Why should I follow your fighting line
For a matter that’s no concern of mine? …
I shall be asked to a general scrap
All over the European map,
Dragged into somebody else’s war
For that’s what a double entente is for.
The average patriot had already used up his normal supply of excitement and indignation in the current Irish crisis. The “Curragh Mutiny” was England’s Mme. Caillaux. As a result of the Home Rule Bill, Ulster was threatening armed rebellion against autonomy for Ireland and English troops stationed at the Curragh had refused to take up arms against Ulster loyalists. General Gough, the Curragh commander, had resigned with all his officers, whereupon Sir John French, Chief of General Staff, resigned, whereupon Colonel John Seely, Haldane’s successor as Secretary of War, resigned. The army seethed, uproar and schism ruled the country, and a Palace Conference of party leaders with the King met in vain. Lloyd George talked ominously of the “gravest issue raised in this country since the days of the Stuarts,” the words “civil war” and “rebellion” were mentioned, and a German arms firm hopefully ran a cargo of 40,000 rifles and a million cartridges into Ulster. In the meantime there was no Secretary of War, the office being left to Prime Minister Asquith, who had little time and less inclination for it.
Asquith had, however, a particularly active First Lord of the Admiralty. When he smelled battle afar off, Winston Churchill resembled the war horse in Job who turned not back from the sword but “paweth in the valley and saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha.” He was the only British minister to have a perfectly clear conviction of what Britain should do and to act upon it without hesitation. On July 26, the day Austria rejected Serbia’s reply and ten days before his own government made up its mind, Churchill issued a crucial order.
On July 26 the British fleet was completing, unconnected with the crisis, a test mobilization and maneuvers with full crews at war strength. At seven o’clock next morning the squadrons were due to disperse, some to various exercises on the high seas, some to home ports where parts of their crews would be discharged back into training schools, some to dock for repairs. That Sunday, July 26, the First Lord remembered later was “a very beautiful day.” When he learned the news from Austria he made up his mind to make sure “that the diplomatic situation did not get ahead of the naval situation and that the Grand Fleet should be in its War Station before Germany could know whether or not we should be in the war and therefore if possible before we had decided ourselves.” The italics are his own. After consultation with the First Sea Lord, Prince Louis of Battenberg, he gave orders to the fleet not to disperse.
He then informed Grey what he had done and with Grey’s assent released the Admiralty order to the newspapers in the hope that the news might have “a sobering effect” on Berlin and Vienna.
Holding the fleet together was not enough; it must be got, as Churchill expressed it in capitals, to its “War Station.” The primary duty of a fleet, as Admiral Mahan, the Clausewitz of naval warfare, had decreed, was to remain “a fleet in being.” In the event of war the British fleet, upon which an island nation depended for its life, had to establish and maintain mastery of the ocean trade routes; it had to protect the British Isles from invasion; it had to protect the Channel and the French coasts in fulfillment of the pact with France; it had to keep concentrated in sufficient strength to win any engagement if the German fleet sought battle; and above all it had to guard itself against that new and menacing weapon of unknown potential, the torpedo. The fear of a sudden, undeclared torpedo attack haunted the Admiralty.
On July 28 Churchill gave orders for the fleet to sail to its war base at Scapa Flow, far to the north at the tip of mist-shrouded Orkney in the North Sea. It steamed out of Portland on the 29th, and by nightfall eighteen miles of warships had passed northward through the Straits of Dover headed not so much for some rendezvous with glory as for a rendezvous with discretion. “A surprise torpedo attack” wrote the First Lord, “was at any rate one nightmare gone forever.”
Having prepared the fleet for action, Churchill turned his abounding energy and sense of urgency upon preparing the country. He persuaded Asquith on July 29 to authorize the Warning Telegram which was the arranged signal sent by War Office and Admiralty to initiate the Precautionary Period. While short of the Kriegesgefahr or the French State of Siege which established martial law, the Precautionary Period has been described as a device “invented by a genius … which permitted certain measures to be taken on the ipse dixit of the Secretary of War without reference to the Cabinet … when time was the only thing that mattered.”
Time pressed on the restless Churchill who, expecting the Liberal government to break apart, went off to make overtures to his old party, the Tories. Coalition was not in the least to the taste of the Prime Minister who was bent on keeping his government united. Lord Morley at seventy-six was expected by no one to stay with the government in the event of war. Not Morley but the far more vigorous Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd George, was the key figure whom the government could not afford to lose, both for his proved ability in office and his influence upon the electorate. Shrewd, ambitious, and possessed of a spellbinding Welsh eloquence, Lloyd George leaned to the peace group but might jump either way. He had suffered recent setbacks in public popularity; he saw a new rival for party leadership arising in the individual whom Lord Morley called “that splendid condottierre at the Admiralty”; and he might, some of his colleagues thought, see political advantage in “playing the peace-card” against Churchill. He was altogether an uncertain and dangerous quantity.
Asquith, who had no intention of leading a divided country into war, continued to wait with exasperating patience for events which might convince the peace group. The question of the hour, he recorded in his passionless way in his diary for July 31, was, “Are we to go in or stand aside. Of course everybody longs to stand aside.” In a less passive attitude, Grey, during the Cabinet of July 31 almost reached the point-blank. He said Germany’s policy was that of a “European aggressor as bad as Napoleon” (a name that for England had only one meaning) and told the Cabinet that the time had come when a decision whether to support the Entente or preserve neutrality could no longer be deferred. He said that if it chose neutrality he was not the man to carry out such a policy. His implied threat to resign echoed as if it had been spoken.
“The Cabinet seemed to heave a sort of sigh,” wrote one of them, and sat for several moments in “breathless silence.” Its members looked at one another, suddenly realizing that their continued existence as a government was now in doubt. They adjourned without reaching a decision.
That Friday, eve of the August Bank Holiday weekend, the Stock Exchange closed down at 10:00 A.M. in a wave of financial panic that had started in New York when Austria declared war on Serbia and which was closing Exchanges all over Europe. The City trembled, prophesying doom and the collapse of foreign exchange. Bankers and businessmen, according to Lloyd George, were “aghast” at the idea of war which would “break down the whole system of credit with London at its center.” The Governor of the Bank of England called on Saturday to inform Lloyd George that the City was “totally opposed to our intervening” in a war.
That same Friday the Tory leaders were being rounded up and called back to London from country houses to confer on the crisis. Dashing from one to the other, pleading, exhorting, expounding Britain’s shame if the shilly-shallying Liberals held back now, was Henry Wilson, the heart, soul, spirit, backbone, and legs of the Anglo-French military “conversations.” The agreed euphemism for the joint plans of the General Staffs was “conversations.” The formula of “no commitment” which Haldane had first established, which had raised misgivings in Campbell-Bannerman, which Lord Esher had rejected, and which Grey had embodied in the 1912 letter to Cambon still represented the official position, even if it did not make sense.
It made very little. If, as Clausewitz justly said, war
is a continuation of national policy, so also are war plans. The Anglo-French war plans, worked out in detail over a period of nine years, were not a game, or an exercise in fantasy or a paper practice to keep military minds out of other mischief. They were a continuation of policy or they were nothing. They were no different from France’s arrangements with Russia or Germany’s with Austria except for the final legal fiction that they did not “commit” Britain to action. Members of the government and Parliament who disliked the policy simply shut their eyes and mesmerized themselves into believing the fiction.
M. Cambon, visiting Opposition leaders after his painful interview with Grey, now dropped diplomatic tact altogether. “All our plans are arranged in common. Our General Staffs have consulted. You have seen all our schemes and preparations. Look at our fleet! Our whole fleet is in the Mediterranean in consequence of our arrangements with you and our coasts are open to the enemy. You have laid us wide open!” He told them that if England did not come in France would never forgive her, and ended with a bitter cry, “Et l’honneur? Est-ce-que l’Angleterre comprend ce que c’est l’honneur?”
Honor wears different coats to different eyes, and Grey knew it would have to wear a Belgian coat before the peace group could be persuaded to see it. That same afternoon he dispatched two telegrams asking the French and German governments for a formal assurance that they were prepared to respect Belgian neutrality “so long as no other power violates it.” Within an hour of receiving the telegram in the late evening of July 31, France replied in the affirmative. No reply was received from Germany.
Next day, August 1, the matter was put before the Cabinet. Lloyd George traced with his finger on a map what he thought would be the German route through Belgium, just across the near corner, on the shortest straight line to Paris; it would only, he said, be a “little violation.” When Churchill asked for authority to mobilize the fleet, that is, call up all the naval reserves, the Cabinet, after a “sharp discussion,” refused. When Grey asked for authority to implement the promises made to the French Navy, Lord Morley, John Burns, Sir John Simon, and Lewis Harcourt proposed to resign. Outside the Cabinet, rumors were swirling of the last-minute wrestlings of Kaiser and Czar and of the German ultimatums. Grey left the room to speak to—and be misunderstood by—Lichnowsky on the telephone, and unwittingly to be the cause of havoc in the heart of General Moltke. He also saw Cambon, and told him “France must take her own decision at this moment without reckoning on an assistance we are not now in a position to give.” He returned to the Cabinet while Cambon, white and shaking, sank into a chair in the room of his old friend Sir Arthur Nicolson, the Permanent Under-Secretary. “Ils vont nous lâcher” (They are going to desert us), he said. To the editor of The Times who asked him what he was going to do, he replied, “I am going to wait to learn if the word ‘honor’ should be erased from the English dictionary.”
In the Cabinet no one wanted to burn his bridges. Resignations were bruited, not yet offered. Asquith continued to sit tight, say little, and await developments as that day of crossed wires and complicated frenzy drew to a close. That evening Moltke was refusing to go east, Lieutenant Feldmann’s company was seizing Trois Vierges in Luxembourg, Messimy over the telephone was reconfirming the ten-kilometer withdrawal, and at the Admiralty the First Lord was entertaining friends from the Opposition, among them the future Lords Beaverbrook and Birkenhead. To keep occupied while waiting out the tension, they played bridge after dinner. During the game a messenger brought in a red dispatch box—it happened to be one of the largest size. Taking a key from his pocket, Churchill opened it, took out the single sheet of paper it contained, and read the single line on the paper: “Germany has declared war on Russia.” He informed the company, changed out of his dinner jacket, and “went straight out like a man going to a well-accustomed job.”
Churchill walked across the Horse Guards Parade to Downing Street, entered by the garden gate, and found the Prime Minister upstairs with Grey, Haldane, now Lord Chancellor, and Lord Crewe, Secretary for India. He told them he intended “instantly to mobilize the fleet notwithstanding the Cabinet decision.” Asquith said nothing but appeared, Churchill thought, “quite content.” Grey, accompanying Churchill on his way out, said to him, “I have just done a very important thing. I have told Cambon that we shall not allow the German fleet to come into the Channel.” Or that is what Churchill, experiencing the perils of verbal intercourse with Grey, understood him to say. It meant that the fleet was now committed. Whether Grey said he had given the promise or whether he said, as scholars have since decided, that he was going to give it the next day, is not really relevant, for whichever it was it merely confirmed Churchill in a decision already taken. He returned to the Admiralty and “gave forthwith the order to mobilize.”
Both his order and Grey’s promise to make good the naval agreement with France were contrary to majority Cabinet sentiment. On the next day the Cabinet would have to ratify these acts or break apart, and by that time Grey expected a “development” to come out of Belgium. Like the French, he felt that he could count on Germany to provide it.
8
Ultimatum in Brussels
LOCKED IN THE SAFE of Herr von Below-Saleske, German Minister in Brussels, was a sealed envelope brought to him by special courier from Berlin on July 29 with orders “not to open until you are instructed by telegraph from here.” On Sunday, August 2, Below was advised by telegram to open the envelope at once and deliver the Note it contained by eight o’clock that evening, taking care to give the Belgian government “the impression that all the instructions relating to this affair reached you for the first time today.” He was to demand a reply from the Belgians within twelve hours and wire it to Berlin “as quickly as possible” and also “forward it immediately by automobile to General von Emmich at the Union Hotel in Aachen.” Aachen or Aix-la-Chapelle was the nearest German city to Liège, the eastern gateway to Belgium.
Herr von Below, a tall, erect bachelor with pointed black mustaches and a jade cigarette holder in constant use, had taken up his post in Belgium early in 1914. When visitors to the German Legation asked him about a silver ash tray pierced by a bullet hole that lay on his desk, he would laugh and reply: “I am a bird of ill omen. When I was stationed in Turkey they had a revolution. When I was in China, it was the Boxers. One of their shots through the window made that bullet hole.” He would raise his cigarette delicately to his lips with a wide and elegant gesture and add: “But now I am resting. Nothing ever happens in Brussels.”
Since the sealed envelope arrived, he had been resting no longer. At noon on August 1 he received a visit from Baron de Bassompierre, Under-Secretary of the Belgian Foreign Office, who told him the evening papers intended to publish France’s reply to Grey in which she promised to respect Belgian neutrality. Bassompierre suggested that in the absence of a comparable German reply, Herr von Below might wish to make a statement. Below was without authority from Berlin to do so. Taking refuge in diplomatic maneuver, he lay back in his chair and with his eyes fixed on the ceiling repeated back word for word through a haze of cigarette smoke everything that Bassompierre had just said to him as if playing back a record. Rising, he assured his visitor that “Belgium had nothing to fear from Germany,” and closed the interview.
Next morning he repeated the assurance to M. Davignon, the Foreign Minister, who had been awakened at 6:00 A.M. by news of the German invasion of Luxembourg and had asked for an explanation. Back at the legation, Below soothed a clamoring press with a felicitous phrase that was widely quoted, “Your neighbor’s roof may catch fire but your own house will be safe.”
Many Belgians, official and otherwise, were disposed to believe him, some from pro-German sympathies, some from wishful thinking, and some from simple confidence in the good faith of the international guarantors of Belgium’s neutrality. In seventy-five years of guaranteed independence they had known peace for the longest unbroken period in their history. The territory of Belgium had been
the pathway of warriors since Caesar fought the Belgae. In Belgium, Charles the Bold of Burgundy and Louis XI of France had fought out their long and bitter rivalry; there Spain had ravaged the Low Countries; there Marlborough had fought the French at the “very murderous battle” of Malplaquet; there Napoleon had met Wellington at Waterloo; there the people had risen against every ruler—Burgundian, French, Spanish, Hapsburg, or Dutch—until the final revolt against the House of Orange in 1830. Then, under Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, maternal uncle of Queen Victoria, as King, they had made themselves a nation, grown prosperous, spent their energies in fraternal fighting between Flemings and Walloons, Catholics and Protestants, and in disputes over Socialism and French and Flemish bilingualism, in the fervent hope that their neighbors would leave them to continue undisturbed in this happy condition.
The King and Prime Minister and Chief of Staff could no longer share the general confidence, but were prevented, both by the duties of neutrality and by their belief in neutrality, from making plans to repel attack. Up until the last moment they could not bring themselves to believe an invasion by one of their guarantors would actually happen. On learning of the German Kriegesgefahr on July 31, they had ordered mobilization of the Belgian Army to begin at midnight. During the night and next day policemen went from house to house ringing doorbells and handing out orders while men scrambled out of bed or left their jobs, wrapped up their bundles, said their farewells, and went off to their regimental depots. Because Belgium, maintaining her strict neutrality, had not up to now settled on any plan of campaign, mobilization was not directed against a particular enemy or oriented in a particular direction. It was a call-up without deployment. Belgium was obligated, as well as her guarantors, to preserve her own neutrality and could make no overt act until one was made against her.