The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (11 page)

In his first years as Colonial Secretary as he grappled with challenges and crises from cod in Newfoundland to gold in southern Africa, Chamberlain was made acutely aware of how isolated Britain was and how vulnerable. Moreover, public opinion, that new and unpredictable force in foreign affairs, was demanding action to shore up British interests around the globe. Isolation, he argued, was no longer serving Britain well and Balfour was coming to agree with him. France would not do as an ally, given the current tensions over Africa and the two countries’ historical rivalry. As for Russia, as Chamberlain said in a speech in 1898, ‘when you sup with the devil, take a long spoon’. Increasingly his thoughts turned to Germany, with which Britain had relatively few disputes. Nor was he alone; other key figures, Cabinet ministers, admirals, officials in the Foreign Office, influential writers, were coming to think along the same lines.
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With Salisbury’s half-hearted approval, Chamberlain started discussions with the German ambassador in London about a possible treaty. In 1899 he had friendly conversations with the Kaiser and his Foreign Secretary, Bernhard von Bülow, at Windsor Castle, which encouraged Chamberlain to think that an alliance, perhaps including the United States as well, might be feasible. The day after the German party left Britain, he made a public speech at Leicester sketching out ‘a new Triple Alliance between the Teutonic race and the two great
trans-Atlantic branches of the Anglo-Saxon race which would become a potent influence on the future of the world’.
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There were some other promising signs. In 1898, Britain made an agreement with Germany over Portugal’s colonies of Mozambique, Angola and Timor, which, given the nearly bankrupt state of their owner, were likely to be coming on the world market. The two signatories (Portugal was not consulted) agreed that they would keep outsiders at bay and divide up the Portuguese Empire between themselves. The following year the British ended an absurd quarrel with the Germans over the Samoan islands in the South Pacific by conceding control of the main island to them.

By 1901 Chamberlain, as he told a member of the German embassy in London, was in favour of closer co-operation with Germany and perhaps Britain’s becoming a member of the Triple Alliance with Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy.
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Balfour agreed. It seemed to him that Britain’s most likely enemy was the alliance of France and Russia. ‘It is a matter of supreme moment to us that Italy should not be crushed, that Austria should not be dismembered, and, as I think, that Germany should not be squeezed to death between the hammer of Russia and the anvil of France.’
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The Germans were not averse to the idea but were in no hurry to conclude a full-blown agreement or see Britain become a member of the Triple Alliance, especially since it seemed to them that the British needed them more than the other way round. The Boer War, which broke out in October 1899, just two years after the triumphal Diamond Jubilee, had severely damaged British prestige and confidence. In the first months, as one humiliating defeat followed another, there was real fear in Britain that France would take the opportunity to invade or that France and Russia might threaten Britain’s position in the Indian Ocean.
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In January 1901, Queen Victoria died, perhaps another sign that the old order was passing.

Inquiries after the war showed that British commanders had been incompetent, that forces had been sent into combat without clear orders, proper maps or sufficient intelligence, and that equipment had been completely inadequate. Leo Amery, who was a reporter in the field for
The Times
, wrote, for example, of the disaster at the Battle of Spion Kop: ‘No effort was made beforehand to ascertain the shape of the
position to be occupied, or to furnish the officers entrusted with its capture with such information. No sufficient effort was made by the officers themselves to discover the shape of the summit before intrenching.’
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The war led to widespread reforms in the military but it was to take some time before these could have an impact.

To make matters worse in those years at the end of the century, the situation in China remained unstable, which threatened Britain’s extensive interests there. In 1897, Germany had used the excuse of two murdered missionaries to force the weak Chinese government to give it a concession including a port at Tientsin (Tianjin) and railways in the Shantung (Shandong) peninsula. This had set off what looked like the start of a serious scramble for China. Russia unilaterally seized a warm-water port, named after a British naval lieutenant, William Arthur, at the southern end of Manchuria. The Cabinet considered sending ships from its China squadron north to expel the Russians but thought better of it for fear of what Russia’s ally France might do. A few months later, Russia grabbed another port just to the north-east of Port Arthur and forced the Chinese government to sign away its rights to both for twenty-five years.

With cries coming from the press and from his colleagues such as Chamberlain, that Britain do something, indeed anything, Salisbury said gloomily ‘“the public” will demand some territorial or cartographic consolation in China. It will not be useful, and will be expensive; but as a matter of pure sentiment, we shall have to do it.’ And so Britain demanded a port at Weihaiwei on the northern side of the Shantung peninsula and to the south of the Russian ports in Manchuria. (In the end it was useless as a port but did have a nice sandy beach for swimming.)
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In 1900, and this at least appeared to be good news, Germany and Britain came to an agreement in China in which both undertook to use their influence for an Open Door policy in China which would allow free access for all the powers. In British minds at least, this was really directed against Russia in Manchuria; the last thing Germany, which had a long land frontier with Russia in Europe, wanted was a conflict with its neighbour. This became clear in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion.

In 1900, a movement which had initially started against the Manchu dynasty was adroitly turned by them against the foreigners from
overseas. All over north China Western missionaries, diplomats and businessmen were attacked and, in Beijing, foreign diplomats were besieged in the summer of 1900. An international relief force was hastily cobbled together by the great powers, which for once had reason to act together. The Boxer Rebellion was put down, Beijing was sacked, and the Chinese government was forced to pay a large indemnity and accept even more foreign interference in its affairs. The Russians took the opportunity to move forces into Manchuria and when the rebellion was over found excuses not to leave. Rumours spread that Russia was negotiating a deal with China for the permanent occupation of Manchuria. When the British government asked the Germans for support, as they tried to find ways to get the Russians to back down, the answer was very clear. Bülow got up in the Reichstag on 15 March 1901 to say that the Anglo-German agreement on China ‘was in no way concerned with Manchuria’.
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It was all too clear that Germany was not prepared to help Britain with its imperial interests at the cost of causing trouble for itself in Europe. And, as a number of British were asking themselves, did Britain really want to get drawn into German disputes with France and Russia in Europe? The Germans, however, still thought the British would come round when they eventually saw that friendship with Germany was their best option. ‘We ought not to show any uneasiness or anxious haste,’ Bülow said to his subordinate Friedrich von Holstein in October 1901. ‘We must let hope shimmer on the horizon.’
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Lord Lansdowne, who had by now replaced Salisbury as Foreign Secretary, tried to keep the discussions alive with the Germans but failed. He also made desultory, equally unproductive, overtures to the Russians. Nevertheless he was convinced, as were many of his colleagues, that Britain could not go back to Salisbury’s policy of detachment from Europe. Lord George Hamilton, by now Secretary of State for India, reported a gloomy conversation with Balfour that summer of 1901:

He said the conviction was forced upon him that we were for all practical purposes at the present moment only a third-rate power; and we are a third-rate power with interests which are conflicting with and crossing those of the great powers of Europe. Put in this
elementary form the weakness of the British Empire, as it at present exists, is brought home to one. We have enormous strength, both effective and latent, if we can concentrate … but the dispersion of our Imperial interests … renders it almost impossible.
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That autumn Lord Selborne, the First Lord of the Admiralty, pointed out to his colleagues in the Cabinet that Britain only had four battleships in the Far East while Russia and France together would soon have nine.
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By this stage, however, public opinion in both countries was becoming a significant factor. In the autumn and early winter of 1901–2, for example, a silly public dispute between Bülow, now German Chancellor, and Joseph Chamberlain stirred up anger in both countries. Chamberlain made a speech in Edinburgh in which he defended British troops against accusations that they were treating the Afrikaner civilians excessively harshly. Chamberlain went on to say that the other nations had behaved much worse, Prussia for example in the Franco-Prussian War. Nationalists in Germany seized on what they saw as a serious insult and Bülow insisted on a formal protest to the British Foreign Office. The British tried to explain the remarks away but refused to make a formal apology. Bülow then chose to appeal to German opinion with a defiant speech in the Reichstag in January 1902. To cheers, he quoted a famous phrase of Frederick the Great to the effect that anyone who dared criticise the German army would find he was ‘biting on granite’. Three days later Chamberlain spoke to equal enthusiasm in his stronghold of Birmingham: ‘What I have said, I have said. I withdraw nothing. I qualify nothing. I defend nothing. I do not want to give lessons to a foreign minister and I will not accept any at his hands.’ Privately he said to Baron Hermann von Eckardstein of the German embassy in London, ‘I have had enough of such treatment and there can be no more question of an association between Great Britain and Germany.’
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The British government had already come to the conclusion that it needed to look elsewhere. With an increasingly weary Salisbury’s acquiescence, it was investigating the possibility of a defensive alliance with Japan. This was not as extraordinary as it seemed. Japan was an up-and-coming power; in the 1890s it handily defeated China in a war. Curzon, who knew Asia well, wrote to Salisbury in 1897: ‘If European Powers are
grouping themselves against us in the Far East we shall probably be driven sooner or later to act with Japan. Ten years hence she will be the greatest naval Power in those seas …’
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That last appealed to the British naval industry, always a powerful lobby, who liked the orders which the Japanese navy kept placing. In 1898, Admiral Charles Beresford, who had taken time out from his naval career to become a Member of Parliament and head of the Navy League, told the annual dinner of the Japan Society of London: ‘there is much affinity between our two nations and an alliance between them would tend greatly to the peace of the world’.
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Moreover, Japan’s interests were conveniently confined to the Far East. There was not therefore the same danger as there would have been with Germany of an alliance dragging Britain into a war in Europe. Britain could use Japan to counter Russia, in particular in China, and perhaps make its rival empire think twice before advancing further in Central Asia towards India.

From the Japanese perspective, Britain was the friendliest of the great European powers. In 1895, at the end of the Sino-Japanese War, Russia, Germany, and France had combined against Japan to force it to give up some of what it had gained from China, notably in Manchuria. Shortly afterwards Russia had made its own move and seized the two southern ports in Manchuria and started to build a short cut for the Trans-Siberian Railway across the north. During the Boxer Rebellion Britain and Japan had worked well together. Japan, like Britain, had explored its alternatives through talks with Russia and Germany. Like Britain it came to the conclusion that these were going nowhere.

Just before Christmas 1901, Prince Ito Hirobumi, one of the elder statesmen who had overseen Japan’s transformation after 1868, stopped in London on his way from Russia. Like Salisbury, he had been Prime Minister of his country three times. (Unlike Salisbury, he was also a notorious womaniser.) It was given out that he was visiting Britain purely for the sake of his health. Nevertheless he was received by Edward VII, who gave him the Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath. The Lord Mayor of London gave a large banquet in his honour. When he rose to reply to the toast, Ito, according to
The Times
, was greeted ‘with prolonged cheers’. In his speech Ito talked about the long and friendly relations, ‘almost a century’, between Japan and Britain and his own happy memories of a country where he had come to study as a
young man. ‘It is only natural in me’, he went on, ‘to entertain a sincere hope as to the further continuation of our friendly feelings and mutual sympathies in the future, that these friendly feelings and mutual sympathies which have existed between us in the past shall be daily more strongly cemented in the future. (Cheers).’
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He visited Salisbury at Hatfield and Lansdowne at his country house of Bowood and had particularly interesting conversations with the latter.