The Sleepwalkers (91 page)

Even after the arrival of the later telegram, Moltke continued to argue that the mobilization plan could not at this late stage be altered to exclude France, but Wilhelm refused to listen: ‘Your illustrious uncle would not have given me such an answer. If I order it, it must be possible.'
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Wilhelm ordered that champagne be brought in, while Moltke stomped off in a huff, telling his wife that he was perfectly prepared to fight with the enemy, but not with ‘a Kaiser like this one'. The stress of this encounter was such, Moltke's wife believed, that it caused the chief of the General Staff to suffer a mild stroke.
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As the champagne corks flew from their bottles, Bethmann and Jagow were still drafting their reply to the first cable from London. Germany would accept the proposal, they wrote, ‘if England could guarantee with its entire armed strength the unconditional neutrality of France in a German-Russian conflict'. The mobilization would continue, but no German troops would cross the French border until 7 a.m. on 3 August, pending a finalization of the agreement. The Kaiser reinforced the message in a telegram of his own to King George V, in which he warmly accepted the offer of ‘French neutrality under guaranteey of Great Britain', and expressed the hope that France would not become ‘nervous'. ‘The troops on my frontier are in the act of being stopped by telegraph and telephone from crossing into France.'
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Jagow, too, sent a telegram asking Lichnowsky to thank Grey for his initiative.
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Shortly afterwards, a new dispatch arrived from Lichnowsky. The eagerly awaited 3.30 p.m. appointment with Grey had in the meanwhile taken place but, to the German ambassador's surprise, Grey had not offered a proposal for British or French neutrality, nor did it seem that he had raised the matter with his colleagues in cabinet. Instead, he merely hinted at the possibility that the German and French armies might ‘in the event of a Russian war, remain facing each other without either side attacking', and then focused on those German actions that might trigger a British intervention. In particular, Grey warned, ‘it would be very difficult to restrain English feeling on any violation of Belgian neutrality by either [France or Germany].' Lichnowsky responded with a question that turned the tables on the foreign secretary: would Grey be prepared to give him an assurance of Britain's neutrality if Germany agreed not to violate Belgian territory? Oddly enough, this overture caught Grey off-guard – he was obliged to state that he could not give any such assurance, since England must keep its hands free. In other words, Grey appeared to be backing away from his earlier proposal. At the same time he revealed – perhaps inadvertently – that he had made his proposal without consulting the French beforehand. In his account of this somewhat inconclusive conversation, Lichnowsky reported simply that the British did not appear prepared to make any engagement that would limit their freedom of action, but that Grey had agreed to enquire into the possibility of a Franco-German armed stand-off.
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In Berlin, this dispatch, which arrived early in the evening, gave rise to general confusion and no reply was sent.

In the meanwhile, however, the Kaiser's telegram to King George V warmly accepting his government's proposal of French neutrality had reached its destination, causing consternation in London. No one, it seems, had been initiated into the twists and turns of Grey's operations that day and the foreign secretary was summoned urgently to Buckingham Palace to provide an explanation and draft a reply. At around 9 p.m., he pencilled the text that became George V's answer to Kaiser Wilhelm's telegram:

There must be some misunderstanding as to a suggestion that passed in friendly conversation between Prince Lichnowsky and Sir Edward Grey this afternoon when they were discussing how actual fighting between German and French armies might be avoided while there is still chance of some agreement between Austria and Russia. Sir Edward Grey will arrange to see Prince Lichnowsky early tomorrow to ascertain whether there is a misunderstanding on his part.
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Any remaining ambiguity was dispelled by a further telegram from Prince Lichnowsky, who had received Jagow's ‘acceptance' of the British ‘proposal' at around the same time as King George had received the exuberant telegram from his cousin. With deadpan clarity, Lichnowsky wrote: ‘Since there is no British proposal at all, your telegram inoperative. Therefore have taken no further steps.'
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By this time it was past 11 p.m. in Berlin. Relief was in sight for Moltke, who was at General Staff headquarters, weeping tears of despair over the Kaiser's order halting the 16th Division. Shortly before midnight, Moltke was ordered back to the palace to hear news of the latest dispatch. On his arrival, Wilhelm showed the staff chief a further telegram he had received outlining the (corrected) British position and said: ‘Now you can do what you want.'
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What was Grey up to? His communications with Lichnowsky, Cambon and various British colleagues during 1 August are so difficult to unravel that the effort to make sense of them has produced a sub-debate within the war-origins literature. On 29 July, Grey had warned Lichnowsky that Britain might be obliged to take swift action if Germany and France were drawn into the war – this was the warning that elicited the Kaiser's angry jottings about ‘scoundrels' and ‘mean shopkeepers'.
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Yet on 31 July he had also warned his ambassador in Paris, Bertie, that the British public could not be expected to support British intervention in a quarrel that was so remote from the country's own interests.
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Perhaps Grey really did hold up the prospect of British neutrality to Lichnowsky – that would mean that there was in fact no misunderstanding by Lichnowsky of his fundamental intentions.
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By this reading, the ‘misunderstanding' becomes Grey's way of wriggling out of the mess he had got himself into. Or perhaps he was trying to accommodate his uncertainty about whether the British cabinet would back his policy of support for France. If they did not, then the proposal of neutrality would at least offer Britain a lever by which to secure various German assurances (a promise to abstain from a pre-emptive attack on France, for example).
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Or maybe Grey was not interested in neutrality at all, but briefly came under pressure from his liberal imperialist ally, Lord Chancellor Haldane, to find a way of preventing or delaying the commencement of hostilities between France and Germany so that there would be time better to prepare and train the British Expeditionary Force. Anxiety about the increasing fragility of the international financial markets in the last week of July may also have given him pause.
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Whichever view we take – and the disagreement among historians is itself telling – it is clear that Grey's ambiguities were on the verge of becoming open contradictions. To propose British neutrality, even in the face of a continental war involving France, would have amounted to a crass reversal of the positions the foreign secretary had earlier adopted – so much so, indeed, that it is hard to believe that this was truly his intention. On the other hand, the proposal that France and Germany should maintain an armed stand-off is unambiguously instantiated in the documents. In a telegram dispatched to Bertie at 5.25 p.m. on 1 August, Grey himself reported that he had put it to the German ambassador that ‘after mobilisation on the western frontier French and German armies should remain, neither crossing the border so long as the other did not do so. I cannot say whether this would be consistent with French obligations under her alliance.'
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But even this suggestion was bizarre, since it was based on the supposition that France might be willing to abandon the Russian alliance Poincaré and his colleagues had worked so hard in recent years to reinforce. It suggests at best a very weak grip on the realities of the wider political and military situation. In any case, Grey was soon called to order by Bertie, who vented his frustration with the foreign secretary's speculations in a remarkably impertinent reply:

I cannot imagine that in the event of Russia being at war with Austria and being attacked by Germany it would be consistent with French obligations towards Russia to remain quiescent. If France undertook to remain so, the Germans would first attack Russians and, if they defeated them, would then turn round on the French. Am I to enquire precisely what are the obligations of the French under Franco-Russian alliance?
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As we know, nothing came of this curious policy option; Grey himself discarded it even before Bertie's acidic note reached the foreign secretary's desk. One thing we do know for sure: during these days, Grey was operating under extreme pressure. He was getting very little sleep. He had no way of knowing whether or when the cabinet would support his pro-intervention policy, and he was being pressed in different directions by various colleagues, including the anti-interventionists of his own government (who still controlled a majority in cabinet) and the pro-interventionists of the Conservative opposition.

One additional source of pressure that may help to explain the prevarications of 1 August was the Russian mobilization order of 30 July. Late in the night of the 31st the German embassy informed London that in response to the Russian order, Berlin had declared the State of Imminent Danger of War, and announced that if Russia did not immediately rescind its order of general mobilization, Germany would be obliged to mobilize its own forces, which in turn would ‘mean war'.
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This news sounded alarm bells in London. At 1.30 in the morning, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and Grey's private secretary Sir William Tyrrell rushed to Buckingham Palace in a taxi to have the king woken so that he could send a telegram appealing to the Tsar to halt the Russian mobilization. Asquith later described the scene:

The poor king was hauled from his bed and one of my strangest experiences (& as you know I have had a good lot) was sitting with him – he in a brown dressing gown over his night shirt & with copious signs of having been wakened from his ‘beauty sleep' – while I read the message & the proposed answer. All he did was suggest that it should be made more personal and direct – by the insertion of the words ‘My dear Nicky' – and the addition at the end of the signature ‘Georgie'!
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The diplomatic activity intensified from dawn that morning.

We might consider the impact of the news from St Petersburg in the light of what we know of the ambivalence of Foreign Office thinking on Russia during the last months before the July Crisis broke. As we have seen, Grey and Tyrrell had been rethinking the relationship with Russia for some time. In the light of continuing Russian pressure on Persia and other peripheral imperial territories, there had been talk of abandoning the Anglo-Russian Convention in favour of a more open-ended policy that would not necessarily exclude a rapprochement of some kind with Germany. This never became Foreign Office policy, but the news that Russian mobilization had just triggered German counter-measures at least temporarily foregrounded the Russian aspect of the growing crisis. British policy-makers had no particular interest in or sympathy for Serbia. This was a war from the east, sparked by concerns remote from the official mind of Whitehall. Did this prompt in Grey misgivings about the Balkan inception scenario?

On the morning of 29 July, Grey reminded Cambon (much to the latter's horror) that France was allowing herself to be ‘drawn into a quarrel which [is] not hers, but in which, owing to her alliance, her honour and interest obliged her to engage'; Britain, by contrast, was ‘free of engagements and would have to decide what British interests required the government to do'. ‘Our idea,' Grey added, ‘had always been to avoid being drawn into war over a Balkan question.'
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Two days later, following the news of the declaration of SIDW in Berlin, he retraced the same argument, insisting, contrary to Cambon's claims, that there was no comparison between the current crisis and Agadir in 1911, when Britain had come to the support of France, because ‘in this case France is being drawn into a quarrel which is not hers'.
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When Cambon expressed great disappointment at this reply, and asked whether Britain would be ready to help France if Germany made an attack on her, Grey made his case even more pointedly: ‘The latest news was that Russia had ordered a complete mobilisation of her fleet and army. This, it seemed to me, would precipitate a crisis, and would make it appear that German mobilisation was being forced by Russia.'
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Only in the light of this perspective on events could it seem to make sense to propose a stand-off between Germany and France, while Russia, abandoned by her ally, faced Germany and Austria alone in the east. ‘If France could not take advantage of this [offer]' Grey told Cambon on the afternoon of 1 August, ‘it was because she was bound by an alliance to which we were not parties, and
of which we did not know the terms
.'
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When he wrote these words, Grey was doing more than merely cooling the temperature by withholding his support or buying time for military preparations; he was struggling with the automatism of a specific understanding of the Triple Entente – an understanding he had himself at various moments shared and articulated. It clearly unnerved him, at least at this juncture, that a remote quarrel in south-eastern Europe could be accepted as the trigger for a continental war, even though none of the three Entente powers was under direct attack or threat of attack. Grey ultimately remained true to the Ententiste line he had pursued since 1912, but these moments of circumspection remind us of a complicating feature of the July Crisis, namely that the bitter choices between opposed options divided not only parties and cabinets, but also the minds of key decision-makers.