A missed chance of peace

THIS SEVENTH WEEK of the war was, perhaps, the last time before 1918 when the conflict in the West might have been concluded. It is a contention which can call upon no great feat in arms, nor swing in public opinion. But after the Germans fell back from the Marne in mid-September, and after the French and British became locked with them in furious fighting around the River Aisne, somebody might have taken a long, cool look at the story so far and (to use the kind of metaphor the ruling classes enjoyed most) drawn stumps. Nobody was going far – and where indeed might they have gone, save home?

Joffre, with some reluctance, abandoned frontal attacks on the Germans on 16th September. They were too costly, but by forming a plan to turn the German army right, he hoped to outflank them and – eventually – to chase them across the frontier. Falkenhayn, the new German Chief of Staff, was having none of it, and threw everything he could in order to reinforce his right wing. Heavy fighting erupted over the next day around Soissons, Noyon and Reims as the Germans sought to push Entente forces back on the Meuse forts surrounding Verdun.

These furious battles were too new and too off-limits to reach newspapers in any sense but the most sanitised, and the British press was still busily trumpeting its recent “victory” in forcing the German retreat from the Marne. On 19th September the Daily Mirror observed complacently that “news of the great retreat of the Kaiser’s hordes” had reached the German capital and “caused Berliners a painful shock”. The next shock, however, belonged to the Entente. By 22nd September, Falkenhayn had identified that if he could seize control of the Channel Ports as far west as Calais, the Allies might be brought to the negotiating table. There were 170 miles of open country which lay between the River Aisne and the Channel Ports, and the next move therefore now suggested itself.

To some eyes, the main infamy of that week in the West was the German bombardment of Reims cathedral on 19th September. A few days later, having been hit by some 300 shells, the cathedral lay in ruins. Most troops were unaware of the outrage this provoked, and would have been unmoved by it. Art historian Emil Male observed, probably not very accurately: “Even those who wept for a fallen son had extra tears for the holy church.” More plausibly, Vera Brittain’s diary suggested “this wanton devastation strengthens the repulsion felt in neutral countries towards German methods of warfare”. It certainly proved a potent propaganda weapon.

The game of cat and mouse which had characterised the Eastern Front persisted during the week. The Austrian attack in western Poland, already a tragi-comic series of blunders, faltered as the Austrians found themselves pitted against Russian forces bent upon taking Silesia.

By 20th September the Austrians had lost an estimated 110,000 killed or wounded, 220,000 captured with a further 100,000 troops cut off in Przemysl. They now retreated to the rivers east of Cracow as Conrad, their epically incompetent commander, belatedly accepted the need to dig in and await German reinforcements. He was lucky that the Russian follow-up was so laggardly and that the Germans had reached the River Niemen on the Eastern Prussia frontier by 21st September. One member of the crew who abandoned a picket boat in the face of the Russian advance on the Vistula that week was an intemperate young patriot philosopher named Ludwig Wittgenstein.

It was a particularly bad week for the Royal Navy. The self-styled Senior Service suffered ignominious losses on three separate occasions in seven days. The first came on 19th September when Admiral Troubridge was summoned to an enquiry to explain how it had come about that the Goeben and Breslau had escaped the attention of the Royal Navy and escaped to Turkey at a point when he had been in command of a cruiser squadron in the Mediterranean. The second, the disabling of HMS Pegasus by the cruiser Königsberg at Zanzibar, occurred the next day.

The last was, in fact, three independent disasters, all of which took place on 22nd September. In one incident, a German light cruiser, the Emden, bombarded the city of Madras – just one of her kills during a two month spree of destruction she was then waging on the Indian Ocean. Later that day, the Scharnhorst and Gneisnau shelled the town of Pepeete in French Tahiti. Meanwhile, HMSS Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy, three old British cruisers performing pointless picket duty off Dutch coast, were all sunk by submarine U-9; 1,459 men perished as captains tried to pick up survivors. (Even so, 837 were picked up, some by a Dutch ship. Given Holland’s neutral status, they should have been interned but in fact found themselves speedily returned  to Britain.) Commanders and Admiralty were strongly criticised at the subsequent board of enquiry during which the full extent of the ships’ unfitness and the absence of elementary safety precautions (such as zig-zagging) were exposed.

Hearing of U-9’s success, a young German naval officer, Lieutenant Knobloch of the Tostok wrote home wistfully, “It must be a heart-warming feeling to re-enter harbour after such an achievement.” This yearning for the blood of enemies is echoed in the letters of soldiers of all armies at this time, and indeed by many civilians. It was one of the responses to the immense anxiety under which so many people lived – a belief in “my country, right or wrong” which was absolute, strident and sometimes, to modern ears, cloyingly sentimental. When the TES published an obituary on 22nd September of Lieutenant A.J.N. Williamson, a teacher at Highgate School, reference was paid to his death “bearing rich and glorious fruit on the stern fields of duty”.

Always more inclined to detachment, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith also noted the death of Rivvy Grenfell, a brilliant young socialite, in a letter to his muse Venetia Stanley on 19th September. “Did you ever dance with him?” he enquired. A feistier performance came from his Chancellor David Lloyd George who delivered one of the most important speeches of his political life that same day in London. Notionally, it was on the subject of German barbarities – always a crowd pleaser. In fact, he promulgated a doctrine the resonance of which would echo powerfully over the next years – that the war in which Britain had engaged was both fearful and hideous, but that out of it great good would come, a moral regeneration and a radical political settlement.

Moral regeneration presupposed moral authority, and the Allies were not giving up on that. “Let us hear no more about degenerate Britain” exclaimed the Daily Mirror on 16th September. “You cannot find it on land, sea or in the air.” In reality, however, this seventh week of the war witnessed a subtle evolution in its public perception. There was a more serious desire to understand the perspective of the enemy. An editorial in the Daily Mirror wondered at Germany’s diplomatic duplicity, observing that  a recent talk by her Chancellor, Herr Bethmann-Hollwegg, “gave expression to the Kriegstaat philosophy in his remarks that necessity knows no law and that treaties are merely scraps of paper”. This did not stop Prince Bülow appealing to jurisprudence when, at the same moment, it began to look likely that Italy would abandon her ally Austria-Hungary. Such an action, he fulminated, “would be a violation of the law of nations such as the world has never yet seen”.

Full time hatred was hard work. The British found it so, at least. The Daily Mirror published a front page photograph on 21st September of a young girl giving some German POWs chocolate – a gesture immediately criticised by readers. That same day, the Daily Express was outraged that the government was giving half-pay to German officers imprisoned in Britain. In truth, so was everyone – but the government had to weigh the risk that any withdrawal of comforts or consideration might result in retaliation for those British soldiers imprisoned on the continent.

The idea that some Germans might be less frightful than others was even given a gentle airing. An article on 17th September in Staats Zeitung, a German-American mouthpiece, asserted that “Germany never wanted war” and that “a peace movement would not be blocked by Germany”. The New York Herald on 16th September published a letter purporting to come from a German Count, no less, announcing: “I am leaving my country, horrified by the barbarism inflicted on humanity by this ruler. I will return to Germany when it is governed as a republic.” Although the irony may have passed by many readers, books on Nietzsche were now being advertised in the national press alongside liver pills.

Nor was the desire for escapism quite extinguished. The Daily Mirror found no difficulty in giving an enthusiastic plug on 16th September for a romantic novel – the story of a man torn between the claims of public office and private happiness (his love for a chorus girl). “It is believed,” the paper opined, “that the engrossing instalments which will be published in the Daily Mirror will be welcomed by tens of thousands of readers as a relief and relaxation from brooding over the sanguinary news of war.”

Laurence Binyon, a scholar and poet working in the British Museum, was unlikely to have been among them. Too old to enlist, he was so horrified by the number of casualties in the opening weeks of the war that he composed a poem – “For the Fallen – which was published in The Times on 21st September. Of its seven verses, one above all has lingered:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.