was. Tens of thousands of volunteers quickly offered themselves to the army, but many more potential recruits decided to stay at home. A Mr Doyle of the Manor House, Birtley, in Co. Durham, wrote to the Yorkshire Post: ‘The important work of instructing the public as to the meaning of the war should begin in real earnest. A few days ago, in passing through one of the larger villages, I stopped to see a dozen or so young men who had joined the colours being drilled in a field. Six times as many were lying up against the fence passively looking on. I enquired of one of them, a well set-up, athletic young fellow, why he was a spectator and not a participant. He looked at me squarely and said: “Because it isn’t worthwhile; we could be of no use for six months, and by that time there will be no enemy. Germany will be off the map.” Another young man said: “It’s no business of ours this foreign war. Austria and Serbia should be let fight it out. Germany didn’t want to come in until compelled by Russia, and we should have kept out of it. Anyhow, we’re all right; the fleet will keep us safe.”’
But others were inspired to don khaki. The writer A.P. Herbert, an instinctive iconoclast, nonetheless wrote long afterwards, denouncing the satirical musical Oh, What a Lovely War!, which suggested that he and his generation were ‘duped into the Forces by damsels singing patriotic songs, or bullied in by peremptory posters’. He declared his own lasting conviction that Britain had gone to war for a just cause, and remained impenitent about his own commitment to fight for it. Most British intellectual opinion agreed. Thomas Hardy believed that ‘England was innocent for once … the war began because the Germans wanted to fight.’ Sir Walter Raleigh, Oxford’s professor of history, confided to a friend: ‘I’ve often known this must come when I’ve heard the Germans talk about their destiny and their plans for achieving it. I’m glad I’ve lived to see it, and sick that I’m not in it.’ Many men idealised the prospect of military service, as did C.E. Montague in his autobiographical novel Rough Justice: ‘Always to have just some one plain and not hard thing to do; to be free to give yourself up … to whole days of rude health, to let yourself go, with a will, in the swing of marching, the patterned dances of drills … with the blithe or grave calls blown on bugles to lead you through the busy, easy days.’ Montague was described by a friend as ‘the only man whose hair turned black in a single night through courage’. At the age of forty-seven, though initially opposed to the war, he dyed his white hair black in order to join the Grenadier Guards.
Few families in Britain embraced the coming of war with as much jingo enthusiasm as Robert Emmet’s. He was a rich East Coast American, forty-three years old, since 1900 living and fox-hunting in Warwickshire. His bank-holiday house party at Moreton Paddox was largely composed of cavalry and reserve officers, ‘who worked themselves into a frenzy of anxiety’ lest the government flinch from a declaration of war ‘which appeared the natural and even inevitable reply to Germany’s wanton invasion of Belgium’. The telephone was in constant service, to quiz porters at the men’s London clubs about the latest news. On the following Tuesday Emmet, who had served as a lieutenant with the New York National Guard in the Spanish-American War, took his entire family to London. Installed in their usual quarters at Claridge’s Hotel, he addressed his wife and three teenage sons. He saw only two alternatives, he said: to disappear quietly back to the safety of neutral America, or stay and fight. He made plain his personal view, then invited a vote among the assembled company. His three sons unhesitatingly opted to stay, ‘Their mother, in her turn, courageously voting “aye” as well, the decision being made unanimous by my final vote. A great load was lifted off my mind.’
Returning to Warwickshire that week of the war’s outbreak, Major Emmet hoisted the Stars and Stripes on his lawn. He intended this as a gesture of solidarity with Britain, but the neighbourhood unfortunately misconstrued it. Emmet’s brother-in-law telephoned to say that unless he lowered the flag, it was not impossible that the house would be burned down. People supposed that he was attempting to proclaim his own neutrality and safeguard his property in the event of a German invasion. Emmet was outraged, and persisted in defiance for three days before prudently lowering Old Glory. Soon afterwards he handed over the Paddox to become a hospital, which it remained for the rest of the war, while he himself trained cavalry recruits and his sons enlisted.
Throughout Europe, families adjusted their domestic economies to the prospect of a new austerity. The haste with which staff were shed caused much hardship. Many German women servants found themselves without a place, and were soon crowding around city soup kitchens. Violet Asquith complained to Venetia Stanley about the crass conduct of Lord Elcho, in whose house she and her father spent a weekend. The peer ‘issued an abrupt ultimatum to all his employees servants etc. – to join the Army or leave his service – & has then gone off to London leaving poor Lady Elcho’ – Arthur Balfour’s long-service lover – ‘to cope with the situation – which he created without consulting her in any sort of way. It is too cruel as the people here have hardly heard of the war.’
Shortage of raw materials forced many factories to reduce or halt production, so that in Germany unemployment rose from 2.7 per cent in July to 22.7 per cent in August. Salesmen working on commission saw their incomes vanish. A pastor in Berlin’s Moabit tenement quarter observed that enthusiasm for the struggle was a luxury only intellectuals could indulge. The Rheinische Zeitung noted: ‘a tense mood prevails during the late hours in our working-class districts. There is no noise, no songs. One hears sobbing and sees men looking grave … no strident patriotic slogans, no hurrahs, instead work and sacrifice.’ A journalist visiting the London East End’s Hoxton, ‘a stronghold of penury at all times’, found its people ‘threatened by a very disaster of distress under the shock of war’. There was special hardship in Lancashire, where one-fifth of cotton looms stopped, and a further one-seventh were reduced to short-time working. Over 100,000 cotton workers were idle, with half Burnley suddenly unemployed, and one-third of Preston.
Jewish historian Gustav Mayer on 12 August found his father bewailing the collapse of business at his drapery shop in Berlin’s Zehlendorf. In Freiburg some 10,000 men, much of the city’s workforce, went to the army, so that one firm lost 154 out of its 231 workers; Ditler’s furniture manufactory lost forty-five men, a third of its employees, and a local publisher was deprived of over a hundred, most of them printers. The building trade collapsed almost overnight. Textile and leather-goods manufacturers found themselves suffering acutely from raw-material shortages.
It is hard to overstate the social and economic impact of the mass mobilisation of horses, which created difficulties not merely for agriculture, but for every form of transport. Though the world would soon become motorised, in 1914 horses and oxen were the customary means of moving goods and people anywhere that a train could not go. In the German countryside near Halle, a pastor asserted that farmers were more upset by the requisitioning of their animals and wagons than by the conscription of their workers. In England, too, horses were ruthlessly commandeered, though on a generous scale of compensation – £40 for a troop horse and £60 for an officer’s charger, which enabled some owners to recycle indifferent hunters. Lt. Guy Harcourt-Vernon of the Grenadier Guards wrote home exhibiting a blend of optimism, bewilderment and opportunism: ‘This war ought to end as soon as the Russians march on Berlin say 4 to 6 months, but I hope they won’t bicker over the spoils like the Balkan war. I wonder if they will send us after all. Are they commandeering horses? If so, let “Child” go, but stand out for £60 if they will give it. It is probably more than I shall get any other way.’ At the Tower of London, long rows of purchased horses stood tethered in the moat.
In the harvest fields of the vast Yorkshire estate of Sledmere, on 5 August wagoners were handed mobilisation papers. After serving in South Africa Sir Mark Sykes MP, the local grandee, had become convinced that a future war would expose a shortage of army transport. He thus persuaded the War Office to acquiesce in a scheme whereby his own neighbours’ agricultural workers should be enlisted as volunteer drivers. These men received no military training, but were subject to call-up. Sykes mustered drivers at his own expense, grading them as ‘Wagoner’, ‘Foreman’ and ‘Roadmaster’, with appropriate brass lapel badges. In 1913 the War Office took over responsibility for paying the men annual bounties of between one
