In Paris they were told German covering troops had taken their places a few hundred meters from the frontier. They knew nothing as yet of the Russian and Austrian mobilizations. Hopes still flourished of a negotiated settlement. Viviani was “haunted by a fear that war might burst from a clump of trees, from a meeting of two patrols, from a threatening gesture … a black look, a brutal word, a shot!” While there was still even the least chance of settling the crisis without war, and in order to leave the lines of aggression clear if war came, the Cabinet agreed upon the ten-kilometer withdrawal. The order, telegraphed to corps commanders, was designed, they were told, “to assure the collaboration of our English neighbors.” A telegram informing England of the measure went out simultaneously. The act of withdrawal, done at the very portals of invasion, was a calculated military risk deliberately taken for its political effect. It was taking a chance “never before taken in history,” said Viviani, and might have added, like Cyrano, “Ah, but what a gesture!”
Withdrawal was a bitter gesture to ask of a French Commander in Chief schooled in the doctrine of offensive and nothing but the offensive. It could have shattered General Joffre as Moltke’s first experience of the war shattered him, but General Joffre’s heart did not break.
From the moment of the President’s and Premier’s return, Joffre had been hounding the government for the order to mobilize or at least take the preliminary steps: recall of furloughs, of which many had been granted for the harvest, and deployment of covering troops to the frontier. He deluged them with intelligence reports of German premobilization measures already taken. He loomed large in authority before a new-born Cabinet, the tenth in five years, whose predecessor had lasted three days. The present one was remarkable chiefly for having most of France’s strong men outside it. Briand, Clemenceau, Caillaux, all former premiers, were in opposition. Viviani, by his own evidence, was in a state of “frightful nervous tension” which, according to Messimy, who was once again War Minister, “became a permanent condition during the month of August.” The Minister of Marine, Dr. Gauthier, a doctor of medicine shoved into the naval post when a political scandal removed his predecessor, was so overwhelmed by events that he “forgot” to order fleet units into the Channel and had to be replaced by the Minister of Public Instruction on the spot.
In the President, however, intelligence, experience, and strength of purpose, if not constitutional power, were combined. Poincaré was a lawyer, economist, and member of the Academy, a former Finance Minister who had served as Premier and Foreign Minister in 1912 and had been elected President of France in January, 1913. Character begets power, especially in hours of crisis, and the untried Cabinet leaned willingly on the abilities and strong will of the man who was constitutionally a cipher. Born in Lorraine, Poincaré could remember as a boy of ten the long line of spiked German helmets marching through Bar-le-Duc, his home town. He was credited by the Germans with the most bellicose intent, partly because, as Premier at the time of Agadir, he had held firm, partly because as President he had used his influence to push through the Three-Year Military Service Law in 1913 against violent Socialist opposition. This and his cold demeanor, his lack of flamboyance, his fixity, did not make for popularity at home. Elections were going against the government, the Three-Year Law was near to being thrown out, labor troubles and farmers’ discontent were rife, July had been hot, wet, and oppressive with windstorms and summer thunder, and Mme. Caillaux who had shot the editor of Figaro was on trial for murder. Each day of the trial revealed new and unpleasant irregularities in finance, the press, the courts, the government.
One day the French woke up to find Mme. Caillaux on page two—and the sudden, awful knowledge that France faced war. In that most passionately political and quarrelsome of countries one sentiment thereupon prevailed. Poincaré and Viviani, returning from Russia, drove through Paris to the sound of one prolonged cry, repeated over and over, “Vive la France!”
Joffre told the government that if he was not given the order to assemble and transport the covering troops of five army corps and cavalry toward the frontier, the Germans would “enter France without firing a shot.” He accepted the ten-kilometer withdrawal of troops already in position less from subservience to the civil arm—Joffre was about as subservient by nature as Julius Caesar—as from a desire to bend all the force of his argument upon the one issue of the covering troops. The government, still reluctant while diplomatic offers and counter-offers flashing over the wires might yet produce a settlement, agreed to give him a “reduced” version, that is, without calling out the reservists.
At 4:30 next day, July 31, a banking friend in Amsterdam telephoned Messimy the news of the German Kriegesgefahr, officially confirmed an hour later from Berlin. It was “une forme hypocrite de la mobilisation” Messimy angrily told the Cabinet. His friend in Amsterdam had said war was certain and Germany was ready for it, “from the Emperor down to the last Fritz.” Following hard upon this news came a telegram from Paul Cambon, French ambassador in London, reporting that England was “tepid.” Cambon had devoted every day of the past sixteen years at his post to the single end of ensuring England’s active support when the time came, but he had now to wire that the British government seemed to be awaiting some new development. The dispute so far was of “no interest to Great Britain.”
Joffre arrived, with a new memorandum on German movements, to insist upon mobilization. He was permitted to send his full “covering order” but no more, as news had also come of a last-minute appeal from the Czar to the Kaiser. The Cabinet continued sitting, with Messimy champing in impatience at the “green baize routine” which stipulated that each minister must speak in turn.
At seven o’clock in the evening Baron von Schoen, making his eleventh visit to the French Foreign Office in seven days, presented Germany’s demand to know what course France would take and said he would return next day at one o’clock for an answer. Still the Cabinet sat and argued over financial measures, recall of Parliament, declaration of a state of siege, while all Paris waited in suspense. One crazed young man cracked under the agony, held a pistol against a café window, and shot dead Jean Jaurès, whose leadership in international socialism and in the fight against the Three-Year Law had made him, in the eyes of superpatriots, a symbol of pacifism.
A white-faced aide broke in upon the Cabinet at nine o’clock with the news. Jaurès killed! The event, pregnant with possible civil strife, stunned the Cabinet. Street barricades, riot, even revolt became a prospect on the threshold of war. Ministers reopened the heated argument whether to invoke Carnet B, the list of known agitators, anarchists, pacifists, and suspected spies who were to be arrested automatically upon the day of mobilization. Both the Prefect of Police and former Premier Clemenceau had advised the Minister of Interior, M. Malvy, to enforce Carnet B. Viviani and others of his colleagues, hoping to preserve national unity, were opposed to it. They held firm. Some foreigners suspected of being spies were arrested, but no Frenchmen. In case of riot, troops were alerted that night, but next morning there was only deep grief and deep quiet. Of the 2,501 persons listed in Carnet B, 80 per cent were ultimately to volunteer for military service.
At 2:00 A.M. that night, President Poincaré was awakened in bed by the irrepressible Russian ambassador, Isvolsky, a former hyperactive foreign minister. “Very distressed and very agitated,” he wanted to know, “What is France going to do?”
Isvolsky had no doubts of Poincaré’s attitude, but he and other Russian statesmen were always haunted by the fear that when the time came the French Parliament, which had never been told the terms of the military alliance with Russia, would fail to ratify it. The terms specifically stated, “If Russia is attacked by Germany or by Austria supported by Germany, France will use all her available forces to attack Germany.” As soon as either Germany or Austria mobilized, “France and Russia, without previous agreement being necessary, shall mobilize all their forces immediately and simultaneously and shall transport them as nea
r the frontiers as possible .… These forces shall begin complete action with all speed so that Germany will have to fight at the same time in the East and in the West.”
These terms appeared unequivocal but, as Isvolsky had anxiously queried Poincaré in 1912, would the French Parliament recognize the obligation? In Russia the Czar’s power was absolute, so that France “may be sure of us,” but “in France the Government is impotent without Parliament. Parliament does not know the text of 1892 .… What guarantee have we that your Parliament would follow your Government’s lead?”
“If Germany attacked,” Poincaré had replied on that earlier occasion, Parliament would follow the Government “without a doubt.”
Now, facing Isvolsky again in the middle of the night, Poincaré assured him that a Cabinet would be called within a few hours to supply the answer. At the same hour the Russian military attaché in full diplomatic dress appeared in Messimy’s bedroom to pose the same question. Messimy telephoned to Premier Viviani who, though exhausted by the night’s events, had not yet gone to bed. “Good God!” he exploded, “these Russians are worse insomniacs than they are drinkers,” and he excitedly recommended “Du calme, du calme et encore du calme!”
Pressed by the Russians to declare themselves, and by Joffre to mobilize, yet held to a standstill by the need to prove to England that France would act only in self-defense, the French government found calm not easy. At 8:00 next morning, August 1, Joffre came to the War Office in the Rue St. Dominique to beg Messimy, in “a pathetic tone that contrasted with his habitual calm,” to pry mobilization from the government. He named four o’clock as the last moment when the order could reach the General Post Office for dispatch by telegraph throughout France in time for mobilization to begin at midnight. He went with Messimy to the Cabinet at 9:00 A.M. and presented an ultimatum of his own: every further delay of twenty-four hours before general mobilization would mean a fifteen-to twenty-kilometer loss of territory, and he would refuse to take the responsibility as Commander. He left, and the Cabinet faced the problem. Poincaré was for action; Viviani, representing the antiwar tradition, still hoped that time would provide a solution. At 11:00 he was called to the Foreign Office to see von Schoen who in his own anxiety had arrived two hours early for the answer to Germany’s question of the previous day: whether France would stay neutral in a Russo-German war. “My question is rather naïve,” said the unhappy ambassador, “for we know you have a treaty of alliance.”
“Evidemment,” replied Viviani, and gave the answer prearranged between him and Poincaré. “France will act in accordance with her interests.” As Schoen left, Isvolsky rushed in with news of the German ultimatum to Russia. Viviani returned to the Cabinet, which at last agreed upon mobilization. The order was signed and given to Messimy, but Viviani, still hoping for some saving development to turn up within the few remaining hours, insisted that Messimy keep it in his pocket until 3:30. At the same time the ten-kilometer withdrawal was reaffirmed. Messimy telephoned it that evening personally to corps commanders: “By order of the President of the Republic, no unit of the army, no patrol, no reconnaissance, no scout, no detail of any kind, shall go east of the line laid down. Anyone guilty of transgressing will be liable to court-martial.” A particular warning was added for the benefit of the XXth Corps, commanded by General Foch, of whom it was reliably reported that a squadron of cuirassiers had been seen “nose to nose” with a squadron of Uhlans.
At 3:30, as arranged, General Ebener of Joffre’s staff, accompanied by two officers, came to the War Office to call for the mobilization order. Messimy handed it over in dry-throated silence. “Conscious of the gigantic and infinite results to spread from that little piece of paper, all four of us felt our hearts tighten.” He shook hands with each of the three officers, who saluted and departed to deliver the order to the Post Office.
At four o’clock the first poster appeared on the walls of Paris (at the corner of the Place de la Concorde and the Rue Royale, one still remains, preserved under glass). At Armenonville, rendezvous of the haut-monde in the Bois de Boulogne, tea dancing suddenly stopped when the manager stepped forward, silenced the orchestra, and announced: “Mobilization has been ordered. It begins at midnight. Play the ‘Marseillaise.’” In town the streets were already emptied of vehicles requisitioned by the War Office. Groups of reservists with bundles and farewell bouquets of flowers were marching off to the Gare de l’Est, as civilians waved and cheered. One group stopped to lay its flowers at the feet of the black-draped statue of Strasbourg in the Place de la Concorde. The crowds wept and cried “Vive l’Alsace!” and tore off the mourning she had worn since 1870. Orchestras in restaurants played the French, Russian, and British anthems. “To think these are all being played by Hungarians,” someone remarked. The playing of their anthem, as if to express a hope, made Englishmen in the crowd uncomfortable and none more so than Sir Francis Bertie, the pink and plump British ambassador who in a gray frock coat and gray top hat, holding a green parasol against the sun, was seen entering the Quai d’Orsay. Sir Francis felt “sick at heart and ashamed.” He ordered the gates of his embassy closed, for, as he wrote in his diary, “though it is ‘Vive l’Angleterre’ today, it may be ‘Perfide Albion’ tomorrow.”
In London that thought hung heavily in the room where small, white-bearded M. Cambon confronted Sir Edward Grey. When Grey said to him that some “new development” must be awaited because the dispute between Russia, Austria, and Germany concerned a matter “of no interest” to Great Britain, Cambon let a glint of anger penetrate his impeccable tact and polished dignity. Was England “going to wait until French territory was invaded before intervening?” he asked, and suggested that if so her help might be “very belated.”
Grey, behind his tight mouth and Roman nose, was in equal anguish. He believed fervently that England’s interests required her to support France; he was prepared, in fact, to resign if she did not; he believed events to come would force her hand, but as yet he could say nothing officially to Cambon. Nor had he the knack of expressing himself unofficially. His manner, which the English public, seeing in him the image of the strong, silent man, found comforting, his foreign colleagues found “icy.” He managed only to express edgily the thought that was in everyone’s mind, that “Belgian neutrality might become a factor.” That was the development Grey—and not he alone—was waiting for.
Britain’s predicament resulted from a split personality evident both within the Cabinet and between the parties. The Cabinet was divided, in a split that derived from the Boer War, between Liberal Imperialists represented by Asquith, Grey, Haldane, and Churchill, and “Little Englanders” represented by all the rest. Heirs of Gladstone, they, like their late leader, harbored a deep suspicion of foreign entanglements and considered the aiding of oppressed peoples to be the only proper concern of foreign affairs, which were otherwise regarded as a tiresome interference with Reform, Free Trade, Home Rule, and the Lords’ Veto. They tended to regard France as the decadent and frivolous grasshopper, and would have liked to regard Germany as the industrious, respectable ant, had not the posturings and roarings of the Kaiser and the Pan-German militarists somehow discouraged this view. They would never have supported a war on behalf of France, although the injection of Belgium, a “little” country with a just call on British protection, might alter the issue.
Grey’s group in the Cabinet, on the other hand, shared with the Tories a fundamental premise that Britain’s national interest was bound up with the preservation of France. The reasoning was best expressed in the marvelously flat words of Grey himself: “If Germany dominated the Continent it would be disagreeable to us as well as to others, for we should be isolated.” In this epic sentence is all of British policy, and from it followed the knowledge that, if the challenge were flung, England would have to fight to prevent that “disagreeable” outcome. But Grey could not say so without provoking a split in the Cabinet and in the country that would be fatal to any war effort before it began.
Alone in Europe Britain had no conscription. In war she would be dependent on voluntary enlistment. A secession from the government over the war issue would mean the formation of an antiwar party led by the dissidents with disastrous effect on recruiting. If it was the prime objective of France to enter war with Britain as an ally, it was a prime necessity for Britain to enter war with a united government.
This was the touchstone of the problem. In Cabinet meetings the group opposed to intervention proved strong. Their leader Lord Morley, Gladstone’s old friend and biographer, believed he could count on “eight or nine likely to agree with us” against the solution being openly worked for by Churchill with “daemonic energy” and Grey with “strenuous simplicity.” From discussions in the Cabinet it was clear to Morley that the neutrality of Belgium was “secondary to the question of our neutrality in the struggle between Germany and France.” It was equally clear to Grey that only violation of Belgium’s neutrality would convince the peace party of the German menace and the need to go to war in the national interest.
On August 1 the crack was visible and widening in Cabinet and Parliament. That day twelve out of eighteen Cabinet members declared themselves opposed to giving France the assurance of Britain’s support in war. That afternoon in the lobby of the House of Commons a caucus of Liberal M.P.s voted 19 to 4 (though with many abstentions) for a motion that England should remain neutral “whatever happened in Belgium or elsewhere.” That week Punch published “Lines designed to represent the views of an average British patriot”:
The Guns of August Page 13