A mood of patriotism swept through England for the first time since the early months of the Boer War. It was mingled with relief that the country was defending a neutral neighbouring country from unprovoked aggression, rather than attacking farmers for gain. When the newspaper boys announced that war had been declared, people rushed out of shops and houses to cheer. Horatio Bottomley’s popular magazine John Bull set the tone, with its headline ‘The Dawn of Britain’s Greatest Glory’. Radical intellectuals were enthusiastic about an ideological crusade against ‘Prussian militarism’. Many progressives hoped the conflict would offer an opportunity to bury the failed political, economic and social culture of the nineteenth century, and to build something better. Was it the end of one age and the beginning of another? The politicians, the people and the intelligentsia displayed the naivety of a generation with no experience of European war. For those born in the second half of the nineteenth century, conflict meant engagements at a safe distance from Britain’s shores against significantly weaker forces. The last time the country had fought on the Continent had been during the Napoleonic era, a period that belonged to ancient history. Thus blindly, and with overweening confidence and eagerness, England entered a conflict that would become the first ever world war.
On one side stood Germany and Austria-Hungary, the ‘Central Powers’, which were eventually supported by the Ottoman Empire. On the other was the Triple Alliance of Britain, France and Russia, who were dubbed ‘the Allies’ and who were joined by the Italians. As the combatants moved towards Belgium, many sang their national anthems, the patriotism and optimism of the moment blending to produce a euphoric mood. Those who lived through the following years of agony and terror would remember the songs of the men who marched to the Western Front; some died with those songs still on their lips.
Countless British soldiers would be among the dead. In the first week of August, an Expeditionary Force of six British infantry divisions and one cavalry division was assembled. The plan was to send them to Belgium to support the French army. The newly appointed secretary of war, Lord Kitchener, a veteran of the anti-Boer campaign, believed that Belgium was too dangerous as a theatre of war. The French staff officers, and their allies among the British military hierarchy, overcame Kitchener’s concerns, but events would bear out his view. The decision to send its forces to Belgium deprived Britain of its tactical independence, committing the country to fight side by side with its French ally for the duration of the war.
Kitchener was even more concerned about troop numbers than he was about strategy. Being a great naval power, and the landlord of a vast and vastly populated empire, Britain did not believe it required anything like as large a standing army as other European nations. ‘Did you consider when you went headlong into a war like this,’ Kitchener asked the cabinet, ‘that you were without an army? Did you not realize the war was likely to last for years and require tens of thousands of soldiers?’ He was soon permitted to ask for volunteers among the male adult population.
Buoyed up by the feeling ‘that war was a glorious affair and the British always won’, as one soldier put it, a million men made their way to English recruiting stations, some of them walking for miles through the night. The slogans on the recruitment posters urged the population to respond to Kitchener’s calclass="underline" ‘Your Country needs YOU’, ‘Women of England! Do your duty! Send your man Today to join our Glorious Army’ and ‘Daddy, what did you do in the war?’ After being given a few weeks’ training, the volunteers would line up in villages and towns and then march to the nearest train station, cheered along the way by those who remained. The train would take the men to military centres in England, from which they would soon be dispatched to the Western Front.
The fighting in that area, which became known as ‘The Battle of the Frontiers’, provided a salutary lesson. On 23 August 1914, the British engaged in their first major action, alongside the French at Mons in Belgium. The jubilant German army, which had just conquered Brussels, outnumbered the Allies three to one. In these difficult circumstances the British fought well, but they could not halt the German advance. The news of the Allied retreat, according to The Times, ‘broke like a thunderbolt’ back home in England. Questions were asked about the preparedness of the troops. The soldiers had been trained and equipped for an old-style imperial campaign, but were they ready for modern continental warfare? They had plenty of rifles but what about machine guns, hand grenades and telephones?
The Germans drove the Franco-British back mile after mile, a manoeuvre that became known as the ‘Great Retreat’. As the Allies withdrew from the towns and villages of northern France, they left behind them piles of dead bodies. The corpses of their own men were left behind, the retreating armies having no time to bury them. The conquering Germans killed or deported thousands of French and Belgian civilians, countless women and children among them, sometimes hanging the naked corpses up in butcher’s shops. Their conduct inspired the ‘great terror’ among civilians and prompted relentless anti-German propaganda in England. As a result, Germans were attacked on English streets and German shops and homes were looted, while many Germans were interned in camps for enemy aliens.
Well-executed Franco-British rearguard actions slowed the advance of the Germans, who halted east of Paris. When the belligerents confronted each other again at the Battle of the Marne in early September, the Allies emerged victorious. It was now the turn of the Germans to retreat, in the so-called ‘Race to the Sea’. The two sides engaged in offensives and counteroffensives as they moved through Picardy, Artois and Flanders. Ypres was recaptured by the Allies, who hoped to push the Germans back further, but their advance was halted. A decisive victory now appeared unlikely for either side. Their aim became to retreat no further, rather than to overwhelm the enemy.
The visible symbols of the stalemate were the elaborate rows of trenches the antagonists now dug opposite each other; they zigzagged down France from the Channel to the border with neutral Switzerland. These trench systems would eventually reach a total length of 25,000 miles. In between the opposing trenches lay a mine-filled ‘no man’s land’, an area exposed to machine-gun fire, mortars, flame-throwers, shells and a new weapon of death, the poison-gas canister. The killing was done at a distance by high-tech weapons, as the waves of men were fed to a vast killing machine. Any attempt to attack the enemy’s trenches was doomed to failure. If advancing soldiers miraculously managed to dodge the bullets, the mines and the gas canisters, they would have to breach a wall of barbed wire before confronting an enemy of vast numerical superiority.
When they were not engaging in futile attacks, the opposing forces sheltered in their trenches, exhausted and depressed by battle, disease, the falling temperatures of autumn and the death of their comrades. Some soldiers also suffered from ‘shell shock’ which left them in a state of helpless panic, unable to walk or talk, and prey to hysteria and insomnia. In the early months of the conflict, army doctors said such men were suffering from nerves or had weak constitutions, yet the disease became part of a new pathology of war. Life in the trenches was uncomfortable, anxious and restless. The noise of the constant gunfire and heavy shelling, mingled with the cries of maimed or dying men, was unbearable.
The soldiers realized that it was now a war of attrition, to use a coined phrase. ‘We have got to stick it longer than the other side,’ as one captain put it, ‘and go on producing men, and material until they cry quits.’ But who knew how long and how many deaths it might take to grind out a bloody victory? Given the type of warfare in which the antagonists were now engaged, and the huge industrial resources commanded by the Germans, it was likely the struggle would be prolonged and the death toll unprecedented. What had happened to the short, sweet war the government had predicted?