshipping a deity more nearly akin to Odin than to Christ.”136 Britain now saw a moral obligation to help Belgium that far exceeded its legal or po­lit­i­cal responsibility. Michael MacDonough reported the mood on the streets of London after the invasion of Belgium as no ­longer favoring neutrality but intervention. “Germany was the aggressor,” he reported, “she must be made to ask humbly for peace.”137 Under such circumstances, neutrality was simply not an option for a nation of conscience. Classicist and peace activist Gilbert Murray addressed this question in his pamphlet “How Can War Ever Be Right?” written after he learned of the German invasion of Belgium.138 Neutrality in the face of such barbarism and militarism, the long-­time pacifist argued, was inadmissible because it meant “simply condemning innocent men, by the thousands and thousands, to death, or even to mutilation and torture.” War, Murray claimed, was a “true tragedy,” but at the same time “not all evil” if it had as its aim the protection of innocent men, ­women, and children.139 Nor was Murray alone. J. A. Seddon’s pamphlet “Why British Labour Supports the War” also mentioned the strenuous opposition to the war and the “wholly pacifist” nature of the British working class before the German invasion of Belgium. Noting that the Labour Party had done “our best to allay anything which might be likely to promote the growth of the fight­ing spirit among our people,” Seddon established that the mood in Britain was “anti-­war.” Nevertheless, the remainder of the pamphlet recounts the many ways that British workers had supported a war they now understood to be just. Germany, Seddon argued, had used Austria as “her tool” and the assassination of Franz Ferdinand as a “pretext” to kindle “the blaze of war at the moment she thought most favorable to herself.” Germany had not only refused arbitration but, according to Seddon, had “got Russia to mobilize by a trick.”140 Thus even the peacefully minded British working class could join the fight secure in the knowledge that their war was just. The invasion of Belgium changed British thinking about Germany, and Germans, in a flash. Whereas in the final days of July Britons spoke 144

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of Germany as a “highly civilized” nation based on “moral ideals” and a “nation standing, in very many respects, in the foremost ranks of civilization,” after the invasion words and feelings turned much harsher. The same people quoted above now spoke of Germany as a state characterized by “methodological and intellectual barbarism” and a country that had “meant murder from the beginning.”141 In France, suspicion of the Germans had always been more acute than in Britain, but there, too, stereotypes and blanket condemnations of Germany were largely absent until the war began. Within a week of the war’s outbreak, Cardinal Alfred Baudrillart, whose prewar writing shows no hatred of Germany, had made the first reference in his diary to Germans as “barbarians” who “have shown the brutality and the baseness of their nature.”142 Such sentiments soon became widespread, and, especially in Britain, the ideal of Germany as a civilized place of learning was quickly replaced by the image of a state built mainly for war and conquest. As pro-­German ideals evaporated in Britain, the friendly fleet visit to Kiel just a few short weeks earlier was soon forgotten, and images of the kaiser turned from peace-­lover to warmonger. Anti-­German attitudes soon became commonplace. Robert Graves, who had German ancestry and relatives in the German Army, felt the pressure to join the British Army to prove his pa­tri­ot­ism. Another man in his circumstances told Graves, “I am glad I joined when I did. If I’d put it off for a month or two, they’d have accused me of being a German spy. As it is, I have an uncle interned in Alexandra Palace, and my father’s only been allowed to retain  the membership of his golf club because he has two sons in the trenches.”143 A more comical scene occurred in a French restaurant near Piccadilly Circus where the clientele forced the mainly German wait staff to sing “La Marseillaise” while the drama critic of the New Age conducted.144 Elsewhere and amid much less theatricality, French restaurateurs and German waiters were departing for war. Some Britons did of course remain suspicious of the decision to go to war. There had been no parliamentary debate and no public discussion of war aims. Moreover, many Britons were uneasy about going to war on the side of the reactionary regime in Russia.145 Henry Woodd Nevinson was among those Britons who “could not but sympathize” with German fears of Russia. He decried his nation’s links to the “cruel tyranny of tsardom” and thought that the triple entente dangerously and unwisely tied the British to “the prolonged and enormous con­flict between Teuton and Slav.”146 As late as the last Sunday before the war, anti-­Russian and pro-­ 145

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German themes were common in discussions among clergy in the Church of En­gland, where traditional anti-­Catholic and anti-­czarist ideals had long motivated views on foreign policy.147 Nevertheless, as on the continent, the British public accepted the “terrible con­flict in which we are now engaged” on the basis of their firm belief that the British government had done ev­ery­thing possible to avoid war. Dr. John Clifford, of the antiwar Churches’ Peace Alliance, who had worked for neutrality, came to accept the justice of Britain’s war because “our government had done ev­ery­thing that could be done to allay the storm and preserve the peace of the world.” Similarly, the Labour Party “recognized that Great Britain, having exhausted the resources of peaceful diplomacy, was bound in honour to fight.” As proof that such attitudes were commonplace, F. S. Oliver, a British industrialist, wrote to his brother in Canada that “the ordinary man’s belief is . . . that Germany has made this war to impose a military supremacy over the whole of Western Europe, including Britain.”148 Thus Germany’s attitude had forced Britain’s hand and given peace-­loving Britons no choice but war. Sir Edward Grey himself noted that the German invasion of Belgium was one of the few acts that could have united Britons around the idea of going to war. Without it, he wrote, “the country would have been split end to end.”149 Across the En­glish Channel, Alsace-­Lorraine had remained an issue in the minds of many on the French right, but, as we have seen, it was not a matter that could motivate Frenchmen to go to war. Some French maps continued to include the two provinces inside French borders; one popular Hachette map had the provinces inside the red line demarcating France and even retained their departmental names of Moselle, Haut Rhin, and Bas Rhin, but the map showed the provinces in white instead of the pastel colors used to denote the departments that France ac­ tually controlled. French nationalists often claimed that retaking Alsace-­ Lorraine in war would constitute not an annexation but the righting of a historic wrong since the provinces properly belonged to France. Nevertheless, as noted in the previous chapter, Alsace-­Lorraine was barely mentioned in the final days of July and was “hardly a motivating force in public attitudes.”150 Basing war aims around Alsace-­Lorraine would have undermined French claims of fight­ing a purely defensive war, and almost all Frenchmen wanted to avoid war even if a successful con­ flict might lead to the reacquisition of Alsace-­Lorraine. Revanche and the desire for the recovery of Alsace-­Lorraine had “little direct in­flu­ence in 146

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the preparation of public opinion” as it related to war aims because so few Frenchmen thought that Alsace and Lorraine were worth a war with Germany. Not until August 1 did a French government of­fi­cial even mention in public the recovery of Alsace-­Lorraine as a war aim. Even when he did, senator and former foreign minister Stéphen Pichon was careful to note that the two provinces would be not a conquest but a just reward for a war “for which France was not responsible.”151 Alsace-­Lorraine did not feature in Poincaré’s statement to the French people announcing mobilization, nor was it part of Prime Minister René Viviani’s “mag­nifi­cent discourse” on France’s reasons for going to war on August 5. Viviani said instead that France was fight­ing to uphold the ideals of the French Revolution, the liberty of the individual, and the rights of peoples ev­erywhere to determine their own form of government.152 Only after war became certain did Alsace-­Lorraine reemerge as a central issue of French politics.153 In part the issue was one of revenge, but revenge was a dif­fi­cult war aim to de­fi ne or to use to rally the entire nation. To some, like Pichon, the recovery of Alsace-­Lorraine appeared as compensation for the costs of fight­ing a war of self-­defense that France had not sought. The war also gave France a chance to reacquire the lost provinces under circumstances that the international community could hardly challenge. Others saw in Alsace-­Lorraine a strategic buffer “making France safe from the enemy across the Rhine.”154 Perhaps most im­ por­tant, the recovery of Alsace-­Lorraine was the only consistent war aim on which the French could agree, other than the obvious one of self-­ defense. In any case, it is clear that the recovery of Alsace-­Lorraine was a result, not a cause, of the outbreak of war.

We Are in It The frenetic and highly unusual activity of early August changed almost ev­ery­thing about life in Europe. “Neither days of the week nor of the month exist any ­longer,” noted one observer in Paris. People instead spoke of “the third day of mobilization.” Somewhat wistfully, he re­ flected, “if it were ‘peace time’ today would be Tuesday.”155 Nevertheless, many people still had trouble adjusting psychologically to their new world. Vera Brittain kept her tennis dates in the first few days of war, but she received a terrible shock when she came home from a match to see her brother in an army uniform. The sight caused a “sudden chill” that forced her to realize at long last that “a war of the size which was said to be im147

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pending was unlikely to remain excitingly but securely con­fi ned to the columns of newspapers.”156 Nevertheless, con­fi­dent that the war was just and would be brief, men went to fight with generally high morale. Emmanuel Bourcier noted that most of his comrades were “pacifists who refused even to acknowledge the possibility of a war. Yet when confronted by the inevitable, each brought to the task an abundant goodwill and an enthusiastic pa­tri­ot­ ism.” Their dislike of war notwithstanding, the soldiers of his unit “swore to make the Prussian pay dearly for his provocation, to chastise his in­ solence. . . . One was sure of the right, that the cause was just.”157 Similarly, André Cornet-­Auquier hated the idea of war and grew pale when he heard the news that it had started, but within two weeks he wrote of his friends that “many of us are burning to get to the front. I came here to fight, am full of ardor, and ready to do all I can.”158 A few people were able to see how rapidly common sense had given way to panic and folly. Just before the war began, Dutch socialist W. H. Vliegen warned that “once war has been declared it is no ­longer the voice of common sense but guns that speak.”159 From Scotland came an observation that might easily have come from any of Europe’s nations: “One can scarcely believe that five Great Powers—also styled ‘civilized’—are at war, and that the original spark causing the conflagration arose from the murder of one man and his wife . . . It is quite mad, as well as being quite dreadful.”160 While some Europeans greeted the war with enthusiasm, many more greeted it with fear, uncertainty, and, above all, determination borne of their faith in the justice of their cause. Europeans hoped for (and genuinely believed in) a brief war, but no one could say for sure. The kaiser had promised that the men would be home before the leaves fell from the trees, but there were a few who doubted it would be that easy; one wag allegedly remarked that he must have been referring to pine trees.161 R. D. Blumenfeld, a veteran journalist for the London Times, wrote in his diary on August 4, “We are in it! How long?”162 With those words he ended his diary and started up a new one, a symbolic reference to the changing world around him. Convinced though they were of the righ­teous­ness of their cause, Europeans were still aware that they were making a bold leap into the unknown. Reverend John Clifford, a British nonconformist, wrote when the war began that “the path of duty shone out in the clearest light, and wherever it might lead us we had to go.”163 Few Europeans in August 1914 could have envisioned how bloody and destructive that path would 148

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become. That they were taking a wild leap into the unknown struck many as the initial adrenaline of the rush to war subsided. En­glishman J. B. Booth noted that in a discussion with his friends, “there was not a man there who did not realize that we were at the deathbed of the old pleasant order of things; that life, as we had known it, lived it, and loved it, was at an end forever.”164

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On August 15, an ocean liner arrived in Plymouth from South Africa on its regularly scheduled ser­vice. The ship was met by British soldiers who removed and arrested all the German passengers who were aboard. Many of the Germans had struck up friendships with En­glish passengers, and people of both nationalities were stunned to discover that in the time it took them to complete their voyage, their two nations had somehow found themselves at war.1 Their voyage symbolized the shocking speed of events. The day before the ship’s arrival, the Wiltshire News had written, “Three short weeks ago the man who ventured to prophesy that the greatest war the world has ever known was about to begin would have been laughed at for his pains.”2 The speed with which the war began con­trib­uted to the general sense of bewilderment among Europeans and led most of them to accept a war that their leaders told them was necessary to the defense of their homes. Determination to defend their homes, however, should not be confused with enthusiasm for war. French soldier Etienne Tanty was as representative as any individual when he wrote on leaving his barracks on August 5, “this wrapping oneself up in trumpeting and provocative enthusiasm is completely absent in me, and the ideas of revenge and national grandeur are for me always false and barbaric. But we were attacked, the Germans are coming to ravage our country. . . . Our families will be their victims.”3 His lack of desire for war, the minimal hatred he felt for his enemies, and his un­der­stand­ing of the war as defensive were common sentiments across national borders in the war’s first few days. Nearly universal beliefs in a short war continued to dominate popular un­der­stand­ings even after the shooting began. Upon the outbreak of the war, Hans Peter Hanssen remarked on a conversation with a fellow member of the Reichstag who was convinced that the con­flict could not last 150

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l­onger than four months because, following the prewar ideas of Norman Angell and others, European economies could not fi­nance war beyond that point.4 On August 14, Evelyn Blücher, an En­glishwoman married to a German prince, confided to her diary her secret wish that the British Army would “arrive too late” to take part in the great battle then going on in Belgium and would therefore not suf­fer any casualties; she had based her hopes on the prediction of a German of­fi­cer that the war could not last ­longer than ten weeks.5 In Paris, many shop windows bore signs announcing closures because the owner was in the army; several of them promised that the stores would reopen in a few weeks, by which time the war would presumably have ended. 6 To cite one further example, French soldier Raoul Bouchet wrote to his parents on August 19 to tell them that he would not see them for a long time, as he expected his unit to be part of the postwar occupation of Germany to begin in a month.7 Most Europeans talked about the war not as a crusade or a divinely inspired mission to save civilization but as a necessary evil to protect their homelands from an unprovoked invasion. They tended to speak of the war in the words used by a group of German pro­gres­sives: “It cannot be worse than it is, but we must go through with it.”8 British journalist Philip Gibbs described similar sentiments from British enlistees, summing up their feelings as follows: “I hate the idea, but it’s got to be done.”9 Comparable words came from people in all the European states at war. Few observers thought that Europeans were eager for war. Evelyn Blücher, who had just left En­gland to return to her husband’s native Germany, noted, “Exactly what was the real cause of the war no one seems to know, although it is discussed night and day. One thing grows clearer to me ev­ery day: neither the people here [Germany] nor there [En­gland] wished for war.”10 When Russian troops reached East Prussia, British liaison of­fi­cer Alfred Knox met a German Red Cross volunteer who told him that “none of the local Germans wanted war, that they [German soldiers] cried when they went away and said they hoped there would soon be peace.”11 Hungarian politician Michael Karolyi, who landed in Brest after a tour of the United States on August 4, found French soldiers “grave, but not enthusiastic.”12 Even enemies on the battlefield often understood that the men trying to kill them wanted to be fight­ing a war no more than they did. Irishman Tom Kettle doubted that “the peasant who knelt by the wayside crucifix in the Tyrol, or the comfortable, stout farmer from Bavaria or Württemberg, or the miner in Westphalia, or any typical Rhinelander wanted to 151

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dip his hands in blood.”13 Gilbert Murray, a British pacifist who endorsed the British war effort upon hearing of the German invasion of Belgium, noted, “I have scarcely met a single person who seems to hate the Germans. We abominate their dishonest government, their unscrupulous and arrogant diplomacy, the whole spirit of ‘blood and iron’ ambition which seems to have spread from Prussia through a great part of the nation. But not the people in general.” He drew an analogy to the situation that had existed a century earlier when an alliance of European powers had united to crush Napoleon’s “lawless ambition” and liberate France and the French people from tyranny. In 1914, the situation was similar: “It is not Germany. It is a system that needs crushing.”14 The war would liberate Germany from the kaiser just as Wells hoped it might also liberate Russia from the czar. Although these sentiments were soon to change, hatred of one another did not drive Europeans to war; instead the main motivator was a sense of responsibility and duty to defend their homes. By the end of August, however, Europe had undergone a crucial, and unexpected, transformation.

­Unions Sacrées Like the belief in a short war, the mirage of domestic po­lit­i­cal unity in the face of an external enemy did not long survive the crucible of war. The start of the war prompted a wide va­ri­ety of gestures, many of them designed for maximum public relations effect, to show the solidarity of the nation’s po­lit­i­cal parties. These gestures included a public embrace between the leaders of Russia’s anti-­Semitic party and some of the nation’s most prominent Jews, the decision by the French government not to arrest the socialists whose names were in the Carnet B, and a public pronouncement by Kaiser Wilhelm that “I no ­longer recognize po­lit­i­cal parties, only Germans.” These po­lit­i­cal truces soon came to be known by lofty-­sounding names such as vnutrennii (internal peace) in Russia, ­union sacrée (sacred ­union), in France, and Burgfrieden (civil truce) in Germany. These gestures were intended to present a uni­fied po­lit­i­cal face to the outside world, but they soon showed themselves to fall far short of the lofty ideals on which they were based. In practice, they often meant the ceding of authority to executive branches and nonrepresentative bodies. One of the first acts of the Burgfrieden involved the Reichstag’s delegation of its own authority to the upper house, the Bundesrat. This decision 152

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came with im­por­tant consequences, as the “most democratic body in the country” essentially abrogated its own authority, voluntarily turning itself into “a peripheral arena.” Thereafter, the Reichstag stood by impotently while the Bundesrat issued more than 800 orders, many of them involving ostensible emergency wartime legislation that had little to do with the war.15 The Austro-­Hungarian Parliament went a step further and voted to disband for the duration of the war. To the extent that such civil truces succeeded, they did so not because of any newfound po­lit­i­cal unity but because of a consensus about the need to fight the war as long as the fundamental assumptions of a short, defensive con­flict held true. Within just a few weeks many of those assumptions had begun to fall by the wayside, prompting the start of the domestic discord that con­trib­uted to revolutions in Germany and Russia, as well as the dissolution of the Austro-­Hungarian Empire. Among the first illusions shattered was the belief of the left that civil truces might demonstrate its fundamental loyalty and thereby lead to more in­flu­ence and power within the existing system. Germany’s socialists hoped that the Burgfrieden would serve as a demonstration of their loyalty to the state and their readiness to serve as part of a wartime government. Instead, the German government saw the truce “as a means of strengthening the sta­tus quo by throttling discussion and preventing initiatives aimed at reforming the system.”16 Such a use of the Burgfrieden clearly violated its spirit, but as long as the fundamental beliefs about the war were widely shared, it might be tolerated. From the beginning, moreover, these truces were emergency arrangements only. Paul Miliukov, leader of the Russian liberal Kadet Party, agreed to suspend po­lit­i­cal debate in order to prosecute a war “for the liberation of the motherland from foreign invasion; we are united in the struggle; we set no conditions and demand nothing; on the scales of war we simply place our firm will for victory.” At the same time, however, he underscored the limited nature of the truce by reminding the government that the Kadets’ support did not mean a total abrogation of their core beliefs: “in no sense is the (party) changing its attitude towards questions of internal affairs, only postponing the parliamentary struggle until the general and national danger has passed.”17 Miliukov, like most Europeans, expected that danger to pass in a matter of a few weeks or months. Their enemies took a strikingly similar approach. In Germany the left understood the Burgfrieden in its literal sense, as “a medieval concept denoting a temporary truce between warring factions in a city under 153

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siege.” The left saw itself as agreeing to the government’s emergency state of siege for the first few weeks of the war only, but it soon found that it had been neutralized by a bargain to which it had willingly agreed. The government used its newly granted powers to ban all po­lit­i­cal gatherings as “inimical to the national interest in wartime,” and especially to keep socialists from meeting.18 In France, too, opposition parties understood the ­union sacrée as a temporary mea­sure “imposed by events” to meet the emergency created by the German invasion. The center-­left Radical Party announced that its acceptance of a po­lit­i­cal truce was intended to support “reconciliation, but not reaction,” meaning that the Radicals would not stand behind a truce that permitted the French government to rule without the consultation and approval of the representatives of the French people.19 Nor were groups above trying to use the civil truces for their own purposes. The Catholic Church in France supported the ­union sacrée in the hopes of regaining a po­lit­i­cal voice, and the Russian Kadet Party supported a similar truce in Russia based on promises of a grant of in­de­pen­dence to Poland after the war.20 The result was a series of civil truces across the continent that looked better on paper than they did in execution. In reality they represented a “superficial harmony” that masked deep abiding tensions.21 As governments used new wartime laws to increase supervision of their prewar po­ lit­i­cal enemies, maintain an unnecessarily tight censorship on the press, and justify the exclusion of po­lit­i­cal rivals from discussions about the course of the war, they violated the social contracts that had underpinned the civil ­unions. As the war continued these tensions put increasing pressure on the harmony the truces tried to proj­ect. France, which made a greater effort than other combatants to bring opposition parties into government, eventually found a way to manage the ­union sacrée and make it work despite its tensions. The German, Russian, and Austro-­Hungarian governments refused to grant such concessions; by 1917–1918, they had left their domestic opponents little option but active opposition and even revolution.

That Last Embrace The unexpected dif­fi­culties of ev­eryday life in wartime struck almost immediately. The rapid disappearance of men for the front lines created one of the first shocks. On the outbreak of war the conscription classes of 154

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1911, 1912, and 1913 were already under arms in France, as were their German peers in the classes of 1912 and 1913. Mobilization meant the call-­up of Frenchmen in the classes of 1896 to 1910 and Germans in the classes of 1907 to 1911. The call-­ups of tens of thousands of reservists soon followed.22 “Very rapidly, you might almost say in a few hours, nearly all the men one knows have disappeared from civilian life,” recalled one German soldier who was himself about to leave for the front. “My sister and all her married friends are left alone—their husbands have joined the colors.”23 As a result of these departures, hundreds of restaurants, stores, and workshops closed as men left for the front. In Paris, an En­glish expatriate noted on August 8 that “it is impossible to walk down any street or avenue in the city without feeling the sting of sudden tears, or that grip at the throat which is even more painful.” Watching men leave the city and their families, she wrote that “not even love for La France could soften the pain of that last embrace.”24 Store and restaurant closures did much more than force people to eat at home. They also meant the end of employment for thousands of men and ­women whose bosses had gone to war or whose businesses were severely disrupted. More than two-­thirds of Paris’s workshops closed, put­ ting 600,000 people out of work in August. In the first two weeks of the war, the unemployment rate in Berlin among ­union workers skyrocketed from 6 percent to 19 percent, despite the large number of men who joined the army. The unexpected rise in unemployment may have con­trib­uted sig­nifi­cantly to British men’s willingness to volunteer. Adrian Gregory notes that 78 percent of Birmingham volunteers came from the urban unskilled workforce.25 The war disrupted international markets and shut off short-­and long­term credit from banks. The impact on industries de­pen­dent on overseas trade was immediate. Siemens, for example, lost orders for 5.8 million light bulbs from overseas clients, and the wine-­growing region of Bordeaux experienced a near collapse as it could no ­longer export products to customers in its two largest foreign markets, Germany and Russia.26 Thus while the war might have been expected to reduce unemployment because of the number of men joining the army, it instead led to a massive increase. Government contracting eventually helped to alleviate the prob­ lem, but the unemployment rate in Berlin was still at 10.5 percent in November, and by January 1915 230,000 Parisians were still looking for work.27 Even when people could find work, they soon discovered that their 155

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wages did not cover the rising cost of living. Hourly wages ac­tually declined in some industries as a result of the high levels of unemployment; in Berlin average family income fell by almost one-­quarter.28 Middle-­ class people who counted on rental in­comes and stock market investments were also hurt by the new wartime economy; share prices on the Paris exchange fell 21 percent in the last months of 1914.29 Banks, under intense pressure to fi­nance the massive machinery of mobilization and war, soon began to limit the amount of money people could withdraw and also stopped lending money, making both cash and credit scarce. One Parisian found it “almost funny to see millionaires going about with enormous cheques which they could not change, and aggrieved expressions at being forced to walk or take the Metro because their small change would not allow of them hiring a cab.”30 American expatriate Elisabeth Marbury, a wealthy relative of J. P. Morgan’s who had not thought the July crisis serious enough to warrant the withdrawal of extra money, could not obtain funds from the local bank in Savoie once the war began; nor could she buy meat or bread with the small amount of cash she had on hand.31 For a brief moment, at least, the war had forced the rich to live a bit more like the poor, disconcerting wealthy people like the Marquise de Foucault, who confided to her diary on August 3 her fears that she was  witnessing the “first crack in our civilization—money has lost its omnipotence.”32 The elimination of social distinction was not to last long, however. According to most observers, the countryside in the first few weeks of the war was even sadder than the cities. The idea of going to war had never been popular in rural areas, and many locales had had only sporadic news about the crisis that was now bursting around them. As a result they were surprised and confused by the massive changes the war was creating. In the Dauphiné, the local newspaper recorded “an atmosphere of sadness and doom” as men left for the front. In the town of Livet, observers described “a sad air” and noted that the departures of men to the army seemed to signal an even greater acceleration of the recent trend of rural depopulation. Some communes lost as much as 25 percent of their populations, either to the army or to migration to the cities in search of work. The war took more than men; armies requisitioned food, fuel, animals, and heavy equipment. The military mobilization of railroads created further disruption and impeded the efforts of farmers to get products to market. Mobilization also meant that small towns and 156

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rural areas were unable to get regular supplies of daily necessities like salt.33 The departure of men for the front placed an enormous burden on those left behind, especially in rural areas. Men too old for military ser­ vice, children (many soon to be fatherless), and wives (many soon to be widows) struggled to bring in the harvest. This harvest now served a dual purpose: it had to fulfill its traditional role of sustaining families through the upcoming winter, and it also now had to produce enough of a surplus to see the soldiers at the front through the first months of a war that many still expected would be brief. The failure of governments to plan adequately for a long war caused particular hardships for rural areas. The French government did not begin a regular system of purchasing from small farmers until November, leaving many rural communities with crops they could not get to markets. The results were a shortage of many key goods, leading both to in­ fla­tion and to a virtual end to vital sources of income for peasants. In some rural areas as many as half of the farmers were “destitute” by the end of August as money stopped coming in and prices soared. 34 Because income was falling and credit evaporating, prices began to rise in both the cities and the countryside. Between August 1914 and January 1915 the average monthly food bill for Berliners rose 19 percent. Germany’s de­pen­dence on imports for 25 percent of its food and its heavy reliance on Polish and Russian seasonal workers to harvest the fields created special prob­lems, but Germany was not alone. In the same time period Londoners saw a 21 percent rise in bread and mutton prices, a 16 percent rise in beef prices, and a remarkable 65 percent rise in sugar prices.35 In rural areas of France it was not unusual for prices of certain foodstuffs to increase 50 percent in just a few weeks.36 In Paris, pork and veal prices doubled over the course of just two days. 37 Some items were simply not available. In Paris for the first two weeks of the war, milk was available only to families with children who presented themselves at the local mairie, and salt disappeared as well because all available supplies went to the city’s bakeries. 38 One Parisian thought it worth noting in her diary on August 14 that pastries and cakes were available for the first time in several days, though others noted how disappointed they were in their quality. Only fish and fruit were in ample supply in the city’s stores, although in some neighborhoods those goods, too, had become much more expensive. 39 157

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Shortages led inevitably to panic and hoarding. In Britain, “habitually quiet and respectable citizens struggled like wolves for the provisions in the food shops, and vented upon the distracted assistants their dismay at learning that all the prices had gone up.”40 In the first days of the war, a journalist for the London Times waited in a grocer’s line for two hours; by the time he reached the counter the shop had run out of food. The entire experience left him with a feeling that “things have begun to crumble around us—we who thought till the beginning of this week that we were rooted firmly in a peaceful and secure existence.”41 Farmers blamed townspeople for buying food in excess of what they needed, while city dwellers blamed peasants for hoarding food instead of sending it to market. Hoarding on the part of both urban and rural people surely added to the prob­lem, but the disruption of labor markets and almost complete takeover of railroads by military authorities were also among the root causes of the food crisis. Governments stepped in with a series of mea­sures to help alleviate the prob­lems of in­fla­tion and shortages, but none of them proved suf­fi­cient for long. Price controls fueled a black market that bene­fited the wealthy, and rent controls on the dwellings of soldiers led to serious declines in the in­comes of middle-­class investors and landlords. The French government issued a daily allowance of 1.25 francs per soldier’s family with another half a franc allowance for each child. But the system proved in­suf­fi­cient; average daily wages in Paris before the war were 7.25 francs. Thus the small sum barely helped to keep a soldier’s family alive. Because the allowance went to all soldiers’ families regardless of need, it also seemed to be an unfair bonus given to families that did not need the extra money at the expense of those who did.42 As one observer of the French working class noted in 1914, the allowances “did not seem enough except for families that could have dispensed with them in any case.”43 These prob­lems brought home the reality of war to Europeans: “‘Pour La Patrie’ was a phrase,” noted one observer of France in the early weeks of war, “whereas suf­fering was an ac­tuality.”44 Material shortages were not the only prob­lems people faced on the home front; a nearly complete news blackout produced an information shortage as well. Claire de Pratz noted that her small town in Brittany felt “almost entirely cut off from civilization” as both food and news stopped coming in to the town in the first week of the war. Even in Paris, “news trickled down atom by atom, never complete or satisfactory, always late, always vague.”45 As a result, it was nearly impossible for people to find 158

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out what was happening during the anxious first few weeks of the war. When the first newspapers arrived from Paris, they were shared by dozens of people, even though the news in them was old and not terribly enlightening.46 Information about the war was so scarce that Vera Brittain reported “a free fight” at the local train station ev­ery time a batch of newspapers arrived from London or Manchester.47 From Paris her fellow Briton Moma Clarke noted that French people had no need to fight over the papers: the of­fi­cial communiqués “tell us nothing” and the rest of the newspapers were good only for “packing.”48 Arthur Ruhl bemoaned the fact that at the most critical moment in the his­tory of civilization, the news contained only stories “about some Servian or Russian victory in some unpronounceable region of the east.”49 The chaos of the early weeks of the war also meant that mail ser­vice was often spotty or nonexistent. Not only were postmen headed off to war, but the railroads that normally carried mail were now carrying military supplies; even when letters could get to the front, military post of­fi­ cers rarely knew where individual regiments were located. Letters to and from the front might take weeks to reach their destinations. The settling of the western front made the delivery of mail a simpler task, but it ­wasn’t until winter that armies put a regular and effective system in place. Governments tried to control the flow of news either to boost morale or to hide the awful truth of military defeats. They operated on the principle that “the less that was told to people, the better.”50 The French government, for example, did not of­fi­cially admit that the Germans were in France until August 29, although it had been perfectly obvious for weeks; the day before, a routine communiqué had announced that the military situation was “unchanged from the Somme to the Vosges,” an accidental admission of what the government soon had to acknowledge.51 The news blackout forced people to learn to read between the lines and divine the news as much by what the government was not telling them as by what it was telling them. One French peasant noted that the lack of newspapers was disorienting, but “we were not so innocent or stupid as some people would like to think. We knew that something terrible was going on.”52 Even Hans Peter Hanssen, a member of the Reichstag, did not get any definitive news of events in Belgium until August 30. Both those reports and news of the victory of the British Navy over the German Navy at Heligoland on August 28 struck him as ominous, but he feared even worse because it was obvious to him that the government was hiding a great deal of information about both incidents.53 He was soon to be proven 159

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right, although the positive news from the great German victory at Tannenberg temporarily lifted German spirits and led German of­fi­cials to repeat their predictions of a quick end to the war.

1,000,000 Russians Are in Britain Rumors soon filled the vacuum created by the lack of real news. Many such rumors revolved around the behavior of foreign powers. Germans repeated reports that Japan had declared war on Russia, while in Vienna Sigmund Freud heard that the British were making plans to deploy a Japanese army to fight against the Germans on the western front by the end of the year.54 Irvin Cobb, an American reporter covering the war in Belgium for the Saturday Evening Post, heard German soldiers predict that the Americans would soon join the German cause in order to balance out the Japanese decision to join the British.55 The Russians were the subject of a vast and fascinating array of rumors. French artillerist Raoul Bouchet heard that 250,000 Russians would soon be in France to help defend Paris.56 Another 100,000 Russians were on their way to En­gland (according to Vera Brittain’s dentist), and “for a few days the astonishing ubiquitousness of the invisible Russians formed a topic of absorbing interest at ev­ery tea table throughout the country.”57 London Times reporter Michael MacDonagh heard rumors of 1,000,000 Russians in Britain, “vouched by people likely to be well-­informed.” The arrival of the Russians was so closely guarded a secret that they traveled in sealed trains, thus explaining why no one had ac­tually seen them. Porters, it was said, had been ordered to sweep snow out of the rail carriages to prevent the presence of Russians from becoming public knowledge.58 Another En­glishman reported that “Russian coins and scraps of Russian clothing [were] left behind in the carriages of our familiar Great Western Railway,” proof positive, it seemed, that the Russians really were in Britain.59 Rev. Andrew Clark’s diary was filled with rumors of Russian soldiers in En­gland, including one that Russians had been transported in a darkened railway car, but that their beards had been spotted by the glow from their cigars. 60 The British government of­fi­cially denied the rumors in mid-­September, leading to a “depressing” mood in London. “The flower of our fondest hopes has suddenly been blighted,” MacDonagh noted in his diary. The rumors evidently began when news leaked that the British government had ordered 200,000 Russian eggs, but only well after the fact did Mac160

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Donagh wonder at how such incredible tales could have spread so quickly and so widely through Britain. 61 Despite the of­fi­cial denials, Andrew Clark continued to report faithfully in his diary on the presence of Russians in Britain into October. 62 As the snow in the rail carriages attests, no matter how incredible the tale, rumors easily “circulated from mouth to mouth” and “were more plentiful than newspapers.”63 They became, in the words of one observant En­glishwoman, “crumbs to live on,” even if they appeared false on the surface. 64 The Marquise de Foucault heard in early August that the Germans had captured French President Raymond Poincaré and that the controversial politician Joseph Caillaux had been assassinated. 65 “To tell a tithe of what we hear,” wrote one Briton living in France, “would fill a volume.”66 In rural Nanteuil-­de-­Bourzac in the Gironde, rumors spread that an Austrian was going around cutting phone lines and, incredibly enough, that Kaiser Wilhelm had escaped from Germany and was hiding in a nearby château. Locals often acted on these rumors, although no one seems to have searched local châteaux for the kaiser. Local peasants did, however, set up a roadblock to intercept drivers of cars (anyone driving a private car was a suspect), and they raided a local clockmaker’s shop because he was German. 67 Parisian looters dumped on the streets tons of badly needed milk from the facilities of the Maggi company believing it was German-­owned, and therefore that the milk might be poisoned; in fact the company was Swiss. 68 Many rumors were, moreover, hard to separate from the truth. Some appeared in the media as newspapers gladly published the cheeriest of stories given to them by soldiers and government of­fi­cials. The right-­ leaning Echo de Paris published a supposed letter from a French soldier on August 15 asking that the paper tell its readers that “all Germans are cowards and that the only prob­lem is how to get at them. In the skirmish where I got hit, we had to shout insults at them to make them come out and fight.” One week later the Petit Parisien similarly quoted a lieutenant colonel who wrote that “as far as our slight setback in Lorraine is concerned, it is of no consequence. . . . The enormous quantity of material we captured from the Germans bears witness to a remarkable weakening on their side.”69 Le Matin announced that “Berlin seems to be on the eve of a revolution” and then a few days later printed a headline proclaiming, “The Cossacks Are Five Days from Berlin.”70 The paper also reported that German heavy artillery “is like the Germans themselves, it is all bluff. Their pro­jec­tiles have very little power.”71 161

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Rumors were sometimes as good a source of news as the meager bits of information coming from newspapers and of­fi­cial bulletins. They were certainly more entertaining and fertile material for “the imagination and the whim and bias of the romantics” willing to believe them.72 One Parisian woman recorded in her diary her own sense of amazement at how the most ridiculous rumors spread across the city as truth: “Though my own common sense told me not to pay the slightest attention to all the rumors, one can’t help being a little impressed by them.” Two rumors she dismissed turned out to be true: that German aircraft would soon bombard Paris and that the French government was making secret preparations to escape to Bordeaux. With ev­ery rumor that turned out to be true, the “special editions of the papers that came all day with nothing in them” lost even more of their credibility.73 As a result, Europeans believed that they had no reliable sources of news at all while the most im­ por­tant events of their lifetimes were playing themselves out. People learned to be quite skeptical of the overly buoyant or obviously inaccurate tone of of­fi­cial news. The French came to call the overblown optimism of the news reports bourrage de crâne or “skull ­stuffing.” Nor did Europeans need much imagination to see how heavy the hand of government censorship was. Just days into the war, of­fi­cial communiqués had already demonstrated an ability to “carry to a fine point the art of saying nothing of importance.” People with access to American newspapers eagerly sought them out, even though they were ten days old, because they normally contained more reliable news than French or German papers. Germans living near the Dutch border and Frenchmen near the Spanish border had access to news sources that often contradicted the of­fi­cial news and newspapers of their own countries, which “no ­longer contain[ed] any news.”74 Little wonder, then, that people sometimes had a dif­fi­cult time accepting real news as anything but more malicious rumors. As late as August 6, people in Picardy were still doubting reports of the assassination of Jaurès, and three days later some were still unsure if the German invasion of Belgium had really occurred or not.75 Virtually all newspapers printed in foreign languages or representing minority ethnic or po­lit­i­cal groups were suppressed or heavily censored. Germany immediately stopped production of all Danish-­language newspapers despite the progovernment tone of the editorial pages of those ­papers and the 20,000 ethnic Danes who were serving in the German Army.76 Polish and Czech newspapers in Germany and Austria-­Hungary were also banned regardless of their views on the war. Similarly, the Vi162

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ennese socialist newspaper, the Arbeiter Zeitung, was censored despite progovernment editorials by its editors.77 Self-­censorship proved to be a prob­lem as well. Readers of the reliably conservative Le Figaro saw an unusual sight in their August 14 edition, a blank half-­page. An editorial explained that the ministry of war had asked that an item be removed, and the paper wanted its readers to know that it had complied with the request “because it was our duty.”78 British newspapers ­adopted a policy of not reporting on the battlefield defeats of British allies; they did not mention French losses at the Battle of the Frontiers or the massive Russian debacle at Tannenberg until the spring of 1915.79 Nor did they report on the sinking of any British military or merchant vessels, even though the sinkings were reported in American newspapers widely available in Britain. In their defense, journalists often had a hard time piecing together fragmentary bits of news from around the world and placing them into something that might resemble a coherent picture. In other cases, however, newspapers consciously hid the truth. Henry Woodd Nevinson, a veteran war correspondent who had covered the South African War, had been in Berlin as a correspondent for the Daily News at the start of the war. He saw some of the early combat in Belgium before find­ing his way back to En­gland. There he found that his editors “considered an account of war as it really is and always must be too horrible for the country to bear.” They refused to publish his dispatches, so he quit and joined a Quaker ambulance unit. At least there he could do something about the suf­fering he had seen.80

“As if We Are Prisoners”: Changes to Daily Life Overnight, daily life as people had known it disappeared. In Freiburg, Germany, the government cut all civilian telegraph and telephone lines and prevented all privately owned cars from leaving town. All railroads came under the authority of the local corps commander, and even walking became regulated. One resident of the town noted the new and strange atmosphere of control: “one has to have one’s identity papers if one wants to take a walk into the outskirts of town. . . . It is as if we are prisoners.”81 The mood of Paris changed overnight as well because of new rules and regulations. Cafés closed at 8 p.m. (in the provinces 6 p.m. was more common), drinking or eating on terraces was banned, and all foreigners, even 163

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those from allied nations, had to apply for travel permits to leave the city. One city resident noted, “We are growing accustomed to martial law, to the complete suppression of all plea­sures, to deserted streets, closed shops, and the cutting down of ev­ery possible expense in our private lives.” Theaters and cinemas closed and all public concerts were banned. The French cap­ital, Moma Clarke noted, “wears very few fine feathers in these days and her jewels are put away altogether.”82 Another visitor to the city in late August was unaccustomed to seeing the City of Light “black as a tomb” as a result of the lack of coal and gas for street lights. The new look of Paris “chilled one at ev­ery turn.”83 Mary King Waddington called Paris “a dead city” on August 17 and an American in Paris called the Champs Elysées on August 24 “the darkest avenue on earth.”84 Arthur Ruhl was shocked by the “ghastly silence” he observed in the normally boisterous French cap­ital.85 Cicero once declared that laws are silent in time of war, but in 1914 citizens quickly heard the sound of government as politicians moved with lightning speed to extend their powers to meet the wartime emergency. The British government passed the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) without debate on August 8 and without a copy even being shown to MPs for their review. The act itself was a brief document authorizing “His Majesty in Council to issue regulations as to the powers and duties of those responsible for securing the public safety and the defense of the realm.” DORA and its revisions over the course of the war led to changes in the daily lives of Britons that few could possibly have anticipated. Liberal British society soon found that DORA gave the government the power to use military courts martial in place of jury trials, even for civilians; to restrict firearms ownership; to conduct searches and seizures without court approval; to restrict the opening hours for pubs and order drinks served in those pubs to be watered down; to ban customers from buying drinks for others; to censor news and correspondence; and to control rail transportation. DORA also gave the government the right to seize any business, farm, or raw material deemed necessary for the prosecution of the war. DORA banned the fly­ing of kites or lighting of bonfires, out of fear that they might be used to direct German airplanes or zeppelins. Britons were also forbidden to feed bread to animals as part of an effort to conserve food for humans. Binoculars and construction of new flagpoles were banned, as was the ownership of pigeons except by expressed written permission of the government. Even private discussions held in public places could be subject to DORA’s regulations. Critics referred to DORA as “that lady of questionable legality,” but there were 164

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few public challenges to its authority, in part, of course, because criticizing DORA was itself illegal. The German government moved in similar directions, enacting the Prussian Siege Law even before the formal start of hostilities. The law, which dated to 1851, empowered military authorities “to suspend fundamental civil liberties such as freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of association.” The German government used the law less to sustain military effectiveness in the face of the wartime emergency than to harass and further marginalize its prewar po­lit­i­cal enemies. 86 Governments defended such controls as critical to counteract a supposed wave of espionage. Spy mania, fueled by the general sense of uncertainty and already a common theme of prewar fiction, reached monumental proportions. The easy fluidity of people, who could move between countries with few controls before 1914, meant that foreigners from now­enemy countries were a common sight; over 150,000 Germans lived in France at the outbreak of the war, of whom almost half were in Paris.87 The enormous numbers of people on vacation trapped by the war’s sudden outbreak added to the confusion. As a result, people saw spies almost ev­ery time they came across someone who looked or sounded different. Two prefects near Lot-­en-­Garonne near Bordeaux issued warnings about a woman “in a big plumed hat” who was handing out poisoned quince pies (or candies, depending on the source of the rumor) to soldiers at train stations.88 In Freiburg, rumors spread that a spy had put cholera into the city’s water supply. 89 Anyone who stood out in any way was marked as a possible spy or traitor. A foreign-­sounding name might be enough to arouse suspicion. Parisian shopkeepers placed signs on their windows reading “Maison Française” to indicate that the owners were not foreign but from the provinces, and their language not German but a regional patois. Also in Paris, Antoine Delécraz had to vouch for a friend accused of espionage because she had blond hair; “It seems that ev­ery­one has his own spy to  denounce,” Delécraz sadly concluded.90 Wilfred Owen, traveling in southern France, was warned not to wear his glasses in public because they made him “look foreign” and therefore suspicious, despite the fact that he was from En­gland, one of France’s allies.91 It was all part of the new and bizarre world of wartime Europe. Entertainment, too, came under government control. When Paris theaters and cinemas reopened a few weeks into the war, they almost exclusively showed plays and movies that supported the war effort. Just a week into the war, the German government told cinemas and music halls that 165

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they could remain open, but warned that if their performances did not re­flect “the pa­tri­otic mood of the nation” they would be closed and their films con­fis­cated. Foreign films and most comedies (deemed to be too light-­hearted for wartime) soon disappeared and most cinemas readily agreed to government requests to show highly propagandized newsreels. By the end of year, new government guidance permitted only the showings of films and plays that “uphold morale and promote pa­tri­ot­ism for the Fatherland.”92 The war also impacted the lives of children. When German schools reopened in September, teachers were ordered to make the war the centerpiece of all instruction. French teachers received the same guidance, requiring teachers to teach the heroism of French soldiers and to make the war the focus of all subject matter. French math teachers, for example, began teaching students how to calculate the number of shells required to attack a given section of the enemy’s front line.93 Jane Michaux watched sorrowfully as the children in her Parisian neighborhood began playing war with toy rifles, “eyes furious, voices harsh, despite their infantile tones.”94 Total war was beginning to in­flu­ence the lives of even the youngest members of society.

The End of Enthusiasm A few weeks of such life were all that even the most ardent supporters of war needed to stop feeling enthusiastic about the con­flict. As Roger Chickering eloquently noted, the high rhetoric of the war’s beginning “offered little practical guidance for negotiating the unimagined strains of war in the twentieth century.”95 The lack of decisive victories and the obvious evaporation of any real hope of a quick end to the war meant that most of the basic assumptions about the war had already been proven false. As early as mid-­August, concluded one study of France and Germany conducted in the 1930s, “whatever effervescence had existed in the first days of the war” had already dissipated, replaced by a resigned sense of the need to do one’s duty. Alongside that sense of duty came a genuine sense of “regret” that the war had begun at all.96 This sense of disillusion set in remarkably quickly. By August 16, when his unit found out that it was to invade Belgium and France, a soldier of the German Landwehr reported high rates of alcoholism and wrote, “I see no more traces of the enthusiasm for war” that some had displayed on its outbreak.97 The next week, French soldier Eugène Lemercier, who had left his barracks three weeks earlier “full of life,” learned of the “terrible 166

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shock” of French defeats in Alsace. He wrote home to his mother that he now understood that the war “will not be the mere military parade that many believed it would be” and that “all our preceding experiences belong to a dead past.”98 The Marquise de Foucault noted as early as August 22 that French soldiers no ­longer sang or showed any sign of enthusiasm; now “faces [show] stern and desperate resolution.”99 British liaison of­fi­ cer Alfred Knox observed that by August 27 Russian troops had lost hope of a quick success.100 The first few weeks of the war brought with them many unpleasant surprises. To members of the German left one of the worst surprises was news of the unprovoked German invasion of Belgium. The German government defended the invasion as a military necessity, but to German socialists it indicated that the government had lied about the reasons for going to war. If the war had been one of self-­defense, they asked, why were German soldiers in a neutral country? Vorwärts, the newspaper of the German Socialist Party, defied the government in an editorial on August 25 that argued, “If we should not succeed in overcoming czarism, if the strategic necessity [of invading Belgium] should push the po­lit­i­cal necessity [of self-­defense against the Russians] then this war would lose its jus­tifi­ca­tion.” The newspaper announced, “We cannot say concerning the invasion of Belgium what we would like to say about it,” although the editors did state that a war against Belgium and France was not morally jus­ti­fied.101 For their honesty and courage, they received new government guidelines and increased censorship that soon ended the paper’s in­de­pen­ dent editorial voice. The oft-­cited letters of Sigmund Freud from this period give one person’s perspective on how quickly a sense of enthusiasm, or at least a sense of acquiescence, could devolve into depression and pessimism. Many sources have cited Freud’s remark about mobilizing his libido for Austria in the opening days of the war as evidence of the widespread support for the war in the Dual Monarchy. Few have followed Freud’s correspondence even a few weeks into the future to watch as his illusions rapidly faded. As early as August 23, he was telling his friend Sándor Ferenczi that the war had produced “a paralyzing effect on any kind of mental activity on my part,” and that he felt like a “foreigner” in an increasingly unrecognizable wartime Vienna. Two days later he wrote a revealing letter to Ferenczi that is worth quoting at length: The rush of enthusiasm in Austria swept me along with it, at first. In place of well-­being and the international practice, which have 167

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long since dissipated, I hoped to get a viable fatherland from which the storm of war had wafted away the worst miasmas and in which the children could live with con­fi­dence. Like many others, I suddenly mobilized my libido for Austria-­Hungary. . . . Gradually a feeling of discomfort set in, as the strictness of the censorship and the exaggeration of the smallest success reminded me of the story of the “Dätsch” [an assimilated Jew] who, as a modern man, returns to his Orthodox family and lets himself be admired by all the relatives until the old grandfather gives the order to take his clothes off. Then, under all the layers of modern clothing, it is discovered that he had closed the flap of his underpants with a clothespin because the drawstrings had been torn off, whereupon the grandfather decides he is not a “Dätsch” after all. Since the day before yesterday’s communiqué about the situation in Serbia, I have fi­ nally secured this conviction for Austria-­Hungary, and I am experiencing the ferment of my libido into anger, which I can’t begin to deal with.102 The communiqué Freud mentioned in his letter alluded to the setback suf­fered by Austro-­Hungarian forces at the hands of the Serbs at the Battle of Jadar. Despite a massive superiority in men and weapons, Austro-­ Hungarian forces had been unable to seize the Serbian cap­ital of Belgrade, an event that might have had a decisive early impact on the war. Serb forces had even managed to recover from the Austro-­Hungarian assault and attack into Austrian-­controlled Bosnia with the intention of fomenting a massive pan-­Slavic revolt. Freud might well have wondered how the Dual Monarchy would fare against the Russians if its armies were having this much trouble with Serbia. In any case, it was already obvious that the war would last ­longer than Viennese of­fi­cials had thought; Freud believed that “the only thing that remains real is the hope that the high ally [Germany] will hack us out” after a war of unknown duration.103 Before the end of the war’s first month, Freud’s libido was being mobilized elsewhere and he was already referring to “these wretched times, this war which impoverishes us as much in spiritual as in material goods.”104 Freud’s disillusion and frustration were widely shared by civilians and soldiers alike. Roger Chickering notes that by August 25 Germans had begun to give up on the “predictions of a brilliant German triumph, a repeat of 1870.”105 The next day in En­gland, Georgina Lee confided to her 168

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diary that she felt a sense of “security trembling beneath our feet.”106 Those who saw the front or the battlefields were even more affected. Even before the Belgian campaign was over and its horrors fully known, one reporter wrote, “I saw enough to cure any man of the delusion that war is a beautiful, glorious, inspiring thing, and to make him know it for what it is—altogether hideous and unutterably awful.”107 On August 29, one German soldier wrote in terms similar to Freud’s: “in the first days my spirit went along with the general current, could in its own way join in. . . . now I am having a very hard time to find, by myself, across this span, the valid and if possible somehow fruitful attitude toward the monstrous generality [of early August].”108 By the end of the month, governments could no ­longer hide the bad news from their own people. Enough refugees, wounded men, and letters from soldiers had reached the home front with versions of events that contradicted the optimistic tones of the of­fi­cial communiqués. It was no ­longer possible to deny the bad news that alternate sources of information were providing. Governments responded by placing even more emphasis on attempts to control the media, but they met with limited success. The London Times was among the first newspapers to report on the massive allied setbacks in August, with one Times correspondent writing on August 30, “Our losses are very great. I have seen the broken bits of many regiments.” He reported comments from British soldiers such as “very badly cut up, sir” and “very heavy losses, I’m afraid.” Warning that Paris was exposed to a German attack or encirclement, the reporter told his readers, “This is a pitiful story I have to write. Would to God it did not fall to me to write it. But the time for secrecy is past. Only by realizing  what has happened can we nerve ourselves for the effort we must make.”109 Governments reacted to such frank reporting by increasing censorship and making renewed efforts to spin bad news in their favor. As a result, civilians at home and soldiers at the front grew even more confused about what was ac­tually happening.

The Baptism of Fire An early sense of disillusionment with the war was even more widespread among soldiers than among civilians. French of­fi­cer Henri Bénard left his garrison with his regiment on August 6 with “music in our heads and in mag­nifi­cent uniforms,” fully con­fi­dent of a quick victory. Four days later he wrote to his family that “we live in a time in his­tory that will hold 169

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the highest of places” and repeated his belief in a short war because he had heard that “Wilhelm, it seems, is completely beaten and humbled” and Germany was already on the brink of starvation. On August 20 he boasted of the wine from the Rhineland and the “ki­lo­me­ters of sausages” his men would consume when they marched into Germany in a few days’ time. Unbeknownst to Bénard, the war was not going as well for France as he had believed. The first indication of bad news came on August 24 (the day after Freud’s letter cited above), when he learned that the French advance into Alsace had not gone well. Within days he learned that the situation near Paris was critical, his first indication that France was in real danger of losing the war. On August 31 he wrote, “What does the future have in store for us[?] I am speaking of the days now approaching when the Germanic hordes will be at the gates of Paris. I am terrified and feel my heart beating non-­stop for entire days.” Less than three weeks into the war he noted that the well-­dressed and enthusiastic soldier he had been on August 6 was gone, replaced by “a bearded bandit” that lived like an animal, eating what he could find along his route of march. His views on the war itself had changed as well. He now saw it not as an honorable contest for grand ideals, but instead as “a war of savages.”110 Bénard was far from alone. An analysis of the letters and diaries of German soldiers conducted in the late 1940s found the same themes. “Wherever men came face to face with the reality of war, their enthu­ siasm was drowned in a sense of profound gloom. The prewar trends ­toward condemnation of war revived almost instantaneously and now received the added impulse of personal experience.”111 One German carpenter had seen enough carnage by August 30 to grow angry at those who had preached his country’s cause just a few weeks earlier: “Would that some of those propagandists and superpa­tri­ots could be in a position now to see the corpses and horse cadavers piled high. . . . I believe then that many a one would think differently and would be readier with support than with moralizing sermons. We can say that each day brings new misery and new distress.” Another wrote simply, “The poetry of the trenches is a thing of the past. The spirit of adventure is dead. We are oppressed by the re­flection that we have seen what a battle is like and shall see it again.”112 As these letters from the war’s early weeks show, a rift was already opening between the war the soldiers knew from their gruesome first-­hand experiences and the war the civilians tried to understand 170

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through the jumble of rumors, the haze of pro­pa­ganda, and the vacuum of real information. Soldiers quickly found that the war, and military life in general, did not conform to their general expectations of it. Their lives were as filled with rumors as the lives of civilians; soldiers nevertheless struggled to do their jobs in an atmosphere notably bereft of hard news. The Royal Welsh Fusiliers left their barracks in En­gland on August 9 without “the faintest idea of our destination” or even a clear sense of whom they were to fight. The ever-­present rumor mill had it that they were going directly to Germany on a Cunard liner “with unlimited Champagne at the government’s expense.” Much to their disappointment, they were served bully beef and army rations on a troop transport, although they still had no firm idea where they were going. It turned out to be Rouen.113 Confusion was commonplace. The realities of modern war also brought with them an acute awareness of the dangers of con­flict as well as the gap between the war of their ideals and the war on the ground. The French and British, who had a much rougher first month of fight­ing than the Germans and Austro-­Hungarians, often felt a sharper sense of disillusionment, and they also had to deal with the ignominy of defeat. Henri Lieberman, a French soldier who took part in the general retreat of late August, recalled his sense of humiliation as an elderly woman shouted at them, “The border is not that way. . . . It is over there! Cowards!”114 The inability to protect defenseless civilians was a cause of great shame and anguish to allied soldiers. The Germans may have had more military success in August than the British and French, but they, too, had their share of disillusion. One German soldier recalled having no idea why his unit was headed west if the purported threat that had necessitated the war had come from the east. He and his men saw a sign for the western border town of Aix-­la-­Chapelle (Aachen) out of their railroad car windows and turned to their of­fi­cers for an explanation. The of­fi­cers “only shrugged their shoulders,” having no idea themselves. When the train entered Belgium the men again asked “what our business was at the Belgian frontier.” The of­fi­cers emphasized the need to defend Germany from invaders “but it was a weak consolation, and did not even outlast the first few days.” The soldiers grew even more confused when Belgian civilians offered them food; what were they to make of these “kindly gifts of ‘the enemy’”? Confusion soon turned to enmity, and enmity to brutality. The sol171

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dier’s unit lost sixty-­five men killed in one week in Belgium, leading to a harsher attitude toward the locals. Warnings from their of­fi­cers not to drink the water because priests had poisoned the wells combined with fatigue and hunger to lead the men to think of the Belgian civilians as “their bitterest enemies.” After participating in a firing squad that executed a Belgian civilian, he and several of his friends contemplated refusing orders to shoot any more, but knew the gesture would be futile: “We had learned enough in those few days of war to know that war brutalizes and that brute force can no ­longer distinguish right from wrong.” He and his friends had to perform double guard duty for sharing their rations with a destitute woman and her eight children. Another German soldier in his unit received fourteen days con­fi nement for giving bread to a starving Belgian. These and other incidents convinced him and his friends that their war had little to do with defending the Fatherland. Instead it had become a bizarre world where men were rewarded for shooting helpless civilians in cold blood but punished for giving them bread when their children were starving. On entering France the situation became even more bizarre. The first French family he met had once lived in Berlin, spoke flu­ent German, and had great admiration for German culture. Now the father and brother in the family were in the French Army with orders to kill Germans. “Oh how terrible it is,” cried one of the sisters. “Now they are away—they who had feelings of respect and friendship for the Germans—and as long as the Germans are between us and them we shall not be able to know whether they are alive or dead. Who is it that has this terrible war, this barbaric crime on his conscience?” The soldier and his friends were too ashamed to accept the woman’s offer of dinner in the house and “after a silent pressing of hands we slunk away” fearing that the war had already lost its jus­tifi­ca­tion.115

The Dead and Wounded The massive numbers of dead and wounded that began to return from the front resulted in the evaporation of whatever enthusiasm might have remained for the war on the home front. The appearance of wounded soldiers “tended to increase [civilians’] general uncertainty and fear about the state of affairs at the front.”116 The first sight of wounded in Vienna shocked residents. Women cried openly in the streets. The scene caused 172

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Alfred Hermann Fried to remark, “What a contrast to the hurrah spirit which greeted the outbreak of the war!”117 The sheer numbers of wounded were enough to shock many civilians as to the realities of war. Their condition also served as a visible reminder of the consequences of modern warfare. Many of the wounded were missing limbs or had been horribly dis­fig­ured. The wounded also represented a potential source of news to information-­starved civilians. Unfortunately, the dazed and wounded men sometimes could not provide much news. One soldier noted sadly that “we ­couldn’t answer the questions [the civilians asked]: ‘How far are the Germans from Paris? Are we on the retreat? What are the British doing?’ They expected us to know far more than we did.” Another noted that “we soldiers were usually in the dark about the military situation as [much as] the civilians. . . . We were told the same things by our of­fi­cers that the civilians were told by the press.”118 The first wounded arrived in southwest France on August 27 as part of a French program to transfer the burden of caring for the wounded to  their home districts. The plan back­fi red, however, as the men also brought with them news of early battlefield defeats and the invasion of French soil by the enemy. They also told civilians of the true horrors of life on the front lines and the realities of combat. “The effect of their eyewitness accounts was too demoralizing and too disturbing to parents and neighbors,” so the French changed to a system of centralized military hospitals where men could be treated and, not inconsequentially, kept relatively isolated from those on the home front.119 The families of the wounded were, of course, the lucky ones. Although it is often overlooked, 1914 was by far the deadliest year of the war. Even when compared with the major battles of Verdun and the Somme, the much lesser-­known battles of 1914 created the highest death rates of the war. The year marked the highest casualty rates of the entire war for both France and Germany. As early as August 29, an American living in Paris noted that “there have been so many morts pour la Patrie that ev­ erywhere there are families who have been stricken by the loss of a member.”120 To put the massive numbers of dead into a local perspective, the working-­class Parisian neighborhood of Clichy lost eighty-­five men in August and September 1914. In no other three-­month period of the war did the neighborhood lose more than sixty men. By comparison, at the height of the Battle of Verdun (July through September 1916), Clichy lost 173

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twenty-­five men.121 Nor were the high casualty rates limited to working-­ class districts; one-­half of all students at the Sorbonne from the classes of 1910 to 1913 were killed in 1914.122 As many other scholars have noted, death in World War I was unlike death in previous wars.123 The sheer scale of the killing was enough to differentiate this war from those that had come before it. From August to November 1914 Britain lost four times the number of men it had lost in  the entire South African War from 1899 to 1902.124 Germany saw 116,000 men killed and 400,000 wounded on the western front alone in 1914; by comparison, Germany lost 43,000 men in the entire Franco-­ Prussian War.125 France suf­fered 329,000 dead in August and September alone. France lost 27,000 men in a single day (August 22), exceeding the death rate for the British Army on the infamous first day of the Somme (July 1, 1916). More than 29 percent of all German war casualties on the western front occurred in August and September 1914.126 These massive numbers are perhaps better understood in microcosm. One French soldier left for war with eighty-­t wo men in his company; by the end of August all but three were already casualties.127 A great number of these casualties fit into an unexpectedly large category, the missing. Thousands of such men were victims of artillery shells so powerful that they literally left no remains behind. As one French gunner noted in the war’s opening weeks, an artillery bombardment “either destroys ev­ery­thing or nothing.”128 Parents and wives who were thus told that their loved ones were missing did not know whether to mourn or to hold out hope. Their son or husband might be relatively safe in a prisoner­of-­war camp or might be lying dazed and disoriented in a hospital.129 A family near Cognac received news that their son had been killed in battle, then soon received another message saying that there had been a mistake and their son was alive. The next day, another message arrived telling them that their son was now listed as missing.130 The uncertainty was dif­ fi­cult for friends and family to handle. Relatives of one French soldier received a notice that their son was missing in the Argonne, leading a friend to ask, “Should he be spoken of in the present or the past?”131 Some families received news of one member’s death alongside the news of another’s call-­up. German soldier Herbert Sulzbach had to say goodbye to his sister the same day (August 29) she learned that her husband had been killed. Sulzbach thought the farewell was “nearly impossible” because “she finds the sight of me in uniform too painful.”132 Tragedy could also come in waves. French general Ferdinand Foch learned of 174

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the death of his only son and his only son-­in-­law on the same day (August 22), and an En­glish noble lost three friends on one day during the First Battle of the Aisne; “Oh this beastly war,” he wrote, “I do wish it would end.”133 As early as August 28, Mary King Waddington confided in her diary her fears that the war was producing “a whole generation wiped out.”134 Little did she then know that Europe faced more than four more years of killing. The astonishingly bloody early weeks of the war completely overwhelmed all systems for dealing with the dead. In France, the original plan had been for a local of­fi­cial, ideally the mayor, to inform a family directly about the loss of a loved one. But the casualty rates of 1914 made such a system impossible to execute except in the smallest communes. In Paris, the government could do little else but send “an impersonal communication” through the mail. This system produced such “heart rending scenes of grief and shock” that the French decided to implement the prewar system by the end of the year.135 The Germans tended to impose on local clergy to deliver news of deaths, but this system, too, was often overwhelmed. News of death often came in strange ways. Just a week into the war, Georges Leballe sent a letter to his family telling them that when you receive this letter, your little boy will be no more. While on patrol with six men I was shot from a few meters away, severing an artery in my thigh. Then abandoned, I survived for 24 hours and I went to the arms of God where I will see you again sooner or later. Do not cry too much and pray for me. My final thoughts will be for you and for God.136 Another father told his sons that “if fate decrees that we do not see each other again” he wanted them to remember his last words of advice: “always work to maintain peace and avoid at all costs this horrible thing that is war.”137

Our Final Hour: Civilians in the Crossfire Almost before they could mentally adjust to the fact that their nation was at war, thousands of civilians found themselves directly in the path of enemy armies. Some had barely even had the chance to deal with the demands of mobilization before they had to face the possibility of occupation. Arthur Sweetser, an American reporter who worked for the United 175

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Press, had a chance to meet some of them. Unable to find out what was happening at the front from the meager dispatches coming into his news of­fice in Paris, Sweetser took a train out of the city hoping to learn some real news; he was surprised to find that he could get as far as Lille without special arrangements from the French military authorities. He soon learned that the ease of his journey was not an indication that the war was going well for France. He met wounded British soldiers as well as French and Belgian refugees “homeless and crazed with fear.” Lille itself was suf­fering from the same lack of news as the rest of France; “the only news at all was that borne of supercharged imaginations. . . . wild rumors, both of victory and defeat, sprang from nowhere, surcharged the air, encompassed the city.” Everyone he met told him the same story, “husband, son, or brother gone, dead for all that was known these past three weeks, nothing left but misery, abject fear, and a sense of utter defenselessness.” Realizing that the city was about to fall, he decided to leave. French of­fi­cials tried to get him to return to Paris by one of the last trains that would leave Lille before the Germans seized it, but he managed to find a bicycle and instead headed down a road toward an unknown destination hoping to find a war to cover. He found it in Valenciennes, which, as an American, he was allowed to enter despite the fact that it now lay on the German side of the line. There he found peasants absolutely stunned and confused about what had transpired. They had had no news at all since the outbreak of the war. He pedaled on to Cambrai, crossing the front lines once again, where he found the locals just as confused as they had been in Valenciennes: “Not one of them realized the sig­nifi­cance of the forces surging about them. Revanche, Alsace-­Lorraine, 1870 may have been shibboleths in the cities, but amongst these poor peasant ­women, they were absolutely unknown.” To the peasants he met, war meant “crops running to seed, a store ruined, and a drawer full of worthless [German] coins” that the occupying troops used to pay for the goods they took. Sweetser’s incredible journey was not yet over. On September 2 he and his bicycle arrived in German-­occupied Compiègne. There a German of­ fi­cial told him that to get back to Paris he would need a German pass as the city would be in German hands in a few days. Another German of­fi­ cer told him that the United States and Germany had jointly declared war on Japan in order to assist China. Announcing that “we’re allies now,” the of­fi­cer told Sweetser he’d give him a ride to the French cap­ital. Sweet176

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ser, doubting the truth of the German’s information, declined and bicycled on to Senlis.138 Not all tales were as extraordinary as Sweetser’s. Most were simply terrifying. An eleven-­year-­old French girl living near Sedan recorded her family’s experiences on August 25 when the Germans entered the town: We went into the dining room and at the moment when these pigs passed we closed the shutters. At that moment, a gigantic volley of fire was heard. We heard the galloping of horses. They charged. A great “poof,” a second, and we left running. The cannons began. Everyone ran to the small bedroom. We heard the shells whistle. They sounded like poumm . . . zsuii . . . poumm. We wondered if our final hour had not come.139 Hundreds of thousands of refugees flooded the roads of Europe in the early weeks of the war. Belgian and French refugees soon became staples of allied and neutral media reports, but more than 800,000 Germans fled eastern districts in the wake of Russia’s early successes. Many of these refugees came to the cities in hope of find­ing food, shelter, and protection from the ravages of war. Their arrival completely overwhelmed governments already dealing with the dif­fi­culties of mobilization and economic dislocation. Private charities and local volunteers stepped in where they could, but their resources were soon exhausted. Refugees were a pitiful sight, bringing home the horrors of the war and the particular ferocity it unleashed on innocent civilians whose only crime had been living too near the front lines. Many of the refugees were elderly or children terrified, confused, and unsure of their futures. “You should live to see it,” one Londoner reported, “the sad, weary faces of those poor homeless, penniless people some having lost their children.”140 More than 5,000 Belgian refugees arrived in Paris amid a symbolic rainstorm on August 27, auguring “the arrival of terror” in the cap­ital.141 Even civilians behind the frontier suddenly found themselves exposed to the harsh realities of war. The army sealed the gates to Paris at night, underscoring the dangers to the city. Such actions could not prevent attacks from the air, which began on August 30. Although many Parisians insouciantly sat on their balconies and watched the German aircraft, others took to cellars and Métro stations in a quest for safety. Jane Michaux understood what this new type of war might mean for her beloved Paris and confided sadly to her diary in late August, “While there is still time 177

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for it, I want to admire the city which will perhaps find its precious beauty suf­fering.”142 Although she was referring to aerial bombardment, memories of the bloody civil war known as the Paris Commune of 1870–1871 were still horribly alive in the minds of all Parisians. The frenetic activity in the city ran counter to the good news trumpeted in the communiqués and in the media. On August 17, artillery appeared on the heights of the Trocadéro, across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower; on the same day the news proclaimed a great French victory on the Meuse. Security was also visibly increased throughout the cap­ital. One woman living in Paris did not know what to make of such contradictory signals, but she took hope from the reports coming from the Meuse: “News this morning of fresh French successes. Germany repulsed on the Meuse, many drowned in the river, and we hope it is true, and wish there are many more Meuses and many more Germans drowned in them— which is an awful thing for a Christian woman to believe.”143 The plight of foreigners trapped behind “enemy” lines required attention as well. Some were luckier than others. Beatrice Kelsey, a young British governess living in Germany, tried to make her way back home at the start of hostilities. She was detained at Cologne but released (presumably to neutral Holland) because the German barracks guard had studied at Oxford and another soldier assigned to guard her was engaged to an En­ glishwoman who had left the day before. They asked her to send news that they were safe to the guard’s fiancée.144 Kelsey’s story was not, however, typical. Thousands of unfortunate civilians ended up interned for years, many for the duration of the war. More than 10,000 Germans had been interned in Britain before mid-­September. Only a lack of space limited the British government’s arrests.145 Many now-­enemy aliens had lived in their ­adopted homelands for years; others had simply been traveling for business or plea­sure when the war unexpectedly began. An American art student, Eric Fisher Wood, described the plight of thousands of Germans and Austrians in Paris: Poor creatures, they are in no way personally responsible for the war, and yet they bear no mean part in the suf­fering it is causing. . . . Last week they were treated ev­erywhere with respect and politeness, today they are looked upon with suspicion and hostility. They are hungry and they have no money. They are surrounded by looks of hatred and they are terror-­stricken.146 178

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In late August Berlin universities expelled 7 foreign professors and 568 students designated as “enemies.” London universities did not follow the German model out of a sense of “responsibility to uphold liberal traditions in the face of the acts of intolerance brought by war,” although the British government did intern several foreign students.147 The governments of neutral nations stepped in to help wherever they could, but the conditions of such people were not a high priority in the early days of the war, nor were neutral governments well-­placed to help. Wood left school and volunteered at the American Embassy in Paris to help the city’s 30,000 stranded enemy nationals who appealed for American help. Wood also found himself trying to deal with the letters of dead German soldiers found by French soldiers who hoped that the Americans might be able to find a way to get them to “the relatives of the dead for whom they were intended.”148 That act indicated that at least a modicum of humanity remained in a Europe drifting further and further from the principles that had guided it before August 1914. It also suggests the commonalities of experience across national borders and the shared senses of loss and disillusionment that the war had already brought to the people of the continent. Nevertheless, that common sense of humanity was rapidly fading to be replaced by a nastier, more brutal un­der­stand­ing of the war and its meanings. As summer faded and the war’s first few weeks ended, a new bitterness and  hatred emerged that no one could have foreseen when the armies marched off to war in the early days of August.

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In early August, Kaiser Wilhelm had promised the German people that their husbands, brothers, and sons would be home before the leaves fell to the ground. But even as the autumn leaves first began to change colors his promise already seemed a quaint relic of a bygone era. Few people any ­longer believed that the war might end by Christmas, although most people still held firm to a conviction that their side would eventually win. Autumn witnessed an intensification of many of the patterns of summer, but several new themes emerged, including the beginning of domestic discord, an early sense of disillusionment with the war from both soldiers and civilians, and an increasing separation between the worlds of soldiers and those they left behind on the home front. Most im­por­tant, however, a vicious cycle of hatred began based around lurid tales of atrocities that all sides used to fuel an ever more murderous war. These themes, normally associated with the horrors of the period of the “big battles” of 1916, were well in place by the time the kaiser saw the first leaves fall to the ground outside his palace at Potsdam. Frustration was widely shared across the continent in the early months. One Frenchman noted as early as October that “the wave of pessimism continues to spread. . . . the length of the struggle has become exasperating; people are indignant . . . [and] give vent to their anger. . . . A wild nihilism rumbles away in their hearts.”1 Europeans had dif­fi­culty accepting the shattering of the high ideals with which they had begun the war. As these ideals rapidly faded, disillusionment, disenchantment, and discord took their place. Genuine hatred, too, emerged as Europeans developed new, often dehumanizing, views of their enemies. In all belligerent nations, there was a growing sense that the sac­ri­fices of the war were not being borne equally. Such an impression stood in marked contrast to the lofty public rhetoric about a war of national sur180

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vival and high ideals. Among the most egregious violators were the war ­profiteers who were supposedly making money while the sons and husbands of other families mourned. As early as October, the war p ­ rofiteer had become a staple image of left-­leaning publications, one of which featured a cartoon sarcastically en­ti­tled “Sacrifice” that showed two ladies from high society sipping tea. One of the well-­dressed ladies says to the other, “Yes, darling, one feels that it is one’s duty to set an example of self-­denial to the people—I have put Fido and all the dogs on the same food as the servants.”2 At the same time, working-­class Germans were already complaining that the shortage of bread was due to “the limited flour stores . . . being squandered on cake for the rich at the expense of their most basic food, therefore already raising the specter of inequitable sac­ri­fice in the name of someone else’s ­profit.” Neither food rationing nor price controls suf­ficed to remove the impression that the rich were not only suf­fering less but ac­tually ­profit­ing from the war.3 The continued economic dif­fi­culties that millions of Europeans felt only increased this anxiety. Small stores in Paris (as in most large cities) remained closed, but by mid-­October several big department stores had reopened even though they had “very little to sell.”4 German stores, especially grocery stores, were equally empty. More than one-­third of German food came from imports, the majority of which the Allied blockade shut off. Because the German government (like all governments in 1914) had made no preparations for a food crisis, the result was a chaotic series of competitions between private food distributors, local governments, and the haphazard efforts of the central government. Inflation and shortages became commonplace in such an environment and anxiety built as people worried about the quality of the 1914 harvest in the absence of so many young men and migrant workers.5 Governments had a dif­fi­cult enough time adjusting to the realities of total war; they had few resources to deal with the economic dislocations the war was causing to millions of their citizens. The enormity of the prob­lem overwhelmed already distracted bureaucrats. Paris reported an unemployment rate of 35 percent in mid-­October. As early as September 6, the largest French trade ­union and the French Socialist Party combined to form a Comité d’Action to deal with the suf­fering. The Comité announced that it would address four fundamental prob­lems: the physical and psychological traumas of war; in­fla­tion; the inadequacies of existing social welfare arrangements; and unemployment. The Comité served 1,000,000 meals in Paris in October alone. It also decried what it alleged 181

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was the nefarious practice of industrialists’ using the high unemployment rates to lower wages. 6 The economic dislocations of the war’s opening weeks were resolved more quickly in defense-­related industries than in more purely civilian industries like construction. Military contracts helped many companies not only resume work but hire new employees as well. Recognizing the need to keep certain sectors of the economy flour­ishing in a war that might not end quickly, armies in all the belligerent nations released skilled workers with experience in essential industries so they could return to their prewar jobs. While this system kept essential industries functioning, it also created tensions as many families understandably “tended to make perhaps too frank a show of their delight” at having their loved ones come home “at a time when others were learning of the death of those who had remained at the front.” Thus some men came home to safe, high-­paying jobs while others remained at the front earning a meager soldier’s wage as they risked their lives. Even if such a system could have been administered fairly, it was virtually impossible to prevent it from seeming to bene­fit friends and family of the well-­placed.7 As a result, it appeared to many families with men at the front that the blood sac­ri­fice demanded of the nation was being increasingly borne by the unfortunate while the well-­connected made money off the sac­ri­fices of ­others. Information, like food and money, became an ever more precious commodity, although in this case its scarcity was due to government action, not inaction. The bourrage de crâne, or skull ­stuffing, continued in both the media and the of­fi­cial communiqués. Increasingly the two sources became almost identical. Briton Arnold Bennett revealingly noted in his journal on October 25, “no news except newspaper news,” and later decried the “lying placards on evening papers,” both damning indictments of the inutility of the media.8 Some newspapers in provincial France had so much dif­fi­culty find­ing anything to cover (or anything that could pass the censors) that they reduced their daily editions from six pages to four.9 Governments acted with greater ef­fi­ciency in controlling information than in controlling food. By October the German government had a central pro­pa­ganda of­fice and no fewer than twenty-­seven of­fi­cial and semiof­fi­cial pro­pa­ganda agencies functioning, a sign of both the government’s mania to control the news and the redundancies and inefficiencies in the German federal system.10 Newspapers in all belligerent nations had little option but to repeat what the propagandists told them and then, in 182

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an effort to attract readers, try to spin the news in ever more pa­tri­otic and sensationalist ways.11 Newspapers therefore continued to print outlandishly positive stories, including one in France that claimed that the troops “laugh at machine guns now. . . . Nobody pays the slightest attention to them.”12 Propaganda of­fices invented stories to justify the continuation of the war effort. In mid-­October, the German government required ev­ery newspaper in Germany to publish a 1906 document supposedly found by German of­fi­cers in Belgium. The document allegedly showed that Britain and France had long planned to use Belgium as an advanced base for attacking Germany as soon as war began. The German government announced, through the newspapers, that therefore Germany had not invaded Belgium but merely preempted a British invasion of that country; because the document seemingly demonstrated that the Belgians were complicit in the planning, moreover, Belgium had ceased to be a neutral country. The document proved to German of­fi­cials “that for the last eight years Belgian neutrality was a mask that deceived Germany and the rest of Europe,” thus revealing the hypocrisy of the British and their feigned outrage at German behavior in Belgium.13 Shortly thereafter, German newspapers also carried the so-­called Manifesto of the Intellectuals, which decried “the lies and calumnies with which our enemies are endeavoring to stain the honor of Germany in her hard struggle for existence—in a struggle that has been forced on her.” The manifesto, signed by ninety-­three of Germany’s most prominent intellectuals promoting themselves as “heralds of truth,” provided more jus­tifi­ca­tion for Germany’s war. It claimed It is not true that Germany is guilty of having caused this war. Neither the people, the Government, nor the Kaiser wanted war. . . . It is not true that we trespassed in neutral Belgium. It has been proved that France and En­gland had resolved on such a trespass, and it has likewise been proved that Belgium had agreed to their doing so [note the reference to the 1906 document]. . . . It is not true that the life and property of a single Belgian citizen was injured by our soldiers without the bitterest defense having made it necessary.14 This manifesto, and others like it, shattered the popular prewar notion in Britain and France that there were “two Germanies,” a militaristic one and an artistic one. C. H. Hereford noted that the manifesto and 183

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the actions of Germany in the war’s opening weeks had “completely effaced” any distinction between “the things we honour and the things we abhor in the Germany of today.”15 Henceforth, the Allies saw themselves as fight­ing not against Prussian autocracy and militarism but against an entire nation because even the humanists and socialists inside Germany had chosen their sides. The Allies now had to fight “not just individual perpetrators but the German army and even the German people as a whole [for] committing moral outrages.”16 At the same time, governments made censorship of all news in the war’s early months ever more tight. In October Vorwärts received a four­day suspension of its right to publish, not because of anything the paper had written, but as preemptive punishment for some unknown and unspeci­fied item that the government feared it might print. The paper took the suspension for what it was, a punishment for even its muted past criticism and a warning against any future criticism. While newspapers from the left received more government attention than those on the right, the latter were not immune either; the conservative and reliably progovernment Vossische Zeitung received a temporary suspension of its right to publish for inadvertently misquoting German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg.17 Censorship sometimes went to absurd lengths. The German government banned a Danish-­language newspaper in Schles­wig for one week for the major crime of failing to note the queen’s birthday. The government’s letter to the newspaper noted, “By this omission one can see that a whole race is painfully and deplorably lacking in pa­tri­ot­ism. . . . If such heedlessness recurs, the paper must be defi­nitely suppressed as long as the war lasts.”18 The only possible point to such an action was to underscore the government’s power in wartime to take any and all capricious actions it wished. Europeans took to reading into the silences in the news, assuming that days without any discussion of the war in the papers meant that it was going badly. “What irreparable misfortune is the government hiding under this silence?” wondered one Frenchman to his diary during such a period of information silence.19 After a few days of similar silence in the German media in mid-­September (following the German retreat from the Marne), Evelyn Blücher noted in her diary, “I am beginning to think the tide has turned against the Germans, hence this sudden silence.” She observed that many Germans were reading the silence in the same way and that people “are hinting at a serious defeat somewhere,” even though she had nothing but the media silence to indicate it. A week later, after reading 184

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German newspapers and a smuggled copy of the London Times, she marveled at how little news they ac­tually contained: “How shall we ever know the truth in any country?” As late as September 23 (two weeks after the Battle of the Marne) she still could record that “nothing defi­nite is known as to the fate of the Germans round Paris” except that “it is a harder fight than people anticipated.”20 Europeans therefore found that their lives were being determined by distant events about which they could learn nothing. Europeans still filled in the news silences with rumors, but they grew more circumspect about what they repeated to others. As one of them noted in her diary in mid-­September, they had learned to dismiss “those stupid rumors such as fly around so thick in time of war.”21 By the time she wrote these lines, diarists and letter writers referred less often to wild rumors such as the one about Russian snow in British railway cars, perhaps because they had at last become more judicious in what they allowed themselves to believe. Many of their writings, moreover, continued to reveal their abiding ignorance, even innocence, about the true nature of the war. Evelyn Blücher heard of the German aerial bombardment of Paris and immediately thought of her native London. The British cap­ital, she thought, was immune from aerial bombardment because the laws of war forbade such attacks on an unfortified city.22 Her diary makes no mention of German behavior in Belgium, so she may not have been aware of the disregard the German military had already shown for the laws of war. On the other hand, the German chancellor had by this time publicly admitted that the German Army had committed crimes of “necessity” in Belgium, so she should certainly have been aware that the laws of warfare offered scant protection to anyone in 1914.23 In any case, her observation reveals a naïveté among even the relatively well-­informed that managed to persist into the war’s first autumn. The rumors of autumn became less outrageous and more practical. They fulfilled the roles of either boosting the morale of one’s own side or demonizing the other side. Other rumors and lurid tales served the purpose of sustaining a deeply longed for belief that the war might soon end or giving people the motivation to fight on against a diabolical foe. Thus people in Britain consistently reported that the Royal Navy’s blockade had Germany on the brink of starvation, which would soon force the kaiser to sue for peace. Henri Bénard heard that French armies were retreating only because of a grand plan to draw German forces away from their heartland, so that the Russians could invade Bohemia and Bavaria and 185

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impose peace.24 That rumor offered a palatable explanation of French military reversals in the war’s first two months. Similarly, a German rumor, repeated faithfully by the media, noted that the German retreat from the Marne to the Aisne had not been the result of a battlefield defeat but was “conforming to the plan at HQ.” With such a barrage of good news and an absence of bad news, Europeans who wanted to think the best could delude themselves into believing that the war was in fact going much better than it was.25 Failures in the po­lit­i­cal realm mirrored the failures on the battlefield. The civil truces that domestic po­lit­i­cal opponents had celebrated with such great fanfare in August had already begun to unravel by October in large part because of the heavy-­handed government use of censorship and the silencing of even loyal domestic po­lit­i­cal opposition. Russian moderates and leftists decried the government’s use of a civil truce to shut out opposition parties and even the Duma itself from consultation on matters related to the war. Alexander Kerensky warned that his Socialist Party “expect[ed] much more from victory in the war” than a temporary truce with the government. He further warned that “after the war [the conservative interior minister] N.  A. Maklakov will be brought to account” for his abuses of power. Kerensky could not then have imagined the role he would play as the head of the provisional government that succeeded that of the czar in 1917; in the fall of 1914, however, he clearly understood how much more unpopular the government had already become. Russian police of­fi­cers were then reporting that “complete disillusionment and growing irritation are emerging in speeches, along the lines that some protest or other must be launched against the current [domestic] tactics and policies of the government.”26 Kadet po­lit­i­cal leader Paul Miliukov, too, railed at the government for breaking the spirit of the civil truce through its continued persecution of national minorities and a vigorous press censorship that “continued unabated” despite government promises to the contrary.27 A former Russian minister noted how quickly the civil truce went from “an emblem of uni­fi­ca­tion” to something akin to a child’s discarded toy that had “lost all sig­nifi­cance, and was soon forgotten.”28 Truces in France and Germany suf­fered under the strain of war as well. In Paris, a police report noted that socialists equated the ­union sacrée with the diminishing of civil power in the face of military power; another report stated that socialists did not expect to continue to honor the ­union sacrée for much l­onger.29 Many socialists and syndicalists soon began to call for a return to po­lit­i­cal activism if the French government 186

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did not take steps to solve the prob­lems and inequalities the war had created. Le Petit Parisien in mid-­October noted that the ­union sacrée was already falling apart under the weight of prewar controversies and polemics, most notably the exclusion of socialists from governance.30 Similarly, their German peers, the SPD, had begun to proclaim that their par­ tic­i­pa­tion in the Burgfrieden was only jus­ti­fied if it brought “concrete results” on economic questions of concern to the German working class, which supplied the majority of the soldiers and industrial workers who made Germany’s war possible. 31 The reality of war ran contrary to the high idealism and lofty nationalist rhetoric of the opening days of August. The increasing pressures on the civil truces in all belligerent nations were a symptom of the tensions and dif­fi­culties of maintaining national unity under the strains of war.

Enthusiasm Is a Thing of the Past For soldiers, the reality that they were now stuck in war with no immediate end in sight was demoralizing. One German soldier noted at the end of October that the “courage of mobilized men [is] being maintained with promises that the war will end by Christmas. When the soldiers find out that things ­don’t turn out that way, they are likely to lose their morale.” He noted that “enthusiasm is a thing of the past” and that the single most common refrain from German soldiers was “I wish the war would be over soon.” He also began to hear the first notes of pessimism from German soldiers about the chances of victory.32 The reactions of many veteran British soldiers were similar, with one writing in mid-­September, “There seems to be a unanimous feeling that nobody would mind how soon this war came to a close.”33 The war’s first few weeks revealed that the illusions young men had about war were not only inaccurate but dangerous.34 German soldier Uli Klimpsch witnessed the destruction of wartime Poland, which appeared to him as “one great grave. Horrible—ghastly.” The sight of mass civilian suf­fering there destroyed all his prewar illusions about the gallantry of war. Thereafter his letters home spoke only of a “deep longing for peace.”35 His response was common. Another German wrote home, “With what joy, with what enthusiasm I went to war; it seemed to me a splendid opportunity for working off all the natural craving of youth for excitement and experience. Now I sit here with horror in my heart, filled with bitter disappointment. It is ghastly.”36 War, these young men soon learned, bore no relation to their prewar 187

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ideas about it. In late October, a German student wrote home that “I can now only think with disgust of the battle pictures which one sees in books. They show a repulsive levity. . . . How many a quite young married man have I seen lying dead! One must not attempt to sweeten or beautify such a thing as that.”37 One British soldier asked rhetorically in an early September letter home “About this ‘Romance of War’ one hears such a lot about. Do you know anything about it? Can’t spot it here; one is usually too tired to think of anything except getting a few corn sheaves to doss down on.”38 Another recalled hearing from a veteran who described a battle as “running for his life with the Prussian Guard after him.” Even weeks after the British retreat from Belgium, this new enlistee stopped and asked himself, “Can this be true? Do British soldiers really run away?”39 Illusions sometimes died hard, but they died all the same. The notion that “seeing a modern battlefield demolishes all one’s preconceived ideas” was commonplace. An American observer found that he was not prepared for his first look at the detritus of a battle. He saw 60 French soldiers lying dead in a nearly perfect row, killed, he was told, by the same machine gun. He also walked through a six-­acre field that contained an astonishing 900 dead and wounded men and saw buildings that “no earthquake could have ruined more thoroughly.”40 Another American was stunned by the sight of the bodies of thousands of men from the Battle of the Marne that had “lain for days unburied under the hot September sun.”41 Arthur Ruhl saw bodies that had sat unburied for two weeks and also saw a wheelbarrow full of “cast off arms” that were unattached to bodies.42 Men learned quickly that they had much less control over their own fates in this war of machines than they had supposed. Many young men had volunteered to fight in part out of desire for adventure in a world that they thought had become too industrial, too predictable, and too stultifying. They quickly learned the painful lesson that the war did not offer an escape from that world, but instead represented a deadly reinforcement of it. “Where is the individual heroism of past wars?” asked one German volunteer. “The present day artillery engagement is like a wretched rabbit chase. . . . One has no weapon with which to defend oneself. Many a brave soldier feels like a bird in a cage at which the hunter is aiming.”43 Hunting images were common, with the soldier always feeling like defenseless prey; Frenchman Eugène Lemercier described being in combat as akin to being a “rabbit when shooting season starts.”44 Like prey, men felt that they could never take an active role in their 188

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own defense; nor could they do anything to avenge the losses of friends and the destruction they saw all around them. A wounded Russian soldier told Alfred Knox that he hated war because “he got hit and hit no one back.”45 One French of­fi­cer bemoaned “losses without combat, when a shell falls among us, the stench of the horse cadavers, the cries of the wounded that, all night, call for help, the death, the mud, the blood. That is what we see ev­ery hour. This is not the war I dreamed of.” Still, he hoped that France would “have the final word” even as he and his men recognized the need to “be fatalistic and learn to say good-­bye to this life” because an “unfortunate shell” could arrive at any time.46 Another Frenchman, Louis Gillet, recorded that “without being able to do anything about it, we have been pinned down for 26 days; I must admit that I had no idea life could be so hellish and humiliating.”47 One French soldier even found himself longing for the days of 1870, when he thought that war had meant “real battles where the armies knocked each other around with tenacity.” In modern war, he thought, the only role for the soldier was to “get killed by the artillery as late as possible” and heroism meant “hiding oneself as best one could.”48 As these comments re­flect, the mechanical anonymity of killing in modern war and its ability to make men feel like sacrificial lambs instead of heroes was a particularly unpleasant surprise to the men of 1914.49 One analyst of soldier writings concluded that “instead of escaping the soul-­killing mechanism of modern technology, they learned that the ­tyranny of technology ruled even more omnipotently in war than in peace.”50 As one soldier wrote in his diary, “We were all of us cogs in a great machine which sometimes rolled forward, nobody knew where, sometimes backwards, nobody knew why. We had lost our enthusiasm, our courage, the very sense of our identity.”51 Another expressed his frustration that “one never knows, truly, if one has done anything useful for the fatherland. We never act!”52 Sometimes soldiers could get lost in that machinery. An Irish priest met German prisoners of war (“nice fellows,” he observed) who had no idea that they were in France. They thought that they had been deployed to the German coastline and had been captured there by British invaders.53 Even when the machines were not the killers, men soon discovered that their own personal virtues counted for little. As one German soldier noted, “instead of heroes there were only victims.”54 Military incompetence and inexperience killed untold thousands of men. One wounded German reported that his regiment had been almost entirely wiped out 189

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when its colonel shouted out a command despite orders for total silence. German artillerists assumed that the shouting had come from the enemy and directed overwhelming fire on their own positions. 55 Soldiers were frequently stunned at the “clumsiness and lack of imagination” they saw in of­fi­cers they had been conditioned to respect and obey.56 It was probably inevitable that men’s emotions could not sustain the high level of excited agitation of the war’s early days. The depths to which these emotions sank, and the speed with which they did so, however, indicate a rapid return to their prewar lack of enthusiasm for going to war. The period of “war enthusiasm,” to the extent that it existed at all, barely lasted into the war’s first fall for the men of all sides. Watching their comrades die to no purpose brought home the frustrations of the war. By September 23, only 40 men were left of the 150 men in Etienne Tanty’s company, and on the same day Charles Delvert’s regiment had just 6 of its original 52 of­fi­cers still alive.57 Henri Bénard’s regiment had lost all its captains and majors by October 9, and while the digging of trenches had reduced the rate of casualty, he knew it offered no permanent protection, either. His men demonstrated this fact by placing a hat on a pole and lifting it above the trench’s front wall. Bénard thought that the ensuing sounds suggested that the Germans had fired at least 1,000 shots at the hat in the span of just a few seconds.58 Bénard knew that his men would have to attack in order to liberate French soil from the German invaders, but he had just seen a terrible demonstration of both the tactical dif­fi­culty of doing so and his likely chances of survival. For most young soldiers, the reality that they might ac­tually be killed in this con­flict, perhaps with no remains to have buried in their hometown cemetery, made real not only the danger of the war but its ultimate futility as well. Many quickly realized that their deaths were inevitable and might come at any minute. Soldiers also faced the knowledge that their fates depended not on their own courage, faith, or prowess but on pure luck. French soldier Alexis Callies, a professional artillerist who had been in the army since 1891, was struck by the poignant sight of a German soldier killed by a shell (perhaps one he had fired) while in a position of prayer.59 Such images changed men and their views of the war going on around them. Acceptance of men’s lack of control over their own lives came quickly and surprisingly to many soldiers in 1914. Eugène Lemercier, once one of the most enthusiastic supporters of war, wrote as early as September 7 that the only response men could make to the war was an “acceptance of 190

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fatality.”60 Another soldier noted shortly after that he and his men no ­longer used the future tense without adding, “if we get there,” re­flect­ing their awareness of the deadliness of the war and the need to face it with a sense of resigned fatalism. 61 A friend of Charles Delvert told him in late September that the best fate any soldier could hope for in the war was to die quickly. 62 Heroism and bravery no ­longer determined life and death; nor did they motivate men any ­longer. German soldier Rudolf Binding notably titled his eloquent memoirs A Fatalist at War. Like thousands of men from all nations, Lemercier’s disillusion happened quickly and totally. In August he had admired Maurice Barrès’s prowar poem “The Eagle Outflies the Butterfly,” which read: When you come back from the Rhine You will have mounted so high And on such strong wings That you will surpass all your dreams As the eagle outflies the butterfly. But a few weeks at war were all that Lemercier needed to see the poem as “out of tune with the spirit of the moment.” His first encounter with the realities of war led him to see the poem as a relic of a now-­vanished age of peace, “like ornaments one puts aside for festive occasions which are a long way off and may never come.”63 Like Lemercier, many Europeans had already begun to see the years of peace and the weeks of war as two distinct and mutually exclusive worlds. The ideals that had established the former were unrecognizable to the latter. As Paul Fussell and others have noted, even the language of peacetime struck many people as inappropriate to wartime. 64 Such realizations came much more quickly than scholars have realized, however. It did not take the Somme or Verdun to bring about the awareness that the war was too horrible to be described by ordinary prose. British journalist Philip Gibbs wrote in the war’s first weeks about the frustrations of war correspondents who all knew that “there was no code of word which would convey the picture of the wild agony of the peoples, that smashing of all civilized law.”65 A Frenchman made the same observation, noting that language could not bridge the gap between “the war as it was” and the image people had of it from their ideas about previous wars.66 Moma Clarke noted that in Paris “no one said anything that really mattered— people rarely do nowadays, for words seem of so little account.” Indeed “there is nothing to be said to comfort” people like the man from Lille 191

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she had met who had had no word of the fate of his wife, sister, or children, all now trapped behind enemy lines amid persistent rumors of the barbaric behavior of occupying German troops. 67 For soldiers of all sides, connecting with other human beings, even those on the other side of the lines, represented an attempt to regain a small portion of their own humanity. As one French soldier wrote in mid­October: It is with great sadness and a blind rage that I think of the families who will next year cry over an empty coffin, children, wives, and the elderly under the folds of some flag in Berlin, in Paris, in London, in Vienna, or in St. Petersburg, under the mourning veil. Can the gold and territories that the nations will gain fill the emptiness in the foyers? You do not know the hatred I have for the apologists of this carnage, and how disgusted I am with the memory of those monsters who imagined themselves worthy to inspire the young to admire this cult [of violence]. 68 German prisoners of war who were brought to Britain and France therefore encountered little hostility in the war’s first few months. They appeared to one Londoner as “a body of ordinary civilized young men who would also be inoffensive looking but for their foreign uniform.” Indeed, many such men would likely have been working in London in entirely peaceful occupations had it not been for the war. Londoners showered the prisoners with cigars, fruit, and ginger beer and their “curiosity quickly warmed into friendship,” perhaps in the hopes that German civilians might offer the same courtesy to their own young men in a similar circumstance. 69 Such sentiments, however, were not to last much ­longer. Ironically, the warm feelings between German soldiers and British civilians did not always exist between British soldiers and British civilians. A member of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers wondered in October if the people at home had yet realized “what fools they’ve been” in not fully un­der­ stand­ing the kind of war they had helped to unleash.70 Another British soldier wrote home about an encounter with an elderly Belgian refugee who had to care for the child of her now-­dead son. Allied soldiers had to destroy her house to create a better field of fire for their guns. Now she had nothing left but a bundle of clothes and a baby to somehow care for. The woman stared at the soldier and asked him, “What am I supposed to do?” The experience moved him, both because of his inability to do anything to help and because of the stark contrast to the situation in En­ 192

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gland, where people “read our papers over their eggs and bacon in the morning and probably say ‘how terrible’ and forget about the war. It is only over here that they understand the awfulness of it.” Wilfred Owen took to drawing pictures of the wounds he had seen in a military hospital in Bordeaux. He sent the pictures to his youn­ger brother “to educate you to the ac­tualities of the war.”71 Another British soldier went so far as to pray for “a raid, or at least a score of [British] civilians killed” in order to wake the British people to the reality of war.72 Such sentiments may have been more pronounced among British soldiers because of the safety and distance British civilians enjoyed compared with the Belgian and French civilians whom British soldiers encountered. Almost all who witnessed the cruelty of modern war felt powerless to do anything to ease a suf­fering that seemed not to be jus­ti­fied by any strategic goals. John Ayclough, an Irish Catholic priest in the British Army, gave Extreme Unction to a dying German soldier, a “sad-­faced, simple country lad from Prussian Poland, with no more idea why he should be killed or should kill anyone else, than a sheep or a cow.” The experience moved him to write home to his mother, “If ever anything was an appeal to heaven from a brother’s blood, crying from the earth, it was one.”73 These first-­hand experiences with war led to a “rediscovery of evil” among many soldiers, such as the British soldier at Antwerp who noted that “one could almost hear the devil laughing at the handiwork of his children.”74 Losing friends and comrades especially brought home the tragedy of war and reminded men of their own fragile mortality. One French soldier, himself to be killed in June 1915, wrote to his family in October that he found himself unable to stop crying after seeing the body of one of his friends. “I think I would rather be killed myself” than see another dead friend, he wrote.75

Rather Tough on John, but Still A deep desire for peace was among the most common characteristics that soldiers in all armies shared. Rowland Owen, a British soldier with a gung ho brother in the Royal Navy, noted at the end of September: I have not met a single man (or horse) of the En­glish, French, or German armies who is not dying for the war to fin­ish! [My brother] John and the Kaiser alone want to keep on. I often feel that this war has done a lot towards the world’s peace. You see, if all goes 193

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well, we ought to win the victory which swallows up all strife, like Waterloo; and that ought to keep the peace for, say, 50 years. By that time the really universal feeling against war will manage to make soldiers a thing of the past. Rather tough on John, but still.76 The same desire for a quick end to the war existed among the Germans as well. A British soldier who spoke German interrogated captured enemy soldiers in October after the Battle of Ypres. He found that “one and all appeared to be overjoyed at having been captured, and, so far as I can make out, there is no enthusiasm in the German ranks over this war.”77 At that point, of course, most of them likely expected to return home in the near future when the war ended. On the same battlefield, German soldier Rudolf Binding wrote at the end of October that the war was “senseless, a lunacy, a horrible bad joke of peoples and their his­tory, an endless reproach to mankind, a negation of all civilization, killing all belief in the capacity of mankind and men for prog­ress, a desecration of what is holy, so that one feels that all human beings are doomed in this war.” Binding wrote these lines after witnessing an event known as the Kindermord, or the Slaughter of the Innocents, when German student volunteers attacked a British position while singing pa­tri­otic songs. The German media and government soon turned the tragedy into a major public relations event, praising the heroism of the men. Binding, however, thought the gesture “just as vain and just as costly” as all the other killing he had seen. All it meant in the end, he thought, was the loss of “the intellectual flower of Germany” for no larger purpose worthy of their deaths.78 A British soldier present at the same battle called it “pure murder prolonged over days” and thought it resembled “a hurricane sweeping down over a castle of cards.”79 Soldiers were introspective enough to recognize the changes that the war was causing in them. Within a few short weeks they had already become hardened to the horrid sights they were seeing ev­ery day. A German soldier noted in early September that “one was already too brutalized to feel pity” even at the worst evidence of war because “the feeling of humanity had been blown to the winds. The groaning and crying, the pleading of the wounded did not touch one. Some Catholic nuns were lying dead before the convent [near Sedan]. You saw it and passed on.” Brutality, he noted, had already become “second nature” to the men of his unit: “They are no ­longer civilized human beings, they are simply bloodthirsty brutes, for otherwise they would be bad, very bad soldiers.”80 A French194

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man noted almost identical feelings just a few weeks later: “I would never have believed that I could remain so indifferent in the presence of dead bodies. For us soldiers, human life seems to count for nothing.”81 Another thought that war was manageable as long as “you do not allow yourself to re­flect too much” about what you had seen and done. 82 As a result, soldiers sometimes came to doubt the wisdom of the reasons they were fight­ing. Although they had enlisted to fight for “Poor Little Belgium,” British soldiers soon found that the Belgians were not always the kinds of victims they would like to rescue. British of­fi­cer Ralph Hamilton had particularly bad experiences. One Belgian demanded 7,000 francs from his unit for the damage British soldiers had caused to his estate (“the gentleman returned without his 7,000 francs and with a very good idea of our exact opinion of him,” noted Hamilton), and at a British hospital near Ypres he put a stop to the outrageous practice of a group of Belgian nurses charging six pence to the locals for the chance to gawk at wounded British soldiers. In another case, he and his men sought shelter at a local château but were denied by the owner. Having exhausted all his logical arguments, Hamilton shouted at the château owner in German that they were Uhlans (the much-­feared German advance cavalry). “This frightened him thoroughly, and he made great haste to open the door and place ev­ery­thing at our disposal.” It was all part and parcel of the bizarre and surreal world of Europe at war. 83 Soldiers came to understand that most civilians were not the cunning enemies they had been led to fear, but merely innocent people caught in the crossfire. Many of them did not know, or care, about the causes that had led to the war, but they found themselves forced to do whatever they could to hold their possessions and their families together. Polish refugees “including tiny babies . . . shivering in the cold and rain” were a “heartbreaking” sight, even to a veteran of­fi­cer like Alfred Knox, the British liaison to the Russian Army. 84 Like most refugees, they had no idea what circumstances had brought war to their communities and they now had no idea where to go next. An Irishman tried to explain the war to a French peasant woman but found that he could not do it through a discussion of diplomacy or morality. The only method that worked was to tell her that if the Germans won, they would take her vegetables, whereas the British and French paid her for them. 85 Similarly, Jeanne Le Guiner, a nurse from Brittany, recalled a French soldier asking her, “I ­don’t understand it. H ­ aven’t the Boches got a country of their own?”86 In Russia, a government agent reported that peasants preferred paying the 195

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Germans to end the war rather than keep fight­ing, and that comments such as “is it not all the same what tsar we live under?” had become commonplace. 87 The war created strange circumstances, forcing people who had no hatred for one another onto opposite sides of the lines. Richard Hoffman, a French-­speaking Alsatian who was in the German Army, wondered “what the French population thinks about this war. Their wives wanted this war as little as ours did, their husbands are also at the front and serve in units that now are opposite us. What an irony! Tomorrow, perhaps, their shells will mow down their own relatives. Alas, that is war.”88

Human Life Seems to Be Absolutely Valueless The early days of the war produced a roller coaster of good and bad news, leading to alternating fits of joy and sadness. Albert de Mun, writing in Echo de Paris after the great allied victory on the Marne, asked his fellow countrymen to envision the ecstatic scene in the cap­ital: “Can you imagine the joy, the inebriation, the pride? This is the start of chasing the Germans from the soil of France! Imagine the enthusiasm, the spirit!”89 Such news stood in marked contrast to the “profound depression” in France during the war’s first few days. French defeats in Belgium and Alsace had led to talk of traitorous generals and fears of a repeat of the great di­sas­ter of 1870, but the “Miracle of the Marne” changed the mood sig­nifi­cantly, “reanimating con­fi­dence in an instant,” although hopes that the battle would lead to the end of the war proved illusory and even more demoralizing.90 Great victories, like the capture of Antwerp for the Germans (news of which reached Berlin on October 9), might temporarily lead people to become “drunk with exaltation” (note that these are almost exactly the same words de Mun used to describe French reactions to the victory at the Marne), but, like the French and British victory on the Marne, these triumphs failed to bring with them a successful end to the war. Each successive battle did, however, greatly increase the casualty lists. Evelyn Blücher, whose fellow Britons were among those dead at Antwerp, noted sadly in her diary that “whoever was the victor, hundreds and thousands of men of all countries were at that moment lying in their death agony.” She was among those who had begun to question whether any strategic gain in the war could possibly be worth the trauma it was causing. As early as September 9 she had recorded in her diary that “the mothers and 196

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wives here seem only to exist in trying to catch a glimpse of their men-­ relatives who pass to and fro between France and Russia. . . . Human life seems to be absolutely valueless nowadays.”91 As casualties mounted to no apparent purpose, Europeans experienced an increasing sadness and gloom. The large numbers of dead and the sight of so many people wearing mourning clothes spoke for themselves. The wife of one soldier received a letter from him telling her that he had been shot and expected to die shortly: “I assure you that it is very sad in this hospital room. There are 29 of us and none of us can move, [there are] broken legs and arms and very serious wounds.” He tried to give her some solace by telling her that he thought it better to die than to return to her in the state he was in. She received the letter on her twenty-­ fifth birthday.92 Nevertheless, many Europeans still believed (or hoped) that the war might end soon. In mid-­September, the French soldier Raoul Bouchet wrote home that the allied victory on the Marne might lead to an end to the war within a month. A few weeks later, he still believed that the war could end before winter set in.93 Some were more pessimistic, but most still had no idea that the war might last for years. In early October, Marc Bloch ruefully allowed that the war would require a winter campaign after all when his unit received a shipment of wool underwear.94 A week later a report from Gard, in the south of France, noted that new call-­ups talked of being home in two to three months.95 Few people predicted that the war would last much beyond spring, although even the optimistic Bouchet did write home on October 3 that “there are days when we believe that the war will end and others when we think we will not live to see the end of it.”96

Paris Despite their sorrow and demoralization, Europeans could not help being amazed that they were in the center of the greatest events of their age, even if they were, in the words of one En­glishwoman living in Paris, “helpless spectators” to them.97 Among the most riveting of these events was the German advance on Paris, which recalled in the minds of many the dramatic events of the Paris Commune of 1870–1871. One woman living in the city recorded in her diary that “all the old stories of the horrors that people had in ’70 came back to me—cats, rats, and glad to have them [for food]!” Fears of being trapped in Paris with little food led her 197

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reluctantly to leave the city, wondering “what sort of Paris we shall find when we get back—and I also wonder if we are right to go.”98 The information blackout and the predominance of the rumor mill meant that the approach of the German armies toward the cap­ital remained essentially unsubstantiated until August 30, when a German airplane dropped notes into the city to demand its surrender. Until that moment, the French newspapers had not mentioned any threat to the cap­ital, although there was “ev­ery conceivable rumor in the air.”99 The arrival of the German planes depressed the mood in the city even further and led to tremendous confusion. As a result, “the rumors of evil which yesterday all refused to believe as absolutely incredible are today accepted as facts.”100 The next day the French government announced plans to leave the city but did not announce whether Paris was to be defended or declared an open city.101 The predictable result was panic “of the most pronounced order” as people made plans to flee.102 The closure of the Bank of France and the removal of its assets to Bordeaux with the government meant that many people could not get access to their money. “It was pitiful,” noted one woman living in Paris who had decided to stay, “to see the children and old people standing for hours and hours waiting for their trains and then, when the trains arrived, to see them carried along in a mad rush for the carriages.” The trains soon filled up, often with government of­fi­cials, wealthy Parisians, and their families. Soon the trains stopped carrying civilians in order to focus on the movement of soldiers and supplies. Those Parisians with the resources to do so might still be able to find a driver to get them out of the city, but such journeys cost 3,000 francs at a time when average daily wages were just over 7 francs. As a result, those who were able to leave the city were disproportionately members of the middle class; the working-­class residents of Paris stayed because of a lack of resources.103 The flight of the wealthy from Paris “without the least bit of dignity” further underscored the class divisions of wartime risk and sac­ri­fice.104 On September 2, the government announced that it would defend Paris, which temporarily lifted spirits. Mildred Aldrich was in the throng of thousands of Frenchmen and ­women who had fled the frontiers to Paris in search of safety. She had been living in a small house on the Marne, which was directly in the path of the German Army, but news came in so inconsistently that she was unaware of the danger she was facing until she began to hear the terrifying sounds of German artillery 198

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pieces. A member of the British Army had calmed one of her neighbors by telling her that the Germans were “far, far away.” Yet when they saw retreating French Hussars, she and her neighbor concluded that “it was time to flee,” and they joined the mass exodus away from the Marne toward Paris. Henriette Cuvru-­Magot had to pack up a household that included her mother, her sister-­in-­law, and several young nieces and nephews. They left in such a hurry that they forgot to lock the front door, an action that she only later re­flected would have been useless in any case. Many refugees faced arduous journeys to Paris because the British and French armies were blowing up bridges to impede the German advance, but Mildred Aldrich managed to reach Paris on September 2. She found the city emptier than she had ever seen it in her sixteen years in France and therefore “perfectly calm.”105 Paris under the threat of siege was indeed a strange place. Moma Clarke watched in amazement as “the woman who takes the pennies for the chairs on the footpaths [in the Tuileries] still insists upon 20 centimes for an arm-­chair and 10 centimes for a chair without arms.” To her much less pleasant amazement she heard that defending the city would be dif­fi­ cult because of the inadequate nature of the forts and the defenses.106 The French Army, expecting a short war to be fought in Belgium, Alsace, or Germany, had made few serious provisions for defending Paris from invasion or encirclement. An estimated 800,000 people fled Paris, creating the hollow city Aldrich had observed; many of those on the move had come to the city from Belgium and now-­occupied sectors of northern France. They now had to flee once again, this time to unknown destinations. Some French towns, like Caen in Normandy, had already sent word to the cap­ital warning people that there were no beds and no food for Parisian refugees.107 Those who stayed in Paris were “desperately anxious for news”; the Paris papers were particularly uninformative, reporting on September 2 on the supposed panic gripping Berlin and Vienna, but providing no real news about the condition of Paris itself.108 Even as the Battle of the Marne, then the largest battle ever fought, raged mere miles away, residents of the city could get no definitive news, just more rumors. Oddly, however, they could clearly hear and sometimes even smell the battle that would soon decide their fates. Not until sentries stopped asking people on the streets for their identity papers on September 11 did the residents of the city begin to discern that their army had won a major victory. One Parisian woman who had 199

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left the city found out that Paris was safe when her daughter-­in-­law wrote to tell her, “The war news is good. The Germans [are] retreating. For the moment they seem to have given up their march on Paris; I wonder why.”109 The French and British soon celebrated the “Miracle of the Marne,” but little news reached Germany about the battle, leaving people confused for weeks afterward. Some believed that Germany had won a great victory near Paris because of positive early media reports; others, remarkably enough, heard nothing at all about the battle for weeks or even months.110 Most of the German media, which had celebrated victory after victory in August, went silent as the government refused to release information about what had happened on the Marne. One German editor thought the silence “harder to bear than the announcement of a defeat,” but he knew he had little choice but to wait for the government to reveal what it knew.111 One German of­fi­cer serving on the western front did not receive of­fi­cial news about the battle until the middle of October.112 Even less news seems to have penetrated the censors in the Austro-­ Hungarian Empire. Michael Karolyi’s bizarre voyage back to his homeland ended in October, when he at last arrived in Vienna. There he found that no one had heard of the German defeat on the Marne. “In fact,” he noted dryly, “when I mentioned it they thought I had been taken in by French pro­pa­ganda.” Budapest was equally in the dark. “I was bewildered by the ignorance of what was happening in the west. People were convinced that France was on the eve of revolution and would not believe me when I said that there was no such chance.”113 Either they had been taken in completely by pro­pa­ganda or they needed to continue to believe outlandish stories because they held out the hope of a quick end to the war. In France as well, the newspapers went silent to conceal the fact that the victory at the Marne had led not to the pursuit of the Germans to the Rhine but instead to a war of positions between exhausted armies on the Aisne. One Parisian noted that after city dwellers learned of “our success in the valley of the Marne,” there was “a sort of apparent calm; for a fortnight we had almost no other news than this: the battle is going on; along the whole front the struggle is bitter; the front line has hardly undergone any change.”114 Many people in France went as long as ten days without any news at all from the cap­ital, except a terse and ominous telegram delivered to prefects reading “Paris fermé,” leaving people without infor200

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mation not only about the war but about the fate of their loved ones as well.115 Even those people who knew of the results of the battle had little time for celebration. The joy of Parisians over their salvation was almost immediately diminished by the sights of the battle’s terrible aftermath. On September 12, the first of more than 200,000 wounded men from the battle came into a stunned and unprepared city; Eric Fisher Wood noted that more men had been wounded in this one battle than had been present at either Gettysburg or Waterloo: “Can all this we are seeing really have taken place in this once quiet French countryside; almost within the suburbs of Paris? It seems impossible—unbelievable!”116 Moma Clarke noted in her diary that although the French losses were obviously very heavy, reports indicated that the German losses were even ­heavier. She knew enough already to “believe only a part of all we hear about the diminishing strength of Germany. The Imperial Guard has been ‘wiped out’ three times already, and on three different occasions!”117 Paris had survived, but it was not the same mag­nifi­cent City of Light it had been just a few short weeks earlier. In October, one visitor remarked that it looked “funereal” owing to the lack of young men and the number of ­women wearing mourning clothes. The Place de la Concorde struck her as a “vast abyss of gloom. . . . Never had I seen Paris like this.”118 In the face of such tragedy, and with the knowledge that fresh tragedies were likely to follow, civilians knew that they needed to help in ways they had never imagined. Caring for the wounded proved to be one of the most arduous tasks. The small French villages of Vizille and La Mure, near Grenoble, each received 300 wounded men from the Battle of the Marne.119 Thousands of civilians volunteered as nurses even though few of them had any medical training. Evelyn Blücher volunteered in Berlin after seeing the “heart-­rending” sight of “so many fine strong men maimed and crippled.” Nursing helped her feel more useful, but it also brought “the terrors of war . . . nearer to our eyes.”120 Refugees presented another challenge; more than 3,000,000 people in France and Belgium were homeless by the end of the year.121 Claire de Pratz’s small town in Brittany took in as many refugees as the residents could manage, but their resources were quickly overwhelmed. She helped to or­ga­nize temporary housing in a local school for what she was told would be a group of 19 children; instead, 41 children arrived. Throughout September and October this prob­lem reemerged, as the numbers of 201

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refugees were always at least double what the government told them to expect. Even in such emergency conditions, however, many landlords ­refused to open their uninhabited properties to strangers from distant provinces, forcing children and widows to sleep in the streets and reinforcing the growing divide between the classes.122 Europeans knew that these events meant that their world had changed forever. One woman writing in her journal on September 16 noted that the events of even a few days earlier seemed to have occurred “a century ago.”123 Remy de Gourmont wrote in La France on October 22: “There is between our present lives and the past a curtain of fog that with some effort I can dissipate, but only for a moment. The curtain is so impenetrable that I can only rarely reach through its murderous thickness and see into the clarity of the things of yesterday. . . . [The present] is a nightmare, most assuredly a nightmare. I will awaken. I must awaken.”124 By the end of the war’s first autumn, as the air turned colder and the armies settled in to a winter in the trenches, deep disillusionment had already become a common feature in all European nations. It could hardly have been otherwise as Europeans came to grips with the reality of a long war for causes that now seemed far less clear-­cut and simple than they had in the first emotional days of August. The leaves had fallen off the trees all across Europe, but the war continued to bring suf­fering to millions of soldiers and civilians alike.

The Creation of Hatred Prior to August 1914 there were no nationalist hatreds or suspicions suf­ fi­cient to cause Europe to go war. Chauvinism and hypernationalism were abstract concepts that lacked both the power to bring about war and the allure to drive the behaviors of the vast majority of Europeans. Neither concept features prominently in the letters and diaries of Europeans before the start of the war. Once the war had begun, however, atrocities and tales of violence fueled the development of genuine hatred and a desire for vengeance that proved suf­fi­cient to maintain the consent for a war that had relied on ideas of self-­defense. The war’s horror, Sigmund Freud presciently noted, “cuts all the common bonds between the contending peoples and threatens to leave a legacy of embitterment that will make any renewal of those bonds impossible for a long time to come.”125 Atrocity tales from the war’s early weeks played an im­por­tant role in the severing of those bonds. 202

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The story of atrocities in World War I has a long and controversial his­ tory.126 It is not the point of this chapter to evaluate the truth of such stories or to try to parse out the atrocities that undoubtedly did occur from those that propagandists embellished. The sig­nifi­cance of atrocity stories in 1914 lies in their ubiquity in all the great powers and their emergence as “one of the de­fi n­ing issues of the war, for both sides.”127 Whether true or not, atrocities struck fear into the hearts of all who heard them and provided motivation to fight the war to the fin­ish in order to keep such depravity from being visited upon one’s own homeland. The nature of censorship, of course, meant that people only heard of the atrocities committed by their enemies. Germany’s now well-­documented atrocities in Belgium, for example, do not appear in German letters and diaries because the Germans either received no news of them or believed that German soldiers were only defending themselves against Belgian and French atrocities. Atrocity stories were commonplace ev­erywhere in August 1914. Germany’s real atrocities in Belgium, as well as those invented by allied publicists, have become the most famous, both because they could be verified (the town of Louvain, for example, was reoccupied by the British briefly after being willfully burned by the Germany Army, allowing for the accumulation of evidence) and because they were used after the war as proof of German perfidy. Atrocities tales abounded in the media and in general conversation. Reverend Andrew Clark spoke to a long-­time British Army veteran who told him of the “fanatic savagery” of German soldiers. Another soldier told him that he had seen ­women who had had their breasts hacked off by German soldiers; he also told of two young Belgian girls beaten by German soldiers so badly that they had bled to death. Belgian refugees also told Clark’s dentist that they had seen the decap­itated bodies of children and wounded soldiers mutilated by German soldiers.128 But Belgium was not the only scene of atrocity tales. French newspapers highlighted the German naval bombardment of undefended cities in Algeria by the German warships Goeben and Breslau during their famous voyage to Turkey, as well as the targeting of the cathedral of Reims. The latter especially seemed to demonstrate to Frenchmen that the goal of Germany’s war was the elimination of French culture and civilization. French soldiers also knew about the German shooting of the mayor of Senlis, the razing of entire French towns, and the brutal German treatment of French civilians.129 French soldier Olivier Guilleux saw for him203

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self French towns where the Germans had killed ev­ery animal, destroyed ev­ery building, cut down fruit trees, poisoned water wells, and shot civilians.130 One soldier spoke to a female refugee who told him that German soldiers had raped ev­ery woman in her town regardless of age.131 “Sexual menace,” report the authors of the most im­por­tant study of the German atrocities, “was ubiquitous in the violence of the German invasion.”132 Learning about atrocities could motivate soldiers to fight harder. French soldier Charles Delvert believed a rumor he had heard that German soldiers had snatched a baby from its mother’s arms and smashed it to the ground for the crime of wearing a beret.133 Delvert had also found a postcard on a dead German soldier promising his family that they would soon burn Paris to the ground after they took it. Seeing the postcard led Delvert to bemoan the “joy in destruction that was so characteristic of the German people,” and he noted that it rallied the men of his unit to fight harder to prevent the Germans from advancing on the cap­ital.134 Germans, too, heard stories real and imagined that gave them motivation to fight. Berliners heard that British soldiers carried special knives designed to carve out the eyeballs of German prisoners of war.135 Fritz Nagel was terrified to hear that Belgians strung wires between buildings to decap­itate German soldiers riding in cars.136 German newspapers reported that a Russian soldier had been found with the fingers of seventeen German soldiers in his pockets, and some German soldiers believed stories that the French cut off the penises of prisoners of war.137 Other tales included French soldiers put­ting cholera in water supplies before retreating; Russians nailing ­women and children to the doors of churches (this one allegedly con­fi rmed by a refugee from East Prussia); the French gouging out the eyes and cutting off the ears of the German wounded; and a Belgian boy having been found with a basket of German eyeballs. Tales of French doctors killing the German wounded were also commonplace.138 Many of these stories appeared in highly respected newspapers, giving them an air of truth. One German noted simply in his diary that the tales of French treatment of the wounded, children, and ­women he had heard were too horrifying to put to paper.139 Germans tended to assume that such atrocities were the result of a carefully planned “popular uprising” directed by government of­fi­cials, local dignitaries, and, in many cases, Catholic priests.140 They therefore assumed that they were facing an “underhanded people” that committed unspeakable horrors, not just isolated acts from a few individuals.141 Refugees often brought with them terrifying tales of the behavior of 204

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the enemy, although in many cases they were merely repeating rumors they had heard from others. In Berlin, refugees from East Prussia told of “Russian barbarism.  .  .  . hands being cut off, children being burned, ­women raped.”142 The tales of Belgian and French refugees were similar, often supported and embellished by government pro­pa­ganda and media reports. Such tales served to reinforce the government’s jus­tifi­ca­tion for the war and to increase hatreds that were rapidly developing. Atrocity stories (whether real, embellished, or invented) gave people on all sides tangible reasons to fight. Fear of the enemy and of the possible consequences of defeat drove consent for the war and led to a demonization of the enemy. Hateful images of the enemy, theretofore virtually absent in contemporary writings, became commonplace within a few short weeks of the war’s outbreak. The Germans, in French eyes, had “the soul of the barbarian who wants to kill.”143 They became “infernal vandals” and “hordes of savages” who had “placed themselves outside humanity” and become nothing more than “machines for burning houses.”144 For the Germans, too, their enemies were “Cossacks” (a term that became shorthand for all the evil in human nature) and their “recruited mercenaries” in France and Britain.145 Consequently, attitudes on both sides hardened as early as the end of the war’s first few weeks. As one Briton who had admired Germany before the war noted in an editorial in the London Times: “The admiration which I feel for Germany as a civilizing power in its own fashion (different from ours) is changed to dislike when she misuses her deserved in­flu­ ence in the world of thought to trample on law and right and to force the horrors of war on a neutral state.”146 Other Britons spoke of Germany as “essentially barbaric,” “devilish,” and “an enemy of civilization.” Such attitudes led to “a frenzy hate” against the Germans and a determination to see that the Germans be “utterly overthrown” before any discussion of peace could begin.147 Such views led to an intensification of resolve to see the war not just to victory but to complete victory. J. Herbert Lewis, a British MP, caught the mood of the British people with his statement, “May Heaven save our land from its clutches.” In the words of one British of­fi­cer, Germany had to be completely defeated so that the Huns (a term that only began to appear in late August) “will never see Britain as a conqueror.”148 Harold Peat, a volunteer in the British Army who had come from Edmonton to fight for the “tiny but mag­nifi­cent island” where he had been born, met a Belgian girl who had lost an arm. She told Peat that a German soldier had 205

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cut it off. “Believe me,” he wrote in his diary, “I realized then, if never before, what we were fight­ing for. I was ready to give ev­ery drop of blood in my veins to avenge the great crimes that this little girl, in her frail person, typified.”149 Such views were common in all belligerent countries. The tales of atrocity that one Saxon of­fi­cer heard convinced him as early as August 23 that the war now had to be “a war to the end.”150 Michael Nolan’s observation that for the French “there could be no talk of negotiation with an enemy who was the very negation of all human values” was an equally valid sentiment in the other great powers as well.151 One British of­fi­cer’s wife wrote to her husband, “I have murder in my heart often and often. I wish I could tear a German Hun limb to limb for what they have done to children. If you get a chance darling ­don’t spare one of the devils. Thank goodness you are a good shot. . . . I hope God will curse their nation.”152 Against such an enemy a compromise peace was unthinkable, thus driving all sides to commit to fight­ing a war to the end, come what may. Revenge, hatred, and fear soon became reasons in their own right to fight “the most holy of all wars that men have ever suf­fered.”153 Charles Delvert noted that as early as August 22 the rallying cry for men in his unit had become “Let us seek vengeance!”154 Another French soldier noted that he and his comrades were fight­ing through their “immeasurable sadness” with the knowledge that they now fought “for duty and for vengeance.”155 Revenge also appeared in Franck Roux’s memoirs as he envisioned paying the Germans back for the “numerous scattered bodies” of comrades that he had seen, a “depressing scene, but one which gives us the idea of vengeance.”156 The French government began a systematic accounting of atrocities on August 20 so that “the population of a country” guilty of such crimes could be “struck from the ranks of civilized peoples.”157 Revenge was no ­longer an abstract and distant concept as it had been before 1914 over the loss of Alsace-­Lorraine; it was now a concrete concept inspired by the need to avenge the deaths of close friends and the horrors men had seen with their own eyes or heard about from witnesses and newspapers. “Is there no punishment too harsh for these monsters?” asked Cardinal Alfred Baudrillart to the diary in which he recorded numerous tales of atrocities committed by Germans.158 Hatreds had developed on both sides of the line. From Germany came the observation that the war had led to “passionate hatred of civilian populations.”159 Bavarian Crown Prince Rupprecht told his soldiers to “annihilate the En­glish” 206

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and to “take revenge against [En­gland’s] hostile intrigue for the many sac­ri­fices we have to make.” His statements, of course, made their way into the British newspapers, fueling British anger in response.160 German soldiers often drew their motivation from the desire to keep the war and its attendant horrors away from their homelands. They often thought of their own homes as they saw the damage that the war had wrought on Belgian and French villages and determined that they would never allow such tragedies to befall German towns. One German soldier was perceptive enough to fear what would happen if the French “in their rage, having discovered their pillaged and destroyed towns,” entered Germany. The fear of what he assumed the French already believed about German behavior was enough to make him afraid to become a prisoner of war in French hands.161 The enemy became increasingly dehumanized as people across Europe looked for outlets for their anger. From Paris, Jane Michaux thought the German atrocities made clear to the world “the danger it runs” should Germany win. France, she thought, had become like the Romans fight­ing off the barbarians and had to choose between fight­ing to the end or suf­ fering Rome’s fate at the hands of people with the “soul of a demon.”162 In Britain, too, “a general indictment of the German character” explained the atrocity stories and motivated people to fight a war to the fin­ish.163 Hatred had not caused the war, but the war quickly created hatreds suf­fi­ cient to ensure its prosecution to the bitter end.

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Around the middle of November, as the last leaves were falling from trees across Europe, the two warring sides on the western front exhausted each other near the medieval Belgian cloth town of Ypres. The twin battles of Ypres and the Yser ended the so-­called race to the sea and any hope that one side might be able to out­flank the other and resume fight­ing on open ground. With tens of thousands of men dead and both sides out of munitions, neither army had any strength left to attack. For the foreseeable future, this war, which most believed should have been entering its final phases, would become a war of positions fought from trenches. For all the horrors that trench warfare brought, in that first frigid winter of the war, life underground protected soldiers from enemy bullets and from some of the worst elements of winter. Perceptive individuals, like the men quoted in the last chapter who placed a hat above the trench line, understood that this new kind of war meant that there would be no easy victories. The war was here to stay, and now hardly anyone dared guess how long it would last. By the time that winter set in, few people were still speaking of the war as being like a natural di­sas­ter. Instead, it had become a horrid fact of daily life to which individuals and so­ci­e­ties had to adjust. Unlike an earthquake or a storm, the war had not passed communities by; instead it had taken on a life of its own and showed no sign of ending. As the first snowflakes fell on their nearly deserted streets, residents in Paris were already “settling down to the war as they might settle into a new home,” learning to find ways to adjust to their new surroundings and recalling with nostalgia the pleasant days of peace they had known just a few months earlier.1 Mildred Aldrich, who had returned to her home on the Marne River, noted that now that the battlefield had receded from their gardens, her neighbors “have settled down to a long war” and “a life that 208

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is nearly normal—much more normal than I dreamed could be possible forty miles from the front.”2 As we shall soon see, life for her and millions of others was far from normal. The war was, however, rede­fi n­ing un­der­ stand­ings of normal and requiring individuals and so­ci­e­ties to adapt to it and the terrible traumas it brought. War had become a daily fact of life in Europe. Because people could only guess at when it might end, they came to accept its existence as an act of fate that they could not control. Few any ­longer spoke of a short war. “Already December,” noted Ludwig Wittgenstein, “and still no talk of peace.”3 People commonly recorded gloomy observations such as “No hope that this unhappy war will end” and “this awful war will never fin­ ish.”4 From the relative safety of London, Lady Ottoline Morrell noted that “the war goes on like an evil dance of the furies.” A soldier had described the world of the trenches to her as “hell,” and, she noted fatalistically, “that, after all, is all that can be said.”5 As to when the war might end, neither she nor the soldier dared to guess. This new kind of war was far from the one Europeans had envisioned. When the con­flict began in August, few Europeans were psychologically prepared for the fight­ing to last into December or for it to kill as many men as it had; recent estimates are that each side suf­fered more than 1,000,000 casualties on the western front alone in 1914. Nor were Europeans prepared for the myriad ways that the war would disturb their daily lives and undermine their sense of security. As the weather turned colder (and all sides ran too low on munitions to permit major offensives), military operations slowed down. The pause gave people on all sides the opportunity to re­flect on the frenetic and tragic last few months. No matter where they lived, they saw little in the first few months of the war but horror, calamity, and misfortune. What brief enthusiasm had existed in early August had clearly and defi­nitely vanished, replaced by a grim determination to win the war and avenge all the suf­fering of its first few months. The war had taken over and transformed individuals and so­ci­e­ ties alike into something that would have been unrecognizable just a few short months earlier. One of the most profound changes in people and so­ci­e­ties involved the hardening of their attitudes. The war had created hatreds that were both products of the first few weeks of bitterness and killing and outlets for the frustrations people felt at being stuck into a total war of national survival after so many years of peace. People who had had no hate worth killing for in July now burned with vengeance and anger. British soldier Louis 209

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Oldfield wrote to a friend in En­gland to describe “little rows of graves with rough crosses on them and on each cross the name of a French soldier. How they hate the Germans,” he added, “and no wonder. . . . Is there a God who could forgive the men who are responsible for this[?] I hope not.” The hatred felt by the French civilians he spoke with was a product, not a cause, of the killing. Oldfield also found his own men hating the Germans, too, and watched as they played a football match behind the lines using recently dug German graves as goalposts. 6 Soldiers and civilians alike recorded feelings of hatred and bitterness that do not appear in their writings before the war’s outbreak; this hatred helped to fuel the war’s continuation and proved to be one of its most enduring legacies for Europe for the next three de­cades. Part of that hatred came from the hardships that people on the home front had to endure. Even if civilians were mercifully spared the hell of the trenches, life at home continued to be arduous. The dislocations of the war far outpaced the efforts of both governments and private charities to provide help to those in need. As winter approached, fuel (especially coal) became scarce, because of industry’s need for it and because some of Europe’s richest coal seams now sat along the western front. The military’s takeover of railway networks and the developing war at sea also shut off needed supplies of fuel and food. Mildred Aldrich noted that her community could get no coal at all, forcing her and others to live in their kitchens, where they could at least warm themselves by the heat that came from the oven. Firewood was also hard to obtain, forcing her to burn green wood gathered locally and leaving her house at a frosty 42 degrees, Fahrenheit.7 Even when supplies were available, people still had a hard time buying them. Cash and credit remained scarce as banks hoarded money and in­ fla­tion continued to soar. Food prices alone rose 21 percent in London and even more sharply in Berlin, in part because the blockade shut off critical imports. 8 In the cities, unemployment remained a persistent prob­ lem as well, leading to the further depression of real wages, which fell sharply in all major cities. In Berlin, unemployment was at its highest in September, when 19.9 percent of ­union members were out of work. By December, government contracts had put more people to work and new call-­ups of reserves had shrunk the labor pool, but 7.2 percent of ­union members were still looking for work. In London, the fig­ure was 5.9 percent. As 1914 turned into 1915, there were 230,000 unemployed work210

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ers in Paris.9 Many of the unemployed were in construction and textiles, two industries that were already slumping when the war began; the war caused their revenues to drop precipitously. In the countryside, conditions were equally dire. The mediocre harvest of 1914 had been an unwelcome surprise. The war had struck just as the arduous task of bringing in the crops was under way. Young men rapidly disappeared from their communities, as did crucial groups of migrant workers, many of whom were from places now labeled as enemy countries; fearing detention, they fled as soon as mobilization began. Farmers could not get their crops to market, and, in many cases, markets themselves were no ­longer functioning. Many small farmers had only made the transition from subsistence crops to cash crops in the last few years. The latter were of no use unless a reliable market and a transportation network were in place. Those farmers who grew crops that armies needed began to see a rise in their in­comes once governments created regular acquisition systems, but those who grew crops for consumer markets or a declining industry like luxury textiles (which bought inedible plants used for dyes) were hit hard and suf­fered greatly. Governments were slow to respond to these crises, both because the “business as usual” mentality took time to fade and because their efforts were needed to prepare for the resumption of hostilities in the spring. The British media noted with some alarm in November that the war had passed the cost threshold of £1,000,000 per day for the United Kingdom alone, leaving little money for social welfare.10 As a result, there were too few resources to help ev­ery­one who needed assistance. Even a comfortable middle-­class person like Sigmund Freud could write by December that “helplessness and poverty,” the “two things he had hated most,” appeared “as if they were not far off.”11 Conditions were becoming drastic and the seeming indifference of governments added to the widespread sense of anxiety. By the end of the year, one French socialist could write in his diary, “Expressions of public exasperation heard this morning. If the war goes on, people will rebel. There will be a revolution.”12 In Germany, too, concern had begun to grow. The Social Democrats ordered their local or­ga­ni­za­tions to “engage in full-­scale agitation on the food question” in November amid fears that the German government had not done enough to guarantee a reliable food supply for 1915.13 Perhaps the most noteworthy feature of such concerns is how quickly they appeared in private and public discourse. Food crises and class tensions were not a 211

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product of the later years of the war; they had become a genuine concern of governments and a factor in public morale before the end of the war’s first year. Some government agencies belatedly became aware of the need to address conditions on the home front, but not all did so successfully. The German government, with the support of the socialists, proposed a three­pronged policy to handle anticipated food shortages in the coming year: a prohibition on the feeding of rye and wheat to animals; price controls for essential commodities; and food rationing. The army, however, opposed the plan, forcing the government to form an Imperial Grain Authority that purchased 2,000,000 tons of wheat from German farmers. That plan took the majority of the season’s wheat harvest off the market, contributing to in­fla­tion and increasing suspicions that the wheat would be sold to bakers who would then sell their products at high prices to a predominantly urban and middle-­class clientele. The government also feared a shortage of potatoes, which it dealt with by encouraging the slaughter of pigs, evidently in an effort to reduce the need to feed the potatoes to them. As a result of this ill-­considered policy, pork prices dropped for a time, then rose sharply, making a critical source of meat too expensive for most Germans.14 Bread became a source of class tension as well. While wealthy Germans still had access to “white” bread, German workers were forced to eat “grey” bread made with 10 to 20 percent potato flour. Germans were angry at both the taste and the presumed lack of nutrition in the new K-­ Brot (for Kartoffelbrot, potato bread, or Kriegsbrot, war bread) and the impression that only the workers had to make do with an inferior product. As grocers sold “inferior goods for exorbitant prices,” moreover, European cities began to see increased disturbances and “turbulent street scenes,” including ones in Berlin, where, according to a police report, “­women ripped the articles from the arms” of people in long food lines and children were sometimes trampled in the chaos and confusion. The “sig­nifi­cant unrest” that existed among European working classes was a function of the resentment that Europeans felt as they saw their daily commodities disappear from their tables. To add insult to injury, government food policies and a vibrant black market appeared to give the middle classes and the wealthy more options and more food during a time of supposed communal sac­ri­fice. Government pro­pa­ganda posters that urged workers to show “probity” in their consumption of foods that had 212

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long since vanished from their daily diets only served as a further “source of irritation” to workers.15 These perceived and real injustices fueled class tensions that began to worry government of­fi­cials, who wondered how long workers would tolerate such inequities in wartime.16 In such an environment, accusations of ­profit taking continued to proliferate. German socialists reacted angrily to a November editorial in the Arbeitgeberzeitung, a trade newspaper for German industrialists, arguing against a wage increase for workers. At a time when average real wages were plummeting due to in­fla­tion and labor surpluses, the newspaper contended that to raise wages for workers would make German industry less competitive in the postwar world.17 German workers understandably were not sold on the logic, and, like many of their peers in France and Britain, they saw an illicit bargain being made between government of­fi­cials and industrialists to maximize ­profits by keeping wages low and prices high. Allegations that po­lit­i­cal contacts, not military necessity, were driving the pro­cess of awarding contracts were commonplace as well. Industrialists knew that they had a golden opportunity to make money and display their pa­tri­ot­ism at the same time. As governments looked in desperation for ways to increase massively their supplies of weapons, ammunition, and other matériel, industry found that it had a client “at once insatiable, forced to buy, and endowed with nearly inexhaustible resources.” French weapons manufacturer Hotchkiss reported ­profits of 980,557 francs in May 1914, but orders for war goods helped to more than double those ­profits to 2,118,884 francs a year later.18 Such huge ­profits stood in marked contrast to the meager government payments made to soldiers’ families, the low wages of the soldiers themselves, and the persistently high unemployment rates in the big cities. Landlords became an especially common target of anger. The image of a soldier’s family being thrown out of their lodgings because of an inability to pay the rent represented all that was wrong about the economics of war. Most soldiers, especially the French, were paid far less than they had made in civilian life. Meager government allowances almost never made up the difference, meaning that the families of soldiers (or worse still, of those killed on the battlefield) could no ­longer afford their housing. Landlords were not always sympathetic, especially when they saw a chance to raise rents. La Bataille ran a cartoon called “The Vulture” in which a well-­dressed landlord with a vulture’s head raises the 213

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rent of a destitute woman holding an infant in her arms. It would not have taken much imagination for the reader to infer that the woman was also a war widow.19 Distrust of ­profiteers and those not doing their share existed in all the belligerent nations. The French popularized the word embusqué (roughly translated as “shirker”), which could refer to someone avoiding military  ser­vice or someone trying to ­profit from the war. The embusqué soon became a staple image in French home-­front culture, and he had counterparts all across Europe. France’s largest trade ­union noted in December that the economic deterioration in the country proved that “the immense sac­ri­fices, moral and material, currently accepted by the proletariat, both in its homes and on the field of battle, neither touch nor move the great majority of the patronat (bosses).”20 Similarly, Briton Augustus John re­flected the anger of many from the working class when he noted that “nothing short of bombs dropping on their shops” would motivate middle-­class men to volunteer in large numbers.21 More bitterly, from Russia, Vladimir Mayakovsky decried “the behind the lines parasites and ­profiteers and all the wartime scum” making money from the suf­ fering of his comrades on the front lines.22 There was little talk of revolution during the war’s first winter, but the seeds of resentment were already being sown, and they would produce a deadly harvest. These tensions gave governments cause for concern, but few thought that they yet posed any great risk to the war effort. They did, however, force governments to begin to devote greater resources to the prob­lems of home-­front morale. Maintaining adequate supplies of food and fuel became a primary concern. Rationing and price fixing gained increasing support despite the ob­jec­tions of conservatives and industrialists, who argued against making radical social and economic changes for the sake of a war that they hoped might still end after a successful spring 1915 campaign. As worrisome as the supply of food, however, was the ever-­ growing sense that the government’s actions were falling far short of its rhetoric of shared sac­ri­fice and dedication to a war that was now open-­ ended in terms of both its length and the commitments Europeans might have to make to it. Although few Europeans could have foreseen it at Christmastime 1914, a government’s ability or inability to manage these prob­lems might well decide its fate. Few Germans, Frenchmen, or Britons seriously expected their state to fail to meet the challenge, but the situation in Russia had already become alarming. Russia had suf­fered tremendous twin de214

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feats at the battles of Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes in August and September and had fought a bloody and indecisive campaign against the Germans around Lodz in Poland in November. Total Russian casualties in the three campaigns have never been accurately calculated, but most historical sources cite fig­ures well in excess of 300,000. Although the Russians had fared somewhat better against the armies of the Austro-­ Hungarian Empire, even those victories had come at an enormous human cost, calling into question the viability of the czarist state. As with other states in 1914, the Russian government had used its civil truce to silence opponents of government policy. The Duma did not meet for the rest of the year after the convening of a civil truce in August 1914. It reconvened in January 1915, approved the new budget with no debate, then dissolved. Promises of self-­governance to the Poles and other minorities in the Russian Empire had also gone unfulfilled, leading to widespread criticism of the czar and his failure to unite the Russian people behind noble war aims. Kadet po­lit­i­cal leader Paul Miliukov, who had supported the po­lit­i­cal truce of August, bemoaned the fact that “what was meant as a truce was taken [by the czar and his ministers] as a capitulation.”23 In November, his fellow Kadet politician A.  M. Kolyubakin noted “an enormous change in the mood of the country” since the outbreak of the war. “The mood [of cooperation] has collapsed and been replaced ev­erywhere by colossal disillusionment.” Some Russians were openly describing opposition to the czar as an expression of “the pa­tri­ot­ ism of the people” and calling either for the Duma to be given an active voice or for a radical change to the entire system.24 Many Kadets and other moderates had already begun to doubt even the short-­term viability of the czar and contemplated the use of more confrontational tactics.25 By the end of the year only those “with a self-­delusive tenacity” believed that the Russian civil truce would last much ­longer.26 The tensions were more evident in Russia than elsewhere, but they bore some broad similarities to the situations in other countries at war. Socialists in France and elsewhere resumed po­lit­i­cal activity, even breaking their previous silence on desired war aims. In a December 13 editorial, L’Humanité urged that peace be signed as soon as German troops had left French territory, although it did not mention if it considered Alsace and Lorraine to be “French” territory as most right-­leaning publications did. Other socialist groups and even a few left-­leaning teachers’ groups began to protest the war with slogans such as “The Church Wanted War” and “Socialism and Free Thought Means Peace.”27 In all 215

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the belligerent nations, civil truces had represented to their citizens social contracts intended to be inclusive and to fairly distribute both the burdens and the few bene­fits of war, in the form of government spending and social welfare. Those states that most effectively managed their social contracts, such as France and Great Britain, laid the foundations of systems that could survive a long war. Those that could not do so, however, established the conditions for future discord and dissolution. In all cases, the experiences of 1914 set the stage for much of what was soon to follow.

Jours de Morts In addition to the material dislocations caused by the war, Europeans had to make several dif­fi­cult mental adjustments to their new world. The first was the need to learn how to deal with the reality of mass mourning. Edmund Gosse was far from unusual in writing to a French friend from London in mid-­November that he knew twenty families who had already buried sons.28 Remy de Gourmont sadly noted on November 11 that twenty French writers of importance were already dead and thirty more were badly wounded.29 In the face of so many people grieving, new rituals to deal with death were needed. As early as October, French mayors had begun to petition the French state for the right to have their community’s dead buried locally, a right the government refused, denying locals the ritual and sacrament of burial.30 In many cases, there were no bodies to bury and information about the death of a loved one was often hard to discern from the sanitized of­fi­cial reports families received. Before the year was out, family members had begun the practice of taking out advertisements in newspapers asking people who knew about their loved one’s fate (or their last few minutes on earth) to contact them. 31 Entire communities engaged in mourning rituals, often for dead that did not even belong to them. Parisians adapted the ritual of the jour de morts, traditionally the two days (All Saint’s Day and the Day of the Dead) when residents placed flowers on grave sites, to the new needs of wartime mourning. In the winter of 1914, noted one resident, “ev­ery day is a jour de morts,” as residents ventured out to makeshift cemeteries to place flowers on the temporary graves of fallen soldiers. Some even put flowers on German graves, with one woman noting that she did so because young Germans “were forced to leave their homes just as our sons were.” Paris, once the city of light and gaiety, now displayed a new mood, 216

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one in which “life is of no more consequence than a ripe cherry in full season” except, ironically enough, when the city’s residents came together to grieve.32 The second adjustment was a need to accept the reality of the war in the absence of credible news about the events of the con­flict itself. Frederic William Wile found people in London fight­ing a “war in the dark” because of the heavy censorship of the news. Generic stories about battles “somewhere in France” or “somewhere in Flanders” meant that Britons were “cheated of the chance to know what was really going on.” As a result many people in London were reluctant to “shake off the shackles of ease and comfort and buckle down [as] a nation in arms to the inconvenient and grim realities of war.” Without hard news, people had dif­fi­ culty accepting the rhetoric of communal sac­ri­fice. He noted that some people had even begun to speak of the war as a “bore” and others as if it were an unreasonable intrusion into their daily lives. 33 Their reactions may have been callous, but even those hungry for information came away dissat­is­fied. Moma Clarke noted that studying maps was a futile way of obtaining information about the war because “the armies in Flanders only move inch by inch.”34 Whether she was referring to the maps or the reality of war in the trenches is not clear. The maps themselves were often censored and provided little more information than the location of key towns and natural features like rivers. They did not always show the location of the front line, and they never showed the location of even large units. Even good news often came in ambiguous and unclear ways. Official dispatches praising units or individuals were, for security reasons, often devoid of information. Punch ran a satirical comment on this absence of news in mid-­November. A young woman whose husband is at the front shows her mother an of­fi­cial dispatch and cries out, “Oh, Mother, ­isn’t it splendid? Harry’s sent me this paper with a marked passage about what he’s been doing. It says ‘Captain —— of the —— Fusiliers, under heavy ——, rescued —— from the ——.’ Now ev­ery­body will know how brave he is!”35 Still, critical and observant civilians could develop a reasonable appreciation, if often in an abstract way, of the conditions at the front. Moma Clarke observed that the soldiers at Ypres “are paying an appalling price, and we at home do not realize a hundredth part of the horrors they are experiencing ev­ery hour.”36 Many media reports gave readers cause to believe that the war and the conditions at the front were reasonably comfortable. A series of photo217

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graphs collected from European news sources and published in January  1915 under the title “Life in the Trenches with the Germans and the Allies” depicted spacious, dry, and comfortable trenches that would have surprised the freezing and waterlogged men at Ypres and elsewhere. The captions on the photographs contained such propagandistic phrases as “Bomb-­proof underground quarters of German of­fi­cers”; “British trenches that have aroused the admiration of the Germans”; “German trenches built with stockade walls, with ample room inside”; and, perhaps most outlandishly, “Hot shower-­baths on the firing line.” Another photograph in the same issue showed an Austrian prisoner of war in Serbia who, like his fellow prisoners, was supposedly “permitted to enter the town for the purpose of buying provisions.” The photograph came with a caption describing him buying cooking utensils from “one of the most popular stores in Nish” as if he were a tourist, not a prisoner of war.37 Another example ­comes from a published account of a Swedish observer of his conversation with anxious French prisoners in German hands uncertain of what would befall them: I told them they might first expect a kettle of boiling soup and a fresh loaf of bread; then a physician who would examine and bandage their wounds. Their imprisonment would not be in idleness, but with work, and after peace they would be restored to their country and their families. It was touching to see the joy in the faces of those poor soldiers, who had spent weeks in the cold and humid trenches dressed in their red trousers and blue coats. 38 The new prisoners of war seem to be the lucky few, out of the war and into a place that seems more like a spa than an internment camp. Nor did letters from soldiers often help to illuminate people at home. Soldiers were aware that of­fi­cers and postal censors were reading their letters and they feared a loss of mail privileges if they said too much. As a result, letters home usually spoke in indirect and ambiguous terms; many men could not (or would not) find the words to convey the true horrors of the trenches to their loved ones. Many letters began with apologies for a delay, because a few days’ silence might be an indication of tragedy. Representative were letters like this one from a French of­fi­cer to his wife in late December that read, “I have the most tragic hours of my life. I do not have the time to write you now. I am safe and send you my love.” Only a few days later did he write to her again to tell her that the two companies under his command had been decimated.39 From a German soldier came 218

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a similar letter written in the same week: “you can’t possibly picture to yourselves what a battlefield looks like. It is impossible to describe it.”40 Little wonder, then, that there was a great deal of ignorance among civilians about what the war was really like. Mildred Aldrich’s maid was stunned to hear that soldiers had “to stay out there in the rain and the mud and the cold.”41 She may have been in­flu­enced by photo captions such as the ones above or by newspaper reports like one in the Petit Journal in November that told readers that the trenches had central heating.42 Even knowledge about the enemy was in short supply as late as the first winter of the war. One French peasant told Eric Fisher Wood that he had given all his goods to men he assumed were British because they spoke a foreign language and were not wearing the spiked helmets that Germans were always pictured wearing in the Paris dailies. He cursed loudly when he found out that he had given his goods to Germans who belonged to a unit that wore a different kind of helmet.43 At the end of the year, Wood found “utter ignorance” of the war in Vienna and Budapest because “the government has somehow convinced the people that ev­ery­thing in the war is going wonderfully well.”44 London was a bit better informed, but even there one observer noted that the Lord Mayor’s parade of November 9 (the city’s first parade since the start of the war) helped to persuade people that life was getting back to normal and that the war might be coming to an end.45 Punch lampooned the general ignorance of Britons in a cartoon that shows a woman telling a man, “It’s a pity someone ­didn’t catch that there old Kruger [a famous Boer commando from the South African War of 1899–1902].” When the man replies, “Ah, you mean the Kaiser,” the woman answers, “Aw—changed his name, has he—deceitful old varmint?”46 Her ignorance, satirical though it was, reveals how little many people understood of the geostrategic events that had led them into this war of unprecedented death and ferocity.

The End of a Civilization? Although the war affected all Europeans, some managed to return to a semblance of normalcy more quickly than others. Not surprisingly, Paris, which had so recently been faced with encirclement and invasion, remained a shadow of its former self. According to one resident, Paris was “so charged with anxiety that [visitors] no ­longer recognize the gay Paris of other days,” although she also noted that residents of the city had be219

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come so accustomed to the new atmosphere that they did not notice the changes as easily as visitors did. The city, she observed, was surely a different and sadder place, filled as it was with “grey beards, bald heads, and beardless chins” in the absence of its usually vibrant population of young men. Some theaters had reopened, but their shows were heavily censored and held little appeal to Parisians used to seeing world-­class drama and comedy. Paris nevertheless slowly began to gain back some semblance of normalcy, or at least what passed for normalcy in wartime. The French government came back from Bordeaux in stages in November, although it did so with a noticeable lack of fanfare for fear of angering those Parisians who had stayed and faced the danger that the ministers had avoided. A late November news release simply announced that government of­fices were reopening. The city remained quiet and dark at night despite the end of German air raids; 8 p.m. curfews on cafés and 9:30 p.m. curfews on restaurants remained in effect. There were no buses and few private cars or taxis moving around, giving the city an eerie quiet. Paris still had its wonderful museums, but even they seemed different in wartime. André Gide visited the Louvre in mid-­November in an effort to take his mind off of the war and remind him of the finer accomplishments of European society, but the trip made him think instead of the “desolation” all around him and led him to ask himself if he was living through the end of European civilization.47 The contrast between the Europe that had created the works of art he admired and the Europe that was bleeding itself to death in the trenches was simply too much for him to bear. Similarly, around the same time Bohemian-­born poet Rainer Maria Rilke (who had lived all over Europe) reread his August prowar poem “Fire Songs” and was horrified at the sentiments contained within it. When he had written the poem “the phenomenon of the war, of the war-­god, seized me. . . . now the war has long since become invisible to me, a spirit of tribulation.” He was so traumatized by the contrast of poetry and war that he did not write another poem for the remainder of the war.48 Life appeared to be a bit more comfortable in Berlin. Art student Eric Fisher Wood left Paris and headed to Germany as part of his newly acquired mission to help the Americans and Europeans stranded when the war began. He found Berlin so calm that “it was dif­fi­cult to realize that there was a battle within a thousand miles.” The city’s restaurants, cafés, theaters, and concert halls were “going at full blast,” and the only signs of war he saw were groups of wounded veterans. Germans he spoke to 220

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mostly believed the pro­pa­ganda coming from the government that the war was going well and that Germany would keep Belgium, Poland, and even Calais (which was not in German hands) at war’s end. Other sources con­fi rm the general optimism in Germany, but the people Wood spoke to may have had good reason to appear overly eager as even a novice emissary like Wood was plainly aware that the German police were following him at ev­ery turn.49 Surveillance, too, had become a common fact of life in wartime.

His Majesty the War Life was, of course, much harsher for the men at the front. Although the trenches provided some modicum of shelter and safety, they were also wet, cold, and dangerous. Perhaps more im­por­tant, they represented a vastly different type of war from the one the men had thought they would fight. Throughout the winter, men sat relatively inactive underground in an “infernal region where feelings of humanity were left behind.” For veteran soldiers, the trenches were a “thing of mystery” and a novel and unwelcome way to fight. Ten-­year French Army veteran Emmanuel Bour­ cier found himself having to learn his trade anew as young soldiers with more trench experience than he had told him where to stand and how to behave to ensure his survival. Instead of doing the soldierly jobs he was trained to do, he was digging. “We did not know why they were making us do this digging, or what good purpose was to be served by our labor; but we worked on unremittingly.” His comrades, he noted, wanted to fight, not dig. Marc Bloch noted on December 20 that the men of his unit found trench warfare “so slow, so dreary, so debilitating to body and soul that even the least brave among us wholeheartedly welcomed the prospect of an attack” to break the monotony and to give their military ser­ vice some meaning.50 The inactivity of the trenches lowered men’s morale and made them realize that they would not liberate France anytime soon.51 The French soldier Henri Bénard grudgingly admired the German trench system, which he noted was “marvelous for them.” Their trench system was “an unbreakable Great Wall of China” that he perceptibly recognized would cause the war to last for many years and “ruin all countries,” costing Europe men and money as the French and British tried to break it. 52 For the Germans, too, the trenches meant that the war would not end soon. Few German soldiers expected the allies to stop attacking, and even the least 221

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strategically minded German soldier could divine that the considerable energies they were put­ting into creating an unbreakable trench system meant that all dreams of winning a quick victory by capturing Paris were now dashed. In this new kind of war, minor, seemingly insig­nifi­cant gains took on enormous importance. Even small victories and the moving of the line by a few hundred yards might be celebrated as great victories, although the men knew that what the press touted as a major victory might in reality mean just “the capture of two rows of beets.”53 The men on the ground also understood quite clearly that it could only be by the shedding of their blood that decisive victories would be won and that their generals seemed out of ideas. One French general told his men, “Advance 40 meters a day and I will be happy.” The reaction of the men to this piece of operational and strategic nonsense went unrecorded.54 Most men saw little to admire in their commanders, although they, too, were adjusting to a new and unfamiliar kind of war. Rudolf Binding, a German soldier stationed near Ypres, saw nothing but the “last degree of clumsiness and lack of imagination” in trench warfare. “Generals and colonels are flirting with the idea that to take the crossroads of Broodseinde may mean something in the his­tory of the world. . . . I would say that ev­ery man sac­ri­ficed at it, on whichever side, is wasted.” Binding compared the world of the trenches to being condemned to “an almost intolerable state of uselessness: we wait in the antechamber of His Majesty the War, who deigns to make us wait.” “Truly,” he noted on December 8, “there is no ­longer any sense in this business.”55 British Field Marshal Lord Kitchener had the same frustration, frankly admitting, “I ­don’t know what is to be done. This ­isn’t war.”56 Still, the war continued. German war letters by the end of the year commonly used words to describe the war that included “murder,” “wholesale assassination,” and “slaughter.”57 Another German soldier wrote simply that “life here ­isn’t worth a damn.”58 Combat was not the glorious test of character and courage that soldiers had anticipated. An attack, recalled one soldier a week before his death in November near Dixmude, was not “mag­nifi­cent” at all. Instead, “it meant nothing but being forced to get forward from one bit of cover to another in the face of a hail of bullets, and not to see the enemy who was firing them!” Another described war as the morally “degrading business” of “hounding men to death.”59 Nevertheless, soldiers were willing to risk their lives, kill others, and even die themselves if they believed that their efforts would lead to an 222

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­ ccomplishment worthy of their sac­ri­fice. In this new impersonal war a fought largely below ground, however, there were few high ideals to be found. Men sometimes dreamed that the war might somehow become the “door that has opened on a new horizon” for Europe and for civili­ zation, but a few weeks in the trenches were usually enough to tarnish these ideals just as quickly as the damp and cold of winter tarnished their weapons. From their new positions underground, all they could normally see was “an endless contest” in which they had become the smallest of cogs. They were not the heroic defenders of their nations that they had hoped to become, but instead were, in the words of one French soldier, “but children when compared with the events of which we form a part.”60 A German soldier wrote in almost exactly the same terms in mid-­ November, telling his family, “The individual is dwarfed before the tremendousness of events and patiently accepts the place destined for him by fate.”61 Nor could the soldiers themselves often determine the prog­ress of the war from their isolated positions at the front. It was therefore impossible for them to develop any kind of gauge about the war or to determine if their side was winning or if an end to the fight­ing might be coming soon. French artillerist Raoul Bouchet told his loved ones that “I will not speak to you about the length of the war because no one knows when it will end,” although, like most soldiers, he held out the hope that it would end soon so that “this terrible life . . . may soon be forgotten.” A week later he wrote, “They tell us that all is going well from the point of view of the war but we can’t see it because we are always stuck here in the same position.”62 Soldiers were stuck, too, in the same vacuum of real news that afflicted civilians, but they could see for themselves how outlandishly inaccurate the media reports were. A German soldier noted that “we led a loathsome, pitiful life, and at times we said to one another that nobody at home even suspected the condition we were in.”63 Rudolf Binding noted that “there is hardly any difference in style and tone between our communiqués . . . and those of the French.” Both badly exaggerated the truth and celebrated insig­nifi­cant events as great triumphs. Just a few days before Christmas, Binding read a communiqué announcing that bells were being rung in Berlin to celebrate a Russian retreat in Poland. “I asked myself why the bells should get going while there were still so many Russians about. . . . I ­don’t suppose that the pealing of bells affected them in the least; I am sure they took no more notice of it than I did.”64 From the 223

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other side of the western front, Bouchet wrote to a loved one, “You ask me for details of the front. What would you like me to say? I am sure that the media has already bombarded you with nonsense.”65 One French soldier called his own country’s newspapers “impossible to read these days” and another called them “pure invention.” Some British soldiers took to calling the daily Army communiqués the “comic cuts.” When they could get copies, men on both sides of the western front sought out the Swiss Journal de Genève, which they read “cover to cover” in an effort to get some reasonably reliable news. 66 Similarly, one British of­fi­cer wrote in his diary of the “ridiculous” account of a recent battle he had read in a copy of the Daily Mail. The of­fi­ cer had been in the battle and fulminated about the treatment the media had given it: How the Royal Scots and Gordons took four lines of trenches [as the Daily Mail had reported], that our cavalry were used on the flank, and that the Germans were surrounded by a “ring of khaki.” Unfortunately, it was most the other way on: there are no cavalry units within miles, nor could they have been used in this enclosed wire country sodden with water; and we took one trench with awful loss. The of­fi­cer noted with sardonic glee in his diary that he was “jolly glad” to hear that a German warship had shelled the British coastal town of Scarborough (see below), as it would wake people up to the reality of the war that he and his men were fight­ing on their behalf. 67 Soldiers were painfully aware of the many ways that the war had changed them. Understandably, their relationship to nature had changed, and with it their ways of seeing the world around them. Eugène Lemercier noted that for men of his unit stars had ceased to become objects of admiration; they were now merely “the rallying sign of the enemy’s patrol.”68 More deeply, however, men took time at the end of the year to re­ flect on the many ways that war had changed them. They looked back with sadness and melancholy at the people they had been just a few short months earlier. Twenty-­year-­old Walter Roy, a native of Hamburg, wrote home in mid-­November of his lost “effervescence of youth” and recalled wistfully the world he had known before the war. “Oh, what a lovely summer it was! And now cold, cruel, bitter earnest, stormy winter, death and misery! And ev­ery­thing vanished so suddenly. How I lived and loved is now like a dream, a passing mood, the sweet remembrance of a passing 224

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mood. Only one thing is real now—the war!”69 Pierre Dupouey similarly re­flected on the changes he saw in himself and his men. He thought that now they knew only how to “fight, sleep, and eat.”70 Separation from family was often the most dif­fi­cult aspect of the war, especially among men who came to believe that they would never return home alive. Laurent Pateu was one of many men who wrote a last letter to be delivered to his family in the event of his death. He composed this letter to his young son in November: And you, my little one, at two and a half years old you are already forgetting the memory of me. You still speak about me because mommy and your sister do, but you will soon forget me. However, when you are older you will learn that you had a daddy who loved you and your sister with all his soul. . . . Learn to read soon so you can decipher for yourself these words I am writing to you today. The sense of fatalism in these sentiments is underscored by the part of the letter intended for his wife: “I forbid you to cry [if I die]. In this time, when the children of France are spilling their blood, mine is no more red than anyone else’s.” Pateu’s family received the letter shortly after his death in June 1915.71 Even amid death, life could emerge, although the contrast between the two made for special poignancy. One soldier wrote home upon hearing news of the birth of his daughter: What did you name her? Tell me soon what her name is. . . . I hope to see her. I want to see her. How I regret that she ­wasn’t born one year earlier. . . . Tell me that our child will live, I am waiting to know. These little ones are so frail. What color are her eyes? How are her little hands? Will she be pretty? I hope she looks like you. I am sorry I will not see her when she is so tiny. Tell me ev­ery­thing about her. Does she cry much? And you, are you suf­fering my dear? . . . Keep my letters. If I do not return, she can read them later on and she will know that her father loved her dearly.72 The disillusionment and depression that the war brought on also manifested themselves outside of letters and diaries. On November 23, the Royal Welsh Fusiliers reported their first case of a man who had shot himself in the arm in the hopes of getting out of the trenches. He later died of his wounds. Within a month the unit was also reporting the first cases of what would later be called shell shock and trench foot. Between 225

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them the two maladies (one psychological and one physical) were “wasting battalions and fill­ing hospitals.” Both were so new and so unfamiliar to the men of the unit that they had no ways of dealing with them, and the medical advice they received was “not very helpful.” As a result, men were falling victim to the war even in those moments when there was relatively little active combat.73 One French soldier thought he knew why: “it is not against the Germans that we are now fight­ing—the ongoing shooting is really just a distraction. The true enemies are rheumatism, colds, trench foot (“l’enflure des pieds”) and demoralization.”74 War against these enemies could bring neither honor nor the liberation of France nor the end of the war itself. A professional from the Gordon Highlanders noted that what he called “brain strain” among the men had caused a number of suicides. He thought that the suicides and the huge spike in alcoholism (“a regular curse”) were the result of the inhumanity of trench warfare: “Human nature cannot stand it, and the man does become an animal of sorts.” This of­fi­cer noted that psychological maladies seemed most common in units stationed near the Ypres canal, where “dead bodies and bits of bodies” constantly floated past.75 War was taking not just a physical toll but an emotional one as well.

The Spirit of Christmas Mirth Is Absent As they prepared to spend their first Christmas at war since 1870, Europeans knew that this season would bring anything but peace on earth and good will to men. Soldiers and civilians alike faced the tremendous contrast of a murderous and ongoing war amid the Christmas season with anxiety and uncertainty. Few Europeans were in much of a mood to celebrate. One Londoner wrote on Christmas Day that “perhaps some evil spirit has been let loose in the old world, taking delight in frustrating the dreams, hopes, and aspirations of man for universal brotherhood which are perpetually associated with Christmas.”76 From France Mildred Aldrich apologized for not having sent out any letters or cards to mark the holiday, telling one of her correspondents, “I had no heart to send the usual greeting of the season. . . . It seemed to me too absurd to even celebrate the anniversary of the days when the angel hosts sang in the skies their ‘peace on earth, good will to men’ and man, only forty miles away occupied in wholesale slaughter.”77 Rudolf Binding went so far as to suggest that the holiday not be marked at all. “If I had my way 226

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some person in authority would proclaim that Christmas will not be celebrated this year. . . . Enemy, Death, and a Christmas tree—they cannot live so close together.”78 Another German wrote of his feeling that “peace is something which ceased to exist ages back and that war is mankind’s permanent situation.”79 Whatever side they fought on, and whatever denomination they belonged to, all Europeans felt the same sadness and the same sense that the holiday was out of touch with the spirit of 1914. Most Europeans spent Christmas in ways they could never have imagined in August. En­glishwoman M.  R. Whitaker found herself writing Christmas cards (with the “Printed in Germany” stamp ironically clearly visible on cards presumably bought before the war) to friends now serving on the western front or volunteering in hospitals.80 A young Piete Kuhr spent the holiday season caring for wounded men in an East Prussian hospital and noting the contrast between the moods of August and December: “At the beginning of the war we thought that the many sickbeds in the hospital would never be filled. Now neither the bed spaces nor the pillows and blankets are suf­fi­cient. The wounded lie on cotton wool and hay.” Her Christmas Eve diary entry, written after another long day of caring for the wounded, read, “Please, please dear God, do bring the war to an end.”81 As a result of such feelings, Christmas celebrations in 1914 were understandably “strange” and “chilling” experiences for people across Europe. Vera Brittain was fortunate enough to have had her family together, but she was already convinced that the war would last a long time and not leave her family unscathed. As a result, she later recalled, she had ­already sensed that 1914 would be the last year that her family would spend Christmas together, and “the unspoken but haunting consciousness in all our minds that perhaps it might be [the last], somewhat subdued the pride” the family felt in the pa­tri­otic ser­vice of her brother, Edward.82 In France, another somber Christmas dinner was celebrated in the absence of loved ones. “We tried not to miss Frances too awfully,” recalled one woman talking about her son at the front, “[we] choked a little when we drank to our men at the front. I wonder what next Christmas will bring us, and how many places will be empty at the Christmas dinner.”83 Ceremonies in the trenches were equally somber, leading a German soldier to call the spirit of Christmas “so really contrary to the Gospel of Love.”84 One British of­fi­cer recalled trying to mark the holiday, but failing to do so satisfactorily: “We drank to ‘absent friends’ in rum and wa227

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ter, but out of the four of us no one could give the toast. So we all stood up and stared very fiercely out of the windows and gulped it down. Our Christmas dinner was very much a frost, as I fear we were all contrasting our present with the past, or what we hope will be our future.”85 Like this of­fi­cer, many people tried to celebrate the season in the best way they could. Family and friends, of course, were never far from people’s minds. Soldiers frequently sent home money they had saved up (or won through gambling or selling war booty), and civilians sent chocolates, cigarettes, favorite foods, and warm clothes. Martin Guillemont, the new father who had written to his wife for information on his newborn daughter, received a photograph of her and learned that her name was Lucile.86 Not all people were as happy as he was with their gifts. Moma Clarke noted sadly that “there is not much laughter in Paris” and that “the spirit of Christmas mirth is absent,” symbolized by the fact that people were not buying large Christmas trees. In place of the usual toys, and in keeping with the theme of the winter, stores were instead selling toy soldiers “in the uniforms of the allies.” There were also “sentry boxes, guns, warships, aeroplanes, and all the panoply of war in miniature for sale” to Europe’s children. She watched as a woman wearing mourning clothes took her young son through these toys and saw him choose a miniature uniform for his toy soldiers “like that his father used to wear.” This scene, plus the image of soldiers on holiday leave buying toys for their sons before returning to the front, led her to conclude somberly that “instead of laughter there will be tears” in most homes. 87 Not all children got the gifts they had wanted. One French soldier wrote home to his young son who had asked for a Prussian helmet: My poor Maurice, you must re­flect that the Prussians are like us. There are fathers who are at war and little boys like you who are home with their mothers. What if a Prussian boy like you wrote to his father asking for the same thing that you are asking for and wanted his father to bring his little boy a French kepi? And what if that kepi was your father’s? Then what would you think? Keep this letter and read it when you are older. Then you will understand. 88 As this letter shows, the war frequently intruded upon the solemnity and joy that people normally associated with the Christmas season. The first German air raid on En­gland occurred in Dover on December 23, leading to a general blackout in many British cities, including London. The raid added to the anxiety created by a German naval attack on the 228

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undefended ports of Hartlepool, West Hartlepool, Whitby, and Scarborough on December 16. These raids killed 137 people and wounded 592 more, all civilians. The war had come to the British homeland at last. From the British cap­ital Michael MacDonough watched searchlights scanning the sky for German aircraft. This novel sight in London was both a symbol of the new world in which the war had forced them to live and a sense of some comfort. The lights “gave us a sense of security against raiders who in the night-­time might attempt to creep upon us and murder us non-­combatants in our sleep.”89 While many civilians were getting their first real taste of the danger and anxiety of war, soldiers in a few places on the western front were getting a brief break from them. The now-­famous Christmas truces did not occur ev­erywhere along the line, nor were they all the same.90 Most began with an unspoken agreement by men on both sides not to shoot at one another on Christmas Day. In some cases the truces were brief, as one German soldier described: “All around silence reigned; even the murdered trees seemed to listen; the charm continued, and one scarcely dared to speak. Why could it not always be so peaceful? We thought and thought, we were as dreamers, and had forgotten ev­ery­thing about us.” But then the war intruded. “Suddenly a shot rang out; then another one was fired somewhere. The spell was broken. All rushed to their rifles. A rolling [artillery] fire [began]. Our Christmas was over. We took up again our old existence.”91 The writer’s choice of words like “charm” and “spell” suggests that the intercession of something almost supernatural was needed to stop the killing even for a few minutes. The Christmas season did bring a few signs of brotherhood, however. One French soldier reported the “unique, never to be forgotten night” he had experienced on Christmas Eve. A French tenor sang out a German hymn, and the Germans responded by singing (incredibly enough) “La Marseillaise.” The scene made the soldier think of a moment when “humanity, in spite of its present, bloody infatuation, showed that it really has a conscience.”92 Singing was a common way to communicate with men across no man’s land because it could be done in relative safety and offered the other side the opportunity to respond in kind. In this case, the truce went no further than the exchange of songs. In a few places, the truces went far beyond singing and stood as a bridge between the prewar Europe and the horrors that were still to come. The Royal Welsh Fusiliers found themselves across the front from a group of “quite human” Saxons, one of whom had been a head waiter at a Lon229

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don restaurant and often shouted questions to them about life in the city he loved but to which he could not return until the end of the war.93 On Christmas morning, neither side opened fire, even after the Saxons began to cook their breakfast in the trenches, an activity that usually drew fire to the location of the smoke coming from the camp stoves. Later in the morning the Germans came out of their trenches and, although the British troops were forbidden to leave theirs, they did promise not to fire on German burial parties that came into no man’s land to bury their dead. Soon, British troops began tossing out tins of bully beef and jam to the Germans as Christmas presents. Shortly thereafter, six of the Saxon of­fi­cers stood on their parapets and yelled in En­glish, “­Don’t shoot! We ­don’t want to fight today.” They then rolled kegs of beer across no man’s land as a Christmas offering. The British replied by sending an of­fi­cer out into no man’s land, where he saluted a German counterpart and the two men toasted the season with glasses of beer. But there the truce ended. At 8:30 the of­fi­cers returned to their respective trenches. The British of­fi­cer described what happened next: “I fired three shots in the air and put up a flag with ‘Merry Christmas’ on it, and I climbed on the parapet. He [the German of­fi­cer] put up a sheet with ‘Thank You’ on it, and the German captain appeared on the parapet. We both bowed and saluted and got down into our respective trenches and he fired two shots in the air, and the War was on again.”94 Such truces were the exception, not the rule. They normally happened between British (often Scottish) units and Saxon or Bavarian units. The Germans, some of whom had lived and worked in London, often initiated the truces because their En­glish was better than the British soldiers’ German. Some truces were friendly, others strictly for the purpose of burying the dead and recovering the wounded. The latter were understandably devoid of celebration and mirth. In most cases, the truces came with clearly understood limits, including a ban on the collection of weapons in no man’s land and a ban on using the truces to repair barbed wire. The importance of these truces should not be exaggerated. They may have represented a brief break from the war, but they did not prevent men from resuming the killing shortly thereafter. Comparatively few men, moreover, enjoyed a Christmas respite from the bloodshed. For most soldiers, the war continued as normal, apart from the gifts sent from home or an extra helping of food. André Cornet­Auquier wrote home to tell his family that Christmas Day “did not differ from all those which we have passed since we came here.” The Germans 230

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had begun the day with artillery fire on the French positions, prompting him to re­flect, “Is that the way to celebrate the night of Bethlehem?”95 Ernst Jünger’s men were too “embittered” by the recent deaths of comrades to contemplate any sort of truce with the men who killed their friends.96 The men of the “Bloody Eleventh” regiment from Devonshire spent the holidays mourning the deaths of nine men killed on Christmas Day and learning to use a new weapon, the hand grenade.97 It may have been Christmas, but not ev­ery­one was in the spirit to forgive and celebrate, even for a little while.

A Monstrous Folly The Christmas season also made men aware of how long the war had already lasted. Almost none of them had expected in August to still be in uniform in December. Now they had to face the reality that, in the words of one soldier, “this will be a long war and we all believe that we will still be here for Christmas, 1915.”98 The coming of a new year reinforced these fears. It also reinforced in men’s minds the futility of the war, especially when its insig­nifi­cant causes were placed alongside its already monumental effects. Writing on New Year’s Eve, Rudolf Binding noted: “The year is drawing to a close. It has been a grave year for all of us who, in spite of all earnestness and deep thought, must admit to ourselves that we cannot realize what the War means. Does it not seem to be a monstrous folly, that mankind with drawn sword is weltering in a massacre before which it will some day stand aghast, like Ajax among the slaughtered sheep?”99 The reference to the play by Sophocles is apt. In the eponymous drama, Ajax tortured and killed the wrong victims after being tricked into thinking they were his enemies. Ajax tries to atone for his sins but is accidentally killed by his own sword, which he had not suf­fi­ciently buried. Like Ajax, the men of 1914 had been led to kill people they had been told were their enemies. Their realization that there had been no hatreds worth the war they were now fight­ing was no less tragic than Ajax’s symbolic death on his own weapon. Binding was far from alone in wondering if European civilization itself would survive such a war or if it, too, would be killed by a sword drawn in tragic error. Although few people were as eloquent as Binding in bidding farewell to 1914, all were glad to see end what the ­bishop of Salford called “the most terrible and deplorable year of all our lives—perhaps in History,” 231

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even if they did not know what was to replace it.100 From London, journalist Michael MacDonough put two contradictory entries into his journal on the last day of 1914. First he wrote, “To blazes with 1914, that year of blood and destruction. Welcome 1915—welcome the happy year that will see this wicked war a thing of the past!” His second entry, however, dampens his optimism and suggests a less certain future: “The old year has written ‘Finis’ on its black and hateful record. The New Year has come in with a white virgin sheet. What will Destiny write upon it? Only the Omniscient Being knows.” Certainly neither MacDonough nor anyone else in Europe could have guessed that three (very nearly four) more bloody and murderous new years stood between them and the end of the war. They did, however, appreciate, as MacDonough’s reference to Destiny demonstrates, that they no ­longer controlled their own futures. The pious hoped that that future lay in the hands of a benevolent God. The less spiritual had already concluded that the war, a creation of man, now controlled the fate of European civilization, and it hardly mattered any ­longer who had been right or wrong, or who perhaps even won or who lost. Indeed, the reasons for the war had now largely been forgotten. No one cared any ­longer whether Austria invaded Serbia or who was responsible for the death of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, now buried and long forgotten. The war was its own reality and perpetuated its own reasons for fight­ing. After another day of caring for wounded men, a young and perceptive Piete Kuhr asked her grandmother why Germany “­didn’t after all make peace. The assassination of the Austrian Crown Prince and Princess had been avenged thousands of times.” Her grandmother had no answer but told her that “we must go right through with the wretched business or we will lose our fatherland.” Piete asked her grandmother when the war would end. “When we have won,” her grandmother replied.101 Such was the reality of 1914. The spark that had caused the war had long since faded, but Europeans were nevertheless trapped in a total war to the fin­ish. Perhaps the final word should come from a young man who dreamed of being a writer but in August 1914 had enlisted in a local regiment to serve his country. On New Year’s Eve he recorded in his diary his impressions of the year just ending. To him 1914 had been a year of pain and sorrow, not only for us but for the whole of what is called the civilized world. This terrible war goes on and on, and 232

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whereas you thought at the start that it would be over in a few weeks, there is now no end in sight. Your feelings harden, you become increasingly indifferent. You ­don’t think about the next day any more. It’s my sister’s birthday today. How will she get along without her husband? A wish for us all for 1915: may this new year make up for 1914 and bring us peace.102 His sentiments might well have been written by any man in any army in Europe. That he was German is almost irrelevant. His story is the story of Europe in 1914. Neither Herbert Sulzbach nor anyone else in Europe in June, July, or even the first days of August could have predicted the death and devastation that 1914 would bring. In the pleasant days of early summer, war was very far from their minds. Now it had arrived and it had destroyed the world that they had known. A new one would have to emerge from the war whenever it ended. Whether it could put the pieces back together again no one knew, but millions of people were already beginning to fear that their worlds and their futures would never be secure again.

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For almost a century now debates about 1914 have centered on the actions of a very small group of men (and they were all men) whose decisions led Europe into a war whose out­comes and ferocity none of them accurately foresaw. But there is another side to the story of 1914 that has until now gone largely untold. It is the story of the millions of people who neither desired nor expected a war in the summer of 1914, but who nevertheless fought that war to the bitter end. By looking at the people of Europe rather than at their leaders, we can see the events of 1914 from a new perspective and discern patterns that might otherwise remain obscure. Doing so allows us to see not just the Europe of 1914 but also the war years themselves in a new light. Europeans in 1914 iden­ti­fied themselves in part by their nationality, but they were more complex and sophisticated than that. They shared much in common, including a pronounced aversion to war. The “mili­ tarism run stark mad” that the American presidential advisor Edward House saw on his visit to Europe in 1914 was limited to the governing elites and was in stark contrast to the pacifist internationalism House ­believed characterized his own homeland.1 Thus the often-­quoted 1890 comment from Helmuth von Moltke the Elder that “the age of cabinet war is behind us—all we have now is peoples war” is inaccurate to describe the outbreak of war in 1914. To most people, Moltke’s words have come as a warning from his­tory not to unleash the underlying nationalist passions of Europe by starting an unnecessary war. But the outbreak of war in 1914 was a classic example of cabinet war. War broke out because a select group of perhaps a dozen men willed it or stumbled incompetently around a situation that they thought they could control until it was too late to stop the machinery they had set in motion. The overwhelming

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response of the people of Europe was not enthusiasm or joy but sadness and resignation. The willingness of Europeans to support war in 1914 came from their acceptance of the of­fi­cial explanation of war as defensive and existential. No matter where they lived, Europeans believed that the responsibility for war belonged with another country and that their own governments had done all they could have to avoid war. Partly this acceptance came from close government control over newspapers and information. Partly, too, it came from the truly dizzying speed with which a seemingly minor Balkan crisis turned into a continental war. As one Briton recognized, “by the first week in August, events that we had barely noticed had plunged Germany, France, Russia, Austria, and Serbia into war.”2 His sentiments were not limited to Great Britain. Europeans were not naïve; nor were they always swayed by the pro­pa­ganda of their government. They did, however, see themselves as having little choice but to rally together to face a crisis that could likely determine their collective future survival. They continued to fight long after August 1914 despite the length and costs of the war because it had become a total war of life or death within its first few weeks. The war quickly created its own hatreds and desires for vengeance, on both the individual and societal levels. Too many people had been killed in the first weeks of this total war for anything but a total peace to end it. Just as terms could not possibly be found to end the war by compromise, no peace treaty could possibly have buried the hatreds and sorrows that the con­flict had already produced by the end of 1914. Indeed, by the war’s first Christmas it was already inevitable that no peace treaty could have made either the victors (to say nothing of the vanquished) sat­is­fied with the cost of the war. For all that Alsace-­Lorraine supposedly meant to the French, for example, its return to France was scant reward for the blood and trea­sure that the nation had lost in a war its people had not wanted and its government had tried to avoid until the last possible moment. This dissatisfaction with the scant rewards of victory (contrasted to victory’s extreme costs) played a critical role in the appeasement politics of the 1920s and 1930s. War, moreover, had given the victors neither safety nor security. Nor could any outcome of the war have possibly compensated for the disillusion that set in before the end of that terrible first year. The illusion of a short, victorious war was among the first mirages to vanish; other 235

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disillusions soon followed. The realization that the burdens and even the few bene­fits of war would not be shared equally struck people harshly as food, fuel, and other resources remained in the hands of a select few. The August rhetoric of shared sac­ri­fice and national unity fell apart quickly as the war continued and governments showed themselves to have no solutions to the dislocations it caused. For the Russian, Austro-­Hungarian, and German governments, this bankruptcy of ideas eventually proved fatal. Scholarly focus on the revolutions of 1917 and 1918 as well as on the age of the big battles like Verdun, the Somme, and Passchendaele has inadvertently blinded us to how quickly this shared sense of disillusion developed and how serious its early consequences were for laying the foundation of revolution later in the war. As those revolutions demonstrate, to see Europe in 1914 as a collection of homogenous and uni­fied nation-­states eager for a chance to avenge some distant stain to national honor fails to explain both the outbreak of war and its out­comes. If it is true that many (though not all) Europeans in that fateful year saw themselves in national terms, it is equally true that almost none of them saw those national identities as something worth killing and dying for. For many of them, sig­nifi­cant foes remained at home in the form of either ethnic or class enemies. As long as the war maintained its sense of being a shared communal struggle for existence, domestic enemies could come together to face a common foe. As these illusions dropped away, mutiny, rebellion, and revolution took their place in locations as different from one another as Dublin, the Chemin des Dames, St. Petersburg, and Wilhelmshaven. To make this statement is not to argue that being French or German was un­im­por­tant. Rather, it is to say that the mutual suspicions and occasional fears that existed across the continent in 1914 were in and of themselves in­suf­fi­cient to cause a war. If anything, nationalist feelings seemed to people in 1914 much less passionate than they had been in recent years. The jingoist stereotypes and suspicions that did exist in 1914 did not cause a war, but they did act as a fertile field for the hatreds and suspicions that quickly emerged once the war began. Because each side believed itself to have been attacked and therefore to be fight­ing a just war, the most satisfying explanation for the war emerged from a demonization of the enemy. The reports of enemy atrocities that were commonplace in all the great powers in the war’s early weeks fueled those fires and seemed to validate the worst tales ever heard about “the other.” Genuine hatred and vengeance soon followed, leaving behind them some of 236

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the First World War’s bitterest legacies. As long as those hatreds remained, the war had no chance of becoming “the war to end war” that H. G. Wells had predicted upon its outbreak. Instead, it left behind the bitter seeds of revenge and revulsion that bequeathed to Europe fascism, Sta­linism, genocide, and another war even more destructive and murderous. Today’s views of the war and its murderous first year are products of the hatreds the war generated as well as the vitriolic and vituperative debates over responsibility for the war after 1918. Germany’s strident denials of its guilt and its rejection of the infamous “war guilt clause” of the Versailles Treaty show how powerful ideas about 1914 remained. Nor was rejection of war guilt only a far-­right obsession in Germany. It had broad support across the po­lit­i­cal spectrum. For years afterward, Germans rejected the notion of their sole responsibility for the war, re­flect­ing the general consensus of Germans in 1914 that their war had been just and defensive.3 Most other German beliefs about the war followed logically from that one. Thus the ideas of 1914 had long-­lasting impacts and deserve a full analysis. Just before the outbreak of the war, when it was still possible to debate and discuss the wisdom of fight­ing, a letter to the editor in a local newspaper warned of the consequences that might ensue from a continental war. “All who par­tic­i­pate in war, of course, intend to put the death and destruction on [their] enemies,” the letter stated, “but his­tory shows that crushing punishment has often fallen on those who thought they could impose it on others. War is not a game to be trifled with.”4 But the leaders of Europe did trifle with it in 1914, with the most horrid consequences for both the winners and the losers, as well as for the innocent victims of war across the globe. As such, the First World War is a reminder to us all that wars have tendencies to take on lives of their own and to destroy even those who ostensibly win them.

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introduc tion

1. Serbia was usually spelled Servia in 1914. Allied propagandists changed the spelling during the war to make it look less like “servile.” Here and elsewhere, I have kept the spelling as it was in the original. 2. Herbert Adams Gibbons, Paris Reborn: A Study in Civic Psychology (New York: Century, 1915), 4–5. Nor was Gibbons alone in his assessment, as the following chapters will show. To cite one more example here, even the well-­connected New York Tribune Paris correspondent Charles I. Barnard postponed his re­ tirement by a few months so that he might have one last “quiet summer” in Paris. See Charles I. Barnard, Paris War Days: Diary of an American (Boston: Little, Brown, 1914), 1. 3. C. E. Cooper, Behind the Lines: One Woman’s War, 1914–1918 (London: Jill Norman and Hobhouse, 1982), 21–22. 4. Cooper, Behind the Lines, 40. 5. Cooper, Behind the Lines, 46. 6. Quoted in Manfred Boemeke, Roger Chickering, and Stig Förster, An­ ticipating Total War: The German and American Experiences, 1871–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and the German Historical Institute, 1999), 347. 7. V. R. Berghahn, Germany and the Approach of War in 1914 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1973), 187. 8. Baron Beyens, Deux années à Berlin, 1912–1914, vol. 2, septembre 1913– août 1914 (Paris: Plon, 1931), 261. 9. Richard Bosworth, Italy and the Approach of the First World War (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983), 97. 10. See, for example, Jean-­Jacques Becker, The Great War and the French People (Oxford: Berg, 1985); Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth, and Mobilization in Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Catriona Pennell, “A Kingdom United: British and Irish Responses to the Outbreak of War, July to December, 1914” (Ph.D. diss., Trinity College, Dublin, 2007). 11. Gibbons, Paris Reborn, 4. 239

NOTES TO PAGES 6–11

12. In an effort not to disrupt the flow of this book, I have tried to keep much of its theoretical basis in the background. For more on the transnational turn that informs my analysis, see Micol Seigel, “Beyond Compare,” Radical History Review 91 (Winter 2005): 62–90; and Robert Gross, “The Transnational Turn: Rediscovering American Studies in a Wider World,” Journal of American Studies 34 (2000): 373–393. 13. Stuart Wallace, War and the Image of Germany: British Academics, 1914–1918 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988), 32. 14. The starting point for any serious research on the atrocities of 1914 should be John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). 15. Marie de Croÿ, War Memories (London: Macmillan, 1932), 38. 16. As early as mid-­S eptember 1914, Charles Barnard was among those who recognized that one side would need to completely vanquish the other for the war to end. He noted that “Parisians of ev­ery class . . . [were] subdued and chastened” by that reality. See Barnard, Paris War Days, 226. 17. More evidence for this argument follows, but it is worth noting that when the Conseil Régional de Basse-­Normandie looked for evidence of a spirit of revenge among the citizens of Normandy for a historical study of the region at war, the only document it could produce was a 1901 statement by a group of Franco-­ Prussian War veterans. See Conseil Régional de Basse-­Normandie, La Basse Normandie dans la Première Guerre Mondiale, 1914–1918 (Orne: Service Communication Département Pédagogique, 1999), 9. 18. Hans Kollwitz, ed., The Diary and Letters of Kaethe Kollwitz (Chicago: Henry Regenery, 1955), 62–63. 1.

a cl ap of thunder in the summer sk y

1. Baron Beyens, Germany before the War (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1916), 273. 2. Johan Wilhelm von Löwenell Brandenburg-­Hohenzollern, Forebodings and Forbearance: What the Fatherland Would Do If Drawn into a European Conflict (Detroit: C. Schwappacher, 1915), 35. 3. Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography (New York: Viking, 1943), 218. 4. David Silbey, The British Working Class and Enthusiasm for War, 1914– 1916 (London: Frank Cass, 2005), 17. 5. Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (London: Penguin, 1994), 93. There had in fact been a bomb thrown at Franz Ferdinand’s car earlier that day, but it had done no harm to the royal couple. It had, however, wounded two people traveling in the car behind the archduke and his wife. They had been on their way to visit the injured when the driver took a wrong turn (oddly enough onto Franz Joseph Street) and ended up on the street corner where Gavrilo Princip was standing with a pistol in his pocket. 6. Claire de Pratz, A Frenchwoman’s Notes on the War (London: Constable, 1916), 2–3. 240

NOTES TO PAGES 12–19

7. Francis Whiting Halsey, The Literary Digest History of the World War, vol. 1 (London: Funk and Wagnalls, 1919), 72. 8. Alexei Brusilov, A Soldier’s Notebook, 1914–1918 (Westport, Conn.: Green­wood Press, 1971), 4. 9. Charles Carrington, Soldier from the Wars Returning (New York: David McKay, 1965), 37. 10. Frederic Morton, Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Book Group, 2001), 25 and 27. 11. Marquise Genevieve Marie de Foucault, A Château at the Front (Boston: Hough­ton Mif­fl in, 1931), 5. 12. Desmond Morton and J. L. Granatstein, Marching to Armageddon: Canadians and the Great War, 1914–1919 (Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1989), 2. 13. Ian Hugh Maclean Miller, Our Glory and Our Grief: Torontonians and the Great War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 12–13. 14. Vincent Cronin, Paris on the Eve, 1900–1914 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 434. 15. Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World before the War, 1890–1914 (New York: Ballantine, 1966), 100. 16. Irish Times, June 29, 1914, p. 6. 17. Bernadotte Schmitt, The Coming of the War, 1914, vol. 1 (New York: Scribners, 1930), 284. 18. J.  A. Spender, Life, Journalism, and Politics, vol. 1 (London: Cassell, 1927), 8; Albert Martin, The Last Crusade: The Church of En­gland in the First World War (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1974), 68. 19. Quoted in Henry Wickham Steed, Through Thirty Years, 1892–1922, vol. 1 (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, Page, 1925), 400. 20. David Stevenson, Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 9. 21. Steed, Through Thirty Years, 401. There had been more than 1,000 uniformed security of­fi­cials for the more popular Franz Joseph’s visit to the city on a day other than June 28 in 1910. 22. Steed, Through Thirty Years, 405. This last detail of the burial was in fact incorrect. Franz Ferdinand had anticipated that the court would not allow the couple to be buried together, so his will dictated that they be buried in a special, nonroyal crypt he had built at their home in Artstetten. 23. Morton, Thunder at Twilight, 270. 24. Theodor Wolff, The Eve of 1914 (New York: Knopf, 1936), 401. 25. Morton, Thunder at Twilight, 266. 26. Schmitt, The Coming of the War, 261–262. 27. Jonathan French Scott, Five Weeks: The Surge of Public Opinion on the Eve of the Great War (New York: John Day, 1927), 33, 36, and 43. 28. Samuel Williamson, Austria-­Hungary and the Origins of the First World War (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 191. 29. Schmitt, The Coming of the War, 281. 30. Gabor Vermes, István Tisza: The Liberal Vision and Conservative State241

NOTES TO PAGES 19–22

craft of a Magyar Nationalist (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 217. 31. Wolff, The Eve of 1914, 188. 32. Franz Schoenberner, Confessions of a European Intellectual (New York: Macmillan, 1946), 69. 33. Zweig, The World of Yesterday, 214–216. 34. Brusilov, A Soldier’s Notebook, 4. 35. Roger Chickering, The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 59. 36. Charles Seymour, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, vol. 1 (New York: Hough­ton Mif­fl in, 1926), 269. 37. Alan Clark, ed., “A Good Innings”: The Private Papers of Viscount [Arthur] Lee of Fareham (London: John Murray, 1939), 132. 38. E. F. Benson, As We Were: A Victorian Peep Show (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1934), 294–295. 39. Geoffrey Marcus, Before the Lamps Went Out (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), 191. 40. D. C. Watt, “The British Reactions to the Assassination at Sarajevo,” European Studies Review 1, 3 (1971), 237. 41. Marcus, Before the Lamps Went Out, 101. 42. Quoted in Catriona Pennell, “A Kingdom United: British and Irish Responses to the Outbreak of War, July to December, 1914” (Ph.D. diss., Trinity College, Dublin, 2007). 43. E. Malcolm Carroll, French Public Opinion and Foreign Affairs, 1870– 1914 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1931), 288. 44. de Foucault, A Château at the Front, 5–6. 45. Jean Malnoury, Au lieu des vacances . . . la guerre (Metz: Editions Serpenoise, 2008), 11. 46. Martha Hanna, Your Death Would Be Mine: Paul and Marie Pireaud in the Great War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 6–7. 47. Compton Mackenzie, My Life and Times: Octave Four, 1907–1915 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965), 219. 48. Soon after taking the throne in 1916, Karl began looking for a way out of the war by sending peace feelers to the French through his brother-­in-­law. He continued to look for an honorable peace even after the Germans reacted angrily to his peace overtures. 49. Schmitt, The Coming of the War, 415. 50. Quoted in Morton, Thunder at Twilight, 266. 51. Schmitt, The Coming of the War, 415–416. 52. Steed, Through Thirty Years, 367–368. 53. Quoted in Laurence Moyer, Victory Must Be Ours: Germany in the Great War (London: Leo Cooper, 1995), 62. 54. Frederic William Wile, The Assault: Germany before the Outbreak and En­gland in War-­time (Indianapolis: Bobbs-­Merrill, 1916), 14. 55. Quoted in Malcolm Brown, The Imperial War Museum Book of 1914 (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 2004), 3. 242

NOTES TO PAGES 23–30

56. James W. Gerard, My Four Years in Germany (New York: George H. Doran, 1917), 106–107. 57. Wile, The Assault, 21. 58. Gerard, My Four Years in Germany, 129–130. 59. V. I. Gurko, Features and Figures of the Past (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1939), 537. 60. Halsey, The Literary Digest History of the World War, 69. 61. Schmitt, The Coming of the War, 285. 62. Georges Haupt, Socialism and the Great War: The Collapse of the Second International (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 134. 63. Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 126–127, 131. 64. Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 121. 65. Ford Maddox Ford, Return to Yesterday (New York: Livewright, 1932), 416. 66. Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 183. 67. Quoted in Harvey Goldberg, The Life of Jean Jaurès (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962), 460. 68. Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 184. 69. Herbert Sulzbach, With the German Guns: Four Years on the Western Front (London: Pen and Sword, 2003), 21. 70. André Gide, The Journals of André Gide, trans., with intro. and notes by Justin O’Brien (New York: Knopf, 1951), 40ff. 71. Arnold Bennett, The Journal of Arnold Bennett (New York: Viking, 1933). 72. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, My Diaries, Part Two, 1900–1914 (New York: Knopf, 1921), 429. 73. R. D. Blumenfeld, R. D. Blumenfeld’s Diary, 1887–1914 (London: William Heinemann, 1930), 244. 74. See Edward Berenson, The Trial of Madame Caillaux (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 75. Hew Strachan notes that the revelation of Caillaux’s possession of the telegrams “did have serious diplomatic consequences” as foreign embassies in Paris struggled to change their codes. Hew Strachan, The First World War, to Arms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 79. 76. It had, however, been tried in the United States, where Dan Sickles, a New York politician and future ­Union general at the Battle of Gettysburg, had successfully used the defense in 1859 in his trial for murdering his young wife’s lover on the streets of Washington in broad daylight. 77. Hanna, Your Death Would Be Mine, 7. 78. For more on the Curragh Incident, see Ian F. W. Beckett, ed., The Army and the Curragh Incident, 1914 (London: Army Records Society, 1986). 79. Marcus, Before the Lamps Went Out, 95. 80. Keith Jeffrey, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson: A Political Soldier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 122. 81. Winifred Tower, quoted in Pennell, A Kingdom United, 38. Note the use of the defi­nite article. 243

NOTES TO PAGES 30–38

82. Blumenfeld, Diary, 244–245. 83. Mackenzie, My Life and Times, 219. 84. Scott, Five Weeks, 21, 32, and 40. 85. Beyens, Germany before the War, 275, 277. 86. Carroll, French Public Opinion, 287. 87. The History of the Times: The 150th Anniversary and Beyond, vol. 4, pt. 1, 1912–1920 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 179; Watt, “British Reactions,” 240 and 243. 88. London Times, July 16, 1914, p.  7. Curiously, “cheerful” was also the word the Irish Times used to describe the London stock market’s attitude toward the crisis on June 29. Irish Times, June 29, 1914, p. 11. 89. Mildred Aldrich, A Hilltop on the Marne (London: Constable, 1915), 43. 90. Elisabeth Marbury, My Crystal Ball: Reminiscences (New York: Boni and Liverlight, 1923), 263. 91. Ian Packer, ed., The Letters of Arnold Stephenson Rowntree to Mary Katherine Rowntree, 1910–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 149, 151. 92. József Galántai, Hungary in the First World War (Budapest: Akadémiai Liadó, 1989), 56–57. 93. Spender, Life, Journalism, and Politics, 9. 94. Schmitt, The Coming of the War, 423, 424, 439, and 397–398. 95. Steed, Through Thirty Years, 410. 96. Scott, Five Weeks, 43 and 47–48. 97. Wile, The Assault, 48 and 54. 98. Zweig, The World of Yesterday, 219. 99. Miller, Our Glory and Our Grief, 13. 2.

background to s ar aje vo,

19 05 –1914

1. V. R. Berghahn, Germany and the Approach of War in 1914 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1973), 86. 2. Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World before the War, 1890–1914 (New York: Ballantine, 1966), 240. On another occasion, he had told new recruits, “You are my soldiers. You have given yourselves to me, body and soul. There is now but one enemy for you, and that is my enemy. In this time of Socialist intrigue, it may happen that I may order you to fire on your brothers or your fathers. God save us from it! But in such a case you are bound to obey me without a murmur.” Wilbur Gordy, The Causes and Meaning of the Great War (New York: Scribners, 1919), 16. 3. The full text of the interview can be found at: http://wwi.lib.byu.edu/ index.php/The_Daily_Telegraph_Affair. For more on the kaiser’s impetuosity see Isabel Hull, The Entourage of Kaiser Wilhelm II, 1888–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); John C. G. Röhl and Nicolaus Sombart, eds., Kaiser Wilhelm II: New Interpretations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and Annika Mombauer, ed., The Kaiser: New Research on Wilhelm II’s Role in Imperial Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 244

NOTES TO PAGES 38–44

4. Robert M. Barry, Germany of the Germans (New York: Scribners, 1915), 11. 5. Baron Beyens, Germany before the War (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1916), 25. 6. Antoine Délecraz, 1914: Paris pendant la mobilisation (Geneva: La Suisse, 1915), 176. 7. “The Greatest of the Hohenzollerns,” Review of Reviews 33, 196 (April 1906), 388. 8. Beyens, Germany before the War, 27. 9. Beyens, Germany before the War, 23. 10. “Foreign Affairs,” The Forum 34, 3 (Jan.–Mar. 1903), 335, 338. 11. “The Kaiser’s Policy,” Review of Reviews 311, 5 (May 1905), 530. 12. Tuchman, The Proud Tower, 281. 13. John C. G. Röhl, The Kaiser and His Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 167. 14. Theodor Wolff, The Eve of 1914 (New York: Knopf), 51–52. 15. Vincent Cronin, Paris on the Eve, 1900–1914 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 68. 16. Hull, The Entourage of Kaiser Wilhelm II, 265. 17. Edward M. House, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, arranged as a narrative by Charles Seymour, vol. 1 (New York: Hough­ton Mif­fl in, 1926), 319. 18. Melissa K. Stockdale, Paul Miliukov and the Quest for a Liberal Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 219. 19. Charles L. Graves, Mr. Punch’s History of the Great War (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1919), xiv. 20. Gavin Roynon, ed., Home Fires Burning: The Great War Diaries of Georgina Lee (Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2006), 3. 21. Tuchman, The Proud Tower, 230. 22. Dan L. Morrill, “Nicholas II and the Call for the First Hague Conference,” Journal of Modern History 46, 2 (June 1974), 296–313, quotation at 296. My thanks to my colleague Brian LaPierre for pointing out this source to me. 23. Suttner was the author of Lay Down Your Arms (1889), a book that Tolstoy claimed was the pacifist movement’s equivalent of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 24. Punch, January 10, 1906. 25. Philippe Husser, Un instituteur Alsacien entre France et Allemagne (Paris: Hachette, 1918), 26; Jean-­Jacques Becker and Gerd Krumeich, La grande guerre: une histoire Franco-­Allemand (Paris: Tallandier, 2008), 58–59. 26. Frederic Morton, Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Book Group, 2001), 123. 27. Beyens, Germany before the War, 22. 28. Sandi Cooper, “Pacifism in France, 1889–1914: International Peace as Human Right,” French Historical Studies 17, 2 (Autumn 1991), 360. 29. John Milton Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1983), 79. In 1906, Roosevelt became the first American to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in helping to end the Russo-­Japanese War. 245

NOTES TO PAGES 45–52

30. John Keiger, “Jules Cambon and Franco-­G erman Détente, 1907–1914,” Historical Journal 26, 3 (1983), 643. 31. Wilfrid Scawen Blount, My Diaries, Part Two, 1900–1914 (New York: Knopf, 1921), 346. 32. Geoffrey Barraclough, From Agadir to Armageddon: Anatomy of a Crisis (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982), 1. 33. Barraclough, From Agadir to Armageddon, 110, 2. 34. E. Malcolm Carroll, French Public Opinion and Foreign Affairs, 1870– 1914 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1931; 1964), 241. 35. La Patrie, July 3, 1911, quoted in Carroll, French Public Opinion, 241. 36. Barraclough, From Agadir to Armageddon, 4; Sidney B. Fay, The Origins of the World War, vol. 1 (New York: Free Press, 1982; 1966), 292. 37. Blount, My Diaries, 354. 38. J.  A. Spender, Life, Journalism and Politics, vol. 1 (London: Cassell, 1927), 237. 39. http://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Agadir_Crisis:_Lloyd_George%27s_ Mansion_House_Speech. 40. Carroll, French Public Opinion, 242. 41. Harvey Goldberg, The Life of Jean Jaurès (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962), 423. 42. Georges Haupt, Socialism and the Great War: The Collapse of the Second International (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 42–44. 43. Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 48n48. 44. Jolyon Howorth, “French Workers and German Workers: The Impossibility of Internationalism, 1900–1914,” European History Quarterly 15 (1985), 84. 45. Howorth, “French Workers and German Workers,” 85. In response to Wilhelm’s urging his countrymen to “keep the powder dry” in case of a future war, Hervé wrote, “Your powder dry? Your Excellency! Can’t you see that four million German workers have already pissed in it?” 46. Wolff, Eve of 1914, 37–38, 40, 56. 47. Barraclough, From Agadir to Armageddon, 109. 48. Barraclough, From Agadir to Armageddon, 140. 49. Carroll, French Public Opinion, 247–250. 50. Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 54. 51. Keiger, “Jules Cambon,” 647. Cambon blamed the inexperience of both France and Germany’s foreign ministers for the crisis. 52. Esmé Wingfield-­Stratford, Before the Lamps Went Out (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979), 240. 53. Barraclough, From Agadir to Armageddon, 148. 54. Richard Bosworth, Italy and the Approach of the First World War (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983), 83. 55. Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 56–57 and 56n1. 56. Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 62. 57. Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 63. 58. Bosworth, Italy and the Approach of the First World War, 75.

246

NOTES TO PAGES 52–58

59. John A. Thayer, Italy and the Great War (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), 251. 60. Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 63. 61. Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 79n61. 62. Goldberg, The Life of Jean Jaurès, 432. 63. Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 80, 82. 64. Goldberg, The Life of Jean Jaurès, 433–434. 65. Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 85. 66. Alexandra Kollantai to T. L. ŠÓepkina-­Kupernik, quoted in Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 91–92. 67. Carl Landauer, European Socialism: A History of Ideas and Movements from the Industrial Revolution to Hitler’s Seizure of Power (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1976), 495. 68. Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 84, 87n17, and 88. 69. Carroll, French Public Opinion, 265. 70. Carroll, French Public Opinion, 273. 71. Barraclough, From Agadir to Armageddon, 150. 72. Carroll, French Public Opinion, 277. 73. Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 71. 74. Thomas Riha, A Russian European: Paul Miliukov in Russian Politics (South Bend, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1969), 207. 75. Stockdale, Paul Miliukov, 211, 213. 76. Friedrich Kießling, “Unfought Wars: The Effect of Détente before World War I,” in Holger Afflerbach and David Stevenson, eds., An Improbable War? The Outbreak of World War I and European Political Culture before 1914 (London: Berghahn Books, 2007), 192, 189, 187, and 183. 77. Holger Afflerbach, “The Topos of Improbable War in Europe before 1914,” in Afflerbach and Stevenson, eds., An Improbable War, 161. 78. Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 107. 79. Carroll, French Public Opinion, 265. 80. Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 112. 81. Douglas J. Newton, British Labour, European Socialism, and the Struggle for Peace, 1889–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 304. 82. Newton, British Labour, 279–280. 83. Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 108. 84. Wingfield-­Stratford, Before the Lamps Went Out, 239. 85. Stuart Wallace, War and the Image of Germany: British Academics, 1914–1918 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988), 12. 86. Jean-­Jacques Becker, 1914: Comment les Français sont entrés dans la guerre (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1977), 54. 87. Ian Ousby, The Road to Verdun (New York: Doubleday, 2002), 212. 88. Mentions of Alsace-­L orraine appeared in 3.4 percent of reports from Charente; 2.2 percent of reports from Isère; 1.5 percent of reports from Gard; and 1.2 percent of reports from Hautes-­A lpes. Revanche (or revenge against Ger-

247

NOTES TO PAGES 58–63

many) appeared in just 6.3 percent of reports from Charente; 6.2 percent of reports from Hautes-­A lpes; 4.5 percent of reports from Isère; 2.9 percent of reports from Côtes du Nord; 1.0 percent of reports from Gard; and 0 percent of reports from Haute-­Savoie. Jean-­Jacques Becker, “That’s the Death Knell of Our Boys,” in Patrick Fridenson, ed., The French Home Front, 1914–1918 (Oxford: Berg, 1992), 32. 89. Carroll, French Public Opinion, 185–187. 90. David Starr Jordan, Alsace-­L orraine: A Study in Conquest, 1913 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-­Merrill, 1916), 6–7. 91. Jordan, Alsace-­L orraine, 96, 113. 92. Jordan, Alsace-­L orraine, 83. 93. Jordan, Alsace-­L orraine, 7. 94. Ousby, The Road to Verdun, 217. 95. Frank Field, British and French Writers of the First World War: Com­ parative Studies in Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 43. 96. Bernadotte E. Schmitt, Triple Alliance and Triple Entente (New York: Henry Holt, 1934), 102. 97. David Schoenbaum, Zabern 1913: Consensus Politics in Imperial Germany (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1982), 13. 98. James W. Gerard, My Four Years in Germany (New York: George H. Doran, 1917), 83. 99. Schoenbaum, Zabern, 13. 100. Schoenbaum, Zabern, 146. 101. Gerard, My Four Years in Germany, 101. 102. Ford Madox Ford, Return to Yesterday (New York: Livewright, 1932; 1972), 405. 103. Barraclough, From Agadir to Armageddon, 152. 104. Carroll, French Public Opinion, 254. 105. Schmitt, Triple Alliance and Triple Entente. General Georges Boulanger had used anti-­G erman sentiment to build a populist, anti-­Republican movement in the 1880s under the slogan “We remember that they are waiting for us in Alsace-­Lorraine.” His supporters tried a ham-­fisted coup d’état that failed, forcing Boulanger into exile in Belgium. He later committed suicide on his dead mistress’s grave and is today buried in Nantillois, near the Argonne Forest. Paul Déroulède was one of the founders of the nationalist Ligue des pa­tri­otes in 1881 and a chief defender of the French Army during the Dreyfus Affair. His death in February 1914 seemed to many to mark the end of the period of aggressive French chauvinism. 106. Cronin, Paris on the Eve, 427. The extension of conscription to three years had narrowly passed in 1913. The socialists and radicals united in their opposition to the bill and their determination to overturn it. The success of the left in May 1914 amounted to a national referendum on the bill and a “vote of no con­fi­dence” in its implementation. Cronin, Paris on the Eve, 429. See also Gerd Krumeich, Armaments and Politics in France on the Eve of the First World War: The Introduction of Three-­Year Conscription (Oxford: Berg, 1985). 248

NOTES TO PAGES 63–68

107. Johan Wilhelm von Löwenell Brandenburg-­Hohenzollern, Forebodings and Forbearance: What the Fatherland Would Do if Drawn into a European Conflict (Detroit: C. Schwappacher, 1915), 14. 108. Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography by Stefan Zweig (New York: Viking Press, 1943), 197, 199, 205. 109. Cambon, quoted in Keiger, “Jules Cambon,” 657–658. 110. Keiger, “Jules Cambon,” 656. 111. Laurence Moyer, Victory Must Be Ours: Germany in the Great War (London: Leo Cooper, 1995), 57. 112. Catriona Pennell, “A Kingdom United: British and Irish Responses to the Outbreak of War, July to December, 1914” (Ph.D. diss., Trinity College Dublin, 2007), 39. Emphasis in original. 113. Georg Brandes, The World at War (New York: MacMillan, 1917), 30– 33. 114. Brandes, The World at War, 33, 20. 115. Robert J. Thompson, En­gland and Germany in the War (Boston: Chapple, 1915), 35–36. 116. Lela B. Costin, “Feminism, Pacifism, Internationalism, and the 1915 Congress of Women,” Women’s Studies International Forum 5, 3/4 (1982), 302. 117. Gabor Vermes, István Tisza: The Liberal Vision and Conservative Statecraft of a Magyar Nationalist (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 211. 118. D.  C. Watt, “The British Reactions to the Assassination at Sarajevo,” European Studies Review 1, 3 (1971), 237. 119. Desmond Morton and J. L. Granatstein, Marching to Armageddon: Canadians and the Great War, 1914–1919 (Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1989), 3. 120. Wolff, Eve of 1914, 179. 121. Ian Hugh Maclean Miller, Our Glory and Our Grief: Torontonians in the Great War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 11. 3.

the delivery of the austro-­h ungarian ultimatum

1. Ford Madox Ford, Between St. Dennis and St. George: A Sketch of Three Civilisations (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1915), 46. 2. I am referring to the annexation of Bosnia, the First Balkan War, and the Second Balkan War. 3. Ford, Between St. Dennis and St. George, 47. 4. Esmé Wingfield-­Stratford, Before the Lamps Went Out (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979), 245. 5. Frederic Morton, Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Book Group, 2001), 286. 6. The History of the Times: The 150th Anniversary and Beyond, vol. 4, pt. 1, 1912–1920 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 182–186. 7. Conrad, quoted in Lawrence Sondhaus, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf: Architect of the Apocalypse (Boston: Brill, 2000), 139. 249

NOTES TO PAGES 68–74

8. See David Stevenson’s authoritative work, Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 13. 9. http://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/The_‘Blank_Check’. 10. Stevenson, Cataclysm, 13. 11. Jean-­Jacques Becker and Gerd Krumeich, La grande guerre: une histoire Franco-­Allemande (Paris: Tallandier, 2008), 47 and 60. 12. Becker and Krumeich, La grande guerre, 66. They were on their way to St. Petersburg on a long-­planned state visit. 13. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov was on vacation at his summer estate until July 20, another indication that some se­nior of­fi­cials did not sense that a crisis was imminent. 14. Baron Beyens, Germany before the War (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1916), 279. 15. Quoted in Zara Steiner, Britain and the Origins of the First World War (London: Macmillan, 1977), 53. 16. William Simpson and Martin Jones, Europe 1783–1914 (London: Routledge, 2000), 352. 17. Daniel Horn, ed., War, Mutiny, and Revolution in the German Navy: The World War I Diary of Seaman Richard Stumpf (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1967), 20–21. 18. J.  A. Spender, Life, Journalism, and Politics, vol. 2 (London: Cassell, 1927), 11–12. 19. Alfred Knox, With the Russian Army, 1914–1917 (New York: Arno Press, 1971), 38. 20. Theodor Wolff, The Eve of 1914 (New York: Knopf, 1936), 451. 21. Christopher Addison, Four and a Half Years (London: Hutchinson, 1934), 29–30. 22. Ford, Between St. Dennis and St. George, 40. 23. E. Malcolm Carroll, French Public Opinion and Foreign Affairs, 1870– 1914 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1931), 293–295. 24. Werner Beumelburg, La guerre de 14–18 racontée par un Allemand (Paris: Bartillat, 1998), 25. 25. D. K. Buse, “Ebert and the Coming of World War I: A Month from His Diary,” International Review of Social History 13, 3 (1968), 438. 26. Wilbur F. Gordy, The Causes and Meaning of the Great War (New York: Scribners, 1919), 65. 27. Beyens, Germany before the War, 280. 28. Eduard Beneš, My War Memoirs (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1928; 1971), 22. 29. Emmanuel Bourcier, Under the German Shells (New York: Scribners, 1918), 3, 5. 30. Ronald W. Clark, Freud: The Man and the Cause (New York: Random House, 1980), 366; see also Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. 2 (New York: Basic Books, 1955), 170. 31. P. J. Flood, France 1914–1918: Public Opinion and the War Effort (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990), 5. 32. Jean-­Jacques Becker, 1914: Comment les Français sont entrés dans la 250

NOTES TO PAGES 75–78

guerre (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1977), 130–132. 33. Carroll, French Public Opinion, 305–306. 34. R. D. Blumenfeld, R. D. Blumenfeld’s Diary, 1887–1914 (London: William Heinemann, 1930), 245. 35. History of the Times, 197. Other newspapers were even less worried about the Balkans. The West Sussex Gazette devoted more space to horticulture than to the Balkans in the period July 9 to July 30. Geoffrey Marcus, Before the Lamps Went Out (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), 242. 36. Knox, With the Russian Army, 38. 37. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, My Diaries, Part Two, 1900–1914 (New York: Knopf, 1921), 429–430. 38. Ottoline Morrell, Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell: A Study in Friendship, ed. Robert Gathorne-­Hardy (New York: Knopf, 1964), 256. Either the situation rapidly changed or Asquith may have been more worried than he let on. Four days later, Asquith walked home and saw “all the people in the street going along happily, and I was saying to myself that I knew war was coming upon them.” Marcus, Before the Lamps Went Out, 209. 39. Charles Petrie, The Drift to World War, 1900–1914 (London: Ernest Benn, 1968), 123. 40. V. R. Berghahn, Germany and the Approach of War in 1914 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1973), 206. 41. History of the Times, 197. 42. Jonathan French Scott, Five Weeks: The Surge of Public Opinion on the Eve of the Great War (New York: John Day, 1927), 117, 136, 139. 43. Frederick William Wile, The Assault: Germany before the Outbreak and En­gland in War-­time (Indianapolis: Bobbs-­Merrill, 1916), 68. 44. Wolff, The Eve of 1914, 454. 45. D. C. Watt, “The British Reactions to the Assassination at Sarajevo,” European Studies Review 1, 3 (1971), 246. 46. History of the Times, 190. 47. Scott, Five Weeks, 147–148. 48. József Galántai, Hungary in the First World War (Budapest: Akadémiai Kladó, 1989), 58, 60. 49. Galántai, Hungary in the First World War, 68. 50. Michael Karolyi, The Memoirs of Michael Karolyi: Faith without Illusion (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1957), 52. 51. Galántai, Hungary in the First World War, 67. 52. Elizabeth Wiskemann, Czechs and Germans: A Study of the Struggle in the Historic Provinces of Bohemia and Moravia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938), 72. 53. Scott, Five Weeks, 64. 54. Harvey Goldberg, The Life of Jean Jaurès (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962), 463, 465. 55. Hanna Hafkesbrink, Unknown Germany: An Inner Chronicle of the First World War Based on Letters and Diaries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), 29–30. 251

NOTES TO PAGES 78–84

56. Bernadotte E. Schmitt, The Coming of the War, 1914, vol. 1 (New York: Scribners, 1930), 519; Laurence Moyer, Victory Must Be Ours: Germany in the Great War (London: Leo Cooper, 1995), 68. 57. I.  S. Bloch, Is War Now Impossible? (New York and Paris: Richards, 1898), was a popular abridgment of his War of the Future in Its Technical, Economic, and Political Relations; Norman Angell, The Great Illusion (New York: Putnam, 1910). 58. Quoted in Holger Afflerbach, “The Topos of Improbable War in Europe before 1914,” in Holger Afflerbach and David Stevenson, eds., An Improbable War? The Outbreak of World War I and European Political Culture before 1914 (London: Berghahn Books, 2007), 162. 59. Quoted in Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 9. 60. The books were E. M. W. Tillyard, The Athenian Empire and the Great Illusion; and R. M. MacIver, Community. For more see Stuart Wallace, War and the Image of Germany: British Academics, 1914–1918 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988), 16. 61. The World’s Work War Manual of the Great Conflict of 1914 (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, Page, 1914), 144. 62. Vincent Cronin, Paris on the Eve, 1900–1914 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 439. 63. Hew Strachan, The First World War, To Arms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 816. 64. Schmitt, The Coming of the War, 177, 487. 65. Beyens, Germany before the War, 286. 66. James W. Gerard, My Four Years in Germany (New York: George H. Doran, 1917), 131. 67. V. I. Gurko, Features and Figures of the Past (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1939), 537. 68. Quoted in Schmitt, Coming of the War, 499. 69. History of the Times, 193 and 196. 70. Scott, Five Weeks, 72, 64, 74. 71. Petrie, Drift to World War, 83. 72. Charles Repington, The First World War, 1914–1918, vol. 1 (London: Constable, 1920), 18. 73. D.  C.  B. Lieven, Russia and the Origins of the First World War (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983), 124–125. 74. Barbara Jelavich, Russia’s Balkan Entanglements, 1806–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 254. 75. Lieven, Russia and the Origins of the First World War, 137–138. 76. Jelavich, Russia’s Balkan Entanglements, 265. 77. W. Bruce Lincoln, In War’s Dark Shadow: The Russians before the Great War (New York: Dial, 1983), 435. 78. Paul Miliukov, Political Memories, 1905–1917 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), 292, 294, 298. 79. Thomas Riha, A Russian European: Paul Miliukov in Russian Politics (South Bend, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1968), 213. 252

NOTES TO PAGES 85–92

80. Melissa Stockdale, Paul Miliukov and the Quest for a Liberal Russia, 1880–1918 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 217. 81. Sergei Sazonov, Fateful Years, 1906–1916 (New York: Stokes, 1928), 151 and 175. 82. Scott, Five Weeks, 81–90. 83. Douglas J. Newton, British Labour, European Socialism, and the Struggle for Peace, 1889–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 320. 84. Georges Haupt, Socialism and the Great War: The Collapse of the Second International (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 186. 85. Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 188–190. 86. Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 194n30. 87. Newton, British Labour, 320–322. 88. Sandi Cooper, “Pacifism in France, 1889–1914: International Peace as Human Right,” French Historical Studies 17, 2 (Autumn 1991), 381. 89. André Gide, The Journals of André Gide, trans., with intro. and notes by Justin O’Brien (New York: Knopf, 1951), 45–48. 90. Marcel Riegel, Souvenirs de guerre, 1914–1918 (Paris: Forum de l’Asso­ ciation 14–18, 2008), 29. 91. Marcus, Before the Lamps Went Out, 205, 208. 92. Becker and Krumeich, La grande guerre, 59; Jane Michaux, En marge du drame: journal d’une Parisienne pendant la guerre, 1914–1915 (Paris: Perrin, 1916), 1. 93. Dominique Richert, Cahiers d’un survivant, 1914–1919, trans. Marc Schublin (Strasbourg: La Nuée Bleue, 1994), 13. 94. Michaux, En marge du drame, 5. 95. Jean Malnoury, Au lieu des vacances . . . la guerre (Metz: Editions Sepenoise, 2008), 12–15. 96. Hafkesbrink, Unknown Germany, 31. 97. Francis Whiting Halsey, The Literary Digest History of the World War, vol. 1 (London: Funk and Wagnalls, 1919), 75. 98. John Boyer, Culture and Political Crisis in Vienna: Christian Socialism in Power, 1897–1918 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 370. 99. Arnold Stephenson Rowntree, The Letters of Arnold Stephenson Rowntree to Mary Katherine Rowntree, 1910–1918, ed. Ian Packer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 152–153. Emphasis in original. 100. Wolff, Eve of 1914, 456–461. 101. Wolff, Eve of 1914, 462, 474, 470. 102. Carroll, French Public Opinion, 295. 103. Beyens, Germany before the War, 309. 104. Claire de Pratz, A Frenchwoman’s Notes on the War (London: Constable, 1916), 22–24. 105. History of the Times, 194–195. 106. History of the Times, 197, 202. 107. Mildred Aldrich, A Hilltop on the Marne: Being Letters Written June 3–September 8, 1914 (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1918), 45–46. 108. Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography by Stefan Zweig (New York: Viking, 1943), 220. 253

NOTES TO PAGES 92–97

109. Elisabeth Marbury, My Crystal Ball: Reminiscences (New York: Boni and Liverlight, 1923), 263–264. 110. Albert Martin, The Last Crusade: The Church of En­gland in the First World War (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1974), 70–71. 111. E. F. Benson, As We Were: A Victorian Peep Show (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1934), 296. 112. Becker, 1914, 129. 4.

drif ting into war against her will

1. Lawrence Sondhaus, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf: Architect of the Apocalypse (Boston: Brill, 2000), 145. 2. “Three Balkan Storm Centers,” Review of Reviews 50, 2 (August 1914), 161–162. 3. Baron Beyens, Deux années à Berlin, 1912–1914, tome 2, septembre 1913 à août 1914 (Paris: Plon, 1931), 251–252. 4. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, My Diaries, Part Two, 1900–1914 (New York: Knopf, 1921), 430. 5. Frederic Morton, Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Book Group, 2001), 309. 6. Sondhaus, Franz Conrad, 145–146. Sondhaus concludes that the lack of Russian precautions was “ostensibly to avoid giving the Russians an excuse to declare war.” 7. Christopher Addison, Four and a Half Years (London: Hutchinson, 1934), 30. 8. Jonathan French Scott, Five Weeks: The Surge of Public Opinion on the Eve of the Great War (New York: John Day, 1927), 193, 197, 202. 9. Geoffrey Marcus, Before the Lamps Went Out (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), 246, 255, 282. 10. Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (London: Penguin, 1994), 94. 11. Frank M. Laird, Personal Experiences of the Great War (Dublin: Eason and Sons, n.d.), 1. 12. Claire de Pratz, A Frenchwoman’s Notes on the War (London: Constable, 1916), 25–26. 13. de Pratz, A Frenchwoman’s Notes on the War, 38–39. 14. Mildred Aldrich, A Hilltop on the Marne: Being Letters Written June 3–September 8, 1914 (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1918), 47. 15. Jean-­Jacques Becker, 1914: Comment les Français sont entrés dans la guerre (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1977), 140. 16. Mikhail Bonch-­Bruyevich, From Tsarist General to Red Army Commander (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966), 8–11. 17. Nicholas Golovine, The Russian Army in the World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1931), 204. 18. Edith Wharton, Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort (Toronto: McLeod and Allen, 1915), 6–7, 8. 254

NOTES TO PAGES 97–103

19. Mary King Waddington, My War Diary (New York: Scribners, 1917), 4. 20. Albert Martin, The Last Crusade: The Church of En­gland in the First World War (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1974), 71–72. 21. The History of the Times: The 150th Anniversary and Beyond, vol. 4, pt. 1, 1912–1920 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 203–205. 22. Theodor Wolff, The Eve of 1914 (New York: Knopf, 1936), 479. 23. Robert Doughty, Pyrrhic Victory: French Strategy and Operations in the Great War (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 50–51. 24. The government gave him the authority to move forces to the frontier, but mandated that they stay ten ki­lo­me­ters away from it so as not to provoke the Germans or give the impression that France was preparing to violate Belgian neutrality. 25. Becker, 1914, 141. 26. Emmanuel Bourcier, Under the German Shells (New York: Scribners, 1918), 10. 27. Gavin Roynon, Home Fires Burning: The Great War Diaries of Georgina Lee (Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2006), 1–2. 28. de Pratz, A Frenchwoman’s Notes on the War, 35, 43. 29. Quoted in Laurence Moyer, Victory Must Be Ours: Germany in the Great War (London: Leo Cooper, 1995), 74. 30. James W. Gerard, My Four Years in Germany (New York: George H. Doran, 1917), 206. 31. Quoted in Moyer, Victory Must Be Ours, 75 and 78. 32. Frederic William Wile, The Assault: Germany before the Outbreak and En­gland in War-­time (Indianapolis: Bobbs-­Merrill, 1916), 79–80. 33. V. R. Berghahn, Germany and the Approach of War in 1914 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1973), 207. 34. Marc Bloch, Memoirs of War, 1914–1915 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 78. 35. Hanna Hafkesbrink, Unknown Germany: An Inner Chronicle of the First World War Based on Letters and Diaries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), 34–36. 36. Ronald W. Clark, Freud: The Man and the Cause (New York: Random House, 1980), 364. 37. Gabor Vermes, István Tisza: The Liberal Vision and Conservative Statecraft of a Magyar Nationalist (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 236. 38. Herbert Sulzbach, With the German Guns: Four Years on the Western Front (London: Pen and Sword, 2003), 22. 39. Moyer, Victory Must Be Ours, 69. 40. Becker, 1914, 167, 174–175. 41. French Socialist Party statement of September 1905, quoted in Georges Haupt, Socialism and the Great War: The Collapse of the Second International (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 19. 42. Jaurès, quoted in Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 11. 255

NOTES TO PAGES 103–108

43. Morton, Thunder at Twilight, 55. 44. Carl Landauer, European Socialism: A History of Ideas and Movements from the Industrial Revolution to Hitler’s Seizure of Power (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1959; 1976), 492. 45. Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 21. 46. Harvey Goldberg, The Life of Jean Jaurès (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962), 384. 47. Landauer, European Socialism, 493–495; Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 41. 48. Landauer, European Socialism, 495. 49. Sandi Cooper, “Pacifism in France, 1889–1914: International Peace as Human Right,” French Historical Studies 17, 2 (Autumn 1991), 381. 50. Frank Field, British and French Writers of the First World War: Com­ parative Studies in Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 30. 51. Landauer, European Socialism, 338. 52. Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 162. 53. D. K. Buse, “Ebert and the Coming of World War I: A Month from His Diary,” International Review of Social History 13, 3 (1968), 438. 54. Roger Chickering, “‘War Enthusiasm?’ Public Opinion and the Outbreak of War in 1914,” in Holger Afflerbach and David Stevenson, eds., An Improbable War? The Outbreak of World War I and European Political Culture before 1914 (London: Berghahn Books, 2007), 206. 55. Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and a World without War: The Peace Movement and German Society, 1892–1914 (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 1975), 320. 56. Goldberg, The Life of Jean Jaurès, 462. 57. Landauer, European Socialism, 496. 58. Roger Chickering, The Great War and Daily Life in Germany: Freiburg 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 63. 59. Goldberg, The Life of Jean Jaurès, 462. 60. Field, British and French Writers, 29. 61. Douglas Newton, British Labour, European Socialism, and the Struggle for Peace, 1889–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 349. 62. Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 186. 63. Field, British and French Writers, 28. The French is more stilted, thus I opted for a simpler translation: “Il y aura des hauts et des bas. Mais les choses ne peuvent pas ne pas s’arranger”; literally, “Things cannot not work themselves out.” 64. Goldberg, The Life of Jean Jaurès, 465. 65. Landauer, European Socialism, 506. 66. Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 206n27. 67. French po­lit­i­cal theorist Theodore Ruyssen, quoted in Georg Brandes, The World at War (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 55–56. 68. Landauer, European Socialism, 506. 69. Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 199. 256

NOTES TO PAGES 108–115

70. Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 239–241. 71. Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 175. 72. Jonathan French Scott, Five Weeks, 201. 73. Vermes, István Tisza, 237. 74. Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 204–205. 75. Newton, British Labour, 324. 76. There were twenty-­eight antiwar demonstrations in Berlin on July 29 alone. William En­glish Walling, “Are the German People Unanimously for the War?” Outlook Magazine, November 25, 1914, quoted in Harold Elk Straubing, The Last Magnificent War (New York: Paragon House, 1989), 30. 77. Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 234. 78. Newton, British Labour, 350. 79. Quoted in Jane Michaux, En marge du drame: journal d’une Parisienne pendant la guerre, 1914–1915 (Paris: Perrin, 1916), 8. 80. Wile, The Assault, 63–68. 81. Wolff, Eve of 1914, 483, 494. 82. Arthur Sweetser, Roadside Glimpses of the Great War (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 2. 83. Bourcier, Under the German Shells, 4. 84. P. J. Flood, France 1914–1918: Public Opinion and the War Effort (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990), 5–6. 85. Martha Hanna, Your Death Would Be Mine: Paul and Marie Pireaud in the Great War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 6–7. 86. Bourcier, Under the German Shells, 4. 87. Becker, 1914, 227. 88. Goldberg, The Life of Jean Jaurès, 471–472. 89. J.  F.  V. Keiger, Raymond Poincaré (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 177. 90. Goldberg, The Life of Jean Jaurès, 473. 91. Keiger, Raymond Poincaré, 177–178. 92. Margaret Pease, Jean Jaurès: Socialist and Humanitarian (London: Headley Brothers, 1916), 19–21. 93. Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 236; Robert Gathborne-­Hardy, ed., The Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell: A Study in Friendship (New York: Knopf, 1964), 257. 94. Landauer, European Socialism, 512. 95. Keiger, Raymond Poincaré, 177. 96. Marc Bloch, Memoirs of War, 1914–1915 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 78. 97. Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography by Stefan Zweig (New York: Viking Press, 1943), 223. 98. Quoted in Alan Cassel, Ideology and International Relations in the Modern World (London: Routledge, 1996), 27. 99. Blunt, My Diaries, 431; Waddington, My War Diary, 3. 100. Robert Mallet, ed., Self-­Portraits: The Gide/Valéry Letters, 1890–1942 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 269. 257

NOTES TO PAGES 115–118

101. Carnets de guerre d’Alexis Callies (Château-­T hierry: Eric Labayle, 1999), 18. The French soldier, Cpl. Peugot, was killed by a German patrol that had already violated the neutrality of Luxembourg. The French government responded with a diplomatic protest. See Raymond Recouly, The National History of France: The Third Republic (New York: William Heinemann, 1923–1938), 291. 102. de Pratz, A Frenchwoman’s Notes on the War, 45. 103. Wolff, The Eve of 1914, 506. 104. Field, British and French Writers, 128–129. 105. Marcus, Before the Lamps Went Out, 264. 106. Charles L. Graves, Mr. Punch’s History of the Great War (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1919), 1. 107. Esmé Wingfield-­Stratford, Before the Lamps Went Out (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979), 245 and 248. 108. Jean-­Pierre Verney, Journal de guerre 1914, tome 1 (Paris: Casterman, 2008), 1. See also Wolff, Eve of 1914, 577. 109. de Pratz, A Frenchwoman’s Notes on the War, 48. 110. Wingfield-­Stratford, Before the Lamps Went Out, 246. 111. On public awareness of the telegrams, see Zweig, The World of Yesterday, 221. 112. The full text of the telegrams is reprinted in Michael S. Neiberg, ed., The World War I Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 46–49. 113. Scott, Five Weeks, 231–232. 114. Waddington, My War Diary, 18. 115. The lead story in the Daily Mail of August 4 was about a local boxing match. Ford Madox Ford, Return to Yesterday (New York: Livewright, 1932; 1972), 417. 116. History of the Times, 193 and 214. 117. André Gide, The Journals of André Gide, trans., with intro. and notes by Justin O’Brien (New York: Knopf, 1951), 53. 118. Otto Ocker, Stederdorf: un village Allemand pendant et après la première guerre mondiale (n.p.: Association Bretagne, 1914–1918, 2007), 13. 119. Marcel Riegel, Souvenirs de guerre, 1914–1918 (n.p.: La Cause des Livres, 2008), 38, 44–45. 120. E. Malcolm Carroll, French Public Opinion and Foreign Affairs, 1870– 1914 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1931), 308–309. 121. Wilson McNair, Blood and Iron: Impressions from the Front in France and Flanders (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1916), 78. 122. Cooper, “Pacifism,” 382. 123. Quoted in Holger Afflerbach, “The Topos of Improbable War in Europe before 1914,” in Afflerbach and Stevenson, eds., An Improbable War?, 172. 124. Scott, Five Weeks, 145. 125. Moyer, Victory Must Be Ours, 74. 126. Werner Beumelburg, La guerre de 14–18 racontée par un Allemand (Paris: Bartillat, 1998), 27. 127. Pages d’histoire, 1914 (Paris: Librairie Militaire Berger-­L evrault, 1914), 9. 258

NOTES TO PAGES 118–120

128. Troy Paddock, “German Propaganda: The Limits of Gerechtigkeit,” in Troy Paddock, ed., A Call to Arms: Propaganda, Public Opinion and Newspapers in the Great War (Westport: Praeger, 2004), 119–120; Philippe Husser, Un instituteur Alsacien entre France et Allemagne (Paris: Hachette, 1989), 25. Piete Kuhr also read in a newspaper in East Prussia that the Russians had invaded German territory and that the French had bombarded Nuremberg. See Piete Kuhr, There We’ll Meet Again: The First World War Diary of a Young German Girl (London: Walter Wright, 1998), 4. 129. Husser, Un instituteur Alsacien, 27. 130. Andrea Orzoff, “The Empire without Qualities: Austro-­Hungarian Newspapers and the Outbreak of War in 1914,” in Paddock, ed., A Call to Arms, 171–172. 131. Helmuth von Moltke quoted in Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “The Topos of Inevitable War in Germany in the Decade before 1914,” in Volker R. Berghahn and Martin Kitchen, eds., Germany in the Age of Total War (London: Croom Helm, 1983), 25 and 36. 132. Jean-­Jacques Becker and Gerd Krumeich, La grande guerre: une histoire Franco-­Allemande (Paris: Tallandier, 2008), 55–56. 133. Quoted in Catriona Pennell, “A Kingdom United: British and Irish Responses to the Outbreak of War, July to December, 1914” (Ph.D. diss., Trinity College, Dublin, 2007), 47. 134. Yvonne Klein, Beyond the Home Front: Women’s Autobiographical Writings of the Two World Wars (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 28–29. 135. Scott, Five Weeks, 149. 136. Michaux, En marge du drame, 9, 17. 137. Pages d’Histoire, 8. 138. Fritz Nagel, Fritz: The World War I Memoirs of a German Lieutenant (Huntington, W.V.: Der Angriff, 1981), 5–7; Moyer, Victory Must Be Ours, 74. 139. Sebastian Haffner, Histoire d’un Allemand (Arles: Actes Sud, 2003), 28. Bavarian Crown Prince Rupprecht told men of his Sixth Army that the war had been provoked by “people whose jealousies have been manifested for years by their creation around us of a circle of enemies to strangle us.” Quoted in Becker and Krumeich, La grande guerre, 34. 140. Commandant Bréant, De l’Alsace à la Somme: souvenirs du front, août 1914–janvier 1917 (Paris: Hachette, 1917), 3. 141. Charles Repington, The First World War, 1914–1918, vol. 1 (London: Constable, 1920), 18. Repington also described the kaiser as not wanting war but being “carried along by the tumult of events.” 142. Wolff, Eve of 1914, 497. 143. Quoted in Moyer, Victory Must Be Ours, 74. 144. Waddington, My War Diary, 9. 145. History of the Times, 214. 146. Aldrich, A Hilltop on the Marne, 46. 147. Quoted in Moyer, Victory Must Be Ours, 71. 148. Gide, Journals of André Gide, 48. Maxim Gorky foresaw that the start of war was to be but “the first act of a worldwide tragedy.” Orlando Figes, A Peo259

NOTES TO PAGES 120–123

ple’s Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution (New York: Viking, 1996), 252. 149. Field, British and French Writers, 161. 5.

the coming of a gre at storm

1. Quoted in Jean-­Jacques Becker, 1914: Comment les Français sont entrés dans la guerre (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1977), 271. 2. Henriette Cuvru-­Magot, Quincy-­Huiry-­Voisins before and during the Battle (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1918), 3. 3. Pierre Drieu de la Rochelle, quoted in Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 27. 4. Frank Field, British and French Writers of the First World War: Comparative Studies in Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 124. Note Wells’s use of the passive voice. 5. Herbert Sulzbach, With the German Guns: Four Years on the Western Front (London: Pen and Sword, 2003), 22. 6. Dominique Richert, Cahiers d’un survivant, 1914–1919 (Strasbourg: La Nuée Bleue, 1994), 13. 7. Claire de Pratz, A Frenchwoman’s Notes on the War (London: Constable, 1916), 47. 8. Quoted in Becker, 1914, 125; Esmé Wingfield-­Stratford, Before the Lamps Went Out (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979), 246, refers to “the European Avalanche.” 9. Emmanuel Bourcier, Under the German Shells (New York: Scribners, 1918), 2; Otto Ocker, Stederdorf: un village Allemand pendant et après la première guerre mondiale (n.p.: Association Bretagne, 1914–1918, 2007), 13; and Margaret Darrow, French Women and the First World War: War Stories of the Home Front (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 53; Elisabeth Marbury, My Crystal Ball: Reminiscences (New York: Boni and Liverlight, 1923), 264. 10. Edith Wharton, Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort (Toronto: McLeod and Allen, 1915), 9–10. 11. Eric Fisher Wood, The Note-­Book of an Attaché (New York: Century, 1915), v. 12. Sergei Sazonov, Fateful Years, 1906–1916 (New York: Stokes, 1928), 175; Evelyn Blücher, An En­glish Wife in Berlin (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1920), 6. 13. Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (London: Penguin, 1994), 95; James Lawson, A Cameronian Officer (Glasgow: John Smith and Son, 1921), 34. 14. Johan Wilhelm von Löwenell Brandenburg-­Hohenzollern, Forebodings and Forbearance: What the Fatherland Would Do if Drawn into a European Conflict (Detroit: C. Schwappacher, 1915), 35, 38. 15. Henry Van Dyke, Fighting for Peace, 1917 (New York: Scribners, 1917), 61. 16. Franz Schoenberner, Confessions of a European Intellectual (New York: Macmillan, 1946), 69. 17. Jonathan French Scott, Five Weeks: The Surge of Public Opinion on the 260

NOTES TO PAGES 123–128

Eve of the Great War (New York: John Day, 1927), 144–145; Arthur Ruhl, Antwerp to Gallipoli (New York: A.  L. Burt, 1916), 14; and Frank M. Laird, Personal Experiences of the Great War (Dublin: Eason and Sons, n.d.), 1. 18. Yves Porcher, Les jours de guerre: la vie des Français au jour le jour entre 1914 et 1918 (Paris: Plon, 1994), 7–8; The Bishop of Salford, the Daily Mail, and Phillip Leicester, quoted in Catriona Pennell, “A Kingdom United: British and Irish Responses to the Outbreak of War, July to December, 1914” (Ph.D. diss., Trinity College, Dublin, 2007), 49, 50, and 54. 19. Wood, Note-­Book, 7. 20. Darrow, French Women, 54. 21. Alfred Baudrillart, Les carnets du Cardinal, tome 1, 1er août 1914–31 décembre 1918 (Paris: Editions Cerf, 1994), 25. 22. Marbury, My Crystal Ball, 264. 23. Cuvru-­Magot, Quincy-­Huiry-­Voisins, 4. 24. Roger Boutefeu, Les camarades: soldats Français et Allemands au combat, 1914–1918 (Paris: Fayard, 1966), 28. 25. P. J. Flood, France 1914–1918: Public Opinion and the War Effort (New York: St. Martins, 1990), 7. 26. Flood, France 1914–1918, 10. 27. Frederic Hamilton, Here, There, and Everywhere (New York: Doran, 1921), 284; Marquise Genevieve Marie de Foucault, A Château at the Front (Boston: Hough­ton Mif­fl in, 1931), 7. 28. Mildred Aldrich, A Hilltop on the Marne: Being Letters Written June 3–September 8, 1914 (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1918), 49. 29. de Pratz, A Frenchwoman’s Notes on the War, 54 and 56. 30. Roger Chickering, The Great War and Daily Life in Germany: Freiburg 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 65. 31. Carole Fink, Marc Bloch: A Life in History (Cambridge: Canto, 1991), 53. 32. Vladimir S. Littauer, Russian Hussar: A Story of the Imperial Cavalry (Shippensburg, Pa.: White Mane, 1993), 126 and 128. 33. Daniel Horn, ed., War, Mutiny, and Revolution in the German Navy: The World War I Diary of Seaman Richard Stumpf (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1967), 13 and 26. 34. Horn, War, Mutiny, and Revolution, 24–27. 35. Frederic William Wile, The Assault: Germany before the Outbreak and En­gland in War-­time (Indianapolis: Bobbs-­Merrill, 1916), 158. 36. Theodor Wolff, The Eve of 1914 (New York: Knopf, 1936), 511. 37. Quoted in André Hallays, L’opinion Allemande pendant la guerre, 1914– 1918 (Paris: Perrin, 1919), 30. 38. E. Malcolm Carroll, French Public Opinion and Foreign Affairs, 1870– 1914 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1931), 310. 39. Quoted in Becker, 1914, 332. 40. Quoted in Boutefeu, Les camarades, 30–31. 41. Le Bonnet Rouge, August 2, 1914, quoted in Antoine Delécraz, 1914: Paris pendant la mobilisation (Geneva: La Suisse, 1915), 29. 42. Brandenburg-­Hohenzollern, Forebodings and Forbearance, 29. 261

NOTES TO PAGES 128–133

43. Wile, The Assault, 114 and 139. 44. Quoted in Welch, Germany, Propaganda, and Total War, 17. 45. Quoted in Chickering, The Great War and Daily Life, 66. 46. Quoted in Flood, France 1914–1918, 10. 47. Quoted in Pages d’Histoire, 1914 (Paris: Librairie Militaire Beger-­ Levrault, 1914), 81. To a German, Clemenceau’s words would likely have seemed hypocritical given France’s alliance with Russia. 48. Hanna Hafkesbrink, Unknown Germany: An Inner Chronicle of the First World War Based on Letters and Diaries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), 37 and 39. 49. Karl Lamprecht, quoted in Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 15. 50. http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/proj­ects/jtap/tutorials/intro/brooke/ipeace .html. 51. Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth and Mobilization in Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 97. 52. Romain Rolland, Journal des années de guerre, 1914–1919 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1952), 32–33. 53. Verhey, Spirit of 1914, 100. 54. Flood, France 1914–1918, 13. 55. Quoted in Stromberg, Redemption by War, 75–76. 56. Quoted in Thomas Riha, A Russian European: Paul Miliukov in Russian Politics (South Bend, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1969), 215. 57. Quoted in Vincent Cronin, Paris on the Eve, 1900–1914 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 439. 58. Aldrich, A Hilltop on the Marne, 58–59. 59. Quoted in Verhey, Spirit of 1914, 110. 60. Wile, The Assault, 85. 61. Marbury, My Crystal Ball, 264. 62. Becker, 1914, 293. 63. Quoted in Eckart Birnstiel and Rémy Cazals, eds., Ennemis fraternels, 1914–1915 (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires de Mirail, 2002), 134–135. 64. Hans Peter Hannsen, Diary of a Dying Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955), 10. 65. Quoted in David Moon, “Peasants into Russian Citizens? A Comparative Perspective,” Revolutionary Russia 9, 1 (June 1996), 49. 66. Quoted in Benjamin Zieman, War Experiences in Rural Germany (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 17–19. 67. Quoted in Jean-­Jacques Becker, The Great War and the French People (Oxford: Berg, 1985), 19. 68. Nicholas Golovine, The Russian Army in the World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1931), 204. 69. Quoted in Golovine, The Russian Army in the World War, 122. 70. Alexei Brusilov, A Soldier’s Notebook, 1914–1918 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1930, 1971), 37. 71. Vladimir N. Ipatieff, The Life of a Chemist (Stanford: Stanford University 262

NOTES TO PAGES 133–136

Press, 1946). Ipatieff was a lieutenant general in the Imperial Russian Army during the war, then emigrated to the United States, where he had a distinguished career as a scientist based at Northwestern University. 72. Golovine, The Russian Army in the World War, 201, 203–204. 73. Joshua Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905–1925 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), 31. 74. Nick Cornish, The Russian Army and the First World War (Stroud: Spellmount, 2006), 21. 75. V. I. Gurko, Features and Figures of the Past (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1939), 537. 76. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation, 30. 77. Golovine, The Russian Army, 202. 78. Quoted in Cornish, The Russian Army in the World War, 21. 79. Chickering, Imperial Germany, 14. 80. David Welch, Germany, Propaganda, and Total War, 1914–1918: The Sins of Omission (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 14. 81. Quoted in József Gálantai, Hungary in the First World War (Budapest: Akadémiai Kladó, 1989), 64. 82. Quoted in Riha, A Russian European, 214. 83. Eric Lohr, “The Russian Press and the ‘Internal Peace’ at the Beginning of World War I,” in Troy Paddock, ed., A Call to Arms: Propaganda, Public Opinion, and Newspapers in the Great War (Westport: Praeger, 2004), 95. 84. Verhey, Spirit of 1914, 97. In all European states, the expense of military training meant that not all young men could be conscripted. In Germany, se­nior of­fi­cers sought to limit the size of the army to avoid the concomitant need to promote middle-­class and non-­Prussian men into the of­fi­cer corps. Thus in August 1914 there were plenty of young men without military training who were physically fit for ser­vice. 85. Quoted in Oscar Jászi, The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929), 424n26. 86. Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution (New York: Viking, 1996), 251. 87. Ute Frevert, “Honor, Gender, and Power: The Politics of Satisfaction in Prewar Europe,” in Holger Afflerbach and David Stevenson, eds., An Improbable War? The Outbreak of World War I and European Political Culture before 1914 (London: Berghahn Books, 2007), 234–235. 88. Quoted in Arthur Marwick, The Deluge: British Society and the First World War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), 28. 89. J.  A. Spender, Life, Journalism, and Politics, vol. 2 (London: Cassell, 1927), 17–18. 90. Charles L. Graves, Mr. Punch’s History of the Great War (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1919), 2. 91. Lawson, A Cameronian Officer, 35. 92. Olivier Guilleux, 1914–1918: La grande guerre d’Olivier Guilleux (La Crèche: Geste, 2003), 25–26. 263

NOTES TO PAGES 136–140

93. Quoted in Becker, 1914, 334. 94. Henry Woodd Nevinson, Last Changes, Last Chances (London: Nisbet, 1928), 7–8. My thanks to Ted Wilson and the staff of the Spencer Library at the University of Kansas for helping me with this source. 95. Oxford Professor A.  H. Sayce, quoted in Stuart Wallace, War and the ­Image of Germany: British Academics, 1914–1918 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988), 38. 96. Reymond Recouly, The National History of France: The Third Republic (New York: William Heinemann, 1923–1938), 299. 97. Quoted in Georges Haupt, Socialism and the Great War: The Collapse of the Second International (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 218, 230, and 242. 98. Jean-­Louis Robert, “Paris, London, Berlin on the Eve of War,” in Jay Winter and Jean-­L ouis Robert, eds., Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, ­Berlin, 1914–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 31–32 and 41–43. 99. Quoted in Wolff, Eve of 1914, 513. 100. Quoted in Carl Landauer, European Socialism: A History of Ideas and Movements from the Industrial Revolution to Hitler’s Seizure of Power (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1959; 1976), 508. 101. Quoted in Landauer, European Socialism, 515. L’Humanité also defended the decision of the German socialists, noting that it was necessary for them to protect themselves from Russia. Becker, 1914, 428. 102. Quoted in Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 238. 103. Quoted in Landauer, European Socialism, 508. 104. Quoted in Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 225n25. 105. Quoted in Becker, 1914, 410 and 428. 106. Leonard V. Smith, Stéphane Audoin-­Rouzeau, and Annette Becker, France and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 29. There appears to be some doubt about the exact size of the Carnet B. The fig­ure of 2,500 ­comes from Becker, 1914, 379, who asserts that 1,000 of the names belonged to non-­Frenchmen and that 561 were suspected of active espionage. Smith, Audoin-­Rouzeau, and Becker cite a fig­ure of 2,000 names. Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 242, gives a fig­ure of 4,000. 107. Becker, 1914, 397. 108. Mikhail Bonch-­Bruyevich, From Tsarist General to Red Army Commander (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966), 12. 109. Compton Mackenzie, My Life and Times: Octave Four, 1907–1915 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965), 226. 110. Helen McCartney, Citizen-­Soldiers: The Liverpool Territorials in the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 30; Laird, Personal Experiences, 5, makes the same point. 111. Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That: An Autobiography (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 67. Godfrey Buxton enlisted, certain that the war would be over by the time Cambridge began its term on October 7. Max Arthur, Forgotten Voices of the Great War (London: Ebury Press, 2002), 46. 112. Quoted in Becker, 1914, 492 and 495. 264

NOTES TO PAGES 140–145

113. Elly Heuss-­K napp, Souvenirs d’une Allemande de Strasbourg (Strasbourg: Oberlin, 1971), 85. 114. Foucault, A Château at the Front, 7. 115. Gurko, Features and Figures, 542. 116. André Gide, The Journals of André Gide, trans., with intro. and notes by Justin O’Brien (New York: Knopf, 1951), 51. 117. Hannsen, Diary of a Dying Empire, 11. 118. Wile, The Assault, 112. 119. Gavin Roynon, Home Fires Burning: The Great War Diaries of Georgina Lee (Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2006), 5. 120. Pvt. Charles Rainbird, quoted in Malcolm Brown, The Imperial War Museum Book of 1914: The Men Who Went to War (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 2004), xxv. 121. Quoted in Leonard V. Smith, The Embattled Self: French Soldiers’ Testimony of the Great War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 28. 122. Marc Bloch, Memoirs of War, 1914–1915 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 78. 123. François Boulet, quoted in Rémy Cazals and André Loez, Dans les tranchées de 1914–1918 (Paris: Cairn, 2008), 20–21. 124. Anonymous, A German Deserter’s War Experience, trans. J. Koettgen (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1917), 2–3. 125. Ocker, Stederdorf, 13. 126. Henry Wickham Steed, Through Thirty Years, 1892–1922: A Personal Narrative, vol. 2 (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1925), 2. 127. Charles Carrington, Soldier from the War Returning (New York: David McKay, 1965), 47. 128. Steed, Through Thirty Years, 31, 36–37. 129. Carrington, Soldier from the War Returning, 46. 130. Michael MacDonagh, In London during the Great War (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1935), 3. 131. The Wimbledon Borough News, quoted in Geoffrey Marcus, Before the Lamps Went Out (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), 303. 132. Nevinson, Last Changes, 3. 133. Quoted in Samuel Williamson, The Politics of Grand Strategy: Britain and France Prepare for War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), vii. 134. Brown, The Imperial War Museum Book of 1914, 19. 135. Graves, Goodbye to All That, 67. 136. Steed, Through Thirty Years, 37. 137. MacDonagh, In London During the Great War, 8. 138. Gilbert Murray, “How Can War Ever Be Right?” Oxford Pamphlets, 1914–1915, no. 18 (1914). 139. Murray, quoted in Marwick, The Deluge, 45. 140. J. A. Seddon, “Why British Labour Supports the War” (London: Avenue Press, [1915]), 4–6. 141. Quoted in Wallace, War and the Image of Germany, 29, 31, and 102. 265

NOTES TO PAGES 145–151

142. Baudrillart, Carnets du Cardinal, 33–34. 143. Graves, Goodbye to All That, 68. 144. Marcus, Before the Lamps Went Out, 318. 145. William Marwick was one of them. See his oral his­tory in Ian MacDougall, Voices from War: Personal Recollections of War in Our Century by Scottish Men and Women (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1995), 50. 146. Nevinson, Last Changes, 8–10. 147. Albert Martin, The Last Crusade: The Church of En­gland in the First World War (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1974), 73 and 85. 148. Quoted in Marwick, The Deluge, 32–33, 49, 33. 149. Quoted in Brown, Imperial War Museum Book of 1914, 19. 150. Flood, France 1914–1918, 14. 151. Carroll, French Public Opinion, 309. 152. Jane Michaux, En marge du drame: journal d’une Parisienne pendant la guerre, 1914–1915 (Paris: Perrin, 1916), 14. 153. Ebba Dahlin, French and German Public Opinion on Declared War Aims, 1914–1918, vol. 4, no. 2 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1933), 5. 154. Smith et al., France and the Great War, 11. 155. Wood, Note-­Book, 12–13. 156. Brittain, Testament of Youth, 96. 157. Bourcier, Under the German Shells, 33–34 and 16. 158. André Cornet-­Auquier, A Soldier Unafraid: Letters from the Trenches on the Alsatian Front (Boston: Little, Brown, 1918), 1, 3. 159. Quoted in Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 227. 160. Quoted in Brown, Imperial War Museum Book of 1914, 21. 161. Hallays, L’opinion Allemande, 26. 162. R. D. Blumenfeld, R. D. Blumenfeld’s Diary, 1887–1914 (London: William Heinemann, 1930), 248. 163. Quoted in Arthur Marwick, Britain in the Century of Total War: War, Peace, and Social Change, 1900–1967 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), 51. 164. Quoted in Marcus, Before the Lamps Went Out, 19. 6.

our families will be their vic tims

1. Gavin Roynon, Home Fires Burning: The Great War Diaries of Georgina Lee (Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2006), 13. 2. Quoted in Catriona Pennell, “A Kingdom United: British and Irish Responses to the Outbreak of War, July to December, 1914” (Ph.D. diss., Trinity College, Dublin, 2007), 54. 3. Quoted in Jean-­Pierre Guéno and Yves Laplume, Paroles de poilus: lettres et carnets du front, 1914–1918 (Paris: Librio, 1998), 35–36. 4. Hans Peter Hanssen, Diary of a Dying Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955), 32. 5. Evelyn Blücher, An En­glish Wife in Berlin (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1920), 12 and 19. 6. Moma E. Clarke, Paris Waits, 1914 (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1915), 21. 266

NOTES TO PAGES 151–155

7. Raoul Bouchet, Lettres de guerre d’un artilleur de 1914 à 1916 (Paris: Harmattan, 2002), 23. Bouchet was killed on the Somme in 1916. 8. Quoted in Hanssen, Diary of a Dying Empire, 31. 9. Philip Gibbs, Now It Can Be Told (New York: Harper, 1920), 69. 10. Blücher, An En­glish Wife in Berlin, 11. 11. Alfred Knox, With the Russian Army, 1914–1917 (New York: Arno Press, 1971), 69. 12. Michael Karolyi, The Memoirs of Michael Karolyi: Faith without Illusion (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1957), 54. Karolyi’s timing was very bad. He was arrested upon his arrival in a “Europe at war” even though France was not yet formally at war with the Austro-­Hungarian Empire. French President Raymond Poincaré ordered him released, after which he made his way to Bordeaux in the hopes of catching a boat home. By the time he arrived in Bordeaux, France and the Austro-­Hungarian Empire were at war, so he was arrested again, and he even read in a local newspaper that he had been shot as a spy. In mid-­September, he was once more released and allowed to go to neutral Spain. Within a few weeks he was back in Vienna. 13. T. M. Kettle, The Ways of War (London: Constable, 1917), 63. 14. Gilbert Murray, Faith, War, and Policy: Addresses and Essays on the European War (Boston: Hough­ton Mif­fl in, 1917), 7, 11. By the same token, he hoped that the war would “enable the Russia of Turgenieff and Tolstoy, the Russia of many artists and many martyrs, to work out its destiny and its freedom.” A democratic Russia, he concluded, “will be a great thing for humanity.” Murray, Faith, 18. 15. Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 34. Chickering notes that the Reichstag retained the right to veto laws coming from the Bundesrat, but did not once exercise this right during the war. 16. David Welch, Germany, Propaganda, and Total War, 1914–1918: The Sins of Omission (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 18. 17. Raymond Pearson, The Russian Moderates and the Crisis of Tsarism, 1914–1917 (London: Macmillan, 1977), 20. 18. Jon Lawrence, “Public Space, Political Space,” in Jay Winter and Jean-­ Louis Robert, eds., Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin, 1914–1919, vol. 2, A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 284 and 288. 19. Jean-­Jacques Becker, 1914: Comment les Français sont entrés dans la guerre (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1977), 438 and 477. 20. Becker, 1914, 452; Melissa Stockdale, Paul Miliukov and the Quest for a Liberal Russia, 1880–1918 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 220. 21. Welch, Germany, Propaganda, and Total War, 19. 22. Adrian Gregory, “Lost Generations: The Impact of Military Casualties on Paris, London, and Berlin,” in Winter and Robert, eds., Capital Cities at War, vol. 1: 67 and 69. 23. Herbert Sulzbach, With the German Guns: Four Years on the Western Front (London: Pen and Sword, 2003), 22. 267

NOTES TO PAGES 155–159

24. Clarke, Paris Waits, 2–3. 25. Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 31. 26. Arthur Ruhl, Antwerp to Gallipoli (New York: A.  L. Burt, 1916), 84. Bordeaux’s sales to the United Kingdom and the United States were also greatly reduced because of the chaos in shipping. 27. Jon Lawrence, “The Transition to War in 1914,” in Winter and Robert, eds., Capital Cities at War, vol. 1: 139, 141–142, 151, 157. 28. Ute Daniel, The War from Within: German Working-­Class Women in the First World War (Oxford: Berg, 1997), 26. 29. Jon Lawrence, “Material Pressures on the Middle Classes,” in Winter and Robert, eds., Capital Cities at War, vol. 1: 239 and 253. 30. Clarke, Paris Waits, 49. 31. Elisabeth Marbury, My Crystal Ball: Reminiscences (New York: Boni and Liverlight, 1923), 265. 32. Marquise Genevieve Marie de Foucault, A Château at the Front (Boston: Hough­ton Mif­fl in, 1931), 8. 33. P. J. Flood, France 1914–1918: Public Opinion and the War Effort (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990), 34–35. 34. Flood, France, 1914–1918, 46. 35. Thierry Bonzon and Belinda Davis, “Feeding the Cities,” in Winter and Robert, eds., Capital Cities at War, vol. 1: 319 and 321. Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 43, cites a 20 percent rise in the cost of butter and bread, a 13 percent rise in the cost of pork, and a 9 percent rise in the cost of potatoes in 1914. 36. Flood, France, 1914–1918, 43. 37. Antoine Delécraz, 1914: Paris pendant la mobilisation (Geneva: La ­Suisse, 1916), 71, 116–117. 38. Clarke, Paris Waits, 50; Delécraz, 1914, 64. 39. Mary King Waddington, My War Diary (New York: Scribner’s, 1917), 32 and 40. Waddington was an American widow of a Frenchman. She had lived in Paris and Mareuil for many years. 40. Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (London: Penguin, 1994), 96. 41. Michael MacDonagh, In London during the Great War (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1935), 12. 42. Jean-­Jacques Becker, The Great War and the French People (Oxford: Berg, 1985), 17. 43. Becker, The Great War and the French People, 22. 44. Marbury, My Crystal Ball, 266. 45. Arthur Sweetser, Roadside Glimpses of the Great War (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 17. 46. Claire de Pratz, A Frenchwoman’s Notes on the War (London: Constable, 1916), 81, 93. 47. Brittain, Testament of Youth, 96. 48. Clarke, Paris Waits, 50. 49. Ruhl, Antwerp to Gallipoli, 21. 268

NOTES TO PAGES 159–163

50. Becker, The Great War and the French People, 29. 51. Margaret Darrow, French Women and the First World War: War Stories of the Home Front (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 56; Leonard V. Smith, Stéphane Audoin-­Rouzeau, and Annette Becker, France and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 36. 52. Quoted in Flood, France, 1914–1918, 48. 53. Hanssen, Diary of a Dying Empire, 55. 54. Hanssen, Diary of a Dying Empire, 14; Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. 2 (New York: Basic Books, 1955), 176. 55. Irvin Cobb, Paths of Glory (New York: Doran, 1915), 70. 56. Bouchet, Lettres de guerre, 32. 57. Brittain, Testament of Youth, 97. 58. MacDonagh, In London during the Great War, 22–24. 59. John Cowper Powys, Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1934), 529. 60. Andrew Clark, Echoes of the Great War: The Diary of the Rev. Andrew Clark, 1914–1919, ed. James Munson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 16. 61. MacDonagh, In London during the Great War, 22–24. 62. Clark, Echoes of the Great War, 21–22. 63. Brittain, Testament of Youth, 96. 64. Beatrice Trefusis, quoted in Pennell, A Kingdom United, 163. 65. Foucault, A Château at the Front, 9. 66. Clarke, Paris Waits, 51. 67. Martha Hanna, Your Death Would Be Mine: Paul and Marie Pireaud in the Great War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 37–38. 68. Emmanuelle Cronier, “The Street,” in Winter and Robert, eds., Capital Cities at War, vol. 2: 81. 69. Becker, The Great War and the French People, 30. 70. Becker, The Great War and the French People, 36; and Becker, 1914, 524. 71. Mon papa en guerre: lettres de poilus, mots d’enfants (Paris: Librio, 2003), 17. 72. James Brady of Lancashire, quoted in Pennell, A Kingdom United, 162. 73. Waddington, My War Diary, 47–48. 74. Eric Fisher Wood, The Note-­Book of an Attaché (New York: Century, 1915), 34. 75. Foucault, A Château at the Front, 10 and 15. 76. Hanssen, Diary of a Dying Empire, 40. 77. John Boyer, Culture and Political Crisis in Vienna: Christian Socialism in Power, 1897–1918 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 370. 78. Becker, The Great War and the French People, 50. 79. The History of the Times: The 150th Anniversary and Beyond, vol. 4, pt. 1, 1912–1920 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 232–233. 80. Henry Woodd Nevinson, Last Changes, Last Chances (London: Nisbet, 1928), 19. 269

NOTES TO PAGES 163–168

81. Quoted in Roger Chickering, The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 66. 82. Clarke, Paris Waits, 27–29 and 45. A law passed in the Vosges on August 10 made it illegal to play a trumpet or even to sing in the streets. Service educatif des archives departementales des Vosges: la vie civile dans les Vosges pendant la guerre, 1914–1918 (Des Vosges: CDDP, 1985), document VIII Bc. 83. Sweetser, Roadside Glimpses, 17. 84. Waddington, My War Diary, 37; Wood, Note-­Book, 37. 85. Ruhl, Antwerp to Gallipoli, 21. 86. Welch, Germany, Propaganda, and Total War, 14. 87. Theodor Wolff, The Eve of 1914 (New York: Knopf, 1936), 582. 88. Becker, 1914, 509–510. 89. Chickering, The Great War and Urban Life in Germany, 69. 90. Delécraz, 1914, 59 and 105. 91. Wilfred Owen, Selected Letters, ed. John Bell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 110. 92. Welch, Germany, Propaganda, and Total War, 1914–1918, 44–45. 93. Philippe Husser, Un instituteur Alsacien entre France et Allemagne, 1914–1951 (Paris: Hachette, 1989), 46–47; Marie-­Pascale Prévost-­Bault, “Le ser­vice des enfants, les ‘Graines de Poilus,’” in Evelyne Morin-­Rotureau, 1914– 1918: Combats de femmes (Paris: Autrement, 2004), 136–138. 94. Jane Michaux, En marge du drame: journal d’une Parisienne pendant la guerre, 1914–1915 (Paris: Perrin, 1916), 21. 95. Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 17. 96. Ebba Dahlin, French and German Public Opinion on Declared War Aims, 1914–1918, vol. 4, no. 2 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1933), 20. 97. “Journal de campagne d’un sous-­officier de la Landwehr,” in Jacques de Dampierre, ed., Carnets de route de combattants Allemands (Paris: Librairie Militaire Berger-­L evrault, 1916), 76, 82. 98. Eugène Lemercier, A Soldier of France to His Mother: Letters from the Trenches on the Western Front (Chicago: A. C. McClung, 1917), 4, 10. 99. Foucault, A Château at the Front, 26. 100. Russian soldiers celebrated on entering the town of Allenstein on August 27, thinking they had reached Berlin and that the war was therefore over. Knox, With the Russian Army, 84. 101. William En­glish Walling, “Are the German People Unanimously for the War?” [originally published in The Outlook on November 25, 1914], in Harold Elk Straubing, The Last Magnificent War (New York: Paragon House, 1989), 30–32. 102. Ernst Falzeder and Eva Brabant, eds., The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, vol. 2, 1914–1919 (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 11 and 13. 103. Falzeder and Brabant, Correspondence of Sigmund Freud, 13. 104. Sigmund Freud, Letters of Sigmund Freud, ed. Ernst L. Freud, trans. S. and J. Stern (New York: Basic Books, 1960), 305. 105. Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 24. 270

NOTES TO PAGES 169–175

106. Roynon, Home Fires Burning, 23. 107. Cobb, Paths of Glory, 112. 108. Quoted in Hanna Hafkesbrink, Unknown Germany: An Inner Chronicle of the First World War Based on Letters and Diaries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), 38. 109. History of the Times, 225–226. 110. Henri Bénard, De la mort, de la boue, du sang: lettres de guerre d’un fantassin de 14–18 (Paris: Jacques Grancher, 1999), 15–28. Bénard was killed in 1916. 111. Hafkesbrink, Unknown Germany, 51. 112. Quoted in Hafkesbrink, Unknown Germany, 63–64. 113. J.  C. Dunn, The War the Infantry Knew, 1914–1919: A Chronicle of Service in France and Belgium (London: Jane’s, 1987), 8. 114. Quoted in Leonard V. Smith, The Embattled Self: French Soldiers’ Testimony of the Great War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 49. 115. Anonymous, A German Deserter’s War Experience, trans. J. Koettgen (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1917), 4–6, 35–36, 39. 116. Flood, France, 1914–1918, 50. 117. Quoted in Hafkesbrink, Unknown Germany, 54. 118. Quoted in Flood, France, 1914–1918, 51–52. 119. Hanna, Your Death Would Be Mine, 41. 120. Wood, Note-­Book, 42. 121. Gregory, “Lost Generations,” 68. 122. Elizabeth Fordham, “Universities,” in Winter and Robert, eds., Capital Cities at War, 2:245. 123. See especially Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Stéphane Audoin-­Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 14–18: Understanding the Great War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002). 124. Pennell, A Kingdom United, 155–156. 125. Laurence Moyer, Victory Must Be Ours: Germany in the Great War (London: Leo Cooper, 1995), 93. 126. Rémy Cazals and André Loez, Dans les tranchées de 1914–1918 (Paris: Cairn, 2008), 24–25. 127. Rémy Cazals and Nicolas Offenstadt, Si je reviens comme je l’espère (Paris: Perrin, 2005), 32. 128. Bouchet, Lettres de guerre, 23. 129. See, for example, Jean-­Yves Le Naour, The Living Unknown Soldier (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004); and the popular film, A Very Long Engagement (2004), based on the equally popular book by Sébastien Japrisot, Un long Dimanche de fiançailles (Paris: Flammarion, 1995). 130. Ruhl, Antwerp to Gallipoli, 87. 131. Lemercier, A Soldier of France, vii. 132. Sulzbach, With the German Guns, 25. 133. Michael Neiberg, Foch: Supreme Allied Commander in the Great War (Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books, 2003), 31; Lord Lorch quoted in Malcolm Brown, 271

NOTES TO PAGES 175–183

The Imperial War Museum Book of 1914: The Men Who Went to War (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 2004), 133–134. 134. Waddington, My War Diary, 52. 135. Gregory, “Lost Generations,” 91. 136. Quoted in Jacques Benoist-­Méchin, Ce qui demeure: lettres de soldats tombés au champ d’honneur, 1914–1918 (Paris: Bartillat, 2000), 65. 137. Martin Guillaumont to his sons, August 26, 1914, quoted in Mon papa en guerre, 48. 138. Sweetser, Roadside Glimpses, 35, 38, 44, 48, 52, 55, 76, 78–80. 139. Diary of Marie-­L ouise Longar, quoted in Mon papa en guerre, 61. 140. Quoted in Adrian Gregory, “Railway Stations: Gateways and Termini,” in Winter and Robert, eds., Capital Cities at War, 2:81. 141. Jane Michaux, quoted in Cronier, “The Street,” 95. 142. Quoted in Cronier, “The Street,” 76. 143. Waddington, My War Diary, 37–38. 144. Brown, The Imperial War Museum Book of 1914, 26. 145. Pennell, A Kingdom United, 133. 146. Wood, Note-­Book, 5–6. 147. Fordham, “Universities,” 262 and 266. 148. Wood, Note-­Book, 35. 7.

hardening at titudes

1. Jules Moméja, quoted in Jean-­Jacques Becker, The Great War and the French People (Oxford: Berg, 1985), 95. 2. “Sacrifice,” in The Herald, cited in Jean-­Louis Robert, “The Image of the Profiteer,” in Jay Winter and Jean-­L ouis Robert, eds., Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, and Berlin 1914–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), vol. 1: 113. 3. Thierry Bonzon and Belinda Davis, “Feeding the Cities,” in Winter and Robert, eds., Capital Cities at War, vol. 1: 334. 4. Mildred Aldrich, On the Edge of the War Zone (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1917), 40. 5. Gerald D. Feldman, Army, Industry, and Labor in Germany, 1914–1918 (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 1966), 98. 6. John Horne, “The Comité d’Action (CGT-­Parti Socialiste) and the Origins of Wartime Labour Reformism (1914–1916),” in Patrick Fridenson, ed., The French Home Front, 1914–1918 (Oxford: Berg, 1992), 242–244. 7. Becker, The Great War and the French People, 27. 8. Arnold Bennett, The Journal of Arnold Bennett (New York: Viking, 1933), 528 and 530. 9. P. J. Flood, France 1914–1918: Public Opinion and the War Effort (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990), 27. 10. David Welch, Germany, Propaganda, and Total War, 1914–1918: The Sins of Omission (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 22. 11. Flood, France 1914–1918, 27. 272

NOTES TO PAGES 183–187

12. Petit Parisien of October 11, quoted in Becker, The Great War and the French People, 36. 13. Troy Paddock, “German Propaganda: The Limits of Gerechtigkeit,” in Troy Paddock, ed., A Call to Arms: Propaganda, Public Opinion and Newspapers in the Great War (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004), 132–134. 14. http://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Manifesto_of_the_Ninety-­T hree_ German_Intellectuals. Emphases in original. Many of the signatories later claimed to have been pressured into signing or to have never even seen the document before it appeared in their newspapers. 15. Stuart Wallace, War and the Image of Germany: British Academics, 1914–1918 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988), 35. 16. John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 175. 17. Welch, Germany, Propaganda, and Total War, 33. 18. Hans Peter Hanssen, Diary of a Dying Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955), 80. 19. Arthur Moméja, quoted in Jean-­Jacques Becker, 1914: Comment les Français sont entrés dans la guerre (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1977), 555. 20. Evelyn Blücher, An En­glish Wife in Berlin (New York: E.  P. Dutton, 1920), 28–31. Although illegal, British and American newspapers often came into Germany via neutral countries like Holland and Denmark. 21. Marquise Genevieve Marie de Foucault, A Château at the Front (Boston: Hough­ton Mif­fl in, 1931), 63. 22. Blücher, An En­glish Wife in Berlin, 26. 23. Bethmann Hollweg admitted that German behavior in Belgium had violated international law, but nevertheless defended it by proclaiming, “We are in a position of necessity and necessity knows no law.” See Francis Halsey, The Literary Digest History of the World War, vol. 1 (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1919), 255. 24. Henri Bénard, De la mort, de la boue, du sang: lettres de guerre d’un fantassin de 14–18 (Paris: Jacques Grancher, 1999), 38. 25. André Hallays, L’opinion Allemande pendant la guerre, 1914–1918 (Paris: Perrin, 1919), 34–35. 26. Raymond Pearson, The Russian Moderates and the Crisis of Tsarism, 1914–1917 (London: Macmillan, 1977), 23–24. 27. Melissa Stockdale, Paul Miliukov and the Quest for a Liberal Russia, 1880–1918 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 220. 28. V. I. Gurko, Fortunes and Figures of the Past (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1939), 543. 29. Becker, 1914, 480 and 476. 30. Michael Nolan, “‘The Eagle Soars over the Nightingale’: Press and Propaganda in France in the Opening Months of the Great War,” in Paddock, ed., A Call to Arms, 78. 31. Feldman, Army, Industry, and Labor in Germany, 120. 32. Hanssen, Diary of a Dying Empire, 76–77. 273

NOTES TO PAGES 187–190

33. Lt. Rowland Owen, quoted in Malcolm Brown, The Imperial War Museum Book of 1914: The Men Who Went to War (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 2004), 149. 34. The in­flu­ence of Gerald Linderman’s Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1987) on this section of the book should be obvious. 35. Quoted in Hanna Hafkesbrink, Unknown Germany: An Inner Chronicle of the First World War Based on Letters and Diaries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), 56. 36. Quoted in Laurence Moyer, Victory Must Be Ours: Germany in the Great War (London: Leo Cooper, 1995), 93. 37. Quoted in Hafkesbrink, Unknown Germany, 61. 38. Lt. Ralph Blewitt, quoted in Brown, The Imperial War Museum Book of 1914, 98. 39. Charles Carrington, Soldier from the Wars Returning (New York: David McKay, 1965), 55. 40. Eric Fisher Wood, The Note-­Book of an Attaché (New York: Century, 1915), 97–98 and 105. 41. Aldrich, On the Edge of the War Zone, 4. 42. Arthur Ruhl, Antwerp to Gallipoli (New York: A. L. Burt, 1916), 27. 43. Quoted in Hafkesbrink, Unknown Germany, 65. 44. Eugène Lemercier, A Soldier of France to His Mother: Letters from the Trenches on the Western Front (Chicago: A. C. McClung, 1917), 29. 45. Alfred Knox, With the Russian Army, 1914–1917 (New York: Arno Press, 1971), 160. 46. Bénard, De la mort, de la boue, du sang, 30, 36–37. 47. Quoted in Vincent Cronin, Paris on the Eve, 1900–1914 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 447. 48. Maurice Maréchal, quoted in Jean-­Pierre Guéno and Yves Laplume, Paroles de poilus: lettres et carnets du front, 1914–1918 (Paris: Librio, 1998), 44. 49. The sacrificial lamb image came from a Saxon of­fi­cer, cited in Jacques de Dampierre, ed., Carnets de route de combattants Allemands (Paris: Librairie Militaire Berger-­L evrault, 1916), 66. 50. Hafkesbrink, Unknown Germany, 65–66. 51. Quoted in Hafkesbrink, Unknown Germany, 66. 52. Maréchal, quoted in Guéno and Laplume, Paroles de poilus, 44. 53. John Ayscough, John Ayscough’s Letters to His Mother, ed. Frank Bickerstaffe-­Drew (New York: P. J. Kennedy, 1919), 59. 54. Quoted in Hafkesbrink, Unknown Germany, 66. 55. Blücher, An En­glish Wife in Berlin, 40. 56. Rudolf Binding, A Fatalist at War (Boston: Hough­ton Mif­fl in, 1929), 20. 57. Guéno and Laplume, Paroles de poilus, 65; Charles Delvert, Carnets d’un fantassin (Paris: Albon Michel, 1935), 87. 58. Bénard, De la mort, de la boue, du sang, 37 and 41. 59. Alexis Callies, Carnets de guerre d’Alexis Callies (Château-­T hierry: Eric Labayle, 1999), 101. 274

NOTES TO PAGES 191–195

60. Lemercier, A Soldier of France to His Mother, 11. 61. André Cornet-­Auquier, A Soldier Unafraid: Letters from the Trenches on the Alsatian Front (Boston: Little, Brown, 1918), 7. 62. Delvert, Carnets d’un fantassin, 86. 63. Lemercier, A Soldier of France to His Mother, 25. 64. See Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). 65. Philip Gibbs, Realities of War (New York: Harper, 1920), 11–12. 66. John Cruickshank, Variations on Catastrophe: Some French Responses to the Great War (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), 30. 67. Moma E. Clarke, Paris Waits, 1914 (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1915), 169 and 199. 68. Etienne Tanty, quoted in Mon papa en guerre: lettres de poilus, mots d’enfants (Paris: Librio, 2003), 18. 69. Michael MacDonagh, In London during the Great War (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1935), 26–27. 70. Quoted in J. C. Dunn, The War the Infantry Knew, 1914–1919: A Chronicle of Service in France and Belgium (London: Jane’s, 1987), 86. 71. Wilfred Owen, Selected Letters, ed. John Bell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 122. 72. Quoted in Brown, The Imperial War Museum Book of 1914, 169 and 173. 73. Ayscough, John Ayscough’s Letters, 30. 74. A. J. Hoover, God, Germany, and Britain in the Great War: A Study in Clerical Nationalism (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1989), 5. 75. Jacques Benoist-­Méchin, Ce qui demeure: lettres de soldats tombés au champ d’honneur, 1914–1918 (Paris: Bartillat, 2000), 136. 76. Quoted in Brown, The Imperial War Museum Book of 1914, 149. 77. Ralph G. A. Hamilton, The War Diary of the Master of Belhaven, 1914– 1918 (London: John Murray, 1924), 26. 78. Binding, A Fatalist at War, 19–20. For more on the Kindermord see Ian F. W. Beckett, Ypres: The First Battle, 1914 (Harlow, U.K.: Pearson, 2004), 76–78. 79. Wilson McNair, Blood and Iron: Impressions from the Front in France and Flanders (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1916), 266. 80. Anonymous, A German Deserter’s War Experience, ed. J. Koettgen (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1917), 42, 49, 52. 81. Cornet-­Auquier, A Soldier Unafraid, 7. 82. Quoted in Ebba Dahlin, French and German Public Opinion on Stated War Aims, 1914–1918, vol. 4, no. 22 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1933), 31. 83. Hamilton, War Diary, 6, 14, and 30. A joke soon passed through the BEF that British soldiers preferred the Germans to the Belgians because the of­fi­cers would at least allow them to shoot Germans. 84. Knox, With the Russian Army, 135. 85. Ayscough, John Ayscough’s Letters, 44. 275

NOTES TO PAGES 195–200

86. Jeanne Le Guiner, Letters from France (Boston: Hough­ton Mif­fl in, 1916), 37. 87. A Smolensk agent, quoted in Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution (New York: Viking, 1996), 258. 88. Quoted in Guéno and Laplume, Paroles de poilus, 20. 89. Quoted in Becker, 1914, 559. 90. Becker, 1914, 555 and 568. Report from Champniers quoted on 563. 91. Blücher, An En­glish Wife in Berlin, 27 and 35. 92. Léon Hugon, quoted in Guéno and Yves Laplume, Paroles de poilus, 31–32. 93. Raoul Bouchet, Lettres de guerre d’un artilleur de 1914 à 1916 (Paris: Harmattan, 2002), 44. 94. Marc Bloch, Memoirs of War, 1914–1915 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 111. 95. Becker, 1914, 570–571. 96. Bouchet, Lettres de guerre d’un artilleur, 52. 97. Clarke, Paris Waits, 61. 98. Mary King Waddington, My War Diary (New York: Scribner’s, 1917), 64. 99. Waddington, My War Diary, 64. 100. Wood, Note-­Book, 44. 101. Clarke, Paris Waits, 70 and 73. 102. Wood, Note-­Book, 48. 103. Clarke, Paris Waits, 75–76. 104. Jane Michaux, En marge du drame: journal d’une Parisienne pendant la guerre, 1914–1915 (Paris: Perrin, 1916), 47. Moma Clarke was suf­fi­ciently cognizant of this dilemma to note, “We, the bourgeoisie, have always said that the great danger to Paris was a revolution among the working-­classes—the mob! We were proved wrong. The mob stood steady when the bourgeoisie did not.” Clarke, Paris Waits, 196–197. 105. Henriette Curvu-­Magot, Quincy-­Huiry-­Voisins before and during the Battle (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1918), 31–34 and 41–46; Mildred Aldrich, A Hilltop on the Marne: Being Letters Written June 3–September 8, 1914 (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1918), 93. She somehow managed to get out of Paris the next day, but headed east toward her house on the Marne. Once she got there, she put an American flag outside the front door in the hopes that the Germans might spare it. 106. Clarke, Paris Waits, 79–80. 107. Waddington, My War Diary, 58. 108. Wood, Note-­Book, 69; Becker, The Great War and the French People, 36. 109. Waddington, My War Diary, 83. 110. Philippe Husser, Un instituteur Alsacien entre France et Allemagne, 1914–1951 (Paris: Hachette, 1989), 47. 111. Roger Chickering, The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 77. Elsewhere 276

NOTES TO PAGES 200–204

Chickering noted that the “real news lay in the orchestrated silence of the [of­fi­cial government] reports, which failed to bring the eagerly awaited announcement of a breakthrough in the west.” Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 47–48. 112. Dampierre, ed., Carnets de route de combattants Allemands, 124. 113. Michael Karolyi, The Memoirs of Michael Karolyi: Faith without Illusion (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1957), 59. 114. André Gide, The Journals of André Gide, trans., with an intro. and notes by Justin O’Brien (New York: Knopf, 1951), 87. 115. Claire de Pratz, A Frenchwoman’s Notes on the War (London: Constable, 1916), 121 and 129. 116. Wood, Note-­Book, 83 and 97–99. 117. Clarke, Paris Waits, 85–86. 118. de Pratz, A Frenchwoman’s Notes on the War, 142–144. 119. Flood, France 1914–1918, 49. 120. Blücher, An En­glish Wife in Berlin, 33. 121. Flood, France 1914–1918, 52. 122. de Pratz, A Frenchwoman’s Notes on the War, 118 and 127. 123. Aldrich, On the Edge of the War Zone, 3. 124. Remy de Gourmont, Pendant l’orage (Paris: Edouard Champion, 1915), 13. 125. Quoted in John Horne, ed., Our War: Ireland and the Great War (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2008), 5. 126. See, for example, Larry Zuckerman, The Rape of Belgium: The Untold Story of World War I (New York: New York University Press, 2004); and Horne and Kramer’s excellent German Atrocities, 1914. The latter book should be the starting point for any serious research into the subject. 127. Horne and Kramer, German Atrocities, 2. 128. Andrew Clark, Echoes of the Great War: The Diary of the Rev. Andrew Clark, 1914–1919, ed. James Munson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 33 and 37. 129. Commandant Bréant, De l’Alsace à la Somme: souvenirs du front: août 1914–janvier 1917 (Paris: Hachette, 1917), 38 and 73. 130. Olivier Guilleux, 1914–1918: La grande guerre d’Olivier Guilleux (La Crèche: Geste, 2003), 82. 131. Delvert, Carnets d’un fantassin, 23. 132. Horne and Kramer, German Atrocities, 71. 133. Jean-­B ernard Passerieu, Histoire générale et anecdotale de la guerre de 1914 (Paris: Librairie Militaire Berger-­L evrault, 1915), 60. 134. Delvert, Carnets d’un fantassin, 75. 135. Blücher, An En­glish Wife in Berlin, 32 and 40. 136. Fritz Nagel, The World War I Memoirs of a German Lieutenant (Huntington, W.V.: Der Angriff, 1981), 22. 137. Moyer, Victory Must Be Ours, 99. Many more stories can be found in Horne and Kramer, German Atrocities, 79ff. 138. Otto Ocker, Stederdorf: un village Allemand pendant et après la guerre 277

NOTES TO PAGES 204–207

mondiale (n.p.: Association Bretagne, 1914–1918, 2007), 14; Piete Kuhr, There We’ll Meet Again: The First World War Diary of a Young German Girl (London: Walter Wright, 1998), 18 and 42; and “Journal de campagne d’un officier Saxon,” in Dampierre, ed., Carnets de route de combattants Allemands, 20, 82. 139. Husser, Un instituteur Alsacien, 35. 140. Horne and Kramer, German Atrocities, 23. 141. The comment ­comes from a young German diarist who believed stories that Belgians “poisoned and murdered” German soldiers. Ute Daniel, The War from Within: German Working-­C lass Women in the First World War (Oxford: Berg, 1997), 23. 142. Gregory, “Railway Stations,” 29. 143. Michaux, En marge du drame, 43. 144. Guilleux, 1914–1918, 82; Delvert, Carnets d’un fantassin, 24. 145. Andrea Orzoff, “The Empire without Qualities: Austro-­Hungarian Newspapers and the Outbreak of War in 1914,” in Paddock, ed. A Call to Arms, 173 and 177. 146. Quoted in Gregory, The Last Great War, 38–39. 147. Quoted in Catriona Pennell, “A Kingdom United: British and Irish Responses to the Outbreak of War, July to December, 1914” (Ph.D. diss., Trinity College, Dublin, 2007), 124–125. 148. James Lawson, A Cameronian Officer (Glasgow: John Smith and Son, 1921), 38. 149. Harold R. Peat, Private Peat (Indianapolis: Bobbs-­Merrill, 1917), 46. Tragically, Peat himself later lost an arm in the war. 150. “Journal de campagne d’un officier Saxon,” 20. 151. Nolan, “‘The Eagle Soars over the Nightingale,’” 59. 152. Mrs. D. G. Johnson, quoted in Pennell, A Kingdom United, 178. 153. Nolan, “‘The Eagle Soars over the Nightingale,’” 61. The statement ­belongs to the French actress Sarah Bernhardt, but the sentiment was widely shared. 154. Delvert, Carnets d’un fantassin, 32. 155. Commandant Bréant, De l’Alsace à la Somme, 116. 156. Franck Roux, Ma campagne d’Alsace-­L orraine, 1914: les sapins rouges (Nîmes: C. Lacour, 1997), 35. 157. Horne and Kramer, German Atrocities, 176. 158. Alfred Baudrillart, Les carnets du Cardinal, tome 1, 1er août 1914–31 décembre 1918 (Paris: Editions Cerf, 1994), 55. 159. Moyer, Victory Must Be Ours, 100. 160. Gavin Roynon, Home Fires Burning: The Great War Diaries of Georgina Lee (Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2006), 56. 161. Dominique Richert, Cahiers d’un survivant, 1914–1919 (Strasbourg: La Nuée Bleue, 1994), 36. 162. Michaux, En marge du drame, 32–33, 39, and 112. 163. Adrian Gregory, “A Clash of Cultures: The British Press and the Opening of the Great War,” in Paddock, ed., A Call to Arms, 30.

278

NOTES TO PAGES 208–214

8.

an e vil dance of the furies

1. Jean-­Jacques Becker, The Great War and the French People (Oxford: Berg, 1985), 101. 2. Mildred Aldrich, On the Edge of the War Zone (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1917), 45–46. 3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Carnets secrets, 1914–1916 (Tours: Farrago, 2001), 77. 4. Mayor of St. Just, quoted in Marquise Genevieve Marie de Foucault, A Château at the Front (Boston: Hough­ton Mif­fl in, 1931), 111; and Jeanne Le Guiner, Letters from France (Boston: Hough­ton Mif­fl in, 1916), 34. 5. Ottoline Morrell, The Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell: A Study in Friendship, ed. Robert Gathorne-­Hardy (New York: Knopf, 1964), 265. 6. Louis Oldfield to Miss M. R. Whitaker, November 14, 1914, and December 6, 1914, Imperial War Museum, London, 76/123/1. I am grateful to the family of Judith Cooke for permission to quote from this impressive collection. 7. Aldrich, On the Edge of the War Zone, 59 and 81. 8. Jonathan Manning, “Wages and Purchasing Power,” in Jay Winter and Jean-­Louis Robert, eds., Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, and Berlin 1914– 1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 259. 9. Jon Lawrence, “The Transition to War in 1914,” in Winter and Robert, eds., Capital Cities at War, 157 and 151. 10. Charles L. Graves, Mr. Punch’s History of the Great War (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1919), 12. 11. Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. 2 (New York: Basic Books, 1955), 176. 12. Quoted in Becker, The Great War and the French People, 96. 13. Gerald D. Feldman, Army, Industry, and Labor in Germany, 1914–1918 (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 1966), 99. 14. Belinda Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 50. 15. Davis, Home Fires Burning, 28–29, 50–51. 16. Feldman, Army, Industry, and Labor in Germany, 99–102. 17. Feldman, Army, Industry, and Labor in Germany, 118. 18. François Boulot, Les ­profiteurs en guerre, 1914–1918 (Paris: Editions Complexe, 2008), 126 and 130. 19. Jean-­Louis Robert, “The Image of the Profiteer,” in Winter and Robert, eds., Capital Cities at War, 123. 20. Quoted in John Horne, “The Comité d’Action (CGT-­Parti Socialiste) and the Origins of Wartime Labour Reformism (1914–1916),” in Patrick Fridenson, ed., The French Home Front, 1914–1918 (Oxford: Berg, 1992), 244. 21. Quoted in Catriona Pennell, “A Kingdom United: British and Irish Responses to the Outbreak of War, July to December, 1914” (Ph.D. diss., Trinity College, Dublin, 2007), 170. 22. Wiktor Woroszliski, The Life of [Vladimir] Mayakovsky (New York:

279

NOTES TO PAGES 215–219

Crion, 1970), 140. Mayakovsky was a leading poet of the Russian Futurist movement. He had tried to enlist when the war began but was turned away. Later he was drafted, but noted that, unlike his mood in August, “Now I do not want to go to the front” (141). 23. Thomas Riha, A Russian European: Paul Miliukov in Russian Politics (South Bend, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1969), 218. 24. Raymond Pearson, The Russian Moderates and the Crisis of Tsarism, 1914–1917 (London: Macmillan, 1977), 30–31. 25. Melissa K. Stockdale, Paul Miliukov and the Quest for a Liberal Russia, 1880–1918 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 220. 26. Pearson, The Russian Moderates, 31. 27. Becker, The Great War and the French People, 79–80. 28. André Gide, The Correspondence of André Gide and Edmund Gosse, 1904–1928, ed. and trans. Linette F. Brugmans (New York: New York University Press, 1959), 115. 29. Remy de Gourmont, Pendant l’orage (Paris: Edouard Champion, 1915), 31. 30. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 23. 31. Adrian Gregory, “Lost Generations: The Impact of Military Casualties on  Paris, London, and Berlin,” in Winter and Robert, eds., Capital Cities at War, 92. 32. Moma Clarke, Paris Waits, 1914 (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1915), 284, 287, 258, 261, and 312. 33. Frederic William Wile, The Assault: Germany before the Outbreak and En­gland in War-­time (Indianapolis: Bobbs-­Merrill, 1916), 264, 266, 284, 285, 287. 34. Clarke, Paris Waits, 304. 35. Punch, November 18, 1914, 425. 36. Clarke, Paris Waits, 275–276. 37. “Life in the Trenches with the Germans and the Allies,” Review of Reviews 51 (January, 1915), 22–23, 63. 38. “Sven Hedin in the Western Theater of War,” Review of Reviews 51 (January, 1915), 103–104. The article originally appeared as a letter from Hedin to a Swedish newspaper, the Sydsvenska Dagbladat. 39. Henri Bénard, De la mort, de la boue, du sang: lettres de guerre d’un fantassin de 14–18 (Paris: Jacques Grancher, 1999), 73. 40. Fritz Franke, quoted in Philipp Witkop, ed., German Students’ War Letters (London: Methuen, 1929), 123. Franke was killed in May 1915. 41. Aldrich, On the Edge of the War Zone, 46. 42. Becker, The Great War and the French People, 38. 43. Eric Fisher Wood, The Note-­book of an Attaché (New York: Century, 1915), 189–190. 44. Wood, Note-­book, 260–261. 45. Michael MacDonagh, In London during the Great War (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1935), 37, 41. 280

NOTES TO PAGES 219–225

46. Punch, November 25, 1914, 447. 47. André Gide, The Journals of André Gide, trans., with intro. and notes by Justin O’Brien (New York: Knopf, 1951), 94. 48. Hanna Hafkesbrink, Unknown Germany: An Inner Chronicle of the First World War Based on Letters and Diaries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), 48. Rilke was living in Paris in 1914 but, not expecting war to break out, had taken a trip to Munich. He was there when the war began and was unable to return to Paris. In his absence, the French government con­fis­cated and auctioned his property. He moved to Switzerland after the war. 49. Wood, Note-­book, 211, 217, 219, and 234. 50. Marc Bloch, Memoirs of War, 1914–1915 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 150. 51. Emmanuel Bourcier, Under the German Shells (New York: Scribners, 1918), 108–109, 111, and 119. 52. Bénard, De la mort, de la boue, du sang, 77. 53. Eugene Pic, Dans la tranchée (Paris: Perrin, 1917), 45. 54. P. G. Barreyre, Carnets de route (Bordeaux: Centre Régional de Documentation Pédagogique, 1989), 43. 55. Rudolf Binding, A Fatalist at War (Boston: Hough­ton Mif­fl in, 1929), 20, 30, 35, and 38. 56. Quoted in Philip Knightley, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Mythmaker from the Crimea to Iraq (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 114. 57. Hafkesbrink, Unknown Germany, 71. 58. Fritz Meese, quoted in Witkop, ed., German Students’ War Letters, 120. Meese was killed in May 1915 at the battle of Notre Dame de Lorette. 59. Quoted in Witkop, ed., German Students’ War Letters, 13 and 40. 60. Eugène Lemercier, A Soldier of France to His Mother: Letters from the Trenches on the Western Front (Chicago: A. C. McClung, 1917), 82 and 97. 61. Quoted in Hafkesbrink, Unknown Germany, 59. 62. Raoul Bouchet, Lettres de guerre d’un artilleur de 1914 à 1916 (Paris: Harmattan, 2002), 69 and 72. Bouchet was killed on the Somme in 1916. 63. Anonymous, A German Deserter’s War Experiences, trans. J. Koettgen (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1917), 158. 64. Binding, A Fatalist at War, 39 and 36–37. 65. Bouchet, Lettres de guerre, 86. 66. Becker, The Great War and the French People, 43; and Henry Williamson, A Soldier’s Diary of the Great War (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1929), 77. 67. Gerald A. Burgoyne, The Burgoyne Diaries (London: Thomas Harmsworth, 1985), 26 and 22. 68. Lemercier, A Soldier of France, 62. 69. Quoted in Witkop, ed., German Students’ War Letters, 69. Roy was killed in April 1915 near Les Eparges. 70. Jacques Benoist-­Méchin, ed., Ce qui demeure: lettres de soldats tombés au champ d’honneur, 1914–1918 (Paris: Bartillat, 2000), 81. Dupouey was killed in April 1915. 281

NOTES TO PAGES 225–231

71. Quoted in Benoist-­Méchin, Ce qui demeure, 133–134. 72. Martin Guillamont, quoted in Mon papa en guerre: lettres de poilus, mots d’enfants (Paris: Librio, 2003), 31–32. Guillamont survived the war and met his daughter, but he and his wife both died of tuberculosis in 1924. 73. J. C. Dunn, The War the Infantry Knew, 1914–1919: A Chronicle of Service in France and Belgium (London: Jane’s, 1987), 96 and 99–100. 74. Benoist-­Méchin, Ce qui demeure, 84. 75. Burgoyne, The Burgoyne Diaries, 6, 8, 14, and 32. 76. MacDonagh, In London during the Great War, 46. 77. Aldrich, On the Edge of the War Zone, 86–87. 78. Binding, A Fatalist at War, 36–37. 79. Herbert Sulzbach, With the German Guns: Four Years on the Western Front (London: Pen and Sword, 2003), 43. 80. Collection of M. R. Whitaker, Imperial War Museum, London, 76/123/1. My thanks to Judith Cooke for permission to cite from her great aunt’s papers. 81. Piete Kuhr, There We’ll Meet Again: The First World War Diary of a Young German Girl (London: Walter Wright, 1998), 85–86, 92. 82. Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (London: Penguin, 1994). Tragically, Edward was killed in Italy in June 1918. At her request, Vera Brittain’s ashes were scattered over his grave. Vera Brittain also lost her fiancé, Roland Leighton, who was killed two days before Christmas 1915, and two of her closest friends. 83. Mary King Waddington, My War Diary (New York: Scribner’s, 1917), 172. 84. Karl Aldag, quoted in Witkop, ed., German Students’ War Letters, 32. Aldag was killed January 15, 1915. 85. Burgoyne, The Burgoyne Diaries, 30. 86. Mon papa en guerre, 34. 87. Clarke, Paris Waits, 300–302. 88. Mon papa en guerre, 30. The soldier, Martin Vaillagou, died in August 1915, just one month after the death of both of his brothers in battle near Mourmelon. The son to whom he wrote this letter developed leukemia and died in 1918. 89. MacDonagh, In London during the Great War, 48. 90. Stanley Weintraub, Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas (New York: Plume, 2002), remains a standard account, though I disagree with his interpretation of the meaning of the truces. 91. A German Deserter’s War Experiences, 162. 92. Lemercier, A Soldier of France, 98. 93. Dunn, The War the Infantry Knew, 98. 94. Dunn, The War the Infantry Knew, 101–103. 95. André Cornet-­Auquier, A Soldier Unafraid: Letters from the Trenches on the Alsatian Front (Boston: Little, Brown, 1918), 26. 96. Weintraub, Silent Night, 123. 97. W. J. P. Aggett, The Bloody Eleventh: History of the Devonshire Regiment, vol. 2, 1815–1914 (Exeter: Wyvern Barracks, 1994), 443 and 447. 98. Bénard, De la mort, de la boue, du sang, 77. 282

NOTES TO PAGES 231–237

99. Binding, A Fatalist at War, 41. 100. Quoted in Pennell, A Kingdom United, 295. 101. Kuhr, There We’ll Meet Again, 87. 102. Sulzbach, With the German Guns, 46. conclusion

1. In House’s case, the remark came after his attendance at a Schrippenfest, an elaborate Prussian ceremony where the kaiser drank beer from a mug one of his soldiers had already used, to symbolize the links between the monarchy and the army. House found Paris obsessed with the Caillaux trial and Britain obsessed with Ulster. See Godfrey Hodgson, Woodrow Wilson’s Right Hand: The Life of Colonel Edward M. House (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 96ff. 2. Quoted in Catriona Pennell, “Going to War,” in John Horne, ed., Our War: Ireland and the Great War (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2008), 39. 3. This attitude helps to set the context for one of the most in­flu­en­tial and im­ por­tant books about the war, Fritz Fi­scher’s Germany’s Aims in the First World War (New York: Norton, 1967), first published in Germany in 1961. Fi­scher touched off an academic and popular firestorm with his argument that Germany had indeed begun the First World War with malice aforethought and with global ambitions that presaged those of the Third Reich. 4. Radnor Hodgson in the Yorkshire Post of August 2, 1914, quoted in Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 18.

283

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is always both a plea­sure and a daunting task to thank all the people who helped me put together a proj­ect as conceptually large as this one. I must begin by thanking the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation for a generous research grant that made much of my travel possible. I must also thank Lin Harper for helping me write the grant proposal and for being a  great sounding board for ideas. The staffs of the following libraries also deserve special mention: in Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University (thanks especially to Sue Collins yet again!), the University of Pittsburgh, and the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh; the Robarts Library of the University of Toronto; the Hatcher Library at the University of Michigan; the Kenneth Spencer Library at the University of Kansas; the National Library of Scotland; the British Library; the Library of Congress; the Bibliothèque Nationale de France; the Imperial War Museum; the libraries of Trinity College, Dublin; and, of course, my home library at the University of Southern Mississippi. Thanks are also due to my editor, Kathleen McDermott, and the staff at Harvard University Press. This book is my third with Harvard, and I am very lucky to have such a good relationship with HUP. Whitney Lackenbauer, Michael Bechtold, Terry Copp, and the staff at the Laurier Centre for Military, Strategic, and Disarmament Studies at the University of Waterloo offered me a ter­rific opportunity to present some of my early ideas in the form of a keynote address at their annual symposium. Ted Wilson and the Hall Center for the Humanities at the University of Kansas kindly gave me the chance to give a talk to a wonderful group, the Peace, War, and Global Change Seminar. I am grateful for the feedback and the incisive and thoughtful questions I received at both lectures. I have bene­fited from the advice and support of so many friends and scholars that I hardly know where to begin, but let me start with the ter­ 285

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

rific people in my own department. Jeff Bowersox, Sarah Franklin, Andrew Haley, Phyllis Jestice, Brian LaPierre, Amy Milne-­Smith, Ruth Percy, Shelia Smith, Heather Stur, Susannah Ural, and Kyle Zelner all patiently put up with me as I asked questions and tested ideas. Andy ­Wiest deserves special mention for being the best colleague anyone could hope to have. This book is better for their help and constant support. Thanks also to friends Bill Astore and David Silbey, who took the time from their busy schedules to read this book in manuscript form and offer advice on how to make it better. Outside USM, I would like to thank Tim Cook, John Grenier, Laurent Henninger, Jennifer Keene, Dennis Showalter, Leonard Smith, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions. Catriona Pennell was kind enough to share her excellent dissertation with me and to allow me to quote from it. Special thanks go to John Horne, Ed Madigan, Julia Eichenberg, and Claudia Siebrecht for their kind hospitality in Dublin. As always, I thank my wife, Barbara, my beautiful daughters, Claire and Maya, my sister, Elyssa, and my wonderful in-­laws, John, Sue, Brian, and Michele Lockley, as well as Mike and Paulina Stader and Willetha Slaughter, for their unwavering support. Finally, I’d like to dedicate this book to the two people who taught me the most im­por­tant lessons in life and who always showed the way. Mom and Dad, this one’s for you.

286

INDEX

Addison, Christopher, 72, 94 Adler, Viktor, 25, 86, 106–107 Agadir, 44–46, 48–51, 63–64, 66, 70, 72– 73, 86–87, 94–95, 102, 104, 106, 111, 117. See also Moroccan crises Aldrich, Mildred, 32, 91, 96, 120, 125, 131, 198–199, 208, 210, 219, 226 Algeciras agreement, 44–45. See also Moroccan crises Alsace-­L orraine, 5, 57–60, 62, 64, 118, 142, 146–147, 176, 206, 235, 247–248 Angell, Norman, 79–80, 151 Anti-­semitism, 6, 42, 152 Arbeiter Zeitung, 78, 85, 108, 163 Asquith, H. H., 20, 75, 92, 251 Asquith, Margot, 92 Aurore, 54, 72, 74, 117 Austria-­Hungary, 3, 4, 21, 43; attitudes of other Europeans toward, 71, 73, 76, 78, 81, 84, 90–91, 93–94, 96, 133, 232, 235; attitudes toward assassination of Franz Ferdinand, 11–12, 17–21, 26, 34; attitudes toward war, 6, 32–33, 77, 81– 82, 85–86, 88–89, 94, 101, 106, 118, 167–168, 236; and the Balkans, 11, 19, 33, 53, 55, 71; and Bosnia, 13, 71, 83, 168; and Britain, 16, 20, 67, 75–76, 82, 90; civil truce in, 153–154; control of the media, 134, 162, 200; and the Czechs, 77; and France, 267; and Franz Ferdinand, 10–13, 18; and Germany, 34, 68–69, 76, 80, 82, 90, 108; and Italy, 80, 96; the royal family, 11, 13–17; ru-

mors about, 110, 161; and Russia, 7, 74, 96, 100, 215; and Serbia, 1, 13, 18, 23, 25, 31, 33, 66–74, 77, 80, 81–83, 87–89, 91, 93–94, 116, 168; and socialists, 106– 108; ultimatum, 77, 93. See also Dual Monarchy Ayclough, John, 193 Balabanoff, Angelica, 108 Balkan wars, 11–12, 14, 19–20, 40, 43, 51–57, 63–66, 71, 73, 78, 81–84, 86, 88, 93, 104, 106 Barrès, Maurice, 113, 130, 191 Barry, Robert, 38–39 Basel Conference, 53–54, 103–104 Baudrillart, Alfred, 124, 145, 206 Bebel, August, 68 Becker, Jean-­Jacques, 5, 58, 102 Belgrade, 18–19, 76, 82–83, 85, 94, 168 Belloc, Hillaire, 87 Bénard, Henri, 169–170, 185, 190, 221, 271 Beneš, Eduard, 74 Bennett, Arnold, 26, 182 Benson, E. F., 19–20, 92 Berghahn, V. R., 5 Berlin, 4, 11, 23, 30, 34, 38, 48, 50, 53, 63, 65, 69, 72–73, 75–76, 82, 89–90, 93, 100, 102, 109–111, 115, 118–119, 131, 136–137, 141, 155–157, 161, 179, 192, 196, 199, 201, 204–205, 210, 212, 220, 223, 257 Berliner Tageblatt, 49, 72, 78, 99, 127 287

INDEX

Berlin Post, 78 Bertie, Lord, 94 Bethmann Hollweg, Theobald von, 108, 137, 184, 273 Beumelburg, Werner, 73, 118 Beyens, Baron, 10, 38–39, 43, 69, 73, 81, 93–94 Binding, Rudolf, 100, 191, 194, 222–223, 226, 231 Bismarck, Otto von, 4, 39 Bloch, I. S., 79–80 Bloch, Marc, 100, 113, 125–126, 141, 197, 221 Blücher, Evelyn, 123, 151, 184–185, 196, 201 Blumenfeld, R. D., 26, 30, 75, 148 Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen, 26, 46, 75, 94, 115 Bonch-­Bruyevich, Mikhail, 96, 140 Bordeaux, 155, 162, 165, 193, 198 Bosnia, 13, 20, 30, 71, 83, 168 Bouchet, Raoul, 151, 160, 197, 223–224, 267, 281 Bourcier, Emmanuel, 74, 98, 111, 122, 148, 221 Brandenburg-­Hohenzollern, Johan Wilhelm von Löwenell, 10, 63 Brittain, Vera, 11, 95, 123, 147, 159, 160, 227 Brusilov, Alexei, 12, 132 Buchanan, George, 22, 133 Budapest, 17, 19, 135, 200, 219 Burgfrieden, 152–153, 187 Caillaux, Henriette, 26–28, 31, 74–75 Caillaux, Joseph, 26–28, 31, 74–75, 161, 243, 283 Callies, Alexis, 115, 190 Calmette, Gaston, 26–27, 54, 56 Cambon, Jules, 50, 64, 246 Carnegie, Andrew, 40, 65 Carnet B, 139, 152, 264 Carrington, Charles, 12, 143 Chickering, Roger, 134, 166, 168, 267– 268, 277 Chotek, Sophie, 10, 12–14, 16, 21, 26 Christmas truces, 229–231 Churchill, Winston, 22, 26

Clark, Andrew, 160–161, 203 Clarke, Moma, 159, 164, 191, 199, 201, 217, 228, 276 Claudel, Paul, 80, 130 Clemenceau, Georges, 119, 129, 262 Comité d’Action, 181 Confédération Générale du Travail, 48, 113 Conrad von Hötzendorff, Franz, 67–68, 94 Cooper, C. E. “Ethel,” 2–4 Copenhagen, 103–104 Cornet-­Auquier, André, 148, 230 Couttereau, Albert, 124, 128 Curragh Incident, 29, 61 Cuvru-­M agot, Henriette, 124, 199 Czechoslovakia, 77, 162 Daily Express, 116 Daily Mirror, 29, 95 Daily Telegraph, 38–39, 88 Danilov, Yuri, 132–133 Defence of the Realm Act (DORA), 164– 165 Delécraz, Antoine, 165 Delvert, Charles, 190–191, 204, 206 Dillon, E. J., 88–89, 91 Doumerge, Paul, 98 Dreyfus Affair, 61–62, 112, 248 Dual Monarchy, 18, 34, 67, 77, 93–94, 167–168. See also Austria-­Hungary Dublin, 28, 30, 75, 236 Echo de Paris, 161, 196 Entente Cordiale, 37 Fashoda Crisis, 44, 64, 82 Figes, Orlando, 135 Foch, Ferdinand, 12, 174 Ford, Ford Maddox, 25, 62–63, 72 Forum, 40 Foucault, Marquise de, 125, 140, 156, 161, 167 France, 3–4, 6–7, 13, 65, 81–82, 104, 152, 155, 166, 199, 214, 248, 255, 258; and Alsace-­L orraine, 5, 58–60, 142, 146– 147, 170, 235; attitudes of other Europe288

INDEX

ans toward 85, 90, 97, 118, 164; attitudes toward assassination of Franz Ferdinand, 11, 20–21, 25, 28, 31–32; attitudes toward the war, 5, 34, 54–55, 59, 64–65, 70, 74–76, 85, 87, 90, 94–99, 102, 111, 115–117, 119–122, 125, 128, 132, 136, 139–141, 148, 150–151, 156, 164–167, 169–172, 176, 180–184, 188– 189, 191–193, 195–197, 202, 206, 208– 209, 223, 225–226, 228; and Austria­Hungary, 74; and the Balkans, 21, 54–56, 74; casualties, 173–175, 188, 201, 216; civil truce, 154, 186, 216; Dreyfus Affair, 61–62, 112, 248; and Germany, 4, 39, 45–46, 49, 56, 63–64,  73–74, 88, 107, 112, 118, 136, 145, 206–207, 262; and Great Britain, 37, 97, 126, 142; media, 159, 162–163, 182– 184, 198, 200, 203; mobilization, 98, 112, 116, 118, 125, 155; and Moroccan crises, 43–50; pro­pa­ganda and rumors about, 127, 161–162, 183, 185, 200, 204, 259; refugees, 176–177, 198–199, 201, 205; and Russia, 37, 74, 68, 88, 96– 98, 107, 112, 262; shortages, 155–157, 210; socialists, 24–25, 47–48, 54, 56, 62, 78, 86, 104–108, 110–114, 139, 152, 181, 186–187, 211, 215, 255; unemployment, 155, 181–182, 210–211, 213 France, Anatole, 113 Franco-­Prussian War, 60, 174, 240 Franz Ferdinand, Archduke, 5, 10–22, 28, 30, 33, 35–36, 65–67, 70, 76, 90, 98, 106, 113, 121, 133, 144, 232, 240–241 Franz Joseph, Emperor, 15–17, 21, 43, 67, 77, 85, 93, 241 Freiburg, 19, 105–106, 125, 163, 165 Freud, Sigmund, 21, 74, 101, 160, 167– 168, 202, 211 Gerard, James, 23, 41, 61–62, 81, 99 Germany, 3–7, 11, 38–40, 43, 90, 110, 118, 125, 153–155, 160, 162–163, 165– 166, 179, 183–184, 228, 242, 263; and Alsace-­L orraine, 58–61, 147, 215; and arbitration, 41, 82, 87; atrocities, 6, 203–204, 206–207; attitudes of other

Europeans toward, 34, 41, 62, 64, 71, 74–75, 80, 88, 91–92, 99, 117, 122, 135–136, 141, 144–146, 151–152, 204– 205; attitudes toward assassination of Franz Ferdinand, 12, 16, 19, 21, 23–24, 30, 34; attitudes toward war, 72–73, 122, 126, 129–132, 142, 166; and Austria-­Hungary, 67–69, 71–73, 75–76, 80, 82, 90; and the Balkans, 19–20, 24, 54–56, 70–71, 78, 82–83, 89; and Belgium, 97–98, 114–115, 127, 135, 143– 144, 146, 152, 167, 172, 183, 185, 196, 203, 273; and Britain, 22–23, 34, 40, 65, 82, 99, 115, 126–127, 135–136, 144–146, 150, 159, 178, 206–207, 210, 228–229; casualties, 173–174; disillusionment, 166, 168–172, 187–189, 194, 222–223, 227, 232, 236; and France, 39, 56, 63–65, 68, 73, 88, 97, 99, 112, 117– 118, 136, 145, 147, 172, 197–199, 201; hopes for peace, 39–41, 62, 64–65, 73, 76–79, 83, 90, 94, 99, 105, 128, 151; and Italy, 96; and Moroccan crises, 43– 46, 49–50, 246; pa­tri­ot­ism/nationalism/ enthusiasm for war, 68–69, 100–101, 118, 130–132, 236–237; prisoners of war, 189, 192; pro­pa­ganda and rumors about, 160–162, 182–183, 185–186, 221, 259; rationalization for war, 6–8, 69, 118–120, 126–128, 134, 137, 207; and Russia, 12, 68–69, 94, 96, 98–100, 112, 215; shortages, 181, 211–212; socialists, 24–25, 43, 47–48, 52–53, 56, 62, 68, 73, 86, 88, 99, 103–108, 128– 129, 137–138, 153, 167, 184, 187, 211– 213, 264; trenches, 218, 221–222, 259; truce, 229–230; war guilt, 237 Gibbons, Herbert Adams, 1–5 Gibbs, Philip, 151, 191 Gide, André, 25, 87, 117, 120, 141, 220 Godfroy, Léonie, 122 Golovine, Nicholas, 97 Gooch, G. P., 79 Gourmant, Rémy de, 60, 202, 216 Graves, Robert, 140, 143, 145 Great Britain, 4, 47; attitudes toward assassination of Franz Ferdinand, 11–12,

289

INDEX

Great Britain (continued) 16, 19–20, 22, 26, 30–33; attitudes toward war, 63–64, 71–72, 77, 90, 94–96, 99, 115, 118, 120, 122, 123, 130, 141– 146, 148–149, 151–152, 169, 171, 187– 188, 192–194, 210, 214, 219; and Austria-­Hungary, 33, 67, 69, 76, 90–91; and the Balkans, 26, 55, 70–71, 75–76, 82, 87, 91–92, 95; and Belgium, 97, 135, 142–144, 195, 203; casualties, 174–175; civil truce, 21; Curragh Incident, 29, 61; Fashoda Crisis, 44, 64, 82; and France, 24, 37, 45, 97, 112; and Germany, 7, 22– 23, 25, 34, 38, 40, 45, 47, 49, 65, 82–83, 89–90, 99, 126–127, 135–136, 143–146, 150, 159, 183, 205–207, 228–230, 275; and Ireland, 28–30, 75, 283; media, 163, 169, 182, 217, 224, 273; and Moroccan crises, 45–47, 49–50; pro­pa­ganda and rumors about, 126–127, 160–161, 183, 185, 204; and Russia, 31, 46, 145; shortages, 158; and socialists, 56, 86, 109, 144, 146, 213; unemployment, 155 Gregory, Adrian, 5, 155 Grey, Edward, 12, 26, 32, 69, 75, 89, 99, 143, 146 Gurko, V. I., 23, 81, 132, 140 Haase, Hugo, 54, 73, 88, 99, 107–108, 129 Haffner, Sebastian, 56, 119 Hafkesbrink, Hanna, 100, 129 Hague, The, 41–42, 44, 65, 116 Hamilton, Frederic, 125 Hamilton, Ralph, 195 Hardie, Keir, 87 Hedeman, Jules, 90 Hereford, C. H., 183 Hervé, Gustav, 48, 114, 246 Home Rule Crisis, 28–29, 32–33 House, Edward, 41, 234, 283 International Socialist Bureau (ISB), 50– 51, 57, 86, 102 International Socialist Congress (1907), 103 Ireland, 11, 28–30, 32, 71, 75, 81, 89, 91, 142

Isaac, Jules, 122–123 Italo-­Libyan War, 51–53, 55, 80–81, 102 Japan, 41–42, 44, 68, 97, 160, 176, 245 Jaurès, Jean, 25, 48, 53, 56–57, 63, 78, 86, 103–110, 129; death of, 111–114, 126, 137, 139, 162 Joffre, Joseph, 98 John Bull, 75 Jordan, David Starr, 58–60, 80 Jouhaux, Léon, 56, 113 Jünger, Ernst, 130, 231 Kadet Party, 83, 134, 153–154, 186, 215 Karl, Archduke, 21, 242 Karolyi, Michael, 77, 151, 200, 267 Kautsky, Karl, 86 Kerensky, Alexander, 186 Kettle, Tom, 151 Kiel, 22–23, 34, 65, 145 Kindermord, 194, 275 Kipling, Rudyard, 120 Kitchener, Lord Horatio, 222 Klemperer, Victor, 56 Knox, Alfred, 71–72, 75, 151, 167, 189, 195 Kollwitz, Käthe, 8 Kölnische Zeitung, 78, 118 Kruger, Paul, 38, 40, 219 Kuhr, Piete, 227, 232, 259 La France, 202 La Guerre Sociale, 48, 108 Laird, Frank, 95, 123, 264 La Presse, 117 Le Bon, Gustav, 130 Le Bonnet Rouge, 128 L’Ecole Emancipée, 92 Lee, Georgina, 41, 98, 141, 168 Le Figaro, 26–27, 54, 163 Leipzig, Colonel von, 83 Le Temps, 31–32 L’Humanité, 48, 56, 86, 108, 112–113, 139, 215, 264 Lille, 176, 191 Lincoln, W. Bruce, 84 Lloyd George, David, 26, 46–47, 85, 117

290

INDEX

London, 4, 11, 16, 19–20, 28–31, 34, 46, 65, 75, 83, 87, 89, 94, 97, 110, 143–144, 157, 159–160, 177, 179, 185, 192, 210, 217, 219, 228–230, 244 London Times, 16, 31, 33–34, 67, 75–77, 81, 83, 91, 94, 98, 116, 118, 120, 142, 148, 158, 160, 169, 185, 205 Longuet, Jean, 86, 139 Louvain, 6, 203 Low, A. Maurice, 39 Luxemburg, Rosa, 73 MacDonough, Michael, 135, 143–144, 229, 232 Mackenzie, Compton, 21, 30, 140 Manchester Guardian, 76, 92, 94, 97, 112 Manifesto of the Intellectuals, 183 Marbury, Elisabeth, 92, 122, 124, 131, 156 Marne, Battle of the (1914), 184–186, 188, 196–197, 199–201 Matin, 73, 90, 161 Maurras, Charles, 106 Metz, 21, 28 Michaux, Jane, 88, 119, 166, 177, 207 Miliukov, Paul, 41, 55, 83–85, 131, 153, 186, 215 Mitchell, Hannah Webster, 119 Moltke, Helmuth von (the Elder), 4, 234, 259 Morgenpost, 24, 76, 78 Moroccan crises, 39, 43–50, 53, 57, 64, 78, 82, 103, 106 Morrell, Ottoline, 75, 113, 209 Müller, Karl Alexander, 117 Mun, Albert de, 196 Murray, Gilbert, 144, 152, 267 Nagel, Fritz, 204 Nation, 20, 31 Népszava, 32, 134 Neues Politisches Volksblatt, 18, 34 Nevinson, Henry Woodd, 136, 143, 145, 163 New York Times, 124 Nicholas II, Czar, 6, 41–43, 65, 84–85, 99–100, 116, 215

Nicolson, Arthur, 22, 31, 55, 63 Nobel Peace Prize, 39, 42, 55, 245 Norddeutsche Zeitung, 77 Ocker, Otto, 117, 122 Ostend, 34, 91, 113 Owen, Rowland, 193 Owen, Wilfred, 165, 193 Pacifism, 6, 43 Pall Mall Gazette, 116 Pan-­Slavism, 84, 127 Paris, 1–4, 11, 21–22, 48, 54, 58, 63, 69, 71, 78, 86, 88, 94–95, 97, 102, 109, 111–112, 116–117, 123–124, 126, 137, 141, 147, 151, 155–166, 169–170, 173–179, 181, 185–186, 191–192, 197–201, 204, 207–208, 211, 216, 219–220, 222, 228, 239, 240, 243, 268, 276, 281, 283 Paris, German drive on, 197–202 Paris Commune, 178, 197 Passchendaele, Battle of, 7, 236 Pease, Margaret, 113 Peat, Harold, 205–206, 278 Pester Lloyd, 85 Petit Parisien, 90, 161, 187 Pichon, Stéphen, 147 Plessis, Barraute de, 104 Poincaré, Raymond, 27, 31, 63, 70, 113, 115, 147, 161, 267 Poland, 6, 154, 187, 193, 215, 221, 223 Pratz, Claire de, 11–12, 26, 90, 95, 99, 115–116, 122, 125, 158, 201 Princip, Gavrilo, 13–14, 17–18, 48, 240 Prussian Siege Law, 134, 165 Punch, 42, 115, 135, 217, 219 Putnik, Radomir, 12 Quidde, Ludwig, 117 Recouly, Raymond, 136 Refugees, 169, 176–177, 195, 199, 201– 205 Reichstag, 50, 61, 64, 132, 137, 150, 152– 153, 159, 267 Repington, Charles, 83, 98, 120, 259 291

INDEX

Revanche, 58–59, 146, 176, 247 Ribot, Alexandre, 80 Richet, Charles, 79–80 Riegel, Marcel, 87, 117 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 220, 281 Rolland, Romain, 130 Roosevelt, Theodore, 44, 245 Rowntree, Arnold, 32, 89 Royal Welsh Fusiliers, 171, 192, 225, 229 Ruhl, Arthur, 123, 159, 164, 188 Rupprecht, Crown Prince, 206, 259 Russo-­Japanese War. See Japan Sarajevo, 2, 10, 13, 15–16, 19–20, 22–23, 25, 28, 31–32, 34, 35, 37, 39, 41, 43, 65, 85 Saturday Evening Post, 160 Saverne. See Zabern Sazanov, Sergei, 69, 84–85, 123, 250 Scarborough, German shelling of, 224, 229 Schmitt, Bernadotte, 80 Schoenberner, Franz, 19, 123 Scott, Jonathan French, 81–82 Smillie, Robert, 109 Social Democratic Party (SPD), German, 52–53, 105, 187 Socialism, 6, 53, 68, 104–105, 109–110, 112–114, 137, 139, 215, 264 Socialist International, 54, 55, 63, 105– 106 Somme, Battle of, 7, 159, 173–174, 191, 236, 267, 281 Spender, J. A., 33, 46, 71, 135 Steed, Henry Wickham, 16, 22, 33–34, 142, 144 Stumm, Wilhelm von, 115 Stumpf, Richard, 70–71, 126–127 Sulzbach, Herbert, 25, 101–102, 122, 174, 233 Suttner, Bertha von, 42, 245 Sweetser, Arthur, 110, 175–177

Ulster, 29, 71, 75, 283 Ultimatum of July 23, 1, 31, 67–81, 83–89, 91, 93, 106, 110, 112, 116, 120–121 ­Union Sacrée, 152, 154, 186–187 Valéry, Paul, 115 Vandervelde, Emile, 108 Verdun, Battle of, 7, 112, 173, 191, 236 Verhey, Jeffrey, 5, 130 Vienna, 4, 12, 15–17, 19, 23–25, 30–31, 41, 57, 66–67, 73–74, 76–78, 80, 82, 86–89, 91, 94, 101, 103, 108–109, 118, 160, 167, 172, 199–200, 219, 267 Vienna Neue Freie Press, 17–18, 85, 118 Viviani, René, 70, 107, 147 Vorwärts, 18, 24, 48, 56, 73, 76, 78, 120, 167, 184 Waddington, Mary King, 97, 115, 120, 164, 175, 268 Wells, H. G., 26, 30, 115, 122, 152, 237 Westminster Gazette, 31, 33, 71, 135 Wharton, Edith, 97, 122 Wile, Frederic William, 100, 131, 217 Wilhelm, Crown Prince, 39 Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 5, 30, 37–41, 43, 45– 46, 49, 50, 54, 61, 69, 83–84, 98–99, 114, 116, 120, 131 Wilson, Henry, 29, 143 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 209 Wolff, Theodor, 49, 72, 76, 89, 127 Wood, Eric Fi­scher, 122–123, 178–179, 201, 219–220 Ypres, First Battle of, 194, 208, 217–218 Zabern, 57, 60–62 Zeitung, 24, 76 Zola, Emile, 112 Zu­rich, 105 Zweig, Stefan, 10, 34, 63, 79, 91, 101, 113

Tanty, Etienne, 150, 190 Tisza, István, 19, 77 292