THERE HAD BEEN plenty of pomp and circumstance on the schedule, but not much else. Archduke Franz Ferdinand's visit to Sarajevo, capital of one of the outlying provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was largely ceremonial. Fifty years old, overweight and ill-tempered, he was not on the best of terms with his elderly uncle, the Emperor, whose throne he was due to inherit. Unusually for a member of European royalty, however, he had a happy marriage, and his pregnant wife had come along from Vienna for the trip. During two days of rain, she visited schools and orphanages while, in his role as inspector general of the army, Franz Ferdinand observed military maneuvers. At the suburban spa where they were staying the couple gave a dinner dance for local officials and army officers; a military band played The Blue Danube and other waltzes. The next morning, June 28, 1914, the sun came out and Franz Ferdinand and Sophie headed into the city in a convoy of cars flying the black and yellow Hapsburg dynasty flag for a 24-gun salute, a welcoming ceremony, and a formal celebration of their 14th wedding anniversary.
The very headgear of the dignitaries who greeted them in Sarajevo reflected the crazy quilt of this ungainly empire that threatened to come apart at the seams: homburgs, yarmulkes, miters, fezzes, turbans, plus cavalry helmets and brimmed military caps in different shapes for regiments of different ethnicities. The empire was a wobbly agglomeration of nearly a dozen minorities, almost all of them restless under Vienna's autocratic domination. The region around Sarajevo included many ethnic Serbs, among them a faction of militant nationalists. Living next door to the independent nation of Serbia, they dreamed of a Greater Serbia encompassing all Serbs. Gavrilo Princip was one of them, a 20-year-old aspiring poet. Small, ascetic, and tubercular, fired up by the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Russian anarchists and aided by a shadowy group of sympathizers across the border in Serbia, he conceived the idea of assassinating the heir apparent on his visit to Sarajevo, and with several fellow conspirators planned a suicide mission. On the morning of June 28 they set off with pistols, bombs, and poison tablets they would swallow after their task was accomplished.
Relations between the empire and Serbia were already touchy. Austro- Hungarian officials considered that country's very existence a threat, and were flexing their military might with the army exercises that the Archduke had come to watch. They were looking for any possible excuse to invade, dismantle, and partition Serbia. Waiting in the crowd on a sunny Sarajevo street for the Archduke's motorcade, Gavrilo Princip was about to provide one.
Making things even more combustible was Kaiser Wilhelm II, the staunchest backer of Vienna. A world industrial colossus, Germany was like an impatient, overbearing big brother to Austria-Hungary. For 35 years the two empires had been bound together by a military alliance, each committed to support the other if attacked. The hot-blooded Kaiser, enthusiastic about flaunting Germany's power but for the moment deprived of opportunities to do so, frequently encouraged his ally to take on little Serbia.
In the background was Russia, another rickety empire and long-time rival of Austria-Hungary for control of the Balkans. The Russians' emotional ties to the Serbs, fellow Slavs and fellow Eastern Orthodox believers, went far back in time (and, indeed, would be a factor in the Balkan wars of the 1990s). Vienna always suspected, sometimes correctly, that any expression of Greater Serbian nationalism had covert Russian support. If Austria-Hungary invaded Serbia, the Russian government would face overwhelming pressure from its own people to come to the aid of their Slavic brethren. Helmuth von Moltke of the German general staff had already assured his Austrian counterpart that if this ever happened, Germany would gladly join a war against Russia.
Like so many German military men, he was eager for the inevitable war to come, in which, he felt, "the issue will be one of a struggle between Germandom and Slavdom." The Kaiser agreed, optimistically assuming that in the long run the British could not remain allied with the "Slavs and Gallics," and would come over to the side of their Teutonic cousins. Racial paranoia about Russia ran deep. "This unorganised Asiatic mass," declared the head of Germany's Royal Library, "like the desert with its sands, wants to gather up our fields of grain." Sometimes high German officials and industrialists talked privately of annexing a slice of western Russia and of turning other parts of it into vassal states.
It was into this powder keg of jostling empires, just as Franz Ferdinand's open touring car unexpectedly stopped on the street in front of him, that young Gavrilo Princip fired two point-blank pistol shots. One hit the Archduke, who was wearing a sky-blue tunic and a helmet with green peacock feathers, in the jugular vein; the other struck the Duchess, dressed in white silk. Both were dead within half an hour.
Outside the Balkans, the assassinations made the headlines for a few days, then dropped from sight. In England, the early summer of 1914 was warm and bright, perfect for tennis at Wimbledon and for the upcoming Henley Regatta; the cloud that threatened to spoil everything was the growing likelihood of civil war in Ireland. The Continent seemed far off. It was "difficult to discuss foreign affairs freely," said one member of the House of Commons, "when our home affairs were in such a particularly evil plight."
In France, President Raymond Poincaré was at the races at Long-champ, where the Baron de Rothschild's horse Sardanapale won the Grand Prix, when he received news of the killings, and did not bother to leave. The French had something far more intriguing to distract them: the sensational murder case against Henriette Caillaux, wife of a former prime minister. She had shot and killed a newspaper editor who threatened to publish love letters she and her husband had exchanged when both were still married to others. At her trial the next month, the murder would be judged a crime of passion for which a woman, by definition not in control of her emotions, could not be held accountable. She was acquitted.
Even today it seems extraordinary how swiftly Princip's two bullets, fired in a city most people had never heard of, set in motion events that would so profoundly reshape our world. Few periods have been as intensively studied as the six weeks that followed the moment Princip squeezed off his shots, unsuccessfully swallowed his poison capsule, and was wrestled away from an angry crowd by sword-wearing policemen. (He would die of tuberculosis in prison four years later.)
If the Archduke and his wife had not been assassinated, might the war have been avoided? Possibly, but given Austria-Hungary's impatience to crush Serbia and Germany's ambitions to dominate Europe, it is hard to imagine a conflict of some sort not taking place—not when we listen, for example, to the Kaiser, at a court ball in 1913, pointing out the general designated "to lead the march on Paris," or asking, fruitlessly, two successive Belgian kings for the right to begin that march through Belgium, or when we read General von Moltke, in 1915, writing to a friend about "this war which I prepared and initiated."
Princip's bullets may have provided the spark, but—German and Austro-Hungarian aggressiveness aside—three other factors steepened Europe's plunge toward the abyss. First was the pair of rival alliances that obligated some countries to come to the aid of others in case of war. Second was the pressure felt by all the major Continental powers to mobilize their large forces of trained reservists who could triple or quadruple the size of any peacetime army. Mobilizing an army in 1914 required several weeks: reservists had to be called up, get to their bases, and collect their rifles and equipment; then millions of men, their weapons, and tens of thousands of tons of food and supplies had to be laboriously deployed by train and horse-drawn wagon to wherever the fighting was expected to be. The very time necessary for mobilization, however, was something inherently destabilizing, for if the other side looked about to mobilize, and you didn't do so, you would be at a fatal disadvantage. A third dangerous factor was the tremendous advantage gained by any country that attacked first, for this guaranteed that the fighting would at least begin on another country's territory.
In Vienna, Emperor Franz Joseph seemed remarkably unperturbed by the death of the nephew he disliked. What he and his advisers saw in the assassination of the heir apparent was something they had long sought: an excuse to attack Serbia. Anti-Serbian riots soon broke out on Vienna's streets. In Germany, when a launch raced out from shore to bring news of the murders to his yacht off Kiel, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had been a close friend of Franz Ferdinand and impatient for him to succeed his aging, side-whiskered uncle, was crushed. A few days later at his palace, he told Vienna's ambassador to Berlin that he would back any Austro-Hungarian move against Serbia—and he urged that the upstart Serbs be taught a lesson with no delay. In effect, the Kaiser, who had far more power than a constitutional monarch like Britain's, gave Austria a secret blank check to invade.
Was anyone in the Serbian cabinet aware of the plans of Princip and his tiny band? No proof of this has ever surfaced, but it hardly mattered now that Austria had the perfect pretext to wipe Serbia off the map.
July was the month when Europe's emperors, kings, and prime ministers began their summer vacations, so the steps toward the cataclysm were taken in slow motion. In Berlin and Vienna, although messengers and telegraph wires were kept busy, no break in the normal routine that might hint at an impending attack on Serbia was allowed. Even General von Moltke, more impatient for war than ever ("We are ready," he had said some weeks earlier, "and the sooner the better for us"), conspicuously went to take the waters at the famous spa in Carlsbad. The Kaiser departed for a cruise off Norway. Germany's chancellor headed for his country estate. Austro-Hungarian officials, from the Emperor on down, similarly took their holidays. The Kaiser sent birthday greetings to the King of Serbia because, the German Foreign Office advised, "the omission of the customary telegram would be too noticeable." All over Europe those of a class who could afford to take July off were doing so: young George Cecil, home on leave from the army at his mother's country house, Great Wigsell, whiled away his time playing cricket with the Kiplings.
The Kaiser had convinced himself that if Austria-Hungary promptly attacked Serbia, there would be no risk of Russian intervention: Tsar Nicholas II's own grandfather had been murdered by terrorists, so how could he come to the aid of a nation possibly implicated in the assassination of two members of another Emperor's family? Furthermore, if the attack were immediate, as the Kaiser urged, Russia would not even be able to intervene. Unlike industrialized countries with dense rail networks, Russia, with its more primitive infrastructure and vast distances, would need some six weeks to fully mobilize. By then, Austria should long have Serbia fully occupied.
Even though the Austro-Hungarian general staff had already been planning moves against Serbia several weeks before the assassinations, it was unable to follow the Kaiser's urging to strike quickly and without warning. To their dismay, Austrian officials discovered that large numbers of army troops had been granted leave to go home and help their families with the summer harvest. Recalling them would tip the government's hand. As a result, only on July 23, 1914, almost four weeks after the killings, did the Austro-Hungarian envoy present an ultimatum to the Serbian finance minister—the prime minister was out of town—who refused to accept it. The diplomat finally left the document on a table and departed. By design, the ultimatum was composed of demands that Serbia could never accept, such as the removal of government officials to be specified and a carte blanche for Austro-Hungarian police to operate on Serbian territory. It was this warlike document, not the assassinations, that rang out like a warning bell across the continent, signaling that, for the first time since the Battle of Waterloo nearly a century earlier, Europe was facing an all-engulfing war.
Winston Churchill, now First Lord of the Admiralty, was in a cabinet meeting about the Irish crisis when a messenger arrived with news that the foreign secretary shared with his colleagues: "The quiet grave tones of Sir Edward Grey's voice were heard," he later wrote, "reading a document which had just been brought to him from the Foreign Office. It was the Austrian note to Serbia.... The parishes of Fermanagh and Tyrone faded back into the mists and squalls of Ireland, and a strange light began ... to fall and grow upon the map of Europe."
Prime Minister Asquith was optimistic his own country could avoid the dangers of the strange light. He sometimes penned letters during meetings, and from that same cabinet session he wrote to his confidante, Venetia Stanley, "We are in measurable ... distance of a real Armageddon." But about Britain he added reassuringly, "Happily, there seems to be no reason why we should be anything more than spectators." Famous for enjoying his leisure, the following weekend he went to play golf.
Desperately mobilizing its small army, Serbia sent an urgent appeal asking the Russian Tsar, "in your generous Slav heart," for help. In St. Petersburg, the Russian capital, the general staff ordered the first steps toward mobilization. France, bound to Russia by treaty, recalled all generals to active duty and canceled all army leaves. Then some 40,000 French troops stationed in Morocco were ordered home.
The moves and countermoves succeeded each other ever faster. On July 28 Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia and the following day Austrian gunboats on the Danube began shelling the Serbian capital, Belgrade—the first actual shots of the First World War. Kaiser Wilhelm II returned from his seagoing holiday, boiling with exasperation that the bumbling Austrians had not done this weeks earlier. In his erratic way he was having an attack of cold feet, for now France and Russia were mobilizing against him. And Britain took an ominous step.
As a long-planned test of its reserve system, in mid-July the Royal Navy had called up reservists from all over the country to man more than 180 warships—the most powerful armada that had ever been assembled in one spot—for exercises off the great south coast naval base at Spithead. Thrilling spectators onshore and in boats, an endless line of vessels, studded with huge Dreadnought-class battleships like the Audacious and Colossus, had steamed past the royal yacht for six hours, the sailors on board returning King George V's salute with rousing cheers. The government then decided to keep the reservists on duty. On July 29 Churchill secretly ordered the core of the fleet to move north to its protected wartime base. From the English Channel, an 18-mile line of battleships and battle cruisers, running at top speed and with lights out, tore through the night up the North Sea to safe anchorage at Scapa Flow, in the Orkney Islands north of Scotland, where a tight circle of fogbound islands would protect them from enemy ships and submarines.
Meanwhile, the British ambassador in Vienna sent a telegram to London: "This country has gone wild with joy at the prospect of war with Serbia." In Berlin, General von Moltke, his eyes no longer on paltry Serbia but on France and Russia, was convinced that Germany should strike. Its army, Europe's best, was prepared. "We shall never hit it again so well as we do now," he said impatiently. The German foreign minister told the Russian ambassador that, with Russia mobilizing, Germany would be "likewise obliged to mobilize ... and the diplomatists must now leave the talking to the cannon."
Indecisive and fatalistic, Tsar Nicholas II waffled, issuing contradictory orders, now for full mobilization, now for partial mobilization. Trying to halt the momentum toward war, he exchanged telegrams with the Kaiser—in English, which they both spoke fluently. But his top generals, like the German ones, were eager to let the cannon do the talking. "I will ... smash my telephone," said one, so that he could not "be found to give any contrary orders for a new postponement of general mobilization." Having humiliatingly lost a war to Japan a decade earlier, the Russian high command felt anxious to prove its mettle. If France were attacked, the generals felt, for Russia to refuse to go to war, as its treaty commitments required, would be an intolerable loss of face. Outside the British embassy in St. Petersburg, an enormous crowd rallied late into the night, excited that Britain's all-powerful fleet might join the war on Russia's side. Nearby, as the Tsar and Tsarina appeared on the balcony of their palace, a great mass of Russians sank to their knees and fervently sang the national anthem.
Although both sides made proposals for mediation, the mobilizations and ultimatums rolled inexorably onward. In Britain, however, most people still hoped the country would not be drawn into the maelstrom. No formal treaties bound it, and despite left-wing rhetoric, most of Britain's industrialists and financiers were not eager for war: after all, Germany was Britain's largest trading partner. In addition, all those monarchical family ties seemed to promise that Europe could step back from the cliff's edge. "Czar, Kaiser and King May Yet Arrange Peace," ran an optimistic headline in the New York Times.
This was the moment that Keir Hardie and his comrades had so long feared, and they hoped desperately that they could call on labor and socialist movements across the continent to reverse the drift toward war. These forces had grown remarkably strong. The number of socialist parliamentary deputies had been rising rapidly, not only in Germany, but in Italy, Belgium, and France. In the past five years, British trade union membership had nearly doubled, and for some time there had been talk of staging a general strike in November 1914. Russian workers were the most militant of all: 1,450,000 of them had gone on strike in the first seven months of the year; in St. Petersburg this July, strikers were smashing shop windows and, in one working-class district, had put up street barricades.
Hardie, who was now talking about the need for a "United States of Europe," had spent the early part of the year railing against war on a speaking tour of Britain. Besides his many supporters in the trade union movement, there was a wider circle of possible sympathizers as well, such as the network of Britons who, like him, had once opposed the Boer War. Even though his comrade in that struggle, Emmeline Pankhurst, had spurned male allies in her suffrage campaign, hadn't she also declared that the WSPU had no use for war? And Christabel, the daughter she was so close to, had, as recently as June, echoed her mother in an article in the organization's newspaper, referring to "men's wars" as "savage and cruel and violent" and "a horror unspeakable ... a mechanical and soulless massacre of multitudes of soldiers, mere boys some of them." Another opponent of the Boer War, David Lloyd George, was now in the cabinet as chancellor of the exchequer—and in public statements, even after the assassinations at Sarajevo, seemed to go out of his way to play down the possibility of war with Germany. Might this new crisis find all of them campaigning together once again?
At the end of July, Europe's socialist parties called an emergency meeting in Brussels at the Maison du Peuple, the headquarters of Belgium's trade unionists, whose café, theater, and cooperative shops hinted at the enlightened social order that united workers might soon bring into being. On a rainy day, their journeys slowed by railways newly clogged with mobilizing soldiers, Hardie came from Britain, Jaurès from France, the diminutive, chain-smoking Rosa Luxemburg from Germany, and more comrades from other countries. To Hardie's disappointment, not all endorsed his call for a general strike against the looming war. The delegates did, at least, approve an antiwar resolution, and called for a full emergency congress of the Second International in Paris ten days later. Jaurès would preside there; perhaps, Hardie hoped, with his great eloquence he could steer the delegates toward a general strike. He was known as a charismatic speaker no matter what he was talking about. "The walls of the room seemed to dissolve: we swam in the ether," wrote one listener after hearing Jaurès mesmerize a dinner party with a discourse on astronomy. "The women forgot to re-powder their faces, the men to smoke, the servants to go in search of their own supper."
Alarming the delegates, the news that Austria had declared war on Serbia arrived during the Brussels meeting—but so did dramatic proof of opposition to German militarism: a telegram from Berlin reporting an antiwar demonstration of 100,000 people on the Unter den Linden, the city's great boulevard. That evening Jaurès stood before a rally of Belgian workers with his arm around Hugo Haase, co-chair of the German Social Democrats—just the sort of public gesture that enraged ultranationalists in France. He spoke with all the passion of someone who had feared the coming of this moment his whole life; when he finished, the crowd of some 7,000 poured through the streets of Brussels, singing "The Internationale" and chanting "Guerre à la guerre!" (War on war!)
"It is impossible that matters will not be settled," Jaurès told a Belgian socialist leader the next morning. "Come, I have a few hours before my train. Let's go to the Museum and see the Flemish primitives." Once back in Paris, Jaurès hurried to the Chamber of Deputies to lobby his fellow legislators against war. The French socialists were encouraged when a special envoy from their sister party in Germany rushed to Paris to assure them that the socialist bloc in the German parliament would vote against the war credits the Kaiser was about to ask for. If socialists in France and Germany worked together, could not the conflict be prevented?
Events outraced them. "The sword is being forced into my hand," Kaiser Wilhelm II declared on July 31. Playing the role of the aggrieved victim of Russia's mobilization, he promptly ordered Germany's own first steps in the process. (Tsar Nicholas II would use similar words a few days later: "I have done all in my power to avert war. Now ... it has been forced on me.") Britain then asked both France and Germany for guarantees that they would honor Belgian neutrality. France said yes within the hour. Germany did not reply.
That night, returning home from dinner, Hardie found a crowd of journalists gathered outside his London flat. They had terrible news from Paris: a fanatical young nationalist had fired two shots into Jean Jaurès as he was dining with some comrades at the Café Croissant on the Rue Montmartre. Slumped across the table, he was dead within minutes. Crowds swept toward the restaurant in such numbers that it took the police a quarter of an hour to clear the way for an ambulance. The French cabinet feared a working-class uprising might occur just as war was about to begin. Politicians who had had no use for Jaurès when he was alive rushed to comfort his widow and to proclaim to all that, at this moment of crisis, the great man surely would have called for national unity.
A German ultimatum to Russia demanding a halt to mobilization brought no answer. On August 1, Germany called up all troops; officers waving handkerchiefs and shouting "Mobilization!" stood in open-topped cars that raced through the streets of the capital. Outside the Kaiser's palace, crowds broke into a hymn of thanksgiving. That evening, Germany declared war on Russia. So eager were its officials that the German government had telegraphed its ambassador in St. Petersburg two declarations of war to be delivered to Russia's foreign minister: one if Russia did not reply to its ultimatum, the other rejecting the Russian reply as unsatisfactory. In his haste and confusion, the ambassador handed over both messages.
That same day, France began preparing for the German attack that clearly was inevitable. At a tea dance at the fashionable lakeside Pavillon d'Armenonville in the Bois de Boulogne, the manager halted the music, announced "Mobilization has been ordered," and asked the band to play "La Marseillaise." By evening, Paris restaurant orchestras were playing the British and Russian national anthems as well.
Across Europe, crowds pulsed with an eerie excitement that few people had experienced in their lifetime. "I must acknowledge that there was a majestic, rapturous, and even seductive something" in the air of Vienna, recalled the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, a pacifist. "In spite of all my hatred and aversion for war, I should not like to have missed the memory of those first days.... All differences of class, rank, and language were swamped 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. Each individual experienced an exaltation of his ego, he was no longer the isolated person of former times."
In Berlin, exuberant masses of well-dressed people, who expected the war to be finished quickly, surged along the boulevards. After all, in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, victory had come in a matter of months. With motor transport and the vast expansion of railways, an even swifter triumph was surely at hand. Leading figures from across German society declared their support for war: university rectors, prominent intellectuals, avant-garde artists, Protest ant and Catholic bishops, rabbis, even the heads of groups working for women's suffrage and the rights of homosexuals. "The victory of Germany," wrote the novelist Thomas Mann, the country's greatest living writer, "will be a victory of soul over numbers." Many pacifists, too, were carried along by the current. "Every German friend of peace must fulfill his duty towards the fatherland exactly as any other German," urged the German Peace Society.
In the capital alone, as reservists prepared to rush off to their units, 2,000 marriages were performed at short notice. "I run to the War Ministry," one official recorded in his diary. "Beaming faces everywhere. Everyone is shaking hands in the corridors: people congratulate one another for being over the hurdle." The congratulations were especially fervent because, with Russia already mobilizing, the war could be presented to the world as a defense against aggression. "The government has managed brilliantly," wrote the chief of the Kaiser's naval staff, "to make us appear as the attacked."
Although August 2 was a Sunday, the British cabinet met three times. The Conservative opposition in Parliament was turning up the heat, saying that any British delay in supporting France and Russia was a sign of national weakness; some hawks among the governing Liberals, like Churchill, felt this way as well. Despite such pressure, 12 of 18 cabinet members opposed giving France a guarantee that Britain would send troops. This majority had a strong argument that the conflict was other countries' business. Only a German invasion of Belgium, whose neutrality Britain had guaranteed, could change that.
One person in England who knew firsthand how much death and suffering for civilians could lurk behind headlines about military triumphs was Emily Hobhouse. Over that weekend, she fired off desperate letters to everyone she could think of, including her onetime ally Lloyd George. Thirteen years earlier, she had personally briefed him for his excoriating attacks in Parliament on the British scorched-earth campaign against the Boers. Could he be persuaded to speak out once again? "Few English people have seen war in its nakedness," she wrote to the Manchester Guardian, backing the newspaper's plea for British neutrality. "...They know nothing of the poverty, destruction, disease, pain, misery and mortality which follow in its train.... I have seen all of this and more."
Crowds gathered outside newspaper offices, where in these pre-radio days the latest information was to be had. Extra editions poured off the presses and hired taxis supplemented regular delivery vans in rushing bundles of papers to street corners across London. Labor unions and left-wing parties organized protest marches that converged for a giant Sunday afternoon antiwar rally in Trafalgar Square, the largest demonstration there in years. Charlotte Despard and other speakers addressed the crowd, which was really waiting for one man, Keir Hardie. To wild cheering, he called for a general strike if Britain declared war. "You have no quarrel with Germany!" he roared. "German workmen have no quarrel with their French comrades.... We are told international treaties compel us [but] who made those? The People had no voice in them!" As he spoke, the sky over London blackened with storm clouds, and before he finished, they burst in a torrential downpour.
That evening, Germany demanded from Belgium passage for its troops. The long-prepared German plan was being put into action. Asquith ordered the British army mobilized. Although several government officials resigned in protest, they included no senior cabinet ministers like Lloyd George, who, to Hardie's dismay, in short order would declare in a fiery speech that "we are fighti ng against barbarism." All Europe was on a downward slope toward the inevitable, and few were those on either side who cared to press on the brakes.
Hardie spoke again the next day, this time in the House of Commons. During his speech, like a mocking dirge for his lifetime of work to stave off this moment, he heard the national anthem being softly sung—from the Labour benches behind him.
That same day, August 3, Germany declared war on France. Of some two million German troops now being mobilized, one and a half million were heading for France and Belgium, the rest for the Russian frontier. Germany expected to move quickly through Belgium and northern France to capture Paris. The plan, worked out over many years, was based on a precise estimate of the time needed to knock France out of the war: exactly 42 days. Then the victorious army would turn on the real enemy, Russia. In the west, however, Belgium rejected Germany's demand and started blowing up railway tunnels and bridges on its border. Berlin, now infuriated and vowing vengeance, had never factored this possibility into its planning.
In the German capital, as reserve soldiers marched to the railway station amid cheering crowds, Social Democratic parliamentary deputies urgently debated whether to oppose war credits for the government. The argument was stormy and agonizing; one legislator wept. Could they refuse if their country was about to be attacked by despotic Russia? And if they did refuse, would the government then shut down socialist newspapers and imprison party activists? Older socialists had painful memories of such repression in the not-so-distant past, and the Social Democrats still suffered annoying official restrictions that did not apply to other parties. If, on the other hand, they supported the government in this moment of crisis, might it put a stop to long years of being labeled subversives and traitors? Could this be, as one socialist put it, the chance to show "that the fatherland's poorest son was also its most loyal"?
In the end, most German socialists were, like everyone else, carried along on the unstoppable torrent of emotion. Two parliamentary deputies taking the train to Berlin had been startled to hear socialist songs—being happily sung by uniformed reservists heading for war. When the party caucus finally took a straw vote on war credits, of 111 deputies, only 14 voted no, among them Hugo Haase, whom the now murdered Jaurès had embraced at Brussels. The next day, following party discipline, they all cast ballots for war credits along with the rest of the German parliament. Delighted to get his financing, the Kaiser declared, "Henceforth I know no parties, I know only Germans."
Echoing him unawares, the president of the French Chamber of Deputies said, "There are no more adversaries here, there are only Frenchmen." In St. Petersburg, too, war fever spread. Strikers pulled down their street barricades and joined the enthusiastic crowds waving flags with the double-headed tsarist eagle outside the French, Belgian, and Serbian embassies.
Countries vied with each other to declare the war a crusade for the most noble goals. Le Matin, a big French daily, on August 4 called the conflict a "holy war of civilization against barbarity." In Germany the next day, a Social Democratic Party newspaper charged that tsarist Russia "wants to crush the culture of all of Western Europe." In Russia, the leftist writer Maxim Gorky was one of many who signed a statement supporting the fight against the "Germanic yoke." When Ottoman Turkey shortly joined the war on the German side, its sultan declared it was fighting a sacred struggle, or jihad.
On both sides, also, governments were delighted to discover that they had feared the left too much. French authorities, for example, worried by socialist anti-militarism, had estimated that 13 percent of reservists would fail to report for duty—but only 1.5 percent did not show
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up. Socialist leaders soon joined governments of national unity in both France and Belgium. The French minister of the interior sent word to local police chiefs not to arrest anyone listed in Carnet B, the government's secret roster of several thousand people it considered dangerous subversives. He guessed right: 80 percent of them would eventually do military service. Even in Austria-Hungary, with its restless mix of ethnic groups to whom mobilization orders had to be issued in more than half a dozen languages, the authorities were amazed that so few men refused the call-up. In the end, as the historian Barbara Tuchman wrote, "The working class went to war willingly, even eagerly, like the middle class, like the upper class, like the species."
"A wide road leads to war," goes a Russian proverb. "A narrow path leads home."
Early on the morning of August 4, German troops crossed the Belgian frontier. Opinion in the British cabinet, in Parliament, and among the public now swung overwhelmingly toward intervention. With Belgium invaded, the Liberal government would be accused by its parliamentary opponents of failing to uphold the national honor if it did not respond. Britain immediately delivered to Germany the final ultimatum of these ultimatum-filled weeks: halt the invasion by midnight or Britain would declare war.
With German soldiers flooding into Belgium, few people in England were in the mood to remember that British troops had been equally uninvited and unwelcome in the various parts of Africa and Asia they had invaded over the last century or two. Belgium seemed a different matter: it was inhabited by white people and less than 100 miles away. The nation, in fact, had virtually been created under the sponsorship of Britain, which had long wanted a friendly power on the other shore of the eastern approach to the English Channel. Belgium's strategic importance mattered most to the government; the British public reacted more emotionally, for citizens of a great imperial power always like to think of themselves as anointed protectors of the weak. But even many anti-imperialists on the left were shocked by the spectacle of hundreds of thousands of steel-helmeted German troops shooting their way into a small country that had done nothing to provoke them.
Throughout Europe the summer weather had been unusually warm, enticing people into the streets. As the evening of August 4 ticked by with no German reply to the British ultimatum, thousands gathered in front of Buckingham Palace and in Parliament Square, less exuberant than the crowds in Berlin, perhaps, but equally loyal to their country, and equally eager to cheer the newly mobilized soldiers in uniform marching through the streets. As Big Ben tolled 11 P.M.—midnight in Berlin—and Britain declared war, thousands of voices began to sing "God Save the King."
Observing formalities to the last, the Kaiser sent a message to his first cousin King George V, resigning his honorary posts as field marshal in the British army and admiral of the fleet in the Royal Navy. In Parliament, meanwhile, with astounding swiftness—helped by the fact that victimized Belgium, like Ireland, was heavily Catholic—the Irish crisis evaporated. All sides agreed to put home rule on hold.
Throughout Europe, men were fearful not of being killed, but of not getting a chance to fight before the war was over. "A single worry tormented me at that time, as with so many others, would we not reach the Front too late?" wrote a young German corporal, Adolf Hitler. The British novelist Alec Waugh recalled how he and his friends "joined with our elders in the discussions about peace, but we kept to ourselves the consideration that weighed most with us. We did not want the war to end before we had reached the trenches; we dreaded having to sit silent after the war when men only a few months older than ourselves compared front-line experiences."
The day after its declaration of war, Britain, too, declared that the very fundaments of civilization were at stake. The country was fighting, Asquith told the House of Commons, "not for aggression or the advancement of its own interests, but for principles whose maintenance is vital to the civilised world." Unfortunately for him, however, the two sides in this war, as in most, did not conveniently break down into the forces of enlightenment and darkness. One of Britain's allies, after all, was Russia. "Semi-barbarians," Emily Hobhouse called the Russians, in a letter to a Boer friend, when the war began. "Pretty bedfellows indeed!" Nor would Germany's invasion of Belgium be the only case of a great power assuming the right to march across the territory of a neutral one: within weeks, British troops would cross Chinese soil to attack the German colony of Tsingtao.
With reservists summoned to active duty by telegrams, church bells, and even bugle calls, some six million soldiers were flowing in trains, wagons, on horseback, and on foot across Europe and the British Isles toward various battlefronts. It was the largest mass movement of men and arms ever seen. Between countries in the world's industrial heartland, limited war was no longer possible. Total war, of a sort not seen before, was about to begin.
Two days after Britain entered the fray, a despairing Hardie took a train to Wales, to appear at a long-planned public meeting in his parliamentary constituency in the coal-mining town of Merthyr Tydfil. Having been a strong supporter of a local miners' strike some years before, he was a popular figure in the district. Here, in the bedrock of British labor militance, he believed public opinion would be with him. But the miners' union official who was to chair the meeting took Hardie aside, and—he would later write—never forgot the "look of surprise and astonishment ... on his face when I told him that the feeling was intensely in favour of war." When someone taunted Hardie about why his sons had not enlisted, he replied, "I would rather see my two boys put up against a wall and shot than see them go to the War." In response came hoots and jeers.
The meeting dissolved in pandemonium, with Hardie and his supporters drowned out by a much larger group who sang the national anthem and "Rule Britannia." When he left the hall, jostled by an angry crowd, shots were fired, apparently into the air. "We walked up the street followed by a howling mob," a colleague remembered. "He looked neither left nor right, his head erect, grey haired, grey bearded chieftain, one of the grandest men that had ever braved the rabble." He spent the night in the house of the local schoolmaster, surrounded by a mob shouting, "Turn the German out!"
Compounding Hardie's grief was a more personal sorrow, for at some unknown point not long before the war that engulfed Europe, his love affair with Sylvia Pankhurst had quietly come to an end. We can only guess at the reasons. Some difficulties were there from the beginning: the great difference in their ages, their all-consuming work. In the previous few years, she had come into her own on the national political stage and perhaps no longer felt the same need for the affirmation Hardie's attention had given her, or perhaps Hardie was put off by her streak of martyrdom. Or perhaps she simply grasped that Hardie was never going to leave his wife. In any case, the love letters and poems ceased. Although the two remained friends, and on one or two occasions spoke from the same platform, Hardie now faced the most painful moment of his political life alone.
Although some generals knew enough to fear otherwise, most people were confident the war would be short. The explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, about to set out from England to attempt the first full crossing of the Antarctic continent, patriotically telegraphed the Admiralty offering to cancel his plans and put his ship and crew at its service. Within an hour he received a one-word telegram: "Proceed." The very day that Britain joined the war, the King sent for Shackleton and handed him a Union Jack to carry on the expedition. By the time Shackleton got to Antarctica, crossed it, and returned, all expected, the war would be long past and the country ready to celebrate the British flag's being raised over yet more new places on the globe.
Two who cared about keeping that flag flying, Alfred Milner and Rudyard Kipling, welcomed their country's taking part in the great fight. Both had been restlessly anticipating this moment for years. Even before Britain declared war, Milner had been pressing friends in the government to send troops to France. When the declaration finally came he said, "It is better to have an end of the uncertainty." Kipling claimed to have only two frustrations now: that he was too old to fight, and that John, just turning 17, was too nearsighted. But perhaps if the war lasted long enough that barrier could be overcome.
An everyone-at-your-posts order meant that Violet Cecil's husband, Edward, back in England on leave, was promptly recalled to Egypt, which would leave her free to spend more time with Milner. But her 18-year-old George, unlike John Kipling, was heading for the front, his battalion of the Grenadier Guards among the first British units ordered to France. Violet and her daughter Helen handed baskets of fruit through a window as the troop train began to move; soldiers cheered; a band played "Auld Lang Syne"; and his mother had one last glimpse of George's "flushed, excited face thrust out of the window." For the first time ever in Helen's sight, Violet burst into tears.
Milner soon went to stay with her at Great Wigsell; the army had requisitioned his own country house as an officers' barracks. (Enlisted men slept in rows of tents in his fields.) We do not know what he said to her, but he may well have reassured her that at least George was in the best of hands, of officers who had proven their mettle in the Boer War, where he had known them. For in charge of the corps of two army divisions of which George's battalion would be a part was Sir Douglas Haig. And commanding the entire 75,000-man British Expeditionary Force being rushed across the English Channel was Sir John French.