The Sleepwalkers (93 page)

How was such a dramatic reversal possible? In answering this question, it is worth noting, first, the skill with which the interventionist group set the terms of the debate. The cabinet minister Herbert Samuel helped to frame the discussion by drawing up in advance of the two meetings two formulae identifying, firstly, a German bombardment of the French coast and, secondly, a ‘substantial violation' of Belgian neutrality as potential triggers for a British armed response. Part of the appeal of these two proposals lay in the fact that they were designed to ensure that it was ‘an action of Germany's and not of ours' which would ‘cause the failure'.
¹⁷⁵
Grey stated at the morning meeting of 2 August with great emotion that Britain had a moral obligation to support France in the coming conflict, adding that ‘We have led France to rely upon us and unless we support her in her agony, I cannot continue at the Foreign Office .. . .'
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And while the pro-interventionists gathered around Grey and the prime minister, the ‘peace party' failed to rally cross-party or extra-parliamentary support and proved unable to generate a leader capable of challenging the imperialists and their Conservative allies.

How important were the arguments put forward by the liberal imperialists? Since Britain's declaration of war on Germany on 4 August did indeed follow upon the German invasion of Belgium and since the Entente swiftly hardened into a fully-fledged alliance, whose history would later be rewritten as a story of abiding Anglo-French friendship, it has generally been assumed that Belgium and France were the issues that drew cabinet, parliament and the British people into war. This view is not wrong: it is impossible to deny their importance both in legitimating the policy adopted and in cementing the
union sacrée
between the cabinet, parliament and popular opinion that was such a striking feature of early wartime Britain.
¹⁷⁷
In a brilliantly judged speech to the House of Commons on 3 August, Grey integrated the Anglo-French Entente into the emerging pro-war consensus. British undertakings to France, he said, had always stopped short of ‘an engagement to cooperate in war'. But the very fact of naval cooperation between the two countries implied a moral obligation:

The French fleet is now in the Mediterranean, and the Northern and Western coasts of France are absolutely undefended. The French fleet being concentrated in the Mediterranean, the situation is very different from what it used to be, because the friendship which had grown up between the two countries has given them a sense of security that there was nothing to be feared from us. The French coasts are absolutely undefended. The French fleet is in the Mediterranean, and has for some years been concentrated there because of the feeling of confidence and friendship which has existed between the two countries.
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And to this moral calculation Grey appended an argument from interest by suggesting that were France to withdraw its fleet from the eastern Mediterranean, Italy might seize the opportunity to depart from her own neutrality and Britain might at some later date be forced to enter the fray in order to defend Mediterranean trade routes that were ‘vital to this country'. This was, by all accounts, the most successful speech of Grey's political career – no one who reads it today can fail to be impressed by the way in which he, in the beguilingly hesitant, gentlemanly style that was his trademark, established the moral credentials of the imperialist position. One of the most telling tributes came from the formerly anti-interventionist Liberal Christopher Addison: ‘[Grey's speech] satisfied, I think, all the House, with perhaps three or four exceptions, that we were compelled to participate.'
¹⁷⁹
And once the decision was made, the nation fell in line behind it with astonishing speed, creating a British
union sacrée
that extended all the way from the unionists of all stripes to the Labour Party and even the Irish nationalists.
¹⁸⁰
Cambon's trust in the British foreign secretary was thus vindicated. There had been a few painful moments, to be sure, but the French ambassador was right in the longer run, and the run was only a few days long, after all.

Nevertheless, the fact that neither Belgium nor France had carried much weight with the cabinet in the last days of July suggests that we need to nuance the argument and distinguish between the reasons for decisions and the arguments chosen to advertise and justify them. Other factors must have catalysed the transition from neutrality to intervention, especially for those waverers among the ministers whose support was necessary for the passage of a cabinet resolution. Within this more circumscribed setting, party-political anxieties about how the Liberal government would survive the resignation of Grey and Asquith were surely crucial. Given the support of the Conservative opposition for intervention (which was in turn powered in part by attitudes to the Irish Question, the assumption being that intervention would necessitate the indefinite postponement of Home Rule), the collapse of the Liberal cabinet would simply have resulted in the slightly belated adoption of Grey's policy. For those who remained unmoved by Belgian neutrality and the Anglo-French naval arrangement, this was a powerful argument against allowing the intervention debate to break the government.
¹⁸¹

Underlying these calculations were deeper concerns about the threat posed to British security by the looming conflict. Since around 1900, the need to ward off Russian menaces had been a central theme in British policy-making. In 1902, Britain had used the Anglo-Japanese alliance to balance against Russia in the Far East. The Anglo-French Entente of 1904 had further weakened Russia, at least as an opponent of Britain, and the Convention of 1907 with Russia provided – in theory at least – a means of managing tensions along an imperial periphery that Britain could no longer afford effectively to garrison. The Russian threat had not disappeared by 1914; in fact it was resurfacing during the last year before the outbreak of war. At that time, the extremely high-handed and provocative behaviour of the Russians in Persia and Central Asia encouraged some policy-makers in London to believe that the Anglo-Russian Convention might be on its last legs, and others to press yet harder for an alliance with St Petersburg. As Buchanan put it in a letter to Nicolson in April 1914: ‘Russia is rapidly becoming so powerful that we must retain her friendship at almost any cost. If she acquires the conviction that we are unreliable and useless as a friend, she may one day strike a bargain with Germany and resume her liberty of action on Turkey and Persia.
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Or in Nicolson's more explicit formulation of 1912:

. . . it would be far more disadvantageous to have an unfriendly France and Russia than an unfriendly Germany. [Germany can] give us plenty of annoyance, but it cannot really threaten any of our more important interests, while Russia especially could cause us extreme embarrassment and, indeed, danger in the Mid-East and on our Indian frontier, and it would be most unfortunate, were we to revert to the state of things which existed before 1904 and 1907.
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Yet it was to contain Germany, not Russia, that Britain went to war in 1914. There has been controversy among historians about the respective impact of what appear to be two quite distinct security paradigms – while the older studies (and some newer ones) stress the centrality of the continental balance of power to British thinking and policy, recent revisionist accounts have globalized the field of vision, arguing that Britain's vulnerability as a world power obliged it to focus on Russia as the more fundamental threat. It is true that continentalist arguments acquired more weight in British thinking after the crises of 1905 and 1911.
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But it is misleading to overstate the tension between the two viewpoints, which were often blended in the arguments offered by decision-makers. An example is the minute appended by Eyre Crowe on 25 July to a telegram from Ambassador Buchanan in St Petersburg. Crowe's view was and always had been that of a balance-of-power continentalist focused on the containment of Germany. Yet he also made an explicit appeal to Britain's imperial security:

Should the war come, and England stand aside, one of two things must happen. (a) Either Germany and Austria win, crush France, and humiliate Russia. What will be the position of a friendless England? (b) Or France and Russia win. What would then be their attitude towards England? What about India and the Mediterranean?
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In short, the key British decision-makers were not forced to choose between continentalist and imperial options in 1914. Whether one identified Russia or Germany as the chief threat, the outcome was the same, since British intervention on the side of the Entente offered a means
both
of appeasing and tethering Russia
and
of opposing and containing Germany. In the conditions of 1914, the logics of global and continental security converged in the British decision to support the Entente powers against Germany and Austria.

French policy combined an offensive posture in the Russian theatre with a defensive one in their own. In Germany's case, the poles were reversed. The need to fight on two fronts obliged German planners to seek a decisive victory first on one front and then on the other. The westward strike was given priority, because it was here that the Germans expected to encounter the most determined and effective resistance. On the eastern front, in the meanwhile, a mere holding force was left to meet the Russian advance. The balance between the eastern and the western contingents changed in the last years before the war as Moltke struggled to address the threat posed by Russian military expansion and infrastructural improvements, but the underlying logic of the plan remained the same: Germany would strike first and hardest in the west and destroy its western opponent before turning to face its enemy in the east. Since 1905 it had been assumed by German planners that military success in the west would be possible only if Germany struck at France through neutral Luxembourg and Belgium. The assault would pass along two corridors on either side of the Ardennes Forest, one leading through Luxembourg, the other squeezing around the tongue of Dutch territory known as the Maastricht salient to cross southern Belgium. A broad, five-armed, concentric attack into northern France would bypass the
places fortes
around Verdun, Nancy, Epinal and Belfort, enabling the German armies to threaten Paris from the north-east and thereby to achieve a swift resolution of the conflict in the west.

Moltke and his subordinates in the General Staff viewed this deployment plan as the pure expression of an incontrovertible military necessity. No alternative plans were devised that might have provided the civilian leadership with options to play with. The only alternative deployment scenario, the Eastern Campaign Plan, which envisaged a mobilization against Russia alone, was shelved in 1913. The military leaders were remarkably unconcerned about the political impact that the violation of Belgian neutrality might have on Germany's diplomatic freedom of manoeuvre during the crucial crisis phase between peace and war. Historians have rightly criticized the rigidity of German military planning, seeing in it the fruits of a political system in which the army pursued its own dreams of ‘absolute destruction', free of civilian control or oversight.
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But there was also careful reasoning behind the narrowing of options: the increasingly interdependent defence arrangements within the Franco-Russian Alliance made a war on one front virtually inconceivable – hence the abandonment of the Eastern Campaign Plan. And the German military (by contrast with their French counterparts and with German
civilian
leaders) did not attach great importance to the question of British intervention, which was seen by most German planners as militarily irrelevant – another failure of strategic and political imagination.

As the moment approached for German mobilization on 1 August, the policy-makers in Berlin made two further epic blunders. The execution of the western deployment plan required the swift and immediate invasion of Belgium. Delaying the violation was out of the question, Moltke argued, because the completion of Belgian defence measures in and around fortified Liège would block the German advance and cost huge casualties. This insistence on immediate action was politically problematic. Had Germany waited until its forces were actually concentrated and ready for attack before crossing the Belgian border, the Belgian and French armies would have acquired more time to consolidate their defensive arrangement. On the other hand, it would have been much harder (though probably not impossible) for Grey and his colleagues to make a case for intervention. Grey's opponents could have pointed out that Russia and (by extension) France, not Germany, were forcing the pace; the British interventionists would have been deprived of one of their most effective arguments. Recognizing this, Admiral Tirpitz, a navalist who understood the importance of the British role, later posed the angry question: ‘Why did we not wait?'
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The presentation of an ultimatum to the Belgian government on 2 August was another disastrous mistake. Given the decision to breach Belgian neutrality and the pressing need for speed, it might well have been better (from Germany's point of view) simply to break into and across Belgian territory, making one's excuses as one went and dealing with the matter afterwards as a
fait accompli
by means of an indemnity. This is exactly what the British government had been expecting the Germans to do. And the ministers in Asquith's cabinet – including Churchill – had repeatedly expressed the view that Britain would not necessarily regard a German
transit
through Belgium as a
casus belli
, so long as the Germans stayed south of the Sambre–Meuse line and thus kept clear of the strategically sensitive region around Antwerp and the Schelde estuary.