When Ambassador Lichnowsky and his staff subsequently left England, a friend who came to say goodbye was struck by the “sadness and bitterness” of the party at Victoria Station. They were blaming officials at home for dragging them into a war with no allies but Austria.
“What chance have we, attacked on every side? Is no one friendly to Germany?” one official asked mournfully.
“Siam is friendly, I am told,” a colleague replied.
No sooner had England delivered herself of the ultimatum than fresh disputes broke out in the Cabinet over the question whether to send an Expeditionary Force to France. Having declared themselves in, they began to dispute how far in they should go. Their joint plans with the French were predicated on an Expeditionary Force of six divisions to arrive in France between M-4 and M-12 and to be ready for action on the extreme left of the French line by M-15. Already the schedule was disrupted because the British M-1 (August 5), which had been expected to be two days behind the French, was now three days behind, and further delay would follow.
Mr. Asquith’s cabinet was paralyzed by fear of invasion. In 1909 the Committee of Imperial Defence after a special study of the problem had declared that as long as the home army was kept sufficiently strong to make the Germans mount an invasion force of such size that it could not evade the navy, a large-scale invasion was “impractical.” Despite its assurance that the defense of the home islands was adequately guaranteed by the navy, Britain’s leaders on August 4 could not summon up the courage to denude the islands of the Regular Army. Arguments were put forward for sending fewer than six divisions, for sending them later rather than sooner, even for not sending them at all. Admiral Jellicoe was told his planned escort of the Expeditionary Force across the Channel would not be required “for the present.” No button at the War Office automatically put the BEF in motion because the British government could not make up its mind to push it. The War Office itself, without a minister for the last four months, was distracted for lack of a chief. Asquith had progressed as far as inviting Kitchener up to London, but could not yet nerve himself to offer him the post. The impetuous and tempestuous Sir Henry Wilson, whose uninhibited diary was to cause such anguish when published after the war, was “revolted by such a state of things.” So was poor M. Cambon who went, armed with a map, to show Grey how vital it was that the French left should be extended by Britain’s six divisions. Grey promised to bring the matter to the attention of the Cabinet.
General Wilson, raging at the delay which he ascribed to Grey’s “sinful” hesitation, indignantly showed to his friends in the Opposition a copy of the mobilization order which instead of reading “mobilize and embark,” read only “mobilize.” This alone, he said, would delay the schedule by four days. Balfour undertook to spur the government. He told them, in a letter addressed to Haldane, that the whole point of the Entente and of the military arrangements which had flowed from it was the preservation of France, for if France were crushed “the whole future of Europe might be changed in a direction we should regard as disastrous.” Having adopted that policy, the thing to do, he suggested, was “to strike quickly and strike with your whole strength.” When Haldane came to see him to explain the nature of the Cabinet’s hesitations, Balfour could not help feeling they were marked by “a certain wooliness of thought and indecision of purpose.”
That afternoon of August 4, at about the time when Bethmann was addressing the Reichstag and Viviani the Chambre des Députés, Mr. Asquith announced to the House of Commons a “message from His Majesty signed by his own hand.” Mr. Speaker rose from his chair and members uncovered while the Mobilization Proclamation was read. Next, from typewritten copy that trembled slightly in his hand, Asquith read the terms of the ultimatum just telegraphed to Germany. When he came to the words “a satisfactory answer by midnight,” a solemn cheer rose from the benches.
All that was left was to wait for midnight (eleven o’clock, British time). At nine o’clock the government learned, through an intercepted but uncoded telegram sent out from Berlin, that Germany had considered itself at war with Britain from the moment when the British ambassador had asked for his passports. Hastily summoned, the Cabinet debated whether to declare war as of that moment or wait for the time limit set by the ultimatum to expire. They decided to wait. In silence, each encased in his private thoughts, they sat around the green table in the ill-lit Cabinet room, conscious of the shadows of those who at other fateful moments had sat there before them. Eyes watched the clock ticking away the time limit. “Boom!” Big Ben struck the first note of eleven, and each note thereafter sounded to Lloyd George, who had a Celtic ear for melodrama, like “Doom, doom, doom!”
Twenty minutes later the War Telegram, “War, Germany, act,” was dispatched. Where and when the army was to act was still unsettled, the decision having been left for a War Council called for the following day. The British government went to bed a belligerent, if something less than bellicose.
Next day, with the assault on Liège, the first battle of the war began. Europe was entering, Moltke wrote that day to Conrad von Hötzendorff, upon “the struggle that will decide the course of history for the next hundred years.”
BATTLE
10
“Goeben … An Enemy Then Flying”
BEFORE THE LAND BATTLE BEGAN, a wireless message from the German Admiralty to the German Commander in the Mediterranean, Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, flickered through the air in the pre-dawn hours of August 4. It read: “Alliance with Turkey concluded August 3. Proceed at once to Constantinople.” Although its expectations proved premature and it was almost immediately canceled, Admiral Souchon decided to proceed as directed. His command consisted of two fast new ships, the battle cruiser Goeben and the light cruiser Breslau. No other single exploit of the war cast so long a shadow upon the world as the voyage accomplished by their commander during the next seven days.
Turkey at the time of Sarajevo had many enemies and no allies because no one considered her worth an alliance. For a hundred years the Ottoman Empire, called the “Sick Man” of Europe, had been considered moribund by the hovering European powers who were waiting to fall upon the carcass. But year after year the fabulous invalid refused to die, still grasping in decrepit hands the keys to immense possessions. Indeed, during the last six years, ever since the Young Turk Revolution overthrew the old Sultan “Abdul the Damned,” in 1908, and established under his more amenable brother a government by the “Committee of Union and Progress,” Turkey had begun to be rejuvenated.
The “Committee,” otherwise the Young Turks, led by their “little Napoleon,” Enver Bey, determined to remake the country, forge the strength necessary to hold the slipping bonds of empire, fend off the waiting eagles, and retrieve the Pan-Islamic dominion of the days of Ottoman glory. The process was watched with no relish at all by Russia, France, and England, who had rival ambitions in the area. Germany, late on the imperial scene and with Berlin-to-Baghdad dreams of her own, determined to become the Young Turks’ patron. A German military mission sent in 1913 to reorganize the Turkish Army caused such furious Russian resentment that only concerted effort by the Powers to provide a face-saving device prevented the affair from becoming that “damned foolish thing in the Balkans” a year before Sarajevo.
From then on, the Turks felt creeping over them the shadow of the oncoming day when they would have to choose sides. Fearing Russia, resenting England, mistrusting Germany, they could not decide. The “Hero of the Revolution,” handsome young Enver with his pink cheeks and black mustache worn in upturned points like the Kaiser’s, was the only wholehearted and enthusiastic advocate of a German alliance. Like some later thinkers, he believed in the Germans as the wave of the future. Talaat Bey, political “Boss” of the “Committee,” and its real ruler, a stout Levantine adventurer who could devour a pound of caviar at a sitting, washed down by two glasses of brandy and two bottles of champagne, was less sure. He believed Turkey could obtain a better price from Germany than fr
om the Entente, and he had no faith in Turkey’s chances of survival as a neutral in a war of the Great Powers. If the Entente Powers won, Ottoman possessions would crumble under their pressure; if the Central Powers won, Turkey would become a German vassal. Other groups in the Turkish government would have preferred an alliance with the Entente, if it had been obtainable, in the hope of buying off Russia, Turkey’s age-old enemy. For ten centuries Russia had yearned for Constantinople, the city Russians called Czargrad that lay at the exit of the Black Sea. That narrow and famous sea passage, called the Dardanelles, fifty miles long and nowhere more than three miles wide, was Russia’s only year-round egress to the rest of the world.
Turkey had one asset of inestimable value—her geographical position at the junction of the paths of empire. For that reason England had been for a hundred years Turkey’s traditional protector, but the truth was that England no longer took Turkey seriously. After a century of supporting the Sultan against all comers because she preferred a weak, debilitated, and therefore malleable despot astride her road to India, England was at last beginning to tire of the fetters that bound her to what Winston Churchill amicably called “scandalous, crumbling, decrepit, penniless Turkey.” The Turkish reputation for misrule, corruption, and cruelty had been a stench in the nostrils of Europe for a long time. The Liberals who had governed England since 1906 were the inheritors of Gladstone’s celebrated appeal to expel the unspeakable Turk, “the one great anti-human specimen of humanity,” from Europe. Their policy was shaped by an image half Sick Man, half Terrible Turk. Lord Salisbury’s sporting metaphor after the Crimean War, “We have put our money on the wrong horse,” acquired the status of prophecy. British influence at the Porte was allowed to lapse just at the time when it might have proved beyond price.
A request by Turkey for a permanent alliance with Great Britain was turned down in 1911 through the medium of Winston Churchill who had visited Constantinople in 1909 and established “amicable relations,” as he conceived them, with Enver and other Young Turk ministers. In the imperial style used for addressing Oriental states, he suggested that although Britain could accept no alliance, Turkey would do well not to alienate British friendship by “reverting to the oppressive methods of the old regime or seeking to disturb the British status quo as it now exists.” Superbly surveying the world from his Admiralty post, he reminded Turkey that British friendship would be of value so long as Britain “alone among European states … retains supremacy of the sea.” That Turkey’s friendship or even her neutrality might be of equal value to Britain was never seriously considered by him or any other minister.
In July 1914, with the two-front war looming before them, the Germans suddenly became anxious to secure the ally who could close the Black Sea exit and cut Russia off from her allies and their supplies. An earlier Turkish proposal of alliance that had been left dangling now suddenly looked desirable. The Kaiser in his alarm insisted that “the thing to do now is to get every gun in readiness in the Balkans to shoot against the Slavs.” When Turkey began to haggle over terms, and made a show of leaning toward the Entente, the Kaiser in increasing panic directed his ambassador to reply to the Turkish offer “with unmistakably plain compliance .… Under no circumstances at all can we afford to turn them away.”
On July 28, the day Austria declared war on Serbia, Turkey formally asked Germany for a secret offensive and defensive alliance to become operative in the event of either party going to war with Russia. Within the same day, the offer was received in Berlin, accepted and a draft treaty signed by the Chancellor telegraphed back. At the last moment the Turks had difficulty bringing themselves to the point of tying the knot that would tie their fate to Germany’s. If only they could be sure Germany would win …
While they were hesitating England helpfully gave them a push by seizing two Turkish battleships then being built under contract in British yards. They were first-class capital ships equal to the best of Britain’s, one of which was armed with 13.5-inch guns. The spirited First Lord “requisitioned”—to use his own word—the Turkish warships on July 28. One, the Sultan Osman, had been completed in May and a first installment already paid, but when the Turks wished to bring her home, the British, supplying sinister hints about a Greek plot to attack her by submarine, had persuaded them to leave her in Britain until her sister ship, the Reshadieh, was completed and the two could return together. When the Reshadieh was ready early in July, further excuses for departure were offered. Speed and gunnery trials were unaccountably delayed. On learning of Churchill’s order, the Turkish captain, who was waiting with five hundred Turkish sailors aboard a transport in the Tyne, threatened to board his ships and hoist the Turkish flag. Not without relish the voice at the Admiralty gave orders to resist such an attempt “by armed force if necessary.”
The ships had cost Turkey the immense sum—for that time—of $30,000,000. The money had been raised by popular subscription after their defeats in the Balkan Wars aroused the Turkish public to the need of renovating the armed forces. Every Anatolian peasant had supplied his penny. Although not yet known to the public, news of the seizure caused, as Djemal Pasha, the Naval Minister, not excessively put it, “mental anguish” to his government.
England took no pains to assuage it. Grey, when officially informing the Turks of this simple piece of piracy on the Tyne, felt sure Turkey would understand why England found it necessary to take the ships for her “own needs in this crisis.” The financial and other loss to Turkey—a matter of “sincere regret” to His Majesty’s Government—would, he blandly said, be given “due consideration.” Compensation he did not mention. Under the cumulative effect of the “Sick Man” and “wrong horse” concepts, England had come to regard the entire Ottoman Empire as of less account than two extra warships. Grey’s telegram of regrets was sent on August 3. On the same day Turkey signed the treaty of alliance with Germany.
She did not, however, declare war on Russia, as she was pledged to do, or close the Black Sea or take any action publicly compromising strict neutrality. Having obtained an alliance with a major power on her own terms, Turkey proved in no hurry to help her new ally. Her uncertain ministers preferred to wait to see which way the opening battles of the war would go. Germany was far away, whereas the Russians and British were a near and ever-present menace. The now certain entry of England in the war was causing serious second thoughts. Afraid of just such a development, the German government instructed its ambassador, Baron Wangenheim, to obtain Turkey’s declaration of war on Russia “today if possible ,” for it was “of the greatest importance to prevent the Porte from escaping from us under the influence of England’s action.” The Porte, however, did not comply. All except Enver wished to delay an overt act against Russia until the progress of the war revealed some sign of its probable outcome.
In the Mediterranean gray shapes were maneuvering for coming combat. Wireless operators, tensely listening to their earphones, took down operational orders from far-away Admiralties. The immediate and primary task of the British and French fleets was to safeguard the passage from North Africa to France of the French Colonial Corps which, with its three instead of the normal two divisions, and its auxiliary arms, numbered over 80,000 men. The presence or absence of an entire army corps from its designated place in the line could be decisive upon the French plan of battle, and the war, as both sides believed, would be determined by the fate of France in the opening clash with Germany.
Both French and British Admiralties had their eyes fixed on the Goeben and Breslau as the chief menace to the French troop transports. The French had the largest fleet in the Mediterranean, with a force available for protecting their transports of 16 battleships, 6 cruisers, and 24 destroyers. The British Mediterranean fleet, based on Malta, while lacking dreadnoughts, was headed by three battle cruisers, Inflexible, Indomitable, and Indefatigable, each of 18,000 tons with an armament of eight 12-inch guns and a speed of 27 to 28 knots. They were designed to overtake and annihilate anything th
at floated except a battleship of the dreadnought class. In addition the British fleet included four armored cruisers of 14,000 tons, four light cruisers of under 5,000 tons, and 14 destroyers. The Italian fleet was neutral. The Austrian fleet, based on Pola at the head of the Adriatic, had eight active capital ships, including two new dreadnoughts with 12-inch guns and an appropriate number of other ships. A paper tiger, it was unprepared and proved inactive.
Germany, with the second largest fleet in the world, had only two warships in the Mediterranean. One was the battle cruiser Goeben, of 23,000 tons, as large as a dreadnought, with a recorded trial speed of 27.8 knots equal to that of the British Inflexibles and an approximately equal firepower. The other was the Breslau of 4,500 tons, a ship on a par with the British light cruisers. Because of her speed, which was greater than that of any French battleship or cruiser, the Goeben “would easily be able,” according to the dire forecast depicted by the British First Lord, “to avoid the French battle squadrons and brushing aside or outstripping their cruisers, break in upon the transports and sink one after another of these vessels crammed with soldiers.” If there was one thing characteristic of British naval thinking prior to the outbreak of war, it was the tendency to credit the German Navy with far greater audacity and willingness to take risks against odds than either the British themselves would have shown or than the Germans in fact did show when the test came.