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Hardie spoke again the next day, this time in the House of Commons. During his speech, like a mocking dirge for his lifetime of work to stave off this moment, he heard the national anthem being softly sung—from the Labour benches behind him.

That same day, August 3, Germany declared war on France. Of some two million German troops now being mobilized, one and a half million were heading for France and Belgium, the rest for the Russian frontier. Germany expected to move quickly through Belgium and northern France to capture Paris. The plan, worked out over many years, was based on a precise estimate of the time needed to knock France out of the war: exactly 42 days. Then the victorious army would turn on the real enemy, Russia. In the west, however, Belgium rejected Germany's demand and started blowing up railway tunnels and bridges on its border. Berlin, now infuriated and vowing vengeance, had never factored this possibility into its planning.

In the German capital, as reserve soldiers marched to the railway station amid cheering crowds, Social Democratic parliamentary deputies urgently debated whether to oppose war credits for the government. The argument was stormy and agonizing; one legislator wept. Could they refuse if their country was about to be attacked by despotic Russia? And if they did refuse, would the government then shut down socialist newspapers and imprison party activists? Older socialists had painful memories of such repression in the not-so-distant past, and the Social Democrats still suffered annoying official restrictions that did not apply to other parties. If, on the other hand, they supported the government in this moment of crisis, might it put a stop to long years of being labeled subversives and traitors? Could this be, as one socialist put it, the chance to show "that the fatherland's poorest son was also its most loyal"?

In the end, most German socialists were, like everyone else, carried along on the unstoppable torrent of emotion. Two parliamentary deputies taking the train to Berlin had been startled to hear socialist songs—being happily sung by uniformed reservists heading for war. When the party caucus finally took a straw vote on war credits, of 111 deputies, only 14 voted no, among them Hugo Haase, whom the now murdered Jaurès had embraced at Brussels. The next day, following party discipline, they all cast ballots for war credits along with the rest of the German parliament. Delighted to get his financing, the Kaiser declared, "Henceforth I know no parties, I know only Germans."

Echoing him unawares, the president of the French Chamber of Deputies said, "There are no more adversaries here, there are only Frenchmen." In St. Petersburg, too, war fever spread. Strikers pulled down their street barricades and joined the enthusiastic crowds waving flags with the double-headed tsarist eagle outside the French, Belgian, and Serbian embassies.

Countries vied with each other to declare the war a crusade for the most noble goals. Le Matin, a big French daily, on August 4 called the conflict a "holy war of civilization against barbarity." In Germany the next day, a Social Democratic Party newspaper charged that tsarist Russia "wants to crush the culture of all of Western Europe." In Russia, the leftist writer Maxim Gorky was one of many who signed a statement supporting the fight against the "Germanic yoke." When Ottoman Turkey shortly joined the war on the German side, its sultan declared it was fighting a sacred struggle, or jihad.

On both sides, also, governments were delighted to discover that they had feared the left too much. French authorities, for example, worried by socialist anti-militarism, had estimated that 13 percent of reservists would fail to report for duty—but only 1.5 percent did not show

up. Socialist leaders soon joined governments of national unity in both France and Belgium. The French minister of the interior sent word to local police chiefs not to arrest anyone listed in Carnet B, the government's secret roster of several thousand people