Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914. Max Hastings

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’.

      But all over Britain military establishments were receiving the mobilisation order. Capt. Maurice Festing of the Royal Marines was exasperated to get the call while playing in a cricket match at the corps depot outside Deal: he had scored 66 not out and just fulfilled a cherished ambition by driving a ball through the window of the sergeants’ mess. The colonel of the Royal Welch Fusiliers was attending a dinner party when an orderly bearing a message was announced. The guests were almost certain of its contents, but etiquette prevailed: the messenger was kept waiting until dinner was finished and the ladies had retired, before being permitted to deliver the regiment’s mobilisation telegram.

      Britain was the only major power to debate in parliament its entry into the war. At 3 o’clock that afternoon of 3 August, Grey, visibly strained and exhausted, rose in the Commons to make the government’s first formal statement about the crisis. He was no great orator, and such grace time as he might have used to prepare a speech was stolen by Prince Lichnowsky, who called at his office to make a futile final plea for Britain not to regard the passage of German troops through just one small corner of Belgium as a casus belli. It was the two men’s last meeting.

      The floor of the House was packed, as were the Diplomatic and Strangers’ Galleries. Asquith was expressionless as Grey invited the House to consider the crisis from the viewpoint of ‘British interests, British honour and British obligation’. The foreign secretary told Members of the secret naval arrangement with France, and how the government had concluded that it could not leave the Germans free at will to bombard the French north coast, on Britain’s doorstep. Tories cheered while Liberals sat silent, many unpersuaded. Then Grey, having spoken unimpressively about British interests and trade routes, was suddenly roused to a passion he had never before displayed, in describing the violation of Belgian neutrality. ‘Could this country stand by and watch the direst crime that ever stained the face of history, and thus become participators in the sin?’

      He reverted to a familiar but fundamental theme of British governments for centuries – the European balance of power. Britain, he said, must take a stand ‘against the unmeasured aggrandisement of any power whatsoever’. After seventy-five minutes, he concluded with a dramatic peroration and appeal: ‘I do not believe for a moment that, at the end of this war, even if we stand aside, we should be able to undo what had happened … to prevent the whole of the West of Europe opposite us from falling under the domination of a single power … and we should, I believe, sacrifice our respect and good name and reputation before the world and should not escape the most serious and grave consequences.’

      This last statement has become, for the past century, the focus of every argument about whether Britain should, or should not, have entered the First World War. The Commons, that afternoon, received his words with overwhelming acclaim. It was because Grey, through his twenty-nine years as an MP, had become known as a man of compulsive taciturnity, that his eloquence on this occasion achieved its remarkable effect. Simon and Beauchamp, having heard him, withdrew their resignations. The mood of the Liberal