Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914. Max Hastings
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happens now?’ Churchill demanded as he and Grey left the House together. An ultimatum would be sent to Berlin, said the foreign secretary, demanding German withdrawal from Belgium within twenty-four hours. Sir Francis Bertie wrote: ‘Grey’s speech … was splendid and has given much more satisfaction [in Paris] than I expected. Germany was determined to have war and tried all she knew to lure us into abstention from the struggle.’ Jules Cambon said after the conflict: ‘We were extraordinarily fortunate that Britain’s Liberal Party was then in government. Had it been in opposition, it would perhaps have delayed British intervention.’ In this he was probably correct; it is by no means certain that if a Conservative government had been eager to fight, the Liberals would have fallen into step. Their contrarian instinct might have proved too strong, as it did for two minor cabinet members – Lord Morley and John Burns – who quit.
That night, even after all the dramas of the day, uncertainty persisted about what practical military measures Britain would adopt. The foreign secretary displayed awesome naïveté, and severely injured his reputation before posterity, when he told the Commons that, since Britain was a naval power, by entering the war ‘we shall suffer but little more than we shall suffer if we stand aside’. Because such vestigial delusions persisted in government, no minister would authorise immediate dispatch of an army to the continent. This prevarication exasperated soldiers who knew that hours mattered in giving orders for a British Expeditionary Force to muster and sail before the German juggernaut swept into Belgium and France.
Coudourier de Chassigne, London correspondent of Le Figaro, rang Tom Clarke, news editor of the Daily Mail, in pursuit of tidings. ‘Are you going to go to the help of France?’ he demanded urgently. ‘I know the whole British nation is with us, but this rotten “wait and see” government of yours, when will they move? Soon it will be too late. It is terrible … Cannot Lord Northcliffe and the Daily Mail do something?’ An old Frenchman peered at a poster outside the local newspaper office in Nice and declared disgustedly: ‘L’Angleterre se dégage! C’est ignoble.’ Early on that evening of 3 August, the German ambassador in Paris called upon René Viviani and read aloud to him a declaration of war, the moral force of which was blunted by its deceits. The document claimed that French aircraft had bombed Nuremberg and Karlsruhe, and overflown Belgium in breach of its neutrality. Viviani denied the charges, then the two men silently bowed and parted. Gen. Joffre took a formal farewell of Poincaré before leaving for his headquarters, from which, through the months that followed, he would exercise a power more absolute than that of any other national commander.
Just after 8 o’clock on the morning of 4 August, the first German troops crossed the Belgian border at Gemmenich, thirty miles from Liège. Belgian gendarmes made the futile but significant gesture of firing on them before taking to their heels. At noon, King Albert formally appealed for aid to Britain, as a guarantor of Belgian neutrality. Then, dressed in field uniform and mounted on a charger, he rode at the head of a little procession of carriages, one of which held his wife and children, to the parliament building in Brussels. Once dismounted and in the chamber, he created an inimitable moment of theatre by demanding of members: ‘Gentlemen, are you unalterably decided to maintain intact the sacred gifts of our fore-fathers?’ As one man they rose, shouting, ‘Oui! Oui! Oui!’
In Berlin the Kaiser summoned the Reichstag deputies to his palace. He received them in helmet and full regimentals, flanked by Bethmann in the uniform of the Dragoon Guards. He said nothing of Belgium, but instead declared the war to have been provoked by Serbia with the support of Russia: ‘We draw the sword with a clear conscience and clean hands.’ His speech prompted wild applause. By contrast, when Bethmann later addressed the Reichstag, he displayed a frankness that Tirpitz afterwards branded as madness: ‘Our invasion of Belgium is contrary to international law, but this wrong – I speak openly – that we are committing – we will make right as soon as our military objective has been attained.’ Social democrats applauded as enthusiastically as did conservatives.
Asquith and Grey found themselves cheered by crowds in Whitehall as they hastened to and from the Commons on 4 August. The prime minister wrote to Venetia Stanley: ‘Winston, who has got on all his war-paint, is longing for a sea-fight in the early hours of tomorrow morning … The whole thing fills me with sadness.’ That afternoon, King George V’s proclamation of mobilisation was read to the Commons, following which Asquith rehearsed to the House the British ultimatum to Germany, which required an answer by midnight – 11 p.m. London time. The final part of the document was finally dispatched only at 7 p.m., after Grey learned that the Kaiser’s forces had entered Belgian territory. When Bethmann received it from the British ambassador, he claimed that ‘my blood boiled at this hypocritical harping on Belgium which was not the thing that had driven England into war’. The chancellor delivered a harangue to Sir Edward Goschen, pinning upon Britain blame for war and all that followed, and concluding: ‘all for just a word – “neutrality” – just for a scrap of paper’. The phrase passed into history. A host of Germans professed to regard British intervention as a betrayal.
In London as darkness fell, the cabinet met once more, to be told that Germany already considered itself at war with Britain. After further debate, they sat together in the Downing Street council room, waiting upon the clock chimes. As soon as Big Ben struck the first note of eleven, the government knew the worst. Twenty minutes later, the War Telegram was dispatched in plain language to the British Army. Norman Macleod perceived during the preceding twenty-hours ‘an extraordinary change in public feeling – up till Monday at any rate strong anti-war party – “Neutrality League” forward – but German refusal to respect neutrality of Belgium absolutely destroyed it’. He noted ‘another remarkable change. On Fri & Sat there had been panic in City & rush for food supplies. [By Monday] there was a feeling of complete confidence in the Govt – I have never seen anything like it, certainly not at the time of the Boer War.’
In the Royal Marine mess at Chatham on the night of 4 August a waiter handed a telegram to the corps commandant, who read it aloud: ‘Commence hostilities against Germany at once.’ This was received with applause by the assembled officers, many of whom would be dead within a year. Britain’s dominions and colonies, led by India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, were not consulted in any way about the decision to fight: their governors-general merely issued proclamations on their own authority, declaring them to be in a state of war with Germany, alongside the Mother Country. Only a few old Boers’ voices were raised in demurral. One of them, Jacobus Deventer, summoned his commando then telegraphed his former general, Louis Botha, now South Africa’s prime minister: ‘All my burghers armed, mounted and ready. Whom do we fight – the British or the Germans?’ He eventually accepted an order to join a force mustering to invade German South-West Africa, though some others mounted a short-lived anti-British rebellion.
Even many intelligent and informed Europeans failed to grasp the gravity of the course of action to which they had committed themselves. This is emphasised by the remarks of British leaders who expressed gratitude that war had reprieved the country from a bloody showdown in Ireland. In Grey’s Commons speech of 3 August he made an almost frivolous aside: ‘One thing I would say: the one bright spot in the very dreadful situation is Ireland.’ Sir William Birdwood, secretary to the government of India, wrote: ‘What a real piece of luck this war has been as regards Ireland – just averted a Civil War and when it is over we may all be tired of fighting.’
Ramsay MacDonald, who resigned the Labour Party leadership when his followers – like their German counterparts – decided to vote in favour of war credits, won some cheers when he told the Commons that Britain should have remained neutral, though when he went on to assert that ‘in the deepest parts of our hearts we believe that [would have been] right, and that alone was consistent with the honour of this country and the traditions of the party now in office’, he was received with a derisive laughter that sensitive witnesses thought unseemly. Mr Ponsonby, MP for Stirling Burghs, said that ‘we were on the eve of a great war and he hated to see people embarking on it with a light heart’, which prompted some assenting voices. Another MP, Mr Wedgwood, said that this was not going to be ‘one of the dear old wars of the 18th century … but a matter of sustaining the civilisation which it had taken centuries to bring about’. Perhaps the wisest comment,