The Sleepwalkers (37 page)

This backstairs diplomacy helped the premier to bypass the Germanophobe hawks of the French foreign ministry, but it brought its own additional risks. In the first week of August 1911, a brief breakdown in communications led to an entirely unnecessary escalation, including threats to dispatch French and British warships to Agadir, even though Caillaux and his German counterpart were at that point in fact both willing to compromise.
⁸⁵
Caillaux blamed his mediator Fondère for the misunderstanding, but there would have been no need for a go-between like Fondère or for Caillaux's backstairs dealing, had it not been for the fact that the officials of the ministry were conspiring to throw him out of office and wreck negotiations for an understanding with Germany. Inevitably, this also meant that Caillaux was sometimes forced to backtrack on his commitments, because his ministerial colleagues refused to accept the assurances he had made to Berlin. And these complex manoeuvres heightened the uncertainty in Berlin about how French moves should be read: it was a matter of weighing contradictory trends against each other, as one junior German diplomat did when he reported that ‘despite the screaming in the press and the chauvinism of the army', Caillaux's policy would probably prevail.
⁸⁶

As for German policy during the crisis, it was formulated not by Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, and certainly not by the Kaiser, who was completely uninterested in Morocco, but by the energetic Swabian imperial state secretary for foreign affairs, Alfred von Kiderlen-Wächter. Kiderlen had been involved in drawing up the Franco-German Agreement on Morocco of February 1909 and it was natural that he should play a leading role in formulating Germany's response to the French troop deployment. In a manner characteristic of the upper reaches of the German executive, the foreign secretary seized personal control of the Morocco policy-thread, managing communications with Paris and keeping the chancellor at arm's length from the developing crisis.
⁸⁷
Kiderlen had no interest in securing a German share of Morocco, but he was determined not to allow France unilaterally to impose exclusive control there. He hoped, by mirroring French moves with a sequence of incremental German gestures of protest, to secure an acknowledgement of German rights and some form of territorial compensation in the French Congo. He had good reason to believe that this objective could be secured without conflict, for in May 1911, Joseph Caillaux, then finance minister, had assured German diplomats in Paris that ‘France would be prepared, if we [the Germans] recognized its vital interest in Morocco, to make concessions to us elsewhere.'
⁸⁸
After Caillaux's accession to the office of premier in June, therefore, Kiderlen assumed that this would be France's policy. He rejected plans to send two ships to Agadir; he believed that the
Panther
, which was not equipped to organize an effective landing and had no instructions to attempt one, would suffice for a symbolic demonstration.
⁸⁹

The subsequent evolution of the crisis revealed that Kiderlen had grossly misjudged the French response. He also seriously mismanaged the German domestic environment. Kiderlen's personal relations with Kaiser Wilhelm II were not especially cordial and the Emperor was as sceptical of the administration's policy on North Africa in 1911 as he had been in 1905.
⁹⁰
In order to bolster himself against possible opposition from this quarter, Kiderlen marshalled the support of German ultra-nationalist politicians and publicists. But he was unable, once the press campaign got underway, to control its tone or content. As a consequence, a German policy that aimed consistently to keep the crisis below the threshold of armed confrontation unfolded against the background of thunderous nationalist press agitation that rang alarm bells in Paris and London. Banner headlines in the ultra-nationalist papers shrieking ‘West Morocco to Germany!' were grist to the mills of the hawks in Paris. They also worried the Kaiser, who issued such sharp criticisms of the foreign secretary's policy that on 17 July Kiderlen tendered his resignation – only through Chancellor Bethmann's mediation was it possible to save the policy and keep Kiderlen in office.
⁹¹

On 4 November 1911, a Franco-German treaty at last defined the terms of an agreement. Morocco became an exclusively French protectorate, German business interests were assured of respectful treatment and parts of the French Congo were conceded to Germany. But the 1911 Moroccan crisis had exposed the perilous incoherence of French diplomacy. An internal disciplinary committee convened on 18 November 1911 to investigate the actions of Maurice Herbette revealed the elaborate machinations of the permanent officials in Paris. Caillaux, too, was discredited. He and his cabinet were associated in the public eye with a treaty that many French nationalists thought had conceded too much to the Germans, which is remarkable, given that it conceded less than Delcassé had envisaged offering in exchange for Morocco in the late 1890s. Revelations of the premier's secret negotiations with the Germans (acquired as decrypts by the
cabinet noir
and tactically leaked to the press by the Centrale) sealed his fate and Caillaux fell from office on 21 January 1912, having occupied the premiership for only seven months.

In Germany, too, the treaty of November 1911 was denounced – for granting the Germans too little. Kiderlen was partly to blame for this – there was a gaping discrepancy between what Germany could expect to achieve by challenging the French over Morocco and the glittering prizes – a ‘German West Morocco', for example – held out to the public by the ultra-nationalist press whose agitation Kiderlen had briefly and unwisely encouraged. By doing this, the foreign secretary contributed to the deepening alienation between the government and those who claimed to be its ‘natural supporters' on the far right. Yet this faustian pact with the nationalist media had only been necessary because Kiderlen had no other means of ensuring that the sovereign would not compromise his own control of the policy-making process.

Perhaps the most important consequence of German policy oscillation during the crisis was a growing tendency in Paris to misread German actions as driven by a policy of bluff. When he read the files of the Quai d'Orsai in the first months of 1912, the new incoming premier and foreign minister, Raymond Poincaré, was struck by the alternation of toughness and concessions in German policy: ‘whenever we have adopted a conciliatory approach to Germany', Poincaré observed, ‘she has abused it; on the other hand, on each occasion when we have have shown firmness, she has yielded'. From this he drew the ominous conclusion that Germany understood ‘only the language of force'.
⁹²

Britain's involvement in the crisis, too, bore the imprint of deep divisions within the executive structure. The reaction of the Liberal cabinet in London was initially cautious, since it was felt that France was largely responsible for triggering the crisis and should be urged to give ground. On 19 July, the cabinet even authorized Grey to inform Paris that there were circumstances under which Britain might accept a German presence in Morocco. The French government angrily replied that British acquiescence on this point would amount to a breach in the Anglo-French agreement of 1904.
⁹³
At the same time, the anti-Germans around Grey adopted a robustly pro-French position. Nicolson, Buchanan, Haldane and Grey himself talked up the threat posed by Germany and revived the notion that what was at stake was the maintenance of the Entente. On 19 July, the secretary of state for war Richard Haldane asked the director of military operations Sir Henry Wilson to delay his departure for the continent so that he could spend a morning assessing prospective troop strengths in the event of a conflict on the Franco-German frontier.
⁹⁴
When Justin de Selves expressed surprise at the extent of German demands for compensation in the Congo, Sir Francis Bertie wrote to Grey from Paris of the ‘excessive' requirements of the Germans, which ‘are known by them to be impossible of acceptance and are intended to reconcile the French to the establishment of Germany on the Moroccan coast'
⁹⁵
– this was a misreading of the German position, and it was calculated to strike fear into the British navalists, for whom the establishment of a German stronghold on the Atlantic would have been unacceptable.

It was the prospect of a German Atlantic port that enabled Grey to secure cabinet approval for a private warning to the German ambassador on 21 July that if Germany meant to land at Agadir, Britain would be obliged to defend her interests there – by which Grey meant the deployment of British warships.
⁹⁶
On the same day, the Grey group raised the temperature yet further: on the evening of 21 July 1911, the Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George delivered a speech at the Mansion House issuing a sharp warning to Berlin. It was imperative, Lloyd George said, that Britain should maintain ‘her place and her prestige among the Great Powers of the world'. British power had more than once ‘redeemed' continental nations from ‘overwhelming disaster and even from national extinction'. If Britain were to be forced to choose between peace on the one hand and the surrender of her international pre-eminence on the other, ‘then I say emphatically that peace at that price would be a humiliation intolerable for a great nation like ours to endure'.
⁹⁷
In the days that followed, Grey stoked the fires of a naval panic in London, warning Lloyd George and Churchill that the British fleet was in danger of imminent attack and informing Reginald McKenna, First Lord of the Admiralty, that the German fleet was mobilized and ready to strike – in reality, the High Seas Fleet was scattered and the Germans had no intention of concentrating it.
⁹⁸

The Mansion House speech was no spontaneous outburst; it was a gambit carefully planned by Grey, Asquith and Lloyd George. Just as Caillaux bypassed his Foreign Office in order to impose his own dovish agenda on the negotiations with Berlin, so the anti-Germans around Grey bypassed the dovish radicals in the Liberal cabinet in order to deliver a harsh and potentially provocative message to the Germans. Lloyd George had not cleared the sensitive passages of his speech with the cabinet, only with Prime Minister Asquith and Foreign Secretary Grey.
⁹⁹
The speech was all the more important for the fact that it signalled Lloyd George's defection from the camp of the dove radicals to that of the liberal imperialists. His words caused consternation in Berlin, where it was felt that the British government was needlessly disrupting the passage of Franco-German negotiations. ‘Who is Lloyd George to lay down the law to Germany and to stop a quick Franco-German settlement?' Arthur Zimmermann, under-secretary of state for foreign affairs, asked the British ambassador in Berlin.
¹⁰⁰

Lloyd George's words also shocked those British cabinet ministers who had not signed up to Grey's programme. Viscount Morley, secretary of state for India, denounced the speech – and Grey's subsequent defence of it in conversation with the German ambassador in London – as an ‘unwarranted and unfortunate provocation to Germany'. The Lord Chancellor, Lord Loreburn, was appalled to find Britain so aggressively backing France in a dispute in which (as it seemed to Loreburn) Paris was by no means clear of blame. He entreated Grey to disavow the speech and to make it clear that Britain had no intention of interfering in the negotiations between France and Germany.
¹⁰¹

The Grey group prevailed. At a meeting of the Committee of Imperial Defence convened on 23 August 1911, it was agreed that should a Franco-German war break out, Britain would mount a rapid continental intervention, including the transshipment of a British Expeditionary Force. Asquith, Grey, Haldane, Lloyd George and the service chiefs were present, but key radicals, including Morley, Crewe, Harcourt and Esher, were either not informed or not invited. The weeks that followed were filled (to the horror of the radicals) with enthusiastic planning for war. Even Asquith recoiled from the extensive ‘military conversations' designed to coordinate mobilization plans and strategy with the French in September 1911, but Grey refused to have them stopped.
¹⁰²
To a greater extent than either of the two original quarrelling parties, Britain was willing to consider the possibility of a drastic escalation.
¹⁰³
While the French had made no war preparations, even at the height of the crisis, Bethmann remarked in a letter to the German ambassador in London, ‘Britain seems to have been ready to strike every day.'
¹⁰⁴
The Austrian foreign minister Count Aehrenthal came to a similar conclusion, noting on 3 August that England had for a moment seemed ready to use the Moroccan quarrel as a pretext for a full-on ‘reckoning' with its German rival.
¹⁰⁵
The contrast with Russia's relatively reserved and conciliatory position was particularly striking.
¹⁰⁶
Only after this British reaction did Vienna abandon the policy of neutrality it had hitherto adopted on the Morocco question.
¹⁰⁷

The battle between the hawks and the doves was not yet over. Just as the officials of the French foreign ministry wrought their revenge upon Caillaux and the hapless Justin de Selves, toppling them from office in January 1912, so in Britain the radical Liberal sceptics renewed their assault on the policy pursued by Grey. Among the ministers there were many who had never appreciated the depth of Grey's commitments to France before Agadir. In December 1911, there was a backbench revolt against Grey. Part of the ill-feeling against him arose from a frustration at the secretiveness of his tactics – why had no one been told about the undertakings the government was supposedly making on behalf of the British people? Arthur Ponsonby and Noel Buxton, both prominent Liberal anti-Grey activists, demanded that a committee be formed to improve Anglo-German relations. The backlash against the foreign secretary swept through virtually the entire liberal press. But whereas the die-hards in Paris did succeed in discrediting both Caillaux and his conciliatory approach, the ‘pro-German' lobby in Britain failed to dislodge Grey or his policy.