Читать книгу Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914 - Max Hastings, Sir Max Hastings, Max Hastings - Страница 19

Now, all Europe waited to learn what Asquith’s government would do. In Vienna, Alexander Freud wrote disbelievingly to his brother Sigmund about the notion of Britain entering the war alongside Russia, arguing that ‘a civilised people will not take the side of barbarians’. Many Germans, too, found it hard to comprehend the threat of British belligerence in a struggle they deemed none of Albion’s business. Richard Stumpf, a sailor with the High Seas Fleet, expressed disgust that only weeks after a squadron of the Royal Navy had been received with every friendly honour at Kiel Regatta, its country should be considering entering hostilities: ‘one feels bitter to think that [British behaviour] is really driven by jealousy, that wretched commercial envy is to blame’. The Germans delayed until 3 August their declaration of war on France, in hopes of preserving British neutrality. The Kaiser continued to think this plausible, because he was absurdly overimpressed by a conversation some time earlier between his brother and King George V. Prince Heinrich came home from a visit to London reporting the monarch’s assurance that his country would stay out of any European conflict. Wilhelm thought Britain would be wise to do so in any event, since, as he cleverly observed, ‘dreadnoughts have no wheels’.

A visitor to France wrote: ‘no one who was not in Paris at the time can ever realize the intense anxiety of the French during those days of waiting for England to speak’. The Asquith government’s intentions remained profoundly uncertain. A Times editorial on 29 July praised the country’s unselfishness: ‘It is our settled interest and traditional policy to uphold the balance of power in Europe’; to the Entente with France ‘we shall remain faithful in the future, come what may’. The French, however, were merely exasperated by such pious expressions of good intentions. All they wanted to know was whether the British Army would fight beside them. And at that moment, the answer was that it would not.

Grey, Churchill, Haldane and Asquith wanted Britain to stand four-square with the other Entente partners: as early as 29 July, the foreign secretary privately threatened resignation if the government failed to do so. The First Lord of the Admiralty buffeted and cajoled his friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer to overcome Lloyd George’s stubborn reluctance to see Britain committed to a continental conflict. Churchill suggested, absurdly, that participation need not cost much: ‘Together we can carry a wide social policy … The naval war will be cheap.’ But as Russia mobilised, most British people resisted the notion that their country should emulate its example. The Daily News asserted firmly on 29 July: ‘the most effective work for peace that we can do is to make it clear that not a British life shall be sacrificed for the sake of Russian hegemony of the Slav world’. The Labour Party considered urging the unions to call a general strike if Asquith sought to join the struggle. ‘All Europe Arming’, ran the Daily Mail’s headline on 30 July, as if describing remote events, followed two days later by ‘Europe Drifting to Disaster’. At a dinner on 31 July, Russian ambassador Count Benckendorff told the writer Maurice Baring that both he and the French envoy were bleakly convinced that England would not fight.

The leftist Daily Chronicle on 31 July applauded the absence of popular jingoism: ‘Very welcome, and in comparison with what we experienced some while ago very remarkable, is the complete absence of anti-German sentiment. The last few years have done a great deal to reopen English eyes to our community of interest with the great people whose civilisation is in many ways the most akin in Europe to our own; and the bare idea of a ruinous conflict between us seems more unqualifiedly distasteful now than it has, perhaps, for a generation.’ That day the Manchester Guardian became the first British newspaper to suggest that the country might be obliged to fight if France was attacked. However, the newspaper discounted any possibility of a German invasion of Belgium, because such action would breach Europe’s 1839 treaty guaranteeing Belgian neutrality, to which Berlin as well as London was a signatory.

A soldier of the Royal Welch Fusiliers was awakened in his quarters in the Dorset town of Dorchester at 6 a.m. on that sunny Friday the 31st by the regimental band playing that jauntiest of ditties ‘I Do Like to be Beside the Seaside’. Yet many British people now recognised that conflict was lapping very close to their shores. Norman Macleod, an Admiralty private secretary, ‘felt rather apprehensive (1) because [I am] entirely ag[ain]st the idea of war (2) for fear of financial and economic crisis – people were buying in large stocks of food supplies. Bank rate up to 10% … I thought this trouble would restrain jingo feeling.’ A delegation from the City called on the Chancellor of the Exchequer to argue that ‘the only means of saving the world was for their own country to stay out of the conflict so that it might remain the great market, the economic arbiter of the world’. On 1 August the Daily News carried an article by its editor A.G. Gardiner, headed ‘Why We Must Not Fight’. The writer demanded: ‘Where in the wide world do our interests clash with Germany? Nowhere. With Russia we have potential conflicts over the whole of South-Eastern Europe and Southern Asia.’ After the cabinet’s meetings that Saturday, Paul Cambon told Grey – in French, through an interpreter, for he resolutely confined himself to his own language in official exchanges – that he flatly refused to communicate to Paris its resolution, ‘or rather, lack of it’.

Many British people believed that responsibility for the unfolding nightmare rested in Belgrade and St Petersburg. The Economist warned that ‘the provocation begun by Serbia has been continued by Russia. If a great war begins, Russian mobilization will be the proximate cause. And we fear that the poisonous articles of The Times have encouraged the Tsar to hope for British support.’ A Viennese letter-writer to The Economist, Josef Redlich, demanded: ‘Public opinion throughout the Austrian dominions, without distinction of party, has throbbed with the one question, How long Austria is to tolerate such a conception of neighbourliness as dominates Serbia?’ Nine distinguished Cambridge academics wrote to The Times: ‘We regard Germany as a nation leading the way in Arts and Sciences, and we have all learnt and are learning from German scholars. War upon her in the interests of Serbia and Russia will be a sin against civilisation. If by reason of honourable obligations we be unhappily involved in war, patriotism might still our mouths, but at this juncture we consider ourselves justified in protesting against being drawn into the struggle with a nation so near akin to our own.’

That night of 1 August, Grey dined with his private secretary at Brooks’s Club in St James’s Street; after leaving the table, for a while they played billiards together. Meanwhile the prime minister retired to bed nursing a grievance: the crisis had obliged him to cancel a country weekend in the company of Venetia Stanley, twenty-six-year-old object of his amorous, if unconsummated, obsession: ‘I can honestly say that I have never had a more bitter disappointment,’ Asquith wrote to her. He had some difficulty achieving unconsciousness, he said, ‘but really I didn’t sleep badly in that betwixt & between of sleeping & waking, thank God the vision of you kept floating about me and brought me rest and peace’. The British prime minister’s prolific and compulsively indiscreet letters to Stanley do little to enhance his reputation, but provide a priceless insight into his thinking.

The most prominent left-wing newspapers – the Daily Chronicle, Daily News and Manchester Guardian – remained vehemently opposed to British intervention, but the government’s attitude was contrarily hardening. On Sunday, 2 August, Asquith breakfasted with the German ambassador, and warned the emotional Lichnowsky of dire consequences should his nation’s army fulfil its threat to march into neutral Belgium. Crowds gathered in Downing Street and Whitehall, and for the first time many anxious faces were seen. Conservative leader Bonar Law wrote to the prime minister, promising his party’s support for a British declaration of war – a missive designed to hasten such an outcome.

The cabinet met, and learned from Grey that the French fleet had mobilised. France, he told them, now counted upon Britain to secure the Channel and the North Sea, having concentrated its own strength in the Mediterranean in conformity with a secret pact made at the 1912 Anglo-French naval talks. Some ministers were astonished, indeed confounded, to learn for the first time of this momentous commitment. But the cabinet – with varying degrees of reluctance – agreed to honour its terms, and to deploy warships to protect the northern French coast. The Germans promptly promised to stay out of the Channel if Britain remained neutral, but when Paul Cambon heard of the Royal Navy’s commitment, his spirits soared: ‘this was the decision I had been waiting for … A great country cannot half-make war. From the moment it decided to do so at sea, it was inescapably fated to do so also on land.’

The cabinet still rejected such a proposition, however. That evening of 2 August Sir John French, Chief of the Imperial General Staff until his March resignation over the ‘Curragh Mutiny’, made a bizarre telephone call: he sought guidance about the government’s military intentions not from ministers, but from Sir George Riddell, owner of the News of the World. The little field-marshal asked Riddell: if war came, would an expeditionary force be sent to France, and who would command it? Riddell referred his questions to the government. Lloyd George sent back word that French should present himself at Downing Street at 10 o’clock next morning. When he did so, he was told there was still no question of Britain sending an army to the continent.

Now Belgium became the focus of British attention. At 3 p.m. on 2 August, the Belgian vice-consul in Cologne arrived at the Brussels Foreign Ministry to report that since 6 o’clock that morning he had been watching trains leaving the Rhine city’s stations every three or four minutes, crammed with troops: they were heading not towards France, but instead for Aix-la-Chapelle and the Belgian border. When word followed that German troops had entered Luxembourg and were expected imminently to invade Belgium, the foreign minister M. Jean Davignon said emotionally to his colleague Baron Gaiffier: ‘Let us go to mass and offer prayers for our poor country: never has it stood in such need of them!’

King Albert had visited Berlin in November 1913, and received a dark warning from the Kaiser and Moltke: ‘small countries, such as Belgium, would be well-advised to rally to the side of the strong if they wished to retain their independence’. On 2 August the Belgian monarch was confronted with the meaning of this threat: Germany summarily demanded for its armies a right of passage through his country. The French were uncertain how the Brussels government would respond: they considered large parts of Belgium to be Germanophile. It was Albert’s personal decision, as commander-in-chief of the armed forces as well as monarch, to reject Berlin’s demand – with the overwhelming support of his people.

‘The response [to Berlin’s ultimatum] was very easy to draft,’ said Baron Gaiffier. ‘We only had to translate in plain language onto paper the feelings that moved each one of us. We were sure that we correctly interpreted the views of the whole country.’ Yet that Sunday evening, though the Belgian government knew the worst, an innocence still pervaded the mood in Brussels, especially among its humbler citizens. At the end of a radiant summer’s day, a host of walkers who had been promenading in the surrounding countryside strolled back into the city, many of them singing and clutching armfuls of flowers.

Britain was among the guarantors of Belgian neutrality under the 1839 European treaty, made soon after the country separated from Holland. Late on 2 August, the Germans warned the British government of their intention to march through King Albert’s country, with or without his consent. At 7 o’clock next morning, Belgium’s rejection of the ultimatum was conveyed to Berlin. When the news was published, Brussels burst forth with tricolour flags. Most Germans regarded this show of defiance with contemptuous pity. ‘Oh, the poor fools,’ the counsellor at the German legation kept repeating, as he gazed out on streets ablaze with national tokens. ‘Oh, the poor fools. Why don’t they get out of the way of the steamroller? We don’t want to hurt them, but if they stand in our way they will be ground into the dirt. Oh, the poor fools!’

It has sometimes been suggested that King Albert’s people would have fared better had the monarch bowed to the inevitable, and granted the German army free passage. But why should he, or the ruler of any sovereign nation, have done so? Throughout modern history, the protection of small states from aggression has often been considered by larger democracies to create a moral imperative. In 1914 force majeure constituted a more formidable influence upon events than international law. But the view adopted by most of the British people, as well as by their government, was that Germany’s invasion of Belgium constituted an affront to morality as well as to the European order. Ironically, once the Germans were committed to violate Belgian neutrality – as secretly they had been for a decade – they would have done better to go the whole hog and attack without an ultimatum. The time-lag between threat and assault enabled King Albert to rally his people and foreign opinion, and also to prepare to resist. The Belgians organised a formidably effective programme of railway-tunnel demolitions, which limited enemy train movements through their country for months to come.

Apologists for Germany’s behaviour argue now – as did the Berlin government then – that if the Kaiser’s army had not violated Belgian neutrality, the allies would swiftly have done so. The only plausible evidence for this claim is that the British debated a possible blockade of Antwerp as a conduit to Germany, a contingency overtaken by events. They repeatedly warned the French against infringing Belgian territory, and Joffre acquiesced. Germany had hitherto been the clear winner, at the expense of Russia, in the game of managing events so as to avoid seeming the immediate aggressor. Moltke forfeited this status, however, the moment his armies crossed the Belgian frontier. Bismarck had warned his countrymen against such action, precisely because he anticipated its impact on foreign opinion. The assault on Belgium came as a heaven-sent deliverance to those members of Asquith’s government already convinced that Britain must enter the European war. Without Belgium, the country would have joined the conflict divided, if at all. Moltke made a critical miscalculation: he was so convinced Britain would fight that he did not think the issue of Belgian neutrality would influence such an outcome one way or the other. He was quite wrong. The perceived martyrdom of King Albert and his people rallied to the cause of war millions of British people who had hitherto opposed it.

There were considerable ironies about Britain’s rush to embrace ‘gallant little Belgium’. During the Boer War, Albert’s country had adopted a passionately anti-British posture. Belgium’s deplorable record of inhumanity as the colonial power in the Congo was surpassed only by that of Germany in South-West Africa. British and French soldiers regarded the Belgian army with contempt, its officers as posturing dandies. Moreover, throughout the previous month the Belgian Catholic press had strongly supported Austria-Hungary’s right to take military action against Serbia. One paper, l’Express of Liège, denounced the Franco-Russian Entente as ‘the nightmare of all those who hold in their hearts a future of liberty, democracy and civilisation … [it is] an alliance against nature’.

No matter. In London a few ministers still clung to a belief that the mere passage of the German army should not constitute a casus belli. But most of the British people here at last identified moral certainty amid a sea of Balkan and European confusions. A telegram was brought to Grey, at dinner with Haldane on Sunday evening, 2 August, warning that German action against Belgium was imminent. The two men drove immediately to Downing Street, where they detached Asquith from some private guests. They told him the news and asked for authority to mobilise the army. Haldane volunteered to become temporary war minister, as Asquith would obviously be too busy to continue to fill that role. The prime minister assented to both proposals.

On the morning of Monday, 3 August, a British bank holiday, The Times declared: ‘Europe is to be the scene of the most terrible war that she has witnessed since the fall of the Roman Empire … The blame must fall mainly upon Germany. She could have stayed the plague had she chosen to speak in Vienna as she speaks when she is in earnest. She has not chosen to do so.’ Whitehall, bathed in brilliant sunshine, became impassable to traffic, so dense were the expectant crowds. At 11 a.m. the cabinet was told of King Albert’s decision that Belgium would resist, yet still ministers agonised. Two, Sir John Simon and Lord Beauchamp, said they would resign rather than be complicit in a British commitment to war. But Lloyd George, a pivotal figure, at last overcame his own doubts, and accepted the case for fighting. A disappointed fellow Liberal complained that the chancellor ‘lacked the courage of his convictions’. It is probably the case that Lloyd George was more strongly influenced by political fears of splitting the government and the Liberal Party – to the partisan advantage of the Conservatives – than by any fervour for the Entente’s cause. Asquith made a telephone call to Dover to halt the imminent departure for Egypt of Lord Kitchener, Britain’s most eminent soldier. The prime minister asked the field marshal to return to London. He was likely to be needed.

That morning George Lambert, the Admiralty’s Civil Lord, ignorant of the latest momentous developments, said to the Financial Secretary: ‘I wish the Cabinet would stop shilly-shallying and decide one thing or another.’ The other official who, in the words of an eyewitness ‘looked very pale and anxious, quite unlike Saturday’, responded: ‘I think they have decided.’ But the British people remained deeply divided. Even amid the news from Belgium, civil servant Norman Macleod wrote on 3 August: ‘Felt very unhappy about turn of events – danger of secret diplomatic engagements forcing people blindly into war – had it not been for financial reasons [I] would have resigned [my] post.’ Sir George Riddell, proprietor of the News of the World, told Lloyd George of his ‘feeling of intense exasperation … at the prospect of the government embarking on war’. Guy Fleetwood-Wilson protested in The Times’s correspondence column: ‘I write as a “man in the street”. Doubtless I am an abnormally dense one, because I cannot for the life of me see why this country should be dragged into this war.’ Serbia, he asserted, ‘is not worth the life of one single British Grenadier’.

But all over Britain military establishments were receiving the mobilisation order. Capt. Maurice Festing of the Royal Marines was exasperated to get the call while playing in a cricket match at the corps depot outside Deal: he had scored 66 not out and just fulfilled a cherished ambition by driving a ball through the window of the sergeants’ mess. The colonel of the Royal Welch Fusiliers was attending a dinner party when an orderly bearing a message was announced. The guests were almost certain of its contents, but etiquette prevailed: the messenger was kept waiting until dinner was finished and the ladies had retired, before being permitted to deliver the regiment’s mobilisation telegram.

Britain was the only major power to debate in parliament its entry into the war. At 3 o’clock that afternoon of 3 August, Grey, visibly strained and exhausted, rose in the Commons to make the government’s first formal statement about the crisis. He was no great orator, and such grace time as he might have used to prepare a speech was stolen by Prince Lichnowsky, who called at his office to make a futile final plea for Britain not to regard the passage of German troops through just one small corner of Belgium as a casus belli. It was the two men’s last meeting.

The floor of the House was packed, as were the Diplomatic and Strangers’ Galleries. Asquith was expressionless as Grey invited the House to consider the crisis from the viewpoint of ‘British interests, British honour and British obligation’. The foreign secretary told Members of the secret naval arrangement with France, and how the government had concluded that it could not leave the Germans free at will to bombard the French north coast, on Britain’s doorstep. Tories cheered while Liberals sat silent, many unpersuaded. Then Grey, having spoken unimpressively about British interests and trade routes, was suddenly roused to a passion he had never before displayed, in describing the violation of Belgian neutrality. ‘Could this country stand by and watch the direst crime that ever stained the face of history, and thus become participators in the sin?’

He reverted to a familiar but fundamental theme of British governments for centuries – the European balance of power. Britain, he said, must take a stand ‘against the unmeasured aggrandisement of any power whatsoever’. After seventy-five minutes, he concluded with a dramatic peroration and appeal: ‘I do not believe for a moment that, at the end of this war, even if we stand aside, we should be able to undo what had happened … to prevent the whole of the West of Europe opposite us from falling under the domination of a single power … and we should, I believe, sacrifice our respect and good name and reputation before the world and should not escape the most serious and grave consequences.’

This last statement has become, for the past century, the focus of every argument about whether Britain should, or should not, have entered the First World War. The Commons, that afternoon, received his words with overwhelming acclaim. It was because Grey, through his twenty-nine years as an MP, had become known as a man of compulsive taciturnity, that his eloquence on this occasion achieved its remarkable effect. Simon and Beauchamp, having heard him, withdrew their resignations. The mood of the Liberal Party, instinctively pacifistic, underwent a dramatic shift towards war – though Parliament was never invited to vote on the final step.

‘What happens now?’ Churchill demanded as he and Grey left the House together. An ultimatum would be sent to Berlin, said the foreign secretary, demanding German withdrawal from Belgium within twenty-four hours. Sir Francis Bertie wrote: ‘Grey’s speech … was splendid and has given much more satisfaction [in Paris] than I expected. Germany was determined to have war and tried all she knew to lure us into abstention from the struggle.’ Jules Cambon said after the conflict: ‘We were extraordinarily fortunate that Britain’s Liberal Party was then in government. Had it been in opposition, it would perhaps have delayed British intervention.’ In this he was probably correct; it is by no means certain that if a Conservative government had been eager to fight, the Liberals would have fallen into step. Their contrarian instinct might have proved too strong, as it did for two minor cabinet members – Lord Morley and John Burns – who quit.

That night, even after all the dramas of the day, uncertainty persisted about what practical military measures Britain would adopt. The foreign secretary displayed awesome naïveté, and severely injured his reputation before posterity, when he told the Commons that, since Britain was a naval power, by entering the war ‘we shall suffer but little more than we shall suffer if we stand aside’. Because such vestigial delusions persisted in government, no minister would authorise immediate dispatch of an army to the continent. This prevarication exasperated soldiers who knew that hours mattered in giving orders for a British Expeditionary Force to muster and sail before the German juggernaut swept into Belgium and France.

Coudourier de Chassigne, London correspondent of Le Figaro, rang Tom Clarke, news editor of the Daily Mail, in pursuit of tidings. ‘Are you going to go to the help of France?’ he demanded urgently. ‘I know the whole British nation is with us, but this rotten “wait and see” government of yours, when will they move? Soon it will be too late. It is terrible … Cannot Lord Northcliffe and the Daily Mail do something?’ An old Frenchman peered at a poster outside the local newspaper office in Nice and declared disgustedly: ‘L’Angleterre se dégage! C’est ignoble.’ Early on that evening of 3 August, the German ambassador in Paris called upon René Viviani and read aloud to him a declaration of war, the moral force of which was blunted by its deceits. The document claimed that French aircraft had bombed Nuremberg and Karlsruhe, and overflown Belgium in breach of its neutrality. Viviani denied the charges, then the two men silently bowed and parted. Gen. Joffre took a formal farewell of Poincaré before leaving for his headquarters, from which, through the months that followed, he would exercise a power more absolute than that of any other national commander.

Just after 8 o’clock on the morning of 4 August, the first German troops crossed the Belgian border at Gemmenich, thirty miles from Liège. Belgian gendarmes made the futile but significant gesture of firing on them before taking to their heels. At noon, King Albert formally appealed for aid to Britain, as a guarantor of Belgian neutrality. Then, dressed in field uniform and mounted on a charger, he rode at the head of a little procession of carriages, one of which held his wife and children, to the parliament building in Brussels. Once dismounted and in the chamber, he created an inimitable moment of theatre by demanding of members: ‘Gentlemen, are you unalterably decided to maintain intact the sacred gifts of our fore-fathers?’ As one man they rose, shouting, ‘Oui! Oui! Oui!’

In Berlin the Kaiser summoned the Reichstag deputies to his palace. He received them in helmet and full regimentals, flanked by Bethmann in the uniform of the Dragoon Guards. He said nothing of Belgium, but instead declared the war to have been provoked by Serbia with the support of Russia: ‘We draw the sword with a clear conscience and clean hands.’ His speech prompted wild applause. By contrast, when Bethmann later addressed the Reichstag, he displayed a frankness that Tirpitz afterwards branded as madness: ‘Our invasion of Belgium is contrary to international law, but this wrong – I speak openly – that we are committing – we will make right as soon as our military objective has been attained.’ Social democrats applauded as enthusiastically as did conservatives.

Asquith and Grey found themselves cheered by crowds in Whitehall as they hastened to and from the Commons on 4 August. The prime minister wrote to Venetia Stanley: ‘Winston, who has got on all his war-paint, is longing for a sea-fight in the early hours of tomorrow morning … The whole thing fills me with sadness.’ That afternoon, King George V’s proclamation of mobilisation was read to the Commons, following which Asquith rehearsed to the House the British ultimatum to Germany, which required an answer by midnight – 11 p.m. London time. The final part of the document was finally dispatched only at 7 p.m., after Grey learned that the Kaiser’s forces had entered Belgian territory. When Bethmann received it from the British ambassador, he claimed that ‘my blood boiled at this hypocritical harping on Belgium which was not the thing that had driven England into war’. The chancellor delivered a harangue to Sir Edward Goschen, pinning upon Britain blame for war and all that followed, and concluding: ‘all for just a word – “neutrality” – just for a scrap of paper’. The phrase passed into history. A host of Germans professed to regard British intervention as a betrayal.

In London as darkness fell, the cabinet met once more, to be told that Germany already considered itself at war with Britain. After further debate, they sat together in the Downing Street council room, waiting upon the clock chimes. As soon as Big Ben struck the first note of eleven, the government knew the worst. Twenty minutes later, the War Telegram was dispatched in plain language to the British Army. Norman Macleod perceived during the preceding twenty-hours ‘an extraordinary change in public feeling – up till Monday at any rate strong anti-war party – “Neutrality League” forward – but German refusal to respect neutrality of Belgium absolutely destroyed it’. He noted ‘another remarkable change. On Fri & Sat there had been panic in City & rush for food supplies. [By Monday] there was a feeling of complete confidence in the Govt – I have never seen anything like it, certainly not at the time of the Boer War.’

In the Royal Marine mess at Chatham on the night of 4 August a waiter handed a telegram to the corps commandant, who read it aloud: ‘Commence hostilities against Germany at once.’ This was received with applause by the assembled officers, many of whom would be dead within a year. Britain’s dominions and colonies, led by India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, were not consulted in any way about the decision to fight: their governors-general merely issued proclamations on their own authority, declaring them to be in a state of war with Germany, alongside the Mother Country. Only a few old Boers’ voices were raised in demurral. One of them, Jacobus Deventer, summoned his commando then telegraphed his former general, Louis Botha, now South Africa’s prime minister: ‘All my burghers armed, mounted and ready. Whom do we fight – the British or the Germans?’ He eventually accepted an order to join a force mustering to invade German South-West Africa, though some others mounted a short-lived anti-British rebellion.

Even many intelligent and informed Europeans failed to grasp the gravity of the course of action to which they had committed themselves. This is emphasised by the remarks of British leaders who expressed gratitude that war had reprieved the country from a bloody showdown in Ireland. In Grey’s Commons speech of 3 August he made an almost frivolous aside: ‘One thing I would say: the one bright spot in the very dreadful situation is Ireland.’ Sir William Birdwood, secretary to the government of India, wrote: ‘What a real piece of luck this war has been as regards Ireland – just averted a Civil War and when it is over we may all be tired of fighting.’

Ramsay MacDonald, who resigned the Labour Party leadership when his followers – like their German counterparts – decided to vote in favour of war credits, won some cheers when he told the Commons that Britain should have remained neutral, though when he went on to assert that ‘in the deepest parts of our hearts we believe that [would have been] right, and that alone was consistent with the honour of this country and the traditions of the party now in office’, he was received with a derisive laughter that sensitive witnesses thought unseemly. Mr Ponsonby, MP for Stirling Burghs, said that ‘we were on the eve of a great war and he hated to see people embarking on it with a light heart’, which prompted some assenting voices. Another MP, Mr Wedgwood, said that this was not going to be ‘one of the dear old wars of the 18th century … but a matter of sustaining the civilisation which it had taken centuries to bring about’. Perhaps the wisest comment, though at the time it received scant applause, also came from Ramsay MacDonald: ‘no war is at first unpopular’.

In the last days of the crisis, many of the principals – the greatest men of their nations, the most powerful people in the world – experienced moments when they shrank in size. They glimpsed the horror of the consequences of the courses they were pursuing, and looked back over their shoulders in yearning. This was true of the Kaiser, Bethmann and Tsar Nicholas; but not, apparently, of any of the Austrians, or Moltke, or Sazonov. The French were astonishingly fatalistic about the need to support Russia, if only because they were convinced – almost certainly correctly – that the German army would anyway fall upon themselves as a partner in the Entente. The British, save a few wild men such as Churchill, were least eager for war, but identified in the violation of Belgium a justification for joining the struggle. Because Britain was a Great Power, they believed that when great issues were at stake, it must be seen to play a great part.

In the last days of peace Vernon Kell, director of the British security service MI5, stayed at his office in Watergate House around the clock, organising arrests of known German agents. Although his infant organisation boasted a staff of only seventeen, he had forged effective links with county chief constables: between 3 and 16 August, twenty-two arrests were made. Some spies escaped in the fashion of Walter Rimann, a language teacher in Hull who caught the Zeebrugge ferry. It is thought that a few others remained undetected, but if so they made little contribution to Germany’s war effort.

Most of those caught had been identified through the interception of their correspondence with Germany’s intelligence service, the Nachrichten-Abteilung, under Home Office warrant – a system fostered by Winston Churchill. The Kaiser raged about the incompetence of his spy chiefs. Gustav Steinhauer, ringmaster of the British network, recorded Wilhelm demanding: ‘Am I surrounded by dolts? Who is responsible?’ German military intelligence had focused its efforts exclusively on France, leaving the navy to handle Britain. Steinhauer, who often travelled there in the pre-war period, had recruited agents chiefly by writing unsolicited letters to German expatriates; his most active ‘postman’ was Karl Ernst, a Pentonville barber, who approached seaman customers for information. German wartime intelligence in Britain never recovered from the 1914 round-up: as late as 21 August, Berlin was unaware that a British Expeditionary Force had been convoyed to France.

Meanwhile, Bernard Shaw wired his German translator: ‘YOU AND I AT WAR CAN ABSURDITY GO NO FURTHER. MY FRIENDLIEST WISHES GO WITH YOU UNDER ALL CIRCUMSTANCES.’ Lord Northcliffe said to his erstwhile Vienna correspondent Wickham Steed, ‘Well it’s come!’ Steed answered, ‘Yes, thank God!’ Memories of Queen Victoria caused many Russians to refer to England as ‘Anglichanka’ – the Englishwoman. A peasant said in August 1914 that ‘he was glad that the Anglichanka was with Russia, because first she was clever and would help; secondly, if things went badly with Russia, she was good and would help; thirdly, if it came to making peace, she was determined and would not give way’.

Fran Šuklje was a well-known Slovenian sage, sixty-five in 1914. On 4 August this unwilling subject of the Hapsburgs was sitting under the trees in the famous Stembur garden in Kandija when he read the news of Britain’s declaration of war. He told the little crowd of disciples around him: ‘Now you will give thanks to God if this war is over in three years.’ His words quickly spread among his fellow citizens, ‘whose unanimous judgement was that I had gone mad. They assume an outcome in three weeks, three months at the most.’ In Berlin, Frederick Wiles of the Daily Mail described scenes at the British embassy that day: ‘the realisation of what was now upon them turned the Germans into infuriated barbarians … Stones, keys, sticks, knives, umbrellas – any and everything which could be thrown were hurtling through the smashed windows.’

At an English country tennis party, the writer Jerome K. Jerome expressed ‘relief and thankfulness … I was so afraid Grey would climb down at the last moment … It was Asquith I was doubtful of. I didn’t think the old man had the grit … Thank God, we shan’t read “Made in Germany” for some little time to come.’ On the night of 4 August, as mindless crowds roared and sang outside Buckingham Palace, Maurice Baring watched a drunken man in evening dress harangue passers-by from the roof of a taxi in Trafalgar Square.

Even after war was declared, impassioned dissenters remained. On 5 August C.P. Scott argued in the Manchester Guardian: ‘By some hidden contract England has been technically committed behind her back to the ruinous madness of a share in the violent gamble of a war between two militarist leagues … It will be a war in which we risk everything of which we are proud, and in which we stand to gain nothing … Some day we will regret it.’ Many British people in the twenty-first century believe that Scott was right, chiefly in the light of the horror of the experience that followed, but also because they are unpersuaded that it was necessary to resist in arms the Kaiser’s Germany at such cost.

Would any of the Entente Powers have acted differently had they known of the profound complicity of the Serbian army, though not the government, in the murder of Franz Ferdinand? Almost certainly not, because this was not why the Austrians and Germans acted, or their opponents reacted. The Russians simply considered the extinction of a small Slav state as an excessive and indeed intolerable punishment for the crime of Princip, and for that matter Apis. Unless France had swiftly declared its neutrality and surrendered its frontier fortresses as Germany demanded, its alliance with Russia would have caused Moltke to attack in the West. The British were entirely unmoved by Serbia’s impending fate, and acted only in response to the German violation of Belgian neutrality and the threat to France. The various participants in what would soon become the Great War had very different motives for belligerence, and objectives with little in common. Three conflicts – that in the Balkans over East European issues, the continental struggle to determine whether German dominance should prevail, and the German challenge to British global naval mastery – accomplished a metamorphosis into a single over-arching one. Other issues, mostly involving land grabs, would become overlaid when other nations – notably Japan, Turkey and Italy – joined the struggle.

Many people in Britain have argued through the past century that the price of participation in the war was so appalling that no purpose could conceivably justify it; more than a few blame Sir Edward Grey for willing Britain’s involvement. But, granted Germany’s determination to dominate Europe and the likely consequences of such hegemony for Britain, would the foreign secretary have acted responsibly if he had taken no steps designed to avert such an outcome?

Lloyd George in his memoirs advanced a further popular argument against the conflict, laying blame upon the soldiers he hated: ‘Had it not been for the professional zeal and haste with which the military staffs set in motion the plans which had already been agreed between them, the negotiations between the governments, which at that time had hardly begun, might well have continued, and war could, and probably would, have been averted.’ This was nonsense. What happened was not ‘war by accident’, but war by ill-conceived Austrian design, with German support.

Today, as in 1914, any judgement about the necessity for British entry must be influenced by an assessment of the character of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s empire. It seems frivolous to suggest, as do a few modern sensationalists, that a German victory would merely have created, half a century earlier, an entity resembling the European Union. Even if the Kaiser’s regime cannot be equated with that of the Nazis, its policies could scarcely be characterised as enlightened. Dominance was its purpose, achieved by peaceful means if possible, but by war if necessary. The Germans’ paranoia caused them to interpret as a hostile act any attempt to check or question their international assertiveness. Moreover, throughout the July crisis they, like the Austrians, consistently lied about their intentions and actions. By contrast, whatever the shortcomings of British conduct, the Asquith government told the truth as it saw this, to both its allies and its prospective foes.

The Kaiserreich’s record abroad was inhumane even by contemporary standards. Isabel Hull has written of ‘a juggernaut of military extremism’, unchecked by any effective civilian authority. Berlin mandated in advance and applauded after the event the 1904–07 genocide of the Herero and Namaqua peoples of German South-West Africa, an enormity far beyond the scope of any British colonial misdeed. German behaviour during the 1914 invasion of Belgium and France, including large-scale massacres of civilians endorsed at the highest level, cannot be compared with what took place in the Second World War, because there was no genocidal intent, but it conveyed a profoundly disturbing image of the character of the regime that aspired to rule Europe.

It seems mistaken to suppose that neutrality in 1914 would have yielded a happy outcome for the British Empire. The authoritarian and acquisitive instincts of Germany’s leadership would scarcely have been moderated by triumph on the battlefield. The Kaiser’s regime did not enter the war with a grand plan for world domination, but its leaders were in no doubt that they required huge booty as a reward for the victory they anticipated. Bethmann Hollweg drafted a personal list of demands on 9 September 1914, when Berlin saw victory within its grasp. ‘The aim of the war,’ he wrote, ‘is to provide us with [security] guarantees, from east to west, for the foreseeable future, through the enfeeblement of our adversaries.’

France was to cede to Germany the Briey iron deposits; Belfort; a coastal strip from Dunkirk to Boulogne; the western slope of the Vosges mountains. Her strategic fortresses were to be demolished. Just as after 1870, cash reparations would be exacted sufficient to ensure that ‘France is incapable of spending considerable sums on armaments for the next eighteen to twenty years’. Elsewhere, Luxembourg would be annexed outright; Belgium and Holland transformed into vassal states; Russia’s borders drastically shrunken; a vast colonial empire created in central Africa; a German economic union extending from Scandinavia to Turkey.

Georges-Henri Soutou has convincingly argued that Bethmann was never as serious about his territorial demands – he strove to dissuade the Kaiser from insisting upon annexation of Belgium – as about the intention to impose a customs union on the continent. But whatever means Berlin proposed to employ, the purpose was not in doubt; in Soutou’s words, ‘it is well understood that customs union must thereby make possible Germany’s control of Europe’. While other German leaders advanced different shopping lists, all took it for granted that the war could not end without their nation receiving what they deemed ‘appropriate’ territorial and financial rewards. Having vanquished its only important continental rivals, it is implausible that Germany would thereafter have been content to make a generous accommodation with a neutral Great Britain, or to acquiesce in its global naval mastery.

The Asquith government is often accused of opacity in European affairs, both strategic – between 1906 and 1914 – and tactical – during the July crisis. While Britain made itself a party to the Triple Entente, uncertainty persisted in all the capitals of Europe, London included, about whether it would join a European war. Yet the British had little power to control events. Though the Germans preferred not to fight them, they were seen in Berlin as marginal in a clash of continental forces. Only if Britain had adopted the domestically unacceptable course of creating a large standing army might it have been capable of playing an effective deterrent role in 1914. The most grievous British error was to suppose the nation could maintain its cherished balance of power on the continent without a credible mass of soldiers to support its diplomacy. But failure to create a conscript army can scarcely be characterised as warmongering.

The argument that Britain should have declared in advance of the 1914 crisis its determination to participate in any Russo-French clash with Germany ignores the nature of democracies, and the requirements of prudent statesmanship. No government could have commanded the support of Parliament for an open-ended commitment to join a European conflict without heed to the circumstances in which this evolved, and there is no reason why it should have done so. If in July 1914 Asquith had offered France and Russia unconditional support, he would have been guilty of the very recklessness – the issue of a ‘blank cheque’ – for which Germany has been justly condemned in its conduct towards Austria-Hungary, and to a lesser degree France also in its commitment to Russia.

Britain cherished the status quo, and was committed to peace, because it still appeared to be global top dog. The Asquith government harboured a sensible unease about Russia and the follies of which its government was capable; it had no desire to promote French bellicosity. Thus its only rational course in the decade preceding the war, and indeed in July 1914, was to offer its allies goodwill and provisional support, the scope and nature of which must depend on events and exact circumstances. The failure of this policy is self-evident: Britain’s tentative approach to European commitments, and especially to the Entente, sufficed to involve it in history’s greatest conflict, but not to prevent such a disaster. It nonetheless seems hard to conceive of any alternative pre-war British diplomatic path which would have commanded domestic political support, and persuaded Germany that the risk of war was unacceptable.

Those who claim that a general conflict was avoidable even after Austria declared war on Serbia, and who hold Russia responsible for what followed, imply that Austria and its German guarantor should have been allowed to have their way at gunpoint in the Balkans, in Belgium and indeed across Europe. Only the German ultimatum to Belgium enabled the war party in the British cabinet to obtain a mandate. It is sometimes said that this was a mere pretext – a figleaf – since Grey, Churchill and several of their colleagues were bent upon belligerence even before the issue of Belgium emerged. But it remains doubtful that they could have carried their point but for the violation of Belgian neutrality. It does not seem ignoble or foolish that much of the Commons and the British people seized upon this as a just casus belli, whereas they recoiled from going to war to support Serbia, or for that matter merely to fulfil Britain’s ill-defined commitment to the Triple Entente. Even if Germany is acquitted of pursuing a design for general European war in 1914, it still seems deserving of most blame, because it had power to prevent this and did not exercise it.

On 3 August the Kaiser told his orderlies to lay out field-grey uniform, topboots, brown gloves, and a helmet without plumes for his address to the Reichstag on the morrow. Then he decided that a more magnificent show was appropriate. He chose to appear in full dress, accompanied by every available senior officer in Berlin, adorned with their medals and sashes. In all his splendour as Germany’s Supreme Warlord, with much emotion he told the assembled members next day: ‘From the bottom of my heart I thank you for your expressions of love and fidelity. In the struggle now ahead of us, I see no more parties in my Volk’ – ‘Ich kenne keine Parteien mehr, ich kenne nur Deutsche’ – ‘among us there are only Germans’. Wilhelm was now to experience a few joyous weeks of the military glory he had always dreamed of. Thereafter, however, the shades would close in upon him – and upon Europe.