The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (90 page)

It was quite evident to Austria that Serbia was no longer to be restrained by what the great powers wanted. From 1913 on, Serbian irredentism or expansionism expressed in endless newspaper articles was demanding a war to gather to the Serbian motherland the six million Serbs spread throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Moreover Serbia had not only doubled in size but she had shown that her soldiers could defeat the German-trained Turkish troops, who were supposed to be the best in the Balkans. There was a real danger that in a war with the empire Serbia might win. The situation seemed so menacing that scarcely had the Balkan War peace treaties been signed than Austria–Hungary had decided that the moment had come to attack Serbia. Backed by Italy, Germany managed to restrain Austria–Hungary. The war never took place because Germany was the one ally Austria–Hungary could not move without. So, despite all the fears that Europe had about Germany, it was Germany which prevented war in 1913.

Just the same, the threat of an impending clash in the Balkans remained. Strategists in the armies of three great powers, Russia, Austria–Hungary and Germany, believed that a war for influence would come at some point. Thus when in July 1914 two Bosnian Serbs assassinated the heir to the Austro–Hungarian Empire, the archduke Ferdinand, it both seemed to be the signal that the Serbs were about to attack the empire and the perfect excuse for Austria–Hungary to fight a limited war to scotch ‘the nest of vipers’–as her generals called Serbia. This time, in 1914, Germany did little to hold her back.

It was an alarming situation and desperate remedies seemed called for. Given her paranoid fears Germany could not afford to let her only ally be broken up by Serb nationalists. Many of the top generals in both the Austro-Hungarian and the German armies viewed some kind of limited preventive war in the Balkans as a solution to their difficulties, while they had the military advantage in armaments and personnel. The general European balance would be tilted against Germany and Austria–Hungary within a few years. But, for now, the army of Serbia’s chief ally, Russia, was still in the throes of modernization. A group of General Staff officers within the German army did much to convince their government that this would be a good time for that limited war in order to assert German influence in the Balkans. The kaiser told the emperor Franz Joseph that Austria–Hungary had his support.

But the idea of a limited war was a chimera. Serbia’s ally Russia had too much at stake not to begin her laborious process of mobilization. That decision inevitably dragged France into the war. When Russia would not cancel the orders for mobilization, Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August and on France on the 2nd. War plans drawn up in 1905 took precedence over common sense: the German plan was predicated on attacking France and defeating her within six weeks, then turning east to dispose of Russia.

After the worldwide slaughter that ensued, for the war was anything but local, some members of the pre-war German government claimed they had hoped Britain would restrain Russia from mobilizing. The British ambassador had in fact pleaded with Russia not to do so. But the complex system of alliances had a series of automatic consequences. As one writer put it, ‘the guns went off by themselves’.

For Britain, declaring war was less simple. She was legally bound by treaty to defend Belgium, whose existence she had guaranteed at her birth in 1839 and reaffirmed in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War. The Anglo-French naval arrangements which had the British guarding the Channel for both countries surely made war with Germany inevitable. But, until German troops actually advanced into Belgium, Grey was doubtful that his Cabinet and British public opinion would agree to war. The most he could tell the French ambassador was that the German fleet would not be allowed into the Channel. The army and navy nevertheless sent out their secret code and signal books to the French, albeit with an embargo on their use.

The pacifist element in Cabinet remained so powerful that when Churchill, the first lord of the Admiralty, insisted on calling out the fleet reserves, eight or nine ministers said it was unnecessary. Fortunately for Britain the maverick and impulsive genius Churchill had decided earlier in the week that the international situation looked so alarming that he should quietly send the portion of the fleet not needed to guard the Channel to hide at its ‘war station’ up above Britain in the secret harbour of the Orkneys, Scapa Flow. The main fleet was thus out of the way of surprise attack by German torpedoes.

Meanwhile there was no certainty about how the Belgians would respond if asked to allow German troops to pass through their country to France. Many in the Cabinet thought Belgium might not resist. There was even a suspicion that there was a secret agreement between Belgium and Germany to allow the German armies free passage into France. Thanks to the atrocities in the Congo, Belgium’s stock was not high; a secret agreement would explain why there was such a high level of German military preparations all along the Belgo-German border. Nevertheless, after much argument, a majority of the Cabinet finally agreed that violation of Belgian neutrality would bring Britain into the war.

By evening that Sunday, 2 August, war for Britain suddenly seemed very near. It was then that a twelve-hour ultimatum was handed to the Belgian government by the Germans requesting that their armies be allowed to pass through its territories into north-eastern France. But the new Belgian king Albert I was of a very different calibre to his uncle Leopold II. On Monday, 3 August the Belgians, led by their king, refused to allow the German armies in. They would fight. King Albert sent a telegram to George V personally appealing for help.

That afternoon Grey made an eloquent speech to the House of Commons which both explained Britain’s legal obligations to Belgium and argued the case for intervention, for only Parliament could decide whether Britain went to war. He described the Channel guarantee to France, and requested all present to ask themselves what friendship or Entente meant when that friend was threatened by a foe like Germany. He did not believe that, even if Britain stood aside, she would be in a position after the war to undo what had happened in the course of it, to prevent the whole of western Europe falling under the domination of a single power. And he added, ‘I am quite sure that our moral position would be such as to have lost us all respect.’

In the House of Commons Bonar Law and the Conservatives gave their support. John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Nationalists, also pledged his MPs to Grey. Support for war became unanimous, other than among Labour MPs, many of whom remained true to their pacifist roots. Grey had not argued the case for intervention in a spirit of enthusiasm. He believed that this war could lead to the destruction of civilization. ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime,’ he said that evening as he stood by the window of the Foreign Office.

The next day the order was given to mobilize the reserves. Britain still had not declared war. A twelve-hour ultimatum was given to Germany, which had invaded Belgium that morning. If Germany did not withdraw from Belgium and respect her neutrality, she would be at war with Great Britain. On the very hot night of 4 August at 11 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time, twelve o’clock in Berlin, the British ultimatum ran out. Outside the Houses of Parliament a crowd had gathered; just before eleven it began to sing ‘God Save the King’. As Big Ben tolled, the deadline expired without a single German soldier moving out of Belgium. Soon afterwards and all through the night, messages flashed halfway across the world in code telling the British Empire that it was at war with Germany.

As day broke on 5 August, thanks to Haldane the six divisions of the British Expeditionary Force under its commander-in-chief John French were ready to land in France. Fourteen territorial divisions were deputed to guard the British Isles. The immediate problem, however, was to get the six regular divisions across the Channel. This took from 9 to 22 August. For three days, when the crossing was at its height, the fleet stood guard. The operation was extremely tense, owing to fears that the troopships would be torpedoed by the Germans, but nothing happened. The Grand Fleet sailed back unscathed to its hideaway position above Britain at Scapa Flow. By the 24th British troops were in the middle of France and had begun fighting the Germans.

Lord Kitchener, the new secretary of state for war, warned against optimism. Unlike other British generals, he said that the struggle would not be over in a few weeks but might take several years. In his view the war could be won only by battles fought on land, not by seapower. A huge recruiting drive would be immediately necessary to supplement the army by half a million male volunteers. It was a mark of Liberal Britain that even in these desperate times it was believed the population would not stand for conscription.

At the outbreak of the First World War Britain faced major problems. Unlike those of the central powers, as Austria–Hungary and Germany became known, her economy was not geared for war. For this was a war that she had been conspicuously reluctant to wage and had done almost everything to avoid. Even if she recruited enough men for ‘Kitchener’s Army’ she did not have enough guns, nor enough factories to produce guns, nor enough shells to arm them.

Today we can see that commercial and colonial rivalries created impossible stresses between the great powers and were among the most important underlying causes of the First World War. On the other hand, to those alive at the time the most striking feature about the pre-war world was the sense of menace which emanated from united Germany and her militaristic culture. Even though Austria had begun the war, Germany was assumed to be responsible. The consensus in most British households was that Germany had been wanting a war, and with the First World War she got it.

The First World War (1914–1918)

The British professional army, the highly trained 150,000-strong British Expeditionary Force (BEF), went straight to France, but the immense portion of the earth covered by the British Empire meant that British military operations took place all over the globe. Two million soldiers from the empire were occupied in what were called sideshows separate from the main action–British armies fought to take over the German colonies in Africa, and troops were poured into the Middle Eastern section of the Ottoman Empire, to protect the Suez Canal and India after Turkey had declared war on the side of the central powers in October 1914.

When the war finally ended, after four years of immense suffering, France and Britain divided between them much of the old Ottoman Empire which their armies were occupying. The British Empire was larger than ever, for Britain added Mesopotamia, renamed Iraq in 1921, and Palestine to her realms in an unofficial form of imperialism, what one historian has called the ‘scramble for Turkey’. Britain for thirty years became an influential power in the Middle East. But it was an illusion. The expense of the First World War ruined British global hegemony, along with that of France, and made way for America’s emergence as a superpower. The post-war settlement was really France’s and Britain’s last hurrah as the great imperial powers they had been for the previous 200 years. Despite Britain’s celebrated naval superiority, which cast a cordon round Germany and began to starve her to death, despite the courage of the immense French armies, what finally tipped the balance and won the First World War was not those nations, but the industrial might and money of America.

The first few months of the First World War determined the shape of what became known as the western front, the location of a three-and-a-half-year campaign by British, French and British Empire troops to keep the Germans from overrunning France. As we have seen, the German military strategy, the Schlieffen Plan, was predicated on France being conquered in six weeks, before the old-fashioned Russian war machine had been completely mobilized. However, the plan, which was intended to prevent the German armies fighting a war on two fronts, was not fulfilled.

In August 1914 the immense fortresses guarding Belgium’s frontier had been as much use as toy forts in stopping the German war machine. Over a million German soldiers swept through Belgium and swarmed over north-eastern France. But their progress was considerably held up at the Battle of Mons on 23 August by the BEF, which the Kaiser had called a ‘contemptible little army’. And though by early September, to the horror of the inhabitants of Paris (many of whom remembered the 1870–1 Siege of Paris), the German armies were within forty miles of the French capital, the war in France was not the lightning strike and rolling up of the French and British armies that the Schlieffen Plan envisaged. The British and French troops were far more of a match than had been anticipated by the Germans. Moreover the number of German soldiers in France had been weakened by the need to send troops to what became known as the eastern front to deal with the Russians.

The Russians had invaded East Prussia before they were quite ready to do so as a diversionary tactic to help France. As a result, at one of the decisive battles of the war, the Battle of the Marne between 6 and 12 September 1914, the German armies’ encircling manoeuvre to pen in the French army was defeated. When the German troops were attacked in the rear by the French chief of staff General Joffre with the BEF, the roll-up of the French armies around Paris had to be abandoned because General von Kluck was forced to retreat. The victory of the Marne wrecked the Schlieffen Plan right at the outset. Until 1917, when the Russian Revolution broke out and Lenin’s new government sued for peace, Germany had to fight on two fronts, which was what she had been determined to avoid. She was never able to turn her back on France and concentrate on Russia.

Furthermore, a key ingredient of the original Schlieffen Plan had been abandoned–striking at France through Holland as well as through Belgium–which shortened the defensive line. An attack through Holland would probably have outflanked Belgian resistance and so have prevented the British from establishing defensive positions from Ypres to the coast, which secured the Channel ports for them. As it was, the German armies were pushed back to the Aisne river, and had to race the allied armies to the North Sea. Had the Germans arrived first this could have had a doubly disastrous effect: the British would have had to take some of their troops out of France to provide a Home Guard, and it would have prevented their landing further British troops in France to reinforce the allied armies. The first Battle of Ypres in Flanders, Belgium from 19 October to 11 November 1914 prevented this, at the cost of literally decimating, that is killing one in ten soldiers of the BEF, the young men so carefully groomed for warfare for the previous seven years.