Dimming of the Day

8 Foreword showing solidarity, although the verdict of most historians is that they were, in practice, swayed by two other elements. First, there was the fear, strongly felt by Lloyd George, that the Germans would crush the French within weeks, as their army under the Prussian flag had done in 1870, with the consequence of them controlling the Channel coast. This was the Englishman’s chief anxiety, scarcely helped by a similar belief among the myriad Parisians who were busily fleeing the city. Second, there was the fear that the rather more bellicose Conservative opposition would be only too delighted either to take over or form a war coalition. Moreover, Winston Churchill, borrowing from the usual sign in the window of a fire damaged shop, called for ‘business as usual’, a dutiful injunction many obeyed, the general understanding being, in a nation untouched for centuries by serious alien incursion, that any war would be fought elsewhere and by the standing army. Until the last minute the ordinary hope was that somehow the problem would be solved and the pursuit of normal activity, inclusive perhaps of calmly playing cricket, might be a psychological token of this. The Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey, speaking in the House of Commons on 3 August, said, ‘if we are engaged in war, we shall suffer it little more than we shall suffer if we stand aside.’ According to A.J.P.Taylor, in his magisterial English History 1914-1945 (1965) ministers assumed that “all would be over in a few months, if not a few weeks. The ordinary citizen would be little affected.” Next there were military vacillations about when to deploy the troops and how many of them should be utilised. Unlike the continental forces, the small British army, including the reservists who were promptly incorporated, was all-regular. Compared with Germany’s 98.5 divisions comprising 2.2 million men, it consisted of but seven divisions, six infantry and one cavalry, 162,000 men in all, plus some 86,000 in reserve, that is following full-time service. In the distant background were 190,000, mainly Indian, colonial troops. Lord Haldane’s nascent attempts to form a Territorial Army were in their early stages and only 7% of its members had undertaken to serve overseas. It was more akin to the militias and yeomanry of the past that had been recruited to deal with foreign assault or internal disorder. The continental armies, huge in size, were based on what later we would call national service, that is the build- up of vast forces by conscription for a period of training, each cohort then held in readiness for mobilisation. Some of this, especially in Russia, was low-level and sporadic, but it is in marked contrast to the British resistance, in spite of the pleading of Lord Roberts and others, to the introduction of obligatory military service. Some have seen the existence of quasi-martial youth organisations like the Boys Brigade and the Boy Scouts as a counter to this, while the officer cadet movement in the public schools was certainly destined to play its poignant part. Nonetheless, this essentially civil as opposed to martial focus is one that needs to be thoroughly understood while studying these early weeks of the war in Britain. The British Expeditionary Force began to disembark at Boulogne, Le Havre and Rouen on 14 August and took up its position on the twenty mile