by Hew Strachan
The lack of either continuity or clarity in German policy was in itself a reflection of the absence of a guiding authority. Supreme command was in name vested in the Kaiser, but by 1914 Wilhelm no longer commanded the respect which his titles demanded: the monarchy was venerated as an institution rather than in the personality of its incumbent. Technically, the reconciliation of the views of the chancellor and of the chief of the general staff in late July was Wilhelm’s responsibility. In practice, the management of the crisis reflected the dominance of first one personality, Bethmann Hollweg, and then another, Moltke. Bethmann had guided events up until 28 July by acting in isolation: he had encouraged the Kaiser to put to sea and Moltke to continue his cure. When the Kaiser returned, the belligerence he had expressed to Hoyos on 5 July had softened. Wilhelm, however, was caught by his own self-image, that of the steely warrior, and thus his reluctance to fight was compromised by his relationship with his military entourage and, above all, with Moltke. Wilhelm saw himself as the victim of an Entente conspiracy, initiated by his despised English uncle Edward VII, and the latter’s Francophile ways. His capacity so to reduce the crisis of late July 1914 to the level of his own personal animosities cut across any possibility of drawing out the full implications of each step which Germany took.
The most striking illustration of the consequent absence of any German grand design was the confusion between German diplomacy, which aimed to limit war as far as possible, and German war plans, which rested on a worst-case analysis, that of a two-front war against France and Russia simultaneously. After the December 1912 Balkan crisis Moltke had concluded that the Franco-Russian alliance was sufficiently strong to mean that Germany could not fight one without having to reckon with the other. Therefore the plans for war against Russia alone, which in the normal course of events were updated by the general staff each year, were abandoned in April 1913. The army thus committed itself to a two-front war. However, the timing of the Austrian ultimatum in July 1914 was dictated by the wish to minimize the chances of a two-front war, to increase the possibility that if Russia acted in support of Serbia it would do so without France’s aid. Of course, neither Bethmann Hollweg nor the Kaiser was blind to the realization that war with Russia would probably lead to war with the Entente as a whole: hence Bethmann’s crassly provocative communication to Britain on 29 July. But they had not appreciated that in the general staff’s view war in the east had inevitably to be preceded by war in the west. On the afternoon of 1 August Germany’s ambassador in London reported that Grey had guaranteed that France would not fight Germany if Germany did not attack France. The report was false, and the elation which it produced in the Kaiser and in Bethmann Hollweg short-lived. But their jubilation was in marked contrast to the despair the report engendered in Moltke. ‘If His Majesty’, the latter recounted himself as saying, ‘were to insist on directing the whole army to the east, he would not have an army prepared for the attack but a barren heap of armed men disorganised and without supplies.’162
The confusion in Germany as to how France would react was in considerable measure a self-inflicted wound. On 27 and 28 July the Germans jammed wireless transmissions between France and Russia, and between both places and the presidential cruiser. Thereafter the two allies routed their signals traffic through Scandinavia, so generating further delays in communication. Poincaré and Viviani did not return to Paris until 29 July. By deliberately trying to silence France’s leaders, the Central Powers were left free to project on to France their own hopes. In practice French policy was remarkably consistent and predictable: more than that of any other great power, it reflected the developments of 1911–14 rather than the pressures and confusion of the July crisis itself.163
The doggedness of Poincaré’s efforts to cement the Triple Entente had by 1914 achieved a momentum of their own. The original objective of his visit to St Petersburg was to promote better relations between Russia and Britain, and the crisis in the Balkans did not in itself bulk large. This was in part a reflection of ignorance: the French ambassador in Belgrade was ill, and the Quai d’Orsay received no information from Serbia between 14 and 25 July. Intelligence from Berlin was not much better, not least because Jules Cambon was home on leave until 23 July. But the comparative neglect of the Balkans in the St Petersburg talks was also an indication that, once the situation did become clear, the French would not be disposed to see the crisis in isolation. In Paris only the caretaker foreign minister, Bienvenu-Martin, sustained the hope that an Austro-Serb war could be localized. He was rapidly disabused of this notion by the ministry’s senior officials, convinced that behind Austria-Hungary stood Germany, and determined that the preservation of the Entente was a more important objective in French foreign policy than the avoidance of war.
The principal problem confronting Poincaré was how to achieve the former without appearing so uncaring about the latter that France prejudiced either its international credibility or its domestic unity. The memory of France’s entry to the war of 1870, when it had forfeited both, loomed large in his calculations. Military considerations were therefore consistently subordinated to diplomatic in order that France’s defensive posture should be unmistakable. The war minister, Messimy, was kept in ignorance for much of July; the distinction between mobilization and a declaration of war was emphasized; and as late as 1 August the order for the army to keep 10 kilometres back from the Franco-Belgian frontier—thus making clear France’s respect for Belgian neutrality—was reaffirmed. But Poincaré knew as well as Messimy and Joffre that France’s security was bound to that of Russia, and that if Russia mobilized so would Germany. Thus, the tension created by affirming the Entente while asserting French defensiveness was played out in the relationship with Russia.
Pivotal to this dialogue, particularly during the periods of enforced silence and delayed communication, was France’s ambassador in St Petersburg, Maurice Paléologue. Paléologue’s early career had left him well versed in the Franco-Russian relationship, and particularly in its military dimensions. Furthermore, he had been at school with Poincaré, and shared the president’s belief in the centrality of the Entente. Lunching with Sazonov on 24 July, he responded to Sazonov’s conviction that the Austrian ultimatum required a robust response by averring that the Entente should stand up to the Central Powers. As a result of this exchange and, more explicitly, of delays in his reporting the steps taken by Russia on its route to general mobilization, Paléologue has been accused of deliberately stoking Russian aggression while at the same time endorsing Paris’s conviction that Sazonov’s policy was essentially pacific. Consequently Paris saw Germany’s decision to mobilize as unprovoked, and felt its task to be the stiffening of Russian resolve. This interpretation, quite apart from its discounting of the practical difficulties in St Petersburg-Paris communications, elevates Paléologue’s role while downgrading those of Sazonov and Poincaré. It overlooks the striking fact that Russian decision-making was remarkably little influenced by France. It also neglects the similarity between the policy which Paléologue pursued and that which Poincaré would have espoused had he been free to do so. To that extent Paléologue was a more than adequate stopgap when communications were broken. Once they were restored the delays in transmission on 30 and 31 July, whether contrived or not, buttressed Poincaré’s position by stilling any suggestion that Russia had initiated hostilities and had thus invalidated the defensive basis of the alliance.
As a result, even if obscured from Germany, and overshadowed in the French press by Madame Caillaux’s trial (the all-male jury gallantly acquitted her on 28 July), Poincaré’s affirmation of the alliance continued unimpeded by its author’s enforced silence. Indeed, it is worth remembering that on board ship with Poincaré was Viviani, who as a radical prime minister was much more disposed to soften France’s support for Russia. By the time that he was able to do so, advising the Russians not to offer Germany a pretext for general mobilization, it was effectively too late.
Viviani’s views, and t
he need to muzzle them, were a reflection of the domestic imperatives under which Poincaré increasingly felt himself to be operating. The elections of April/May 1914, and the shift to the left which they had produced, although in practice no block to nationalist sentiment, did point to a continuing threat to the three-year military service law. During July itself Messimy was working on a revision of the law, and Poincaré expected its amendment in autumn 1914. The military strength of the Franco-Russian alliance was thus likely to be challenged from within France, as well as by Austro-Germany policy without. The improvements in the French army since 1911, combined with growing evidence of Russian military strength, contributed by 1914 to greater optimism within the French general staff about its prospects in a war with Germany. As in the latter, therefore, so in the former: there was a sense that if war was to come to Europe, better now, with the French army profiting from the three-year law, and with Russian support guaranteed by a Balkan crisis, than later.164
The French president’s resolve was heightened by the ecstatic welcome which he and Viviani were accorded on their arrival in Paris on 29 July. Four days previously the Echo de Paris had published an account of the visit of Germany’s ambassador to the Quai d’Orsay: he had been seeking France’s cooperation in localizing the conflict, but the version leaked by the foreign ministry to the French press carried a somewhat different spin. The call confirmed that Germany was prodding Austria-Hungary, and that its purpose was to carry on the policy of the second Moroccan crisis and split the Entente. Furthermore, the implications of such a policy were not simply diplomatic. The three-year-law agitation, and its centrality to recent domestic politics, had accustomed the French public to the idea of a surprise German attack. The fact that among the cries of ‘Vive la France’ Poincaré could also hear ‘Vive l’armée’ left him in no doubt of the prevailing mood.165
France’s sense of now or never was contributed to by an inflated expectation of the likely British response. Paul Cambon, France’s ambassador in London, had listened to those British friendly to the Entente rather than those who were not: his dispatches reflected the expectation generated by the Anglo-French naval agreement of 1912, that in the event of war with Germany the Entente would become a definitive alliance. On 1 August the mobilization orders to the French fleet assumed that the joint Anglo-French operational plans would be put into effect: in practice Britain had neither committed itself on this point nor yet sent an ultimatum to Germany.
It is tempting to see Britain’s strategic imperative, the need to prevent any great power dominating the further coast of the English Channel and so providing a direct threat to Britain’s sea-power, as creating an inevitability about Britain’s entry to the First World War. Grey’s foreign policy, combined with both naval and military staff talks, had established—so this argument would add—a continental commitment. A minority of the cabinet, as well as general-staff officers like Henry Wilson, did think like this in July 1914. But they did not represent the sort of widespread consensus which would justify hostilities. Britain was the only great power to debate its entry to the war in parliament; it was also the only state that did not see its own territorial integrity under direct threat. The decision to fight, therefore, had to be justified to more people than was the case in other countries, but itself rested on a more indirect danger. The reluctance of the Foreign Office to treat foreign policy in an open way, Grey’s own tendency to keep diplomacy from the cabinet—both these factors meant that British opinion had to be educated, coaxed, given time to develop, in late July.166
Indeed, as has already been seen, until 29 July Grey’s approach to the crisis was one of caution. Liberalism’s affection for the rights of small nations did not extend to Serbia. The Manchester Guardian was of the view that, ‘if it were physically possible for Serbia to be towed out to sea and sunk there, the air of Europe would at once seem cleaner’.167 Grey told the Austro-Hungarian ambassador that, if his country could fight Serbia without provoking Russia, he could ‘take a holiday tomorrow’.168 On 24 July Asquith, the prime minister, recognized the implications of the Austrian ultimatum for European relations and the possibility of a ‘real Armageddon, but still reckoned that the British could be ‘spectators’.169 He could not at first see why a German victory would upset the balance of power in Europe, on the grounds that it had not done so in 1871, and as much as a week later he told the archbishop of Canterbury that the Serbs deserved a ‘thorough thrashing’.170 His major concern in July was Irish home rule. If his government did not carry a bill it would lose the support of the Irish members of parliament on whom it depended for an overall majority; if it did, Ulster loyalists threatened civil war. In the event the problems of yet a third small nation, Belgium, subsumed those of Serbia and allowed the Liberals to shelve those of Ireland.
Grey’s self-appointed role as mediator between 24 and 29 July was not, therefore, adopted for the benefit of Germany. Domestically, he both had to create time for a public awareness of the crisis to grow and had to have tried a diplomatic solution before he could hope to argue for the commencement of hostilities. Abroad, his purpose was to restrain Russia and France: he feared that by openly affirming the solidarity of the Entente he would encourage both powers to precipitate action. His allies, on the other hand, contended that a united front could have deterred Germany. Certainly the consequence of Grey’s ambivalence was apparent failure: his efforts at negotiation did not moderate Austro-German behaviour, but they did alarm the Russians and the French. Grey could not afford to follow an independent line indefinitely. He had recognized in 1911 that Britain’s own interests were too closely intertwined with those of the Entente for neutrality to be a genuinely viable option. By allying with France, Britain was better able to manage its own relationship with Germany, and to give itself the sort of continental military clout which its diminutive army could not. Even more important was the link with Russia: Russia’s membership of the Entente committed it to rivalry with Germany, gave its policy a European twist, and so relieved the British of the challenge of its main rival in Central Asia. If Britain had failed to support France and Russia in 1914, its links with them would have been forfeit, and the reopening and deepening of those old and more traditional rivalries would have driven Britain into the only alternative, an Anglo-German alliance. For all Asquith’s hope, isolation from Europe was no longer possible, not least because of its imperial consequences.
The events of late July went faster than Grey’s diplomatic machinations. For some sections of the press, notably The Times, the Foreign Office’s reactions were dilatory. But this did not mean that it had lost its sense of direction. As early as 26 July Grey used the decision of the First Sea Lord, Prince Louis of Battenberg, to keep the naval reserve at its stations as a signal to Germany. On 27 July the army and the navy were put on precautionary alert. The cabinet approved these steps on 29 July. On 31 July Eyre Crowe, head of the eastern and western departments at the Foreign Office and a well-established harbinger of the German menace, wrote that ‘if England cannot engage in a big war [it] means her abdication as an independent State’.171
But the British government was still not in a situation where it could adopt an unequivocal position. Grey made his commitment to the Entente clear to Germany, and was justified in doing so by Germany’s own confirmation that it intended to march through France and Belgium. Yet at the same time he had to tell Paul Cambon that a clash between Austria-Hungary and Serbia did not constitute a direct threat to France, and that Britain was therefore free from any engagement. He had no other choice: on 31 July the cabinet continued to emphasize Britain’s free hand, and as late as 1 August two of its members wanted a declaration that Britain would in no circumstances fight Germany.