Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (76 page)

By November 1914 Eton had lost sixty-five of its former pupils, Wellington thirty-eight, Charterhouse and Harrow twenty-one each, Rugby twenty. This toll did nothing to stem martial ardour among such schools’ leavers. Lord Cranborne, heir to the Marquess of Salisbury, invited his two friends Oliver Lyttelton and Arthur Penn to stay at Hatfield, the family palace, until the army was ready to accept their services. They passed much of the time shooting, which prompted laughter about another sort of gunfire they would soon experience. A determination to view the play as a comedy persisted through a later spell in France: when Penn was invalided home after being shot in both legs, he added an entry to his gamebook: ‘Beat – Cour de l’Avoue, Bag – Self.’

In a sixth-form debate at Westminster, the motion ‘It will be disastrous to the world when Arbitration takes the place of War’ was carried by eleven votes to seven, though interestingly another motion – ‘The Kaiser is responsible for the present War’ – was defeated by ten votes to six. Schoolmasters shepherded their former pupils towards the battlefield with a ruthlessness suggesting that they supposed themselves dispatching a cricket eleven to play in the Great Game. On 2 September Dr A.A. David, headmaster of Rugby, wrote to
The Times
emphasising the moral benefits of volunteering: ‘here is a splendid opportunity of giving a lead to young men of all classes. Here also is a supreme test of school spirit and character … To parents we would recommend a mother’s advice to a hesitating son
… “My boy, I don’t want you to go, but if I were you, I should.”’ So extravagant was the sentimentality with which the war was promoted in its early months that in due time, as its human cost soared, a lasting revulsion emerged among some of the audience, who felt that they had been duped. The genuine merits of the allied cause became profoundly tarnished by the baroque language and spurious religiosity with which it was marketed, especially in the eyes of the generation that would do most of the dying that made victory belatedly possible.

Deepening shadows over their own prospects of survival caused some men to abandon thoughts of early marriage, but persuaded others to seize the moment. The daughter of a friend of parliamentary lawyer Hugh Godley was married on 23 August, and became a widow when her new husband was killed just four days later. A twenty-four-year-old gunner officer named John Peake Knight, DSO, had been engaged to a Miss Olive Knight of Brighton since 1913. In August 1914 they agreed to delay a wedding until the end of the war, but the approach of winter in the trenches caused them to change their minds. Knight was granted a brief leave. The loving couple were joined at St John’s church, Bromley, the groom clad in khaki, as had become fashionable, rather than displaying the glories of full dress uniform. A reception was held at his parents’ house, nearby Sundridge Park; within days, John Knight was back with his battery in France, where he was killed in 1916. Many newspaper accounts reported weddings without receptions or perhaps even consummations, such as that of Miss Joan Jameson to Mr John Farrell of the Leinster Regiment: ‘The honeymoon was to have been spent in Scotland, but the bridegroom had to rejoin his regiment.’

Amid millions of separations, letters assumed a critical significance in the lives of divided families. Some men wrote home every day they were not in action, and many wives put pen to paper at least as often. Most Europeans were now literate: during the entire 1870 war, the Prussian army in the field received half a million letters and parcels. By contrast, in 1914 that figure rose to 9.9 million pieces dispatched each day to the German army, with 6.8 million coming back. The mere fact of receiving a communication from a loved one was cause for emotion: ‘I received such a long and lovely letter from my husband,’ wrote Austrian schoolteacher Itha J on 19 October. ‘How much we women depend on our beloved spouses!’

But most writers both at home and in the field found it hard to describe events, and especially to avow passion, in a fashion remotely capable of
matching the emotional needs of the recipients. Itha J again: ‘I write a daily letter to my beloved husband. I recount everything that saddens and moves me. Yesterday I had one letter from him, and today two. He writes in a factual, interesting way about his daily doings. At the end, there is always a little [word of] tenderness! I would like less objective description and more tenderness. But he can’t help himself – he must wring every tender word out of his rough heart.’ Some French peasants, transformed into
poilus
, wrote home to give their womenfolk minute instructions about their farms. One soldier, from Saint-Alban in the Tarn, expressed anxiety about a mare in the stable, and demanded accusingly of his wife: ‘You say that you are not behind [with the tillage] but you do not tell me [how many] sacks of oats and corn you have sown.’ A woman in Lot-et-Garonne sent a present of pâté to her husband’s commanding officer, hoping desperately that this might persuade him to spare her man from utmost peril.

‘It was a polite convention at home, to which men on leave conformed,’ wrote gunner officer Rolfe Scott-James, the author’s grandfather, ‘to respect their supposed disinclination to talk about the war. The real disinclination was that of the people at home to listen. I do not mean that the overseas serviceman was in any degree better or worse than his fellow-countryman at home – only that the latter had turned into one kind of animal, the former into another. If the truth be told, they were not really even in sympathy.’

Some privileged people found it hard to treat the war with the gravity it assuredly demanded. After a visit to France in October, Violet Asquith wrote to her father the prime minister, describing in tones of teasing gaiety her cross-examination of an old woman refugee ‘in hope of atrocities’: ‘
Les allemands se sont mal conduits dans votre village?
’

‘
Très mal – ils ont tout ravagé etc.
’

‘
Ils étaient cruels?
’

‘
Très cruels – ils ont tué un cochon!
’

The questioner expressed relief about ‘the death of a pig having loomed so large in the category of horrors!’ She was too crass to know how large such a tragedy might loom in the economy of a French peasant family.

Contemporary issues of the society magazine
The Lady
likewise emphasise the naïveté that persisted in British polite society. On 15 October a correspondent lamented the privations thrust upon the rural upper classes by losing so many husbands and hunt servants to the army. Under the headline ‘Sportswomen and the War’, her letter reported crossly: ‘Troubles at the kennels are unending, for at present no one has got the work in hand.
Though Evelyn is down there morning, noon and night, she has not sufficient confidence in her own judgement to keep the men in order. The feeding is a constant bother, for the man who now reigns as feeder is a dirty, slovenly creature who only follows our directions when he is forced to.’

Quite early in the war, there were signs of a trend which became progressively more pronounced – a decline of social deference, to the dismay of its former beneficiaries. An Englishman who met an old friend from Oxford days lamented: ‘Ten years ago, when I came into a crowded bus, a working man would rise and touch his cap and give me his seat. I am sorry to see that spirit dying out.’ Racial distinctions, however, remained as sharp as ever. The
Clarion
on 10 October deplored a report that a British general had dined in the same hotel dining room as an Indian prince in uniform without addressing a word to him. On the following night in the same hotel’s smoking room, an eyewitness saw a group of officers likewise ignoring the ‘dusky potentate’. A
Clarion
columnist wrote angrily: ‘If an Indian Prince is not fit to speak to, why does our King accept his services?’

This was a good question, but not one which the arbiters of British society chose to answer. If pressed, many of them would have asserted that the war was being fought to preserve the standards and decencies of traditional Britain. Almost all the belligerents, indeed, supposed themselves to be upholding conservative social values. Middle-class volunteers for the army raised strong objections, in Leo Amery’s words, to ‘being put down in the barracks next to a couple of lousy and swearing hooligans’. Cyril Asquith, the prime minister’s younger son who later served as an officer in France, described war service contemptuously as ‘fighting barbarians in the company of bores and bounders’. Though shared peril caused some blurring of class distinctions at the front, many middle-class men – and women – found it hard to adjust to being thrust into enforced intimacy with their social inferiors: ‘Never did I expect it would fall to my lot to sleep a whole night under heavy shell fire in a room with common soldiers and all of us lying on straw,’ wrote nurse Elsie Knocker in a Belgian barn. When she accompanied a group of wounded men back to England, they were all obliged to doss down for the night in a Dover hostel, after being refused admission to a local hospital. At Euston station, she had difficulty persuading the authorities to allow her casualties to be laid out in the ladies’ waiting room until their train came.

A few fortunate folk found themselves, by contrast, in environments more comfortable than those to which they were accustomed at home.
Austrian peasant Karl Auberhofer, a thirty-four-year-old father of seven mobilised with the
Landsturm
, was billeted in a luxury hotel in the Tyrol. He marvelled: ‘One can just sit down at a table and be served by a waitress as if one was a nobleman – one doesn’t have to think about anything.’ As Auberhofer was fortunate enough to escape front-line service, he decided that military duty was much preferable to hard labour on his farm. He and his comrades passed their days and nights drinking and gambling with an abandon unthinkable at home. Duty obliged him only to spend two hours a day guarding a railway line, so ‘church parades are our hardest work apart from eating’.

The Lady
addressed with sublime condescension the issue of continental refugees in England: ‘English life and ways must seem strange to the many Belgians and French staying here. One thing that the womenfolk sadly miss is the bargaining which is the accompaniment of almost every purchase they make in their respective countries. The fixed price which is the joy of most Englishwomen they regard as a dull arrangement.’ The magazine’s social gossip column picked up the same theme: ‘Among the many who are offering hospitality to the Belgians who have suffered so greatly from the war are Lord and Lady Exeter, who have the Belgian Countess Villers and her five children as their guests at Burghley House, their historic place in the Midlands. Lady Exeter, who has the pretty name of Myra, is very attractive, with fair hair and dark eyes. Turquoises become her, and she owns some beautiful ornaments in these stones.’

The Lady
strove to help women address unexpected social problems thrown up by the war. In its ‘Daily Difficulty’ column of 10 December, it raised the dilemma facing a cat-owning woman who houses a dog for an officer setting forth for the front. When the dog starts killing her cats, what should she do?
The Lady
asserted that she had a responsibility to ensure the dog was properly quartered, but might reasonably seek another home for it. The magazine also reported delicate problems of etiquette facing wives returning from the colonies. It urged that they should not have calling cards printed with their temporary addresses, but instead merely strike through their permanent address on existing cards. They should recognise that established residents of a given community would not call on a newcomer unless introduced by a mutual acquaintance. To facilitate this process,
The Lady
suggested that newcomers from abroad should post notice of their arrival in a reputable newspaper. The nearest the magazine came to addressing the travails of British menfolk on the continent was in an article on logistics: ‘the task of feeding an army of hard-worked men
on a modern battlefield is a truly wonderful achievement – “housekeeping” you may term it, upon a colossal scale. Because we have command of the sea, however, provisioning our Expeditionary Force becomes a fairly easy matter.’ It is unsurprising that many people at home remained blissfully ignorant of the horrors unfolding in France, if they relied on
The Lady
for enlightenment – and serious newspapers offered little more substantial fare.

Some innocents allowed lingering wisps of humanitarian sentiment to cross the fronts. In Schneidemühl little Elfriede Kuhr wrote in her diary: ‘Sailors whose vessels sink in naval battles must be terribly frightened, because no ship will stop to rescue them. When all those people drowned after the
Titanic
hit an iceberg, the whole world recoiled in horror. Now, ships sink every day and nobody asks what happens to the crews.’ The little girl and her friend Gretel embraced a personal mission: to tidy and decorate the graves of Russian PoWs who died in the local camp near Schneidemühl, far from their homes.

PoW compounds became popular tourist attractions in rural areas, where foreign visitors of any kind had a curiosity value. The authorities became exasperated by the peasant practice of taking a Sunday family stroll to peer at the inmates through the wire; in Münster an order was published banning all civilians from approaching within six hundred metres of a camp. In German cities, crowds – mostly women – assembled around trains bearing prisoners on their way to PoW camps. Some patriots were shocked by displays of sympathy for the foreigners’ plight: a journalist accused those who indulged in such feelings of succumbing to ‘a degenerate desire for erotic adventure’, and the government threatened to publish the names of these shameless creatures. When it emerged that four nurses at Thionville had become engaged to French PoWs, the German Red Cross was informed by the government that its volunteers would no longer be permitted to visit the compounds.

Any display of sympathy for the enemy became increasingly unacceptable. In Carinthia a Slovenian Catholic priest was imprisoned as a Serbophile for telling his flock: ‘Let us pray for the Emperor and Austria but also for the Serbs to see the light.’ Dr Eugen Lampe wrote gleefully from Hapsburg Ljubljana about news of British defeats: ‘Everyone wishes ill to the British. Bernatorič, whose Jewish establishment called itself “The English Clothing Warehouse”, announces that he has renamed it “The Ljubljana Clothing Warehouse”.’ An English acquaintance of Ethel Cooper, who lived in Leipzig, had a baby by a German man who
was killed in France. The authorities refused either to support the child or to allow the woman, as an enemy alien, to take a job. The Oxford classicist Gilbert Murray initially opposed the war, but before long was writing: ‘I find that I desperately desire to hear of German dreadnoughts sunk in the North Sea … When I see that 20,000 Germans have been killed in such-and-such an engagement and next day that it was only 2,000, I am sorry.’