A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (26 page)

This kind of thinking was conspicuous at the headquarters of the British army, especially among those Unionist officers who thought (rightly, as it turned out) that British involvement in a European war would mean the death of the Home Rule bill. For years before 1914 British general staff planners had been meeting secretly with their French counterparts to plan a joint war against Germany. (Asquith, it might be noted, got little thanks for allowing these talks.) The chief military liaison to Paris, General Sir Henry Wilson, was an almost violently passionate Unionist. He was heard to say that his loyalty to Ulster transcended his loyalty to Britain. His contempt for Asquith, whom he called “Squiff” in his diary, and for Asquith’s “filthy cabinet,” was only a somewhat extreme example of the prevailing army attitude.

Wilson’s talks with the French led gradually to the development of detailed plans for the movement of a British Expeditionary Force to France in the event of war. Only the “imperialist” minority in the Asquith cabinet was allowed to know the details of this planning, however. When other members asked for information, Grey would assure them that they need not be concerned, that nothing had been done to commit Britain. The skeptical majority was not reassured when, early in the summer, it was revealed (in German newspapers) that British military and naval authorities were now also engaged in secret talks with Russia. Grey publicly denied that any such talks had taken place, but he was lying. Here as in the July crisis that followed the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, his position was excruciatingly difficult. He had agreed to talks with the Russians only out of fear that without evidence of British interest—of possible British support in case of war—the Russians might abandon their Entente with France. Some influential Russians thought it absurd that the Romanov regime should be allied with republican France. Nor, such men thought, did it make sense for Russia to be allied with Britain, which to protect its overseas interests had consistently blocked Russian expansion to the south. More than a few British, by the same token, were scornful of a possible alliance with the autocratic, repressive court of St. Petersburg. An agreement worked out with Russia in 1907 was basically, as London saw it, a way of relieving pressure on an empire that had grown too big for even the Royal Navy to defend. It was a quid pro quo affair: a willingness to be friendly toward Russia on the continent of Europe in return for Russia’s willingness not to threaten India, Britain’s portion of Persia (Iran to us), or Afghanistan.

Only gradually was the attention of Asquith’s government drawn from the Irish problem to the worsening crisis in Europe. The cabinet was divided, with a solid majority opposed to involvement in a war that now seemed increasingly likely. The men who made up this majority had varied motives. Some believed that Britain should be allied with Germany, not France or Russia, and that the anti-German bias of the imperialists was irrational and sure to lead to trouble. Some warned that, instead of ensuring a balance of power, the defeat of Germany would make tsarist Russia dominant in Europe—an unappealing prospect to say the least. Some were simply convinced that there was no justification for going to war, that saving France was not Britain’s business, and that the human and material costs would far outweigh any possible gain.

A cabinet meeting on Saturday, July 25, showed plainly that the antiwar majority would resign rather than approve any declaration of war. Such resignations would mean the end of the Asquith government, its near-certain replacement by a Conservative government under the dour Unionist Andrew Bonar Law, and the undoing of everything the Liberals had achieved or expected to achieve in Ireland and at home. It would also mean war, because the Conservatives wanted war, and not incidentally it would mean the loss of every cabinet member’s job. Not even the most vociferous members of the majority were eager to bring the government down.

It would be unfair to say that the cabinet’s imperialist minority actively wanted war. Such an accusation might have some plausibility if directed at the flamboyantly adventurous young Winston Churchill, who as First Lord of the Admiralty had responsibility for the Royal Navy and admitted to being thrilled by the prospect of a fight. Asquith and Grey were more sober in their views. Both agreed that war, if it came, was likely to be a disaster for winners and losers alike, though they remained convinced that allowing Germany to crush France would be an even more terrible disaster. Russia mattered only as one of the means by which France could be saved. If a successful war increased Russia’s size and power, that would be regrettable.

The problem of finding a way through all these complexities fell most heavily on the thin shoulders of Sir Edward Grey, and it presented him with two distinct dilemmas. The first was an immediate one: he had to try to use the influence of the British Empire to avert war while not saying or doing more than the cabinet’s majority would tolerate and thereby triggering resignations. In this he failed, though his failure was not his fault. The divisions of the cabinet made it impossible for him to intervene in ways that might have made a difference. Grey’s other dilemma had to do with persuading both the cabinet and the House of Commons—it too was mainly against war as August came to an end—to agree to intervention
if
the continental powers went to war. In this he was ultimately successful, but his success like his failure rose out of factors beyond his control. It was made possible by an issue that emerged abruptly, as if out of nowhere (actually it was Kaiser Wilhelm who brought it to light), and ultimately swept the opposition aside.

British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey
“The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

Grey, fifty-two years old in 1914, was the very model of what an Englishman was supposed to be at the zenith of the British Empire. Quiet and refined, intelligent and aristocratic and splendidly well educated, he had the requisite country estate to which he loved to retreat on weekends. He also had the requisite firm belief that Britain was at least one large notch above the Europeans in the realm of morals and ethics, and that in serving the interests of the empire he was serving civilization. He was a lonely man—his wife had been killed when her pony cart overturned on a country lane in 1906, three years before he took charge of the foreign office—whose life was dominated by work. Work was becoming difficult for him because his eyesight was failing.

Prime Minister Asquith was more than content to leave the hard work of diplomacy in Grey’s hands. A cautious, cunning lawyer of middle-class origins, Asquith was sixty-one in 1914. He had been in Parliament for three decades and had survived at the head of the Liberal government through six eventful years. Though he was not without principles, he appears to have been dedicated above all other things to staying in power without exerting himself overmuch—without having to give up the pleasures of society, his nightly game of bridge, or the pursuit of desirable women. Staying in power meant holding together his increasingly fragile Liberal majority, a combustible coalition that ranged from the Irish nationalists to the fiery Welsh reformer David Lloyd George, from near-pacifists to the bellicose Churchill. Accomplishing this in July 1914 required skills of the highest order.

From Saturday July 25 on, the cabinet met almost daily, and it remained clear that any attempt to bring a majority around to the support of France could lead to nothing but the end of the government. Asquith and Grey could do little more than hang on and wait. By Monday it was obvious that Grey’s proposal for referring the Austro-Serbian dispute to a conference of Britain, France, Germany, and Italy was not going to work. The proposal itself had been naïve, doomed by the fact that the London Conference of 1913 had settled the Second Balkan War in a way that Austria-Hungary and Germany found thoroughly unsatisfactory. By using the London Conference to their own advantage, the other powers had destroyed the potential of conferences generally.

On Wednesday members of the cabinet’s majority suggested a resolution by which Britain would declare itself to be unconditionally neutral in case of war. Grey told his fellow ministers that he was not the man to implement such a resolution, and that if it were approved he would resign. When Asquith supported him, the majority drew back. Everything remained unresolved. The pressure on the government—on Grey in particular—was intense and coming from many directions. General Wilson, the Asquith-hating director of military operations, was demanding that the army be mobilized. The French were doing everything possible to persuade the British to support them, while German ambassador Lichnowsky was virtually begging Grey to remain neutral and trying to persuade him that Germany neither wanted war nor had hostile intentions where British interests were concerned. The position that Grey and Asquith had taken with the cabinet might have had a powerful impact if the Germans had learned of it, but it remained secret.

General Wilson began insisting with almost hysterical fervor that the government had a moral obligation to stand with France—that the years of military consultation justified the French in expecting nothing less. He pointed out that France had demonstrated its trust in Britain by agreeing to move its navy to the Mediterranean, leaving the defense of northern waters to the Royal Navy. The antiwar ministers, annoyed, replied that over the years they had repeatedly expressed concern that joint military planning would draw Britain into commitments to France, and that they had been assured that such concerns were unfounded.

Thursday was the day when Tsar Nicholas consented to mobilization. Grey, to his credit, had been urging the Russians to delay, but he and his ambassador in St. Petersburg had less influence there than France’s Ambassador Paléologue, who from the start had been urging action. This was also the day when French President Poincaré sent word to Grey that he believed Britain could stop the slide to war if it warned Berlin that it was prepared to support France. Grey, clinging to his pose of impartiality, responded in almost the feeblest way imaginable, saying only that he doubted Britain’s ability to make that big a difference. Privately, he now took a step for which he did not have cabinet approval. He told Lichnowsky, whom he knew to regard the prospect of a war between their two countries with horror, that in his opinion a German war with France would mean war with Britain as well.

By Friday, with everyone’s options narrowing and the cabinet’s majority still against war, Grey pressed upon Lichnowsky his Stop-in-Belgrade idea. When Vienna rejected the proposal despite Kaiser Wilhelm’s endorsement, that option too was at an end. It was then that the kaiser, desperate for a way out, instructed Lichnowsky to promise Grey that if Britain would remain neutral, Germany would pledge itself to restore the borders of France and Belgium if war came and Germany won.

Belgium: Germany’s raising of this subject introduced an explosive new element into the drama. Even the antiwar ministers saw immediately that this was a momentous question. The cabinet authorized Grey to ask France and Germany for an explicit guarantee of Belgium’s neutrality and autonomy. The inability of the Germans to respond said everything.

And so, in a matter of hours, the question of British intervention was cast in an entirely new context. The issue was no longer whether Britain should go to war in support of France and Russia—of whether the British public could possibly be brought to support such a war. Now it was a question of whether Britain would compromise its own interests by allowing a small but strategically important neutral nation, a nation whose neutrality Britain had pledged to uphold, to be invaded. This was something that the public would have no difficulty understanding.

On the last weekend of peace, the weekend when Germany and France both mobilized, the cabinet remained divided with eight members favoring war if Germany invaded Belgium and eleven opposed. Churchill, Grey, and the prime minister were in favor. The most prominent figure on the other side—but careful not to allow himself to be positioned as the leader of the antiwar group, which would destroy his freedom to maneuver—was the chancellor of the exchequer, David Lloyd George. Though the opponents of intervention had maintained their majority, several were no longer firm. Asquith and Grey had deftly softened the ground on which their opponents stood by misleading them into thinking—by allowing them to hope, at a minimum—that Britain’s role in the coming war would be a strictly naval one and therefore relatively low in risk and cost. The situation was moving away from the antiwar faction, and few still believed that resignations could make a difference.

Some of the most senior members of the antiwar faction saw the whole matter as a kind of bait-and-switch ruse. Lord John Morley, an aging bulwark of the Liberal Party and one of the small number of cabinet members who in the end did resign rather than assent to war, said “the precipitate and peremptory blaze about Belgium was due less to indignation at the violation of a Treaty than to natural perception of the plea that it would furnish for intervention on behalf of France, for expeditionary force, and all the rest of it.” This resentful view would be supported years later by the woman who served as Lloyd George’s private secretary (and mistress) in 1914, saw him swing around to support a declaration of war early in August, and later became his wife. “My own opinion,” wrote Frances Stevenson Lloyd George more than forty years later, “is that L.G.’s mind was really made up from the first, that he knew we would have to go in, and that the invasion of Belgium was, to be cynical, a heaven-sent excuse for supporting a declaration of war.”