Читать книгу: «Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914», страница 5

The Third Republic was known as the ‘république des paysans’; though social inequality persisted, the influence of the landowning class was weaker than in any other European nation. French social welfare was evolving, with a voluntary pensions scheme, accident-insurance law, improved public health. France’s middle class wielded more political power than that of any other European nation: Poincaré was the son of a civil servant, and himself a lawyer; former and future prime minister Georges Clemenceau was a doctor and the son of another. Insofar as the aristocracy played a part in any profession, it was the army, though it is noteworthy that the origins of France’s principal soldiers of 1914–18, Joseph Joffre, Ferdinand Foch and Philippe Pétain, were alike modest. The influence of the Church was fast diminishing among the peasantry and the industrial masses; its residual power rested with the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. The nation was becoming more socially enlightened: though Article 213 of the Code Napoléon still decreed that a wife owed legal obedience to her husband, a modest but growing number of women entered the legal or medical professions, foremost among them Marie Curie, who won two Nobel Prizes.

Rural conditions remained primitive, with peasants living in close proximity to their animals. Foreigners sneered that French standards of hygiene were low: most people had only one bath a week, and humbler middle-class men kept up appearances with false collars and cuffs. The French were more tolerant of brothels than any other nation in Europe, though there was some dispute about whether this reflected enlightenment or depravity. Alcoholism was a serious problem, worsened by rising prosperity: the average Frenchman consumed 162 litres of wine a year; some miners assuaged the harshness of their labours by drinking up to six litres a day. The country had half a million bars – one for every eighty-two people. Mothers were known to put wine in their babies’ bottles, and doctors frequently prescribed it for illness, even in children. Alcohol and masculinity were deemed inseparable. To drink beer or water was unpatriotic.

French politicians were obsessed with the need to counter Germany’s demographic advantage. Between 1890 and 1896, the years when many of those who would fight the First World War were born, Kaiser Wilhelm’s people produced more than twice as many children as the Republic; the 1907 census showed France’s population at just thirty-nine million, meaning that there were three Germans for every two Frenchmen. French working mothers received paid maternity leave, with a cash bonus to those who breast-fed. Health standards had risen impressively since the beginning of the twentieth century, when one in ten new French military recruits stood less than five feet one inch tall, but many bourgeois families chose to defy their priests and restrict themselves to one child. Poincaré presented his 1913 three-year compulsory military service law as an essential defensive measure. By heroic endeavours, France had restored itself to the status of a great power. But almost no one, including its own people, supposed its unaided military strength the equal of Germany’s – which was why it had sought the alliance with Russia.

The British, last-comer to create a third pillar of the Entente, ruled the largest empire the world had ever seen, and remained its foremost financial power, but discerning contemporaries understood that their dominance was waning. At home, vast new wealth was being generated, but social and political divisions had become acute. Britain’s five million most prosperous inhabitants shared an annual income of £830 million, while the remaining thirty-eight millions made do with the balance, £880 million. The journalist George Dangerfield looked back at Britain’s condition in the Edwardian and post-Edwardian era from the perspective of 1935 in his milestone work The Strange Death of Liberal England:

The new financier, the new plutocrat, had little of that sense of responsibility which once had sanctioned the power of England’s landed classes. He was a purely international figure, or so it seemed, and money was his language … Where did the money come from? Nobody seemed to care. It was there to be spent, and to be spent in the most ostentatious manner possible; for its new masters set the fashion … Society in the last pre-war years grew wildly plutocratic; the middle classes became more complacent and dependent; only the workers seemed to be deprived of their share in prosperity … The middle classes … looked upon the producers of England with a jaundiced, a fearful and vindictive gaze.

In 1926 C.E. Montague took much the same view of the pre-1914 period in Rough Justice, an autobiographical novel: ‘The English world that he loved, and believed in, seemed now to be failing, and failing first at the top … The old riders seemed to be falling out with their horses – fearing them, not going near them if they could help it, shirking the old job of understanding their wants and sharing their slow, friendly thoughts … The only rights of captaincy that the old ruling class had ever possessed were drawn from the strength of its members’ love and knowledge of tenants, labourers, servants, private soldiers and sailors, their own lifelong comrades in the rural economy, in sport, in the rearing of children and in the chivalries of war and adventure.’ This was sentimental tosh, but reflected the fact that the aristocracy and the Conservative Party fought tooth and nail to resist the Liberals’ 1909 introduction of basic social reforms.

Government and its bureaucracies scarcely impinged on most people’s lives, for good or ill. It was possible to travel abroad without a passport, and freely to exchange unlimited sums of currency. A foreigner could take up residence in Britain without any process of official consent. Though since gaining office in 1905 the Liberals had doubled expenditure on social services, the £200 million raised by all forms of taxation in 1913–14 amounted to less than 8 per cent of national income. The school-leaving age was thirteen; at seventy a British citizen became eligible for a meagre pension, and in 1911 Lloyd George had created a primitive insurance scheme to protect the sick and unemployed.

Nonetheless, a decade into the new century the British worker was poorer in real terms than he had been in 1900, and disaffected in consequence. There were constant disputes and stoppages, especially in the coal industry. In 1910 seamen and dockers struck to demand a minimum wage and better working conditions; there was also a transport strike. Women workers in a Bermondsey confectionery factory, paid between seven and nine shillings a week – young girls got three shillings – won increases of one to four shillings a week after downing tools. In 1911, over ten million working days were lost to strikes – compare this with 2011’s figure of 1.4 million days. Militancy derived not from trade union leaders, many of whom became as frightened as employers, but from the shop floor. A despairing union secretary told an industrial arbitrator that he could not understand what had come over the country: ‘Everyone seems to have lost their heads.’

The hand of the state was most visible in its use of military power to suppress working-class revolt. In 1910 troops were deployed against rioters at the Rhondda Valley coal pits: Hussars and Lancashire Fusiliers were sent to Tonypandy. Winston Churchill as home secretary dispatched a cavalry column to cow London’s East End, home to thousands of striking dockers. During a rail strike, the Mayor of Chesterfield urged troops to fire on a mob wrecking the town’s station; the officer in command prudently refused to give the order.

Coal owners were the least sympathetic representatives of contemporary capitalism: in 1912 they summarily rejected union demands that men should be paid five shillings a shift, boys two shillings – what became known as ‘the five and two’. This at a time when the London wine merchants Berry Bros charged ninety-six shillings a dozen for Veuve Clicquot champagne, sixty shillings a dozen for 1898 Nuits Saint-Georges. That year, over thirty-eight million working days were lost to strikes. Nor was it hard to understand workers’ grievances: in October 1913 an explosion at Senghenydd colliery, caused by criminal management safety negligence, cost 439 lives. In the Commons tears ran down the face of Herbert Asquith, the prime minister, as he appealed to striking workers to return to the pits. Asquith’s wife Margot, a raffish creature of indifferent judgement but forceful personality, sought to negotiate privately with the miners’ leader to resolve the dispute. When he refused, she wrote crossly: ‘I don’t see why anyone should know we have met.’ Between 1910 and 1914, trade union membership rose from 2.37 million to almost four million. In the seven months before the outbreak of war, British industry was hit by 937 strikes.

Yet at least as grave as industrial warfare was the Ulster crisis. Between 1912 and 1914 this created a real prospect of civil war within the United Kingdom. Home Rule for Ireland was the price Asquith had agreed to pay for the support of Irish MPs in passing his bitterly divisive 1909 budget, seed of the Welfare State. Thereafter the Protestants of Ulster, determined to resist becoming a minority in a Catholic-ruled society, armed themselves. Their rejection of the Home Rule legislation then passing through Parliament won the support of the Conservative Party and its leaders, even unto preparing violent resistance to its implementation. Much of the aristocracy owned Irish property, which spawned a special sense of outrage against Asquith.

In March 1914, some army officers made explicit their refusal to participate in coercion of the Ulster rebels through the so-called ‘Curragh Mutiny’, which precipitated the resignation of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field-Marshal Sir John French, and the secretary for war, Col. Jack Seely. The latter, in a moment of madness, told the commander-in-chief that officers who did not wish to serve in Ulster could ‘disappear’. Maj. Gen. Sir Henry Wilson, director of military operations at the War Office, wrote triumphantly in his diary: ‘we soldiers beat Asquith and his vile tricks’. The prime minister temporarily took on the war portfolio himself.

The Liberals whom Asquith led formed one of the most talented administrations in British history, dominated in 1914 by such figures as Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer; Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty; Richard Haldane, a former reforming war minister, now Lord Chancellor. The prime minister himself was a survivor of an earlier era, old enough to have seen, as a boy of twelve in 1864, the bodies of five murderers dangling from the gallows outside Newgate, their heads concealed by white hoods. A lawyer of modest middle-class origins, ‘a Roman reserve was always natural to Asquith’, in the words of his biographer. ‘He fought against any expression of his stronger feelings.’ George Dangerfield went further, asserting that Asquith lacked imagination and passion; that, for all his high intelligence, he failed convincingly to address any of the great crises which overtook Britain during his years of office: ‘He was ingenious but not subtle, he could improvise quite brilliantly on somebody else’s theme. He was moderately imperialist, moderately progressive, moderately humorous, and being the most fastidious of Liberal politicians, only moderately evasive.’ If this judgement was cynical, it is plain that by August 1914 Asquith was a tired old man.

British politics had become savage in temper and often irresponsible in conduct. Lord Halsbury, a veteran Conservative lawyer, denounced ‘government by a cabinet controlled by rank socialists’. A Tory MP hurled a rule book at Winston Churchill in the Commons library, striking him in the face. Before the great Ulster struggle, rival party leaders were often seen in the same drawing room, but now they and their respective followers were socially estranged. When Margot Asquith wrote to protest at being excluded from Lord Curzon’s May ball, attended by the King and Queen, Curzon replied haughtily that it would be ‘impolitic to invite, even to a social gathering, the wife and daughter of the head of a Government to which the majority of my friends are inflexibly opposed’.

The Scottish-Canadian Bonar Law had succeeded Arthur Balfour as Tory standard-bearer in November 1911, and played the Ulster ‘Orange card’ as a cynical gambit against the Liberals. On 28 November 1913, the leader of ‘His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition’ publicly appealed to the British Army not to enforce Home Rule in northern Ireland. This was a staggering piece of constitutional impropriety, which nonetheless commanded the support of his party and most of the aristocracy, while not provoking the censure of the King. Prominent among the Unionists was the lawyer Sir Edward Carson, courtroom nemesis of Oscar Wilde and aptly characterised as ‘an intelligent fanatic’. Captain James Craig, leader of the rebellious Ulstermen, wrote: ‘There is a spirit spreading abroad which I can testify to from my personal knowledge, that Germany and the German Emperor would be preferable to the rule of John Redmond [and his Irish Home Rulers].’

Field-Marshal Lord Roberts, Britain’s most famous old soldier, publicly applauded the April 1914 shipment of guns to the Protestant rebels, and declared that any attempt to coerce Ulster would be ‘the ruin of the army’. Thousands of openly armed men paraded in Belfast, addressed by Carson, Craig and that most incendiary of Conservatives, F.E. Smith. And all the while the British government did – nothing. In southern Ireland, militant nationalists took their cue from Carson and his success in defying Parliament: they set about procuring their own weapons. The British Army proved much less indulgent to nationalist militancy than to the Ulstermen’s excesses. On Sunday, 26 July 1914 at Bachelor’s Walk in Dublin, troops fired on unarmed civilians – admittedly in the aftermath of a gun-running episode – killing three and injuring thirty-eight.

If the British Empire was viewed around the world as rich and powerful, the Asquith government was seen as chronically weak. It was conspicuously failing to quell violent industrial action or the Ulster madness. It seemed unable effectively to address even the suffragette movement, whose clamorous campaign for votes for women had become deafening. Militants were smashing windows all over London; using acid to burn slogans on golf club greens; hunger-striking in prison. In June 1913 Emily Davison was killed after being struck by the King’s horse at the Derby. In the first seven months of 1914, 107 buildings were set on fire by suffragettes.

Asquith’s critics ignored an obvious point: no man could have contained or suppressed the huge social and political forces shaking Britain. George Dangerfield wrote: ‘Very few prime ministers in history have been afflicted by so many plagues and in so short a space of time.’ The prominent Irish Home Ruler John Dillon told Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: ‘the country is menaced with revolution’. Domestic strife made a powerful impression on opinion abroad: a great democracy was seen to be sinking into decadence and decay. Britain’s allies, France and Russia, were dismayed. Its prospective enemies, notably in Germany, found it hard to imagine that a country convulsed in such a fashion – with even its little army riven by faction – could threaten their continental power and ambitions.

2 BATTLE PLANS

Many Europeans anticipated with varying degrees of enthusiasm that their two rival alliances would sooner or later come to blows. Far from being regarded as unthinkable, continental war was viewed as a highly plausible, and by no means intolerable, outcome of international tensions. Europe had twenty million regular soldiers and reservists, and each nation developed plans for every contingency in which they might be deployed. All the prospective belligerents proposed to attack. The British Army’s 1909 Field Service Regulations, largely drafted by Sir Douglas Haig, asserted: ‘Decisive success in battle can be gained only by a vigorous offensive.’ In February 1914, Russian military intelligence passed to its government two German memoranda, discussing the need to prepare public opinion for a two-front war. The Triple Alliance’s third party, Italy, was notionally committed to fight alongside Germany and Austria, which meant that the French must allocate troops not only to meet the Germans, but also to defend their south-eastern frontier. All the European powers remained nonetheless uncertain what Italy would do in the event of a war, as were Italians themselves. What seemed plain was that the Rome government would eventually offer support to whichever power promised to indulge its ambitions for territorial aggrandisement.

In Germany, chief of staff Helmuth von Moltke inherited in 1906 from his predecessor, Alfred Graf von Schlieffen, a scheme for a massive sweeping advance through northern France, around Paris, to smash the French army before turning on Russia. For the past century, Schlieffen’s vision has lain at the heart of all debate about whether Germany might have won the war in 1914. The confidence of the nation’s leadership that it could successfully launch a general European conflict rested entirely upon the Schlieffen concept, or more exactly Moltke’s modification of it.

The Kaiser liked to pretend that he ruled Germany, and occasionally he did so; his appointed chancellor, the liberal-conservative Bethmann Hollweg, exercised varying influence, while striving to manage an increasingly hostile Reichstag. But the most powerful single figure in the Wilhelmine Empire was Moltke, controlling the most formidable military machine in Europe. He was an unexpected general, a Christian Scientist who played the cello and was prey to deep melancholy – ‘der traurige Julius’ – ‘sad Julius’. Conspicuous in his life were devotion to his wife and a fascination with the afterlife, spiritualism and the occult, which she encouraged. Moltke believed that he occupied the most honourable position on earth. He and the army answered to no politician, only to the Kaiser.

The Great General Staff, which operated under his direction, was Germany’s most respected institution. It consisted of 625 officers, who worked in a building on Berlin’s Königsplatz in which Moltke and his family occupied a flat. Security was tight: there were no secretaries or clerks; staff officers drafted all documents. Once the cleaners left each morning, no women save Eliza Moltke and her maid entered the building. Each year when a new mobilisation plan was prepared, copies of the redundant version were meticulously destroyed. The Staff’s output owed little to technology: it owned no automobiles; even the influential Railway Department had only one typewriter; urgent telephone calls were made from a single box in a corridor. There was no canteen, and most officers brought in packed lunches to eat at their desks during working days of twelve to fourteen hours. Every member of the General Staff was taught to think of himself as one among a hallowed elite, subject to social rules which were meticulously observed: no man – for instance – might enter a bar frequented by socialists.

Moltke himself sought to convey an impression of personal strength that would soon prove to have been illusory, but which exercised a critical influence on the advance to war. A highly intelligent and cultured man, he rose through a close association with the Kaiser, which began when he served as adjutant to his uncle, ‘the great Moltke’, victor over France in 1870–71. Wilhelm found the hero’s nephew congenial, and clung to a conviction that the old man’s genius must have passed to the next generation. But the decision to appoint Helmuth chief of staff was controversial, indeed to some shocking. One of Moltke’s former military instructors wrote: ‘This man could be disastrous.’ Wilhelm’s choice plainly derived from their personal relationship: he found the general an agreeable companion with a pleasing bedside manner, that essential requirement for courtiers through the ages. Moltke had shown himself a competent officer without offering – or having much opportunity to display – evidence of military genius.

It was ironic that after 1890 the elder Moltke argued that Europe’s fate should thenceforth be decided diplomatically rather than on the battlefield: he thought the usefulness of war to Germany was exhausted. But from 1906 onwards, his much less gifted nephew professed to think that Schlieffen’s concept of a grand envelopment offered the prospect of securing German dominance of Europe. Moltke told Austrian chief of staff Conrad von Hötzendorf in February 1913: ‘Austria’s fate will not be definitively decided along the Bug but rather along the Seine.’ He became imbued with faith that new technologies – balloons and motor vehicles – would empower highly centralised battlefield control of Germany’s armies by himself. Some other senior officers were much more sceptical. Karl von Einem, especially, warned about the difficulties of directing the movements of almost three million men, and the likely operational limitations of unfit and ill-trained reservists; he anticipated in a fashion that proved prescient a progressive loss of momentum during the proposed epic dash across France.

Moltke, however, remained if not an enthusiast, at least a consistent fatalist about the inevitability of war with Russia and France. In October 1912, by then sixty-four, he said: ‘If war is coming, I hope it will come soon, before I am too old to cope with things satisfactorily.’ He told the Kaiser he was confident a decisive campaign could be swiftly won, and restated this advice early in the 1914 July crisis. The huge enigma about the chief of staff was that all the while, he nursed private doubts and fears which would burst forth in the most dramatic fashion when conflict came. The rational part of his nature told him that a great clash between great powers must be protracted and hard, not swift and easy. He once told the Kaiser: ‘the next war will be a national war. It will not be settled by one decisive battle but will be a long wearisome struggle with an enemy who will not be overcome until his whole national force is broken … a war which will utterly exhaust our own people even if we are victorious.’

Yet his own conduct in the years before 1914 belied such prudent caution. He acquiesced in the prospect of a grand European collision with a steadiness that prevailed when others – Bethmann and the Kaiser – sometimes faltered. Germany’s highest commander succumbed to a disease common among senior soldiers of many nationalities and eras: he wished to demonstrate to his government and people that their vastly expensive armed forces could fulfil their fantasies. Moltke famously, or notoriously, characterised himself to Prince von Bülow: ‘I do not lack personal courage, but I lack the power of rapid decision; I am too reflective, too scrupulous, or, if you like, too conscientious for such a post. I lack the capacity for risking all on a single throw.’ Yet, in contradiction of such a profession of self-knowledge, he yearned to show himself worthy of a responsibility for which most of his peers thought him unfit, by achieving a triumph for his country. This required an awesomely fast mobilisation and concentration of forces; the deployment of a small holding force to check the Russians, while the nation’s overwhelming strength conquered France in a campaign of forty days, before turning East.

Austria-Hungary’s plans were more flexible, indeed chaotic, because the Empire could not be sure whether it would be fighting Serbia alone – as it hoped – or contesting a second front on its Galician border with Russian Poland. Many bizarre figures jostled for attention on the European stage in 1914, but Conrad Hötzendorf was notable among them. Churchill described him as a ‘dark, small, frail, thin officer with piercing and expressive eyes set in the face of an ascetic’. It is hard to imagine a man less suited to his role: an epic incompetent, he was also an extreme imperialist, wanting the Hapsburgs to dominate the Adriatic, the eastern Mediterranean, the Balkans and North Africa. He perfectly fulfilled the elder Moltke’s dictum about the most dangerous kind of officer, by being both stupid and intensely energetic. His wife had died a decade earlier, and he shared a home with his mother. He had lately fallen in love with Virginie von Reininghaus, a brewery magnate’s wife, who became his obsession. He convinced himself that if he could lead Austria to a great military victory, he could surf a wave of personal glory to persuade his Gina to divorce her husband and marry him. He wrote to her of his hope for a ‘war from which I could return crowned with success that would allow me to break through all the barriers between us … and claim you as my own dearest wife’.

Since 1906 Conrad had been demanding military action against Serbia. In the seventeen months between 1 January 1913 and 1 June 1914, the chief of staff urged war on his government twenty-six times. He wrote to Moltke on St Valentine’s Day 1914, asserting the urgency of Austria’s need to ‘break the ring that once again threatens to enclose us’. For Conrad, and indeed for Berchtold, the Archduke’s death offered a heaven-sent excuse for war, rather than a justification for it. After witnessing the shrinkage of the Ottoman Empire, humbled by young and assertive Balkan nations during the regional conflicts of the preceding three years, Conrad believed that Sarajevo offered Austria its last chance to escape the same fate, by destroying the threat of assertive Slavdom embodied by Serbia. He said: ‘Such an ancient monarchy and such an ancient army [as those of the Hapsburgs] cannot perish ingloriously.’

Berchtold, Austria’s foreign minister, characterised Conrad’s policy in July 1914 as ‘war, war, war’. Wishing to expunge the shame of Austria’s 1866 defeat by Prussia, the general deplored ‘this foul peace which drags on and on’. So powerful was his craving for military collision that he gave scarcely a thought to its practical aspects. For years Austria’s army had lagged behind those of its neighbours, gathering mould. Parliament resisted the higher taxes that would have been required by bigger budgets, and the navy consumed much of the available cash. Though Austrian industry developed good weapons – especially heavy artillery and the M95 rifle – the army remained too poor to buy them in adequate numbers.

There were many disaffected people among the hotchpotch of ethnic minorities that made up the Empire. According to 1911 figures, among every thousand Austro-Hungarian soldiers, there were an average of 267 Germans, 233 Hungarians, 135 Czechs, eighty-five Poles, eighty-one Ukrainians, sixty-seven Croatians and Serbs, fifty-four Romanians, thirty-eight Slovaks, twenty-six Slovenes and fourteen Italians. Of the officer corps, by contrast, 76.1 per cent were Germans, 10.7 per cent Hungarians and 5.2 per cent Czechs. In proportion to population, Germans had three times their rightful number of officers, Hungarians half, Slavs about one-tenth. The Austrian army was thus run on colonial lines, with many Slav riflemen led into battle by Germans, rather as British officers led their Indian Army. Of all the European powers, Austria was least fit to justify its pretensions on the battlefield. Conrad simply assumed that, if Russia intervened in Serbia’s interest, the Germans would take the strain.

Vienna had been urged by Berlin to adopt harsh policies towards the Serbs. As early as 1912, Wilhelm and Moltke assured Franz Ferdinand and Conrad that they ‘could fully count on Germany’s support in all circumstances’ – what some historians have called ‘the first blank cheque’. Nor did Berlin make any secret of its commitment: on 28 November the secretary of state, Alfred von Kiderlen-Waechter, told the Reichstag: ‘If Austria is forced, for whatever reason, to fight for its position as a Great Power, then we must stand by her side.’ Bethmann Hollweg echoed this message on 2 December, saying that if the Austrians were attacked by Russia for asserting their legitimate interests in the Balkans, ‘then we would fight for the maintenance of our own position in Europe, in defence of our own future and security’.

A meeting of the Kaiser and his warlords – Bethmann and foreign minister Gottlieb von Jagow were absent – which took place at the Royal Palace on 8 December 1912 has been the focus of intense attention throughout the three generations since it was revealed. Wilhelm and Germany’s principal generals and admirals debated Haldane’s reported insistence upon Britain’s commitment to preserving a continental balance of power. Though no minutes were taken, immediately afterwards Georg Müller, chief of Wilhelm’s naval cabinet, recorded in his diary that Moltke said: ‘War the sooner the better.’ The admiral added on his own account: ‘he does not draw the logical conclusion from this, which is to present Russia or France or both with an ultimatum which would unleash the war with right on our side’.

Three other sources confirm Müller’s account, including that of Saxony’s military plenipotentiary in Berlin, who wrote on the 11th to his state’s minister of war: ‘His Excellency von Moltke wants war … His Excellency von Tirpitz on the other hand would prefer if it came in a year’s time when the [Kiel] canal and the Heligoland submarine base would be ready.’ Following the 8 December meeting, Germany’s leaders agreed that there should be a press campaign to prepare the nation to fight Russia, though this did not happen. Müller wrote to Bethmann to inform him of the meeting’s conclusions. Even if a cautious view is taken of the 1912 War Council’s significance, rejecting the darkest ‘Fischer’ thesis that Germany thereafter directed policy towards precipitating a general European conflict, the record of subsequent German conduct shows Berlin strikingly untroubled by the prospect of such an outcome. The nation’s leaders were confident they could prevail, so long as a clash came before Russian rearmament was completed in 1916. Müller felt obliged to inform the Kaiser that some senior officers were so convinced war was imminent that they had transferred their personal holdings of cash and shares into gold.