The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (87 page)

The Liman von Sanders affair, as it rapidly became known, destroyed the co-operation between Germany and Russia in the Ottoman Empire and the reactions to it showed how jittery Europe’s capitals had become by this point. The Russians, who were furious at the appointment, urged their French allies and the British to put pressure on the Young Turks to limit Liman’s powers. Sazonov talked about seizing Ottoman ports to press the point home and yet again talk of a general war was in the air. The Russian Prime Minister, Kokovtsov, urged moderation and so did the French and the British, who did not want to be dragged into a war over the Ottoman Empire. (The British government was also embarrassed when it discovered that the admiral who headed a British naval mission in Constantinople had the same powers as Liman.) As before, though, they recognised – especially the French – the need to stand by Russia. Izvolsky reported to St Petersburg that Poincaré showed ‘a calm determination not to dodge away from the duties which the alliance with us has imposed on them and Delcassé, the French ambassador there, assured the Russian government of unconditional support’.
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Fortunately Europe had a reprieve this time: the Russians and the Germans were unwilling to force the matter to a showdown and the Young Turks, who were becoming alarmed at the furore, were anxious for a settlement as well. In January, in a face-saving move, Liman was raised in rank so that he was now too senior to command a corps. (He was to stay in the Ottoman Empire until its defeat in 1918; one of his lasting legacies was to further the career of a promising Turkish officer, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.) The affair served to heighten still more the Entente’s suspicions of Germany and drove Russia and Germany even further apart. Within the Russian government, especially after Kokovtsov fell January 1914, it became accepted that Germany was planning a war. In an audience that month with Delcassé Nicholas talked calmly with the French ambassador about the coming conflict. ‘We will not let them tread on our toes and, this time, it will not be like the war in the Far East: the national mood will support us.’
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In February 1914, the Russian general staff gave to the government two secret German memoranda which its spies had gained in which the Germans
talked of a two-front war and how German public opinion must be prepared well in advance. The same month the tsar approved preparations for an attack on the Ottoman Empire in the event of a general war.
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Nevertheless, the successful conclusion of the Liman von Sanders affair and the international management of the crises in the Balkans in 1912 and 1913 seemed to show that Europe could still keep its peace, that something of the old Concert of Europe where the great powers came together to broker and enforce settlements lingered on. In fact many observers felt that the mood in Europe by 1914 was better than it had been for some time. Churchill in his history of the Great War talked about the ‘exceptional tranquillity’ of those last months of the peace and Grey, again looking back, wrote: ‘In the early months of 1914 the international sky seemed clearer than it had been. The Balkan clouds had disappeared. After the threatening periods of 1911, 1912, and 1913 a little calm was probable, and, it would seem, due.’
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In June 1914 Oxford University awarded honorary degrees to Prince Lichnowsky, the German ambassador, and the composer Richard Strauss.

Europe was, it is true, divided into two alliance systems and after the Great War this was seen as one of the main causes of the war since a conflict between any two powers ran the risk of bringing their allies in. It could be argued, though, as it was at the time and has been since, that defensive alliances, which these were, act as a deterrent to aggression and can be a force for stability. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact after all brought a balance, which was in the end a peaceful one, to Europe during the Cold War. As Grey said approvingly in the House of Commons in 1912, the powers were divided into ‘separate groups not opposite’ and many Europeans, Poincaré among them, agreed with him. In his memoirs, written after the Great War, Grey continued to insist on the value of the alliances: ‘We wanted the Entente and Germany’s Triple Alliance to live side by side in amity. That was the best that was practicable.’
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And while France and Russia in the former and Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy in the latter had signed military alliances, Britain still refused to do so, to keep, as Grey insisted, its free hand. Indeed, in 1911 Arthur Nicolson, now Permanent Undersecretary at the Foreign Office, complained that Britain had still not committed itself sufficiently to the Triple Entente: ‘I do not
think that people quite recognise that, if we are to assist in preserving the peace and the status quo, it is necessary for us to acknowledge our responsibilities, and to be prepared to afford our friends or our allies, in case of necessity, some assistance of a more material and efficient kind than we are at present in a position to offer them.’
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In reality, defensive though the alliances might have been and as much as Britain felt it was free to steer its own course, over the years the division of Europe had become an accepted fact. That was reflected even in the language of those statesmen who had always been cautious identifying too clearly with one side. By 1913 Sazonov, who only the year before had told the German ambassador in St Petersburg that he refused to use the term, was talking of the Triple Entente. Grey, who had shared Sazonov’s reluctance, conceded the following year that there was no more hope of avoiding its use than of getting rid of split infinitives. In any case, he argued, the entente was good for Britain: ‘The alternatives are either a policy of complete isolation in Europe, or a policy of definite alliance with one or the other group of European powers …’
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Inevitably expectations and understandings of mutual support accumulated within the two alliances as diplomats and the military grew accustomed to working with each other. The partners also found that they needed to reassure each other or run the risk of losing an ally. Even though Germany had no vital interests at stake in the Balkans, it found it increasingly difficult not to support Austria-Hungary there. For France, the Russian alliance was crucial to its great-power status yet the French always feared that once Russia had grown strong again it would not need France and that it might revert to an older alliance, the one with Germany.
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That led the French to support Russian aims even when they felt they were dangerous; Poincaré apparently gave Russia the impression that France would enter a war between Russia and Austria-Hungary even over Serbia. ‘The bottom line is’, he told Izvolsky in Paris in 1912, ‘that all this amounts to the same thing, that is to say that if Russia enters a war, France will also enter it as we know that in this question Germany will stand behind Austria.’
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Although France’s treaty with Russia was a defensive one, coming into effect only if either party was attacked, Poincaré went beyond its terms to suggest that France would feel obliged to enter a war even if Germany merely
mobilised. By 1914, the alliances, rather than acting as brakes on their members, were too often pushing the accelerators.

The Triple Entente, despite Britain’s caution, developed greater cohesion and depth than the Triple Alliance as the ties binding it together, whether financial, especially in the case of France and Russia, military, diplomatic, or even improved wireless and telegraph communications grew more numerous and stronger. The French not only encouraged Britain and Russia to enter into military discussions but themselves pressed Britain for a clearer commitment than it had yet been willing to give. Although the British Cabinet remained divided on the issue and Grey himself preferred to occupy the foggy ground between reassuring the French of his support and refusing to specify what that might consist of, France had a willing and active collaborator in Henry Wilson, who visited the country seven times alone in 1913 for discussions with his French counterparts.
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By 1912, as well, the British and French navies were moving towards closer co-operation in the Mediterranean, the Atlantic and the Far East.

This was not just a result of French pressure but because the British faced a dilemma: their navy could no longer meet all the challenges facing it, in particular defending British interests in the Mediterranean, where Italy, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire were all building dreadnoughts, and outmatching the German navy on the high seas. If Britain could not bring the naval race with Germany under control – and by the end of 1912, with the failure of yet more talks, that looked highly unlikely – it would have to either spend a good deal more on its navy or work with the navies of friendly powers to share responsibilities for key areas. This posed a political problem for Asquith. Although the Conservatives generally supported increased naval spending, the radicals in his own party did not, and many Liberals were also wary of making further international commitments which might lead Britain into war.

Britain’s new First Lord of the Admiralty was the ambitious, energetic and forceful young Winston Churchill, in those days a member of the Liberal Party. ‘Winston talks about nothing but the Sea and the Navy and the wonderful things he is going to do,’ his Naval Secretary noted.
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Churchill took to his new post with boundless enthusiasm and self-confidence, mastering the details of ships, shipyards, docks, and
equipment as well as thinking through Britain’s strategic needs. ‘These were great days,’ he wrote in his account of the Great War. ‘From dawn to midnight, day after day, one’s whole mind was absorbed by the fascination and novelty of the problems which came crowding forward.’
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In the three years before the war he spent eight months on board the Admiralty yacht,
Enchantress
, visiting every key ship and naval establishment in the Mediterranean and British home waters. (‘Holiday at Govt. expense’, noted Wilson of one of these trips.)
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‘In the end’, Churchill claimed with some exaggeration, ‘I could put my hand on anything that was wanted and knew thoroughly the current state of our naval affairs.’
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Although he infuriated many of the senior naval officers with his calm assumption that he could do their jobs better than they, he made much needed reforms. He created a proper general staff for the first time; he improved the working conditions of the ordinary sailors; and he converted the navy’s ships from coal to the more efficient and less labour-intensive fuel of oil.
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Although this last had long-term strategic implications by making oil fields in the Middle East of critical importance to Britain, it was Churchill’s decision to reorganise and reposition the Mediterranean Fleet that added yet another element to the mix that made the Great War possible.

While the Mediterranean remained of great importance to the British, providing as it did access to the vital Suez Canal, the Atlantic especially around the British Isles was a matter of life and death, and Germany now could bring an equal number of battleships to its waters. Churchill and his naval advisers therefore decided early in 1912 to improve the odds by moving their battleships from their bases in the Mediterranean to Gibraltar at its entrance from the Atlantic and leave only a squadron of fast cruisers based at Malta. What that meant, although the implications were not recognised immediately, was that France was now primarily responsible for the security of the Mediterranean in the face of threats from the Italian and Austrian fleets and possibly, if matters turned out badly, that of the Ottoman Empire as well. To do this, the French would be obliged to move more of their own fleet from its Atlantic ports into the Mediterranean, which they soon did, and they could reasonably expect as a consequence that Britain would guarantee the safety of the French Atlantic coast and protect the vital shipping lanes of the Channel. As Churchill pointed out in a
memorandum to Grey in August 1912, the French would have had to concentrate in the Mediterranean because of their North African colonies even if the British navy had not existed but the fact that the British had withdrawn their battleships left the French in a strong moral position if war came. Consider, he urged Grey, ‘how tremendous would be the weapon which France would possess to compel our intervention, if she could say, “On the advice of and by arrangement with your naval authorities we have left our Northern coasts defenceless.”’ And he concluded, perfectly correctly, ‘Every one must feel who knows the facts that we have the obligations of an alliance without its advantages, and above all without its precise definitions.’
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An alliance and precise definitions were what, of course, Paul Cambon, the French ambassador in London, and his government wanted, and just what Grey and the British government hoped to avoid. The conversations between the French and British armies had already encouraged the French to think that they could count on British military support on land, however much Grey waved his free hands about. Naval conversations had also been going on in a desultory and inconclusive fashion for some years but in July 1912 the British Cabinet gave them greater significance by formally authorising them to continue. By the end of 1913 the British and French navies had reached several understandings to co-operate if war should come. The British navy would look after the narrowest point of the Channel, the Straits of Dover, while the British and the French would share responsibility for the rest. In the Mediterranean, the French would patrol the western half while the British, with their fleet at Malta, looked after the eastern end. The two navies would also work together against Germany in the Far East. Detailed operational plans were drawn up, especially for the Channel.
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