The Children's Book

50

In May 1914 Diaghilev brought the Russian Ballet with music by Richard Strauss for a triumphant season in Drury Lane. They played Ivan the Terrible and Strauss’s Joseph. Rupert Brooke went to see them; Bloomsbury was there; Anselm Stern and his sons went with August Steyning. On July 25th the last performance staged both Joseph and Petrouchka, ending with the pathetic death of the living puppet. That evening the Austrian Ambassador rejected the Serbian reply to his ultimatum, and left for home. The Sterns also went home. It was prudent, Anselm said. There was conflict in the air.

On July 31st Germany sent an ultimatum to Russia, and declared Kriegsgefahr, danger of war, and began to mobilise its men. The socialist world rallied round Jean Jaurès, who was still hoping for a general rising of workingmen against war. That evening, as he dined in the Café Croissant in Montmartre, he was shot with a pistol, by a young man who had been following him for a day. He died in five minutes. On August 1st, as his death was reported, the French army mobilised.

The City of London, troubled by dangers to the gold market, sent a deputation to Lloyd George, to say that “the financial and trading interests in the City of London” were “wholly opposed to intervening in the War.” Nobody expected war. Nobody was prepared for it. The financiers had believed that they lived in a world of financial and economic forces, so constructed that political forces were subjugated to the economic structures of prosperity and growth. Lloyd George remarked that “Financiers in a fright do not make a heroic picture. One must make allowances, however, for men who were millionaires with an assured credit which seemed as firm as the globe it girdled, and who suddenly found their futures scattered by a bomb hurled at random from a reckless hand.” The Economist advocated strict neutrality. The quarrel on the continent “was no more our concern than would be a quarrel between Argentina and Brazil or between China and Japan.”

Saki, who had written so many stories of feral and irresponsible children mocking the respectable in English gardens, woods, and pigsties, had published When William Came—a grimly satirical tale of English society adapting very well to Hohenzollern rule. The story culminated with a planned ceremonial march of Boy Scouts past the German Emperor and the monument to his grandmother in front of Buckingham Palace. The Emperor waited. And waited. And no marching children appeared under the flapping flags in the Mall. English boys had cared for England’s honour. The wild children had a mind of their own.

Colonel-General von Moltke was Chief of the General Staff of the Field Army of the German Empire. He had tried to refuse this position; he was sixty-six; he was, he thought, unlike his great uncle, too cautious, too reflective, too scrupulous, to make rapid decisions on which millions of lives and the fate of his country depended. The Kaiser had overruled his wishes. He would follow his uncle. He would direct the elaborate Schlieffen Plan, which required the German armies to march into Luxembourg and Belgium and seize their railways, in order to sweep round from the north and encircle Paris from the west. He did as he must and deployed his troops and trains.

On August 1st 1914 he was called suddenly to a war conference in the Berliner Schloss, with the Kaiser, generals, ministers. These men were jubilant. The Kaiser ordered celebratory champagne. Von Moltke was told that Sir Edward Grey had promised the German Ambassador in London that Great Britain would guarantee that France would not enter the war against Germany if Germany promised not to attack France. The Kaiser, full of delight and relief, told von Moltke that now they need only fight Russia. The armies could now advance to the East.

Von Moltke tried to explain that a million men, eleven thousand trains, tons of ammunition, guns, supplies, were already deployed, travelling west; patrols were already in Luxembourg; a division was behind them. The Kaiser rebuked him, telling him, with childish petulance, that his great-uncle would have given a different answer. Von Moltke could “use some other railway instead.”

Von Moltke was humiliated. He recorded that, as he realised the ignorance and light-headedness of his leader, the childish failure to imagine the world as it was, something inside him snapped. “I never recovered from that incident,” he wrote. “I was never the same again.”

Time was lost: the Kaiser countermanded orders; von Moltke sat in despair in his office and refused to sign the new ones. Then at eleven in the evening, he was recalled, to the Kaiser’s private apartments, where the head of state was half undressed, with a mantle thrown over his withered arm. He handed von Moltke a telegram from George V. The German Ambassador had been mistaken. Britain did not guarantee French neutrality.

“Now you can do what you like,” the Kaiser told his commander.

And the armies marched.