The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [341]
Colonel-General von Moltke was Chief of the General Staff of the Field Army of the German Empire. He had tried to refuse this position; he was sixty-six; he was, he thought, unlike his great uncle, too cautious, too reflective, too scrupulous, to make rapid decisions on which millions of lives and the fate of his country depended. The Kaiser had overruled his wishes. He would follow his uncle. He would direct the elaborate Schlieffen Plan, which required the German armies to march into Luxembourg and Belgium and seize their railways, in order to sweep round from the north and encircle Paris from the west. He did as he must and deployed his troops and trains.
On August 1st 1914 he was called suddenly to a war conference in the Berliner Schloss, with the Kaiser, generals, ministers. These men were jubilant. The Kaiser ordered celebratory champagne. Von Moltke was told that Sir Edward Grey had promised the German Ambassador in London that Great Britain would guarantee that France would not enter the war against Germany if Germany promised not to attack France. The Kaiser, full of delight and relief, told von Moltke that now they need only fight Russia. The armies could now advance to the East.
Von Moltke tried to explain that a million men, eleven thousand trains, tons of ammunition, guns, supplies, were already deployed, travelling west; patrols were already in Luxembourg; a division was behind them. The Kaiser rebuked him, telling him, with childish petulance, that his great-uncle would have given a different answer. Von Moltke could “use some other railway instead.”
Von Moltke was humiliated. He recorded that, as he realised the ignorance and light-headedness of his leader, the childish failure to imagine the world as it was, something inside him snapped. “I never recovered from that incident,” he wrote. “I was never the same again.”
Time was lost: the Kaiser countermanded orders; von Moltke sat in despair in his office and refused to sign the new ones. Then at eleven in the evening, he was recalled, to the Kaiser’s private apartments, where the head of state was half undressed, with a mantle thrown over his withered arm. He handed von Moltke a telegram from George V. The German Ambassador had been mistaken. Britain did not guarantee French neutrality.
“Now you can do what you like,” the Kaiser told his commander.
And the armies marched.
51
Some of them joined up immediately. Julian joined his father’s regiment and was sent to Officers’ Training Camp in Suffolk. He was good with guns and rode well. The sun shone. He made friends with another Cambridge man. He felt fierce because what was being attacked was the English pastoral he was studying—the woods and fields, the wild things, the cows, the sheep, the shepherds to a certain extent, the gathering in of the harvest. They said it would all be done by Christmas. His temperament was ironic; he believed in duty but not in glory and thought he must go steadily on to the promised end. He liked his men: it was necessary to like them, and he really liked them. He noticed when they were anxious and told them when they did well. In 1915 he embarked for France.
Geraint went back to Lydd, and trained as a gunner in the camp on the shingle that he knew so well. He enlisted as a private, and then became a bombadier. He kept the little ring he had given Florence in the pocket of his tunic. He thought: when this is over, everything will be different, including me. The ocean voyage under the stars vanished like a mirage. Like Julian, in those early days, he seemed to see everything more clearly because it had all been called in question. He made drinking-friends in his platoon, one of whom had been an acquaintance when he was a boy running wild on Romney Marsh, a fishmonger’s son called Sammy Till. In 1915 he