Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (39 page)

It was the Cabinet, not Grey, which would make the final decision; and the government as a whole was, in Grey’s words, ‘quite free’.
¹⁵⁷
As far as the Lord Chancellor Loreburn was concerned, intervention in ‘a purely French quarrel’ was therefore inconceivable, because it could only be done with ‘a majority largely composed of Conservatives and with a very large number of the Ministerial side against you.... This would mean that the present Government could not carry on.‘
¹⁵⁸
In November 1911, Grey was comprehensively outvoted in the Cabinet (by fifteen to five) over two resolutions expressly repudiating any military commitment to France.
¹⁵⁹
The issue came up again in November 1912, when the Radicals in the Cabinet, backed up by the navalists Hankey and Esher, succeeded in forcing Grey to deny in the House of Commons that any secret and binding military commitment to France had been given. Haldane felt that he had emerged from the decisive Cabinet session ‘unhampered in any material point‘, but that was not the way Asquith summarised the Cabinet’s conclusion to the King: ‘No communications should take place between the General Staff and the Staffs of other countries which can, directly or indirectly, commit this country to military or naval intervention.... Such communications, if they related to concerted action by land or sea, should not be entered into without the previous approval of the Cabinet.‘
¹⁶⁰
Small wonder the French military attaché in Berlin concluded that, in a war with Germany, ‘England will be but of very little assistance to us’. Crowe continued to press ‘to render our general understanding with France both wider and more definite’, but the opponents of alliance were in the ascendant.
¹⁶¹
Nothing illustrates this more clearly than Churchill’s notes of 1912 on the naval division of responsibility which concentrated the French navy in the Mediterranean and the British fleet in home waters. These dispositions, Churchill stated, had been ‘made independently because they are the best which the separate interests of each country suggests [sic].... They do not arise from any naval agreement or convention. ...
Nothing in the naval or military arrangements ought to have the effect of exposing us ... if, when the time comes, we decide to stand out
.’
¹⁶²

With Harcourt and Esher publicly and privately hammering home the point, Grey had no option but to tell Cambon that there was no ‘engagement that commits either Government ... to cooperate in war’.
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The Anglo-Russian naval talks implied still less of a commitment. Indeed, there was growing unease in London about the Russian appetite for unreciprocated concessions in the Near East.
¹⁶⁴
As Grey told Cambon in May 1914, ‘We could not enter into any military engagement, even of the most hypothetical kind, with Russia.’ On 11 June 1914 - just days before the Sarajevo assassination - he had to repeat his assurance to the Commons that ‘if war arose between the European Powers, there were no unpublished agreements which would restrict or hamper the freedom of the Government or ... Parliament to decide whether or not Great Britain should participate in a war’.
¹⁶⁵

Thus the sole plausible justification for Grey’s strategy - that it would deter a German attack on France - fell away. ‘An Entente between Russia, France and ourselves would be absolutely secure,’ he had said shortly after becoming Foreign Secretary. ‘If it is necessary to check Germany it could be done.’
¹⁶⁶
That had been the basis for his, Haldane’s and even the King’s statements to various German representatives in 1912 that Britain could ‘under no circumstance tolerate France being crushed’.
¹⁶⁷
These statements have often been seen by historians as categorical commitments which the Germans ignored at their peril. But the truth, as the German government could hardly fail to realise, was that the Entente was not as ‘absolutely secure’ as Grey had intended. Indeed, he had been forced by his Cabinet colleagues to disavow publicly the idea of a defensive alliance with France and Russia. All that remained to console the French in the event of a German attack was Grey’s
private
undertaking as a Wykehamist, a Balliol man and a gentleman. But that would mean British intervention only if Grey could convert the majority of the Cabinet to his standpoint, something he had wholly failed to do in 1911. If he could not, he and possibly the whole Government would resign - hardly a cause for German trepidation. Is it therefore so surprising that Bethmann Hollweg was willing to take his gamble? If the
Manchester Guardian
could confidently state - as it did in July 1914 - that there was ‘no danger of [Britain] being dragged into the conflict [between Austria and Serbia] by treaties of alliance’; if Asquith himself could see ‘no reason why we should be more than spectators’ as late as 24 July - why should Bethmann Hollweg have thought otherwise?
¹⁶⁸
On balance, the uncertainty about Britain’s position probably made a continental war more rather than less likely, by encouraging the Germans to consider a pre-emptive strike.
¹⁶⁹
But it certainly did not make
British
intervention in such a war inevitable - quite the reverse, as the events of July 1914 were to show.

When, in the wake of the Sarajevo assassination, it became clear in London that the Austrian government intended demanding ‘some compensation in the sense of some humiliation for Serbia’, Grey’s first reaction was to worry about how Russia might react. Seeing the possibility of a confrontation between Austria and Russia, he sought to exert indirect pressure via Berlin to temper any Austrian reprisals, hoping to repeat the success of his Balkan diplomacy of the previous year.
¹⁷⁰
At first, Grey urged Austria and Russia to ‘discuss things together’ in the hope that terms could be devised for the Serbs which both sides would find acceptable, but this was dismissed by the French President Poincaré, who happened to be in St Petersburg. Doubting his ability to exercise a moderating influence over Russia, and suspecting that the German government might actually be ‘egging on’ the Austrians, Grey changed tack, warning the German ambassador Lichnowsky that Russia would stand by Serbia, prophesying a second 1848 revolution in the event of a continental war and suggesting mediation between Austria and Russia by the four other powers (Britain, Germany, France and Italy).
¹⁷¹

From the outset, Grey was extremely reluctant to give any indication of how Britain might respond to an escalation of the conflict. He knew that if Austria pressed extreme demands on Belgrade with German backing, and Russia mobilised in defence of Serbia, then France might well become involved - such was the nature of the Franco-Russian entente and German military strategy. The whole strategy of the ententes with France and Russia had been to deter such a Franco-German war. However, Grey also feared that too strong a signal of support for France and Russia - such as Crowe and Nicolson predictably urged - might encourage the Russians to risk war. He found himself in a cleft stick: how to deter the Dual Alliance without encouraging the Dual Entente.
¹⁷²
The impression he gave, unfortunately, was exactly the opposite of what he hoped to achieve: by Sunday 26 July, the French thought they could count on Britain, while the Germans felt ‘sure’ of English neutrality. As Jagow put it to Cambon: ‘You have your information. We have ours’; unfortunately, the source was identical in each case.
¹⁷³
The German government continued undeterred, feigning interest in Grey’s proposals for mediation, which it had no intention of pursuing.
¹⁷⁴

To be fair to Grey, his tactic of studied ambiguity very nearly paid off. So exposed did the Serbian government feel itself to be that - despite Grey’s dismay at its ‘formidable’ terms - it all but accepted the Austrian ultimatum, seeking only the most limited modifications to it.
¹⁷⁵
Moreover, to the dismay of both Bethmann Hollweg and Moltke, who had been urging the Austrians not to take Grey’s mediation proposal seriously, the Kaiser hailed the Serbian reply as a diplomatic triumph, urging Vienna simply to ’Halt in Belgrade’ - that is, to occupy the Serbian capital temporarily (much as Prussia had occupied Paris in 1870) to ensure the implementation of the Austrian demands. This compounded the confusion which Jagow had created by stating that Germany would
not
act if Russia mobilised only in the south (that is, against Austria but not Germany).
¹⁷⁶
At the same time, the Russian Foreign Minister Sazonov unexpectedly changed his mind about the possibility of bilateral talks between Austria and Russia, an idea Grey immediately returned to when it became clear that the German government did not really favour his scheme for a four-power conference.
¹⁷⁷
For a moment, it seemed that the continental war might be averted. Unfortunately for Grey, however, there was already an unbridgeable gulf between Berlin and St Petersburg. On the one hand, Sazonov had no intention of accepting the occupation of Belgrade by Austria, which would have represented in his eyes a serious reverse for Russian influence in the Balkans.
¹⁷⁸
On the other, Bethmann Hollweg had no intention of treating the terms of the Austrian ultimatum as in any way negotiable.
¹⁷⁹

At this stage, military logic began to supersede diplomatic calculation. Even before the Austrian bombardment of Belgrade began, Sazonov and his military colleagues issued orders for partial mobilisation, which they then desperately tried to turn into full mobilisation on being warned that Germany in fact intended to mobilise even in the case of partial Russian mobilisation.
¹⁸⁰
This was precisely the pretext the Germans wanted to launch their own mobilisation against not only Russia but also France.
¹⁸¹
The idea of Austro-Russian talks was forgotten in a bizarre ‘reverse race’, in which, for the sake of domestic opinion, Germany tried to get Russia to mobilise first and vice versa. Continental war was now surely unavoidable. Even when Bethmann Hollweg, grasping at last that Britain might intervene immediately in response to an attack on France, sought to force the Austrians to the negotiating table, they refused to suspend their military operations.
¹⁸²
Royal appeals from London to St Petersburg to halt mobilisation were equally futile, as the Chief of the Russian General Staff Yanushkevich had (in his own words) ‘smashed his telephone’ in order to prevent a second cancellation by the Tsar.
¹⁸³
And, if Russia continued to mobilise, the Germans insisted they had no option but to do the same. That meant the invasion of Belgium and France.
¹⁸⁴
In short, what Taylor called ‘war by timetable’ had become unavoidable the moment Russia decided on even partial mobilisation - that is, war by timetable between the continental powers. What still nevertheless remained avoidable - contrary to the memoir literature and so much determinist historiography - was Britain’s involvement.

Not surprisingly, it was at this point that the French and Russian governments began seriously pressing Grey to make Britain’s position clear.
¹⁸⁵
The French argued that if Grey were to ‘announce that in the event of a conflict between Germany and France ... England would come to the aid of France, there would be no war’.
¹⁸⁶
But Grey, who had been trying for some days to intimate this to Lichnowsky, knew that he alone could not make such a commitment to France. True, he already had the hawks at the Foreign Office behind him arguing that a ‘moral bond’ had been ‘forged’ by the Entente, the repudiation of which would ‘expose our good name to grave criticism’.
¹⁸⁷
But, as had been made perfectly clear in 1912, he could not act without the support of his Cabinet colleagues and his party - to say nothing of that nebulous and frequently invoked entity ‘public opinion’. And it was far from clear that he could rely on any of these to back a public military commitment to France. As we have seen, there was a substantial body of Liberal politicians and journalists who strongly opposed such a commitment.
¹⁸⁸
Their arguments were now underlined by the acute financial crisis which the threat of war had unleashed in the City of London.
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On 30 July, twenty-two Liberal members of the backbench Foreign Affairs Committee intimated through Arthur Ponsonby that ‘any decision in favour of participation in a European war would meet not only with the strongest disapproval but with the actual withdrawal of support from the Government’.
¹⁹⁰
The Cabinet too proved as divided as it had been in 1912, and, as then, the proponents of a declaration in support of France were in the minority. It was therefore decided simply to decide nothing, ‘for (as the President of the Local Government Board Herbert Samuel put it) if both sides do not know what we shall do, both will be the less willing to run risks’.
¹⁹¹

The most Grey could do was once again to tell Lichnowsky
privately -
‘to spare himself later the reproach of bad faith’ - that ’if [Germany] and France should be involved, then ... the British government would ... find itself forced to make up its mind quickly. In that event, it would not be practicable to stand aside and wait for any length of time.’
¹⁹²
That this impressed Bethmann Hollweg where Grey’s previous statements had not can be explained by the fact that, for the first time, Grey implied that any British action in defence of France would be swift.
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An equally deep impression was made in London by Bethmann Hollweg’s bid for British neutrality - which he made just before he heard Grey’s warning to Lichnowsky - principally because it made Germany’s intention to attack France so blatantly obvious.
¹⁹⁴
But, although it was sharply rebuffed, even this did not prompt a commitment to intervene, and Churchill’s limited naval preparations of 30 July certainly did not have the same significance as the continental armies’ mobilisation orders.
¹⁹⁵
On the contrary: having issued his private warning, Grey took a markedly
softer
official line with Germany, in a last bid to revive the idea of four-power mediation.
¹⁹⁶
Indeed, on the morning of 31 July Grey went so far as to say to Lichnowsky: