Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914

The only untenable view of the July crisis is that war was the consequence of a series of accidents. On the contrary: the leaders of all the great powers believed themselves to be acting rationally, in pursuit of coherent and attainable objectives. A large enigma nonetheless persists about the exercise of authority in Germany: who was in charge? During the previous decade, the dysfunctionality of the nation’s governance had progressively worsened, even as its economic might increased. A new generation of elected politicians, many of them socialists, jostled for access to power outside palaces still dominated by the spurred topboots of a highly militarised autocracy. The Kaiser had become the symbol of his country’s assertive nationalism rather than an executive ruler, but he continued to make erratic interventions. Around him rival personalities, institutions and political groupings vied for mastery. The army and navy were at loggerheads. The General Staff scarcely spoke to the War Ministry. The Empire’s component states intermittently asserted themselves against Berlin.

A German author predicted in 1910 that during the period of political and military tension preceding any conflict, ‘the press and its key instruments, telegraph and telephone, will exercise immense influence, which may be for either good or ill’. Moltke agreed. However great the power of the army, the chief of staff recognised that to induce millions of conscripted civilians to engage in a twentieth-century conflict, the cause must command popular support. ‘Moltke told me,’ recorded a Prussian officer in 1908, ‘… that the time of cabinet wars was over and that a war the German people did not want or did not understand, and would therefore not greet with sympathy, would be a very dangerous affair. If … the people thought that the war had been conjured up in a frivolous fashion and was only intended to help the governing classes out of an embarrassment, then it would have to start with us having to fire on our own subjects.’ This goes far to explain why Germany had refused to go to war alongside Austria in earlier Balkan crises. It shows why, in July 1914, Moltke attached such importance to ensuring that Germany was seen, above all by its own people, as a threatened victim and not as an aggressor. The European crisis was overlaid on domestic turbulence. Labour unrest, manifested in frequent strikes, alarmed the Berlin government as much as similar troubles elsewhere prompted British, French and Russian fears about social stability.

It is difficult to assess the Kaiser’s conduct, because he changed his mind so often. Scribbled annotations on state documents emphasise his irredeemable intemperance: ‘Fool yourself Mr Sazonov!’; ‘Damnation!’; ‘No!’; ‘It’s not for him to decide’; ‘a tremendous piece of British insolence!’. The exclamation mark was his favoured instrument of policy-making. Wilhelm’s reversions to caution always came too late to undo the damage inflicted by his more usual imprudence. He allegedly told Bethmann on 5 July: ‘we should use all means to work against the growth of the Austro-Serbian controversy into an international conflict’. Yet next day he gave Vienna the ‘blank cheque’.

On 27 July his initial reaction, on returning from his Norwegian yachting trip to read the Serbs’ humble response to Vienna’s ultimatum, was that he saw ‘no more reason for a war’. But Bethmann that same day told the German ambassador to Austria: ‘We must appear as the ones being forced into the war.’ Gen. Erich von Falkenhayn, the Prussian war minister, met the Kaiser and Moltke on the 27th and recorded afterwards: ‘It has now been decided to fight the matter through, regardless of the cost.’ Three days later, on the 30th, the Bavarian Gen. Krafft von Dellmensingen wrote in his diary: ‘The Kaiser absolutely wants peace and the Kaiserin is working towards it with all her might. He even wants to influence Austria and stop her continuing further. That would be the greatest disaster! We would lose all credit as allies.’

By that time, however, the general’s court gossip was two days out of date. The Kaiser said on 28 July, ‘the ball that is rolling can no longer be stopped’, and seemed to mean it. One might liken his erratic behaviour to that of an amateur actor struggling to fill a monarch’s part in a Shakespearean history piece. Wilhelm strove to keep up with the rest of the cast, to play the warrior emperor, while being chronically uncertain what this required: he was forever snatching at the wrong cue or delivering misplaced lines.

But if German policy had vacillated earlier in July, now the march to war had attained its own momentum. In Berlin on the 29th, Falkenhayn sought to force the pace: he declared that the time for prevarication was over; Germany could no longer wait for Russia to move, but must mobilise. Bethmann and Moltke remained anxious, for domestic reasons, to be seen to follow rather than lead Russia, but they knew the hour was nigh. An ultimatum to neutral Belgium was prepared, demanding a right of passage through the country for the German army. Bethmann then made a diplomatic blunder. At a moment when British sentiment was wavering, he dispatched an offer to Sir Edward Grey: would Britain undertake to remain neutral, in return for assurances about German respect for Belgian and French territorial integrity? This essay in blackmail, which made plain that the Germans were preparing to attack in the West, provoked outrage in London. ‘There is something crude and almost childlike about German diplomacy,’ wrote Asquith disdainfully. Grey responded curtly that in no circumstances could Britain entertain so shameful a proposal.

This news from London precipitated a brief crisis of nerves on the part of Wilhelm and Bethmann during the night of 29 July. It had become apparent that they were leading their country into the greatest military clash in history, with the British unlikely to remain neutral. The Kaiser suddenly proposed that the Austrians should agree merely to occupy Belgrade until their terms were met. At 2.55 a.m. on the 30th, Bethmann telegraphed Vienna urging acceptance of diplomatic mediation. His message reached Berchtold, however, only after Austrian mobilisation had begun, and on the same day as the telegram from Moltke, urging the Empire to reject mediation and deploy its army against Russia rather than Serbia. Thus, before the chief of staff knew of full Russian mobilisation, he emphasised his personal commitment to a wider war, and his readiness to exercise his influence in the diplomatic sphere in a fashion well beyond the usual compass of an army chief of staff. Berchtold asked Conrad after reading the two contradictory messages: ‘Who rules in Berlin – Moltke or Bethmann?’ The Austrians figuratively and perhaps literally shrugged, then continued their mobilisation and bombardment of Belgrade.

The answer to Berchtold’s question was anyway now Moltke. Bethmann made no further attempt to dispute the chief of staff’s insistence that the march to war must take its course. Moreover, the chancellor would soon become an advocate of far-reaching war aims, explicitly directed towards securing German mastery of Europe. Though both the Kaiser and Bethmann havered during July, they could never bring themselves to adopt the only measure that would probably have averted disaster: withdrawal of German support for an Austrian invasion of Serbia. By the last days of the month, Moltke and Falkenhayn were asserting military imperatives – and the soldiers’ primacy in the decision-making process, now that war was inevitable – in a fashion that brooked no dissent. Wilhelm, like his chancellor, lacked strength to allow himself to be seen to draw back when the generals were insisting that his duty lay in acceptance of trial by combat. Falkenhayn had once argued that duelling must be maintained as a means of resolving personal disputes between officers, citing its importance ‘for the honour of the army’. Now, in the same spirit, he sternly silenced the Kaiser’s belated expressions of doubt: ‘I reminded him that he was no longer in control of these matters.’

Moltke became the critical personality in Germany’s endgame. The army was the country’s most powerful institution, and he directed its motions. Part of the historic indictment against the chief of staff is that, even if the charge that from the outset he pressed for war is disputable, he endorsed such a course while harbouring huge doubts about its implications, and about Germany’s prospects of success. If it was sufficiently wretched for a man as foolish as Conrad to have willed Armageddon, it seems even more base for one as intelligent as Moltke to have been complicit in this outcome. The most plausible explanation, supported by his subsequent conduct amidst the stress of war, is that like his royal master, the chief of staff was fundamentally a weak man seeking to masquerade as a strong one. In Vienna and Berlin alike – and in St Petersburg and Paris also, though to a lesser degree – there was now a fatal hunger for a showdown, a decision, in place of repeated inconclusive crises over a decade.

Many of Germany’s soldiers, as well as its conservative politicians, believed that war offered a prospect of reversing the social democratic tide which they deemed a threat to national greatness as well as to their own authority. The generals also saw that within two or three years, enhanced Russian capabilities would remove Germany’s last hopes of fulfilling Schlieffen’s mystic vision – smashing France before turning east. Deterrence was bound to fail, with or without a British commitment to fight, because the Germans believed that in 1914 they had a better chance of defeating any Entente combination than they would ever enjoy again. Berlin merely sought to ensure that the Tsar bore the odium for initiating mobilisation, and for the Kaiser’s mighty military response.

The Belgians suddenly recognised the peril facing their own country. Baron de Gaiffier d’Hestroy, political director of Belgium’s Foreign Ministry, holidaying with his family in the Engadine, was hastily ordered home, and departed for Brussels on 29 July. He found that many trains had already been commandeered by the Germans or Austro-Hungarians for troop movements; only a chance meeting secured him a place homewards in the private carriage of a Belgian industrialist, reaching Brussels on the morning of the 30th.

Sir Francis Bertie wrote that day, quite mistakenly but in a fashion reflecting the mood in Paris: ‘Things are hanging in the balance of peace and war. We are regarded as the deciding factor. The Italians suggested that they and we should both stand aside. A poor bargain for the French. I have written to Grey that the feeling here is that peace between the Powers depends on England and that if she declare herself solidaire with France and Russia there will be no war, for Germany will not face the danger to her of her supplies by sea being cut off by the British.’ That afternoon of 30 July, it was learned that French pedestrians attempting to cross the frontier into Germany were being turned back, while some motor cars and even railway locomotives with the same intentions were detained; telephone links were severed.

All over France, people gathered to discuss the news. Work stopped in the little factories of Beaurepaire, in Isère; solemn crowds filled the streets, discussing the crisis with gravity rather than excitement. In the words of one local man, ‘It was like a funeral. Our small town appeared to be in mourning.’ In Germany on 30 July, a thousand customers of Freiburg’s Municipal Savings Bank emptied their accounts, forcing it to restrict withdrawals, and there were matching queues outside most of the banks of Europe. Many shop-owners refused to accept payment in paper currency, while others shut their doors. In Le Havre, waiters warned restaurant customers before they ordered dinner that only gold rather than banknotes would be acceptable in payment.

There were still a few spasms of optimism: on the evening of the 30th, in the courtyard of the Palais Bourbon journalists thronged around M. Malvy of the Foreign Office, who told them of new exchanges between St Petersburg, Berlin and Vienna. ‘As soon as the diplomats start talking,’ he said, ‘we may hope for an accommodation.’ But late that night, as Raymond Recouly was writing his column at Le Figaro, a colleague burst into his office and cried: ‘Henri de Rothschild is downstairs. He has been dining with a senior official of the Foreign Ministry, who told him that war was a matter of days away, perhaps even of hours.’ Shortly afterwards a woman friend appeared, and asked the journalist whether she should cancel an intended motoring holiday in Belgium the following week. Without question, replied Recouly: ‘If you are really determined to go driving, head instead for Biarritz or Marseille.’

By the evening of the 30th, Moltke was no longer willing to wait for the Russians to announce mobilisation. He told Bethmann that Germany must act. The two agreed that whatever the Tsar did, Germany would proclaim its own mobilisation at noon next day, the 31st. A few minutes before this deadline came, to the vast relief of the Germans, St Petersburg announced its own move. Berlin could thus go to war, having achieved its critical diplomatic purpose of seeing the Russians become first after Austria to draw the sword. Following an official ‘declaration of a war threat’ – ‘Zustand der drohenden Kriegsgefahr’, a legal definition – on the 31st, the army forthwith began to patrol Germany’s borders. Some unauthorised crossings took place by troops of both sides, notably in Alsace. German pioneers blew up a railway bridge near Illfurt, following false reports that the French were at hand. Only on 3 August, however, did Berlin formally authorise its soldiers to invade French soil.

After the Kaiser signed Germany’s mobilisation order at 5 p.m. on 1 August in the Sternensaal of his Berlin palace, with his usual instinct for the wrong gesture he ordered champagne to be served to his suite. The Bavarian Gen. von Wenninger visited the Prussian War Ministry soon after news of Russian mobilisation came through: ‘Everywhere beaming faces, people shaking hands in the corridors, congratulating one another on having cleared the ditch.’ Russia had acted in accordance with the ardent and freely avowed hopes of Wenninger, Moltke, Falkenhayn and their comrades; as Germany adopted pre-mobilisation measures on 31 July, they merely expressed fears that France might decline to follow suit, fail to enter the trap. Wilhelm despised the French as ‘a feminine race, not manly like the Anglo-Saxons or Teutons’, and this undoubtedly influenced his lack of apprehension about going to war with them.

There was one more internal crisis in Berlin that day: Moltke had already left the palace after the mobilisation decree ceremony when a telegram was brought to the Kaiser from Lichnowsky in London. This professed to bear an undertaking from Grey that Britain would remain neutral, and guarantee French neutrality, if Germany refrained from attacking France. Wilhelm exulted. Moltke was recalled, to be told that it was now only necessary to fight in the East. A legendary exchange followed: the chief of staff, appalled, said that the mobilisation plans could not be changed; such an upheaval would dispatch to the battlefield not an army, but a rabble. He was outraged that Wilhelm should seek to meddle when diplomacy was at an end; the issue was now that of conducting a war – the responsibility of himself.

It swiftly became plain that Lichnowsky’s dispatch reflected a foolish misunderstanding of the British position. The French were mobilising, and Germany had its two-front war. But the conversation with Wilhelm had a devastating impact on Moltke. He returned to the General Staff building incandescent, his face mottled deep red. He told his adjutant: ‘I want to wage a war against the French and the Russians, but not against such a Kaiser.’ His wife later testified that she believed him to have suffered a slight stroke. Moltke’s health was already fragile, his nerve unsteady. Now, on the brink of the collision of armies that he had done much to bring about, he showed the first signs of a moral and physical vulnerability which within six weeks would destroy him.

German mobilisation was accompanied by a declaration of war on Russia six days before the Austrians followed suit. A fourteen-year-old Bavarian schoolboy, Heinrich Himmler, wrote in his diary for 1 August: ‘Played in the garden in the morning. Afternoon as well. 7.30 Germany declares war on Russia.’ France was informed that its neutrality could be accepted only on condition that it surrendered its border fortresses to Germany ‘as a gesture of sincerity’. Bethmann was furious that the military now marginalised him: it was a General Staff officer, Major Hans von Haeften, who drafted a declaration to the German people for the Kaiser to deliver. The chancellor and the general had always disliked and resented each other. Hereafter, their animosity became manifest. On the afternoon of 1 August crowds cheered the Kaiser as he motored from Potsdam down Berlin’s Unter den Linden in the full-dress uniform of a cuirassier of the Guard. Wilhelm enthused: ‘a wonderful confidence prevails … unanimity and determination’. Journalist Theodor Wolff, a spectator, said of the crowd’s enthusiasm for the Kaiser’s appearance, ‘It was a warm, sunny day. In the hot air there was already the sweaty breath of fever and the smell of blood.’ A right-wing newspaper asserted that after Wilhelm had passed there was ‘a holy mood among the crowd, worthy of the moment’. Strangers shook hands with each other.

Russia’s mobilisation solved a critical political problem for Moltke. Germany’s Social Democrats might well have continued to oppose war had their own country been seen as the first to move. As it was, though the government had already made its own secret commitment to march, Berlin could assert that Germany was merely responding to a Russian initiative – preparing to defend the Reich against Slavonic aggression. Admiral Müller wrote on 1 August: ‘The mood is brilliant. The government has succeeded very well in making us appear as the attacked.’ Moltke, after his fall, wrote to a fellow field-marshal: ‘it is dreadful to be condemned to inactivity in this war which I prepared and initiated’. Nor was he alone among prominent Germans in avowing without embarrassment responsibility for the horrors that were now ordained. Foreign secretary Gottlieb Jagow later told a woman friend that he was haunted by contemplation that Germany had ‘wanted the war’ which went so wrong. In 1916, shipping magnate Albert Ballin declined to meet Jagow because ‘he wanted nothing further to do with a man who bore the responsibility for this whole dreadful disaster and for the deaths of so many hundreds of thousands of men’.

Wilhelm von Stumm, Jagow’s close associate, told Theodor Wolff in February 1915: ‘we were reconciled to the fact that we would have war with Russia … If the war had not come now, we would have had it in two years’ time under worse conditions … No one could have foreseen that militarily not everything would work out as one had believed.’ Prince von Bülow, a former chancellor, blamed Bethmann Hollweg for giving Austria the 5 July ‘blank cheque’; he did not suggest that Germany sought war, but said the chancellor should have insisted upon prior consultation about the terms of Vienna’s ultimatum to Belgrade, and condemned Berlin’s rejection of Britain’s proposal for a diplomatic conference.

During the last two days before and after mobilisation came, the German public mood became much less exuberant. On 31 July a Frankfurter Zeitung journalist recorded: ‘Over everything hangs a great gravity, a frightening peace and tranquillity … In their quiet rooms wives and young women sit, nursing their sombre thoughts about the immediate future … a great fear of terrible things, of what may be to come.’ Social democrat Wilhelm Heberlein said that in Hamburg news of mobilisation was grimly received: ‘most people were depressed, as if waiting to be beheaded the following day’. The Hamburger Echo said that on the evening of 1 August ‘the noisy mood which was ignited by a couple of unthinking fools in the first few days of this week is gone … one seldom hears a joyous laugh on the street’.

That day Gertrud Schädla repeatedly visited Verden’s town centre to garner the latest news, until finally at 6 p.m. she saw the mobilisation order posted. She described her community’s mixed feelings: ‘We were half happy because our government has behaved with nobility and firmness, half minded to cry because of our fears for the future.’ She added later: ‘Now all our fears have been realised, things that appeared both all too possible and yet impossible … Our enemies in the east, the west and the north tormented us pitilessly. Now they will see that we fight back! … We did not want war – if we did, we could have had it ten times during the past forty-three years of peace!’ On Sunday, 2 August, Berlin police warned against extravagant displays of enthusiasm, such as crowds surging up to the Kaiser’s car. For the first time, soldiers guarding public buildings appeared garbed in field grey. From the very onset of the struggle, Germany became the first power to characterise it not as a merely European affair, but as global war – Weltkrieg.

As Germany began to mobilise, in Paris Sir Francis Bertie called on the French prime minister, whom he found ‘in a highly nervous state … Evidently the Germans want to hurry matters before the Russians can be ready.’ France now lagged two days behind Germany’s military preparations: Joffre told the government that every further twenty-four-hour delay represented a prospective loss of up to twelve miles of French territory when Moltke’s offensive began. Some socialists remained implacably opposed to war, but their gestures towards peace were brushed aside. The sub-prefect of Isère was among many officials who banned public protests, prohibiting a socialist anti-war demonstration in Vienne on 31 July. Local unions planned another such rally in Grenoble for 2 August, but withdrew when it became plain it would receive little grassroots support, and would anyway be disallowed.

Jean Jaurès, France’s great socialist leader, complained to his companion in a taxi taking them to a Paris restaurant on the evening of 31 July that the driver’s manic haste would be the death of them. ‘No,’ said the other wryly, ‘like all Parisian drivers he is a good socialist and union man.’ It was not reckless speed that killed Jaurès that night, however, but instead a deranged fanatic who shot him in the back as he ate. This assassination prompted across Europe a wave of shock and horror far more emotional than that following the murder of Franz Ferdinand. Jaurès was recognised across frontiers as a political giant. Le Temps lamented that he was extinguished ‘just at the moment when … his oratory was about to become a weapon of national defence’.

Raymond Recouly wrote of that night of Friday the 31st: ‘As I came out of the paper with a friend, towards one in the morning, at the corner of the Rue Drouot we heard in the distance the sonorous clatter of a troop of cavalry. The cafés were just closing, but there were plenty of people about. The hooves resounded ever more loudly on the cobbles. A voice cried: “Here come the cuirassiers!” Something like an electric shock surged through the crowd. On every floor, windows opened. People stood up on benches, on the tables of cafés. A big taxi-driver hoisted himself up on the roof of his vehicle, at the risk of breaking it. Led by a band of children and young people, the horsemen appeared. In campaign kit, their helmets covered, gigantic in their long cloaks, they filled the roadway. A formidable clamour rose from every lip: “Vive la France! Vive l’armée!” The taxi-driver atop his vehicle looked frenzied. He cried more loudly than all the others, throwing his cap in the air and windmilling his arms.’

Later that night, a Le Temps office boy in front of the central post office in the Boulevard des Italiens saw the mobilisation order being posted. Just before 4 a.m. on 1 August, he ran into the newspaper manager’s office crying, ‘C’est affiché!’ The staff hurried outside to see for themselves. A crowd gathered before one of the post office windows to read the small blue sheet – Russia’s was lilac in colour. ‘Mobilisation is not war,’ prime minister Viviani had insisted when he signed the order. But as Raymond Recouly said, ‘no one believed him. If it was not war, it was in any event something equally terrible.’ The French army was instructed not to approach within six miles of the German or Belgian frontiers, to ensure that the odium for territorial aggression rested squarely in Berlin.

Sir Francis Bertie wrote, as French troops began to muster: ‘The populace is very calm. Here today it is “vive l’Angleterre”, tomorrow it may be “perfide Albion”. I was to have dined at Edmond de Rothschild’s Boulogne-sur-Seine villa; the rendezvous was in Paris instead, for all his horses and automobiles have been appropriated. His electric brougham cannot go outside the enceinte [city perimeter] – no automobile can do so without a special permit. Our 4 footmen have left to join their regiments at once and the under-butler left 10 days ago; 3 other men have joined the colours. I have asked to be allowed to keep the French chauffeur.’ There were violent demonstrations against German-owned businesses such as the Maggi food-processing company, which achieved a special virulence because small French milk-producers considered the giant a commercial menace. German and Austrian shops were looted while the police stood passively by. Viviani told the Chamber of Deputies: ‘Germany has nothing to reproach us with. What is being attacked are the independence, dignity and security which the Triple Entente has secured for the benefit of Europe.’ His words received thunderous applause.

The American novelist Edith Wharton, who was living in France, had spent July visiting Spain and the Balearics. She returned to Paris on 1 August, and found herself obliged to abandon plans to move on to England for the balance of the summer: ‘everything seemed strange, ominous and unreal, like the yellow glare which precedes a storm. There were moments when I felt as if I had died, and woken up in an unknown world. And so I had.’

4 THE BRITISH DECIDE (#ulink_bc53a8b6-aae3-5fb1-aadd-47c4b785e6c4)

Now, all Europe waited to learn what Asquith’s government would do. In Vienna, Alexander Freud wrote disbelievingly to his brother Sigmund about the notion of Britain entering the war alongside Russia, arguing that ‘a civilised people will not take the side of barbarians’. Many Germans, too, found it hard to comprehend the threat of British belligerence in a struggle they deemed none of Albion’s business. Richard Stumpf, a sailor with the High Seas Fleet, expressed disgust that only weeks after a squadron of the Royal Navy had been received with every friendly honour at Kiel Regatta, its country should be considering entering hostilities: ‘one feels bitter to think that [British behaviour] is really driven by jealousy, that wretched commercial envy is to blame’. The Germans delayed until 3 August their declaration of war on France, in hopes of preserving British neutrality. The Kaiser continued to think this plausible, because he was absurdly overimpressed by a conversation some time earlier between his brother and King George V. Prince Heinrich came home from a visit to London reporting the monarch’s assurance that his country would stay out of any European conflict. Wilhelm thought Britain would be wise to do so in any event, since, as he cleverly observed, ‘dreadnoughts have no wheels’.

A visitor to France wrote: ‘no one who was not in Paris at the time can ever realize the intense anxiety of the French during those days of waiting for England to speak’. The Asquith government’s intentions remained profoundly uncertain. A Times editorial on 29 July praised the country’s unselfishness: ‘It is our settled interest and traditional policy to uphold the balance of power in Europe’; to the Entente with France ‘we shall remain faithful in the future, come what may’. The French, however, were merely exasperated by such pious expressions of good intentions. All they wanted to know was whether the British Army would fight beside them. And at that moment, the answer was that it would not.

Grey, Churchill, Haldane and Asquith wanted Britain to stand four-square with the other Entente partners: as early as 29 July, the foreign secretary privately threatened resignation if the government failed to do so. The First Lord of the Admiralty buffeted and cajoled his friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer to overcome Lloyd George’s stubborn reluctance to see Britain committed to a continental conflict. Churchill suggested, absurdly, that participation need not cost much: ‘Together we can carry a wide social policy … The naval war will be cheap.’ But as Russia mobilised, most British people resisted the notion that their country should emulate its example. The Daily News asserted firmly on 29 July: ‘the most effective work for peace that we can do is to make it clear that not a British life shall be sacrificed for the sake of Russian hegemony of the Slav world’. The Labour Party considered urging the unions to call a general strike if Asquith sought to join the struggle. ‘All Europe Arming’, ran the Daily Mail’s headline on 30 July, as if describing remote events, followed two days later by ‘Europe Drifting to Disaster’. At a dinner on 31 July, Russian ambassador Count Benckendorff told the writer Maurice Baring that both he and the French envoy were bleakly convinced that England would not fight.

The leftist Daily Chronicle on 31 July applauded the absence of popular jingoism: ‘Very welcome, and in comparison with what we experienced some while ago very remarkable, is the complete absence of anti-German sentiment. The last few years have done a great deal to reopen English eyes to our community of interest with the great people whose civilisation is in many ways the most akin in Europe to our own; and the bare idea of a ruinous conflict between us seems more unqualifiedly distasteful now than it has, perhaps, for a generation.’ That day the Manchester Guardian became the first British newspaper to suggest that the country might be obliged to fight if France was attacked. However, the newspaper discounted any possibility of a German invasion of Belgium, because such action would breach Europe’s 1839 treaty guaranteeing Belgian neutrality, to which Berlin as well as London was a signatory.

A soldier of the Royal Welch Fusiliers was awakened in his quarters in the Dorset town of Dorchester at 6 a.m. on that sunny Friday the 31st by the regimental band playing that jauntiest of ditties ‘I Do Like to be Beside the Seaside’. Yet many British people now recognised that conflict was lapping very close to their shores. Norman Macleod, an Admiralty private secretary, ‘felt rather apprehensive (1) because [I am] entirely ag[ain]st the idea of war (2) for fear of financial and economic crisis – people were buying in large stocks of food supplies. Bank rate up to 10% … I thought this trouble would restrain jingo feeling.’ A delegation from the City called on the Chancellor of the Exchequer to argue that ‘the only means of saving the world was for their own country to stay out of the conflict so that it might remain the great market, the economic arbiter of the world’. On 1 August the Daily News carried an article by its editor A.G. Gardiner, headed ‘Why We Must Not Fight’. The writer demanded: ‘Where in the wide world do our interests clash with Germany? Nowhere. With Russia we have potential conflicts over the whole of South-Eastern Europe and Southern Asia.’ After the cabinet’s meetings that Saturday, Paul Cambon told Grey – in French, through an interpreter, for he resolutely confined himself to his own language in official exchanges – that he flatly refused to communicate to Paris its resolution, ‘or rather, lack of it’.

Many British people believed that responsibility for the unfolding nightmare rested in Belgrade and St Petersburg. The Economist warned that ‘the provocation begun by Serbia has been continued by Russia. If a great war begins, Russian mobilization will be the proximate cause. And we fear that the poisonous articles of The Times have encouraged the Tsar to hope for British support.’ A Viennese letter-writer to The Economist, Josef Redlich, demanded: ‘Public opinion throughout the Austrian dominions, without distinction of party, has throbbed with the one question, How long Austria is to tolerate such a conception of neighbourliness as dominates Serbia?’ Nine distinguished Cambridge academics wrote to The Times: ‘We regard Germany as a nation leading the way in Arts and Sciences, and we have all learnt and are learning from German scholars. War upon her in the interests of Serbia and Russia will be a sin against civilisation. If by reason of honourable obligations we be unhappily involved in war, patriotism might still our mouths, but at this juncture we consider ourselves justified in protesting against being drawn into the struggle with a nation so near akin to our own.’

That night of 1 August, Grey dined with his private secretary at Brooks’s Club in St James’s Street; after leaving the table, for a while they played billiards together. Meanwhile the prime minister retired to bed nursing a grievance: the crisis had obliged him to cancel a country weekend in the company of Venetia Stanley, twenty-six-year-old object of his amorous, if unconsummated, obsession: ‘I can honestly say that I have never had a more bitter disappointment,’ Asquith wrote to her. He had some difficulty achieving unconsciousness, he said, ‘but really I didn’t sleep badly in that betwixt & between of sleeping & waking, thank God the vision of you kept floating about me and brought me rest and peace’. The British prime minister’s prolific and compulsively indiscreet letters to Stanley do little to enhance his reputation, but provide a priceless insight into his thinking.

The most prominent left-wing newspapers – the Daily Chronicle, Daily News and Manchester Guardian – remained vehemently opposed to British intervention, but the government’s attitude was contrarily hardening. On Sunday, 2 August, Asquith breakfasted with the German ambassador, and warned the emotional Lichnowsky of dire consequences should his nation’s army fulfil its threat to march into neutral Belgium. Crowds gathered in Downing Street and Whitehall, and for the first time many anxious faces were seen. Conservative leader Bonar Law wrote to the prime minister, promising his party’s support for a British declaration of war – a missive designed to hasten such an outcome.

The cabinet met, and learned from Grey that the French fleet had mobilised. France, he told them, now counted upon Britain to secure the Channel and the North Sea, having concentrated its own strength in the Mediterranean in conformity with a secret pact made at the 1912 Anglo-French naval talks. Some ministers were astonished, indeed confounded, to learn for the first time of this momentous commitment. But the cabinet – with varying degrees of reluctance – agreed to honour its terms, and to deploy warships to protect the northern French coast. The Germans promptly promised to stay out of the Channel if Britain remained neutral, but when Paul Cambon heard of the Royal Navy’s commitment, his spirits soared: ‘this was the decision I had been waiting for … A great country cannot half-make war. From the moment it decided to do so at sea, it was inescapably fated to do so also on land.’

The cabinet still rejected such a proposition, however. That evening of 2 August Sir John French, Chief of the Imperial General Staff until his March resignation over the ‘Curragh Mutiny’, made a bizarre telephone call: he sought guidance about the government’s military intentions not from ministers, but from Sir George Riddell, owner of the News of the World. The little field-marshal asked Riddell: if war came, would an expeditionary force be sent to France, and who would command it? Riddell referred his questions to the government. Lloyd George sent back word that French should present himself at Downing Street at 10 o’clock next morning. When he did so, he was told there was still no question of Britain sending an army to the continent.

Now Belgium became the focus of British attention. At 3 p.m. on 2 August, the Belgian vice-consul in Cologne arrived at the Brussels Foreign Ministry to report that since 6 o’clock that morning he had been watching trains leaving the Rhine city’s stations every three or four minutes, crammed with troops: they were heading not towards France, but instead for Aix-la-Chapelle and the Belgian border. When word followed that German troops had entered Luxembourg and were expected imminently to invade Belgium, the foreign minister M. Jean Davignon said emotionally to his colleague Baron Gaiffier: ‘Let us go to mass and offer prayers for our poor country: never has it stood in such need of them!’

King Albert had visited Berlin in November 1913, and received a dark warning from the Kaiser and Moltke: ‘small countries, such as Belgium, would be well-advised to rally to the side of the strong if they wished to retain their independence’. On 2 August the Belgian monarch was confronted with the meaning of this threat: Germany summarily demanded for its armies a right of passage through his country. The French were uncertain how the Brussels government would respond: they considered large parts of Belgium to be Germanophile. It was Albert’s personal decision, as commander-in-chief of the armed forces as well as monarch, to reject Berlin’s demand – with the overwhelming support of his people.

‘The response [to Berlin’s ultimatum] was very easy to draft,’ said Baron Gaiffier. ‘We only had to translate in plain language onto paper the feelings that moved each one of us. We were sure that we correctly interpreted the views of the whole country.’ Yet that Sunday evening, though the Belgian government knew the worst, an innocence still pervaded the mood in Brussels, especially among its humbler citizens. At the end of a radiant summer’s day, a host of walkers who had been promenading in the surrounding countryside strolled back into the city, many of them singing and clutching armfuls of flowers.

Britain was among the guarantors of Belgian neutrality under the 1839 European treaty, made soon after the country separated from Holland. Late on 2 August, the Germans warned the British government of their intention to march through King Albert’s country, with or without his consent. At 7 o’clock next morning, Belgium’s rejection of the ultimatum was conveyed to Berlin. When the news was published, Brussels burst forth with tricolour flags. Most Germans regarded this show of defiance with contemptuous pity. ‘Oh, the poor fools,’ the counsellor at the German legation kept repeating, as he gazed out on streets ablaze with national tokens. ‘Oh, the poor fools. Why don’t they get out of the way of the steamroller? We don’t want to hurt them, but if they stand in our way they will be ground into the dirt. Oh, the poor fools!’

It has sometimes been suggested that King Albert’s people would have fared better had the monarch bowed to the inevitable, and granted the German army free passage. But why should he, or the ruler of any sovereign nation, have done so? Throughout modern history, the protection of small states from aggression has often been considered by larger democracies to create a moral imperative. In 1914 force majeure constituted a more formidable influence upon events than international law. But the view adopted by most of the British people, as well as by their government, was that Germany’s invasion of Belgium constituted an affront to morality as well as to the European order. Ironically, once the Germans were committed to violate Belgian neutrality – as secretly they had been for a decade – they would have done better to go the whole hog and attack without an ultimatum. The time-lag between threat and assault enabled King Albert to rally his people and foreign opinion, and also to prepare to resist. The Belgians organised a formidably effective programme of railway-tunnel demolitions, which limited enemy train movements through their country for months to come.

Apologists for Germany’s behaviour argue now – as did the Berlin government then – that if the Kaiser’s army had not violated Belgian neutrality, the allies would swiftly have done so. The only plausible evidence for this claim is that the British debated a possible blockade of Antwerp as a conduit to Germany, a contingency overtaken by events. They repeatedly warned the French against infringing Belgian territory, and Joffre acquiesced. Germany had hitherto been the clear winner, at the expense of Russia, in the game of managing events so as to avoid seeming the immediate aggressor. Moltke forfeited this status, however, the moment his armies crossed the Belgian frontier. Bismarck had warned his countrymen against such action, precisely because he anticipated its impact on foreign opinion. The assault on Belgium came as a heaven-sent deliverance to those members of Asquith’s government already convinced that Britain must enter the European war. Without Belgium, the country would have joined the conflict divided, if at all. Moltke made a critical miscalculation: he was so convinced Britain would fight that he did not think the issue of Belgian neutrality would influence such an outcome one way or the other. He was quite wrong. The perceived martyrdom of King Albert and his people rallied to the cause of war millions of British people who had hitherto opposed it.

There were considerable ironies about Britain’s rush to embrace ‘gallant little Belgium’. During the Boer War, Albert’s country had adopted a passionately anti-British posture. Belgium’s deplorable record of inhumanity as the colonial power in the Congo was surpassed only by that of Germany in South-West Africa. British and French soldiers regarded the Belgian army with contempt, its officers as posturing dandies. Moreover, throughout the previous month the Belgian Catholic press had strongly supported Austria-Hungary’s right to take military action against Serbia. One paper, l’Express of Liège, denounced the Franco-Russian Entente as ‘the nightmare of all those who hold in their hearts a future of liberty, democracy and civilisation … [it is] an alliance against nature’.

No matter. In London a few ministers still clung to a belief that the mere passage of the German army should not constitute a casus belli. But most of the British people here at last identified moral certainty amid a sea of Balkan and European confusions. A telegram was brought to Grey, at dinner with Haldane on Sunday evening, 2 August, warning that German action against Belgium was imminent. The two men drove immediately to Downing Street, where they detached Asquith from some private guests. They told him the news and asked for authority to mobilise the army. Haldane volunteered to become temporary war minister, as Asquith would obviously be too busy to continue to fill that role. The prime minister assented to both proposals.

On the morning of Monday, 3 August, a British bank holiday, The Times declared: ‘Europe is to be the scene of the most terrible war that she has witnessed since the fall of the Roman Empire … The blame must fall mainly upon Germany. She could have stayed the plague had she chosen to speak in Vienna as she speaks when she is in earnest. She has not chosen to do so.’ Whitehall, bathed in brilliant sunshine, became impassable to traffic, so dense were the expectant crowds. At 11 a.m. the cabinet was told of King Albert’s decision that Belgium would resist, yet still ministers agonised. Two, Sir John Simon and Lord Beauchamp, said they would resign rather than be complicit in a British commitment to war. But Lloyd George, a pivotal figure, at last overcame his own doubts, and accepted the case for fighting. A disappointed fellow Liberal complained that the chancellor ‘lacked the courage of his convictions’. It is probably the case that Lloyd George was more strongly influenced by political fears of splitting the government and the Liberal Party – to the partisan advantage of the Conservatives – than by any fervour for the Entente’s cause. Asquith made a telephone call to Dover to halt the imminent departure for Egypt of Lord Kitchener, Britain’s most eminent soldier. The prime minister asked the field marshal to return to London. He was likely to be needed.

That morning George Lambert, the Admiralty’s Civil Lord, ignorant of the latest momentous developments, said to the Financial Secretary: ‘I wish the Cabinet would stop shilly-shallying and decide one thing or another.’ The other official who, in the words of an eyewitness ‘looked very pale and anxious, quite unlike Saturday’, responded: ‘I think they have decided.’ But the British people remained deeply divided. Even amid the news from Belgium, civil servant Norman Macleod wrote on 3 August: ‘Felt very unhappy about turn of events – danger of secret diplomatic engagements forcing people blindly into war – had it not been for financial reasons [I] would have resigned [my] post.’ Sir George Riddell, proprietor of the News of the World, told Lloyd George of his ‘feeling of intense exasperation … at the prospect of the government embarking on war’. Guy Fleetwood-Wilson protested in The Times’s correspondence column: ‘I write as a “man in the street”. Doubtless I am an abnormally dense one, because I cannot for the life of me see why this country should be dragged into this war.’ Serbia, he asserted, ‘is not worth the life of one single British Grenadier’.