Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (40 page)

The ‘reasonable proposal’ Grey had in mind was that ‘Germany would agree not to attack France if France remained neutral [or kept its troops on its own territory] in the event of a war between Russia and Germany.‘
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Even the pessimistic Lichnowsky began to think on hearing this that ‘in a possible war, England might adopt a waiting attitude’.
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Reactions in Paris were correspondingly bleak. On the evening of 1 August, Grey told Cambon baldly:

A private warning to Lichnowsky was not, as Grey explained to Cambon, ‘the same thing as ... an engagement to France’.
²⁰⁰

Grey’s conduct in these crucial days faithfully reflected the acute divisions within Asquith’s Cabinet. The nineteen men who met on 31 July were divided into three unequal groups: those who, in common with the bulk of the party, favoured an immediate declaration of neutrality (including Morley, Burns, Simon, Beauchamp and Hobhouse), those who were in favour of intervention (Grey and Churchill only) and those who had not made up their minds (notably Crewe, McKenna, Haldane and Samuel, but probably also Lloyd George and Harcourt, as well, of course, as Asquith himself).
²⁰¹
Morley argued forcefully against intervention on the side of Russia, and it seemed clear that the majority was inclining to his view. However, Grey’s threat to resign if ‘an out-and-out uncompromising policy of non-intervention’ were adopted sufficed to maintain the stalemate.
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The Cabinet agreed that ‘British opinion would not now enable us to support France ... - we could say nothing to commit ourselves’.
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Nor was the deadlock really broken when, on the night of 1 August, Churchill was able to persuade Asquith to let him mobilise the navy on the news of the German ultimatum to Russia.
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This merely prompted Morley and Simon to threaten resignation at the next morning’s meeting and the majority once again to close ranks against Grey’s repeated pleas for a clear declaration. The most that could be agreed in the first session of that crucial Sunday was that ‘if the German fleet comes into the Channel or through the North Sea to undertake hostile operations against the French coasts or shipping, the British fleet will give all the protection in its power’.
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Even this - which was far from being a declaration of war, given that such German naval action was highly unlikely - was too much for Burns, the President of the Board of Trade, who resigned. As Samuel noted, ‘Had the matter come to an issue, Asquith would have stood by Grey ... and three others would have remained. I think the rest of us would have resigned.’
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At lunch at Beauchamp’s that day, seven ministers, among them Lloyd George, expressed reservations about even the limited naval measures.
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Had they realised that Grey had already surreptitiously withdrawn his proposal to Lichnowsky for French neutrality in a Russo-German war, and that Lichnowsky had been reduced to tears at Asquith’s breakfast table that morning, they might have acted on those reservations.
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As it was, Morley, Simon and Beauchamp now joined Burns in offering their resignations, following the commitment to Belgium which Grey had been able to secure that evening only by himself threatening to resign. A junior minister, Charles Trevelyan, also went.

Why then did the government not fall? The immediate answer is, as Asquith recorded in his diary, that Lloyd George, Samuel and Pease appealed to the resigners ‘not to go, or at least to delay it’, whereupon ‘they agreed to say nothing today and sit in their accustomed places in the House’.
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But why did these erstwhile waverers set their faces against resignation at this decisive moment? The traditional answer can be expressed in a single word: Belgium.

Certainly, it had long been recognised in the Foreign Office that the decision to intervene on behalf of France ‘would be more easily arrived at if German aggressiveness ... entailed a violation of the neutrality of Belgium, which Great Britain has guaranteed to maintain’ under two treaties dating back to 1839.
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And certainly, with hindsight, Lloyd George and others cited the violation of Belgian neutrality as the single most important reason for swinging them - and ‘public opinion’ - in favour of war.
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At first sight, the point seems irrefutable. On 6 August 1914, Britain’s ‘solemn international obligation’ to uphold Belgian neutrality in the name of law and honour, and ‘to vindicate the principle ... that small nations are not to be crushed‘, provided the two central themes of Asquith’s ‘What are we fighting for?’ speech to the Commons.
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It was also the keynote of Lloyd George’s successful Welsh recruitment drive.
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And if subsequent memoirs by combatants like Graves and Sassoon are any guide (to say nothing of the
Punch
cartoons of the day), the Belgian issue struck a chord.
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Nevertheless there are reasons for scepticism. As we have seen, the Foreign Office view in 1905 had been that the 1839 treaty did not bind Britain to uphold Belgium’s neutrality ‘in any circumstances and at whatever risk’. When the issue had come up in 1912, none other than Lloyd George had expressed the concern that, in the event of war, Belgium should ‘either be entirely friendly to this country ... or ... definitely hostile’, as neutrality would undermine the British blockade strategy.
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Significantly, when the issue was raised in Cabinet on 29 July, it was decided to base any response to a German invasion of Belgium on ‘policy’ rather than ‘legal obligation’
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The government’s line was therefore to warn the Germans obliquely by stating that a violation of Belgium might cause British public opinion to ‘veer round’. Thus Grey was able to respond to German prevarication on the subject with a unanimous Cabinet warning that ‘if there were a violation of Belgian neutrality ... it would be extremely hard to restrain public feeling’.
²¹⁷
But that did not commit the government itself. This is not so surprising, as a number of ministers were in fact rather keen to welch on the Belgian guarantee.

Lloyd George was one of those who, as Beaverbrook recalled, tried to argue that the Germans would ‘pass only through the furthest southern corner’ and that this would imply ‘a small infraction of neutrality. “You see,” he would say [pointing to a map], “it is only a little bit, and the Germans will pay for any damage they do.”’
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It was widely (though wrongly) expected, in any case, that the Belgians would not call for British assistance, but would simply issue a formal protest in the event of a German passage through the Ardennes. The German bid for British neutrality on 30 July had very clearly implied an incursion into Belgium; but even on the morning of 2 August, after Jagow had clearly refused to guarantee Belgian neutrality, Lloyd George, Harcourt, Beauchamp, Simon, Runciman and Pease agreed that they could contemplate war only in the event of the ‘invasion
wholesale
of Belgium’. Charles Trevelyan took the same view.
²¹⁹
Hence the careful wording of the Cabinet’s resolution that evening, communicated by Crewe to the King, that ‘a
substantial
violation of the neutrality of [Belgium] would place us in the situation contemplated as possible by Mr Gladstone in 1870, when interference was held to compel us to take action’.
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When news of the German ultimatum to Belgium reached Asquith on the morning of 3 August, he was therefore profoundly relieved. Moltke’s demand for unimpeded passage through the
whole
of Belgium, the subsequent appeal of King Albert to George V and the German invasion the next day distinctly ‘simplified matters,’ in Asquith’s words, because it allowed both Simon and Beauchamp to withdraw their resignations.
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The last-minute attempts by Moltke and Lichnowsky to guarantee the postwar integrity of Belgium were therefore futile.
²²²
When Bethmann Hollweg lamented to Goschen that ‘England should fall upon them for the sake of the neutrality of Belgium’ - ‘just for a scrap of paper’ - he was missing the point. By going for the whole of Belgium, Moltke had unwittingly saved the Liberal government.

Yet, as Wilson has argued, it was not so much the German threat to Belgium which swung the Cabinet behind intervention as the German threat to
Britain
which Grey and the hawks had always insisted would arise if France fell. This can be inferred from Asquith’s note to Venetia Stanley of 2 August in which he set down the six principles by which he was guided: only the sixth referred to Britain’s ‘obligations to Belgium to prevent her being utilised and absorbed by Germany’. The fourth and fifth were more important, stating as they did that, while Britain was under no obligation to assist France, ‘It is against British interests that France should be wiped out as a Great Power’ and ‘We cannot allow Germany to use the Channel as a hostile base.‘
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Likewise, the main argument of Grey’s famous speech to the Commons of 3 August - delivered before the news of the German ultimatum to Belgium - was that ‘if France is beaten in a struggle of life and death ... I do not believe that ... we should be in a position to use our force decisively to ... prevent the whole of the West of Europe opposite to us ... falling under the domination of a single Power’.
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The strategic risks of non-intervention - isolation, friendlessness - outweighed the risks of intervention. As Grey put it in a private conversation the next day: ’It will not end with Belgium. Next will come Holland, and after Holland, Denmark.... England[‘s] ... position would be gone if Germany were thus permitted to dominate Europe.’ ‘German policy’, he told the Cabinet, was ‘that of the great European aggressor, as bad as Napoleon’. That this argument also won over waverers like Harcourt seems clear.
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Morley was thus not far wrong when he said that Belgium had furnished a ‘plea ... for intervention on behalf of France’.
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There was, however, another and arguably even more important reason why Britain went to war at 11 p.m. on 4 August 1914. Throughout the days of 31 July-3 August, one thing above all maintained Cabinet unity: the fear of letting in the Tories.
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As early as 31 July, Churchill secretly asked Bonar Law via F. E. Smith whether, in the event of up to eight resignations, ‘the Opposition [would] be prepared to come to the rescue of the Government ... by forming a Coalition to fill up the vacant offices’.
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Bonar Law declined to respond, but, after consultation with Balfour, Lansdowne and Long, sent a letter to Asquith making clear the Tory view that it would be ‘fatal ... to hesitate in supporting France and Russia at this present juncture’. The ‘unhesitating support’ offered by Bonar Law ’in any measures [the government] may consider necessary for that object’ was nothing less than a veiled threat that Conservatives would be willing to step into Liberal shoes if the government could not agree on such measures.
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After years of bellicose criticism from the Tory press, and especially the Northcliffe-owned papers, this was the one thing calculated to harden Asquith’s resolve. Resignation, he told the Cabinet, might seem the ordinary course for a government so divided. But, he went on, ‘the National situation is far from ordinary, and I cannot persuade myself that the other party is led by men, or contains men, capable of dealing with it’.
²³⁰
Samuel and Pease immediately grasped the point, telling Burns: ‘For the majority of the Cabinet now to leave meant a ministry which was a war one and that was the last thing he wanted.’ ‘The alternative government’, as Pease put it, ‘must be one much less anxious for peace than ourselves.’ He said the same to Trevelyan three days later, by which time Simon and Runciman had taken up the refrain.
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At first sight, the fact that the Conservatives were more eager than the Liberals for war might seem to strengthen the determinist case: if Asquith had fallen, then Bonar Law would have gone to war just the same. But would it have been just the same? Let us suppose Lloyd George - defeated on his most recent Finance Bill, beset by financial panic, assailed by pacifist editorials in the
Guardian
and the
British Weekly
- had deserted Grey at the critical Cabinet meeting. Grey would certainly have resigned; Churchill would have rushed off to join Bonar Law. Would Asquith have been able to hang on with his slender majority already strained to breaking point by Irish Home Rule? It seems unlikely. But how quickly could a Conservative government have been formed? The last change of government had been a protracted affair: Balfour’s administration had shown the first signs of disintegrating over tariff reform as early as 1903, had actually been defeated in the Commons on 20 July 1905, had lost the confidence of the Chamberlainites in November 1905 and had finally resigned on 4 December. The general election which confirmed the strength of Liberal support in the country was not over until 7 February 1906. It is conceivable that matters would have moved more swiftly had Asquith been forced to resign in early August 1914. Certainly Churchill’s plan for a coalition was designed to prevent any delay in intervention. But would a declaration of war on Germany have been possible under such circumstances before a general election? Much would have depended on the King, who, like his cousins in Berlin and St Petersburg, had shown little enthusiasm for war once he looked over the edge of the abyss.
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It seems reasonable to assume that a change of government would have delayed the despatch of the British Expeditionary Force by at least a week.