Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (22 page)

In the last days of peace Vernon Kell, director of the British security service MI5, stayed at his office in Watergate House around the clock, organising arrests of known German agents. Although his infant organisation boasted a staff of only seventeen, he had forged effective links with county chief constables: between 3 and 16 August, twenty-two arrests were made. Some spies escaped in the fashion of Walter Rimann, a language teacher in Hull who caught the Zeebrugge ferry. It is thought that a few others remained undetected, but if so they made little contribution to Germany’s war effort.

Most of those caught had been identified through the interception of their correspondence with Germany’s intelligence service, the
Nachrichten-Abteilung
, under Home Office warrant – a system fostered by Winston Churchill. The Kaiser raged about the incompetence of his spy chiefs. Gustav Steinhauer, ringmaster of the British network, recorded Wilhelm demanding: ‘Am I surrounded by dolts? Who is responsible?’ German military intelligence had focused its efforts exclusively on France, leaving the navy to handle Britain. Steinhauer, who often travelled there in the pre-war period, had recruited agents chiefly by writing unsolicited letters to German expatriates; his most active ‘postman’ was Karl Ernst, a Pentonville barber, who approached seaman customers for information. German wartime intelligence in Britain never recovered from the 1914 round-up: as late as 21 August, Berlin was unaware that a British Expeditionary Force had been convoyed to France.

Meanwhile, Bernard Shaw wired his German translator: ‘YOU AND I AT WAR CAN ABSURDITY GO NO FURTHER. MY FRIENDLIEST WISHES GO WITH YOU UNDER ALL CIRCUMSTANCES.’ Lord Northcliffe said to his erstwhile Vienna correspondent Wickham Steed, ‘Well it’s come!’ Steed answered, ‘Yes, thank God!’ Memories of Queen
Victoria caused many Russians to refer to England as ‘
Anglichanka
’ – the Englishwoman. A peasant said in August 1914 that ‘he was glad that the
Anglichanka
was with Russia, because first she was clever and would help; secondly, if things went badly with Russia, she was good and would help; thirdly, if it came to making peace, she was determined and would not give way’.

Fran Šuklje was a well-known Slovenian sage, sixty-five in 1914. On 4 August this unwilling subject of the Hapsburgs was sitting under the trees in the famous Stembur garden in Kandija when he read the news of Britain’s declaration of war. He told the little crowd of disciples around him: ‘Now you will give thanks to God if this war is over in three years.’ His words quickly spread among his fellow citizens, ‘whose unanimous judgement was that I had gone mad. They assume an outcome in three weeks, three months at the most.’ In Berlin, Frederick Wiles of the
Daily Mail
described scenes at the British embassy that day: ‘the realisation of what was now upon them turned the Germans into infuriated barbarians … Stones, keys, sticks, knives, umbrellas – any and everything which could be thrown were hurtling through the smashed windows.’

At an English country tennis party, the writer Jerome K. Jerome expressed ‘relief and thankfulness … I was so afraid Grey would climb down at the last moment … It was Asquith I was doubtful of. I didn’t think the old man had the grit … Thank God, we shan’t read “Made in Germany” for some little time to come.’ On the night of 4 August, as mindless crowds roared and sang outside Buckingham Palace, Maurice Baring watched a drunken man in evening dress harangue passers-by from the roof of a taxi in Trafalgar Square.

Even after war was declared, impassioned dissenters remained. On 5 August C.P. Scott argued in the
Manchester Guardian
: ‘By some hidden contract England has been technically committed behind her back to the ruinous madness of a share in the violent gamble of a war between two militarist leagues … It will be a war in which we risk everything of which we are proud, and in which we stand to gain nothing … Some day we will regret it.’ Many British people in the twenty-first century believe that Scott was right, chiefly in the light of the horror of the experience that followed, but also because they are unpersuaded that it was necessary to resist in arms the Kaiser’s Germany at such cost.

Would any of the Entente Powers have acted differently had they known of the profound complicity of the Serbian army, though not the government, in the murder of Franz Ferdinand? Almost certainly not, because
this was not why the Austrians and Germans acted, or their opponents reacted. The Russians simply considered the extinction of a small Slav state as an excessive and indeed intolerable punishment for the crime of Princip, and for that matter Apis. Unless France had swiftly declared its neutrality and surrendered its frontier fortresses as Germany demanded, its alliance with Russia would have caused Moltke to attack in the West. The British were entirely unmoved by Serbia’s impending fate, and acted only in response to the German violation of Belgian neutrality and the threat to France. The various participants in what would soon become the Great War had very different motives for belligerence, and objectives with little in common. Three conflicts – that in the Balkans over East European issues, the continental struggle to determine whether German dominance should prevail, and the German challenge to British global naval mastery – accomplished a metamorphosis into a single over-arching one. Other issues, mostly involving land grabs, would become overlaid when other nations – notably Japan, Turkey and Italy – joined the struggle.

Many people in Britain have argued through the past century that the price of participation in the war was so appalling that no purpose could conceivably justify it; more than a few blame Sir Edward Grey for willing Britain’s involvement. But, granted Germany’s determination to dominate Europe and the likely consequences of such hegemony for Britain, would the foreign secretary have acted responsibly if he had taken no steps designed to avert such an outcome?

Lloyd George in his memoirs advanced a further popular argument against the conflict, laying blame upon the soldiers he hated: ‘Had it not been for the professional zeal and haste with which the military staffs set in motion the plans which had already been agreed between them, the negotiations between the governments, which at that time had hardly begun, might well have continued, and war could, and probably would, have been averted.’ This was nonsense. What happened was not ‘war by accident’, but war by ill-conceived Austrian design, with German support.

Today, as in 1914, any judgement about the necessity for British entry must be influenced by an assessment of the character of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s empire. It seems frivolous to suggest, as do a few modern sensationalists, that a German victory would merely have created, half a century earlier, an entity resembling the European Union. Even if the Kaiser’s regime cannot be equated with that of the Nazis, its policies could scarcely be characterised as enlightened. Dominance was its purpose, achieved by peaceful means if possible, but by war if necessary. The Germans’ paranoia
caused them to interpret as a hostile act any attempt to check or question their international assertiveness. Moreover, throughout the July crisis they, like the Austrians, consistently lied about their intentions and actions. By contrast, whatever the shortcomings of British conduct, the Asquith government told the truth as it saw this, to both its allies and its prospective foes.

The
Kaiserreich
’s record abroad was inhumane even by contemporary standards. It mandated in advance and applauded after the event the 1904–07 genocide of the Herero and Namaqua peoples of German South-West Africa, an enormity far beyond the scope of any British colonial misdeed. German behaviour during the 1914 invasion of Belgium and France, including large-scale massacres of civilians endorsed at the highest level, cannot be compared with what took place in the Second World War, because there was no genocidal intent, but it conveyed a profoundly disturbing image of the character of the regime that aspired to rule Europe.

It seems mistaken to suppose that neutrality in 1914 would have yielded a happy outcome for the British Empire. The authoritarian and acquisitive instincts of Germany’s leadership would scarcely have been moderated by triumph on the battlefield. The Kaiser’s regime did not enter the war with a grand plan for world domination, but its leaders were in no doubt that they required huge booty as a reward for the victory they anticipated. Bethmann Hollweg drafted a personal list of demands on 9 September 1914, when Berlin saw victory within its grasp. ‘The aim of the war,’ he wrote, ‘is to provide us with [security] guarantees, from east to west, for the foreseeable future, through the enfeeblement of our adversaries.’

France was to cede to Germany the Briey iron deposits; Belfort; a coastal strip from Dunkirk to Boulogne; the western slope of the Vosges mountains. Her strategic fortresses were to be demolished. Just as after 1870, cash reparations would be exacted sufficient to ensure that ‘France is incapable of spending considerable sums on armaments for the next eighteen to twenty years’. Elsewhere, Luxembourg would be annexed outright; Belgium and Holland transformed into vassal states; Russia’s borders drastically shrunken; a vast colonial empire created in central Africa; a German economic union extending from Scandinavia to Turkey.

Georges-Henri Soutou has convincingly argued that Bethmann was never as serious about his territorial demands – he strove to dissuade the Kaiser from insisting upon annexation of Belgium – as about the intention to impose a customs union on the continent. But whatever means Berlin proposed to employ, the purpose was not in doubt; in Soutou’s
words, ‘it is well understood that customs union must thereby make possible Germany’s control of Europe’. While other German leaders advanced different shopping lists, all took it for granted that the war could not end without their nation receiving what they deemed ‘appropriate’ territorial and financial rewards. Having vanquished its only important continental rivals, it is implausible that Germany would thereafter have been content to make a generous accommodation with a neutral Great Britain, or to acquiesce in its global naval mastery.

The Asquith government is often accused of opacity in European affairs, both strategic – between 1906 and 1914 – and tactical – during the July crisis. While Britain made itself a party to the Triple Entente, uncertainty persisted in all the capitals of Europe, London included, about whether it would join a European war. Yet the British had little power to control events. Though the Germans preferred not to fight them, they were seen in Berlin as marginal in a clash of continental forces. Only if Britain had adopted the domestically unacceptable course of creating a large standing army might it have been capable of playing an effective deterrent role in 1914. The most grievous British error was to suppose the nation could maintain its cherished balance of power on the continent without a credible mass of soldiers to support its diplomacy. But failure to create a conscript army can scarcely be characterised as warmongering.

The argument that Britain should have declared in advance of the 1914 crisis its determination to participate in any Russo-French clash with Germany ignores the nature of democracies, and the requirements of prudent statesmanship. No government could have commanded the support of Parliament for an open-ended commitment to join a European conflict without heed to the circumstances in which this evolved, and there is no reason why it should have done so. If in July 1914 Asquith had offered France and Russia unconditional support, he would have been guilty of the very recklessness – the issue of a ‘blank cheque’ – for which Germany has been justly condemned in its conduct towards Austria-Hungary, and to a lesser degree France also in its commitment to Russia.

Britain cherished the status quo, and was committed to peace, because it still appeared to be global top dog. The Asquith government harboured a sensible unease about Russia and the follies of which its government was capable; it had no desire to promote French bellicosity. Thus its only rational course in the decade preceding the war, and indeed in July 1914, was to offer its allies goodwill and provisional support, the scope and nature of which must depend on events and exact circumstances. The
failure of this policy is self-evident: Britain’s tentative approach to European commitments, and especially to the Entente, sufficed to involve it in history’s greatest conflict, but not to prevent such a disaster. It nonetheless seems hard to conceive of any alternative pre-war British diplomatic path which would have commanded domestic political support, and persuaded Germany that the risk of war was unacceptable.

Those who claim that a general conflict was avoidable even after Austria declared war on Serbia, and who hold Russia responsible for what followed, imply that Austria and its German guarantor should have been allowed to have their way at gunpoint in the Balkans, in Belgium and indeed across Europe. Only the German ultimatum to Belgium enabled the war party in the British cabinet to obtain a mandate. It is sometimes said that this was a mere pretext – a figleaf – since Grey, Churchill and several of their colleagues were bent upon belligerence even before the issue of Belgium emerged. But it remains doubtful that they could have carried their point but for the violation of Belgian neutrality. It does not seem ignoble or foolish that much of the Commons and the British people seized upon this as a just
casus belli
, whereas they recoiled from going to war to support Serbia, or for that matter merely to fulfil Britain’s ill-defined commitment to the Triple Entente. Even if Germany is acquitted of pursuing a design for general European war in 1914, it still seems deserving of most blame, because it had power to prevent this and did not exercise it.

On 3 August the Kaiser told his orderlies to lay out field-grey uniform, topboots, brown gloves, and a helmet without plumes for his address to the Reichstag on the morrow. Then he decided that a more magnificent show was appropriate. He chose to appear in full dress, accompanied by every available senior officer in Berlin, adorned with their medals and sashes. In all his splendour as Germany’s Supreme Warlord, with much emotion he told the assembled members next day: ‘From the bottom of my heart I thank you for your expressions of love and fidelity. In the struggle now ahead of us, I see no more parties in my
Volk
’ – ‘
Ich kenne keine Parteien mehr, ich kenne nur Deutsche
’ – ‘among us there are only Germans’. Wilhelm was now to experience a few joyous weeks of the military glory he had always dreamed of. Thereafter, however, the shades would close in upon him – and upon Europe.