The Marne, 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle That Changed the World (4 page)

FRENCH DECISIONS MADE DURING
the July Crisis, in the words of historian Eugenia C. Kiesling, “mattered rather little.” For whatever course Paris took, “France would be dragged into an unwanted war.”
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In the face of the frenetic diplomatic actions at Vienna, Berlin, and St. Petersburg, French policy makers in July 1914 were content to make no decision at all. Most were interested merely in making sure that Paris was not seen as pursuing an aggressive policy, one that could possibly encourage war. In President Poincaré’s well-chosen words, “It is better to have war declared on us.”
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But this does not mean that France was without a policy in 1914. France had sketched out a secret military alliance with Russia in 1892. Formally signed by Nicholas II two years later, it called on each side to assist the other “immediately and simultaneously” if attacked by Germany—France with 1.3 million and Russia with 800,000 men.
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Thus, even to discuss the matter of support for Russia during the July Crisis risked arousing suspicions concerning French reliability. If Paris as much as hinted that it had a “free hand” in shaping its course of action, then this would imply the same for St. Petersburg. Neither side, of course, was willing to jeopardize Europe’s only firm military alliance.

The main issue concerns the French diplomatic mission to Russia. At 5
AM
on 16 July, President Poincaré, Premier Viviani, and Pierre de Margerie, political director of the French Foreign Ministry, boarded the battleship
France
at Dunkirk. They shaped a course for the Baltic Sea to conduct state visits to Russia and to the Scandinavian countries. Was it “design” or “accident”?
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Was it sheer lack of responsibility, given the escalating crisis over the murders at Sarajevo and the certain but still undetermined Austro-Hungarian response? Was it a gross miscalculation, given that radio transmission was still in its infancy? And just what did French leaders hope to accomplish in St. Petersburg? Whatever the case, they had intentionally isolated themselves from the decision-making process.

It was an uneasy voyage. Poincaré, shocked at the degree of naïveté exhibited by his premier concerning foreign policy, spent the days at sea lecturing Viviani on European statecraft. Viviani, for his part, was preoccupied by what bombshells might be revealed at the Caillaux trial—and by the whereabouts of his mistress from the Comédie française. On 20 July, the French delegation boarded the imperial yacht
Alexandria
in Kronstadt Harbor and set off for discussions at the Peterhof. The talks continued at the Winter Palace, in the capital, where massive strikes reminded the French visitors of the fragility of the tsar’s empire. No formal record of the discussions has ever been found.

Through interception and decryption of Austro-Hungarian diplomatic telegrams by the Russian Foreign Ministry’s code breakers, French and Russian leaders became aware that Vienna was planning a major action against Serbia. But they hardly needed such clandestine information: On 21 July, the Habsburg ambassador to Russia, Friedrich Count Szápáry, informed the French president that Austria-Hungary was planning “action” against Belgrade. Poincaré’s blunt warning that Serbia “has some very warm friends in the Russian people,” that Russia “has an ally France,” and that “plenty of complications” were to be “feared” from any unilateral Austrian action against Serbia
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apparently fell on deaf ears. For on 23 July, after having made sure that the French had departed Kronstadt, Vienna delivered its ultimatum to Belgrade.

Poincaré received word of the ultimatum on board the
France
the next day. From Stockholm, he set course for Copenhagen, where on 27 July he received several cables urging him to return to Paris at once. He complied—after sending off a telegram to Russian foreign minister Sergei Sazonov assuring him that France was “ready in the interests of the general peace wholeheartedly to second the action of the Imperial Government.”
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French ambassador Maurice Paléologue unofficially assured Sazonov of “the complete readiness of France to fulfill her obligations as an ally in case of necessity.”
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Poincaré, Viviani, and Margerie landed at Dunkirk on Wednesday, 29 July. The president, fearing what he termed Viviani’s “hesitant and pusillanimous” character, at once assumed control of foreign affairs. But by then, events had already spun out of his control. On 28 July, Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia, and the next day its river monitors shelled Belgrade. Two days later, Russia posted red mobilization notices
(ukases)
in St. Petersburg. Poincaré called a meeting of the Council of Ministers for the morning of 30 July to assess the situation. While no minutes of the meeting were kept, Abel Ferry, undersecretary of state for foreign affairs, committed the main points of the “impressive cabinet” to his diary. “For the sake of public opinion, let the Germans put themselves in the wrong.” There was no panic among the group of “solemn” ministers. “Cabinet calm, serious, ordered.” For the time being, there was little to be done. “Do not stop Russian mobilization,” Ferry summed up. “Mobilize, but do not concentrate.”
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At the army’s insistence, War Minister Adolphe Messimy agreed to establish the
couverture
, or frontier-covering force, but demanded that it be kept ten kilometers from the frontier to avoid any unintentional contact with the Germans.

On 31 July, Germany declared a state of “imminent danger of war” to exist, and at 6
PM
the next day declared war on Russia. On 2 August, as previously noted, Lieutenant Albert Mayer’s Jäger regiment violated French territory at Joncherey. Under the pretext that French airplanes had bombed railways at Karlsruhe and Nürnberg—a claim that the Prussian ambassador at Munich, Georg von Treutler, immediately informed Berlin could not be substantiated—Germany declared war on France at 6:45
PM
on 3 August. To Poincaré’s great relief, Rome had announced on 31 July that it considered Vienna’s attack on Serbia to be an act of aggression and hence did not bind it to act on behalf of the Triple Alliance.

Poincaré, who as a child had witnessed the German occupation of Bar-le-Duc, in Lorraine, carried France through the July Crisis with “firmness, resolve and confidence.”
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France appeared to the world as the victim of German aggression. Domestic unity had been maintained. The Russian alliance had been honored. Despite the eternal cry of
la patrie en danger
and the sporadic looting of German shops in Paris, the president demanded calm and maintained control. On 2 August, he signed the proclamation that a state of emergency existed. The next evening, he again spelled out to his cabinet his “satisfaction” that Germany, and not France, had made the move toward war. “It had been indispensable,” he stated, “that Germany should be led into publicly confessing her intentions.” He allowed himself only one misstep—“at last we could release the cry, until now smothered in our breasts:
Vive l’Alsace Lorraine”
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—but at the urging of several ministers omitted that xenophobic phrase from his message to Parliament two days later.
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The German declaration of war against France on 3 August spared the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies from having to debate—and much less to approve—a formal declaration of war. That left War Minister Messimy free to compile a “wish list” of war aims: Germany was to lose Alsace-Lorraine, the Saar, and the west bank of the Rhine, thereby greatly reducing its territory. France thus defined its war-aims program a month before Bethmann Hollweg did likewise for Germany.

Poincaré next proclaimed a
union sacrée
(“No, there are no more parties”); it met with near-universal acceptance. The famous declaration of a newfound “sacred union” was in fact read by Minister of Justice Jean-Baptiste Bienvenu-Martin in the Senate and by Prime Minister Viviani in the Chamber of Deputies, since the president did not have the right to address those bodies directly. Then Poincaré silenced critics who feared that Britain would remain aloof from the continental madness about to take place. London, he assured his colleagues, would join the war. “The English are slow to decide, methodical, reflective, but they know where they are going.”
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BRITAIN’S LEADERS WERE CONCERNED
first and foremost with the security of the empire. Continental Europe was far removed from their innermost concerns. In early July 1914, Whitehall was busily redrafting terms of the entente with Russia. Britain’s security lay in the power of the Royal Navy and in its geographical separation from the Continent. Its army was small and trained to deploy “east of Suez.” London was beset by what historian Paul Kennedy has famously called “imperial overstretch,”
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that is, with mustering the power required to maintain the greatest empire since the days of Rome—and concurrently to meet the industrial and naval challenges of up-and-comers such as Germany, Japan, and the United States. As well, the Liberal government of Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith had come to power to undertake a sweeping program of social reforms, and it faced daunting challenges at home with regard to Irish Home Rule, labor unrest, and women’s suffrage. Not surprisingly, then, the double murders at Sarajevo initially hardly registered at Whitehall. Surely, Europe could survive a possible third Balkan war.

State Secretary Grey was slow to appreciate the potential danger of the Balkan situation. His mind was on his upcoming vacation, to fly-fish for stippled trout in the river Itchen. His critics later charged him with failing to avoid a European war owing to his timidity, his studied aloofness, and his failure to inform Berlin that London would not allow it to invade France unpunished.
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David Lloyd George after the war spoke of Grey in the July Crisis as “a pilot whose hand trembled in the palsy of apprehension, unable to grip the levers and manipulate them with a firm and clear purpose.”
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At the Foreign Office, Sir Eyre Crowe simply called Grey “a futile useless weak fool.”
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He was none of these. He appreciated the Austro-German threat. He was determined to stand by France and Russia. Belgium’s “perpetual” neutrality, guaranteed by the great powers by 1839, was to Grey neither a “legal” nor a “contractual” matter, but rather a power-political calculation. He played for time. He urged caution on the involved parties. He offered four-power mediation. Above all, he was uncertain of how the cabinet would react to war over Sarajevo.

Three events rudely interrupted Grey’s insouciance—the tenor of the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum (“the most formidable document I have ever seen addressed by one state to another that was independent”) delivered at Belgrade on 23 July; Berlin’s rejection of his offer of mediation by the less interested powers on 28 July; and Russia’s partial mobilization of the military districts of Odessa, Kiev, Moscow, and Kazan the following day. Still, when Grey on 29 July suggested to the cabinet that defense of Belgium and France lay in Britain’s vital interest, the majority rejected this view and, in president of the Board of Trade John Burns’s famous words, “decided not to decide.”
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Although the cabinet kept no formal records of its minutes and votes, historian Keith Wilson has argued that its nineteen members by 1 August fell into three unequal groups: The largest, led by Asquith, was undecided; a smaller middle group of about five demanded an immediate declaration of British neutrality; and only Grey and First Lord of the Admiralty Winston S. Churchill (“the naval war will be cheap”) favored intervention on the Continent.
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Grey was thus in a weak position. A good deal of it was due to his secretiveness. For years, he had studiously avoided formal discussion of whether a German attack on France would involve Britain’s vital security interests. In what historian Elie Halévy has called “an ignorance whose true name was connivance,”
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he had declined even a cursory mention in cabinet of the fact that in 1911 he had, quite on his own, authorized “military conversations” with the French General Staff.

Nor was Asquith more forthcoming. Foreign policy, after all, was Grey’s bailiwick. While the prime minister feared that Vienna’s ultimatum to Belgrade might lead to war between France and Germany and/or between Austria-Hungary and Russia—“a real Armageddon”—he nevertheless saw “no reason why we should be more than spectators.” Ten days later, he shared with the socialite Venetia Stanley his firm conviction that Britain had “no obligations of any kind either to France or Russia to give them military or naval help,” and that it was “out of the question” at this time (2 August) to “dispatch” any “Expeditionary Forces” to France.
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An astute politician, Asquith had taken stock of the deep divisions within the cabinet over the issue of a “continental commitment.” As late as 2 August, he estimated that “a good 3/4 of our own [Liberal] party in the H[ouse] of Commons are for absolute noninterference at any price.”
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But Asquith was also plagued by fear of German domination of the Continent. France was a “long-standing and intimate” friend. Belgium counted on Britain to “prevent her being utilized and absorbed by Germany.” In terms of naked realpolitik, Britain could not “allow Germany to use the Channel as a hostile base.” It was not in the nation’s “interests that France should be wiped out as a Great Power.”
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And how would the country react to a Liberal government that jettisoned the hallowed principle of the balance of power, whereby Britain since the days of Louis XIV had formed coalitions to deny all hegemonic aspirations on the Continent? Yet if he opted for military deployment in Europe, would the substantial stubborn group of ministers that refused to countenance intervention in France bring down his government? And how would even a
perceived
refusal as part of the Triple Entente to stand up against Germany play in Paris? French ambassador Paul Cambon reported the British conundrum to his government, wondering whether the word
honor
had been “struck out of the English vocabulary.”
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Finally, if Asquith did not back Grey, would the state secretary’s certain resignation bring down the government? “No more distressing moment can ever face a British government,” historian Barbara Tuchman cheekily remarked, “than that which requires it to come to a hard and fast and specific decision.”
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