Читать книгу Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914 - Max Hastings, Sir Max Hastings, Max Hastings - Страница 15

Many Europeans anticipated with varying degrees of enthusiasm that their two rival alliances would sooner or later come to blows. Far from being regarded as unthinkable, continental war was viewed as a highly plausible, and by no means intolerable, outcome of international tensions. Europe had twenty million regular soldiers and reservists, and each nation developed plans for every contingency in which they might be deployed. All the prospective belligerents proposed to attack. The British Army’s 1909 Field Service Regulations, largely drafted by Sir Douglas Haig, asserted: ‘Decisive success in battle can be gained only by a vigorous offensive.’ In February 1914, Russian military intelligence passed to its government two German memoranda, discussing the need to prepare public opinion for a two-front war. The Triple Alliance’s third party, Italy, was notionally committed to fight alongside Germany and Austria, which meant that the French must allocate troops not only to meet the Germans, but also to defend their south-eastern frontier. All the European powers remained nonetheless uncertain what Italy would do in the event of a war, as were Italians themselves. What seemed plain was that the Rome government would eventually offer support to whichever power promised to indulge its ambitions for territorial aggrandisement.

In Germany, chief of staff Helmuth von Moltke inherited in 1906 from his predecessor, Alfred Graf von Schlieffen, a scheme for a massive sweeping advance through northern France, around Paris, to smash the French army before turning on Russia. For the past century, Schlieffen’s vision has lain at the heart of all debate about whether Germany might have won the war in 1914. The confidence of the nation’s leadership that it could successfully launch a general European conflict rested entirely upon the Schlieffen concept, or more exactly Moltke’s modification of it.

The Kaiser liked to pretend that he ruled Germany, and occasionally he did so; his appointed chancellor, the liberal-conservative Bethmann Hollweg, exercised varying influence, while striving to manage an increasingly hostile Reichstag. But the most powerful single figure in the Wilhelmine Empire was Moltke, controlling the most formidable military machine in Europe. He was an unexpected general, a Christian Scientist who played the cello and was prey to deep melancholy – ‘der traurige Julius’ – ‘sad Julius’. Conspicuous in his life were devotion to his wife and a fascination with the afterlife, spiritualism and the occult, which she encouraged. Moltke believed that he occupied the most honourable position on earth. He and the army answered to no politician, only to the Kaiser.

The Great General Staff, which operated under his direction, was Germany’s most respected institution. It consisted of 625 officers, who worked in a building on Berlin’s Königsplatz in which Moltke and his family occupied a flat. Security was tight: there were no secretaries or clerks; staff officers drafted all documents. Once the cleaners left each morning, no women save Eliza Moltke and her maid entered the building. Each year when a new mobilisation plan was prepared, copies of the redundant version were meticulously destroyed. The Staff’s output owed little to technology: it owned no automobiles; even the influential Railway Department had only one typewriter; urgent telephone calls were made from a single box in a corridor. There was no canteen, and most officers brought in packed lunches to eat at their desks during working days of twelve to fourteen hours. Every member of the General Staff was taught to think of himself as one among a hallowed elite, subject to social rules which were meticulously observed: no man – for instance – might enter a bar frequented by socialists.

Moltke himself sought to convey an impression of personal strength that would soon prove to have been illusory, but which exercised a critical influence on the advance to war. A highly intelligent and cultured man, he rose through a close association with the Kaiser, which began when he served as adjutant to his uncle, ‘the great Moltke’, victor over France in 1870–71. Wilhelm found the hero’s nephew congenial, and clung to a conviction that the old man’s genius must have passed to the next generation. But the decision to appoint Helmuth chief of staff was controversial, indeed to some shocking. One of Moltke’s former military instructors wrote: ‘This man could be disastrous.’ Wilhelm’s choice plainly derived from their personal relationship: he found the general an agreeable companion with a pleasing bedside manner, that essential requirement for courtiers through the ages. Moltke had shown himself a competent officer without offering – or having much opportunity to display – evidence of military genius.

It was ironic that after 1890 the elder Moltke argued that Europe’s fate should thenceforth be decided diplomatically rather than on the battlefield: he thought the usefulness of war to Germany was exhausted. But from 1906 onwards, his much less gifted nephew professed to think that Schlieffen’s concept of a grand envelopment offered the prospect of securing German dominance of Europe. Moltke told Austrian chief of staff Conrad von Hötzendorf in February 1913: ‘Austria’s fate will not be definitively decided along the Bug but rather along the Seine.’ He became imbued with faith that new technologies – balloons and motor vehicles – would empower highly centralised battlefield control of Germany’s armies by himself. Some other senior officers were much more sceptical. Karl von Einem, especially, warned about the difficulties of directing the movements of almost three million men, and the likely operational limitations of unfit and ill-trained reservists; he anticipated in a fashion that proved prescient a progressive loss of momentum during the proposed epic dash across France.

Moltke, however, remained if not an enthusiast, at least a consistent fatalist about the inevitability of war with Russia and France. In October 1912, by then sixty-four, he said: ‘If war is coming, I hope it will come soon, before I am too old to cope with things satisfactorily.’ He told the Kaiser he was confident a decisive campaign could be swiftly won, and restated this advice early in the 1914 July crisis. The huge enigma about the chief of staff was that all the while, he nursed private doubts and fears which would burst forth in the most dramatic fashion when conflict came. The rational part of his nature told him that a great clash between great powers must be protracted and hard, not swift and easy. He once told the Kaiser: ‘the next war will be a national war. It will not be settled by one decisive battle but will be a long wearisome struggle with an enemy who will not be overcome until his whole national force is broken … a war which will utterly exhaust our own people even if we are victorious.’

Yet his own conduct in the years before 1914 belied such prudent caution. He acquiesced in the prospect of a grand European collision with a steadiness that prevailed when others – Bethmann and the Kaiser – sometimes faltered. Germany’s highest commander succumbed to a disease common among senior soldiers of many nationalities and eras: he wished to demonstrate to his government and people that their vastly expensive armed forces could fulfil their fantasies. Moltke famously, or notoriously, characterised himself to Prince von Bülow: ‘I do not lack personal courage, but I lack the power of rapid decision; I am too reflective, too scrupulous, or, if you like, too conscientious for such a post. I lack the capacity for risking all on a single throw.’ Yet, in contradiction of such a profession of self-knowledge, he yearned to show himself worthy of a responsibility for which most of his peers thought him unfit, by achieving a triumph for his country. This required an awesomely fast mobilisation and concentration of forces; the deployment of a small holding force to check the Russians, while the nation’s overwhelming strength conquered France in a campaign of forty days, before turning East.

Austria-Hungary’s plans were more flexible, indeed chaotic, because the Empire could not be sure whether it would be fighting Serbia alone – as it hoped – or contesting a second front on its Galician border with Russian Poland. Many bizarre figures jostled for attention on the European stage in 1914, but Conrad Hötzendorf was notable among them. Churchill described him as a ‘dark, small, frail, thin officer with piercing and expressive eyes set in the face of an ascetic’. It is hard to imagine a man less suited to his role: an epic incompetent, he was also an extreme imperialist, wanting the Hapsburgs to dominate the Adriatic, the eastern Mediterranean, the Balkans and North Africa. He perfectly fulfilled the elder Moltke’s dictum about the most dangerous kind of officer, by being both stupid and intensely energetic. His wife had died a decade earlier, and he shared a home with his mother. He had lately fallen in love with Virginie von Reininghaus, a brewery magnate’s wife, who became his obsession. He convinced himself that if he could lead Austria to a great military victory, he could surf a wave of personal glory to persuade his Gina to divorce her husband and marry him. He wrote to her of his hope for a ‘war from which I could return crowned with success that would allow me to break through all the barriers between us … and claim you as my own dearest wife’.

Since 1906 Conrad had been demanding military action against Serbia. In the seventeen months between 1 January 1913 and 1 June 1914, the chief of staff urged war on his government twenty-six times. He wrote to Moltke on St Valentine’s Day 1914, asserting the urgency of Austria’s need to ‘break the ring that once again threatens to enclose us’. For Conrad, and indeed for Berchtold, the Archduke’s death offered a heaven-sent excuse for war, rather than a justification for it. After witnessing the shrinkage of the Ottoman Empire, humbled by young and assertive Balkan nations during the regional conflicts of the preceding three years, Conrad believed that Sarajevo offered Austria its last chance to escape the same fate, by destroying the threat of assertive Slavdom embodied by Serbia. He said: ‘Such an ancient monarchy and such an ancient army [as those of the Hapsburgs] cannot perish ingloriously.’

Berchtold, Austria’s foreign minister, characterised Conrad’s policy in July 1914 as ‘war, war, war’. Wishing to expunge the shame of Austria’s 1866 defeat by Prussia, the general deplored ‘this foul peace which drags on and on’. So powerful was his craving for military collision that he gave scarcely a thought to its practical aspects. For years Austria’s army had lagged behind those of its neighbours, gathering mould. Parliament resisted the higher taxes that would have been required by bigger budgets, and the navy consumed much of the available cash. Though Austrian industry developed good weapons – especially heavy artillery and the M95 rifle – the army remained too poor to buy them in adequate numbers.

There were many disaffected people among the hotchpotch of ethnic minorities that made up the Empire. According to 1911 figures, among every thousand Austro-Hungarian soldiers, there were an average of 267 Germans, 233 Hungarians, 135 Czechs, eighty-five Poles, eighty-one Ukrainians, sixty-seven Croatians and Serbs, fifty-four Romanians, thirty-eight Slovaks, twenty-six Slovenes and fourteen Italians. Of the officer corps, by contrast, 76.1 per cent were Germans, 10.7 per cent Hungarians and 5.2 per cent Czechs. In proportion to population, Germans had three times their rightful number of officers, Hungarians half, Slavs about one-tenth. The Austrian army was thus run on colonial lines, with many Slav riflemen led into battle by Germans, rather as British officers led their Indian Army. Of all the European powers, Austria was least fit to justify its pretensions on the battlefield. Conrad simply assumed that, if Russia intervened in Serbia’s interest, the Germans would take the strain.

Vienna had been urged by Berlin to adopt harsh policies towards the Serbs. As early as 1912, Wilhelm and Moltke assured Franz Ferdinand and Conrad that they ‘could fully count on Germany’s support in all circumstances’ – what some historians have called ‘the first blank cheque’. Nor did Berlin make any secret of its commitment: on 28 November the secretary of state, Alfred von Kiderlen-Waechter, told the Reichstag: ‘If Austria is forced, for whatever reason, to fight for its position as a Great Power, then we must stand by her side.’ Bethmann Hollweg echoed this message on 2 December, saying that if the Austrians were attacked by Russia for asserting their legitimate interests in the Balkans, ‘then we would fight for the maintenance of our own position in Europe, in defence of our own future and security’.

A meeting of the Kaiser and his warlords – Bethmann and foreign minister Gottlieb von Jagow were absent – which took place at the Royal Palace on 8 December 1912 has been the focus of intense attention throughout the three generations since it was revealed. Wilhelm and Germany’s principal generals and admirals debated Haldane’s reported insistence upon Britain’s commitment to preserving a continental balance of power. Though no minutes were taken, immediately afterwards Georg Müller, chief of Wilhelm’s naval cabinet, recorded in his diary that Moltke said: ‘War the sooner the better.’ The admiral added on his own account: ‘he does not draw the logical conclusion from this, which is to present Russia or France or both with an ultimatum which would unleash the war with right on our side’.

Three other sources confirm Müller’s account, including that of Saxony’s military plenipotentiary in Berlin, who wrote on the 11th to his state’s minister of war: ‘His Excellency von Moltke wants war … His Excellency von Tirpitz on the other hand would prefer if it came in a year’s time when the [Kiel] canal and the Heligoland submarine base would be ready.’ Following the 8 December meeting, Germany’s leaders agreed that there should be a press campaign to prepare the nation to fight Russia, though this did not happen. Müller wrote to Bethmann to inform him of the meeting’s conclusions. Even if a cautious view is taken of the 1912 War Council’s significance, rejecting the darkest ‘Fischer’ thesis that Germany thereafter directed policy towards precipitating a general European conflict, the record of subsequent German conduct shows Berlin strikingly untroubled by the prospect of such an outcome. The nation’s leaders were confident they could prevail, so long as a clash came before Russian rearmament was completed in 1916. Müller felt obliged to inform the Kaiser that some senior officers were so convinced war was imminent that they had transferred their personal holdings of cash and shares into gold.

Bethmann at times thereafter seemed to waver. For instance, he said in June 1913: ‘I have had enough of war and bellicose talk and of eternal armaments. It is high time that the great nations settle down and pursue peaceful work. Otherwise it will certainly come to an explosion, which no one wants and which will hurt everyone.’ Yet the chancellor played a prominent role in strengthening Germany’s war machine. In conversation with Field-Marshal Wilhelm von der Goltz, he told the old soldier and military intellectual that he could secure the Reichstag’s support for any amount of military funding. Goltz responded that in that case the army had better hurry to present its shopping list. Yes, said the chancellor, but if you ask for a lot of money you will need to be seen to use it soon – to strike. Goltz warmly agreed. Then Bethmann added, in a characteristic moment of hesitation: ‘But even Bismarck avoided a preventive war in the year [18]75.’ He was very conscious that the Iron Chancellor, towards the end of his life, had urged that Germany should stop fighting. Goltz said scornfully that it was easy for Bismarck to take that line, after winning three earlier wars. Bethmann became a prime mover in pushing through parliament the huge 1913 Army Bill, which dramatically increased the nation’s military strength.

Meanwhile, Moltke was only the foremost of Germany’s leading soldiers who, during the nineteen months between the December 1912 War Council and the August 1914 outbreak of war, displayed a keen appetite for a European showdown. In May of the latter year, army quartermaster-general Gen. Count Georg von Waldersee wrote a memorandum which expressed optimism about Germany’s immediate strategic prospects, coupled to gloom about the longer term: ‘Germany has no reason to expect to be attacked in the near future, but … it not only has no reason whatever to avoid a conflict, but also, more than that, the chances of achieving a speedy victory in a major European war are today still very favourable for Germany and for the Triple Alliance as well. Soon, however, this will no longer be the case.’ There is vastly more documentary evidence to support the case that German leaders were willing for war in 1914 than exists to sustain any of the alternative scenarios proposed in recent years.

The Triple Entente had in common with the Triple Alliance the fact that only two of its parties were firmly committed to fight together. It represented an expression of goodwill and possible – but by no means assured – military collaboration: something more than that between France and Russia, something less on the part of Britain. The Russians always knew that they must fight any war from the exposed salient of Poland, vulnerable in the north and west to Germany, in the south to the Hapsburg Empire. The race to deploy forces following mobilisation was in the Russians’ eyes a race to save Poland; their first priority was to secure its borders.

Back in 1900 they had made a decision to launch simultaneous offensives against the Germans in East Prussia, against the Austrians in Galicia. Though they wavered about this in 1905, by 1912 they had renewed the commitment, and sustained it thereafter: they were much attracted to the notion of conquering Hapsburg Galicia, and thus acquiring a strong new mountain frontier on the Carpathians. They had two alternative schemes. The first, ‘Plan G’, covered the unlikely contingency that Germany deployed the bulk of its army in the East. The second, implemented in 1914, was ‘Plan A’. This required two armies to drive into East Prussia as a preliminary to an invasion of Germany proper. Meanwhile a further three armies were to launch the main thrust against the Austrians, driving them back to the Carpathians.

France proposed to implement against Germany its ‘Plan XVII’. This had been refined by Joffre, but was far less detailed than Moltke’s arrangements. Where Schlieffen sketched a design for a grand invasion of France, the French General Staff merely schemed operations against the German army, though these assumed a subsequent advance into the Kaiser’s realm. Plan XVII principally addressed the logistics for concentrating forces behind the frontier, and contained no timetable for operations, nor commitment to explicit territorial objectives. Much more important than the plan were the ethos and doctrine promoted with messianic fervour by the chief of staff. ‘The French Army,’ declared its 1913 Regulations, the work of Joffre, ‘returning to its traditions, henceforth knows no law but the offensive.’ Berlin’s best source in Paris, ‘Agent 17’, an Austrian boulevardier named Baron Schluga von Tastenfeld who acquired much of his information by mingling at the grand salons, informed Moltke – correctly – that Joffre was likely to make his main effort in the Ardennes, at the centre of the front.

France’s chief of staff was a technician, not an intellectual. Always a grave figure, he had acquired in childhood the nickname ‘le père Joffre’ – ‘Papa Joffre’. German intelligence characterised him as hard-working and responsible, but judged him too slow and heavy to respond effectively to such a spectacular initiative as the Schlieffen envelopment. French politicians, however, approved of Joffre because – unlike many of his peers – he was devoid of personal political ambitions. They also found him refreshingly direct. Legend held that Joseph Caillaux, France’s leader during the Agadir crisis, asked the chief of staff, then newly appointed: ‘General, they say Napoleon waged war only if he thought he had a 70–30 chance of winning. Have we a 70–30 chance?’ Joffre answered tersely: ‘Non, monsieur le premier ministre.’

Whether or not the chief of staff indeed took such a cautious view in 1911, he had since become more confident. Joffre believed that, in partnership with the Russians, the French army now possessed the strength, and above all the spirit, to vanquish the Germans. He made a misjudgement common to all Europe’s soldiers in 1914, based upon an exaggerated belief in the power of human courage. The French called it ‘cran’ – guts – and ‘élan vital’. Training emphasised the overriding importance of the will to win. The French army equipped itself with large numbers of its superb soixante-quinze – a 75mm quick-firing field gun – but neglected howitzers and heavy artillery, which it considered irrelevant to its offensive doctrine. Events would demonstrate that 75s and cran did not constitute an effective system for making war, but in the summer of 1914 Joffre and most of his colleagues supposed that they did.

As for French appraisals of German intentions, the intelligence officers of the Deuxième Bureau importantly underestimated the overall strength of the German army, because they did not anticipate that Moltke would deploy his reserve formations alongside his regular ones; they also thought he would send twenty-two divisions to face the Russians, whereas in reality he committed only eleven. They correctly predicted that the Germans would attempt an envelopment, but because of their misjudgement of enemy strength, they greatly mistook its geographical scope. They supposed that the Germans would come through only a corner of Belgium, instead of sweeping across the entire country. Joffre calculated that German concentrations in the north and south must make Moltke’s centre weak, and vulnerable to a French thrust. In this he was quite mistaken.

Both sides’ commanders grossly underrated their opponents. Elaborate rival plans for mobilisation and deployment were not the cause of conflict in 1914, but the Great Powers might have been much less willing for war had their soldiers recognised the fundamental weakness of their offensive doctrine. All the nations’ assessments were critically influenced by Japanese successes in attack in 1905, against Russian machine-guns. They concluded that this experience demonstrated that if the spirit was sufficiently exalted, it could prevail against modern technology.

Enthusiastic British patriots, in the early summer of 1914, were looking forward to a commemoration the following June of the centenary of the Battle of Waterloo: they proposed to make the occasion a celebration of the fact that for a hundred years no British army had shed blood in western Europe. Nonetheless, cautious contingency plans were in place to do so again. The British and French armies had begun staff talks in 1906, and Britain signed an agreement with Russia the following year. The Russians, however, saw reason to question their new friend’s good faith when in 1912 a British shipyard began building for the Turks two battleships, which represented a mortal threat to the Tsar’s dominance of the Black Sea. Challenged by St Petersburg, the Foreign Office responded blithely that it could not interfere with private commercial contracts. A British naval mission was meanwhile aiding the Turkish fleet, at the same time as Liman von Sanders trained the Turkish army.

Once in 1908 when Bethmann Hollweg was dining with Lloyd George, Germany’s chancellor became strident, waving his arms as he denounced the ‘iron ring’ enemies were forging around his nation: ‘England is embracing France. She is making friends with Russia. But it is not that you love each other; it is that you hate Germany!’ Bethmann was wrong. Britain’s adherence to the Entente was prompted much less by enthusiasm for embracing Russia and France as allies or partners against the Kaiser than by a desire to diminish the number of Britain’s enemies. It was increasingly understood, at least in Whitehall, that the vast empire of which the British people were so proud threatened to become an economic and strategic burden rather than a source of wealth. Russian power in central Asia, and the Great Game which derived from it, demanded much effort and expenditure to counter. Britain’s 1898 confrontation with France over Fashoda on the Upper Nile had reawakened visceral jealousies and enmities. What evolved during the first decade of the twentieth century was less a triple entente to which Britain was a committed partner, than two parallel processes of détente.

Sazonov, in St Petersburg, knew how badly his country and France needed Britain. He wrote on 31 December 1913: ‘Both powers [France and Russia] are scarcely capable of dealing Germany a mortal blow even in the event of success on the battlefield, which is always uncertain. But a struggle in which England took part might be fatal for Germany.’ Thus the foreign minister was infuriated by London’s ‘vacillating and self-effacing policy’, which he considered a critical impediment to deterrence. But British enthusiasm for Russia remained tepid. It was a source of embarrassment to many doughty democrats that their country should be associated with an absolutist autocracy, and worse still with its Balkan clients. In Paris near the climax of the July 1914 crisis, Raymond Recouly of Le Figaro met Sir Francis Bertie, the British ambassador, as he was about to enter the Quai d’Orsay. The Englishman, nicknamed ‘the Bull’ by colleagues, wrung his hands about Europe’s condition, then said: ‘Do you trust the Russians? We don’t, above half!’ He added: ‘I would say pretty much the same of the Serbs. That is why our country is not going to feel comfortable about entering a quarrel in which the Serbs and Russians are involved.’ Moreover, many British people, especially the elderly, were less than enthusiastic about entering any conflict on the same side as France. Lord Rosebery said crossly in 1904 when his Conservative colleagues welcomed the Entente: ‘You are all wrong. It means war with Germany in the end!’ Old Lady Londesborough, Wellington’s great-niece, told Osbert Sitwell in 1914: ‘It’s not the Germans but the French I’m frightened of!’

Such mistrust was reciprocal. A prime motive for President Poincaré’s determination to cling close to Russia as a military ally was his fear that Britain would not be there beside the French army on the day. While France and Russia had signed a bilateral treaty and were committed to support each other against attack, Britain was party to no such intimate pact, instead merely to expressions of good intentions, and army and naval staff talks. The first discussions of a possible expeditionary force to France took place in December 1908. Thereafter, a sub-committee meeting of the Committee of Imperial Defence on 23 August 1911, attended by Asquith and Churchill, addressed at length the contingency that Britain would be obliged to intervene in the event of a European war. One modern historian has suggested that this gathering ‘set the course for a military confrontation between Britain and Germany’. That seems a wild exaggeration: no one knew better than Asquith how reluctant might be his own party, and Parliament, to endorse participation in a European conflict.

The prime minister wrote sternly after the CID meeting that ‘all questions of policy have been & must be reserved for the decision of the Cabinet, & it is quite outside the function of military or naval officers to prejudge such questions’. The contemporary view of an exasperated senior British staff officer – Henry Wilson – was that ‘there was still no definite agreement with France to come in with her, nothing but a very grudging authorisation by our Gov to the General Staff on the theory of eventual co-operation’. This seems about right. The head of the Foreign Office, Sir Arthur Nicolson, reminded the foreign secretary in August 1914 that ‘you have over and over again promised M. Cambon [the French ambassador] that if Germany was the aggressor you would stand by France’. Grey replied in a manner that justified every French prejudice about Anglo-Saxon duplicity: ‘Yes, but he has nothing in writing.’

One recent chronicler of this period suggests that Asquith’s ministers and generals engaged in ‘enthusiastic planning for war’ following the 1911 meeting. Precautionary steps were certainly taken and plans made from that year onwards – for instance, earmarking Oxford University’s Examination Schools for use as a hospital. But it seems impossible justly to characterise these measures as enthusiastic. What was extraordinary about all British policy-making during the evolution of the Entente, reflected in attitudes struck at the 1911 CID meeting, was that the government acknowledged possible participation in a continental war, while proposing to contribute an absurdly small army to fulfilling such a purpose. Winston Churchill wrote later that as a young cavalry officer in the 1890s, he and his kind were so conscious of the insignificance of the British Army by comparison with its continental counterparts that ‘no Jingo lieutenant or fire-eating staff officer … even in his most sanguine moments, would have believed that our little Army would again be sent to Europe’. Fifteen years on, while Haldane had reformed the army’s structure, it remained tiny by continental standards. The 1913 Army Estimates made no mention whatsoever of a possible British ground role in a European conflict. The putative Expeditionary Force was given that designation because nobody knew where abroad it might be deployed – conceivably in India, Africa, the Middle East.

Here was a manifestation of a huge, historic British folly, repeated over many centuries including the twenty-first: the adoption of gesture strategy, committing small forces as an earnest of good intentions, heedless of their gross inadequacy for the military purpose at hand. Since 1907, Lord Northcliffe had been campaigning for conscription in his Daily Mail, to create a British army of a size to match the Empire’s greatness, but his crusade roused little support. The most grievous charge against the Asquith government, and explicitly against the foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey, is that they pursued policies which sensibly acknowledged a likelihood that Britain would be unable to remain neutral in the event of a general European war, because German hegemony on the continent would represent an intolerable outcome, but they declined to take appropriate practical measures to participate in such a struggle.

Grey is usually depicted as a gentle, civilised figure who lamented the coming of war in 1914 with unaccustomed eloquence, and wrote fine books on birdwatching and fly-fishing. A widower of fifty-two, his personal affairs were less arid than most of his contemporaries assumed. He conducted a lively love life, albeit much more discreetly than his colleague Lloyd George; Grey’s most recent biographer identifies two illegitimate children. Some of his contemporaries disdained him. Sir Eyre Crowe, a Foreign Office official who was admittedly prone to intemperance, called Grey ‘a futile, useless, weak fool’. The foreign secretary’s accustomed taciturnity caused Lloyd George, for one, to conclude that there was less to him than met the eye; that his economy with words reflected not strength of character, but debility. Grey spoke no foreign languages, and disliked Abroad. Although a highly intelligent man, he was also a narrow one, subject to violent mood swings.

Yet from 1905 to 1916 he ran Britain’s foreign policy as a private bailiwick. Lloyd George wrote: ‘During the eight years that preceded the war, the Cabinet devoted a ridiculously small percentage of its time to a consideration of foreign affairs.’ The Asquith government’s attitude to such matters, and to the other European powers, reflected an epic moral conceit, manifested in a condescension which especially upset the Germans. The French ambassador in London, Paul Cambon, observed sardonically that nothing gave greater pleasure to an Englishman than to discover that the interests of England matched those of mankind at large: ‘and where such a confluence does not exist, he does his best to create it’. At a dinner party where several members of the government were present, Lord Northcliffe asserted contemptuously that Britain’s newspaper editors were better informed about foreign affairs than any cabinet minister. The chancellor said of the foreign secretary: ‘Sir Edward Grey belongs to the class which, through heredity and tradition, expects to find a place on the magisterial bench to sit in judgement upon and above their fellow men, before they ever have any opportunity to make themselves acquainted with the tasks and trials of mankind.’

This was a characteristically nasty jibe, but Henry Wilson wrote after his own 1911 conversations with ministers about conflict scenarios that he was not impressed by ‘the grasp of the situation possessed by Grey and Haldane [then secretary for war], Grey being much the most ignorant & careless of the two, he not only had no idea of what war means but he struck me as not wanting to know … an ignorant, vain & weak man quite unfit to be the Foreign Minister of any country larger than Portugal’. Bernard Shaw hated Grey as ‘a Junker from his topmost hair to the tips of his toes … [with] a personal taste for mendacity’, a charge that related to a brutal British response to a 1906 Egyptian village dispute about officers’ pigeon-shooting rights.

If this was Shavian hyperbole, Grey’s secret diplomacy was certainly high-handed – as was all British conduct of foreign affairs in that era. In August 1904 Lord Percy, for the then-Conservative government, responded with patrician magnificence to a Commons question about the newly concluded Anglo-French Agreement: ‘Speculation and conjecture as to the existence or non-existence of secret clauses in international treaties is a public privilege, the maintenance of which depends upon official reticence.’ But Asquith wrote to Grey on 5 September 1911, warning about the perils of the dialogue the foreign secretary had authorised between the British and French general staffs: ‘My dear Grey, Conversations such as that between Gen. Joffre and Col. Fairholme seem to me rather dangerous; especially the part which refers to possible British assistance. The French ought not to be encouraged, in present circumstances, to make their plans on any assumptions of this kind. Yours always, H.H.A.’

Yet amid the prime minister’s huge difficulties at home, by default he allowed Grey almost a free hand abroad. The foreign secretary felt able to give assurances to France about likely British support in the event of war, without reference to the full cabinet or the House of Commons, in a manner incompatible with modern or even contemporary notions of democratic governance, and arguably unmatched until the far less defensible 1956 Anglo-French collusion to invade Egypt. Grey acted in secrecy because he knew he could secure no parliamentary mandate. During the July crisis, his personal willingness for Britain to fight beside France ran well ahead of that of most of his government colleagues or the public.

But it is hard to sustain the argument that Grey thus bears a large responsibility for war because of his failure either to speak frankly to the British people during the last years of peace, or explicitly to warn Berlin that Britain would not remain neutral. The Germans, in pursuing their course in 1914, had discounted British intervention and were unimpressed by the potential involvement of an army they despised. They were undeterred by the economic perils posed by Britain’s absolute dominance of the world’s merchant shipping and capability for imposing a blockade, because they intended to win quickly. It is unlikely that any course of action adopted by Asquith’s government could have averted a European war in 1914, though another foreign secretary might have adopted a different view about British participation.

The planned British Expeditionary Force was well-equipped for its size, but its inadequate mass reflected reluctance to spend big money on soldiers when the Royal Navy was absorbing a quarter of state expenditure. Henry Wilson, as director of military operations between 1910 and 1914, spoke of ‘our funny little army’, and said contemptuously that there was no military problem on the continent to which the appropriate British answer was a mere six divisions. But these were all the government would stand for, and its policy reflected popular sentiment. Sailors were what the British loved and cherished; by contrast both the regular and the Territorial forces were under-recruited, with enthusiasm for military service especially low among country-dwellers and the Welsh.

Wilson played a critical role in promoting a military relationship with France much closer than most British soldiers wanted, or the cabinet knew. A brilliantly fluent speaker, of erratic and often reckless convictions, he failed the military academy entrance exams five times. He was a long-time advocate of conscription, describing the part-time volunteers of the Territorial Force as ‘the best & most patriotic men in England because they are trying to do something’. In 1910, as commandant of the Staff College, he asserted the likelihood of a European war, and argued that Britain’s only prudent option was to ally itself with France against the Germans. A student ventured to disagree, saying that only ‘inconceivable stupidity on the part of statesmen’ could precipitate a general conflagration. This provoked Wilson’s derision: ‘Haw! Haw! Haw!!! Inconceivable stupidity is just what you’re going to get.’ Lord Esher wrote later that Wilson returned his pupils to their formations ‘with a sense of [war’s] cataclysmic imminence’. Wilson was described by the prime minister to Venetia Stanley as ‘that poisonous tho’ clever ruffian’, which seems about right. He was a shameless intriguer who meddled in everything, including offering support to the Ulster Protestants’ threatened rebellion. But it was almost entirely his doing that the British Army had plans prepared to send a force to the continent – what was known as the ‘W.F.’ or ‘With France’ scheme.

In 1911, Wilson secured Grey’s agreement that he should liaise with Britain’s railway companies about a schedule for moving units to the ports in the event of war, and appropriate timetables were drawn up. At the end of July that year, Lloyd George made a speech at the Mansion House, placing Britain firmly beside France in any dispute with Germany, and Wilson became the foremost British instrument in preparing to implement such a commitment. In 1913 he visited France seven times, and in conversations with Joffre and his staff promised 150,000 men for the thirteenth day after mobilisation, to concentrate between Arras–Saint-Quentin and Cambrai ready for operations. This was fanciful, but a senior British officer thus created a military convention. Wilson argued that, though a BEF would be small, its moral contribution could be critical. He grossly underestimated prospective German strength. But, though then still only a brigadier-general, he exercised an extraordinary influence towards persuading Asquith to contemplate, though emphatically not to confirm, a continental military commitment. This seems to reflect a sense of statesmanlike prudence, rather than any taste for warmongering.

Meanwhile, at 1914 Anglo-Russian naval staff talks the British discussed providing support for a Russian landing in Pomerania. This was the sort of war-gaming all armed forces indulge in, but when news of it was leaked to Berlin by a Russian diplomat, German paranoia about the Entente was intensified. Unfortunately, the Pomeranian scheme lacked plausibility. The Royal Navy’s preparation for Armageddon focused chiefly upon a blockade of which the diplomatic complications had been inadequately considered. Like all British war planning, it was limited in scale and incoherent in substance, lacking the political impetus to make it anything more. The continental nations expected to clash in arms sooner or later, which helped to ensure that they did so. The offshore islanders, however, thought it more plausible that they would soon be fighting each other.