by Simon Heffer
At 2 p.m. Grey wired Goschen noting the German message to Belgium, and information he had received that Belgian territory ‘had been violated’ at Gemmenich.303 He asked him to tell the German government that Britain still awaited a reply to its question about Belgian neutrality, and wanted it by 11 p.m. London time. ‘If not, you are instructed to ask for your passports and to say that His Majesty’s Government feel bound to take all steps in their power to uphold the neutrality of Belgium and the observance of a Treaty to which Germany is as much a party as ourselves.’
Goschen saw Bethmann and Jagow that afternoon, and in a dispatch that did not reach London until 13 August told Grey that they ‘regretted’ being unable to give the answer he sought.304 He found his interview with Bethmann ‘very painful’. ‘He [Bethmann] could not but consider it an intolerable thing that because they were taking the only course open to them to save the Empire from disaster, England should fall upon them just for the sake of the neutrality of Belgium. He looked upon England as entirely responsible for what might now happen. I asked him whether he could not understand that we were bound in honour to do our best to preserve a neutrality which we had guaranteed. He said: “But at what price!”’ Later, Goschen told Grey that a ‘very agitated’ Bethmann harangued him in English for twenty minutes, saying neutrality was a word often disregarded in wartime, and that the British government had acted ‘just for a scrap of paper.’305 The central aim of German policy, Jagow had told him, had been to secure better ties with Britain and, through Britain, become closer to France. Now that was in ruins, ostensibly because the British took treaties seriously and the Germans did not. Goschen protested vigorously at the attempt to blame Britain.
Asquith spoke to the Commons on the afternoon of 4 August, its numbers depleted by the absence of almost one hundred MPs, called up as reservists, and with John Burns’s place empty on the Treasury Bench. The prime minister referred to three telegrams from the recent diplomatic traffic; the first was the appeal from the King of the Belgians, the second Villiers’s wire confirming that the Germans, as a consequence of Belgium’s determination to maintain her neutrality, would enter the country by force to attack France, and the third the Belgian legation’s telegram announcing the violation of their border. ‘We cannot regard this in any sense a satisfactory communication,’ he continued. ‘We have, in reply to it, repeated the request we made last week to the German government, that they should give us the same assurance in regard to Belgian neutrality as was given to us and to Belgium by France last week. We have asked that a reply to that request, and a satisfactory answer to the telegram of this morning … should be given before midnight.’306
Asquith believed the German claim that the French were plotting an invasion of Belgium to attack Germany to be ‘a manifest and transparent lie’.307 He told the House the King was calling up the Territorial Army because of the ‘great emergency’, and confirmed the protection of shipping to ensure food supplies. He went to the Bar of the House, bowed, walked to the Chair and handed the Speaker the proclamation of the mobilisation of the Army, signed in the King’s own hand. With that, at 4.17 p.m., the Commons adjourned to await news from Germany. Asquith was deeply saddened by the prospect of war, and contrasted his feelings with those of the First Lord of the Admiralty: ‘Winston, who has got on all his war-paint, is longing for a sea-fight in the early hours of the morning to result in the sinking of the Goeben.’ Scott condemned Churchill for his ‘light-hearted irresponsibility’ and contrasted it with Grey’s having ‘burst into tears’ at one of the cabinet’s meetings, a scene relayed to him by Simon.308 For Churchill, the war was the great romantic adventure he had always longed for; for him, it would not turn out quite as he had hoped, not least through his own inability to reconcile romance with reality. Ironically his friend Lloyd George, a last-minute convert to the idea of fighting, would, through keeping a level head and resorting to stealth and duplicity, end up turning the conflict hugely to his personal advantage.
Later that afternoon a German diplomat called at the Foreign Office to say it was ‘absolutely untrue that a single German soldier had crossed the French frontier.’309 Crowe noted that the French claimed to have shot some German officers on their territory. Villiers reported that the Germans had tried to force the surrender of Liège, but had been repulsed. Coincidentally, also at 4.17 p.m. – as the Commons was rising – the Foreign Office intercepted a telegram sent in English and en clair from Jagow to Lichnowsky (it had been intended for interception) justifying invading Belgium by saying ‘we knew that France was ready for invasion’ (of Belgium), and promising ‘that as long as England will keep neutral our fleet would not attack the Northern Coast of France and that we would not touch the territorial integrity and the independence of Belgium.’310 By around 5 p.m. most GOCs had received the single-word telegram from the War Office: ‘Mobilise’.311
Grey told the American government that afternoon: ‘There are two sets of people in Germany: people like the German Chancellor, Herr von Bethmann Hollweg, and the German Ambassador here, Prince Lichnowsky, who dealt with all these things as we dealt with them; on the other hand, there was the military party of force, who had no respect at all for these things.’312 By ‘these things’ Grey meant treaty obligations, which he saw as ‘the test of the progress of civilisation’ and ‘the foundation of all confidence between nations.’ He explained that if Germany had come to dominate France the notional independence of Belgium, Holland, Denmark and possibly Norway and Sweden would be ‘a fiction’ with their harbours at Germany’s disposal. This domination of Western Europe would, Grey argued, ‘make our position quite impossible.’ The American ambassador, Page, recalled Grey saying, as his eyes ‘filled with tears’: ‘Thus the efforts of a lifetime go for nothing. I feel like a man who has wasted his life.’313 Grey never understood why Morley and Burns resigned, but believed their decisions were based on ‘deep and sincere convictions’, not ‘pusillanimity’.
That evening Grey sent a final note to Lichnowsky. He told him Goschen was coming home and added: ‘I have the honour to inform your Excellency that in accordance with the terms of the notification made to the German Government today His Majesty’s Government consider that a state of war exists between the two countries from today at eleven o’clock p.m. I have the honour to enclose passports for your Excellency, your Excellency’s family and staff.’314 He spent much of the evening in Downing Street with Asquith and other colleagues.
In Berlin Goschen, having observed the civilities, left his embassy with his staff in a fleet of taxis early on 6 August, returning home via a train to the Hook of Holland. He bore a curt message from the Kaiser to the King renouncing his appointments as a British admiral and field marshal. Because of hostile acts by Austria against France and Russia, war was declared on Austria at midnight on 12 August, and de Bunsen headed home on 14 August on a train to the Swiss frontier, after a day on which ‘Countess Berchtold [the wife of the foreign minister] and other ladies of Vienna society called to take leave of Lady de Bunsen.’315 Grey conveyed the news to Mensdorff, asking him to call on the morning of 13 August: ‘I should like to see you to say good-bye, and to shake hands, and to assure you how much my personal friendship remains unaltered.’316 The meeting was at Grey’s house, to be ‘quite private’. Mensdorff was ‘deeply grieved’ by the declaration of war but ‘I highly appreciate and heartily reciprocate the friendly personal feelings expressed’.
The government asked doctors, motorcyclists, blacksmiths, lorry drivers, butchers, bakers and members of other trades to volunteer for the Army. Weddings were brought forward before officers rejoined their regiments. The masses sang and cheered outside Buckingham Palace. The Royal Family acknowledged them at 7, 9.30 and 11 p.m., as the ultimatum to Germany expired. The King held a Privy Council at Buckingham Palace at 10.45 p.m. with Beauchamp (who was about to become Lord President, succeeding Morley) and two courtiers to approve the proclamation of war on Germany. ‘It is a terrible catastrophe,�
�� the King wrote, ‘but it is not our fault.’317
As Hankey walked through St James’s Park he encountered ‘crowds of excited folk … often with linked arms and singing patriotic songs’.318 In his history of the conflict, Sir Hew Strachan has observed: ‘Popular enthusiasm played no part in causing the First World War. And yet without a popular willingness to go to war the world war could not have taken place.’319 That willingness was born of an inability to comprehend what modern warfare actually entailed, notably the ease of mechanised slaughter, and the fact that even then the Boer War was a distant memory to but a few.
A crowd gathered in Downing Street as 11 p.m. neared to hear whether the Germans had accepted Britain’s ultimatum. In Whitehall, ‘as the news of the declaration of war reached the street the crowd expressed its feelings with loud cheering. It left the precincts of Downing Street and gathered in front of the War Office, where patriotic demonstrations continued until an early hour’.320 Nor was it just the masses who felt the war was right and just. Four days earlier Bertrand Russell, then a don at Trinity College, Cambridge, had started to collect signatures for a statement to be published in the Manchester Guardian expressing opposition to the war, telling Lady Ottoline Morrell that ‘all think it folly and very unpopular’.321 ‘The day war was declared,’ he recalled, ‘almost all of them changed their minds.’322
A formal statement was issued from the Foreign Office at 12.15 a.m. on 5 August that because of the ‘summary rejection’ of the government’s request to respect Belgian neutrality ‘a state of war exists between Great Britain and Germany as from 11 p.m. on August 4.’ As Big Ben had struck midnight, despite there being no formal confirmation that Britain was at war, ‘a vast cheer burst out and echoed and re-echoed for nearly 20 minutes. The National Anthem was then sung with an emotion and solemnity which manifested the gravity and sense of responsibility with which the people regard the great issues before them.’323
CHAPTER 2
WAR
I
On the morning of 5 August 1914 newspapers carried advertisements for the Burberry officer’s trench coat, a Boer War veteran that, in the new hostilities, could serve well all ranks from commander-in-chief to subaltern (non-commissioned officers and other ranks would have to settle for rubberised rain capes). Burberry’s could also provide ‘Active Service Kit’ in four days. Another advertisement implored Territorial Army officers to buy, for a mere £275, Overland cars, which would withstand ‘the roughest usage’, take ‘steepest hills in top gear’ and do 20 to 24 miles to the gallon.1 Within days the newspapers announced that ‘Every Man accepted by his Country for Defence or Offence should take with him a Bottle of Dr J Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne’, available from all chemists at 2s 9d, and ‘in Diarrhoea, Dysentery, Colic, and other Bowel Complaints it acts like a charm.’2
Webley & Scott, purveyors of service revolvers to the officer class, increased the price from 5 guineas to £10, outraging MPs. The firm claimed it had had to pay workers a 15 per cent bonus, and the price of steel had risen by 15 per cent. Stanley Baldwin would, observing the Parliament elected in 1918, talk of ‘hard-faced men who look as if they had done very well out of the war,’ some of the hardest-faced of whom had already served in what would become a wartime ‘government of businessmen’.3 In Britain’s mercantile society that was inevitable: whatever else would distinguish it, the war would be the greatest sales opportunity in history. The customers were not always impressed. Major J. C. Ker-Fox, visiting the Army & Navy Stores on the first afternoon of the war, felt ‘disgusted to see hundreds of people whom one cannot dignify by calling men and women, laying in tons of provisions.’ Since Britain was fighting ‘for our existence as a nation’ the Major demanded that ‘the Government ought to confiscate these private stores, and fine and imprison the selfish brutes who are hoarding them.’4
A huge trade was done in war maps, so the civilian population could follow events at the front. Northcliffe started a new periodical, The Great War, a weekly record of events. The Times printed its own weekly pictorial History of the War, and set up a telephone news service for subscribers so that, in the age before radio, they could receive information the moment it reached Printing House Square. However, at a guinea a week, and with restrictions on the capacity of the telephone system, it was for the very few. Such was the appetite for news that consumption of paper increased by 25 per cent in the first week of the war, and newsprint rose from a penny a pound to a penny three farthings: ten weeks’ supply suddenly became six weeks’. Rationing was not contemplated, but the nation’s excited thirst for news increased the possibility.
The fervent patriotism of the first day of the war was unavoidable. Grey, early that morning, had asked Villiers to tell his Belgian hosts that ‘His Majesty’s Government regard common action to resist Germany as being now in operation and justified by treaty of 1839.’5 Britain was fighting to protect its honour, to keep its word to Belgium, to join (as a consequence) its friend France in resisting that country’s crushing by Germany, and thus enhancing Britain’s national security by keeping Germany from the English Channel. ‘I discovered to my amazement,’ Bertrand Russell recorded, ‘that average men and women were delighted at the prospect of war.’6 There was the odd dissenter: the Neutrality League, of which little would be heard again, advertised in the Daily Citizen that morning urging all Englishmen to ‘DO YOUR DUTY’ which was to oppose ‘A WICKED and STUPID WAR’.7 However, the line elsewhere was being firmly held. In The Times that morning Henry Newbolt – he of ‘a breathless hush in the close tonight’ – had published a poem entitled ‘The Vigil’, which began with the ejaculation:
England! where the sacred flame
Burns before the inmost shrine,
Where the lips that love thy name
Consecrate their hopes and thine …
and ended with the equally plangent:
Then let Memory tell thy heart,
‘England! what thou wert, thou art!’
Gird thee with thine ancient might,
Forth! And God defend the Right!8
It was a tone that Rupert Brooke, with a modicum of additional poetic talent, would take up, before the first winter of trench warfare extinguished it: but it was typical of the mood of August 1914. However, the next day, as reality arrived, The Times wrote: ‘First and foremost – Keep your heads. Be calm. Go about your ordinary business quietly and soberly. Do not indulge in excitement or foolish demonstrations.’9 A nation reared on British naval supremacy thought it knew what war to expect: some battles in which the German navy was obliterated, and the German army driven back into the Fatherland from both sides and its people starved into submission in a magnified repeat of the Boer War. Hostilities began with British morale high. When, on 13 August, Churchill ran out of petrol in Reading and went into a local club, the members cheered, ‘and sang Rule, Britannia.’10
Sensing a commercial imperative the magazine John Bull, which had earlier demanded Serbia be wiped off the map, quickly became the most full-throated advocate of war. It emerged redesigned on 15 August, with John Bull in a sailor’s cap with HMS Victory on it. A leading article, entitled ‘The Dawn of England’s Greatest Glory’, exhorted every Englishman to ‘gird on his armour’. It continued: ‘It is not necessary to be a soldier, but it is necessary to be a MAN.’11 Legends surrounded Horatio Bottomley, John Bull’s editor, mostly self-propagated, such as that his natural father had been Charles Bradlaugh, the Liberal MP who for six years refused to take the religious oath required to assume the seat he had won in the House of Commons, and to whom he bore a resemblance.12 Born in Bethnal Green in 1860, Bottomley had spent part of his childhood in an orphanage, had launched a publishing company, been acquitted of fraud, made a fortune in gold-mining shares, been a philanderer and gambler, served as a Liberal MP and had had to leave the Commons in 1912 when being declared bankrupt.
John Bull would become the leading organ of jingoism and Hun-bashing; and Bottomley would lead an enormous r
ecruitment drive, speaking at over 300 public meetings. Once he also acquired a column in the Sunday Pictorial in March 1915 he would become the leading demagogue of the age, loved by the masses but hated by intellectuals and the elite. Undetected by his adoring public, Bottomley’s nefarious private conduct continued; his denouement would come after the war, in a less successful confrontation with the forces of law and order when he was convicted of fraud. Yet during the war his influence as one of the country’s most self-advertising patriots was enormous. He told a friend, Henry Houston, that ‘this war is going to be my opportunity’, and until hubris fatally overtook him, he was right.13
Shopkeepers who showed the national sense of humour by displaying signs that read ‘BUSINESS AS USUAL DURING ALTERATIONS TO THE MAP OF EUROPE’ would, like everyone else, soon find that business as usual was over.14 Farmers had an early awakening. The War Office requisitioned heavy horses, to the distress of the eastern counties – where agriculture was predominantly arable – because they were taken at harvest time. Asquith ordered this to stop, along with the drafting of horses needed to pull wagons of food and fuel. However, the government requisitioned all horse-boxes on the railways, and race meetings were liable to be cancelled. The Kent County Cricket Club committee said Canterbury Week would continue, but hoped the public would not suppose that ‘they are indifferent to the grave crisis which affects the country’.15 The county’s slow left-arm bowler and England Test cricketer Colin Blythe took 6 for 107 in Sussex’s innings: he would be killed at Passchendaele in November 1917. Surrey were ordered from the Oval for the duration, as it was required for military training. In the battle to maintain a semblance of normal life in abnormal circumstances, abnormality was already winning.