‘Henceforth,’ said the general, ‘my telephone’s out of order.’
‘Smash your telephone,’ replied the minister, as millions of Russians were called to their units. France too now had to mobilize. At his Neues Palais, Potsdam, Willy was encouraged by his bombastic sons and the kaiserin, all ‘frightfully warlike’ and all hoping that Russian aggression would allow Britain to stay out – even though Britain had twice made clear it would never tolerate French destruction.
On 31 July, confirming Russian mobilization, Wilhelm used his new telephone to unleash Moltke. Leaving one army to defend against Russia, Moltke ordered his forces to smash through Belgium into France and take Paris. Wilhelm practically ordered Franz Josef to declare against Russia: Serbia was now ‘a side issue’. Only the role of Britain was uncertain: when British intervention became likely, Moltke panicked so much that Wilhelm sneered, ‘Your uncle would have given a different answer.’ Moltke was falling apart from the strain, weeping, ‘I’m happy to wage war against the French and Russians but not against such a kaiser.’ A conciliatory telegram arrived from George, at which an ‘elated’ kaiser toasted British neutrality with champagne. But on 4 August, when German forces invaded Belgium, Britain declared war as hysterical crowds celebrated across Europe: the tsar and Alexandra appeared on the balcony of the Winter Palace; the kaiser told the crowds, ‘I see no parties, just Germans’; while on Munich’s Odeonsplatz, the twenty-five-year-old Hitler, having moved to Munich flush with his father’s inheritance and having been rejected by the Austrian army for medical reasons, joined the exultant throng. ‘Overcome by tempestuous enthusiasm,’ he recalled, ‘I sank to my knees and thanked heaven … I was fortunate enough to live in these times.’ He quickly joined the Royal Bavarian Army, and ‘the most unforgettable and exciting time of my life had begun’.
The kaiser, exhausted, spent forty-eight hours in bed. ‘A little nerves rest cure,’ he said. While the Russians advanced on the eastern front, Moltke took the Liège fortress, then swung down towards Paris. A veteran general in the east, Paul von Hindenburg, recalled from retirement and assisted by an ambitious self-made officer, Erich von Ludendorff, encircled the Russian armies at Tannenberg, just as in the west German armies were stopped at the Marne. The Schlieffen–Moltke Plan had failed. On 14 September, after six weeks of wartime command, Moltke had a nervous breakdown; Wilhelm sacked him and appointed the war minister, Erich von Falkenhayn. But Falkenhayn persisted with the plan and launched the ‘race to the sea’, hoping to encircle the French, who were soon joined by a massive British force. The cerebral British prime minister, Herbert Asquith, a Liberal lawyer who daily spent hours writing love letters to his aristocratic young paramour, appointed Earl Kitchener as war minister. The Sudan Machine was one of the first to spot that the war would last years and require ‘new armies’ of conscripts who would fight ‘to the last million’. His pewter-eyed stare and slogan – ‘Your Country Needs You’ – attracted hundreds of thousands of volunteers. The scale of the war reflected the surging world population, the mystique of nationalist ideas, the panoply of modern power, the extent of the European empires and the ability of trains and steamships to transport vast numbers around the world to fight: the Mass Age.* On the western front the combatants became locked in a savage and bloody stalemate; this was the horror of the trenches, where green countryside and mass armies of millions of civilians, mobilized in numbers never before seen, were mulched into mud and splinter, flesh and limb, by Vickers machine guns and Krupp howitzers.
A GERMAN PRIVATE ON THE WESTERN FRONT: MASS KILLING IN THE MASS AGE
