The British public was on vacation as nations on the Continent began to fight. The holiday-goers returned from the Summer Bank Holiday to realize, after all, that they might get wrapped up in the conflict on the Continent.
France was preoccupied with scandal, the latest being the Callaux affair, which involved a socialite who murdered a newspaper editor to protect her husband's past dalliances and his involvement in questionable activity in government.
The moods of those countries changed overnight when war arrived.
Austria-Hungary, the first to declare war, enjoyed popular support for crushing Serbia. There even was a Dick Cheney in high councils of government.
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| Budapest: two days into the war |
When war arrived on Europe's doorstep, the Germans, French and Serbians also were eager to fight.
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| Men marching to their barracks in Berlin |
Though no one could be more enthusiastic for war than the Germans, France also had its war plans. French soldiers were taught to fight with élan. There is no precise English translation but "zest" or "dynamism" come close. French plans called for going on the offensive immediately. The defense was eschewed, even though it made sense. France's all-consuming goal: to retrieve their lost provinces in Alsace and Lorraine, then push the Germans back to Berlin. Finally the moment had come.
Serbia seemed born to fight everyone to the death. It embraced expansion, mortal sacrifice, terrorism and Balkan resentments dating back of 1389.
War back had an element of chivalry. It still was the time of the bayonet charge and even the horseman with lancet, when soldiers fought in close quarters. Civilians were not meant as targets. French soldiers still wore red trousers because that's the way they had done it for nearly a century.
My argument is that war came as a relief, a celebration, because most European countries (other than the Balkans) suffered relatively minor conflicts in their recent past. The last occasion when Great Powers fought each other to the death was in 1870, the Franco-Prussian War. The conflict was just nine months long and resulted in the deaths of 167,000 soldiers. From that experience came the notion that this new war would be over by Christmas.
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| Antietam, 1862; by Matthew Brady |
For the South, it was total war. Every aspect of the Southern economy, even slavery, was employed.
In 1914, a young American man who fought on the first day of the Civil War was now 73 years old. He could remember the horror. He could describe the slaughter to his children and grandchildren. For everyone to see, there were the Matthew Brady photographs of the detritus from the battlefield—the corpses, the dying, the land stripped bare. And there were the physical scars: tens of thousands of men made amputees. They struggled the rest of their lives in plain view. Those images were still fresh to many Americans.
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| Chamberlain, 1874 |
Americans realized in 1914 that involvement in a major open-ended conflict was too horrible to repeat. Sure, Americans had fought wars since 1865 but these were mostly minor short-term affairs, such as the Spanish-American War. They were routs or police actions, as in Mexico or the Dominican Republic, or guerrilla actions such as in the Philippines. Most of the time, they departed as quickly as they could.
Americans had dismantled their huge Civil War-sized land-based army, preferring to exert political influence by a show of naval force. It was a fleet in being, not meant to fight Britain or Germany.
So when Americans read of European nations eagerly lining up to fight each other, that was news. Big news. It reminded them of their own experience. That war wasn't glory. Or élan. It was gruesome business, fraught with hardship and the recognition that peace won't arrive for Christmas. And it reinforced the idea that neutrality wasn't bad after all.