The Guns of August

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  They talked standing in the doorway, each oppressed by his own urgency, Grey trying to leave for some last moments of privacy in which to work on his speech, Lichnowsky trying to hold back the moment of the challenge made explicit. They parted and never saw each other officially again.

  The House had gathered in total attendance for the first time since Gladstone brought in the Home Rule Bill in 1893. To accommodate all the members extra chairs were set up in the gangway. The Diplomatic Gallery was packed except for two empty seats marking the absence of the German and Austrian ambassadors. Visitors from the Lords filled the Strangers’ Gallery, among them Field Marshal Lord Roberts, so long and vainly the advocate of compulsory military service. In the tense hush when, for once, no one bustled, passed notes, or leaned over benches to chat in whispers, there was a sudden clatter as the Chaplain, backing away from the Speaker, stumbled over the extra chairs in the aisle. All eyes were on the government bench where Grey in a light summer suit sat between Asquith whose bland face expressed nothing and Lloyd George whose disheveled hair and cheeks drained of all color made him look years older.

  Grey, appearing “pale, haggard and worn,” rose to his feet. Though he had been a member of the House for twenty-nine years and on the Government bench for the last eight, members on the whole knew little—and the country much less—of his conduct of foreign policy. Questions put to the Foreign Secretary rarely succeeded in trapping Grey into a clear or definitive answer, yet his evasiveness, which in a more adventurous statesman would have been challenged, was not regarded with suspicion. So noncosmopolitan, so English, so county, so reserved, Grey could not be regarded by anyone as a mettlesome mixer in foreign quarrels. He did not love foreign affairs or enjoy his job but deplored it as a necessary duty. He did not run over to the Continent for weekends but disappeared into the country. He spoke no foreign language beyond a schoolboy French. A widower at fifty-two, childless, nongregarious, he seemed as unattached to ordinary passions as to his office. What passion broke through his walled personality was reserved for trout streams and bird calls.

  Speaking slowly but with evident emotion, Grey asked the House to approach the crisis from the point of view of “British interests, British honor and British obligations.” He told the history of the military “conversations” with France. He said that no “secret engagement” bound the House or restricted Britain’s freedom to decide her own course of action. He said France was involved in the war because of her “obligation of honor” to Russia, but “we are not parties to the Franco-Russian alliance; we do not even know the terms of that alliance.” He seemed to be leaning so far over backward to show England to be uncommitted that a worried Tory, Lord Derby, whispered angrily to his neighbor, “By God, they are going to desert Belgium!”

  Grey then revealed the naval arrangement with France. He told the House how, as a consequence of agreement with Britain, the French fleet was concentrated in the Mediterranean, leaving the northern and western coasts of France “absolutely undefended.” He said it would be his “feeling” that “if the German fleet came down the Channel and bombarded and battered the undefended coasts of France, we could not stand aside and see this going on practically within sight of our eyes, with our arms folded, looking on dispassionately, doing nothing!” Cheers burst from the Opposition benches, while the Liberals listened, “somberly acquiescent.”

  To explain his having already committed Britain to defend France’s Channel coasts, Grey entered into an involved argument about “British interests” and British trade routes in the Mediterranean. It was a tangled skein, and he hurried on to the “more serious consideration, becoming more serious every hour,” of Belgian neutrality.

  To give the subject all its due, Grey, wisely not relying on his own oratory, borrowed Gladstone’s thunder of 1870, “Could this country stand by and witness the direst crime that ever stained the pages of history and thus become participators in the sin?” From Gladstone too, he took a phrase to express the fundamental issue—that England must take her stand “against the unmeasured aggrandizement of any power whatsoever.”

  In his own words he continued: “I ask the House from the point of view of British interests to consider what may be at stake. If France is beaten to her knees … if Belgium fell under the same dominating influence and then Holland and then Denmark … if, in a crisis like this, we run away from these obligations of honor and interest as regards the Belgian Treaty … I do not believe for a moment that, at the end of this war, even if we stood aside, we should be able to undo what had happened, in the course of the war, 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 economic consequences.”

  He placed before them the “issue and the choice.” The House, which had listened in “painful absorption” for an hour and a quarter, broke into overwhelming applause, signifying its answer. The occasions when an individual is able to harness a nation are memorable, and Grey’s speech proved to be one of those junctures by which people afterward date events. Some dissent was still vocal, for, unlike the continental parliaments, the House of Commons was not to be exhorted or persuaded into unanimity. Ramsay MacDonald, speaking for the Laborites, said Britain should have remained neutral; Keir Hardie said he would raise the working classes against the war; and afterward in the lobby, a group of unconvinced Liberals adopted a resolution stating that Grey had failed to make a case for war. But Asquith was convinced that on the whole “our extreme peace lovers are silenced though they will soon find their tongues again.” The two ministers who had resigned that morning were persuaded to return that evening, and it was generally felt that Grey had carried the country.

  “What happens now?” Churchill asked Grey as they left the House together. “Now,” replied Grey, “we shall send them an ultimatum to stop the invasion of Belgium within 24 hours.” To Cambon, a few hours later, he said, “If they refuse, there will be war.” Although he was to wait almost another twenty-four hours before sending the ultimatum, Lichnowsky’s fear had been fulfilled; Belgium had been made the condition.

  The Germans took that chance because they expected a short war and because, despite the last-minute moans and apprehensions of their civilian leaders over what the British might do, the German General Staff had already taken British belligerency into account and discounted it as of little or no significance in a war they believed would be over in four months.

  Clausewitz, a dead Prussian, and Norman Angell, a living if misunderstood professor, had combined to fasten the short-war concept upon the European mind. Quick, decisive victory was the German orthodoxy; the economic impossibility of a long war was everybody’s orthodoxy.

  “You will be home before the leaves have fallen from the trees,” the Kaiser told departing troops in the first week of August. A diarist of German court society recorded on August 9 that Count Oppersdorf came in that afternoon and said things could not last ten weeks; Count Hochberg thought eight weeks, and after that, “You and I will be meeting again in England.”

  A German officer leaving for the Western Front said he expected to take breakfast at the Café de la Paix in Paris on Sedan Day (September 2). Russian officers expected to be in Berlin about the same time; six weeks was the usual allowance. One officer of the Imperial Guard asked the opinion of the Czar’s physician whether he should pack at once his full-dress uniform to wear for the entry into Berlin or leave it to be brought by the next courier coming to the front. An English officer who, having served as a military attaché in Brussels, was considered au courant, was asked, upon joining his regiment, his opinion of the duration. He did not know, the officer replied, but he understood there were “financial reasons why the Great Powers could not continue for long.” He had heard it from the Prime Minister “who told me that Lord Haldane told him so.”

  In St. Petersburg the
question was not whether the Russians could win but whether it would take them two months or three; pessimists who suggested six months were considered defeatists. “Vasilii Fedorovitch (William, son of Frederick, that is, the Kaiser) has made a mistake; he won’t be able to hold out,” solemnly predicted the Russian Minister of Justice. He was not so very wrong. Germany had not planned on the need to hold out for long and upon entering the war had a stockpile of nitrates for making gunpowder sufficient for six months and no more. Only the later discovery of a method for fixing nitrogen out of the air enabled her war effort to continue. The French, gambling on a quick finish, risked no troops on what would have been a difficult defense of the Lorraine iron basin but allowed the Germans to take it on the theory that they would regain it with victory. As a result they lost 80 per cent of their iron ore for the duration and almost lost the war. The English, in their imprecise fashion, counted vaguely on victory, without specifying when, where, or how, within a matter of months.

  Whether from instinct or intellect, three minds, all military, saw the dark shadow lengthening ahead into years, not months. Moltke, foretelling the “long, wearisome struggle,” was one. Joffre was another. Questioned by ministers in 1912 he had said that if France won the first victory in a war, German national resistance would then commence, and vice versa. In either case other nations would be drawn in, and the result would be a war of “indefinite duration.” Yet neither he nor Moltke, who were their countries’ military chiefs since 1911 and 1906 respectively, made any allowance in their plans for the war of attrition which they both foresaw.

  The third—and the only one to act upon his vision—was Lord Kitchener, who had no part in the original planning. Hastily recalled to become War Minister on August 4, as he was about to board a Channel steamer to take him to Egypt, he brought forth from some fathomless oracular depths of his being the prediction that the war would last three years. To an incredulous colleague he said it might last even longer, but “three years will do to begin with. A nation like Germany, after having forced the issue, will only give in after it is beaten to the ground. That will take a very long time. No one living knows how long.”

  Except for Kitchener who, from his first day in office insisted on preparing an army of millions for a war lasting years, no one else made plans reaching ahead for more than three or six months. In the case of the Germans, the fixed idea of a short war embraced the corollary that in a short war English belligerency would not matter.

  “If only someone had told me beforehand that England would take up arms against us!” wailed the Kaiser during lunch at Headquarters one day later in the war. Someone in a small voice ventured, “Metternich,” referring to the German ambassador in London who had been dismissed in 1912 because of his tiresome habit of predicting that naval increases would bring war with England no later than 1915. In 1912 Haldane had told the Kaiser that Britain could never permit German possession of the French Channel ports, and reminded him of the treaty obligation to Belgium. In 1912 Prince Henry of Prussia had asked his cousin King George point-blank “whether in the event of Germany and Austria going to war with Russia and France, England would come to the assistance of the two latter powers?” King George had replied, “Undoubtedly yes, under certain circumstances.”

  In spite of these warnings the Kaiser refused to believe what he knew to be true. According to the evidence of a companion, he was still “convinced” England would stay neutral when he went back to his yacht after giving Austria a free hand on July 5. His two Corpsbrüder from student days at Bonn, Bethmann and Jagow, whose qualification for office consisted chiefly in the Kaiser’s sentimental weakness for brothers who wore the black and white ribbon of the fraternity and called each other du, comforted themselves at intervals, like devout Catholics fingering their beads, with mutual assurances of British neutrality.

  Moltke and the General Staff did not need Grey or anyone else to spell out for them what England would do, for they already counted on her coming in as an absolute certainty. “The more English the better,” Moltke said to Admiral Tirpitz, meaning the more who landed on the Continent the more would be netted in decisive defeat. Moltke’s natural pessimism spared him the illusions of wishful thinking. In a memorandum he drew up in 1913 he stated the case more accurately than many Englishmen could have done. If Germany marched through Belgium without Belgian consent, he wrote, “then England will and must join our enemies,” the more so as she had declared that intention in 1870. He did not think anyone in England would believe German promises to evacuate Belgium after defeating France, and he felt sure that in a war between Germany and France, England would fight whether Germany went through Belgium or not, “because she fears German hegemony and true to her policy of maintaining a balance of power will do all she can to check the increase of German power.”

  “In the years immediately preceding the war, we had no doubt whatever of the rapid arrival of the British Expeditionary Force on the French coast,” testified General von Kuhl, a General Staff officer of the top echelon. The Staff calculated that the BEF would be mobilized by the tenth day, gather at embarkation ports on the eleventh, begin embarkation on the twelfth, and complete the transfer to France on the fourteenth day. This proved to be almost dead reckoning.

  Nor was Germany’s naval staff under any illusions. “England probably hostile in case it comes to war,” the Admiralty telegraphed as early as July 11 to Admiral von Spee on board the Scharnhorst in the Pacific.

  Two hours after Grey finished speaking in the House of Commons, that event took place which had been in the back of every mind on both sides of the Rhine since 1870 and in the front of most since 1905. Germany declared war on France. To Germans it came, said the Crown Prince, as the “military solution” of the ever-increasing tension, the end of the nightmare of encirclement. “It is a joy to be alive,” rejoiced a German paper on that day in a special edition headlined “The Blessing of Arms.” Germans, it said, were “exulting with happiness .… We have wished so much for this hour .… The sword which has been forced into our hand will not be sheathed until our aims are won and our territory extended as far as necessity demands.” Not everyone was exulting. Deputies of the left, summoned to the Reichstag, found each other “depressed” and “nervous.” One, confessing readiness to vote all war credits, muttered, “We can’t let them destroy the Reich.” Another kept grumbling, “This incompetent diplomacy, this incompetent diplomacy.”

  For France the signal came at 6:15 when Premier Viviani’s telephone rang and he heard the American ambassador, Myron Herrick, tell him in a voice choked with tears that he had just received a request to take over the German Embassy and hoist the American flag on its flagpole. He had accepted the charge, Herrick said, but not the flag raising.

  Knowing exactly what this meant, Viviani waited for the imminent arrival of the German ambassador, who was announced a few moments later. Von Schoen, who had a Belgian wife, entered in visible distress. He began by complaining that on the way over a lady had thrust her head through the window of his carriage and insulted “me and my Emperor.” Viviani, whose own nerves were strung taut with the anguish of the last few days, asked if this complaint was the purpose of his visit. Schoen admitted he had a further duty to perform and, unfolding the document he carried, read its contents, which, as he was the “soul of honor” according to Poincaré, were the cause of his embarrassment. In consequence, it read, of French acts of “organized hostility” and of air attacks on Nuremberg and Karlsruhe and of violation of Belgian neutrality by French aviators flying over Belgian territory, “the German Empire considers itself in a state of war with France.”

  Viviani formally denied the charges which were included less to impress the French government, who would know they had not taken place, than to impress the German public at home that they were the victims of French aggression. He escorted von Schoen to the door and then, almost reluctant to come to the final parting, walked with him out of the building, down the steps, as far
as the door of his waiting carriage. The two representatives of the “hereditary enemies” stood for a moment in mutual unhappiness, bowed wordlessly to each other, and von Schoen drove away into the dusk.

  In Whitehall that evening, Sir Edward Grey, standing with a friend at the window as the street lamps below were being lit, made the remark that has since epitomized the hour: “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

  At six o’clock on the morning of August 4, Herr von Below paid his last visit to the Foreign Office in Brussels. He delivered a note saying that in view of the rejection of his Government’s “well intentioned proposals,” Germany would be obliged to carry out measures for her own security, “if necessary by force of arms.” The “if necessary” was intended to leave an opening for Belgium still to change her mind.

  That afternoon the American Minister, Brand Whitlock, who had been called to take over the German Legation, found von Below and his First Secretary, von Stumm, slumped in two chairs, making no effort to pack up and seeming “nearly unstrung.” Smoking with one hand and mopping his brow with the other, Below sat otherwise motionless while two aged functionaries with candles, sealing wax, and strips of paper proceeded slowly and solemnly around the room sealing the oaken cupboards which held the archives. “Oh the poor fools!” von Stumm kept repeating, half to himself, “Why don’t they get out of the way of the steam roller. 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!”

  Only later did anyone on the German side ask himself who had been the fools on that day. It had been the day, Count Czernin, the Austrian Foreign Minister, discovered afterward, of “our greatest disaster”; the day, even the Crown Prince mournfully acknowledged long after the fact, “when we Germans lost the first great battle in the eyes of the world.”

  At two minutes past eight that morning the first wave of field gray broke over the Belgian frontier at Gemmerich, thirty miles from Liège. Belgian gendarmes in their sentry boxes opened fire. The force detached from the main German armies for the assault upon Liège under the command of General von Emmich consisted of six infantry brigades, each with artillery and other arms, and three cavalry divisions. By nightfall they had reached the Meuse at Visé, a name that was to become the first in a series of ruins.