CHAPTER THREE

‘THE GERMANS HAVE LANDED!’: INVASION FEARS IN THE SOUTH-EAST OF ENGLAND, AUGUST TO DECEMBER 1914

Catriona Pennell

Introduction

On the morning of 4 August 1914, Germany invaded neutral Belgium. The biggest invasion force of modern times—consisting of one million men (fi ve armies made up of sixteen corps)—had violated both French and Belgian territory.1 Attempts at resistance met with brutal force. Within days the Allied press were reporting atrocities, some exaggerated and some later to be proved as accurate, committed by the German troops against innocent civilians.2 These included rape, pillage, the deliberate destruction of buildings, the use of women and children as human shields and mass executions. In total, around 6,500 Belgian and French civilians perished between August and October 1914; the majority between 5 and 31 August.3 As Sophie de Schaepdrijver outlines, the invasion of Belgium imme- diately became ‘the burning international question.’4 It provided a neat and compact framework for both camps to rationalize the confl ict: ‘justifi cations of the invasion implicitly endorsed the view of Germany’s conduct of the war as self-defense; condemnations of it contained assumptions of Germany’s war guilt.’5 For Britain in particular, ‘Brave Little Belgium’ became shorthand for the moral issues of the war. Although historians debate whether Britain would have entered the war without a German invasion of Belgium, the latter made entry inevitable and did so on terms that maximized support for what was perceived as

1 Showalter (1998), p. 40. 2 See Horne and Kramer (2001). 3 Ibid., pp. 1, 9–86, 435–439. 4 Schaepdrijver (1999), p. 267. 5 Ibid.

JONES_f5-95-116.indd 95 4/3/2008 4:02:01 PM 96 catriona pennell

a moral crusade. As the war progressed, ‘the small state was elevated to the status of living embodiment of the right-against-might values that the West was ostensibly fi ghting for.’6 The British coastal town of Southend-on-Sea, Essex is situated less than one hundred miles away from Ostend. What was the impact of the German invasion of Belgium on the residents of the British east coast? The focus on Belgium in British propaganda (or ‘high culture’) has perhaps meant that a simpler inquiry—that of geography and localities—has been overlooked. Although we are now aware that the invading German army was halted at the battle of the Marne in early September 1914 and began retreating in October, which resulted in the stalemate of the trenches, contemporaries were not.7 How did the German invasion of Belgium permeate into the minds of local people residing along Britain’s vulnerable east coast? In what way did this affect their responses to the outbreak of war in the fi rst fi ve months of the confl ict in 1914? The primary reaction of the Essex population between August and December 1914 was a fear of invasion by a German army. This chapter seeks to examine this singular reaction in its multiple manifestations in order to argue that for the people of Essex invasion was more than simply an abstract fear. It became an imagined reality in the form of detailed plans, evacuation routes and home defense measures. This reality even fi ltered into the remembrance of war in Essex, in the form of a plaque commemorating the invasion plans of 1914–18. For the majority of people in the South-East it was not a matter of if, but when, the Germans would land. After considering the prewar history of invasion fears and government plans for national defense at the beginning of the war, I shall examine how invasion was imagined in Essex during the fi rst fi ve months of the confl ict and how preparations to counter it were made. I shall conclude with some refl ections on how we can understand this phenomenon, and, more importantly, how this evidence goes some way towards challenging the long-held belief that the British population reacted to the outbreak of the First World War with unabated enthusiasm.

6 Ibid., p. 268. 7 Horne and Kramer (2001), p. 1.

JONES_f5-95-116.indd 96 4/3/2008 4:02:02 PM