Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (81 page)

At last, in failing light she saw the ambulance making its way back towards her, and an hour later she was safe at her hospital. Nothing more vividly emphasises the stultifying boredom of peacetime existence for middle-class women of that era than Elsie Knocker’s later euphoric comment on her experience: ‘it was a wonderful & grand day & I would not have missed it’. She retained her sense of excitement and romance through the years ahead, not diminished by marrying a Belgian airman and becoming Baroness de T’Serclaes.

A week later and some miles to the west, the prime minister’s daughter revealed something of the same enthusiasm for adventure amid carnage. Violet Asquith, who had crossed to France to engage in a few days’ privileged war tourism, severely rebuked civilians in Bailleul, three miles behind the front, whom she saw taunting German PoWs: ‘
Il ne faut pas se moquer des prisonniers
.’ The French were unimpressed: ‘
Eh, dame! Il faut bien! Que voulez-vous? Les allemands c’est un sale peuple – des brigands – des barbares – ils ont tout pillé – tout ravagé
.’ It is easy to see why the French, whose country was being devastated by German invaders, resented the intervention of an Englishwoman who embraced all that she saw with the enthusiasm of a joyrider: ‘Darling father,’ she wrote home to the prime minister, ‘everything that has ever or can ever happen to me pales & shrivels before the thrilling interest of this expedition.’

Antwerp surrendered on the afternoon of 10 October, though most of the garrison and British contingent made good their escape down the coast to join the rest of the allied forces on the narrow strip of Belgian soil now remaining in King Albert’s hands. The monarch himself proudly insisted on remaining at La Panne for the rest of the war. The Royal Naval Division was evacuated through Ostend, where the newly formed British 7th Division was landing, although more than a thousand bluejackets ended up as either German prisoners or Dutch internees. The 7th Division was originally intended to strengthen the garrison of Antwerp, but fortunately – although to Churchill’s fury – wiser counsels prevailed.

The First Lord wrote to Sir John French on 26 October: ‘Antwerp was a bitter blow to me and some aspects have given a handle to my enemies.’ Later, licking his political wounds in a mood of rueful self-pity, he observed: ‘Looking back with after-knowledge and increasing years, I seem to have been too ready to undertake tasks which were hazardous or even forlorn.’ He never acknowledged Antwerp for the fiasco it was. Maurice Festing wrote in disgust, ‘one would have thought a limit would have been placed upon Mr Winston Churchill’s appetite for daredevil pranks and sensational attempts at strokes of genius. Not many months elapsed, however, before he was busy again – this time at the Dardanelles … Should this narrative ever fall into the hands of a publisher, I would ask the great British public to see to it that the Corps of Royal Marines is never again told to go to war on land unless it has been trained, organized and equipped for the purpose.’

Some of Winston Churchill’s admirers and biographers have treated his Antwerp intervention indulgently, as a picaresque adventure, a colourful addition to a wondrous lifetime pageant. In truth, however, what took place represented shocking folly by a minister who abused his powers and betrayed his responsibilities. It is astonishing that the First Lord’s cabinet colleagues so readily forgave him for a lapse of judgement that would have destroyed most men’s careers. A 3 October telegram to the prime minister, proposing to resign his office in return for ‘full powers of a commander of a detached force in the field’, prompted the derisive laughter of colleagues. Asquith wrote: ‘W is an ex-lieutenant of Hussars, and would if his proposal had been accepted have been in command of 2 distinguished Major Generals, not to mention Brigadiers, Colonels & c.’

Asquith’s wider view of Churchill’s behaviour at Antwerp remained benign, but senior officers were appalled. The Fourth Sea Lord ‘was very sarcastic about Winston as a strategist’, wrote Admiralty civil servant Norman Macleod on 12 October. The King’s private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, observed not unreasonably that ‘our friend [Churchill] must be quite off his head!’ Another naval officer said contemptuously that the Antwerp affair ‘read like a story in a child’s picture book’. The
Morning Post
was fiercely critical of the First Lord’s conduct in an editorial on the 13th, causing the
New Statesman
to applaud the fact that ‘a prominent newspaper has broken through the self-imposed rule whereby practically all criticism of the Government has been suppressed’. On 16 October Macleod wrote again: ‘Feeling of depression everywhere – public felt loss of Antwerp keenly, especially as reports had been so optimistic … German advance on Ostend and Warsaw … had effect as well – marked loss of confidence in Adm[iralt]y.’

King Albert’s troops, disorganised and demoralised, fell back to the Yser river and canal, the old medieval waterway by which English wool was carried inland from the sea below Nieuport to the great clothmaking hub of Ypres. Dorothie Feilding, serving nearby, wrote home on 10 October: ‘The Belgian troops have lost their heads now & refuse even to meet the Germans. They just retreat the moment there is a question of a fight. They
are utterly worn out at having had to stand the brunt of it all these months & now are in a state of funk & run like hares. But it does one good to see all these British soldiers about & you know you won’t go under with them about.’ Madame Jeanne van Bleyberghe, whose husband was serving with the Belgian army, wrote from Ghent to a friend in England on 11 October: ‘we all admire England so much, it really is a grand and generous nation. When your soldiers pass in the street, everybody cheers.’

But the British Army would not be seen again in Ghent for many a long day, as the tide of war washed past the city, leaving the Germans in occupation. The 7th Division, whose men Dorothie Feilding met, marched from their Belgian disembarkation ports towards positions north of Ypres. A Royal Welch Fusilier officer met Col. George Malcolm of the London Scottish, one of the newly-come units, who professed regret about arriving at the war ‘too late to have a look in’. Malcolm’s apprehension was unjustified. There would be enough war for all comers, and certainly so for himself. The 7th Division marched towards a junction with the rest of the BEF, which was meanwhile approaching from the south. They met on a battlefield that would become, during the months that followed, the graveyard of the old British Army.

2 ‘INVENTIONS OF THE DEVIL’

New technologies created many opportunities and difficulties for the soldiers of 1914; foremost among them were the consequences of man’s achievement of powered flight. On 25 August, staff at a Bavarian corps headquarters east of Nancy saw an aeroplane circling overhead which eventually dropped a brilliant light. While contemplating the significance of this apparently harmless firework, the Bavarians found themselves under French shellfire – their position had been marked by an air-dropped flare.

A modern writer, Christian Kehrt, suggests that the new-found vulnerability of the sky to man’s invasion roused in many breasts the same lust for dominance as the wildernesses of Africa. During the previous century, soldiers’ ventures into the skies had been limited to sporadic use of observation balloons, tethered to cables. These had their value, and continued to do so throughout the First World War, but their range of vision was limited, and they could be hoisted only behind a combatant’s own front. Powered flight represented a stunning advance. In 1903 the Wright brothers had ended mankind’s millennia of earthbound bondage with their first
successful take-off. In just eleven intervening years before war came, aircraft capabilities advanced at astounding speed. German test pilot Ernst Canter noted in his logbook that while in 1910 he flew at a height of eighty feet, two years later he was ascending to almost 5,000. In 1908 one pilot in five died – a corpse for every thousand miles flown. By 1912, the accidental death rate had fallen to one for every fifty-one pilots – a fatality per 103,000 miles.

German generals were initially more impressed by airships than by aeroplanes, and rejected a 1907 commercial approach from the Wrights. But some pundits quickly predicted that heavier-than-air machines would prove more efficacious than Zeppelins: Wilhelm Hesse argued that they would ‘soon outstrip all existing mechanical transportation by their speed and freedom from the ground’. In 1909 Germany began to address the new science more seriously, stimulated by knowledge that France was then training forty-one military pilots to its own ten. Dr Walther Huth of the Albatros company paid for his own chauffeur to learn to fly, who there-after became a military instructor.

The following year France’s Gen. Joseph Manoury, who would command Sixth Army at the Marne, took to the air during manoeuvres, and was profoundly impressed by seeing for himself what flight must do to war. After the German army’s 1912 exercises, Falkenhayn reflected upon a range of technological innovations of which aircraft were among the foremost: ‘When these inventions of the devil work, then what they achieve is more than amazing; when they do not work, then they achieve less than nothing.’ The Kaiser formally accorded Germany’s air corps parity with his other services in March 1914, when he ordered the Protestant Church to include fliers in its regular prayer for the armed forces.

The British were slow starters: in 1909 the War Office temporarily closed down army flying experiments, claiming that their cost of £2,500 – this at a time when the Germans had already spent £400,000 and the French little less – was unaffordable. But in 1912 the Royal Flying Corps was formed, and at the following year’s manoeuvres Lt. Gen. Sir James Grierson told King George: ‘I think, sir, that these aeroplanes are going to spoil war. When they come over I can only tell my men to cover their heads with hay and make a noise like a mushroom!’ Grierson was nonetheless an imaginative early convert to the new technology, exploiting air reconnaissance to win an exercise. Senior officers of every army realised that power to view the earth from the sky, reaching far behind enemy lines, changed the rules, rendering concentrations vulnerable to bombardment and every
manoeuvre susceptible to enemy counterstroke. In past wars, before a battle commanders liked to position themselves on hilltops with a view. Now, such exposure could be fatal: German staff regulations emphasised the importance of avoiding locating headquarters near landmarks.

But air reconnaissance had its limitations, of which the most obvious was the weather: low cloud and serious rain grounded planes. Even if pilots became airborne and observed troop movements, they had much to learn about interpreting the significance of what they saw. Moreover, they could not be assured that generals would display the imagination to heed their reports – French at Mons and Kluck at the Marne were only two obvious examples of commanders who failed to draw appropriate conclusions from air intelligence received. Finally, aircraft were chronically scarce, especially on the Eastern Front. The Germans started with 254 trained pilots and 246 aircraft, half Taubes and the rest Albatroses and Aviatiks, but only a modest proportion were serviceable at any one time. The same was true of France’s
Aviation Militaire
, which had two hundred machines and five hundred trained pilots, soon reinforced by civilian volunteers. The aircraft – mostly Caudrons and Morane-Saulniers – were organised in
escadrilles
– squadrons – of either six two-seaters or four single-seaters. The French air corps’ erratic commanding officer first mobilised his fliers on his own initiative at the beginning of July – a month before war – then decided that any conflict would be brief, and in August closed down flying schools and sent all instructors to the front. More rational policies were adopted after a new general was appointed.

The British went to war with 197 pilots and 113 serviceable operational aircraft, mostly Farmans and BE2a biplanes. Churchill had also created a separate Royal Naval Air Service. The army initially deluded itself that replacement pilots could be found by inviting gentleman fliers to secure their own Aero Club certificates of competence, themselves paying the necessary £75, before enlisting for service. ‘Members of the RFC who own their own aeroplanes should be encouraged to bring them to the Central Flying School when they undergo their training there,’ said a War Office instruction. In the autumn of 1914, however, an RFC flight-training programme was hastily introduced, which before the war’s end had killed more pilots than enemy action. The first Flying Corps battlefield casualty was Sgt-Maj. Jillings, hit in the leg by a rifle bullet while flying over Belgium on 22 August.

Meanwhile, the Austrians owned just forty-eight planes and the Belgians twelve. The Russians had an impressive paper strength of two
hundred aircraft of sixteen types, and displayed notable design flair. But such was their organisational incompetence that serviceability was chronically low. The French, alone among the belligerents, had gained previous practical experience of using aircraft for military purposes, during their 1913 colonial campaign in Morocco. French biplanes flew at speeds of between 50 and 70 mph, and required between thirty and sixty minutes to reach an altitude of 6,000 feet, depending on conditions; Blériot and Taube monoplanes were somewhat faster and nimbler.