The Sleepwalkers (38 page)

There were three reasons for this: the first was that British ministers were inherently less vulnerable to this kind of campaigning, thanks to the robust partisan structure of British parliamentary politics; then there was the fact that if Grey's policy were comprehensively disavowed, he himself might resign, taking Lloyd George, Haldane and possibly Churchill with him – this would be the end of the Liberals in government, a sobering thought for the Liberal non-interventionists. No less important was the support of the parliamentary Conservatives for Grey's policy of military entente with France. One of the things that helped the foreign secretary to weather the storms of the Agadir crisis was the secret assurance of support from Arthur Balfour, leader of the Conservative Party until November 1911.
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This dependence on the parliamentary opposition would prove something of a liability in the summer of 1914, when a looming crisis over Ireland raised questions about the continuation of Conservative support.

But if the essentials of Grey's
ententiste
policy remained in place, the fact that he had to defend his position against such vociferous and influential domestic opposition nonetheless prevented him from articulating his commitments as unequivocally as he might have wished. After Agadir, Grey had to walk a tightrope between French demands that he make a clearer commitment and the insistence of the non-interventionists in cabinet (who were, after all, still in the majority) that he do no such thing. In two cabinet resolutions of November 1911, fifteen of his fellow cabinet ministers called Grey to order, demanding that he desist from sponsoring high-level military discussions between Britain and France without their prior knowledge and approval. In January 1912, there was talk among the non-interventionists led by Loreburn of agreeing a cabinet statement to the effect that Britain was ‘not under any obligation, direct or indirect, express or implied, to support France against Germany by force of arms'. Grey and his people were spared this blow only by Loreburn's illness and retirement.
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The need to balance such concerted opposition from inside his government with a policy focused on maintaining the entente as a security device produced a baffling ambiguity in British diplomatic signalling. On the one hand, British military commanders had always been accorded a certain discretion in their dealings with their French colleagues; their assurances of British military support in the event of a conflict with Germany helped to harden the French position.
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These initiatives were not sanctioned by Cabinet, let alone by the British parliament. During the Agadir crisis of 1911, the new DMO, Major General Henry Wilson, was sent to Paris for discussions with the French General Staff aimed at agreeing a schedule for an Anglo-French joint mobilization against Germany. The resulting Wilson–Dubail memorandum of 21 July 1911 (General Auguste Dubail was at that time the French General Staff chief) stipulated that by day fifteen of mobilization, six British infantry divisions, one cavalry division, and two mounted brigades (encompassing 150,000 men and 67,000 horses) would be deployed on the French left flank.
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The decision in the early months of 1912 to neutralize German naval expansion by coordinating Anglo-French naval strategy strengthened the presumption that something like a defensive alliance was coming into existence.

On the other hand, the famous Grey–Cambon letters of 22–23 November 1912, ‘extorted', as Morley later put it, from Grey by his non-interventionist opponents, made it clear that the Entente was anything but an alliance, for they asserted the freedom of both partners to act independently, even if one of the parties were to be attacked by a third power. Was there an obligation to support France, or was there not? It was all very well for Grey to declare in public that these were mere contingency plans with no binding force. In private, the foreign secretary acknowledged that he viewed the Anglo-French military conversations as ‘committing us to cooperation with France', so long as her actions were ‘non-provocative and reasonable'. When the permanent under-secretary for foreign affairs, Sir Arthur Nicolson, inisted to Grey at the beginning of August 1914 that ‘you have over and over again promised M. Cambon that if Germany was the aggressor you would stand by France', Grey merely replied: ‘Yes, but he has nothing in writing.'
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Anglo-French diplomacy thus came to be marked at the highest level – on the British side – by a kind of doublethink. It was understood that Grey must tailor his public statements and even his official communications to the expectations of the non-interventionists in cabinet and among the broader public. Yet, when Paul Cambon listened to his anti-German friends in London, or to Bertie in Paris, he heard what he wanted to hear. This was a difficult arrangement for the French to live with, to say the least. As the July Crisis of 1914 reached its climax, it would cost the decision-makers in Paris, the French ambassador in London and indeed Grey himself a few moments of high anxiety. More importantly, uncertainty about the British commitment forced French strategists to compensate in the east for their weaknesses in the west by committing ever more strongly to militarizing the alliance with Russia.
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The French government, Baron Guillaume, the Belgian minister in Paris, noted in the spring of 1913, was obliged to ‘tighten more and more its alliance with Russia, because it is aware that Britain's friendship for it is less and less solid and effective'.
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For Germany too the irresolution of British policy was a source of confusion and vexation. On the one hand, Grey was obliged to maintain the appearance of an open door to Berlin in order to placate the non-interventionists. Yet he also felt obliged from time to time to administer harsh warnings to the Germans, lest they come to the conclusion that France had been comprehensively abandoned and could be attacked without fear of a British response. The result of this system of mixed messaging, a consequence of the mutability of power relations within the European executives, was a perennial uncertainty about British intentions that would unsettle the policy-makers in Berlin throughout the July Crisis.

‘The situation [in Europe] is extraordinary,' Colonel Edward House reported to American President Woodrow Wilson after a trip to Europe in May 1914. ‘It is militarism run stark mad.'
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House's views may have been shaped in part by a personal experience: he was a ‘political colonel' of the American type. He had been appointed to that rank in the Texas militia in return for political services there. But when Colonel House visited Berlin, the Germans took him to be a military man and always sat him with the generals at dinner. His views on the prevalence of militarism may have owed something to this unfortunate misunderstanding.
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Be that as it may, there is no doubt that, viewed from across the Atlantic, pre-war Europe presented a curious spectacle. Senior statesmen, emperors and kings attended public occasions wearing military uniform; elaborate military reviews were an integral part of the public ceremonial of power; immense illuminated naval displays drew huge crowds and filled the pages of the illustrated journals; conscript armies grew in size until they became male microcosms of the nation; the cult of military display entered the public and the private life of even the smallest communities. In what ways did this ‘militarism' shape the decisions that led Europe to war in 1914? Did the roots of the July Crisis lie, as some historians have argued, in an abdication of responsibility by civilian politicians and a usurpation of political power by the generals?

There was without doubt a struggle between the soldiers and the civilians within the pre-war executives: it was a struggle for money. Defence expenditure accounted for a substantial share of government spending. Military commanders keen to improve equipment, training and infrastructure had to contend (as they do today) with civilian politicians for access to government resources. Conversely, ministers of finance and their political allies fought to impose restraint in the name of fiscal rigour or domestic consolidation. Who prevailed in these contests depended on the structure of the institutional environment and the prevailing domestic and international political constellation.

Until 1908, the chaotic structure of the Russian military command made it difficult for the generals to lobby government effectively. But the balance began to shift from 1908, when reforms to the military administration created a more concentrated executive structure, establishing the minister of war as the pre-eminent defence official with the exclusive right to report to the Tsar on military matters.
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From 1909, a rivalry of epic bitterness evolved between the new war minister Vladimir Sukhomlinov (who was still in post in July 1914) and the strong-willed conservative finance minister, Vladimir Kokovtsov. Backed by the powerful premier Pyotr Stolypin, Kokovtsov, a champion of fiscal responsibility and domestic economic development, routinely blocked or curtailed Sukhomlinov's draft budgets. Professional friction swiftly deepened into lively personal hatred.
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Sukhomlinov thought Kokovtsov ‘narrow, verbose and self-seeking'; Kokovtsov accused the minister of war (with more justice) of incompetence, irresponsibility and corruption.
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Kokovtsov's German equivalent was Adolf Wermuth, treasury minister in 1909–11, who, with the support of Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, worked hard to rebalance the Reich budget and cut public debt. Wermuth was critical of overspending under Tirpitz and often complained of the naval secretary's irresponsibility, just as Kokovtsov complained of Sukhomlinov's profligate handling of military funding.
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The treasury minister's motto was: ‘no expenditures without revenues'.
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There was also perennial tension between the chief of staff and the minister of war, since the former's demands for increased funding were often rejected or opposed by the latter.
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A recent study has even suggested that the famous memorandum of 1905 in which the chief of the General Staff Alfred von Schlieffen sketched the outlines of a massive westward offensive, was not a ‘war plan' as such but a plea for more government money – among other things, Schlieffen's sketch envisaged the deployment of eighty-one divisions, more than the German army when mobilized actually possessed at the time.
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The question of military finance was complicated in Germany by the fact that the federal constitution assigned direct taxation revenues to the member states, rather than to the Reich government. The devolved structure of the German Empire placed a fiscal limit on Reich defence expenditure that had no direct counterpart in Britain, France or Russia.
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Nevertheless, the conflict over resources was muted in Germany by the fact that military budgets were submitted to the parliament only at five-yearly intervals – a system known as the
Quinquennat
. Because senior military figures valued the
Quinquennat
as a means of protecting the army from constant parliamentary interference, they were reluctant to jeopardize it by requesting large extra-budgetary credits. This system worked as a powerful incentive for self-restraint. As the Prussian minister of war Karl von Einem observed in June 1906, the
Quinquennat
was a cumbersome arrangement, but it was useful nonetheless, because ‘the savage and persistent agitation against the existence of the army which arises with every military expansion would only become all the more dangerous if it were a yearly occurrence'.
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Even in 1911, when the
Quinquennat
came up for renewal and Chief of Staff Moltke and War Minister Heeringen joined forces in pressing for substantial growth, the opposition of Treasury Minister Wermuth and Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg ensured that the resulting increase in the strength of the peacetime army was very modest (10,000 men).
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We can discern analogous tensions in every European executive. In Britain, the Liberals campaigned (and won an absolute majority) in 1906 on the promise to cut back the vast military expenditure of the Boer War years under the slogan ‘Peace, Retrenchment and Reform'. Budgetary constraints were a significant factor in the decision to seek an understanding with France and Russia. One consequence was that, while British naval budgets continued to soar (British naval spending was three times the German figure in 1904 and still more than double in 1913), army expenditure remained static throughout the pre-war years, forcing War Minister Haldane to focus on efficiency savings and reorganization rather than expansion.
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In Austria-Hungary, the tumultuous domestic politics of dualism virtually paralysed the monarchy's military development after the turn of the century, as autonomist groups within the Hungarian parliament fought to starve the monarchy's joint army of Hungarian tax revenues and recruits. In this environment, proposals for increased military allocations were worn down in endless legislative feuding, and the Habsburg military languished in a condition, as the Austrian staff chief put it, of ‘persistent stagnation'. This was one reason why, as late as 1912, Austria-Hungary spent only 2.6 per cent of its net national product on defence – a smaller proportion than any other European power and certainly far below what its economy could afford (the figures for Russia, France and Germany in that year were 4.5, 4.0 and 3.8 per cent respectively).
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In France, the ‘Dreyfus affair' of the 1890s had destroyed the civil– military consensus of the Third Republic and placed the senior echelons of the army, viewed as a bastion of clerical and reactionary attitudes, under a cloud of public suspicion, especially in the eyes of the republican and anticlerical left. In the wake of the scandal, three successive Radical governments pursued a programme of aggressive ‘republicanizing' military reform, especially under prime ministers Émile Combes (1903–5) and Georges Clemenceau (1906–9). Government control over the army was tightened, the civilian-minded ministry of war grew stronger vis-à-vis the regular army commanders and the period of service was reduced in March 1905 – against the advice of the military experts – from three years to two with a view to transforming the politically suspect ‘praetorian guard' of the Dreyfus years into a ‘citizen army' of civilian reservists for national defence in wartime.