The Guns of August (18 page)

“Evidemment,”
replied Viviani, and gave the answer prearranged between him and Poincaré. “France will act in accordance with her interests.” As Schoen left, Isvolsky rushed in with news of the German ultimatum to Russia. Viviani returned to the Cabinet, which at last agreed upon mobilization. The order was signed and given to Messimy, but Viviani, still hoping for some saving development to turn up within the few remaining hours, insisted that Messimy keep it in his pocket until 3:30. At the same time the ten-kilometer withdrawal was reaffirmed. Messimy telephoned it that evening personally to corps commanders: “By order of the President of the Republic, no unit of the army, no patrol, no reconnaissance, no scout, no detail of any kind, shall go east of the line laid down. Anyone guilty of transgressing will be liable to court-martial.” A particular warning was added for the benefit of the XXth Corps, commanded by General Foch, of whom it was reliably reported that a squadron of cuirassiers had been seen “nose to nose” with a squadron of Uhlans.

At 3:30, as arranged, General Ebener of Joffre’s staff, accompanied by two officers, came to the War Office to call for the mobilization order. Messimy handed it over in dry-throated silence. “Conscious of the gigantic and infinite results to spread from that little piece of paper, all four of us felt our hearts tighten.” He shook hands with each of the three officers, who saluted and departed to deliver the order to the Post Office.

At four o’clock the first poster appeared on the walls of Paris (at the corner of the Place de la Concorde and the Rue Royale, one still remains, preserved under glass). At Armenonville, rendezvous of the
haut-monde
in the Bois de Boulogne, tea dancing suddenly stopped when the manager
stepped forward, silenced the orchestra, and announced: “Mobilization has been ordered. It begins at midnight. Play the ‘Marseillaise.’” In town the streets were already emptied of vehicles requisitioned by the War Office. Groups of reservists with bundles and farewell bouquets of flowers were marching off to the Gare de l’Est, as civilians waved and cheered. One group stopped to lay its flowers at the feet of the black-draped statue of Strasbourg in the Place de la Concorde. The crowds wept and cried
“Vive l’Alsace!”
and tore off the mourning she had worn since 1870. Orchestras in restaurants played the French, Russian, and British anthems. “To think these are all being played by Hungarians,” someone remarked. The playing of their anthem, as if to express a hope, made Englishmen in the crowd uncomfortable and none more so than Sir Francis Bertie, the pink and plump British ambassador who in a gray frock coat and gray top hat, holding a green parasol against the sun, was seen entering the Quai d’Orsay. Sir Francis felt “sick at heart and ashamed.” He ordered the gates of his embassy closed, for, as he wrote in his diary, “though it is
‘Vive l’Angleterre’
today, it may be
‘Perfide Albion’
tomorrow.”

In London that thought hung heavily in the room where small, white-bearded M. Cambon confronted Sir Edward Grey. When Grey said to him that some “new development” must be awaited because the dispute between Russia, Austria, and Germany concerned a matter “of no interest” to Great Britain, Cambon let a glint of anger penetrate his impeccable tact and polished dignity. Was England “going to wait until French territory was invaded before intervening?” he asked, and suggested that if so her help might be “very belated.”

Grey, behind his tight mouth and Roman nose, was in equal anguish. He believed fervently that England’s interests required her to support France; he was prepared, in fact, to resign if she did not; he believed events to come would force her hand, but as yet he could say nothing officially to Cambon. Nor had he the knack of expressing himself unofficially. His manner, which the English public, seeing in him the image of the strong, silent man, found comforting, his foreign
colleagues found “icy.” He managed only to express edgily the thought that was in everyone’s mind, that “Belgian neutrality might become a factor.” That was the development Grey—and not he alone—was waiting for.

Britain’s predicament resulted from a split personality evident both within the Cabinet and between the parties. The Cabinet was divided, in a split that derived from the Boer War, between Liberal Imperialists represented by Asquith, Grey, Haldane, and Churchill, and “Little Englanders” represented by all the rest. Heirs of Gladstone, they, like their late leader, harbored a deep suspicion of foreign entanglements and considered the aiding of oppressed peoples to be the only proper concern of foreign affairs, which were otherwise regarded as a tiresome interference with Reform, Free Trade, Home Rule, and the Lords’ Veto. They tended to regard France as the decadent and frivolous grasshopper, and would have liked to regard Germany as the industrious, respectable ant, had not the posturings and roarings of the Kaiser and the Pan-German militarists somehow discouraged this view. They would never have supported a war on behalf of France, although the injection of Belgium, a “little” country with a just call on British protection, might alter the issue.

Grey’s group in the Cabinet, on the other hand, shared with the Tories a fundamental premise that Britain’s national interest was bound up with the preservation of France. The reasoning was best expressed in the marvelously flat words of Grey himself: “If Germany dominated the Continent it would be disagreeable to us as well as to others, for we should be isolated.” In this epic sentence is all of British policy, and from it followed the knowledge that, if the challenge were flung, England would have to fight to prevent that “disagreeable” outcome. But Grey could not say so without provoking a split in the Cabinet and in the country that would be fatal to any war effort before it began.

Alone in Europe Britain had no conscription. In war she would be dependent on voluntary enlistment. A secession from the government over the war issue would mean the formation of an antiwar party led by the dissidents with disastrous
effect on recruiting. If it was the prime objective of France to enter war with Britain as an ally, it was a prime necessity for Britain to enter war with a united government.

This was the touchstone of the problem. In Cabinet meetings the group opposed to intervention proved strong. Their leader Lord Morley, Gladstone’s old friend and biographer, believed he could count on “eight or nine likely to agree with us” against the solution being openly worked for by Churchill with “daemonic energy” and Grey with “strenuous simplicity.” From discussions in the Cabinet it was clear to Morley that the neutrality of Belgium was “secondary to the question of our neutrality in the struggle between Germany and France.” It was equally clear to Grey that only violation of Belgium’s neutrality would convince the peace party of the German menace and the need to go to war in the national interest.

On August 1 the crack was visible and widening in Cabinet and Parliament. That day twelve out of eighteen Cabinet members declared themselves opposed to giving France the assurance of Britain’s support in war. That afternoon in the lobby of the House of Commons a caucus of Liberal M.P.s voted 19 to 4 (though with many abstentions) for a motion that England should remain neutral “whatever happened in Belgium or elsewhere.” That week
Punch
published “Lines designed to represent the views of an average British patriot”:

The average patriot had already used up his normal supply of excitement and indignation in the current Irish crisis. The “Curragh Mutiny” was England’s Mme. Caillaux. As a result of the Home Rule Bill, Ulster was threatening armed rebellion against autonomy for Ireland and English troops stationed
at the Curragh had refused to take up arms against Ulster loyalists. General Gough, the Curragh commander, had resigned with all his officers, whereupon Sir John French, Chief of General Staff, resigned, whereupon Colonel John Seely, Haldane’s successor as Secretary of War, resigned. The army seethed, uproar and schism ruled the country, and a Palace Conference of party leaders with the King met in vain. Lloyd George talked ominously of the “gravest issue raised in this country since the days of the Stuarts,” the words “civil war” and “rebellion” were mentioned, and a German arms firm hopefully ran a cargo of 40,000 rifles and a million cartridges into Ulster. In the meantime there was no Secretary of War, the office being left to Prime Minister Asquith, who had little time and less inclination for it.

Asquith had, however, a particularly active First Lord of the Admiralty. When he smelled battle afar off, Winston Churchill resembled the war horse in Job who turned not back from the sword but “paweth in the valley and saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha.” He was the only British minister to have a perfectly clear conviction of what Britain should do and to act upon it without hesitation. On July 26, the day Austria rejected Serbia’s reply and ten days before his own government made up its mind, Churchill issued a crucial order.

On July 26 the British fleet was completing, unconnected with the crisis, a test mobilization and maneuvers with full crews at war strength. At seven o’clock next morning the squadrons were due to disperse, some to various exercises on the high seas, some to home ports where parts of their crews would be discharged back into training schools, some to dock for repairs. That Sunday, July 26, the First Lord remembered later was “a very beautiful day.” When he learned the news from Austria he made up his mind to make sure “that the diplomatic situation did not get ahead of the naval situation and that the Grand Fleet should be in its War Station before Germany could know whether or not we should be in the war
and therefore if possible before we had decided ourselves.
” The italics are his own. After consultation with the First Sea
Lord, Prince Louis of Battenberg, he gave orders to the fleet not to disperse.

He then informed Grey what he had done and with Grey’s assent released the Admiralty order to the newspapers in the hope that the news might have “a sobering effect” on Berlin and Vienna.

Holding the fleet together was not enough; it must be got, as Churchill expressed it in capitals, to its “War Station.” The primary duty of a fleet, as Admiral Mahan, the Clausewitz of naval warfare, had decreed, was to remain “a fleet in being.” In the event of war the British fleet, upon which an island nation depended for its life, had to establish and maintain mastery of the ocean trade routes; it had to protect the British Isles from invasion; it had to protect the Channel and the French coasts in fulfillment of the pact with France; it had to keep concentrated in sufficient strength to win any engagement if the German fleet sought battle; and above all it had to guard itself against that new and menacing weapon of unknown potential, the torpedo. The fear of a sudden, undeclared torpedo attack haunted the Admiralty.

On July 28 Churchill gave orders for the fleet to sail to its war base at Scapa Flow, far to the north at the tip of mist-shrouded Orkney in the North Sea. It steamed out of Portland on the 29th, and by nightfall eighteen miles of warships had passed northward through the Straits of Dover headed not so much for some rendezvous with glory as for a rendezvous with discretion. “A surprise torpedo attack” wrote the First Lord, “was at any rate one nightmare gone forever.”

Having prepared the fleet for action, Churchill turned his abounding energy and sense of urgency upon preparing the country. He persuaded Asquith on July 29 to authorize the Warning Telegram which was the arranged signal sent by War Office and Admiralty to initiate the Precautionary Period. While short of the
Kriegesgefahr
or the French State of Siege which established martial law, the Precautionary Period has been described as a device “invented by a genius … which permitted certain measures to be taken on the
ipse dixit
of the
Secretary of War without reference to the Cabinet … when time was the only thing that mattered.”

Time pressed on the restless Churchill who, expecting the Liberal government to break apart, went off to make overtures to his old party, the Tories. Coalition was not in the least to the taste of the Prime Minister who was bent on keeping his government united. Lord Morley at seventy-six was expected by no one to stay with the government in the event of war. Not Morley but the far more vigorous Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd George, was the key figure whom the government could not afford to lose, both for his proved ability in office and his influence upon the electorate. Shrewd, ambitious, and possessed of a spellbinding Welsh eloquence, Lloyd George leaned to the peace group but might jump either way. He had suffered recent setbacks in public popularity; he saw a new rival for party leadership arising in the individual whom Lord Morley called “that splendid condottierre at the Admiralty”; and he might, some of his colleagues thought, see political advantage in “playing the peace-card” against Churchill. He was altogether an uncertain and dangerous quantity.

Asquith, who had no intention of leading a divided country into war, continued to wait with exasperating patience for events which might convince the peace group. The question of the hour, he recorded in his passionless way in his diary for July 31, was, “Are we to go in or stand aside. Of course everybody longs to stand aside.” In a less passive attitude, Grey, during the Cabinet of July 31 almost reached the point-blank. He said Germany’s policy was that of a “European aggressor as bad as Napoleon” (a name that for England had only one meaning) and told the Cabinet that the time had come when a decision whether to support the Entente or preserve neutrality could no longer be deferred. He said that if it chose neutrality he was not the man to carry out such a policy. His implied threat to resign echoed as if it had been spoken.

“The Cabinet seemed to heave a sort of sigh,” wrote one of them, and sat for several moments in “breathless silence.” Its members looked at one another, suddenly realizing that their
continued existence as a government was now in doubt. They adjourned without reaching a decision.