1914- The Days of Hope Read online

  But, like all units serving in India, the soldiers’ year was regulated by the seasons rather than the calendar, by the Cool Weather from November to February, and the Hot Weather when temperatures rose from reasonable discomfort in the month of March to blistering, unendurable heat in June, when the weather broke and the monsoons began. To keep the Battalion at the peak of efficiency, it had to be kept on the move. The cool weather was spent round Lahore in a rigid timetable of battalion training, culminating in Brigade Manoeuvres and mock battles with other units of the Division. For the hot weather and the monsoon season, the Battalion marched some two hundred miles, up the Great Trunk Road to Rawalpindi and on to the north-east to the barracks at Kuldana in the Murree Hills to skirmish and manoeuvre in the rough country of the uplands and to carry out a stiff programme of signalling and musketry practice in the clear, crisp air, where the flash of a heliograph lamp could be seen for fifty miles.

  The long and dusty route marches between camps and bivouacs toughened the feet, strengthened the muscles, built up stamina and scorched the soldiers’ skins to leather.

  When no marauding tribesmen disturbed the peace of the frontiers, when no unruly natives claimed their attention on the plains, in the intervals between the exigencies of training and exercises there was plenty of sport to be had. The army was generous in the matter of local leave for elephant shooting, for pigsticking, for shooting sand-grouse in the Bikanir Desert, for hunting bear and ibex in Kashmir. The trophies from the current season, having been stuffed, mounted and duly displayed and admired in the Officers’ Mess, were already crated up ready to be shipped home with the Battalion’s heavy baggage.

  The polo season had been disappointing, but largely because most far-seeing officers had already sold their best ponies in anticipation of their early departure. The cricket season, when officers and men formed a single and singular democratic team, had been more than satisfactory, and in the inter-Brigade competitions the men had acquitted themselves well in the economical, less exclusive sports, cross-country running, boxing, football, which were encouraged in the interests of fitness and of keeping boredom at bay. Taken as a whole, the 2nd RB had had a satisfactory year. It culminated in the annual event which was devised to test to the limit their skill and efficiency in soldiering – the Divisional competition known as the Grand Assault at Arms.

  The RBs were not displeased with their performance. They had taken both first and second places in Individual Bayonet Fighting, and come first in the Bayonet team event. They had been first in the tough obstacle race, designed to reproduce conditions in which soldiers might have to advance in actual warfare. Despite rigorous training they had failed miserably in the Tug-of-War, but the Battalion had come second in the Officers’ Revolver Competition and in hand-to-hand sword fighting their officers had not disgraced themselves. Overall, the Rifle Brigade had been narrowly beaten into second place by the Yorkshire Regiment who had carried off the coveted cup for the best Regiment at Arms, but there had been some brilliant individual performances. The Battalion was of the unanimous opinion that, if they were able to hold on to the best of the men when they got back to Blighty and the barracks at Colchester, they would have an excellent chance of putting a team into the arena at Olympia for the Royal Tournament in the summer of 1915.

  The Grand Assault at Arms ended on 27 June. Next day, after the obligatory church parades, the Battalion enjoyed a well-earned rest. It was a Sunday like any other. They had no inkling that in Europe it had been a fateful day nor how profoundly its events would affect their future. It was three weeks before the mail brought newspapers from Home with reports of the shooting at Sarajevo. Avid though they were for news, no one read them with particular attention.

  The bulk of the British Army was spread around the Empire, and in India alone there were more serving soldiers than there were in the British Isles. Unlike the land-locked nations on the Continent, ever snapping and yapping across their easily breached frontiers, often separated by as little as a range of hills, a river or a road, Great Britain had no need of a large standing army. Her natural frontier was her coastline, her backyard the seas that lapped her shores, and the first line of her defence the mighty ships that sailed them. Encircled by the protective power of the world’s largest navy, enriched by the voyaging of a great merchant fleet that carried her trade to the four corners of the earth, Great Britain could afford to stand aloof from European quarrels and the tangle of enmities and alliances that maintained Europe’s balance of power.

  But recently, that delicate balance of power had shifted and the events of the past ten years had made it increasingly obvious that she could not remain aloof for ever.

  Not that Britain, as a paramount power, had ever been averse to poking a finger into the European pie when it had suited her to do so. Palmerston had been a prime architect of the plan to relandscape Europe which released Belgium from Holland, made her an independent kingdom and guaranteed her neutrality in perpetuity. Lord Salisbury had played a major role in the Congress of Berlin which had placed Bosnia and Herzegovina under the suzerainty of Austria and thus lit the slow-burning fuse of resentment in the Slavs which was to spark off the conflagration that would engulf Europe in 1914.

  It had also balked Russia of her ambitions in the Balkans, made her fearful of the growing power of the German and Austrian Empires, once her allies, and sent her looking for a new ally. She had found one in France, still aggrieved, still brooding, still nursing passionate hatred for Germany after her crushing defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. And, recently, Great Britain’s own attitude to Germany had changed.

  Twenty years earlier, the idea of war between Great Britain and Germany would have been unthinkable. Queen Victoria was on the throne and her influence extended by intimate family connection into every major court on the Continent. Queen Victoria, although she prided herself on her Englishness, was the daughter of a German mother and the widow of a German husband. German philosophy, German music, German literature, German sentiments were the keystones of the private life of the Royal Family and, on a domestic level, the Victorian virtues which permeated downwards to humbler households had a good deal in common with German notions of respectability. The dearest wish of the Prince Consort had been to see a liberal, united, democratic Germany, wrested from autocratic political hands, a strong and benign force for peace at the centre of chaotic Europe. If Great Britain, powerfully ensconced at the head of her far-flung Empire, was Mother Country to half the world, Germany should be her ‘Brother Country’, her staunchest friend in Europe.

  His eldest daughter, the Princess Royal, had been married to a Hohenzollern prince and now, although Albert had not lived to see it, his grandson was the German Emperor. He was also a thorn in the flesh of Great Britain and regarded by the Royal Family with, to say the least, mixed feelings. There was no avoiding the fact that Kaiser Wilhelm was an awkward and a complicated character.

  Undoubtedly much of the explanation lay far back in the circumstances of his birth. The Kaiser’s left arm had been damaged so badly that it was useless and withered for life. It was a traumatic disability for an emperor traditionally acclaimed as the ‘All Powerful’ and ‘All Highest’, who must take his place in a line of soldier kings whose legendary prowess and bravery went back to Frederick the Great. All his life, the Kaiser was driven by the need to prove himself better and stronger than the next man. This desire crystallised into a determination to make Germany better and stronger than Great Britain. It was a schizophrenic obsession, which had grown out of love and of hate.

  In his boyhood, long visits to the court of his grandmother the Queen and Empress, enthroned metaphorically at the centre of the sun that never set on her great Empire, had bred in the Kaiser an admiration and enthusiasm for England and all things English.

  In Berlin, by contrast, he was held deliberately under the influence of the Emperor, his autocratic grandfather (who disliked and suspected his mother for her liberal ‘English’ ideas), and was
brought up in the rigid discipline of a military education, surrounded by flattering toadies at his grandfather’s militaristic court.

  It was hardly surprising that the mixed loyalties of his heritage as a boy had set up warring traits in the character of the man. ‘Please remind William,’ remarked King Edward VII testily, on the eve of a visit by his nephew, the Kaiser, to Sandringham, ‘that it is not the custom to wear uniform in the country in England.’

  The Kaiser adored uniforms, and none in his extensive collection gave him more pleasure and satisfaction than the uniforms he was entitled to wear as an honorary field marshal of the British Army and honorary admiral of the Royal Navy. There were some in the British royal family who believed that the latter honour, awarded to him by his grandmother Queen Victoria, had gone to his head. His heartfelt desire was to build up the German navy until it was a battle fleet as glorious, as prestigious and as powerful as the Royal Navy itself. Freed from the restraining hand of Bismarck, from whom he had cut loose in 1891, too blinkered and egocentric to see that he was being used as a tool by Bismarck’s political successors, the Kaiser, with single-minded enthusiasm, had set about achieving his ambition and embarked on a mammoth programme of ship-building, which had sent a shiver of apprehension through the body politic of Europe, not least in Great Britain. Even the man in the street had regarded it as a piece of infernal cheek.

  In July 1914 a combination of chance and foresight brought the ships of the British Navy together, fully mobilised, at maximum efficiency, and at the very moment they were needed. It was the most extravagant display of sea-power ever assembled and, ironically, it was the result of an economy measure. As long ago as October of the previous year, the Lords of the Admiralty had decreed that, in the summer of 1914, the expensive exercise of Test Mobilisation should be combined with the annual summer exercises.

  Twenty thousand regular sailors who had completed their time on active service but were required by the terms of their enlistment to rejoin in an emergency, had been called up and every destroyer, every cruiser, every battle squadron, every shore establishment was at full strength. The coalmines had worked overtime to fulfil the demand for fuel – unprecedented even by the lavish standards of Admiralty contracts – and the matelots, filthy, sweating and swearing, had toiled day and night to coal the ships in record time, and toiled on again to clean and polish and scrub away the resulting dust and grime. When all the tasks had been accomplished, every ship that could reasonably be spared from the seas of the British Empire sailed from its Home Port to join the Fleet riding at anchor off Spithead. It was the sight of the summer, and holidaymakers by the thousand flocked to the south coast to see it.

  Even the names were enough to strike terror into the heart of any upstart nation who dared to challenge the might of Great Britain and her Empire: Colossus, Hercules, Centaur, Ajax, Superb, Monarch, Marlborough, Audacious, Conquerer, Thunderer, Dreadnought. Fifty-nine great battleships led the Fleet. There were one hundred and eighty-seven destroyers, twelve squadrons of cruisers, and fifty-nine submarines. At the head of them all rode the mighty Iron Duke, 25,000 tons, the pride of the British Navy and the flagship of the officer in command of the Fleet, Admiral Sir George Callaghan. It was the proudest day of his life.

  By the time the last ship had weighed anchor and steamed into position, the ships of the vanguard had long since sailed over the horizon. Far out in the Channel stood the Royal Yacht at anchor, the King at the salute as his Royal Navy steamed past at precisely fifteen knots, ship after ship streamered with flags, ships’ companies drawn up on white-scrubbed decks, ships’ bands playing the National Anthem again and again. And again and again, faintly heard across the water, came the orders ‘Off caps’ and ‘Three cheers for the King!’ ‘Hip hip HOORAY! HOORAY Hoor-a-a-a-y …’ tailing off into the wind as one great ship ploughed on and the next rode up astern. It took six hours for the whole fleet to sail past. Nothing like it had been seen since the glorious days of Victoria. Nothing remotely like it would ever be seen again.

  It was a salutary reminder to certain irascible European nations that Great Britain was not to be trifled with, and that a war in which she might possibly intervene was not something to be undertaken without careful consideration of the consequences. It was hoped that the Kaiser in particular would take the hint. He had held a naval occasion of his own the previous month when he had formally opened the newly deepened Kiel canal. It had not escaped the notice of British naval officers among the guests that, through this new channel, large German warships could now move speedily from the Baltic into the North Sea. They hoped that this greatest naval review in history would serve to draw the Kaiser’s attention to the fact that, should they do so with belligerent intent, the Royal Navy would be waiting for them.

  Until recently, a Europe in which a strong Germany held the central position had posed no threat to the interests of Great Britain either at home or abroad. Seen from this British viewpoint it had seemed more to her advantage than otherwise that strong Prussia had gathered a scattering of weak German states under her wing to make a united Germany, and an emperor of the Prussian King. But certain unfortunate circumstances, offensive in their brashness, far-reaching in their consequences, had attended the birth of the new Germany. It had been proclaimed at the end of the Franco-Prussian War – not in Berlin but, with arrogant flamboyance, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Thus Prussia, having scooped in the long-disputed French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine to swell the territory of the new German Empire, stamped her jackboot hard on the neck of defeated France.

  The Kaiser at the time had been twelve years old. Seventeen years later, in 1889, he had become Emperor of a very different Germany. The German Empire, formed by the unification of small states, had been rendered indivisible by the explosive growth of their combined industrial power. The coal of Westphalia and Silesia, the iron ore of sequestered Lorraine, the timber resources of the vast forests, the mineral deposits of the Harz mountains, the great ports of Hamburg and Bremen, were now at the disposition of one centralised Reich. Investment capital poured in to develop them, cities doubled and redoubled in size and population as factories, foundries, mills, chemical plants, engineering works, sprang up and a vast labour force poured in from the rural areas to man them. In the space of seventeen years Germany became an industrial force to be reckoned with, and by the turn of the century the Kaiser was beginning to throw his weight about in earnest.

  1904 was the first year of the decade of fateful events which would come to an inexorable climax. It was the year in which Great Britain and France were brought together by the Entente Cordiale and the year when the Kaiser began to make a series of bombastic gaffes which might have attracted less attention had they not so clearly demonstrated Germany’s intentions of aggrandisement.

  It was not just that he gloated so publicly over the growing strength of the German navy, going so far as to refer to himself (to his cousin the Tsar of Russia) as ‘The Admiral of the Atlantic’. It was not just that he publicly (at a banquet for three hundred people) referred to his uncle, King Edward VII, in virulent terms, ‘He is a devil. You cannot believe what a devil he is!’ It was not even that he proclaimed in an official speech (when refusing a placatory invitation to visit France), ‘The Order of the Day is, keep your powder dry – keep your sword sharp – and keep your fist on the hilt!’ In a series of ill-considered, injudicious outpourings, the Kaiser postured and strutted on the delicate tightrope of European politics – now rushing forward with apparent abandon that drew gasps from the watching nations; now drawing back with cat-like cunning; now teetering with windmilling arms in calculated exhibitionism intended to test the nerve of the countries allied against Germany, and intended in particular to test the nerve of Great Britain. Just how far would she be prepared to go in support of France?

  Three years earlier Germany had put that question to the test at Agadir. In one clause of the loose agreement between France and Great Britain, two old rivalries h
ad been resolved. France had agreed to withdraw her interest in Egypt and the Suez Canal, that vital highway to the British Empire, while Great Britain pledged herself to support the claims of France in the Sultanate of Morocco. It was the latter to which Germany took exception, for France could claim little more than squatter’s rights to parts of the coastline and the Germans themselves were anxious for a toehold in Morocco. They had already tried to stir up trouble shortly after the signing of the Entente Cordiale but Britain had then made no bones about supporting French interests; the matter had been put to international arbitration and the Germans had reluctantly backed down.

  In 1911 Germany tried again. The Germans wanted a naval base and they sent a gunboat to Morocco to stake a claim at Agadir. It was only an insignificant town on the edge of a remote sandy bay, but Agadir lay on the coastline of the Atlantic Ocean and far too close for comfort to the sea-lanes plied by the Royal Navy and the British Merchant fleet. The possibility of a German base in this sensitive position was not to be thought of.

  For the first time since the Napoleonic Wars, the British Government ordered the concentration of the Fleet. It was no more than a token gesture – the merest warning growl, as a dozing bulldog might grumble at a cheeky kitten playing between its outstretched paws. But, in a routine speech to Britain’s bankers, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, made it crystal clear that the British Government would stand no nonsense and that the growl might easily turn into a snarl.