Jean Jaurès, France’s great socialist leader, complained to his companion in a taxi taking them to a Paris restaurant on the evening of 31 July that the driver’s manic haste would be the death of them. ‘No,’ said the other wryly, ‘like all Parisian drivers he is a good socialist and union man.’ It was not reckless speed that killed Jaurès that night, however, but instead a deranged fanatic who shot him in the back as he ate. This assassination prompted across Europe a wave of shock and horror far more emotional than that following the murder of Franz Ferdinand. Jaurès was recognised across frontiers as a political giant. Le Temps lamented that he was extinguished ‘just at the moment when … his oratory was about to become a weapon of national defence’.
Raymond Recouly wrote of that night of Friday the 31st: ‘As I came out of the paper with a friend, towards one in the morning, at the corner of the Rue Drouot we heard in the distance the sonorous clatter of a troop of cavalry. The cafés were just closing, but there were plenty of people about. The hooves resounded ever more loudly on the cobbles. A voice cried: “Here come the cuirassiers!” Something like an electric shock surged through the crowd. On every floor, windows opened. People stood up on benches, on the tables of cafés. A big taxi-driver hoisted himself up on the roof of his vehicle, at the risk of breaking it. Led by a band of children and young people, the horsemen appeared. In campaign kit, their helmets covered, gigantic in their long cloaks, they filled the roadway. A formidable clamour rose from every lip: “Vive la France! Vive l’armée!” The taxi-driver atop his vehicle looked frenzied. He cried more loudly than all the others, throwing his cap in the air and windmilling his arms.’
Later that night, a Le Temps office boy in front of the central post office in the Boulevard des Italiens saw the mobilisation order being posted. Just before 4 a.m. on 1 August, he ran into the newspaper manager’s office crying, ‘C’est affiché!’ The staff hurried outside to see for themselves. A crowd gathered before one of the post office windows to read the small blue sheet – Russia’s was lilac in colour. ‘Mobilisation is not war,’ prime minister Viviani had insisted when he signed the order. But as Raymond Recouly said, ‘no one believed him. If it was not war, it was in any event something equally terrible.’ The French army was instructed not to approach within six miles of the German or Belgian frontiers, to ensure that the odium for territorial aggression rested squarely in Berlin.
Sir Francis Bertie wrote, as French troops began to muster: ‘The populace is very calm. Here today it is “vive l’Angleterre”, tomorrow it may be “perfide Albion”. I was to have dined at Edmond de Rothschild’s Boulogne-sur-Seine villa; the rendezvous was in Paris instead, for all his horses and automobiles have been appropriated. His electric brougham cannot go outside the enceinte [city perimeter] – no automobile can do so without a special permit. Our 4 footmen have left to join their regiments at once and the under-butler left 10 days ago; 3 other men have joined the colours. I have asked to be allowed to keep the French chauffeur.’ There were violent demonstrations against German-owned businesses such as the Maggi food-processing company, which achieved a special virulence because small French milk-producers considered the giant a commercial menace. German and Austrian shops were looted while the police stood passively by. Viviani told the Chamber of Deputies: ‘Germany has nothing to reproach us with. What is being attacked are the independence, dignity and security which the Triple Entente has secured for the benefit of Europe.’ His words received thunderous applause.
The American novelist Edith Wharton, who was living in France, had spent July visiting Spain and the Balearics. She returned to Paris on 1 August, and found herself obliged to abandon plans to move on to England for the balance of the summer: ‘everything seemed strange, ominous and unreal, like the yellow glare which precedes a storm. There were moments when I felt as if I had died, and woken up in an unknown world. And so I had.’
Now, all Europe waited to learn what Asquith’s government would do. In Vienna, Alexander Freud wrote disbelievingly to his brother Sigmund about the notion of Britain entering the war alongside Russia, arguing that ‘a civilised people will not take the side of barbarians’. Many Germans, too, found it hard to comprehend the threat of British belligerence in a struggle they deemed none of Albion’s business. Richard Stumpf, a sailor with the High Seas Fleet, expressed disgust that only weeks after a squadron of the Royal Navy had been received with every friendly honour at Kiel Regatta, its country should be considering entering hostilities: ‘one feels bitter to think that [British behaviour] is really driven by jealousy, that wretched commercial envy is to blame’. The Germans delayed until 3 August their declaration of war on France, in hopes of preserving British neutrality. The Kaiser continued to think this plausible, because he was absurdly overimpressed by a conversation some time earlier between his brother and King George V. Prince Heinrich came home from a visit to London reporting the monarch’s assurance that his country would stay out of any European conflict. Wilhelm thought Britain would be wise to do so in any event, since, as he cleverly observed, ‘dreadnoughts have no wheels’.
A visitor to France wrote: ‘no one who was not in Paris at the time can ever realize the intense anxiety of the French during those days of waiting for England to speak’. The Asquith government’s intentions remained profoundly uncertain. A Times editorial on 29 July praised the country’s unselfishness: ‘It is our settled interest and traditional policy to uphold the balance of power in Europe’; to the Entente with France ‘we shall remain faithful in the future, come what may’. The French, however, were merely exasperated by such pious expressions of good intentions. All they wanted to know was whether the British Army would fight beside them. And at that moment, the answer was that it would not.
Grey, Churchill, Haldane and Asquith wanted Britain to stand four-square with the other Entente partners: as early as 29 July, the foreign secretary privately threatened resignation if the government failed to do so. The First Lord of the Admiralty buffeted and cajoled his friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer to overcome Lloyd George’s stubborn reluctance to see Britain committed to a continental conflict. Churchill suggested, absurdly, that participation need not cost much: ‘Together we can carry a wide social policy … The naval war will be cheap.’ But as Russia mobilised, most British people resisted the notion that their country should emulate its example. The Daily News asserted firmly on 29 July: ‘the most effective work for peace that we can do is to make it clear that not a British life shall be sacrificed for the sake of Russian hegemony of the Slav world’. The Labour Party considered urging the unions to call a general strike if Asquith sought to join the struggle. ‘All Europe Arming’, ran the Daily Mail’s headline on 30 July, as if describing remote events, followed two days later by ‘Europe Drifting to Disaster’. At a dinner on 31 July, Russian ambassador Count Benckendorff told the writer Maurice Baring that both he and the French envoy were bleakly convinced that England would not fight.
The leftist Daily Chronicle on 31 July applauded the absence of popular jingoism: ‘Very welcome, and in comparison with what we experienced some while ago very remarkable, is the complete absence of anti-German sentiment. The last few years have done a great deal to reopen English eyes to our community of interest with the great people whose civilisation is in many ways the most akin in Europe to our own; and the bare idea of a ruinous conflict between us seems more unqualifiedly distasteful now than it has, perhaps, for a generation.’ That day the Manchester Guardian became the first British newspaper to suggest that the country might be obliged to fight if France was attacked. However, the newspaper discounted any possibility of a German invasion of Belgium, because such action would breach Europe’s 1839 treaty guaranteeing Belgian neutrality, to which Berlin as well as London was a signatory.
A soldier of the Royal Welch Fusiliers