In Europe

Café, Hotel Westminster became the Lindenhof. Czar Nicholas II appeared on the balcony of the Winter Palace and was cheered by an enthusiastic crowd, which then sang the national anthem and kneeled before him in unison. Strikes were called off. The Duma held a recess ‘in order not to hinder the government's work with undue politics’. The name St Petersburg, sounding overly Teutonic now, was changed to Petrograd. The French cooper Louis Barthas wrote in his diary: ‘To mygreat amazement, the announcement [of the mobilisation] seemed to give rise to more enthusiasm than despair. In their innocence, people seem to love the idea of living in an age when something grand and compelling is about to happen.’
    In Berlin, Käthe Kollwitz saw her sons leave for war. Hans was already in the army, Peter volunteered for duty after seeing a company march away while bystanders sang a ‘rousing popular chorus’ of ‘Die Wacht am Rhein.’ It was hard for her, but her husband Karl said: ‘These wonderful children – we shall have to work hard to deserve them.’ In the evening, after dinner, the family read aloud a war novella about a man who had been summoned to his dying friend. After that there was singing in the living room, ‘old country ballads and war songs’. Käthe went to the barracks to visit her sons. ‘In the courtyard, Hans. In uniform. His baby face.’
    There were those, however, who sensed that this war would put an end to their old, familiar world. The writer Vera Brittain, studying at Oxford at the time, read the summons to mobilisation pasted up everywhere ‘with the feeling that I had been transported back into an uglier century’. The German Jewish industrialist Walter Rathenau, son of the founder of AEG, sat quietly in his chair, tears running down his cheeks. Behind the scenes, he had done everything in his power to slow down the arms race and prevent this war. ‘While the people were in the grip of wild enthusiasm, Rathenau was wringing his hands,’ his friend, cosmopolite and diarist Harry Kessler wrote.
    During the final week of peace, the newspapers of the European socialists were full of editorials against the war and against militarism. Mass meetings were held, demonstrations organised and plans forged for an international general strike to stop the war machinery in its tracks, but nothing came of it. On Wednesday, 29 July, the Socialist International Congress held an emergency meeting in Brussels, but with little result. That evening the socialist leaders stood on the stage before a cheering crowd, the French party leader Jean Jaurès put his arm around the German social democrat Hugo Haase, both men clearly moved, and then the workers marched en masse through Brussels, waving white signs with the slogan ‘
Guerre à la Guerre!
’ and singing the ‘Internationale’ over and over.Two days later, on Friday, 31 July, Jaurès was shot and killed by a nationalist in Paris. The German socialists were deeply shocked, and expressed their condolences to their French comrades at this great loss.
    Four days later, on Tuesday, 4 August, Lenin's agent in Berlin, Alexandra Kollontai, saw with her own eyes how these same socialists – some of them having even come to the Reichstag in uniform – voted enthusiastically in favour of Kaiser Wilhelm's war budget. ‘I couldn't believe it,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘I was convinced that they had either gone mad or that I was the one who had lost my senses.’ After that fateful vote, she went in a daze to the parliament and was stopped in a corridor by a social-democrat representative, who asked her angrily what a Russian was doing in the Reichstag.
    The French socialists behaved no differently. Jaurès was honoured amid a groundswell of national unity. From now on, the fatherland would take precedence over all the rest. Within a week the ‘Internationale’ had been forgotten, but three months later all enthusiasm for the war was gone as well. When Louis Barthas marched off to war, people doffed their hats, ‘as for a procession of condemned men.’
    Why were people so keen to go to battle in 1914? The people's rage in Germany was directed principally against the British, the arrogant empire blocking the development of young, dynamic Germany: ‘
Gott strafe England!
’ Furthermore, for Germany it was a pre-emptive war: the kaiser and his generals were deeply concerned about Russia's burgeoning military power. They feared that, within the