“So it is all up?” said Margot Asquith.
Without looking up, tears in his eyes, Asquith replied, “Yes, it is all up.”58
It was with heavy hearts that Grey and Asquith led their country into war. Lloyd George was of a similar cast of mind. On the eve of a war he now supported, but with a troubled conscience, he wrote,
I am moving through a nightmare world these days…. I have fought hard for peace & succeeded so far in keeping the Cabinet out of it, but I am driven to the conclusion that if the small nationality of Belgium is attacked by Germany all my traditions & even prejudices will be engaged on the side of war. I am filled with horror at the prospect. I am even more horrified that I should ever appear to have a share in it but I must bear my share of the ghastly burden though it scorches my flesh to do so.59
“[Lloyd George] was sickened by the huge crowds jubilantly thronging Whitehall and Parliament Square and his face was white as he sat slumped in his seat in the Commons,” listening to Grey make the case for war.60 Cheered on his way to Parliament, Lloyd George muttered: “This is not my crowd…. I never want to be cheered by a war crowd.”61
The prime minister felt equal revulsion. Making his way through the cheering throngs, Asquith “expressed his loathing for the levity and quoted Robert Walpole, ‘Now they ring the bells but soon they will wring their hands.’”62 “It is curious,” Asquith would later write,
how, going to and from the House, we are now always surrounded and escorted by cheering crowds of loafers and holiday makers. I have never before been a popular character with “the man in the street,” and in all this dark and dangerous business it gives me scant pleasure. How one loathes such levity.63
At 11 P.M., August 4, as the ultimatum expired and the moment came when Britain was at war, a tearful Margot Asquith left her husband to go to bed, and as she began to ascend the stairs, “I saw Winston Churchill with a happy face striding towards the double doors of the Cabinet room.”64
Lloyd George was sitting within with his disconsolate prime minister when, as he later told a friend:
Winston dashed into the room, radiant, his face bright, his manner keen, one word pouring out after another how he was going to send telegrams to the Mediterranean, the North Sea, and God knows where. You could see he was a really happy man.65
Churchill was exhilarated. Six months later, after the first Battle of Ypres, with tens of thousands of British soldiers in their graves, he would say to Violet Asquith, “I think a curse should rest on me—because I am so happy. I know this war is smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment and yet—I cannot help it—I enjoy every second.”66
Said Sir Maurice Hankey, “Churchill was a man of a totally different type from all his colleagues. He had a real zest for war. If war there must needs be, he at least could enjoy it.”67
A year earlier, in his book Pillars of Society, A. G. Gardiner had written prophetically of the young First Lord:
He sees himself moving through the smoke of battle—triumphant, terrible, his brow clothed with thunder, his legions looking to him for victory, and not looking in vain. He thinks of Napoleon; he thinks of his great ancestor. Thus did they bear themselves; thus, in this rugged and most awful crisis, will he bear himself. It is not make-believe, it is not insincerity; it is that in that fervid and picturesque imagination there are always great deeds afoot with himself cast by destiny in the Agamemnon role…. He will write his name big in the future. Let us take care he does not write it in blood.68
WHY BRITAIN FOUGHT
WAS WORLD WAR I a necessary war?
Writes British historian John Keegan, “The First World War was…an unnecessary conflict. Unnecessary because the train of events that led to its outbreak might have been broken at any point during the five weeks that preceded the first clash of arms, had prudence or common goodwill found a voice.”69
Had the Austrians not sought to exploit the assassination of Ferdinand to crush Serbia, they would have taken Serbia’s acceptance of nine of their ten demands as vindication. Had Czar Nicholas II been more forceful in rescinding his order for full mobilization, Germany would not have mobilized, and the Schlieffen Plan would not have begun automatically to unfold. Had the Kaiser and Bethmann realized the gravity of the crisis, just days earlier, they might have seized on Grey’s proposal to reconvene the six-power conference that resolved the 1913 Balkan crisis. The same six ambassadors were all in London, including Germany’s Prince Lichnowsky, an Anglophile desperate to avoid war with Britain.
Had Grey himself conveyed to Lichnowsky, more forcefully and “just a few days earlier,” that Britain would likely be drawn into a European war, writes one historian, “Berlin almost certainly would have changed its position more quickly and firmly. Austria might then have deferred its declaration of war, and Russia would have had little reason to mobilize.”70 The Great War might have been averted.
And it is in Britain’s decisions and actions that we are most interested. For it was the British decision to send an army across the Channel to fight in Western Europe, for the first time in exactly one hundred years, that led to the defeat of the Schlieffen Plan, four years of trench warfare, America’s entry, Germany’s collapse in the autumn of 1918, the abdication of the Kaiser, the dismemberment of Germany at Versailles, and the rise to power of a veteran of the Western Front who, four years after the war’s end, was unreconciled to his nation’s defeat. “It cannot be that two million Germans should have fallen in vain,” cried Adolf Hitler in 1922. “No, we do not pardon, we demand—vengeance.”71
Britain turned the European war of August 1 into a world war. For, while the wave of public sentiment against the invasion of “brave little Belgium” swept Parliament over the brink and into war, Grey, Haldane, Churchill, and Asquith had steered her toward the falls for other reasons:
1. Preserve France as a Great Power. In his speech to the Commons on August 3, Grey declared: “If France is beaten in a struggle of life and death…I do not believe that…we should be in a position to use our force decisively…to prevent the whole of the West of Europe opposite to us…falling under the domination of a single Power.”72
Grey believed in a domino theory. The day after his address, he told a colleague, “It will not end with Belgium. Next will come Holland, and after Holland, Denmark…England[’s] position would be gone if Germany were thus permitted to dominate Europe.”73 To Grey, the Kaiser was Napoleon and the risks of neutrality—a German-dominated Europe—outweighed the risks of war. “If we are engaged in war, we shall suffer but little more than we shall suffer if we stand aside.”74
Sir Edward was tragically mistaken.
2. British Honor. What brought the Cabinet around behind Grey was not France or an abstraction like the balance of power. It was Belgium. Had the Germans not invaded Belgium, had the Belgians not fought, the Cabinet would not have supported the ultimatum. Grey would then have resigned; Asquith’s government would have fallen; days would have passed before a new government was formed. New elections might have had to be called. There would have been no ultimatum of August 3, no declaration of war of August 4. In his speech of August 6, “What are we fighting for?,” Asquith gave this answer: Britain had a duty “to uphold Belgian neutrality in the name of law and honour” and “to vindicate the principle…that small nations are not to be crushed.”75
In justifying the decision for war, Asquith, writes Ferguson, adopted “the idiom of the public-school playground: ‘It is impossible for people of our blood and history to stand by…while a big bully sets to work to thrash and trample to the ground a victim who has given him no provocation.’”76 In his memoirs, Grey, too, does not give as a casus belli any imperiled vital British interest, but regards it as a matter of national honor:
[Had we not come in] we should have been isolated; we should have had no friend in the world; no one would have hoped or feared anything from us, or thought our friendship worth having. We should have been discredited…held to
have played an inglorious and ignoble part…We should have been hated.77
Lord Grey is saying here that Britain had to enter the war because the character and credibility of the British nation were at issue. Allies of the empire all over the world, who relied on British commitments, were watching. Had Britain not gone to war, had she stood aside as France was crushed, who would then trust Britain to stand by them?
What Grey was saying is that the empire was held together by a belief that, in any crisis, the British army and Royal Navy would be there. That belief, critical to maintaining the empire, could not survive a British neutrality as Belgium and France were being assaulted, invaded, and overrun.
3. Retention of Power. Why did the antiwar Liberals in the Cabinet not resign? Because Lloyd George begged them to wait. Because they feared a breakup of the Cabinet would bring about the fall of Asquith’s government, and new elections that might bring to power the Unionists who backed Grey, Churchill, and war. Already, Churchill had sounded out the Conservative leader Bonar Law on a national unity government.
Indeed, on Sunday, August 2, Law had written Asquith offering the Tories’ “unhesitating support in any measures they may consider necessary,” adding, “[i]t would be fatal to the honour and security of the United Kingdom to hesitate in supporting France and Russia.”78
Bonar Law’s letter did not mention Belgium.
If Britain must go to war, Liberals believed, better that they lead her and conclude the peace. The Liberal Imperialists steered their country to war, and, rather than risk the loss of power, the Little Englanders went along.
Since their triumph in 1906, the Liberals had seen their electoral support wither away. By 1914, Herbert Asquith’s government was on the verge of collapse. Given the failure of their foreign policy to avert a European war, he and his Cabinet colleagues ought to have resigned. But they dreaded the return to Opposition. More, they dreaded the return of the Conservatives to power. They went to war partly to keep the Tories out.79
And the German General Staff accommodated them. “By requiring a German advance through the whole of Belgium,” writes Ferguson, “the Schlieffen Plan helped save the Liberal government.”80
4. Germanophobia. Britain resented the rise of Germany and feared that a defeat of France would mean German preeminence in Europe and the eclipse of Britain as an economic and world power. During his tour in the late summer of 1919 to sell America on his Versailles Treaty, a tour that ended when he was felled by a stroke, Wilson said in St. Louis and St. Paul: “This war, in its inception, was a commercial and industrial war…. The German bankers and the German merchants and the German manufacturers did not want this war. They were making conquest of the world without it, and they knew it would spoil their plans.”81
Churchill himself had imbibed deeply of Grey’s Germanophobia. As he said in 1912: “I could never learn their beastly language, nor will I till the Emperor William comes over here with his army.”82
In 1907, preparing for the Hague Conference on disarmament, U.S. secretary of state Elihu Root sent Ambassador Henry White to London to ascertain British views. According to Allan Nevins, Root’s biographer, White was “startled” by what he heard into the stark realization that a European war involving Britain was a possibility. White had several conversations with Balfour, one of which was overheard by White’s daughter, who took notes:
Balfour (somewhat lightly): “We are probably fools not to find a reason for declaring war on Germany before she builds too many ships and takes away our trade.”
White: “You are a very high-minded man in private life. How can you possibly contemplate anything so politically immoral as provoking a war against a harmless nation which has as good a right to a navy as you have? If you wish to compete with German trade, work harder.”
Balfour: “That would mean lowering our standard of living. Perhaps it would be simpler for us to have a war.”
White: “I am shocked that you of all men should enunciate such principles.”
Balfour (again lightly): “Is it a question of right or wrong? Maybe it is just a question of keeping our supremacy.”83
5. Imperial Ambition and Opportunism. The British war party saw France and Russia as bearing the cost in blood of land battle in Europe while the Royal Navy, supreme at sea, ravaged Germany’s trade, seized her markets, and sank the High Seas Fleet, as the empire gobbled up every German colony from Togoland to the Bismarck Archipelago. A war where France and Russia fought the German army, while Britain did most of her fighting outside Europe, or at sea, matched perfectly the ambitions and strengths of the British Empire.
Thus, in early August 1914, a Cabinet that had come to power in public revulsion against an imperial war in South Africa was happily poring over maps, plotting the plunder of Germany’s colonies, as Asquith mused to his colleagues, “We look more like a gang of Elizabethan buccaneers than a meek collection of black-coated Liberal Ministers.”84
For Britain, World War I was not a war of necessity but a war of choice. The Germans did not want war with Britain, nor did they seek to destroy the British Empire. They feared a two-front war against a rising Russian Empire and a France resolute upon revenge for 1870 and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine. Berlin would have paid a high price for British neutrality.
WHY THE LIBERALS WENT ALONG
IDEOLOGY AND EMOTION HELPED to sweep the Liberal Party along to war. Once Belgium was attacked, everything changed. Writes British historian Peter Clarke,
Serbia was belatedly seized upon as a small nation struggling to be free—Lloyd George was to make a speech about how much the world owed the “little 5-foot-5 nations”—but it was Belgium which immediately fitted this particular paradigm…. [A] war on behalf of Belgium was not seen as an assertion of realpolitik in the national interest…but a struggle of right and wrong in the Gladstonian tradition.85
Once Belgium became Britain’s cause, Liberals who had opposed war only hours before enthusiastically joined the crusade. Three days after war was declared, H. G. Wells wrote in the Liberal Daily News, “Every sword drawn against Germany is a sword drawn for peace…. The defeat of Germany may open the way to disarmament and peace throughout the earth….”86 The Daily News echoed Wells, “We have no quarrel with the German people…no, it is not the people with whom we are at war, it is the tyranny which has held them in its vice.”87 To the News, the Germans were a good people; it was the “despots and diplomatists” who had brought on the war.88 Writes historian Correlli Barnett:
The shameful war out of which Britain must at all costs keep had thus swiftly changed its nature to a war of Good against Evil. Spiritual exaltation was now manifested at a temperature not seen since the religious transports of the original evangelical movement of the early nineteenth century. As a writer in the Daily News put it in September 1914, “Humanity is going to pay a great price, but not in vain…[T]he reward is its liberty and a larger, nobler life.”89
When Wilson took America into the war, he, too, had his Damascene moment, awakening to the truth that a European war whose origins he could not discern in December 1916, a war in which he had said both sides were fighting for the same ends, was now a “war to end wars” and “to make the world safe for democracy,” the latter “a phrase first coined by H. G. Wells in August, 1914.”90 Wilson became history’s champion of moralistic intervention. In the 1930s, others would take up the great cause and make League of Nations moralism the polestar of British policy.
Despite their sudden enthusiasm for war when Belgium was invaded, the Liberal Party and the people had no vote in Britain’s decision to enter the bloodiest conflict in Western history. Writes Taylor,
[T]he war came as though King George V still possessed the undiminished prerogatives of Henry VIII. At 10:30 P.M. on 4 August 1914, the king held a privy council at Buckingham Palace which was attended by only one minister and two court officials. This council sanctioned the proclamation of a state of war from 11 P.M. That was all. The Cabinet played no part
once it had resolved to defend the neutrality of Belgium. It did not consider the ultimatum to Germany, which Sir Edward Grey…sent after consulting only the Prime Minister, Asquith, and perhaps not even him. Nor did the Cabinet authorize the declaration of war…. The parliament…did not give formal approval to the government’s acts until it voted a credit of (100) million (pounds)…on 6 August.91
“More astonishing, when viewed though modern eyes,” writes David Fromkin, were the reflexive decisions of the Dominions, thousands of miles from Europe, to send their sons to fight and die in a war against an enemy that had neither attacked nor threatened them or the British Empire.
“The governments and parliaments of the Dominions were not consulted.” Instead, each “governor general issued the royal proclamation on his own authority, as did the viceroy of India.” Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India (which then included Pakistan and Bangladesh), and much of Africa were swept up in a war without first being asked.92
Thus did Britain, her empire trailing behind, enter upon a thirty years’ war of Western civilization. From the killing fields of this mighty conflict, four European empires would never return. No European nation would emerge without wounds that would diminish it forever.
THE KAISER’S CULPABILITY
NEITHER THE KAISER NOR Chancellor Bethmann is blameless for what the Great War historian Jacques Barzun calls the “blow that hurled the modern world on its course of self-destruction.”93 But neither entered it with the “zest” of the First Lord. In early July, the Kaiser had acceded to Vienna’s request to stand by Austria in the event of a war with Serbia, which might mean a collision with Russia. This was the famous “blank cheque.” But as the Kaiser sailed off on his summer vacation to tour Norwegian fjords, Berlin implored the dithering Austrians to settle accounts with the Serbs quickly. Writes Keegan, “Austria had simply wanted to punish Serbia (though it had lacked the courage to act alone). Germany had wanted a diplomatic success that would leave its Austrian ally stronger in European eyes; it had not wanted war.”94
Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War Page 6