The German withdrawal from the Belgian border was, in Grey’s view, unfortunate. Without a German invasion of Belgium, there was no chance that Great Britain would come into the war on the side of France. The House of Commons would never agree to go to war to help either the Russians or the French without some further provocation. Whatever the reason behind it, the withdrawal was a clever stroke by the Germans. It had pulled the rug out from under Grey and his Francophile allies in the Cabinet.
Now, he was going to have to tell Ambassador Cambon that His Majesty’s Government was “…unable to commit to any precipitate action under the present circumstances…” Grey muttered to himself. “In other words, we plan to do a fair imitation of rats leaving a sinking ship,” he finished bitterly.
“The French Ambassador is here, sir,” Grey’s private secretary said.
“Show the Ambassador in please, Harrison,” Grey said.
Grey’s secretary disappeared, and then returned a few moments later to announce, “His Excellency, Ambassador Paul Cambon.”
“Thank you, Harrison,” Grey said, dismissing his subordinate. The private secretary bowed to Grey, then to Cambon, and left silently.
Paul Cambon was a dapper figure, with short, wiry grey hair and a neatly trimmed beard and moustache. Grey considered the French Ambassador to be a personal friend more than a diplomatic colleague. They had met at a party in 1895 just after Cambon had first taken up his current post, and the two men developed an immediate liking and respect for each other. Since 1905, when Grey had come to the Foreign office, they had worked closely together, trying to bring their two nations into a military alliance, trying in vain, as events proved.
Now the Frenchman stood rigid, his face expressionless, his eyes fixed on Grey’s. Grey himself felt stiff and uncomfortable in his friend’s presence.
“It is a pleasure to see you again, Paul,” Grey said. He gestured to a Louis XIV armchair embroidered with hunting scenes. The chair had been a birthday present from Cambon on the occasion of Grey’s 40th birthday. “Please, make yourself comfortable.”
“No thank you, Mr. Foreign Secretary,” responded the Frenchman icily. “My errand will not take long.”
Grey cringed inwardly when the other man addressed him formally, rather than by his first name as he had done for so many years. This was the moment he had been dreading all day, and this interview was beginning quite as badly as he had anticipated. Long years of diplomatic practice allowed Grey to maintain an impassive mask that hid the pain he felt, although he could not control the way his complexion paled.
There was a long, uncomfortable silence. When Cambon finally spoke again, his voice was strained. “I am here, as you must know, Mr. Foreign Secretary, to ascertain the position of His Majesty’s Government with regard to commitments previously made by your Government to France. Promises, mutual obligations between our Governments were made ten years ago, and have since been renewed and extended. The time has come to redeem those commitments, now that Germany has declared an unprovoked war on my country.” He paused. Grey waited, saying nothing.
“Does His Majesty’s Government intend to place the Royal Navy on station in the English Channel to cover French ports as was previously arranged?” Cambon demanded. “What is the prospect of fulfilling the terms of the military convention between our countries? His Majesty’s Government was committed to landing the British Expeditionary Force in Channel ports in cooperation with the left wing of the French Army. This was part of our mutual war plans. When will these troops be landing? The war has begun; our plans must take into account the intentions of our allies.”
There was another endless period of silence that lasted perhaps three seconds. Grey knew that he had no satisfactory answer, that he had nothing to offer the anguished Frenchman.
“Surely, Paul, you and the French Government understood that all of those arrangements were on an informal basis,” he replied steadily. “His Majesty’s Government has never undertaken a formal commitment to go to war alongside France. In point of fact, such a commitment would not have been approved by the Cabinet or Parliament, as you well know. All of these arrangements were contingent upon the occurrence of certain events over which we have no control. The informal arrangements were the best that we could manage. Indeed, we had to take care to see that even the informal arrangements did not become general knowledge, to prevent a public outcry against Continental commitments. A military alliance with France, with any Continental Power, has never been a popular idea in this country.”
“So, His Majesty’s Government will stand aside and do nothing at this critical moment in history? Will you simply look on with arms folded while the German Empire comes to dominate Europe?” demanded the Ambassador, his voice quavering with emotion. “Because if you wait until after we and the Russians are crushed, it will be far too late to do anything. The shadow of Prussianism will fall over the whole of the Continent. What will His Majesty’s Government do then, with France and Russia defeated and prostrate, and a hostile German Empire supreme? What will you do then, Monsieur Foreign Secretary?”
Grey’s mouth tightened, but his voice was calm as always. It was a little unfair of Cambon to blame Grey for the apparent abandonment of the French by His Majesty’s Government. It was only because he and a handful of colleagues in the Cabinet had insisted that anything at all had been done. As he had reminded Cambon, the informal understanding with France had been the absolute most they could achieve under the circumstances. The simple truth was that, if not for the informal arrangements, they would have had nothing at all. As events turned out, they did have nothing.
Still, he did not blame Cambon. If their positions were reversed, Grey suspected that he would feel exactly the same way as the Frenchman did.
Normally Grey held as an article of faith that he was morally bound to support the positions of his own government. If he could not do so, then he was honour bound to resign rather than remain in office in a false position. But on this occasion Grey’s feelings of guilt were so strong that he was driven to violate this rule by admitting to his friend that his own views were at variance with those of the government he served.
“You know I wish it were otherwise and that I believe we should come to France’s aid in her hour of peril, but my personal feelings on the matter are of no consequence,” he said. “It is the official position of His Majesty’s Government that a quarrel between Russia, Austria, Germany and France is not a matter of vital interest to Great Britain sufficient to justify a declaration of war. It is absolutely clear that neither in Parliament nor among the public is there any support for taking the country into the war under the present circumstances.”
He sighed. “I should tell you that two days ago a group of Liberal MPs voted 19 to 4 to remain neutral, even if Germany were to violate Belgium. The Cabinet voted 12 to 6 against going to war in support of France, and they further decided to not even allow the fleet to take up war stations in the North Sea for fear of provoking an incident with the German Navy. Mr. Asquith will never take a divided country into war; indeed he could not even if he wished to, as support for such a course does not exist in Parliament. We must await some new development before the Prime Minister can even consider putting the question to the House or to the Cabinet. There is really nothing we can do but wait for new developments and hope.”
Ambassador Cambon burst out, “Kaiser Wilhelm is not going to oblige us by invading Belgium. There is not going to be any ‘new development’. So what will happen now? Based on your country’s assurances, all our military plans were arranged in common, on the assumption that Great Britain would be fighting at our side. Those plans are now in ruins. Our General Staffs have consulted and you have seen our schemes and preparations. Our fleet has committed to the Mediterranean and we have left our Atlantic coast wide open to the Germans, all because of British guarantees. If you abandon us now, France will never forgive you. And what will be the value of English promises after this betrayal, and wha
t allies will trust them in the future?”
Grey had no answers for the anguished Cambon. The fact of the matter was that he agreed with everything the Frenchman had said. He subscribed the adage attributed to his predecessor, Lord Palmerston, that Britain had neither permanent friends nor permanent enemies, only permanent interests. The main permanent interest, the guiding star of British foreign policy in Europe for generations, had been to oppose the domination of the Continent by any single power and to ally with the lesser powers to prevent such domination. The British Empire had joined coalitions against the Hapsburgs in the 17th century, against Louis XIV, the Sun King, in the 18th, and had headed the alliance that finally defeated Napoleon in the last century, guided by that same principle. Would she now allow the German Empire to succeed where the others had failed? As he accompanied the Frenchman from his office, he could only say, “Let us hope that tomorrow brings better tidings.” Cambon did not reply.
Grey sat for a long time in his office after the Ambassador had left, reading new intelligence estimates from the War Ministry about Belgium. Nothing he read gave him any hope at all. Every source available to the British government; diplomats, military observers and newspaper reporters all told the same story: massive formations of German troops were pulling out from the Belgian border and boarding trains rolling off to… where? To the East, to Prussia, to fight the Russians was what nearly everyone thought.
Grey pondered whether he should offer his resignation to the Prime Minister. He was strongly tempted to take some action to demonstrate his feelings, and he thought it would be a great relief to be rid of the responsibilities of the Ministry. In the end, he decided that resignation would amount to nothing more than a gesture, and would do nothing to change his country’s course. He was too responsible to commit such a rash act just to allay his personal sense of guilt.
Long after evening had fallen and the streetlamps on Downing Street had flickered to life, Grey brooded over his meeting with the French Ambassador. Cambon was right, he decided. Without British help, the Franco-Russian coalition would eventually be overwhelmed, and an aggressive, militaristic Germany, with a growing population, expanding industry and ambition to match, would come to dominate Europe. “Then what will we do?” Grey murmured aloud, echoing the words of the departed French Ambassador. “Then what?”
Chapter Three: BERLIN, AUGUST 6, 1914
Under ordinary circumstances, Ray Swing would have gladly spent a few hours of a steamy August Berlin afternoon here in the Pratergarten in the fashionable Prenzlauer Berg district. The beer garden had been brewing and serving its own beer since it opened in 1837, and nowhere in the city could a tastier weiss bier be had. Moreover, the linden trees provided a cool, shady place to rest, the chairs were comfortable, the wursts among the best in town, and even the inevitable brass band that Germans seemed to feel was an essential part of the beer-drinking experience, was neither as loud nor as annoying as its counterparts at rival beer gardens.
But Swing would be hard-pressed to come up with a word that was less appropriate than “ordinary” to describe this August, in the summer of 1914. Ray Swing was a journalist, and pure luck had landed him in Berlin right in the middle of the biggest story since Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. The capital of the German Empire was this summer the epicentre of the greatest European war in a century and, as the newly appointed (three months) chief of German bureau of the Chicago Daily News, it was his job to report on the conflagration for readers back in America.
During the preceding week, he had closely followed the progress of the German mobilisation in his dispatches home. He described the rivers of the Kaiser’s feldgrau-clad soldiers flowing through the streets of Berlin as the cheers of the happy citizenry rang in their ears, the pretty women showering the marching men with flowers or running up to kiss a lucky trooper, the endless troop trains overflowing with the young Teutonic warriors waving out the windows, laughing and singing as if the war would be some wonderful vacation or a glorious game.
But Swing’s role was not just that of reporter. As bureau chief, he was also obliged to oversee the work of his all-too-few reporters whom he had dispatched to cover as many of the scattered potential battlefields as possible, and to coordinate their reports so that they were reasonably consistent (or at least, not completely inconsistent), when they were put together for publication.
There was enough work to keep three Ray Swings busy around the clock. Yet, in the middle of the unfolding European apocalypse, he had agreed to take two hours that he did not have to spare for a meeting in this beer garden. There was only one reason he had done so: because of his friendship respect for the man who had asked him to meet today, Joseph Stilwell.
Even as Swing brooded, he saw the man himself moving smoothly through the lindens and around the tables filled with sweating burghers gulping down litre steins of the house summer beer, heading for Swing’s table. The thirty-one year old Lieutenant Stilwell (not for the first time, Swing reflected on the slow pace of promotions in the peacetime American Army), was a thin, wiry man, with an alert expression on his intelligent face, a sharp beak of a nose and a piercing, compelling gaze. His upright military posture made him appear to be taller than his actual five feet, eight inches. He was not in uniform today, but was dressed in a white linen suit topped by a Panama hat.
Stilwell sat at the table and removed his hat, using it to fan his perspiring face. He ordered a beer by catching the eye of one of the powerfully built bierkellnerins who was rushing by with two foaming glass steins in each hand, and holding up one finger. The hefty fraulein smiled, nodded and said, “Einen moment bitte, mein Herr,” then hurried on.
“Sorry to keep you waiting, Ray,” he apologised, “but poor ‘Ambastador’ ‘Gerry’ is about to go completely off his rails from the overwork. It seems that the State Department keeps insisting that he supply them with daily updated reports on the political and military situation over here, and his position is that if he wanted to work for a living, he would never have gone into politics.”
Stilwell had a low opinion of the abilities of his boss (an opinion fully shared by Swing), Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Empire of Germany by appointment of the President of the United States of America on the advice and consent of the Senate, the Honourable James W. Gerard. He considered Gerard to be nothing more than a life-long political hack who had received the appointment as a reward for his years of service in the corrupt Tammany Hall Democratic machine. It would have gone without saying that Stilwell thought Gerard was completely unqualified for the position, except for the military attaché’s inability to keep his opinion of the Ambassador to himself.
“I haven’t been here long enough to finish even one lager,” Swing replied, holding aloft a half-full stein. “I’m not surprised about the… Ambassador… you really should stop calling him that, you know. The wrong person is going to hear you one of these days… but I am curious about what would bring the military attaché of the American Embassy out to a beer garden at such a critical time, and in mufti at that.”
Before replying, Stilwell swivelled his head right and left to look around the garden through the haze of cigar smoke at the stolid German citizenry enjoying tankards of beer, plates of spaetzel and sausage. He said quietly, “I have new orders from Washington, straight from the War Department. The… Ambassador…” he pronounced the word with extravagant care, making a sour face as he did so, ”…knows nothing about them.” He looked at Swing meaningfully.
At this moment, the waitress returned to thump a great mug of foaming pale beer in front of Stilwell. He laid a silver one-mark coin in her hand, making a gesture to indicate that she was to keep the excess fifty pfennigs as a gratuity. The waitress clasped her hands together and gasped in astonishment at such largess.
“Oh danke, mein Herr! Dankeshon!” she exclaimed.
“Es ist nichts,” the American said modestly, motioning for her to resume her duties.
The two men s
peculatively regarded the beer-maiden’s solidly built posterior as she walked away. Swing said, “Joe, I think if you asked her out for a date tonight, you might get lucky.”
“She’s not my type,” Stilwell replied, shaking his head. “She’d probably break my arm if she got excited in a clinch.” He returned his gaze to his companion. “Now, where was I? Oh yeah, the new orders from DepWar.”
“I’m going to guess they want you gather some intelligence on the German army,” Swing said.
“They want me to make personal observations of the Kraut war machine in action,” Stilwell replied. “They want my evaluations of everything from combat morale to infantry-artillery coordination to how they load heavy equipment on their troop trains.”
“I’ve seen that last one,” Swing volunteered. “They do it very cleverly. They open up the ends of all the cars, lay down planks between cars and then roll the guns or whatever all the way through to the first car. Then to unload…”
“I know. I’ve seen it myself,” Stilwell said. “I heard that the Kaiser himself gave the Army the idea, after he saw the Ringling Brothers Circus load up that way.”
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