The Guns of August (19 page)

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.

L
OCKED 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.

When, by the evening of August 1, Germany’s silence in response to Grey’s request had continued for twenty-four hours, King Albert determined on a final private appeal to the Kaiser. He composed it in consultation with his wife, Queen Elizabeth, a German by birth, the daughter of a Bavarian duke, who translated it sentence by sentence into German, weighing with the King the choice of words and their shades of meaning. It recognized that “political objections” might stand in the way of a public statement but hoped “the bonds of kinship and friendship” would decide the Kaiser to give King Albert his personal and private assurance of respect for Belgian neutrality. The kinship in question, which stemmed from King Albert’s mother, Princess Marie of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, a distant and Catholic branch of the Prussian royal family, failed to move the Kaiser to reply.

Instead came the ultimatum that had been waiting in Herr von Below’s safe for the last four days. It was delivered at seven on the evening of August 2 when a footman at the Foreign Office pushed his head through the door of the Under-Secretary’s room and reported in an excited whisper, “The German Minister has just gone in to see M. Davignon!” Fifteen minutes later Below was seen driving back down the Rue de la Loi holding his hat in his hand, beads of perspiration on his forehead, and smoking with the rapid, jerky movements of a mechanical toy. The instant his “haughty silhouette” had been seen to leave the Foreign Office, the two Under-Secretaries rushed in to the Minister’s room where they found M. Davignon, a man until now of immutable and tranquil optimism, looking extremely pale. “Bad news, bad news,” he said, handing them the German note he had just received. Baron de Gaiffier, the Political Secretary, read it aloud, translating slowly as he went, while Bassompierre, sitting at the Minister’s desk took it down, discussing each ambiguous phrase to make sure of the right rendering. While they worked, M. Davignon and his Permanent Under-Secretary, Baron van der Elst, listened, sitting in two chairs on either side of the fireplace. M. Davignon’s last word on any problem had always been, “I am sure it will turn out all right” while van der Elst’s esteem for the Germans had led him in the past to assure his government that rising German armaments were intended only for the
Drang nach Osten
and portended no trouble for Belgium.