The Guns of August (25 page)

Germans could not get over the perfidy of it. It was unbelievable that the English, having degenerated to the stage where suffragettes heckled the Prime Minister and defied the police, were going to fight. England, though wide-flung and
still powerful, was getting old, and they felt for her, like the Visigoths for the later Romans, a contempt combined with the newcomer’s sense of inferiority. The English think they can “treat us like Portugal,” complained Admiral Tirpitz.

England’s betrayal deepened their sense of friendlessness. They were conscious of being an unloved nation. How was it that Nice, annexed by France in 1860, could settle down comfortably and within a few years forget it had ever been Italian, whereas half a million Alsatians preferred to leave their homeland rather than live under German rule? “Our country is not much loved anywhere and indeed frequently hated,” the Crown Prince noted on his travels.

While the crowds shrieked for vengeance in the Wilhelmstrasse, depressed deputies of the left gathered in cafés and groaned together. “The whole world is rising against us,” said one. “Germanism has three enemies in the world—Latins, Slavs and Anglo-Saxons—and now they are all united against us.”

“Our diplomacy has left us no friend but Austria, and it was we who had to support her,” said another.

“At least one good thing is that it can’t last long,” a third consoled them. “We shall have peace in four months. Economically and financially we can’t last longer than that.”

“One hopes for the Turks and Japanese,” someone else suggested.

A rumor had in fact swept the cafés the previous evening when diners heard distant hurrahs shouted in the streets. As a diarist of the time recorded it: “They came nearer. People listened, then jumped up. The hurrahs became louder; they resounded over Potsdamer Platz and reached the proportions of a storm. The guests left their food and ran out of the restaurant. I followed the stream. What has happened? ‘Japan has declared war on Russia!’ they roared. Hurrah! Hurrah! Uproarious rejoicing. People embraced one another. ‘Long live Japan! Hurrah! Hurrah!’ Endless jubilation. Then someone shouted, ‘To the Japanese Embassy!’ And the crowd rushed away carrying everybody with it and besieged the embassy. ‘Long live Japan! Long live Japan!’ people shouted impetuously
until the Japanese Ambassador finally appeared and, perplexed, stammered his thanks for this unexpected and, it would seem, undeserved homage.” Although by next day it was known the rumor was false, just how undeserved was the homage would not be known for another two weeks.

When Ambassador Lichnowsky and his staff subsequently left England, a friend who came to say goodbye was struck by the “sadness and bitterness” of the party at Victoria Station. They were blaming officials at home for dragging them into a war with no allies but Austria.

“What chance have we, attacked on every side? Is no one friendly to Germany?” one official asked mournfully.

“Siam is friendly, I am told,” a colleague replied.

No sooner had England delivered herself of the ultimatum than fresh disputes broke out in the Cabinet over the question whether to send an Expeditionary Force to France. Having declared themselves in, they began to dispute how far in they should go. Their joint plans with the French were predicated on an Expeditionary Force of six divisions to arrive in France between M-4 and M-12 and to be ready for action on the extreme left of the French line by M-15. Already the schedule was disrupted because the British M-1 (August 5), which had been expected to be two days behind the French, was now three days behind, and further delay would follow.

Mr. Asquith’s cabinet was paralyzed by fear of invasion. In 1909 the Committee of Imperial Defence after a special study of the problem had declared that as long as the home army was kept sufficiently strong to make the Germans mount an invasion force of such size that it could not evade the navy, a large-scale invasion was “impractical.” Despite its assurance that the defense of the home islands was adequately guaranteed by the navy, Britain’s leaders on August 4 could not summon up the courage to denude the islands of the Regular Army. Arguments were put forward for sending fewer than six divisions, for sending them later rather than sooner, even for not sending them at all. Admiral Jellicoe was told his planned escort of the Expeditionary Force across the
Channel would not be required “for the present.” No button at the War Office automatically put the BEF in motion because the British government could not make up its mind to push it. The War Office itself, without a minister for the last four months, was distracted for lack of a chief. Asquith had progressed as far as inviting Kitchener up to London, but could not yet nerve himself to offer him the post. The impetuous and tempestuous Sir Henry Wilson, whose uninhibited diary was to cause such anguish when published after the war, was “revolted by such a state of things.” So was poor M. Cambon who went, armed with a map, to show Grey how vital it was that the French left should be extended by Britain’s six divisions. Grey promised to bring the matter to the attention of the Cabinet.

General Wilson, raging at the delay which he ascribed to Grey’s “sinful” hesitation, indignantly showed to his friends in the Opposition a copy of the mobilization order which instead of reading “mobilize and embark,” read only “mobilize.” This alone, he said, would delay the schedule by four days. Balfour undertook to spur the government. He told them, in a letter addressed to Haldane, that the whole point of the Entente and of the military arrangements which had flowed from it was the preservation of France, for if France were crushed “the whole future of Europe might be changed in a direction we should regard as disastrous.” Having adopted that policy, the thing to do, he suggested, was “to strike quickly and strike with your whole strength.” When Haldane came to see him to explain the nature of the Cabinet’s hesitations, Balfour could not help feeling they were marked by “a certain wooliness of thought and indecision of purpose.”

That afternoon of August 4, at about the time when Bethmann was addressing the Reichstag and Viviani the Chambre des Députés, Mr. Asquith announced to the House of Commons a “message from His Majesty signed by his own hand.” Mr. Speaker rose from his chair and members uncovered while the Mobilization Proclamation was read. Next, from typewritten copy that trembled slightly in his hand, Asquith read the terms of the ultimatum just telegraphed to Germany.
When he came to the words “a satisfactory answer by midnight,” a solemn cheer rose from the benches.

All that was left was to wait for midnight (eleven o’clock, British time). At nine o’clock the government learned, through an intercepted but uncoded telegram sent out from Berlin, that Germany had considered itself at war with Britain from the moment when the British ambassador had asked for his passports. Hastily summoned, the Cabinet debated whether to declare war as of that moment or wait for the time limit set by the ultimatum to expire. They decided to wait. In silence, each encased in his private thoughts, they sat around the green table in the ill-lit Cabinet room, conscious of the shadows of those who at other fateful moments had sat there before them. Eyes watched the clock ticking away the time limit. “Boom!” Big Ben struck the first note of eleven, and each note thereafter sounded to Lloyd George, who had a Celtic ear for melodrama, like “Doom, doom, doom!”

Twenty minutes later the War Telegram, “War, Germany, act,” was dispatched. Where and when the army was to act was still unsettled, the decision having been left for a War Council called for the following day. The British government went to bed a belligerent, if something less than bellicose.

Next day, with the assault on Liège, the first battle of the war began. Europe was entering, Moltke wrote that day to Conrad von Hötzendorff, upon “the struggle that will decide the course of history for the next hundred years.”

B
EFORE THE LAND BATTLE BEGAN,
a wireless message from the
German Admiralty to the German Commander in the Mediterranean, Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, flickered through the air in the pre-dawn hours of August 4. It read: “Alliance with Turkey concluded August 3. Proceed at once to Constantinople.” Although its expectations proved premature and it was almost immediately canceled, Admiral Souchon decided to proceed as directed. His command consisted of two fast new ships, the battle cruiser
Goeben
and the light cruiser
Breslau.
No other single exploit of the war cast so long a shadow upon the world as the voyage accomplished by their commander during the next seven days.

Turkey at the time of Sarajevo had many enemies and no allies because no one considered her worth an alliance. For a hundred years the Ottoman Empire, called the “Sick Man” of Europe, had been considered moribund by the hovering European powers who were waiting to fall upon the carcass. But year after year the fabulous invalid refused to die, still grasping in decrepit hands the keys to immense possessions. Indeed, during the last six years, ever since the Young Turk Revolution overthrew the old Sultan “Abdul the Damned,” in 1908, and established under his more amenable brother a government by
the “Committee of Union and Progress,” Turkey had begun to be rejuvenated.

The “Committee,” otherwise the Young Turks, led by their “little Napoleon,” Enver Bey, determined to remake the country, forge the strength necessary to hold the slipping bonds of empire, fend off the waiting eagles, and retrieve the Pan-Islamic dominion of the days of Ottoman glory. The process was watched with no relish at all by Russia, France, and England, who had rival ambitions in the area. Germany, late on the imperial scene and with Berlin-to-Baghdad dreams of her own, determined to become the Young Turks’ patron. A German military mission sent in 1913 to reorganize the Turkish Army caused such furious Russian resentment that only concerted effort by the Powers to provide a face-saving device prevented the affair from becoming that “damned foolish thing in the Balkans” a year before Sarajevo.

From then on, the Turks felt creeping over them the shadow of the oncoming day when they would have to choose sides. Fearing Russia, resenting England, mistrusting Germany, they could not decide. The “Hero of the Revolution,” handsome young Enver with his pink cheeks and black mustache worn in upturned points like the Kaiser’s, was the only wholehearted and enthusiastic advocate of a German alliance. Like some later thinkers, he believed in the Germans as the wave of the future. Talaat Bey, political “Boss” of the “Committee,” and its real ruler, a stout Levantine adventurer who could devour a pound of caviar at a sitting, washed down by two glasses of brandy and two bottles of champagne, was less sure. He believed Turkey could obtain a better price from Germany than from the Entente, and he had no faith in Turkey’s chances of survival as a neutral in a war of the Great Powers. If the Entente Powers won, Ottoman possessions would crumble under their pressure; if the Central Powers won, Turkey would become a German vassal. Other groups in the Turkish government would have preferred an alliance with the Entente, if it had been obtainable, in the hope of buying off Russia, Turkey’s age-old enemy. For ten centuries Russia had yearned for Constantinople, the city Russians called Czargrad that lay at the exit of the Black Sea. That narrow and famous sea passage, called the Dardanelles, fifty
miles long and nowhere more than three miles wide, was Russia’s only year-round egress to the rest of the world.

Turkey had one asset of inestimable value—her geographical position at the junction of the paths of empire. For that reason England had been for a hundred years Turkey’s traditional protector, but the truth was that England no longer took Turkey seriously. After a century of supporting the Sultan against all comers because she preferred a weak, debilitated, and therefore malleable despot astride her road to India, England was at last beginning to tire of the fetters that bound her to what Winston Churchill amicably called “scandalous, crumbling, decrepit, penniless Turkey.” The Turkish reputation for misrule, corruption, and cruelty had been a stench in the nostrils of Europe for a long time. The Liberals who had governed England since 1906 were the inheritors of Gladstone’s celebrated appeal to expel the unspeakable Turk, “the one great anti-human specimen of humanity,” from Europe. Their policy was shaped by an image half Sick Man, half Terrible Turk. Lord Salisbury’s sporting metaphor after the Crimean War, “We have put our money on the wrong horse,” acquired the status of prophecy. British influence at the Porte was allowed to lapse just at the time when it might have proved beyond price.

A request by Turkey for a permanent alliance with Great Britain was turned down in 1911 through the medium of Winston Churchill who had visited Constantinople in 1909 and established “amicable relations,” as he conceived them, with Enver and other Young Turk ministers. In the imperial style used for addressing Oriental states, he suggested that although Britain could accept no alliance, Turkey would do well not to alienate British friendship by “reverting to the oppressive methods of the old regime or seeking to disturb the British status quo as it now exists.” Superbly surveying the world from his Admiralty post, he reminded Turkey that British friendship would be of value so long as Britain “alone among European states … retains supremacy of the sea.” That Turkey’s friendship or even her neutrality might be of
equal value to Britain was never seriously considered by him or any other minister.