In 1914, the celebration of Christmas was considered a patriotic duty, the only concession to the war, now four months old, being the replacement of tinsel and paper chains with strings of brightly coloured allied flags. In London, the West End was thronged. In the suburbs, poulterers fairly bulged with geese and turkeys; happily, the cost of Christmas dinner would be only a touch more expensive than in peacetime. All the same, those who went out, baskets on arms, couldn't help but notice that this wasn't any old Christmas. According to the writer Katherine Mansfield, on Oxford Street the shop windows were filled with "khaki and wool and pots of Vaseline and marching socks". More poignantly, the department stores had baskets prominently on display into which shoppers could drop gifts for "Our Men at the Front". Among the more popular presents for soldiers were "tinder lighters with their natty little plaited rope and striker" and – oh, how the heart aches to read this! – "waterproof squares for trench seats".
The Fateful Year, Mark Bostridge's idiosyncratic diary of 1914, is rich with details such as this, the domestic and the quotidian quietly standing proxy for the loud horror and fear one has learned from histories of a wholly different kind. Its power as a narrative, however, comes from an altogether stranger and less physical realm, for this is a book of shadows and portents, a series of harbingers that might have come straight out of a film script, and sometimes a pretty creaky one at that.
It begins, after all, with the murder in January of a small boy called Willie Starchfield whose malnourished body was hidden beneath a seat on a train to Dalston Junction in east London – and since this crime has no connection whatsoever to the coming war, the reader has little choice but to see its inclusion as a foreshadowing of the innocence that will shortly be lost.
There follow descriptions of paintings, music and poems that seem to predict the coming carnage, each one more unnerving than the last: David Bomberg's The Mud Bath was exhibited before the outbreak of war and inspired by the vapour baths close to where he grew up in Whitechapel, and yet to the 21st-century eye, its exuberant vorticist shapes speak only of the sludge of northern France, a mire of blood and bones in which a "waterproof square" would have seemed like a bad joke indeed.
No wonder, then, that by the time the calamity finally arrives, the reader's mind is likely to be playing tricks on them. When I took in the revelation, courtesy of his friend Edmund Gosse, that in the days before the declaration of war, the foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey escaped for peace and quiet to the birdhouse at London Zoo, I pictured not exotic species, green of wing and yellow of belly, but rooks and carrion crows, their oily feathers as black as the gathering storm.
Knowing what's coming makes every cloud look like an omen. But on the matter of "innocence" at least, Bostridge remains clear-sighted: prewar England wasn't precisely the sunny, sepia world, all archaic moustaches and tidy gardens, conjured by Larkin's poem, MCMXIV. It's not only that the weather wasn't quite so good as we've been led to believe; these were fiery, febrile months, irrespective of what was happening in the Balkans.
The suffragettes were becoming ever more militant, committing 141 acts of destruction in the first half of 1914 alone. Meanwhile, in Holloway prison, those on hunger strike were still being force-fed. When Mary Richardson, the woman who had recently slashed the National Gallery's Rokeby Venus with a small axe, was treated for appendicitis, her doctor recorded the painful scars inside her mouth, wounds that had been inflicted by the fingernails of her guards.
As the public mood turned against Mrs Pankhurst and her followers, some argued that the government should simply let these infernal women die in prison; others suggested they be deported to St Kilda. In Ireland, the prospect of civil war loomed. In English cities, industrial unrest had returned. A coal strike had London's middle classes bringing their fuel home in cabs.
Nevertheless, the war brought with it "a different world". How could it do otherwise? As John Galsworthy wrote in his diary: "The horror of the thing keeps coming over one in waves, and all happiness has gone out of life." The conflict put out the fires of home rule and militant suffrage overnight. But it also turned every stranger into a spy, making the lives of the 57,000 Germans who then lived in the country extremely difficult; when Cosmo Gordon Lang, the archbishop of York, dared to remind people that it wasn't that long ago that the Kaiser had knelt at the bier of his grandmother Queen Victoria beside Edward VII, the public opprobrium was so severe, he developed alopecia.
As enlistment began, the white feather brigade patrolled the streets, publicly and cruelly shaming those not yet in uniform (it is miserable to be reminded of just how many vengeful suffragettes were involved in this horrible, misguided pastime). Worst of all – and this is often forgotten – there was the terrifying early morning bombardment on 16 December of Scarborough and Hartlepool by German warships, an attack that killed 136 people and maimed hundreds more. Sylvia Pankhurst visited Scarborough on Christmas Eve, but it was "too sad" for her and she soon scarpered.
All of this is extremely well told. But some other episodes feel misplaced. Bostridge's account of Herbert Asquith's crush on his daughter's friend, Venetia Stanley, is fascinating – I longed to know more about her pet penguin, with which the spoony prime minister was once photographed – but I wondered about its inclusion in this book, especially since he does not appear to have turned up anything new. By 1915, Venetia had married another suitor and the fumbling Asquith had turned his attentions to her sister; Bostridge's interest in the affair seems to belong to another volume altogether.
And while his sketch of the staging of Shaw's Pygmalion is hilariously funny – the hammy antics of its ageing stars, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Mrs Patrick Campbell, drove the playwright halfway round the bend – such high comedy sits rather uneasily in his narrative, mostly so plangent. Mrs Pat, playing the 18-year-old Eliza Doolittle at the ripe age of 50, may well have belonged to an old order – the elaborate wigs, the heavy makeup and the dazzling spotlights were on their way out, thank God – but it wasn't the old order, actors not being representative of anything very much.
The complicated heroism of the poets Edward Thomas and Rupert Brooke is familiar by now, and there is something a little dutiful about its appearance here. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that, for all its many pleasures, for all its wonderful stories, The Fateful Year is sometimes desultory. It left me with the uneasy feeling that its primary engine was a desire to honour an important anniversary rather than the careful unpicking of a knotty new idea.
