Sensing this objective, the Serb government in Belgrade appealed to the Tsar for support and Russia duly warned Vienna that she would protect Serbia's interests if Austria's demands went too far. This led, inevitably, to the next step, for Austria duly called on her German ally for support. On 5 July 1914, Germany assured Austria-Hungary of her 'faithful support', the so-called 'blank cheque' of military assistance if Austria found herself drawn into war with Russia.
This assurance promptly escalated the tension. On 23 July Austria-Hungary issued an ultimatum to Serbia, demanding that the Serb authorities arrest or proscribe any individual or local organization demanding independence for the Austrian Serbs. This demand included a requirement that Serbia admit Austrian policemen to supervise the local investigation into the archduke's assassination. Even to Kaiser Wilhelm, who was then on holiday, cruising off Norway on the imperial yacht Hohenzollern, the Serbian reply was so conciliatory that it 'dissipated any cause for war'. The Kaiser therefore continued his cruise, clearly believing that any danger of conflict had passed. This belief proved false. The Austrians rejected the Serb response on 26 July and two days later declared war on Serbia. The following day Austrian ships were sailing down the Danube to shell Belgrade- and another step had been taken towards a general European war.
On 28 July Russia mobilized her own forces on the Austrian frontier, at that time her southern border. This order alarmed the German general staff; their entire strategy was posited on the requirement that Russia would still be mobilizing her forces while France was crushed. If the Schlieffen Plan were to be implemented, the Russians must not be given time to mobilize ahead of Germany.
Military escalation therefore continued. Austria promptly mobilized her own forces along the Russian frontier and on 31 July both Russia and Austria ordered total mobilization. Germany then entered the fray, the Imperial General Staff demanding that Russia demobilize within twelve hours. This ultimatum was ignored, so on 1 August Germany ordered a general mobilization. Their intention was to declare war on Russia and France and then implement the Schlieffen Plan - the basis of their entire strategy.
At this crucial juncture the Kaiser- or the Supreme War Lord, as he now became - hesitated. He had rushed back to Berlin, knowing that if Germany declared war on Russia, France would immediately strike at Germany's western frontiers and implement their war plan, Plan XVII. The French plan was well known in German military circles and required the bulk of the French Army to advance across the German frontier with great force and retake Alsace and Lorraine before crossing the Rhine and invading the Reich. Germany would immediately be faced with a war on two fronts, the ultimate result of 'encirclement', and the Kaiser was by no means sure that the outcome of these two plans - Schlieffen's and Plan XVII - would be favourable to Germany. Sabre-rattling was one thing, all-out war quite another- and war on two fronts a recipe for disaster.
There was, perhaps, one way of avoiding a two-front war. The German ambassador in London had already informed the Kaiser that the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, was offering to mediate between Austria-Hungary and Russia and keep France out of the war ... or at least, so the ambassador alleged. The Kaiser grasped at this straw, and more precious hours were wasted while Berlin attempted to find out what Sir Edward was actually proposing.
Kaiser Wilhelm was also tinkering with the Schlieffen Plan. Desperate to limit the impending conflict, he told von Moltke that if the British could keep France out of the fighting, Germany could turn all her might against Russia. 'All we have to do,' claimed the Kaiser, 'is march the whole of our forces against Russia.' Von Moltke flatly rejected this proposal. 'A plan prepared and rehearsed over many years cannot be dismantled in a few hours. If we do as Your Majesty proposes we will send nothing more than an armed mob against Russia.'
Historians are divided as to the truth of this assertion, but military men are convinced that von Moltke was right and the sheer scale of Germany's military preparations supports that belief.
'On August 6', writes Basil Liddell Hart, 'the great deployment began; 550 trains a day crossed the Rhine bridges and by the 12th the seven German armies (totalling 1,500,000 men) were ready to advance. Over the Hohenzollern bridge in Cologne, a train passed every ten minutes during the first fortnight of war.' (3)
Perhaps Germany could have used that first-rate railway network to move her armies east, but that would have left her western frontier open to the temptations of Plan XVII, an opportunity the French could not have resisted. Besides, the Schlieffen Plan dictated that France was the main enemy and must be defeated first. Therefore the railway junctions in Luxembourg must be seized within hours of a declaration of war. Von Moltke pleaded with the Kaiser for permission to proceed that far, knowing that once the move towards France began it could not be halted.
The Kaiser refused. Wilhelm was not entirely a fool and he was much more widely travelled than his military advisers. They saw this conflict as a war on the frontiers, a chance to crush French and Russian aggression; the Kaiser was worried that the war might quickly consume the entire continent. He had, albeit belatedly, begun to grasp where the conflict was heading and what any failure in the Schlieffen Plan might mean for the Hohenzollern dynasty. However well prepared and planned and rehearsed, the Schlieffen Plan was, in fact, a gamble. It placed Germany's fortune and future on the outcome of one six-week campaign. If that campaign failed, then Germany would face the kind of war that, as the Plan asserted, it would certainly lose. Faced with this uncertain prospect, it is hardly surprising that the Kaiser hesitated.
Another telegram from the German ambassador in London then revealed exactly what the British Foreign Secretary was proposing. Sir Edward was offering to keep France neutral if Germany promised not to go to war with either France or Russia. The aim was to give Sir Edward time to seek a solution to the conflict between Austria and Serbia and extinguish this spreading conflagration at source.
Once again the issue was a matter of time. Grey was well meaning but it was already too late for outside mediation. The Russians were mobilizing and had refused to stop; for the Schlieffen Plan to succeed the German armies must move- at once. The Kaiser read the British telegram several times and then handed it to von Moltke. 'Now you can do what you like,' he said, and left the room. As the door closed behind him, Helmuth von Moltke picked up the telephone and started the First World War.
The British Go to War 1898-1914
Cool bravery, chivalry, discipline ... these were the qualities which the British possessed at Waterloo and on the Somme, and at almost every engagement in between. It must not be forgotten that in this quixotic, eccentric and peculiar army, these qualities existed to a very high degree.
Byron Farwell, Mr Kipling's Army, 1981, pp. 243-4
What were the reasons that impelled the British government to send an Expeditionary Force to France in 1914, after ninety-nine years of deliberate disengagement? This part of the story begins, curiously enough, in the swamps of the Sudan, sixteen years before the BEF went to France.
On 4 September 1898, two days after his victory over the Dervishes at Omdurman, General Sir Horatio Herbert Kitchener received some disturbing news. A Dervish gunboat had docked at Khartoum and the crew were anxious to report a recent encounter to the new ruler of the Sudan. Some days previously, European troops occupying the fort at Fashoda on the upper Nile had engaged them with rifle fire. General Kitchener was mmediately concerned. There were no British troops south of Khartoum, so these troops could only be from Captain Marchand's Trans-Africa Expedition- and that was especially disturbing, for Captain Jean Baptiste Marchand was French.
Apart from crushing the Dervishes and ending the Sudanese slave trade, the British conquest of the Sudan was part of a grand imperial design. The strategic aim was to create a swathe of British-controlled territory across Africa, from Cairo to the Cape. Only physical difficulties - the distance, the climate, the terrain and hostile tribes - now stood in the way of this strategy, unless the
French succeeded in their grand design - creating a block of French-controlled territory, west to east across Africa, so barring Britain's progress to the south. Marchand's intrusion into a territory Britain regarded as her own was therefore not to be borne. Kitchener embarked a battalion of Sudanese infantry and a battery of artillery in two gunboats and sailed upstream to confront the French.
At Fashoda, Kitchener found Marchand's expedition firmly entrenched under the French flag, anticipating another Dervish attack but equally willing to fight the British. The size of Kitchener's force made the outcome of such resistance obvious, but Marchand declared that he had no intention of hauling down the French flag and intended to proceed with the annexation of the upper Nile. Should Kitchener use force to confound this aim, the effect on Anglo-French relations would be disastrous- a fact of which both officers were well aware. Kitchener delivered a formal protest at this French military presence on the Nile and declared that he now intended to hoist the Egyptian flag over what had always been Egyptian territory. That done, the two officers and their staffs sat down to an enjoyable lunch.
When the news of this meeting at Fashoda reached Paris in October 1898, there was public outrage. Once again, 'l'Albion perfide' had come between France and her fair share of glory and territorial conquest. While the deputies debated what to do, the press seethed. 'Le duel sans merci est commencé,' declared La Patrie, and other papers adopted a similar tone. 'France's honour is at stake,' declared Le Figaro; 'there could be no surrender and something must be done'. (1)
Something was done. Channel-based ships of the French fleet sailed for the Mediterranean. The French Army was put on a war footing and prepared to call up reservists. In public and political circles all the old familiar, Anglo-French animosities, dating back to the time of Napoleon or the Hundred Years War, were revived.
Nor were the British any less pacific. The French had been caught red handed attempting to sneak across the Nile, annex a territory under British protection and thwart a cherished imperial strategy. There was no room for negotiation on this issue. 'The elements of compromise do not exist,' stated The Times; (2) the French must withdraw forthwith. Where these hostile rumblings might have led is hard to say. War was certainly not impossible over this confrontation at Fashoda, but two factors combined to prevent it.
The first obstacle was the state of French society and the French Army in 1898, which can best be described as chaotic. For the last three years France's military and political elite had been locked in a public dispute over 'L'Affaire' - the debate as to whether a Jewish staff officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, had or had not been passing military secrets to Germany, a crime for which Dreyfus had already been dismissed from the service and sentenced to a lifetime's imprisonment on Devil's Island. Following Zola's famous rebuttal- J'Accuse- and the investigation that followed, the Dreyfus Affair was about to reach a conclusion- the Court de Cassation called to review the Dreyfus verdict met on the day Marchand was ordered to withdraw from Fashoda, (3) but the effect of the affair was to split France in two, politically and socially.
At such a time a quarrel with Britain might have seemed useful, a good way of uniting the nation, so creating a situation in which internal political disputes could be put aside and the Dreyfus Affair forgotten. The French government wisely chose to ignore this option. France was in no state to engage in a major war that the British were clearly quite willing to fight- not with the army divided and imperial Germany on the eastern frontier.
Besides, there was no real casus belli. Kitchener handled the meeting with great courtesy, hoisting the Egyptian flag rather than the British one, and no shots had been exchanged. The French had no reason to be offended unless they chose to take offence: their national honour had not been impugned; their flag had not been insulted.
The subsequent discussions between Kitchener and Marchand are of no great relevance to the story of the British Expeditionary Force of 1914. The outcome of their talks at Fashoda was that the future of the upper Nile should be settled between their respective governments, not by an exchange of fire. What is relevant to our story is this: had Kitchener not handled the 'Fashoda Incident' with tact and charm- two qualities not normally attributed to this dour soldier - war between France and Britain might have followed. The Entente Cordiale would never have been signed in 1904 and the long process that created an Anglo-French alliance in the First World War would not have begun. Fashoda, in short, was a turning point. It marked the end of a centuries-old mutual animosity and a new beginning in Franco-British affairs; the road to Mons began at Fashoda.
The next step on the journey began in October 1899, with the outbreak of the second Boer War- the South African War. In this struggle Britain quickly found herself at odds with the rest of Europe, which was solidly in support of the Boers. This support was not merely vocal; the Boer artillery came from Krupp and Creusot, and many of the Boer gunners were French or German. Nor did the war go well; it began with a series of defeats, notably during Black Week, between 10 and 15 December 1899, which delighted Britain's opponents in Europe. 'The war exposed Britain to humiliation in the eyes of her European rivals, especially France and Germany,' writes Thomas Pakenham, (4) and Barbara Tuchman records that 'With Black Week went the last time Britons felt themselves unquestionably masters of the earth.' (5)
There can be no doubt that the South African War dented the confidence of the British military and political class. Coupled with these military worries, there were doubts about the handling of Britain's foreign policy. Her nineteenth-century 'splendid isolation' (6) was beginning to look rather less splendid by the end of the South African War. As Lord Salisbury's grip on foreign affairs slackened, his successor at the Foreign Office, Lord Lansdowne,' began a quest for alliances and understandings with other powers to give Britain useful allies'. (7)
Another authority, John Keiger, endorses this view: 'The traumatic experience of the Boer War was a major cause of Britain's changed attitude towards France. It showed up a number of British military weaknesses and it underlined her diplomatic isolation. On the diplomatic front the popularity of "Splendid Isolation" was anyway on the wane and Britain began to look towards the Continent for support. British public opinion was growing increasingly hostile to an arrangement with Germany whose Weltpolitik was beginning to threaten Britain in the colonies and, by the expansion of the German Navy, at sea.' (8)
Keiger's comment introduces the third element into this evolving situation; apart from Britain's strategic concerns, the growing amity with France was matched by a decline in British relations with Imperial Germany. The underlying cause of this decline was economic, a growing and massive increase in German industrial power at a time when Britain's nineteenth-century industrial lead was declining in the face of competition from the United States and Germany.
Paul M. Kennedy confirms this point: 'Historians grappling with the overall alteration in Anglo-German relations have before anything else to confront the fact that whereas Britain produced over twice as much steel as Germany at the start of this period it produced less than half at the end of it', adding that 'steel output is a very selective criterion but not a totally unreasonable one in an age of Dreadnoughts, field cannon and locomotives'. (9)
An economically powerful nation could certainly compete for markets with the United Kingdom but there was more to Anglo German rivalries than trade. The creation of the German empire by Bismarck in 1871 had radically altered the balance of power in Europe. While Bismarck was in power his energies were concentrated on developing German industrial power and protecting his creation by a series of alliances - including, in 1889, the offer of an alliance with Britain. According to Kennedy, 'Bismarck's proposal for an open Anglo-German Alliance, to last for a fixed number of years and be directed ostensibly against France, was turned down, politely but firmly, by the British Prime Minister.' (10) Matters changed radically in 1890 when Wilhelm II dismissed Bismarck from office. From that time on German foreign policy took an
erratic course in which periodic attempts to reach an alliance with Britain were interspersed with actions calculated to annoy and alarm her government and people.
Wilhelm II could have been a potent source of Anglo-German amity; he was Queen Victoria's grandson, the nephew of Edward VII, a British Field Marshal, Colonel of the Royal Dragoons and an Admiral of the Fleet. Had he so wished, the Kaiser could have been a revered member of the British Establishment. Indeed, from time to time he did so wish; his relationship with Britain was one of love and hate, admiration and envy, imitation and rejection.
This volatility caused alarm, for the Kaiser was also the ruler of a large European country, which possessed a powerful industrialized economy, a very large army and a network of political and military leaders who intended to deploy that power in the not too distant future. These facts alone obliged all Germany's neighbours to be wary but posed little immediate threat to Britain; that threat took shape with the German Naval Law of 1900.
This was not the first sign of conflict. In 1896 the Kaiser sent what became known as the 'Kruger Telegram' to Paul Kruger, the president of the Transvaal, congratulating him on repelling the recent Jameson Raid and assuring the Boers of German support. When the South African War broke out in 1899, Germany again supported the Boer republics- as indeed did many other European nations- but the Kaiser's fatal mistake, certainly in the eyes of the British, was the German Naval Law of 1900.
More than any other single action, more than all the Kaiser's provocations in Europe over the last twelve years, the German Naval Law of 1900 brought Great Britain out of her century-old isolation from European affairs. 'It convinced Britain that she needed friends,' wrote Barbara Tuchman.' In 1901 the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty cemented good relations with the United States. In 1902 Britain concluded a formal alliance with Japan, in 1904 the Entente Cordiale.' (11) These diplomatic moves would continue.
The Old Contemptibles Page 3