the assurance it needed, then promptly went off on a cruise around Norway.
It took the Austrian–Hungarian government three weeks but the ultimatum they sent Serbia was, in the words of Britain’s foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, the ‘most formidable document ever sent from one nation to another’. Serbia was given forty-eight hours to comply with ten demands, specifically designed to humiliate and therefore be rejected. Although the Serbs agreed to eight, it was never going to be enough for the bellicose Austrian–Hungarians and on 28 July they declared war on Serbia.
Events now moved quickly, one triggering off another. In response to this declaration of war, Russia, which saw itself as protector of Serbia, began to mobilize. France, Russia’s ally since 1892, offered her its support. In response, the Germans gave Russia twelve hours to halt its mobilization. The deadline passed, thus on 1 August, Germany declared war on Russia and, two days later, on France. ‘The sword has been forced into our hand,’ claimed the Kaiser.
Germany now faced a war on both its western and eastern borders; a war on two fronts. But it was a prospect they had long anticipated. In 1905, the then German Chief of Staff, Count Alfred von Schlieffen, had devised a plan for such an eventuality. Russia, he surmised, not incorrectly, would take up to six weeks to mobilize its armies, allowing Germany time to defeat France. In order to avoid the line of fortifications on the Franco-German border, the German army would have to advance through neutral Belgium in a huge sweeping movement: ‘let the last man on the right brush the Channel with his sleeve’. Having knocked out Belgium, it would swing south, covering twenty kilometres a day, and encircle Paris. Having dealt with the French, it would then have time to move east to confront the vast armies of Russia. Schlieffen died in 1913. One year later, his grand plan was put into action.
Speed was of the essence. On 2 August, Germany stormed through Luxembourg and demanded immediate access through Belgium. But ‘Poor little Belgium’, as the British press called her, refused and turned to a 1839 treaty, guaranteeing its neutrality. One of the signatories was Germany. The other was Great Britain. Britain asked Germany for an assurance that they would respect Belgium’s neutrality. Germany ignored it and on 4 August began bombing the city of Liège. Germany could not believe that Britain would go to war with a ‘kindred nation’ over a ‘scrap of paper’ – a treaty signed seventy-five years before. Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August. Sir Edward Grey, gazing out from the Foreign Office, remarked, ‘the lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime’.
The German army goes off to war, August 1914 Deutsches Bundesarchiv Bild 183-25684-0004
Grey, in his gloominess, was in a minority – the rest of Europe rejoiced at the prospect of war. Everywhere, civilians gathered in town squares to celebrate, young men anticipated adventures of derring-do and chivalry. ‘It’ll all be over by Christmas’, the British army was told; ‘You’ll be home before the leaves fall’, declared the Kaiser to his troops. For the Russian Tsar, Nicholas II, a victorious war would stifle the murmurings of revolution that was infecting his kingdom. For France, still chafing over its defeat in the Franco–Prussian War in 1871, war offered a chance to re-establish its reputation.
Unlike her European counterparts, Britain had no standing army, only a small professional force, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), numbering a mere 100,000 men (compared, for example, to Germany’s 1.1 million). It was this tiny army that arrived in northern France to bolster the French effort. The Kaiser dismissed the BEF as a ‘contemptible little army’, hence British soldiers took pride in calling themselves the ‘Old Contemptibles’.
The first major confrontation between the Great Powers took place in the Belgium town of Mons on 23 August; Britain’s first battle on mainland Europe since Waterloo almost a century before. The ‘contemptible’ BEF, despite being outnumbered three to one, inflicted huge casualties on the Germans, delayed their advance, and then retreated in good order. The Retreat from Mons was, as legend would have it, guided by the ‘Angels of Mons’, ghostly apparitions who safely led the British soldiers away from the battlefield.
The Germans advanced through France but were rapidly running out of steam, too exhausted to maintain the momentum. By early September they had reached the River Marne, only thirty miles north of Paris. The military commander of Paris, General Joseph Gallieni, was old enough to remember 1871 when the Prussians, Germany’s predecessors, had besieged the capital to the point of starvation. He had no intention of allowing the Germans anywhere near Paris again.
After three days of fighting at the Marne, the Germans looked poised to break through the French and British forces, and onto Paris. Gallieni was to send reinforcements but while he had the troops he had no means to transport them north. In a flash of ingenuity, he seized every available Parisian taxi – 600 of them – crammed each one full of soldiers and sent them on their way to meet the army of the French commander-in-chief, General Joseph Joffre.
The arrival of Gallieni’s taxis saved the day. It was on the River Marne that the Schlieffen Plan came to a shuddering halt. Paris was safe and now it was the turn of the Germans to retreat. They fell back, forty miles north, to the River Aisne where they stopped and dug in. The Allies tried to dislodge the Germans from their defensive positions but, failing to do so, began to dig their own trenches.
General Joffre moved part of his force northwards of the Aisne to try and outflank the Germans. The Germans, now led by Erich von Falkenhayn, moved a comparable number of men to block Joffre’s manoeuvre. Joffre repeated his tactic – as did the Germans, each side constructing trenches as it went along. It developed in what became known as the ‘Race to the Sea’ as each army tried to out lap the other until they both hit the Channel. A similar charade extended the line of trenches south from the Aisne to the Swiss border.
The war of movement had come to an end. The consolidation of defence had triumphed over attack. Stretching 400 miles from the English Channel to Switzerland, lay a network of trenches. They were to remain, by and large, in place for four long years. As 1914 drew to a close, the idea of a short, sharp war had all but vanished. Offence was no match against deeply entrenched defence. Generals on all sides puzzled over this uncomfortable truth.
On Christmas Day, 1914, British troops in the front-line trenches could hear the Germans singing Stille Nacht (Silent Night). The British joined in. Cautiously, soldiers on both sides climbed out of their trenches and walked towards each other across No Man’s Land. They shook hands, exchanged cigarettes, and took photographs of each other. Further up the line, a group of Scots played the Germans at football with helmets for goalposts. The Germans won 3–2. But the festivities had to end. With reluctant handshakes, they each returned to their trenches and grudgingly took up their arms. This fraternization was very much against orders. It was never to happen, to such a large extent, again.
War had begun on the Eastern Front. Two Russian armies bore down into East Prussia, while the German army was led by the formidable duo of Generals Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff. The Germans, in full possession of Russian plans, decimated the first Russian army. ‘The tsar trusted me,’ wailed the Russian commander, Alexander Samsonov. ‘How can I ever face him again?’ He didn’t – he walked into a nearby wood and shot himself. The second Russian army fared no better. The Battles of Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes went down as terrible defeats for Russia. The Austrian–Hungarian empire, the instigators of this whole war, was faring no better.
