July 1914: Countdown to War (11 page)

I
N
L
ONDON
,
THE READING PUBLIC
, accustomed through long experience of empire to take an interest in incidents in far-off corners of the globe, was more likely to follow the latest Balkan imbroglio than were the domestic scandal–mad French. The
Times
was something like the paper of record for observers of global affairs and could hardly ignore the story. The paper’s Sarajevo correspondent did not disappoint, providing colorful details on the assassinations (including the failed bombing attempt that preceded the shooting), noting the presence of multiple assassins, and concluding sensibly that the attacks were “evidently the fruit of a carefully laid plot.” Other dispatches from Vienna rounded out the Austrian side of the story, weaving
great drama out of the forlorn, doomed marriage of Ferdinand and Sophie and the (much exaggerated) grief of Emperor Franz Josef I. On Monday, 29 June, the Sarajevo outrage was front-page news in London, reported with all the verve and gusto one expected of Fleet Street. There was even a sharp downward blip in the London stock market that morning, reflecting investors’ fears of European complications in the Balkans. By Monday afternoon, however, the City of London had fully recovered its footing. On Tuesday, even the globally minded
Times
had shunted Sarajevo back to page 7. The Balkan drama did merit an editorial that day, but its purpose was to explain why, even though the story must “occupy the attention of all students of European politics,” it should not unduly concern anyone in Britain, where “our own affairs must be addressed.” By the following Monday, a
Times
editorial wrote off the Sarajevo incident as old history: it was no longer a matter “of European significance.”
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By “our own affairs,” the
Times
meant Ireland. Just as France was consumed by the Caillaux affair, so was England convulsed with reverberations from the Curragh Incident of March 1914. By spring, Irish Loyalist Volunteers from Ulster (the “Ulstermen”) had put more than one hundred thousand men under arms to block any effort by the British government to impose Home Rule (that is, independence) on Ireland—on the northern counties of Ulster, anyway. In early March, the Liberal government in London had offered a “compromise” exempting Ulster from Home Rule for six years and
only
six years. The offer was rejected, and documents turned up by army intelligence suggested that the Volunteers were planning a coup. Winston Churchill, first lord of the Admiralty, ordered the HMS
Pathfinder
and HMS
Attentive
to the Irish coast and vowed privately that, if the Ulstermen took up arms against the British army, “he would pour enough shot and shell into Belfast to reduce it to ruins.” Churchill then gave an open-throated public speech on
March 14, offering “the hand of friendship” to Ulstermen if they desired it but a confrontation if they did not (“let us put these grave matters to the proof”).

Fearing, with good cause, that the government was about to strike, on Friday, 20 March, fifty English cavalry officers at the Curragh barracks in Ireland announced that they would not take up arms against the Ulstermen—a sort of mutiny, as critics called it, although no orders had yet been given that they could have disobeyed. General Hubert Gough, the head “mutineer,” then resigned with all his officers, which led Sir John French, chief of the General Staff, to resign, which in turn prompted the resignation of the secretary of state for war and the colonies, Colonel John Seeley. Just as the Caillaux affair divided Right and Left in France, Home Rule pitted pro-independence Irish Catholics against loyalist Protestants, pro–Home Rule Liberals against Conservatives and Unionists, and the Liberal/Irish Party–controlled House of Commons (which kept passing Home Rule bills, with a third reading scheduled in May 1914) against the more Conservative and Unionist-friendly House of Lords (which kept rejecting them). There was even a “treason” angle, as it was widely reported that German firms, in late April, had sold arms to Ulster in the hope of provoking an Irish civil war. (The total haul was later confirmed at thirty-five thousand Mauser rifles and three million rounds of ammunition.) The Curragh incident and all its echoes, said the
Daily Mail
, “was the biggest story since the Boer War” of 1899–1902.
⁹

While it lacked the sexiness of France’s Caillaux affair, Britain’s Irish crisis was more serious in nature. It was Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone’s attempt to pass the first Home Rule bill that had wrecked the Liberal Party in 1886, ushering in years of Conservative-Unionist dominance; his attempt to pass a second bill in 1893 had led to another thumping Tory-Unionist victory in 1895. So explosive was the issue that the Liberals, despite winning a landslide victory in 1905, had waited
nearly seven years before introducing a Home Rule bill again in 1912. Many in the army wished that they had waited another decade. Sir Henry Wilson, an Irish Unionist major-general who was Britain’s key liaison staff officer with the French high command, in charge of planning joint operations in case of a European war, thought that using the army to enforce Home Rule would split it “from top to bottom.” This was hardly an unlikely scenario, considering that the mere rumor of impending Home Rule had nearly torn the army apart in March. Like Wilson, a large number of British officers hailed from Northern Ireland, and they tended, almost to a man, to be Unionists. If the Liberal government chose to enact and enforce Home Rule, many feared it would lead to a real mutiny or even civil war.

At the time of the Sarajevo incident, because of the fallout from the Curragh incident, Britain did not even have a secretary of state for war. This office was, in theory, occupied by the Liberal prime minister, Herbert Asquith, until a permanent replacement could be found, but Asquith had plenty else on his plate, beginning with Home Rule. Having been rejected by the House of Lords after its third reading in late May, the Home Rule bill was now eligible for enactment by royal assent, but Asquith was hardly going to tempt Gladstone’s fate, and risk a civil war in Ireland, by doing so without negotiating a compromise. Secret talks were underway all through June over some kind of partition exempting Ulster from Home Rule—talks that threatened to enrage Asquith’s Liberal and Irish nationalist supporters if they found out about them. In the House of Commons on 30 June, Asquith did set aside the burning Irish issue long enough to express “indignation and deep concern” on behalf of the House over the Sarajevo outrage, which he called “one of those incredible crimes which almost make us despair of the progress of mankind.” But this was all he had to say on the matter.
¹⁰

With Asquith up to his neck in Irish affairs, and no secretary of war in the cabinet, foreign and defense policy was largely
left to Sir Edward Grey, His Majesty’s foreign secretary, and Churchill, the first lord of the Admiralty. While neither was as directly involved in the Home Rule business as was Asquith, it still dominated cabinet discussions; they could not afford to ignore it. Grey was also embroiled in another controversy that June. German newspapers, led by the
Berliner Tageblatt
, had gotten wind of ongoing naval talks between Britain and Russia, which they used to trumpet the nightmare of encirclement: the idea was that the British and Russian navies might team up against Germany’s Baltic fleet. Germany’s chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, had issued a formal protest to London, via his ambassador, Prince Karl Max Lichnowsky, on 24 June. Bethmann, whose entire foreign policy hinged on rapprochement with Britain—he saw this as a “question of life and death for Germany”—was obviously disturbed. So was Grey when he learned how upset the Germans were. In conversation with Lichnowsky, Grey dismissed the rumors about an Anglo-Russian naval convention, pointing out that Britain had no formal alliance “committing us to action” with either France or Russia, although he conceded that “we did from time to time talk as intimately as Allies.” This “intimacy” was, Grey insisted, absolutely “not used for aggression against Germany.” Lichnowsky, a notorious Anglophile, “cordially endorsed” Grey’s suspiciously vague assurance, but it was an open question whether less Anglophilic statesmen in Berlin would do so.
¹¹

What Grey told Lichnowsky was deeply misleading. While it is true that England’s own “Entente Cordiale” with France, first negotiated in 1904 over colonial questions in Africa, fell far short of a bilateral military alliance such as France had with Russia, over the years since, British naval and army officers had begun cooperating ever more closely with their French counterparts in joint war-planning against Germany, without their superiors ever publicly owning up to this. Grey himself had personally worked out a secret naval agreement in 1912 with
France’s ambassador to London, Paul Cambon, under which the French navy would “cover” the Mediterranean, leaving France’s northern and western coastlines undefended against Germany—with the understanding that the British fleet, covering the Channel, would defend them on France’s behalf by interdicting the German navy.

Meanwhile, still-more-secret staff talks between the French and British armies had, by June 1914, reached the point where a top-secret liaison agreement specified that a British expeditionary force (BEF) of six divisions would be dispatched across the Channel if German armies violated Belgian territory in a European war, as Franco-British intelligence suggested they might do. All the powers, including Germany, had guaranteed Belgian neutrality by treaty, but the country, owing to its location alongside the Channel opposite the south of England, had outsized strategic importance for Britain. Indeed, the treaty creating an independent Belgium had been signed in London in 1839 under the watchful eye of one of Britain’s greatest foreign ministers, Lord Palmerston. Not all British statesmen agreed that Belgian neutrality was worth a war: Lord Salisbury, the Tory titan of the 1880s and 1890s, would have preferred to water down the obligation because either France or Germany would inevitably have to violate Belgian territory if they went to war. But then not even Salisbury had succeeded in altering the London treaty.

Most ordinary Britons, and even most British members of Parliament, would have been astonished to learn that their country might go to war over a treaty obligation to uphold Belgian neutrality dating to 1839. And yet the staff work of recent years, along with Grey’s shifty secret diplomacy, had made this scenario increasingly plausible. Sir Henry Wilson, the Irish Unionist general in charge of joint planning with the French in case the Germans violated Belgium, had done his work so thoroughly that the BEF deployment plan to France was now “complete to the last billet of every battalion, even to the places where
they were to drink their coffee.”
¹²
Curiously, by 1914 not only the French army but even German military planners, too, had a rough idea what to expect from the BEF (because the Germans knew their war plan required violating Belgian territory, they had to reckon with the possibility of British intervention), but Britain’s own civilian government, including Grey, had been kept in the dark. Aside from lying about the Franco-British naval agreement with Cambon, Grey was therefore telling Lichnowsky the truth as he knew it, but then he did not know very much.

Much the same could be said of the Anglo-Russian naval talks. Despite German fears, discussions of joint maneuvers had, by June 1914, barely gotten off the ground, which is why Grey felt no need to enlighten Lichnowsky about them. And yet serious naval talks were indeed afoot that spring between London and St. Petersburg—not about Russia’s Baltic fleet but about her Black Sea fleet. With their own Black Sea dreadnoughts-under-construction nowhere near completion, the Russians were terrified that the Turks were about to float their own state-of-the-art British dreadnoughts in the Bosphorus, which would effectively rule out any future Russian attempt to seize Constantinople and the Straits. Just as Germans like Liman von Sanders were helping train the Ottoman army, a British mission under Admiral Sir Arthur Limpus was modernizing the Turkish navy. Skeleton crews were being trained to take over the first British-built dreadnought, scheduled to reach Ottoman territorial waters in July. This was the
Sultan Osman I
, which would mount more guns than any ship ever afloat—13.5-inch guns that were larger, faster-firing, and more accurate than the Russians’ 12-inchers. And the inferior Russian dreadnoughts would not be completed before 1916, giving the Turks nearly two years to assert their dominance over a Russian Black Sea fleet rendered obsolete by the
Sultan Osman I
. Small wonder that Sazonov, via Russia’s ambassador to Britain, Count Benckendorff, was requesting that the British government block, or at least delay, delivery
of the
Sultan Osman I—
the first of no less than four dreadnoughts that British yards were building for the Ottoman navy. Alas for Russia, Grey and Churchill, on 12 June 1914, declined, on the classic Liberal grounds that the British government could not interfere with private business contracts.
¹³