He had dreamed and preached of the individual absorbed in the family, the family in the nation and the nation in that ‘highest attainment of human collectivity that the world has yet seen, the British Empire’, and just when it seemed that history had left that dream behind, war had come to give sacrificial patriotism a last, bloody chance. In the final summer of peace, the headmaster of Uppingham School had told his departing sixth form that unless they could serve their country they would be better dead, and for a heady moment in that autumn of 1914 it was as if the whole country had been listening – not just that headmaster’s ‘country’, not the country of Wykehamists and Etonians desperate to get to France before it was all over, but the 300,000 men who volunteered in August, the 450,000 in September, the 137,000 in October, forerunners of the five million who, in one way or another, would find themselves in uniform before the war’s end to bear out Kipling’s prophecy that it would be the ‘third-class carriages’ that would save the country.
It was the same too on the broader scale, where all those dreams of imperial preference and closer union had seemed the vision of a departing age. The First World War would only hasten the centrifugal forces at work within the Empire, but before it did that it would prove a macabre theatre for the realisation of Ware’s dream. The parliaments of the Empire had no more say in the declaration of war than did the Imperial Parliament at Westminster, but as the Viceroy in India and each governor general issued the King’s proclamation, the same enthusiasm that had fired Britain brought the Dominion troops in their tens of thousands to sacrifice their lives – 65,000 Canadians, 60,000 Australians, 18,000 New Zealanders, more than 9,000 South Africans – in a war that only sentiment, historical ties and a shared linguistic and cultural heritage, can remotely have suggested was theirs.
As Fabian Ware made his way across to France to take up his new post as commander of the Mobile Ambulance Unit, he at least knew what he wanted out of this war. Milner had found him a consultancy with Rio Tinto, but that was now forgotten. In October 1914 he had no idea, of course, where his Red Cross work would ultimately take him, but no one could have been better equipped to recognise and fill the need when it came. He had arrived with all the qualifications for the task – ambition, connections, intelligence, energy, diplomatic skills, charm, iron will, fluent French – but at the core of everything he would do was a belief in the rightness of the cause: belief in the Empire, belief in France, and a belief in a patriotic sacrifice. Fifteen years earlier he had written that the purpose of education was to produce the citizen ‘ready to perform, to the utmost of his ability, those duties which his country demands of him’, and war had only changed the nature of that call. ‘So long as … patriotism is the controlling force … no sacrifice will be thought too great in the cause of unity,’ he had concluded his political credo, and he was not going to shy away from the consequences now. Only at the moment of birth and death, he had written just two years earlier, can men be truly equal. Desperate and shameful poverty in England might have given the lie to the first part of that proposition, but, from now on, his life’s work would be to make sure that the second half of it, at least, would come true.
At the distance of a hundred years, the First World War and the attritional fighting of the Somme or Passchendaele have become so synonymous in the public mind that it is hard to remember that it was not always so. For any soldier going to France between the spring of 1915 and the end of 1917 this might well have been the one experience of war he would ever know, but for the men of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in August 1914, or their conscript heirs of 1918 who arrived in time to face the last German offensives and the final Advance to Victory, the Great War was a war not of entrenchment but of mobility, retreat and advance.
It was this initial, highly fluid phase – defined for the British by their first, brilliant action at Mons on 23 August and by the death knell of the Old Army at the first battle of Ypres in early November – that had brought Ware and his Mobile Ambulance Unit into the conflict. In these early weeks of the war, before security fears dictated a stricter regime, it was easy enough for civilians to get over to France, and few things so beautifully capture the bizarre mix of amateurishness and high professionalism with which Britain went into battle in 1914 as the advertisement that Ware had seen in The Times on the day after the declaration of war: ‘The Royal Automobile Club,’ it announced over the name of the Hon. A. Stanley, the philanthropic chairman of the RAC who had just been brought in to try to make the Red Cross and St John Ambulance work together after more than thirty years of institutional bickering, ‘will be glad to receive the names of members and associates who will offer the services of their cars or their services with their cars either for home or foreign service, in case of need.’
There was a certain scepticism from the Army over civilian involvement, but in the days when the nation still believed in Kitchener, Kitchener’s pronouncement in September that he could see ‘no objection to parties with Motor Ambulances searching villages that are not in occupation by the Germans for wounded and to obtain particulars of the missing and to convey them to hospital’, was all that was needed. On the Sunday morning following it, the first vehicles and owners embarked at Folkestone for France, and by the end of the month twenty-five vehicles had made the crossing, the vanguard of over two hundred cars that were collected by road and rail from across the country by engineers before being converted into ambulances and shipped out under the aegis of the Red Cross to Le Havre.
Among the first of these arrivals was the collection of owners and cars – a Hudson, Vauxhall, Morris Oxford, Sunbeam, Daimler – that made up the unit that Fabian Ware had come out to command. The Mobile Unit was not the only Red Cross team operating in northern France during these opening weeks, but from the first, Ware’s was unusual in being a quasi-autonomous command, enjoying a jealously guarded independence owing something to its original remit, but still more to Ware’s iron determination to run his own show in France as he had done in South Africa or at the Morning Post.
He was lucky in his bosses – lucky they were for the most part on the other side of the Channel, lucky they were the kind of men they were – and Arthur Stanley, in particular, had never been a man to see a committee as anything but a rubber stamp. Over the next months there would be various challenges to the unit’s independence, but the Joint Finance Committee of the Red Cross and St John Ambulance was always ready to back him, sanctioning his local initiatives and giving him his own budget – £2,000 for these first three months, £3,000 for the second – perfectly happy to believe what he told them and bask in the reflected glory of the work that the unit carried out.
It was a necessary latitude because for all that it was a hand-to-mouth existence in these early weeks – petrol to be begged, hotel rooms and office space to be found, cars to be mended, jurisdictional niceties to be negotiated, rivals to be seen off, Uhlans to be avoided – Ware had arrived at a moment when events were rapidly outstripping the unit’s original modest remit. ‘The Mobile Unit was organised under the command of Mr Fabian Ware, shortly after the Battle of the Marne,’ Ware himself – always perfectly at ease talking