On 3 August, the British foreign secretary, Edward Grey, laid down an ultimatum to Germany to withdraw from Belgium or face war. Nobody in power in Berlin paid the slightest attention. The first stage of the Schlieffen Plan, the huge wheeling movement that was supposed to surround and conquer Paris from the north and north-west within six weeks, was already in motion: the first columns of 750,000 German soldiers had started the invasion of Belgium.
Britain’s civilian leaders, several of whom, including the future prime minister David Lloyd George, had opposed the war until that point, were shocked by the magnitude of what was happening. Tears breached the dam of English reserve. The resolute calm of the Foreign Office and the prim punctiliousness of Whitehall yielded to the open sobbing of old men conscious of their role in the tragedy of the world. The German invasion of Belgium had swung the ‘neutrals’ in government behind the war.
Margot Asquith joined her husband, Herbert ‘H.H.’ Asquith, the prime minister, in his office in the House of Commons. ‘So it’s all up?’ she asked. ‘Yes it’s all up,’ he answered, without looking at her. He sat at his desk, pen in hand, and she leant her head against his. She later wrote, ‘we could not speak for the tears’.1
That evening, as Edward Grey stood at a window in Whitehall, watching the sun set over St James’s Park and the street lamps being lit on the Mall, he said to a friend, ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’2
At dawn on 4 August 1914, Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg rose to address Germany’s Parliament, the Reichstag:
A stupendous fate is breaking over Europe … [W]e wished to continue our work of peace [but], like a silent vow, the feeling that animated everyone from the Emperor down to the youngest soldier was this: Only in defence of a just cause shall our sword fly from its scabbard. That day has now come when we must draw it, against our wish, and in spite of our sincere endeavours. Russia has set fire to the building. We are at war with Russia and France – a war that has been forced upon us …3
Bethmann-Hollweg then gave a heavily truncated version of the July crisis that had precipitated the outbreak of war, distorted by untruths and omissions, and redounding always to Germany’s honourable intent amid the perfidy of its neighbours. He unwittingly laid bare the siege mentality of a people perennially wronged, never the wrongdoers.
He dismissed the warnings Tsar Nicholas had given that Russia would not stand by if Austria–Hungary crushed Serbia, ignoring the fact that everyone in power knew this ‘Third Balkan War’, which Germany had provoked, could not be confined to the peninsula. He said nothing of Germany’s role in engineering this outcome, of handing Vienna a blank cheque to do as it pleased against Serbia, confident of German support. He excised from the script Berlin’s refusal to engage constructively in mediation attempts. He made much of Russia’s reckless decision to order partial mobilization, which was admittedly the greatest error made by the Triple Entente.
Towards the end of his speech, Bethmann-Hollweg declared: ‘Gentlemen, we are now in a state of necessity, and necessity knows no law.’4 The remark horrified the embassies of Europe: was the civilized world, then, to revert to barbarian lawlessness? The chancellor later sourced his words to Helmuth von Moltke, chief of the German General Staff, who believed that fighting a war on two fronts made the invasion of Belgium a case of ‘absolute military necessity’: ‘I had to accommodate my view to his,’ were the chancellor’s weasel words.5
From that point, the German government tossed aside all the customary rules that exist between nation states, in war and peace. Henceforth, Germany would behave as if centuries of evolving diplomacy and international law traceable to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the European wars of religion, were as nothing and revert to the blood pact of a gang of Visigoths. In waging war on Europe, the Reich would act outside all the accepted rules drawn up by the Hague Conventions. And the Entente powers would soon respond in kind.
In phrases that heaped shame upon ignominy, Bethmann-Hollweg then admitted that Germany had already committed two ‘necessary’ lawless acts – the invasions of Luxembourg and Belgium:
Our troops have occupied Luxembourg and perhaps have already entered Belgian territory. Gentlemen, that is a breach of international law … [But] we were forced to ignore the rightful protests of the Governments of Luxembourg and Belgium. The wrong – I speak openly – the wrong we thereby commit we will try to make good as soon as our military aims have been attained. He who is menaced as we are and is fighting for his highest possession can only consider how he is to hack his way through [durchhauen].
His words drew ‘great and repeated applause’.6
Belgium quaked at the realization of what she was about to endure: the full force of the German Army, unconstrained by the treaty obligations of Belgium’s neighbours. Astonishingly, Bethmann-Hollweg still seemed to think British neutrality negotiable, despite his defence of German lawlessness:
We have informed the British Government that, as long as Great Britain remains neutral, our fleet will not attack the northern coast of France, and that we will not violate the territorial integrity and independence of Belgium [a bizarre statement, having admitted that Germany had already done just that]. These assurances I now repeat before the world, and I may add that, as long as Great Britain remains neutral, we would also be willing, upon reciprocity being assured, to take no warlike measures against French commercial shipping …
Gentlemen, so much for the facts. I repeat the words of the Emperor: ‘With a clear conscience we enter the lists.’ … Now the great hour of trial has struck for our people. But with clear confidence we go forward to meet it. Our army is in the field, our navy is ready for battle – behind them stands the entire German nation – the entire German nation united to the last man …7
If the chancellor’s remarks shocked millions of Germany’s neighbours, they exhilarated young Hitler, who approved of stamping all over small, neutral countries. To him, nothing should be allowed to stand in the path of German power, least of all international laws and old treaties. His hatred of meddling lawyers and prying bureaucrats had been well honed in Vienna, and was rooted in his contempt for the patient civil service of his father.
On the brink of war, the chancellor and Kaiser made rousing public noises, but behind the scenes were weighed down by the sheer enormity of what they had committed their country to do. In the eyes of Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, secretary of state of the Imperial Navy, Bethmann-Hollweg resembled a ‘drowning man’; and the Kaiser, according to a friend, wore ‘a tragic and disturbed face’.8 In rushing to mobilize, Germany’s civilian leaders knew they had exhausted any hope of a diplomatic solution and had ceded power to the Prussian generals. Bethmann-Hollweg’s rudderless diplomacy had dismally failed to avoid the descent into conflict and done much to start it. The destiny of the country, and Europe, now lay in the sights of the Prussian military class.
The final blow fell that same day, 4 August, when Britain revealed its true position. Having heard no response to its ultimatum, Britain declared war on Germany that day, killing Bethmann-Hollweg’s last hope that the world’s greatest sea power would stay neutral. Young Hitler could scarcely contain his excitement.
The next day Hitler eagerly volunteered for the German Army. He was rejected. He tried again on 16 August and this time was accepted, as a trainee infantryman in a Bavarian battalion. He would absurdly claim, in Mein Kampf, that as an Austrian he had had to petition Bavaria’s King Ludwig III for a special dispensation to join the German Army. This was preposterous grandstanding. In the rush to enlist, a bureaucratic oversight had failed to pick up his nationality and landed him in a Bavarian unit by mistake. On 16 September he was assigned to the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, of the 6th Bavarian Reserve Division; it was known as the ‘List Regiment’ after its first commander, Colonel Julius List.
Hitler had found a home, at last. For the first time in his life he had discovered a cause, regular employment and comradeship. ‘I passionately loved soldiering,’ he would later say.9 The war would be ‘the greatest and most unforgettable time of my earthly existence’.10 His regiment quickly became his family, which he would refuse to abandon even when wounded or offered the prospect of promotion to a more effective unit.
Far from being members of a well-oiled fighting machine, the List Regiment’s 3,500 soldiers formed a ‘motley assortment of callow youths and not always young, or fit, men, from a range of backgrounds’.11 It contained homeless misfits, romantic students, unemployed workers and, of course, idealists and Pan-Germans like Hitler (there were also fifty-nine Jews, who served mostly as privates or non-commissioned officers12). The List Regiment ranked well down the food chain in the German Army, receiving outmoded rifles with which to practise, not the weapons they would use in combat.13
Poorly trained and ill-equipped, these bumbling conscripts (volunteers like Hitler made up only 15 per cent of his regiment14) were thrown together into new formations and, on 10 October, dispatched to the training grounds at Lechfeld, near Augsburg. Hitler described the first five days of combat training as ‘the hardest of my life’. ‘Every day,’ he wrote to his Munich landlady, Anna Popp, on 20 October, ‘we have a long march, major exercises, and a night-time march of up to forty-two kilometres, followed by major brigade manoeuvres.’15
They trained for ten days before their departure for France and the Western Front. ‘The volunteers of the List Regiment may not have learned how to fight properly,’ Hitler would later say of his comrades, ‘but they knew how to die like old soldiers.’16
Brave they certainly were. The Listers would fight with blind courage, obedient cannon fodder in the coming slaughter. Some 16,000 men would pass through the regiment between 1914 and 1918, a horrific turnover rate, but not so extreme on Germany’s scale of losses. The German front desperately needed these young recruits during the first, devastating confrontations. By the time Hitler’s regiment arrived on the Western Front, in late October, French and British forces had confounded the German Schlieffen Plan at the great Battle of the Marne on 5–12 September, driving the invaders back from the gates of Paris and crushing Prussian hopes of a swift victory.
In October, the focus of the German attack turned to Flanders, deemed an important link in the Allied defences: strategically close to the Channel ports of Dunkirk and Calais, vital to the maintenance of the British supply line to France. Their goal was to burst through the British and French defences and seize the town of Ypres, shutting off the British lifeline. Hitler and his comrades were to be thrown into the attack. But first, he would have to travel to Lille, Germany’s new headquarters in northern France, through the aftermath of the invasion of Belgium.