July 1914: Countdown to War (49 page)

At midnight, the ministers dispersed, and a drafting committee set to work on the reply. Below-Selaske, desperate for news, showed up at the Foreign Ministry at one thirty
AM
, reporting that the French army had crossed the German frontier “in a breach of international law” (that is, before war had been declared; the Germans were fanatics on this point).
²³
As French troops had reportedly crossed German, not Belgian, territory,
Below-Selaske’s complaint was dismissed as irrelevant. It was obvious that the German simply wanted an answer on which way the Belgians would go. At two thirty
AM
, the final text of the reply was approved. The “infringement of [Belgium’s] independence with which the German Government threatens her,” the note declared, “would constitute a flagrant violation of international law. No strategic interest justifies such a breach of law. Were it to accept the proposals laid before it, the Belgian Government would sacrifice the nation’s honor while being false to its duties toward Europe.” While expressing a hope that the Germans might change their minds, the note concluded that, “if this hope were disappointed, the Belgian Government is firmly resolved to repel every infringement of its rights by all the means in its power.”
²⁴

As everyone turned in on Sunday night, policymakers in Berlin, London, and Paris were awaiting news from Belgium with almost unbearable anxiety. By morning, they would have it.

 
___________

*
While Bethmann knew in a general sense about the planned march through Belgium, it is true that he learned of the M + 3 assault on Liège only on Friday, 31 July.

*
So incompetent was German diplomacy that this treaty was invalid even before Wangenheim signed it. Because Germany had declared war on Russia (and not the other way around), the
casus foederis
did not, technically, apply to
any
of her allies, not even Austria-Hungary. The clever Ottoman grand vizier, it seems, knew this: Turkey did not declare war on Russia until months later, despite furious protests from Berlin.

*
In a sense, it was curious that no one in London seemed much exercised by the violation of Luxembourg’s neutrality, guaranteed by a treaty also signed in London in 1867. But then Luxembourg was tiny and landlocked, whereas Belgium was Britain’s main continental buffer along the English Channel. Sentiment and sympathy there might have been regarding the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, but not national interest.

MONDAY, 3 AUGUST

B
Y
M
ONDAY MORNING
, news of the German ultimatum to Brussels had reached London, although it was not yet clear what Belgium’s response had been. Bonar Law and Lord Landsdowne met with Asquith to reconfirm Conservative support for intervention. Public opinion seemed to be shifting in their direction. As Lloyd George recalled, “the war had leapt in popularity between Saturday and Monday . . . the threatened invasion of Belgium had set the nation on fire from sea to sea.” The chancellor of the Exchequer, always adept at reading shifts in the popular mood, now came over to the war party.
¹

Not everyone felt the same way. Morley and Simon both sent Asquith resignation letters on Monday morning (although they did promise to attend that day’s cabinet). Even Sir Edward Grey seemed to be having cold feet. Scheduled to address the Commons in the afternoon, he had stayed up late the night before, jotting down notes for his speech. When he arrived at the Foreign Office around ten
AM
, the German ambassador was waiting for him, desperate for news on which way Britain would
go. Grey was almost apologetic, leaving Lichnowsky with the impression that, although Britain would “not be able to regard the violation of Belgian neutrality calmly,” he, personally, “would like, if at all possible, to remain neutral.” Lichnowsky, hoping to give Grey grounds for doing so, promised that Germany, “even in the event of a conflict with Belgium . . . would maintain the integrity of Belgian territory,” and that, providing England stayed neutral, the German fleet would not attack France’s northern coastline. Grey listened politely but promised nothing.
²

When the cabinet met at eleven
AM
, the very gravity of the moment did much to dissolve the bitterness of the weekend. Everyone knew that Grey was going to address the Commons at three
PM
, and everyone knew, more or less, what he would say about Britain’s obligations regarding Belgium. Burns had already gone; Morley and Simon were going, too. Now, the first commissioner of works, Lord William Beauchamp—“Sweetheart,” as Asquith called him—announced that he, too, would resign.
*
Lloyd George, having switched sides, made a “strong appeal” to the waverers “not to go, or at least to delay it.” It was, Asquith wrote after the session, “a rather moving scene in which everyone all round said something.”
³

Ordinarily, a wave of resignations like this would be enough to sink a government, but with a European war on the immediate horizon, they had the opposite effect, convincing the remaining ministers to stand firm. With the deck cleared of the most vociferous noninterventionists, the cabinet at last approved Churchill’s previous, unauthorized mobilization of the British fleet. When news arrived confirming the German ultimatum,
and that “Belgium has refused categorically,” Asquith (in his temporary role as secretary of state for war) ordered the army to mobilize, too. Most important, Grey was authorized to tell the Commons that afternoon that Britain would defend the French coast against German attack and that she would take action if Germany invaded Belgium. Simon and Beauchamp, overwhelmed with emotion, withdrew their resignations (although Morley did not). Even Morley agreed to “say nothing today,” to attend the Commons debate, and not to walk out in protest when His Majesty’s foreign secretary made his case. At two
PM
, the cabinet broke up to give everyone time to dine and to allow Grey to gather his energy for his speech.
⁴

Anticipation for the big event had been building all day. Since 1871, the first Monday in August had been a bank holiday in England. Most years, this meant the city would be empty, with vacationers staying away for a third day. But with the cabinet in constant session owing to the war crisis, the tourist traffic had reversed course. Masses had descended on London, keen for news. The weather remained superb, so even in the city people were enjoying the outdoors. By afternoon, the crowd of pedestrians in Westminster, Lloyd George recalled, “was so dense that no car could drive through it.” “Had it not been for police assistance,” he wrote, “we could not have walked a yard on our way.”
⁵

By three
PM
, the House of Commons was “crowded to the roof and tense with doubt and dreadful expectation,” the historian G. M. Trevelyan recalled. For the first time since 1893, every member was in attendance. The diplomatic gallery was packed (although Lichnowsky was not there). So many visitors wanted to witness history that extra chairs had to be brought into the gangway. All eyes were on Sir Edward Grey as he rose to speak—especially those of Ambassadors Benckendorff and Cambon, desperate to learn at last whether England would join
Russia and France. The endless crisis meetings had taken a severe toll on Grey, who was normally accustomed to regaining his strength in the country each weekend. To those close enough to see his face, he looked “pale, haggard, and worn.”
⁶
In Grey’s own recollection of the moment in his memoirs, he strikes an oddly passive note, as if he were merely submitting to fate rather than shaping world-historical events: “I do not recall feeling nervous. At such a moment there could neither be hope of personal success nor fear of personal failure. In a great crisis, a man who has to act or speak stands bare and stripped of choice. He has to do what it is in him to do; just this is what he will and must do, and can do no other.”
⁷
Grey’s elliptical manner of speaking, his inability to simply come out and say what he meant, had long infuriated ambassadors trying to tease out an understanding of British policy. This speech would be no different.

“It has not been possible to secure the peace of Europe,” he began, characteristically using indirect language, but he did not “want to dwell on that.” To allay suspicions that he had secretly committed Britain to fight, Grey stated that he had “given no promise of anything more than diplomatic support” (to
whom
this promise of diplomatic support had been given, Grey did not say). Grey did share with the House a letter he had written to Ambassador Cambon in November 1912, relating to the disposition of the British and French fleets, but he insisted that, read literally, it did not constitute “an engagement to co-operate in war.” As to the Franco-Russian alliance, Grey insisted that “we are not parties” to it and that “we do not even know the terms of that Alliance.” After a half hour of this aimless, uninformative meandering, members of the House could have been forgiven for wondering why Grey was addressing them at all.

At last Grey came to the point—or so it seemed. “For many years,” he remarked as if stating an unremarkable fact, “we have had a long-standing friendship with France.” (“And with Germany!”
one MP was heard to shout.) As if discouraged by this protest from the back benches, Grey started backing down again. “But how far that friendship entails obligation,” he continued, “let every man look into his own heart, and his own feelings. . . . I construe it myself as I feel it, but I do not wish to urge upon anyone else more than their feelings dictate as to what they should feel about this obligation.”

Grey then explained his own “feelings” as to what Britain owed France. Because of the concentration of the French fleet in the Mediterranean—a concentration owing, Grey explained as elliptically as possible, to “the feeling of confidence and friendship which has existed between [our] two countries”—“the French coasts are absolutely undefended.” As if stating a hypothetical, Grey explained that his own “feeling is that if a foreign fleet engaged in a war which France had not sought, and in which she had not been the aggressor, came down the English Channel and bombarded and battered the undefended coasts of France, we could not stand aside.” Expanding the hypothetical, Grey offered that if Britain
did
stand aside, France would be forced to withdraw her fleet from the Mediterranean, which would leave Britain’s weak squadron there exposed to attack from Italy, in case she abandoned her current posture of neutrality and joined the Central Powers. This, he informed the House with something less than great conviction, would disturb “our trade routes in the Mediterranean.” As if to undermine his own argument, Grey now revealed that Germany’s ambassador had assured him that “if we would pledge ourselves to neutrality, [Germany would] agree that its Fleet would not attack the Northern coast of France.” At this stage, Grey’s case for intervention rested on a naval attack on France’s channel coast that the Germans had expressly promised not to carry out if England remained neutral and a far-fetched hypothetical involving an Italian threat to Britain’s Mediterranean shipping
interests. Little wonder that Lord Derby, an interventionist Tory, was heard whispering angrily, “By God, they are going to desert Belgium!”

Just when it seemed that Grey had lost his line of thought, he gathered himself for a final push. He had avoided mentioning Belgium for more than an hour. Now, as if revealing a trump, he did. After reading out France’s positive reply to his question about respecting Belgian neutrality, along with Germany’s evasive one, Grey finally dropped his bombshell: Germany had issued an ultimatum to Brussels the previous night. Even this news, he confessed, was unconfirmed (“I am not yet quite sure how far it has reached me in an accurate form”). “We have great and vital interests,” Grey now stirred himself to declare, “in the independence—and integrity is the least part—of Belgium.” At last finding his voice, Grey channeled Gladstone, the great moralist, who had asked regarding a violation of Belgium by a European power whether Britain “would quietly stand by and witness the perpetration of the direst crime that ever stained the pages of history, and thus become participators in the sin.” True, Gladstone was discussing a hypothetical, but it now appeared that it was about to become real. And if Belgium fell and France were “beaten to her knees,” Grey predicted, “the independence of Holland will follow,” followed by Denmark: before long, Germany would dominate the entire Channel coastline and have England at her mercy. In an ill-judged prophecy, Grey argued that “we are going to suffer, I am afraid, terribly in this war, whether we are in it or whether we stand aside.” If Britain did stand aside, forfeiting her “Belgian Treaty obligations,” then she would “sacrifice our respect and good name and reputation before the world.”

After listening to Grey in “painful absorption” for nearly an hour and a half, the Commons, one eyewitness recalled, “broke into overwhelming applause, signifying its answer.”
⁸
Grey had carried the day.

He had not, however, won over everyone. Trevelyan, disappointed, complained that Grey had given “not a single argument why we should support France”—as, indeed, he had not. Nor had there been any mention of Russia’s secret early war preparations, nor of her having been the first power to mobilize—these revelations, of course, had not reached Grey himself, owing to French and Russian deception and his own incuriosity. Strangest of all, considering the aim of his speech, Grey, despite alluding to the German ultimatum to Brussels delivered the previous night, had not noted that Belgium had already refused it and vowed to fight—although this had been confirmed by Britain’s minister to Belgium in a wire received by the Foreign Office at 10:55
AM
.
*
Considering how much was riding on his speech—and that his meandering remarks went on for ninety minutes—it is astonishing how much Grey did
not
mention. Small wonder that the Labour Party registered dissent with Grey’s case for intervention. Grey’s own party had similar reservations. No less than twenty-eight dissident Liberals met in the lobby to adopt a resolution stating that he had failed to make the case for war.
⁹