for an urgent meeting with his erratic commander at the British embassy in Paris.
Kitchener's post as secretary for war had traditionally been occupied by a civilian. But in this time of need, Alfred Milner and other influential figures had quietly maneuvered a reluctant prime minister into giving the job to the hero of Omdurman, regarded as the country's greatest living military man. It was the first time a serving soldier had been in the cabinet in more than 250 years. French felt threatened by Kitchener, with whom he had never been close, and was insulted that Kitchener wore his field marshal's uniform to Paris—undermining, as French saw it, his own authority as field commander. During a contentious meeting, Kitchener bluntly forbade French to remove his troops from the battlefront.
As dismayed Britons tried to absorb the disastrous news from France, a curious rumor swept the country. This retreat would not matter, because Russians—hundreds of thousands of them, millions of them—were coming to Britain's aid. They had been seen, in vast hordes, pouring off ships at night, filling hundreds of trains which secretly whisked them through England to the Channel ports. They sang, played balalaikas, sported fierce beards, wore fur hats, and called out for vodka in deep voices; their rubles had jammed the slots of railway station vending machines built for pennies; they still had the snow of Russia on their boots. The rumors were so persistent and convincing that a German spy in Scotland urgently reported to Berlin that Russian soldiers had landed at Aberdeen; he himself had seen them heading south in high-speed trains with window blinds drawn.*
The British reverses were especially painful for those who felt their country should not be fighting at all. None of them wanted a German victory; but, few as they were, they felt the war would not be worth the high casualty counts that seemed certain to come. One distinguished dissenter was 42-year-old Bertrand Russell, a Cambridge logician and mathematician. Not only was the pipe-smoking Russell his country's best-known philosopher, but his broad forehead, aquiline nose, piercing blue eyes, ramrod posture, and arresting shock of hair, now turning gray, made him one of the most striking-looking philosophers of all time. A young woman who fell in love with him wrote to him about "your heathery hair ... looking robustious and revolutionary"; decades later, in her memoirs, she recalled that Russell's hair "seemed almost to give off sparks like a heath fire."
The grandson of a prime minister, whose earldom he would eventually inherit, Russell explored the abstruse heights of theory—his greatest work, the co-written Principia Mathematica, takes 347 pages before reaching a definition of the number 1—but he also wrote fluently and widely for the general public. Over his long life dozens of books flowed from his pen as easily as letters: a popular history of philosophy still read today, collections of essays, a sprinkling of fiction, volumes about China, happiness, politics, socialism, and educational reform. He denounced conventional marriage but had an irresistible attraction for women (one came all the way from the United States to pound on the door of his flat); he hated organized religion but felt moments of spiritual ecstasy; he came from the ruling class yet spent most of his life on the political left. During this greatest crisis of his generation, he loved his country deeply but believed from the start that the war was a tragic mistake.
Part of Russell's intellectual bravery lay in his willingness to confront that last set of conflicting loyalties. He described himself poignantly in the autumn of 1914 as being "tortured by patriotism.... I desired the defeat of Germany as ardently as any retired colonel. Love of England is very nearly the strongest emotion I possess, and in appearing to set it aside at such a moment, I was making a very difficult renunciation." What left him even more anguished was realizing that "anticipation of carnage was delightful to something like ninety per cent of the population.... As a lover of truth, the national propaganda of the belligerent nations sickened me. As a lover of civilization, the return to barbarism appalled me. As a man of thwarted parental feeling [he as yet had no children], the massacre of the young wrung my heart."
Over the more than four years of fighting to come, he never yielded in his belief that "this war is trivial, for all its vastness. No great principle is at stake, no great human purpose is involved on either side.... The English and French say they are fighting in defence of democracy, but they do not wish their words to be heard in Petrograd or Calcutta." He was dismayed to see two-thirds of Cambridge and Oxford undergraduates enlist in the war's opening months, their powers of reasoning "swept away in a red blast of hate." These convictions, expressed in an unceasing blizzard of articles and speeches, would soon land him in the forefront of a slowly growing antiwar movement, while losing him old friendships, his Cambridge lectureship, and his passport. Eventually, they would put him behind bars.
Antiwar beliefs were severely tested by the mass patriotic hysteria of the war's first months. "One by one, the people with whom one had been in the habit of agreeing politically went over to the side of the war," as Russell put it, "and as yet the exceptional people ... had not yet found each other." How hard it was, he wrote, to resist "when the whole nation is in a state of violent collective excitement. As much effort was required to avoid sharing this excitement as would have been needed to stand out against the extreme of hunger or sexual passion, and there was the same feeling of going against instinct."
While dissenters like him tried to make their voices heard against the torrent, generals and cabinet ministers feverishly debated strategy, and men thronged recruiting stations, messages from the War Office were reaching thousands of British homes. On September 8, 1914, Violet Cecil received the news that, following an infantry battle in a French forest, her son George was reported wounded and missing.
9. THE GOD OF RIGHT WILL WATCH THE FIGHT
WHILE BLOODIED BRITISH and French forces retreated, filling the roads of northern France with haggard troops and ambulances and open wagons full of wounded men, their commanders could at least take comfort that, unlike them, the Germans had to battle on two fronts. For Russia, with its bottomless reserves of manpower, was attacking Germany from the east. Russian armies were already well across the border, heading for the medieval Teutonic city of Königsberg on the Baltic, and had won a battle with German troops on the way. Since so many Germans had been sent west, the advancing Russian forces outnumbered their adversaries by three to one, and, in cavalry, by eight to one. On August 23, 1914, the same day as the battle at Mons, a titanic clash began on the Eastern Front.
Unfortunately for the Allies, though Russia's army was the largest on earth, it was also one of the most inept. There were, for example, little more than half as many rifles available as soldiers who needed them, a matter to which no one seemed to have given much thought. The army had only one battery of antiaircraft guns—which were protecting the Tsar's summer palace. Many Russian generals were elderly and overweight; the nerves of one corps commander proved incapable of withstanding the sound of rifle fire. Higher-ranking officers had been promoted largely by seniority and connections at court; the main claim to renown of the army's chief, Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, was being the Tsar's cousin. His most visible asset, along with royal blood, was commanding height. At six feet six inches, he towered impressively above all others; in his headquarters, aides pinned pieces of white paper over door frames built for ordinary mortals, to warn him to duck. He had no battlefield experience, and upon being appointed commander in chief he wept, believing himself not up to the job. Furthermore, he and the minister of war were barely on speaking terms, and he was also out of favor with the Tsarina, who connived ceaselessly to weaken his position in the eyes of her husband.
In the Russian military supply services, corruption was the norm. When a major general led a purchasing mission to buy war materiel in the United States, according to a New York businessman, "He and his officers quickly became notorious in the metal trade as grafters. The General himself was less interested in the prices his government had to pay than in trying to get the companies to add a concealed commissio
n for him."
Western suppliers discovered the same expectations when they went to Russia. "A French businessman, seeking a contract to supply ten thousand platoon tents, was duly placing his bribes in the Ministry of War," the historian Alan Clark has written. "Finally he came to the highest point, the minister's personal secretary.... To the businessman's alarm the private secretary insisted on a personal 'gratuity' equal in size to all the lesser disbursements which he had been obliged to make on the way up. He protested that, if this last sum were paid out, he would have no profit left on the order. 'Ah,' replied the secretary with a silky smile, 'I understand. But why deliver the tents?"'
When the Grand Duke met his supply staff for the first time, his words to them were "Gentlemen, no stealing."
Russia was a peasant country and roughly one-third of its millions of conscripts were illiterate. Unfamiliar with modern technology and in need of cooking fuel, soldiers sometimes chopped down telegraph poles for firewood. Exasperated commanders then resorted to the radio, but as codebooks had not been properly distributed, the Germans could simply listen in. In these early days, Russian soldiers tended to fire on any airplane, including their own. Not having seen one before, they assumed such an exotic invention must be German.
For the upper classes, the war was still an adventure. Wealthy women sponsored their own private hospital trains, in which their daughters did the nursing, at least when marriageable officers were involved. Such volunteer nurses, however, were allowed to treat only "cases of light wounds, above the belt." Observers noticed that these hospital trains tended to migrate to the rear of the Imperial Guard regiments, whose officers were likely to come from the most eligible layer of St. Petersburg society.
This, then, was the army that went into battle in the swamps and forests of East Prussia on August 23, with a German force whose size and position were unknown. In the inscrutable ways of the Russian bureaucracy, the commanding general, Alexander Samsonov, had just finished seven years as governor of Turkestan when, less than two weeks earlier, he had been placed in charge of troops and staff he had never seen before. As his tired, ill-fed soldiers blundered forward through unfamiliar terrain, they were set upon by large detachments of well-supplied German troops, who—thanks to overheard radio transmissions—knew exactly where to find them. Largely unaware, Samsonov was at his headquarters in a town behind the lines having dinner with a British military attaché when a whole division of panicked retreating troops came pouring down the street. As the sound of German artillery fire drew closer, Samsonov commandeered some Cossack horses and headed to the front to take on-the-spot command of whatever forces remained. Urging the British attaché to get away while he could, the general rode off, saying, obscurely, "The enemy has luck one day, we will have luck another."
Samsonov had no luck. The Russians who were not captured tried to retreat, only to find that the Germans now controlled all passable roads. From one entire army corps (well over 25,000 soldiers) under Samsonov's command, only a single man returned to Russia. When the battle was over, although the Germans had suffered 13,000 casualties, the Russians had lost more than 30,000 men killed or wounded, plus 92,000 taken prisoner—60 German trains were needed to transport them to POW camps. Like his army's remnants, Samsonov, too, ended up fleeing. With their horses unable to cross marshy ground, he and some aides slogged through the night on foot. When their supply of matches was exhausted, they could no longer read their compasses. Shortly after midnight, Samsonov moved apart from the rest of the group and shot himself.
Soon after this debacle, the Germans crushed a second invading Russian army. The Russian general commanding it lost his nerve and fled home by car. All in all, during a month of fighting, the Russians lost 310,000 men killed, wounded, or taken prisoner, as well as 650 artillery pieces. Industrial war had taken an instant and devastating toll of their half-industrialized country. For the rest of the conflict, Russia's armies would never again pose a threat to Germany.
In November, sensing that the winds were blowing in Germany's favor, a longtime rival of Russia, the Ottoman Empire, joined the Central Powers, as the alliance between Germany and Austria-Hungary was now called. This opened up a new front in the rugged mountains and valleys of the Caucasus, where the Turkish and Russian empires met. As if they had not heard enough bad news already, toward the end of 1914, Russian officials began receiving troubling secret-police reports of revolutionary agitators spotted talking to wounded soldiers, and to fresh troops heading for the front on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Antiwar leaflets were also found. In several units, including those that ran the crucial railroads to the front, the army discovered cells of the most militant underground revolutionary faction, the Bolsheviks. In the more developed countries of Western Europe the lower classes had stopped talking of revolution and patriotically joined the fighting, but in Russia, it seemed, their loyalty was not so certain.
That prospect did not trouble the Tsar and Tsarina. Long after Russian casualties started streaming home from the front, she still ordered special trains each week to rush fresh flowers more than a thousand miles northward from the Crimea to the capital, to decorate the imperial palace.
The Russian defeats were so massive they could not be kept hidden, but the British press preferred to emphasize instead the news from a less important front where the Russians were having success against the only major army that was even more incompetent than their own. Reflecting the power structure of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, three-quarters of its officers were of German-speaking stock, while only one enlisted man in four understood the language. Throughout late 1914 until they were halted by winter, Russian troops advanced steadily, inflicting great casualties as they pushed the Austro-Hungarians back into the rugged Carpathian Mountains, where wounded men stranded on the battlefield faced an additional terror: prowling wolves, already gorging themselves on the bodies of the dead.
Austrian cavalrymen made excellent targets in their brilliant blue-and-red uniforms (which, unlike the French, they would not abandon for several years). One of many Britons who took heart from this Russian advance was Sir Ernest Shackleton, who had his last news of the war that autumn as he set sail for Antarctica. "The Russian SteamRoller was advancing. According to many the war would be over within six months."
In England, enthusiasm remained strong. "I would not be out of this glorious delicious war for anything the world could give me," Churchill told Margot Asquith, the prime minister's wife. Most people were so confident that it would be over quickly that brokers began offering "peace insurance": if you paid £80, you would receive £100 if the war hadn't ended by January 1, 1915—and you could more than quadruple your money if the war wasn't over by September 15, 1915.
At soccer matches, army recruiters patrolled outside the gates with sandwich boards saying "Your Country Needs You"; patriotic speakers addressed crowds before the games started; players themselves stepped forward as volunteers, to great bursts of applause. Fans followed their example, so these games proved the single best venue for recruiters. One poster, taking a phrase from Newbolt's poem, invited volunteers to "Play the Game!" and showed Kitchener, French, Haig, and others lined up in different positions on a team for another sport, rugby. The first correspondent sent to cover the fighting in France by the proprietor of the Daily Mail, Lord Northcliffe, was the paper's sports editor. The Times, which Northcliffe also owned, published these verses:
Come, leave the lure of the football field
With its fame so lightly won,
And take your place in a greater game
Where worthier deeds are done....
Come, join the ranks of our hero sons
In the wider field of fame,
Where the God of Right will watch the fight,
And referee the game.
Eagerness to fight was not the full story behind soaring recruitment figures, however. When London trolley workers went on strike, for instance, the city council simply fired all males of military age a
nd urged them to join up. Young men working for local governments and businesses often found themselves "released" from their jobs so they could volunteer. Although a bumpy economy had thrown hundreds of thousands of people out of work and was raising food prices, the government quietly asked charities not to aid jobless men eligible to enlist. The bull-necked, immensely wealthy "King of Lancashire," Lord Derby, who owned 68,000 acres of land and employed more than 75 servants and gardeners at his manor house alone, declared that after the war he intended to hire only men who had been at the front. Hundreds of other landowners and employers followed his example—especially after Derby was appointed director general of recruiting.
Young John Kipling once again was crushed when he failed the army medical exam. But this time, making use of the new climate of national urgency, his father called upon a friend for help, the renowned Field Marshal Lord Roberts, a hero of many nineteenth-century colonial wars, whom he had first known in India. Roberts pulled the necessary strings and, to Rudyard Kipling's delight, got John a commission in the Irish Guards. Kipling proudly identified with his son, writing to a friend that "he's rather like what I was, to look at, at his age." Just turned 17, John began training with the regiment in Essex. His father, meanwhile, suggested that Oxford should close down and that all undergraduates should be sent into the military. His poetry throbbed with martial fervor:
For all we have and are,
For all our children's fate,
Stand up and take the war,
The Hun is at the gate!
But Kipling was not all blood and thunder. Trying to assuage a shaken Violet Cecil, he carefully tracked down wounded survivors of the battle where young George had last been seen, and interviewed them in their hospital beds. None knew George's fate, but Kipling was able to sketch for Violet a map of the fighting. The Germans had been surging down a forest road near the French town of Villers-Cotterêts and George's unit, near a clearing in the woods, could hear their shouts and bugle calls. A German machine gun began spraying bullets into the clearing and surrounding forest, dotted with British troops. By one account, with enough of a storybook feel to make one skeptical, George ordered his men to fix bayonets and led them in a counterattack. When a bullet hit him in the hand, he stumbled, then drew his sword and shouted, "Charge lads, and we'll do 'em in yet!" The charge, it was said, delayed the Germans and helped other British troops escape, but left dozens of Grenadier Guardsmen dead or wounded, George among them, on the forest floor.