Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (20 page)

The leftist
Daily Chronicle
on 31 July applauded the absence of popular jingoism: ‘Very welcome, and in comparison with what we experienced some while ago very remarkable, is the complete absence of anti-German sentiment. The last few years have done a great deal to reopen English eyes to our community of interest with the great people whose civilisation is in many ways the most akin in Europe to our own; and the bare idea of a ruinous conflict between us seems more unqualifiedly distasteful now than it has, perhaps, for a generation.’ That day the
Manchester Guardian
became the first British newspaper to suggest that the country might be obliged to fight if France was attacked. However, the newspaper discounted any possibility of a German invasion of Belgium, because such action would breach Europe’s 1839 treaty guaranteeing Belgian neutrality, to which Berlin as well as London was a signatory.

A soldier of the Royal Welch Fusiliers was awakened in his quarters in the Dorset town of Dorchester at 6 a.m. on that sunny Friday the 31st by the regimental band playing that jauntiest of ditties ‘I Do Like to be Beside the Seaside’. Yet many British people now recognised that conflict was lapping very close to their shores. Norman Macleod, an Admiralty private secretary, ‘felt rather apprehensive (1) because [I am] entirely ag[ain]st the idea of war (2) for fear of financial and economic crisis – people were buying in large stocks of food supplies. Bank rate up to 10% … I thought this trouble would restrain jingo feeling.’ A delegation from the City called on the Chancellor of the Exchequer to argue that ‘the only means of saving the world was for their own country to stay out of the conflict so that it might remain the great market, the economic arbiter of the world’. On 1 August the
Daily News
carried an article by its editor A.G. Gardiner, headed ‘Why We Must Not Fight’. The writer demanded: ‘Where in the wide world do our interests clash with Germany? Nowhere. With Russia we have
potential conflicts over the whole of South-Eastern Europe and Southern Asia.’ After the cabinet’s meetings that Saturday, Paul Cambon told Grey – in French, through an interpreter, for he resolutely confined himself to his own language in official exchanges – that he flatly refused to communicate to Paris its resolution, ‘or rather, lack of it’.

Many British people believed that responsibility for the unfolding nightmare rested in Belgrade and St Petersburg.
The Economist
warned that ‘the provocation begun by Serbia has been continued by Russia. If a great war begins, Russian mobilization will be the proximate cause. And we fear that the poisonous articles of
The Times
have encouraged the Tsar to hope for British support.’ A Viennese letter-writer to
The Economist
, Josef Redlich, demanded: ‘Public opinion throughout the Austrian dominions, without distinction of party, has throbbed with the one question, How long Austria is to tolerate such a conception of neighbourliness as dominates Serbia?’ Nine distinguished Cambridge academics wrote to
The Times
: ‘We regard Germany as a nation leading the way in Arts and Sciences, and we have all learnt and are learning from German scholars. War upon her in the interests of Serbia and Russia will be a sin against civilisation. If by reason of honourable obligations we be unhappily involved in war, patriotism might still our mouths, but at this juncture we consider ourselves justified in protesting against being drawn into the struggle with a nation so near akin to our own.’

That night of 1 August, Grey dined with his private secretary at Brooks’s Club in St James’s Street; after leaving the table, for a while they played billiards together. Meanwhile the prime minister retired to bed nursing a grievance: the crisis had obliged him to cancel a country weekend in the company of Venetia Stanley, twenty-six-year-old object of his amorous, if unconsummated, obsession: ‘I can honestly say that I have never had a more bitter disappointment,’ Asquith wrote to her. He had some difficulty achieving unconsciousness, he said, ‘but really I didn’t sleep badly in that betwixt & between of sleeping & waking, thank God the vision of you kept floating about me and brought me rest and peace’. The British prime minister’s prolific and compulsively indiscreet letters to Stanley do little to enhance his reputation, but provide a priceless insight into his thinking.

The most prominent left-wing newspapers – the
Daily Chronicle
,
Daily News
and
Manchester Guardian
– remained vehemently opposed to British intervention, but the government’s attitude was contrarily hardening. On Sunday, 2 August, Asquith breakfasted with the German ambassador, and warned the emotional Lichnowsky of dire consequences should his
nation’s army fulfil its threat to march into neutral Belgium. Crowds gathered in Downing Street and Whitehall, and for the first time many anxious faces were seen. Conservative leader Bonar Law wrote to the prime minister, promising his party’s support for a British declaration of war – a missive designed to hasten such an outcome.

The cabinet met, and learned from Grey that the French fleet had mobilised. France, he told them, now counted upon Britain to secure the Channel and the North Sea, having concentrated its own strength in the Mediterranean in conformity with a secret pact made at the 1912 Anglo-French naval talks. Some ministers were astonished, indeed confounded, to learn for the first time of this momentous commitment. But the cabinet – with varying degrees of reluctance – agreed to honour its terms, and to deploy warships to protect the northern French coast. The Germans promptly promised to stay out of the Channel if Britain remained neutral, but when Paul Cambon heard of the Royal Navy’s commitment, his spirits soared: ‘this was the decision I had been waiting for … A great country cannot half-make war. From the moment it decided to do so at sea, it was inescapably fated to do so also on land.’

The cabinet still rejected such a proposition, however. That evening of 2 August Sir John French, Chief of the Imperial General Staff until his March resignation over the ‘Curragh Mutiny’, made a bizarre telephone call: he sought guidance about the government’s military intentions not from ministers, but from Sir George Riddell, owner of the
News of the World
. The little field-marshal asked Riddell: if war came, would an expeditionary force be sent to France, and who would command it? Riddell referred his questions to the government. Lloyd George sent back word that French should present himself at Downing Street at 10 o’clock next morning. When he did so, he was told there was still no question of Britain sending an army to the continent.

Now Belgium became the focus of British attention. At 3 p.m. on 2 August, the Belgian vice-consul in Cologne arrived at the Brussels Foreign Ministry to report that since 6 o’clock that morning he had been watching trains leaving the Rhine city’s stations every three or four minutes, crammed with troops: they were heading not towards France, but instead for Aix-la-Chapelle and the Belgian border. When word followed that German troops had entered Luxembourg and were expected imminently to invade Belgium, the foreign minister M. Jean Davignon said emotionally to his colleague Baron Gaiffier: ‘Let us go to mass and offer prayers for our poor country: never has it stood in such need of them!’

King Albert had visited Berlin in November 1913, and received a dark warning from the Kaiser and Moltke: ‘small countries, such as Belgium, would be well-advised to rally to the side of the strong if they wished to retain their independence’. On 2 August the Belgian monarch was confronted with the meaning of this threat: Germany summarily demanded for its armies a right of passage through his country. The French were uncertain how the Brussels government would respond: they considered large parts of Belgium to be Germanophile. It was Albert’s personal decision, as commander-in-chief of the armed forces as well as monarch, to reject Berlin’s demand – with the overwhelming support of his people.

‘The response [to Berlin’s ultimatum] was very easy to draft,’ said Baron Gaiffier. ‘We only had to translate in plain language onto paper the feelings that moved each one of us. We were sure that we correctly interpreted the views of the whole country.’ Yet that Sunday evening, though the Belgian government knew the worst, an innocence still pervaded the mood in Brussels, especially among its humbler citizens. At the end of a radiant summer’s day, a host of walkers who had been promenading in the surrounding countryside strolled back into the city, many of them singing and clutching armfuls of flowers.

Britain was among the guarantors of Belgian neutrality under the 1839 European treaty, made soon after the country separated from Holland. Late on 2 August, the Germans warned the British government of their intention to march through King Albert’s country, with or without his consent. At 7 o’clock next morning, Belgium’s rejection of the ultimatum was conveyed to Berlin. When the news was published, Brussels burst forth with tricolour flags. Most Germans regarded this show of defiance with contemptuous pity. ‘Oh, the poor fools,’ the counsellor at the German legation kept repeating, as he gazed out on streets ablaze with national tokens. ‘Oh, the poor fools. Why don’t they get out of the way of the steamroller? We don’t want to hurt them, but if they stand in our way they will be ground into the dirt. Oh, the poor fools!’

It has sometimes been suggested that King Albert’s people would have fared better had the monarch bowed to the inevitable, and granted the German army free passage. But why should he, or the ruler of any sovereign nation, have done so? Throughout modern history, the protection of small states from aggression has often been considered by larger democracies to create a moral imperative. In 1914
force majeure
constituted a more formidable influence upon events than international law. But the view
adopted by most of the British people, as well as by their government, was that Germany’s invasion of Belgium constituted an affront to morality as well as to the European order. Ironically, once the Germans were committed to violate Belgian neutrality – as secretly they had been for a decade – they would have done better to go the whole hog and attack without an ultimatum. The time-lag between threat and assault enabled King Albert to rally his people and foreign opinion, and also to prepare to resist. The Belgians organised a formidably effective programme of railway-tunnel demolitions, which limited enemy train movements through their country for months to come.

Apologists for Germany’s behaviour argue now – as did the Berlin government then – that if the Kaiser’s army had not violated Belgian neutrality, the allies would swiftly have done so. The only plausible evidence for this claim is that the British debated a possible blockade of Antwerp as a conduit to Germany, a contingency overtaken by events. They repeatedly warned the French against infringing Belgian territory, and Joffre acquiesced. Germany had hitherto been the clear winner, at the expense of Russia, in the game of managing events so as to avoid seeming the immediate aggressor. Moltke forfeited this status, however, the moment his armies crossed the Belgian frontier. Bismarck had warned his countrymen against such action, precisely because he anticipated its impact on foreign opinion. The assault on Belgium came as a heaven-sent deliverance to those members of Asquith’s government already convinced that Britain must enter the European war. Without Belgium, the country would have joined the conflict divided, if at all. Moltke made a critical miscalculation: he was so convinced Britain would fight that he did not think the issue of Belgian neutrality would influence such an outcome one way or the other. He was quite wrong. The perceived martyrdom of King Albert and his people rallied to the cause of war millions of British people who had hitherto opposed it.

There were considerable ironies about Britain’s rush to embrace ‘gallant little Belgium’. During the Boer War, Albert’s country had adopted a passionately anti-British posture. Belgium’s deplorable record of inhumanity as the colonial power in the Congo was surpassed only by that of Germany in South-West Africa. British and French soldiers regarded the Belgian army with contempt, its officers as posturing dandies. Moreover, throughout the previous month the Belgian Catholic press had strongly supported Austria-Hungary’s right to take military action against Serbia. One paper,
l’Express
of Liège, denounced the Franco-Russian Entente as
‘the nightmare of all those who hold in their hearts a future of liberty, democracy and civilisation … [it is] an alliance against nature’.

No matter. In London a few ministers still clung to a belief that the mere passage of the German army should not constitute a
casus belli
. But most of the British people here at last identified moral certainty amid a sea of Balkan and European confusions. A telegram was brought to Grey, at dinner with Haldane on Sunday evening, 2 August, warning that German action against Belgium was imminent. The two men drove immediately to Downing Street, where they detached Asquith from some private guests. They told him the news and asked for authority to mobilise the army. Haldane volunteered to become temporary war minister, as Asquith would obviously be too busy to continue to fill that role. The prime minister assented to both proposals.

On the morning of Monday, 3 August, a British bank holiday,
The Times
declared: ‘Europe is to be the scene of the most terrible war that she has witnessed since the fall of the Roman Empire … The blame must fall mainly upon Germany. She could have stayed the plague had she chosen to speak in Vienna as she speaks when she is in earnest. She has not chosen to do so.’ Whitehall, bathed in brilliant sunshine, became impassable to traffic, so dense were the expectant crowds. At 11 a.m. the cabinet was told of King Albert’s decision that Belgium would resist, yet still ministers agonised. Two, Sir John Simon and Lord Beauchamp, said they would resign rather than be complicit in a British commitment to war. But Lloyd George, a pivotal figure, at last overcame his own doubts, and accepted the case for fighting. A disappointed fellow Liberal complained that the chancellor ‘lacked the courage of his convictions’. It is probably the case that Lloyd George was more strongly influenced by political fears of splitting the government and the Liberal Party – to the partisan advantage of the Conservatives – than by any fervour for the Entente’s cause. Asquith made a telephone call to Dover to halt the imminent departure for Egypt of Lord Kitchener, Britain’s most eminent soldier. The prime minister asked the field marshal to return to London. He was likely to be needed.