Another August

So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun… Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last.  – Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August, 1962 (published in the UK as August 1914).

That’s the opening of Tuchman’s magnificent history of the first month of WW1. This is how the paragraph ends:

The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.

It was not the war to end all wars but it was the break-in history. There was the time before the war.  And then the time after the war.

As the political fall-out from the murder of Arch-Duke Ferdinand on June 28th escalated, the the deadly alliances took effect. The armies of Europe mobilised and nations and empires declared war.

“It’s a beastly nuisance this war, especially as it’s against such nice people as the Germans.”

I’ve been reading the letters of the poet Charles Sorley.¹ 

In July 1914, Sorley was in Germany on a walking tour following a half a year living with a German family and studying at the university in Jena. He and his companion were arrested and held overnight before he was released and made his way back to England. 

In his last year at Marlborough, he won a scholarship to Oxford and decided to leave school and spend the rest of that year living and studying in Germany. In January 1914 he set off for Schwerin. At the end of July he set off with a friend on a walking tour of the Moselle area. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia and the pair were arrested and spent the might in jail in Trier. They were released the next day and Sorley made his way back home via Belgium.

By then the dominos of the alliance system had fallen and Britain was at war with Germany. 

The day after his arrival home Sorley applied for a commission in the army. When he did not hear back he considered enlisting as a private but before that happened he heard that he had been gazetted as 2nd lieutenant in the Suffolk regiment and was soon training on the Berkshire downs at Churn. In a letter to his sister he wrote” It’s a beastly nuisance this war, especially as it’s against such nice people as the Germans.”

1. The Letters of Charles Sorley, ed. by Margaret Sorley (Cambridge University Press, 1919)

The featured image is  a Tuck’s Chromograph printed in Prussia and shows a Harry Payne painting of part of the funeral procession which took place on Friday 20th May 1910. It is probably The Mall with St. James’s Park in the background. The Kaiser is wearing the uniform of a British Army Field Marshall, that honour was given to him by his uncle Edward VII in January 1901 a few days after the death of his Grandmother, Queen Victoria,