Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (11 page)

Sazonov, in St Petersburg, knew how badly his country and France needed Britain. He wrote on 31 December 1913: ‘Both powers [France and Russia] are scarcely capable of dealing Germany a mortal blow even in the event of success on the battlefield, which is always uncertain. But a struggle in which England took part might be fatal for Germany.’ Thus the foreign minister was infuriated by London’s ‘vacillating and self-effacing policy’, which he considered a critical impediment to deterrence. But British enthusiasm for Russia remained tepid. It was a source of embarrassment to many doughty democrats that their country should be associated with an absolutist autocracy, and worse still with its Balkan clients. In Paris near the climax of the July 1914 crisis, Raymond Recouly of
Le Figaro
met Sir Francis Bertie, the British ambassador, as he was about to enter the Quai d’Orsay. The Englishman, nicknamed ‘the Bull’ by colleagues, wrung his hands about Europe’s condition, then said: ‘Do you trust the Russians? We don’t, above half!’ He added: ‘I would say pretty much the same of the Serbs. That is why our country is not going to feel comfortable about entering a quarrel in which the Serbs and Russians are involved.’ Moreover, many British people, especially the elderly, were less than enthusiastic about entering any conflict on the same side as France. Lord Rosebery said crossly in 1904 when his Conservative colleagues welcomed the Entente: ‘You are all wrong. It means war with Germany in the end!’ Old Lady Londesborough, Wellington’s great-niece, told Osbert Sitwell in 1914: ‘It’s not the Germans but the French I’m frightened of!’

Such mistrust was reciprocal. A prime motive for President Poincaré’s determination to cling close to Russia as a military ally was his fear that Britain would not be there beside the French army on the day. While France and Russia had signed a bilateral treaty and were committed to support each other against attack, Britain was party to no such intimate pact, instead merely to expressions of good intentions, and army and naval
staff talks. The first discussions of a possible expeditionary force to France took place in December 1908. Thereafter, a sub-committee meeting of the Committee of Imperial Defence on 23 August 1911, attended by Asquith and Churchill, addressed at length the contingency that Britain would be obliged to intervene in the event of a European war. One modern historian has suggested that this gathering ‘set the course for a military confrontation between Britain and Germany’. That seems a wild exaggeration: no one knew better than Asquith how reluctant might be his own party, and Parliament, to endorse participation in a European conflict.

The prime minister wrote sternly after the CID meeting that ‘all questions of policy have been & must be reserved for the decision of the Cabinet, & it is quite outside the function of military or naval officers to prejudge such questions’. The contemporary view of an exasperated senior British staff officer – Henry Wilson – was that ‘there was still no definite agreement with France to come in with her, nothing but a very grudging authorisation by our Gov to the General Staff on the theory of eventual co-operation’. This seems about right. The head of the Foreign Office, Sir Arthur Nicolson, reminded the foreign secretary in August 1914 that ‘you have over and over again promised M. Cambon [the French ambassador] that if Germany was the aggressor you would stand by France’. Grey replied in a manner that justified every French prejudice about Anglo-Saxon duplicity: ‘Yes, but he has nothing in writing.’

One recent chronicler of this period suggests that Asquith’s ministers and generals engaged in ‘enthusiastic planning for war’ following the 1911 meeting. Precautionary steps were certainly taken and plans made from that year onwards – for instance, earmarking Oxford University’s Examination Schools for use as a hospital. But it seems impossible justly to characterise these measures as enthusiastic. What was extraordinary about all British policy-making during the evolution of the Entente, reflected in attitudes struck at the 1911 CID meeting, was that the government acknowledged possible participation in a continental war, while proposing to contribute an absurdly small army to fulfilling such a purpose. Winston Churchill wrote later that as a young cavalry officer in the 1890s, he and his kind were so conscious of the insignificance of the British Army by comparison with its continental counterparts that ‘no Jingo lieutenant or fire-eating staff officer … even in his most sanguine moments, would have believed that our little Army would again be sent to Europe’. Fifteen years on, while Haldane had reformed the army’s structure, it remained tiny by continental standards. The 1913 Army Estimates
made no mention whatsoever of a possible British ground role in a European conflict. The putative Expeditionary Force was given that designation because nobody knew where abroad it might be deployed – conceivably in India, Africa, the Middle East.

Here was a manifestation of a huge, historic British folly, repeated over many centuries including the twenty-first: the adoption of gesture strategy, committing small forces as an earnest of good intentions, heedless of their gross inadequacy for the military purpose at hand. Since 1907, Lord Northcliffe had been campaigning for conscription in his
Daily Mail
, to create a British army of a size to match the Empire’s greatness, but his crusade roused little support. The most grievous charge against the Asquith government, and explicitly against the foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey, is that they pursued policies which sensibly acknowledged a likelihood that Britain would be unable to remain neutral in the event of a general European war, because German hegemony on the continent would represent an intolerable outcome, but they declined to take appropriate practical measures to participate in such a struggle.

Grey is usually depicted as a gentle, civilised figure who lamented the coming of war in 1914 with unaccustomed eloquence, and wrote fine books on birdwatching and fly-fishing. A widower of fifty-two, his personal affairs were less arid than most of his contemporaries assumed. He conducted a lively love life, albeit much more discreetly than his colleague Lloyd George; Grey’s most recent biographer identifies two illegitimate children. Some of his contemporaries disdained him. Sir Eyre Crowe, a Foreign Office official who was admittedly prone to intemperance, called Grey ‘a futile, useless, weak fool’. The foreign secretary’s accustomed taciturnity caused Lloyd George, for one, to conclude that there was less to him than met the eye; that his economy with words reflected not strength of character, but debility. Grey spoke no foreign languages, and disliked Abroad. Although a highly intelligent man, he was also a narrow one, subject to violent mood swings.

Yet from 1905 to 1916 he ran Britain’s foreign policy as a private bailiwick. Lloyd George wrote: ‘During the eight years that preceded the war, the Cabinet devoted a ridiculously small percentage of its time to a consideration of foreign affairs.’ The Asquith government’s attitude to such matters, and to the other European powers, reflected an epic moral conceit, manifested in a condescension which especially upset the Germans. The French ambassador in London, Paul Cambon, observed sardonically that nothing gave greater pleasure to an Englishman than to discover that the
interests of England matched those of mankind at large: ‘and where such a confluence does not exist, he does his best to create it’. At a dinner party where several members of the government were present, Lord Northcliffe asserted contemptuously that Britain’s newspaper editors were better informed about foreign affairs than any cabinet minister. The chancellor said of the foreign secretary: ‘Sir Edward Grey belongs to the class which, through heredity and tradition, expects to find a place on the magisterial bench to sit in judgement upon and above their fellow men, before they ever have any opportunity to make themselves acquainted with the tasks and trials of mankind.’

This was a characteristically nasty jibe, but Henry Wilson wrote after his own 1911 conversations with ministers about conflict scenarios that he was not impressed by ‘the grasp of the situation possessed by Grey and Haldane [then secretary for war], Grey being much the most ignorant & careless of the two, he not only had no idea of what war means but he struck me as not wanting to know … an ignorant, vain & weak man quite unfit to be the Foreign Minister of any country larger than Portugal’. Bernard Shaw hated Grey as ‘a Junker from his topmost hair to the tips of his toes … [with] a personal taste for mendacity’, a charge that related to a brutal British response to a 1906 Egyptian village dispute about officers’ pigeon-shooting rights.

If this was Shavian hyperbole, Grey’s secret diplomacy was certainly high-handed – as was all British conduct of foreign affairs in that era. In August 1904 Lord Percy, for the then-Conservative government, responded with patrician magnificence to a Commons question about the newly concluded Anglo-French Agreement: ‘Speculation and conjecture as to the existence or non-existence of secret clauses in international treaties is a public privilege, the maintenance of which depends upon official reticence.’ But Asquith wrote to Grey on 5 September 1911, warning about the perils of the dialogue the foreign secretary had authorised between the British and French general staffs: ‘My dear Grey, Conversations such as that between Gen. Joffre and Col. Fairholme seem to me rather dangerous; especially the part which refers to possible British assistance. The French ought not to be encouraged, in present circumstances, to make their plans on any assumptions of this kind. Yours always, H.H.A.’

Yet amid the prime minister’s huge difficulties at home, by default he allowed Grey almost a free hand abroad. The foreign secretary felt able to give assurances to France about likely British support in the event of war, without reference to the full cabinet or the House of Commons, in a
manner incompatible with modern or even contemporary notions of democratic governance, and arguably unmatched until the far less defensible 1956 Anglo-French collusion to invade Egypt. Grey acted in secrecy because he knew he could secure no parliamentary mandate. During the July crisis, his personal willingness for Britain to fight beside France ran well ahead of that of most of his government colleagues or the public.

But it is hard to sustain the argument that Grey thus bears a large responsibility for war because of his failure either to speak frankly to the British people during the last years of peace, or explicitly to warn Berlin that Britain would not remain neutral. The Germans, in pursuing their course in 1914, had discounted British intervention and were unimpressed by the potential involvement of an army they despised. They were un-deterred by the economic perils posed by Britain’s absolute dominance of the world’s merchant shipping and capability for imposing a blockade, because they intended to win quickly. It is unlikely that any course of action adopted by Asquith’s government could have averted a European war in 1914, though another foreign secretary might have adopted a different view about British participation.

The planned British Expeditionary Force was well-equipped for its size, but its inadequate mass reflected reluctance to spend big money on soldiers when the Royal Navy was absorbing a quarter of state expenditure. Henry Wilson, as director of military operations between 1910 and 1914, spoke of ‘our funny little army’, and said contemptuously that there was no military problem on the continent to which the appropriate British answer was a mere six divisions. But these were all the government would stand for, and its policy reflected popular sentiment. Sailors were what the British loved and cherished; by contrast both the regular and the Territorial forces were under-recruited, with enthusiasm for military service especially low among country-dwellers and the Welsh.

Wilson played a critical role in promoting a military relationship with France much closer than most British soldiers wanted, or the cabinet knew. A brilliantly fluent speaker, of erratic and often reckless convictions, he failed the military academy entrance exams five times. He was a long-time advocate of conscription, describing the part-time volunteers of the Territorial Force as ‘the best & most patriotic men in England because they are trying to do something’. In 1910, as commandant of the Staff College, he asserted the likelihood of a European war, and argued that Britain’s only prudent option was to ally itself with France against the Germans. A student ventured to disagree, saying that only ‘inconceivable stupidity on
the part of statesmen’ could precipitate a general conflagration. This provoked Wilson’s derision: ‘Haw! Haw! Haw!!! Inconceivable stupidity is just what you’re going to get.’ Lord Esher wrote later that Wilson returned his pupils to their formations ‘with a sense of [war’s] cataclysmic imminence’. Wilson was described by the prime minister to Venetia Stanley as ‘that poisonous tho’ clever ruffian’, which seems about right. He was a shameless intriguer who meddled in everything, including offering support to the Ulster Protestants’ threatened rebellion. But it was almost entirely his doing that the British Army had plans prepared to send a force to the continent – what was known as the ‘W.F.’ or ‘With France’ scheme.

In 1911, Wilson secured Grey’s agreement that he should liaise with Britain’s railway companies about a schedule for moving units to the ports in the event of war, and appropriate timetables were drawn up. At the end of July that year, Lloyd George made a speech at the Mansion House, placing Britain firmly beside France in any dispute with Germany, and Wilson became the foremost British instrument in preparing to implement such a commitment. In 1913 he visited France seven times, and in conversations with Joffre and his staff promised 150,000 men for the thirteenth day after mobilisation, to concentrate between Arras–Saint-Quentin and Cambrai ready for operations. This was fanciful, but a senior British officer thus created a military convention. Wilson argued that, though a BEF would be small, its moral contribution could be critical. He grossly underestimated prospective German strength. But, though then still only a brigadier-general, he exercised an extraordinary influence towards persuading Asquith to contemplate, though emphatically not to confirm, a continental military commitment. This seems to reflect a sense of statesmanlike prudence, rather than any taste for warmongering.