To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  The possibility of a split within the cabinet was the single most compelling argument for not forcing the pace of Britain’s internal debate. In 1911 the radicals within British Liberalism had been weakened by the willingness of Lloyd George and Churchill to support Grey. But in 1914 Lloyd George wavered, responding to the anti-war sentiments of the Liberal press more than to the blandishments of Churchill.172 The chancellor of the exchequer could be confident that a principled stand against entry to the war would be assured of major backbench support. Even on 2 August Asquith thought three-quarters of the Liberal party’s members were opposed to war. If Asquith’s cabinet did split over entry to the war, the Conservatives would gain power. The dread of such an outcome was a force for Liberal unity, even for the radicals. But its importance did not lie only in its ramifications for a single political party: a united Liberal government would be able to lead a united Britain into war, a divided party would betoken a divided country. The Labour party had discussed the possibility of a general strike in the event of war. Such a danger was real enough for a nation where the railwaymen, the dockers, and the seamen had all staged national strikes since 1911, and where trade-union membership had almost doubled since 1909. The possibility of social upheaval as a result of the economic strains of war was as threatening to Grey, who referred to the 1848 revolutions, as to other European leaders. In the City of London commercial opinion warned that war would lead to the collapse of credit. In such circumstances a Conservative-led entry to war would make the war itself a party issue; the Liberals, on the other hand, not least by virtue of the electoral pact which they had struck with the Labour party in 1903, had a greater claim to represent the national interest.

  Such arguments were not lost on the Conservatives themselves. The fear of Grey’s replacement as foreign secretary by somebody of a more radical disposition was their corollary to the radicals’ fear of a Conservative government. Although no nearer consensus on the issue than the rest of the country in late July, on 2 August the Conservatives’ leader, Bonar Law, was able to write to Asquith pledging his party’s support for the war. The issues for which the Conservatives were prepared to fight were Britain’s status as a great power and the balance of power in Europe: Law was affirming Grey’s commitment to the Entente.

  Henceforth the attentions of Asquith and Grey could be focused firmly on the need to convince the radicals, and they could back up their blandishments with the implicit threat of being able to form a coalition government with the Conservatives should the radicals not follow Grey in his determination that Britain must support France. Nonetheless, the outcome of the cabinet held on the morning of 2 August was ambiguous. Grey informed the meeting of the French naval mobilization the previous day, and of France’s dependence on Britain for the defence of its northern coast. The direct danger to British maritime interests posed by a German naval presence in the Channel and the North Sea was not a divisive issue. For some in the cabinet the decision to affirm Britain’s naval obligations was therefore a step to deter Germany, not a step towards war itself. Their interpretation was confirmed when Germany promptly offered to remain out of the Channel.

  Nonetheless, the cabinet’s decision affirmed the 1912 Anglo-French naval talks. It had, at least in small degree, recognized that Britain could not enjoy a ‘free hand’ sine die. Furthermore, Germany’s willingness to limit its naval activity was not matched in regard to its army. During the course of Sunday 2 August the key question became less Britain’s support for France and more Britain’s commitment to the maintenance of Belgian neutrality. Although the German threat to Belgium was not a new element in British calculations, it had been assumed that the Germans would advance south of the River Meuse, and might thus avoid a major irruption through Belgium, so encouraging the Belgian army itself to stand aside. In these circumstances Britain, although a guarantor of Belgium under the terms of the 1839 treaty, might reasonably regard itself as freed of any obligation to act. However, on 1 August the Belgian government stated its intention to defend its neutrality. Indications of German violation of that neutrality were evident the following day, and on the evening of 2 August the Germans delivered to Britain an ultimatum, demanding unimpeded passage through all Belgium. In reality the obligation to defend Belgian neutrality was incumbent on all the signatories to the 1839 treaty acting collectively, and this had been the view adopted by the cabinet only a few days previously. But now Britain presented itself as Belgium’s sole guarantor. Its neutrality became the symbol around which Asquith could rally the majority of his cabinet, including Lloyd George. Gladstonian liberalism might abhor the instincts of Grey and Haldane, but it was committed to the defence of small nations: that commitment became the bridge which allowed Realpolitik and liberalism to join forces.

  By the morning of 3 August the cabinet and the country were at last effectively united. The cabinet approved the mobilization of the army and the navy. On the same day Germany declared war on France, and on 4 August Britain—its ultimatum to Germany having expired—declared war on Germany. In the event only two ministers resigned: Britain’s wavering may have muddied the European scene, but it clarified the domestic position. In the afternoon of 3 August Grey spoke in the House of Commons. It was a long speech, delivered in a conversational style, but its effect was extraordinarily powerful. Its appeal was to Britain’s moral obligation; its attention was to the left; it eschewed specifically strategic arguments.

  The war in which Britain thought it was about to engage was above all a war for British interests. Grey argued that, as a sea-power and as a trading nation, Britain would be almost as directly affected by the war if it remained neutral. The fact that Britain was a sea-power meant that the war would be limited because it would be naval; he told the House of Commons on 4 August that, by engaging in war, ‘we shall suffer but little more than we shall suffer if we stand aside’.173 If any pre-war commitments had effected British entry to the war, it had been the 1912 Anglo-French naval talks. The staff conversations, and the 1911 resolution of the Committee of Imperial Defence to send an expeditionary force to the continent, formed no part of Britain’s decision to fight. One of the reasons why the cabinet had been able to accept British belligerence had been its implicit assumption that the country was engaging in a naval war. Neither it nor the House of Commons made a specific decision in favour of a continental strategy; on 2 August the prime minister himself saw the dispatch of an expeditionary force to France as serving no purpose.

  Thus, Britain’s thinking on the sort of war in which it was embarking was as muddled as that of the other belligerents. Naval pressure on Germany would be of value only over the long term. The needs of France and Belgium were more immediate; there was a danger that Germany would be master of both long before British sea-power would be effective. Furthermore, the navy’s strategy would itself become vulnerable if the European coastline was dominated by a hostile power. The ‘moral’ obligation therefore carried with it a continental commitment. In addition, Grey’s public presentation of the war as limited did not conform to his gloomier prognostications with regard to the economic and social consequences; this contradiction was present even if the war did remain purely maritime, because the application of sea-power and of commercial pressure implied a war that would achieve its objects slowly and by directing its efforts against the German nation as a whole, rather than exclusively against its armed forces.

  Insufficient clarity about the nature of the war on which they were embarking is a feature common to all the belligerents in 1914. Such a criticism, moreover, is not simply the product of hindsight. Between 1871 and 1914 the serious study of war was transformed; the success of the German general staff in the planning and execution of the wars of unification, and the need to respond tactically to the technological transformation wrought on the battlefield by quick-firing, long-range weaponry, prompted four decades of reform and analysis. Many professional soldiers recognized, in their plans for future war, individual elements which would pr
ove characteristic of the battlefield of 1914–18. But, perhaps partly because of the increasingly demanding nature of their own specialist concerns, their overall outlook was narrowed. Specialist and technical concerns could prompt political lobbying in order to advance specifically military interests. Generals, however, were not on the whole involved in politics per se. The army may have been the focus of much attention from the radical right in France before 1914; soldiers themselves, however, identified with the nation as a whole and tended to accept republicanism as a general concept. The Dreyfus affair was a product, not of a politicized army, but of a professional army, over-zealous in the protection of its own identity from outside intervention. In Germany, Schlieffen might advise whether or not the opportunity was right for war in 1905, but he did not see it as his task to direct foreign policy by actively and vociferously advocating preventive war; in 1914 Moltke had no role at all in the management of the bulk of the July crisis. Ironically, therefore, for all the suspicions harboured by the left, soldiers were in some respects insufficiently political. Many of them did anticipate tactical conditions in which stalemate and attrition would come to dominate warfare. But they too readily accepted, because it was the received wisdom in an area outside their specialist knowledge, that such conditions could not be long sustained because domestic economic and social collapse would follow.

  The soldiers’ narrow political vision was matched by the remarkable military ignorance of the civilian leaders. A century previously the tasks of military and political leadership were only just ceasing to be combined in a single individual; the First World War itself would prompt the creation of collective bodies designed to fuse the wisdom of soldiers, sailors, and politicians. But in July 1914 either there were no such committees, or where they did exist, as in Britain and France, they were not consulted. Thus, statesmen like Bethmann Hollweg and Berchtold could evoke an image of war that implied quick and decisive battlefield success, when even a limited acquaintance with the changes in warfare since 1870 might have suggested a somewhat different scenario. Furthermore, the notion of war as a major catastrophe for Europe was a common one in July 1914, and yet it was not one which was necessarily related to military conditions in themselves, but was derived from assumptions about economic factors. The year 1870 once again provided a historical but superficial analogy. The Franco-Prussian War had prompted revolution in France; yet the revolution was seen as a phenomenon separate from the conditions of the war itself.

  Military factors did, therefore, play a role in the origins of the war, but more in the shaping of general assumptions than in the mechanics of the crisis of late July. This is not to deny that the war plans of the powers affected the tempo of events in late July. Mobilization for Germany did mean war; less directly it probably also meant war for France—at least that was what General Boisdeffre had told the Russians on behalf of France in 1892.174 But the staff plans were not called into operation until events had already made the implementation of military measures probable. In the Bosnian and Balkan crises mobilizations had been effected without war. At a much earlier stage in the July crisis images of war were being employed in the manipulation of events. Bethmann Hollweg relied on an apocalyptic view of European war and on the assumption (which was widely shared) that war would bring domestic political change, and even revolution, to persuade the powers not to fight. He saw the possibility of a limited war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, reckoning that the other states would (in the language of contemporary strategic studies) be self-deterred. He was wrong: war was preferable to diplomatic defeat. The popular image of war proved insufficiently awful for deterrence to operate.

  Furthermore, other powers applied deterrence in different ways. Poincaré reckoned that strong alliance blocs, backed up by military preparations and firm agreements, would keep the peace. The plans which the general staffs prepared, therefore, confirmed the alliances rather than ran counter to them. Poincaré and Sazonov both argued that, if Grey had been able to pledge British support earlier, the threat of a united Entente would have forced Germany to climb down. If they were right, theirs is an argument for clarity of intention— not uncertainty—as a keynote in deterrence. However, Britain, whose uncertainty was prompted not by the needs of foreign policy, nor by the argument that the creation of doubt as to its intentions in the mind of its opponent made for more effective deterrence, but by genuine domestic division, could defend its position by replying that the likelihood of its intervention was at least sufficient to have deterred Germany if Germany had had a mind to be deterred. Germany and Austria-Hungary calculated that the alliances would encourage the Entente powers to restrain each other from intervention, but for some reason would not have the same effect on the Triple Alliance.

  The accusation levelled against the alliance system before 1914 is, however, more serious than that it failed to prevent war; it is that it actually provoked war. Kurt Riezler, writing before the outbreak of war, reckoned that one ally would restrain another; a vital interest for one would not be a vital interest for another. The military context was in part responsible for transforming a system of great-power management that was designed to be defensive into one of offence. The emphasis on speed of mobilization, the interaction of war plans, and Germany’s central geographical position meant that a chain reaction became possible. But the interlocking sequence of mobilizations can be exaggerated; Serbia decided to mobilize ahead of Austria-Hungary; Austria-Hungary settled for general mobilization before Russia’s position was known; Russia’s move to mobilization preceded Germany’s and yet Germany’s decision was made before it was aware of the Russian position; Britain responded to Germany before it had decided to honour any commitment to France. The imperative of the alliance system was not one of altruism, but of brutal self-interest: Germany needed Austria-Hungary; France’s military position was dependent on Russian support; British diplomacy was unsustainable if it allowed the Entente to shatter.

  By 1914, therefore, the alliances had become a major vehicle for the expression of a great power’s status. This was the context into which Germany’s Weltpolitik fitted. By 1914 Germany simultaneously sought affirmation as a world power and as a continental power. Furthermore, it did so in a way calculated to infuriate. Bethmann Hollweg put a large share of the blame for the war on his own country: ‘the earlier errors of a Turkish policy against Russia, a Moroccan against France, fleet against England, irritating everyone, blocking everybody’s way and yet not really weakening anyone.’175 By July 1914 each power, conscious in a self-absorbed way of its own potential weaknesses, felt it was on its mettle, that its status as a great power would be forfeit if it failed to act.

  Such a view, however nebulous and unsatisfactory, helps to explain why the July crisis cannot stand in isolation. To a certain extent, and particularly in the final week of that month, the crisis did generate its own momentum. The speed of events outstripped the speed of communications. Insufficient time elapsed for reflection and calculation. But the postures which the powers adopted in that week were themselves reflections of the previous crises, and the decisions taken earlier narrowed the options available later. Russia had to support Serbia because it had not done so in 1909; Germany had to support Austria-Hungary because it had backed down in 1913; France had to honour the commitments to Russia Poincaré had repeated since 1912; Britain’s apparent success in mediation in 1913 encouraged a renewed effort in 1914. Thus, too, the fluidity which had characterized the international scene in the first of the major crises, that over Morocco in 1905, and which had particularly revolved around the attitudes of Britain, Russia, and Italy, had given way to considerable rigidity.

  Such explanations are unfashionably political and diplomatic. Economic and imperial rivalries, the longer-range factors, help explain the growth of international tension in the decade before 1914. Economic depression encouraged the promotion of economic competition in nationalist terms. But trade was international in its orientation; economic interpenetration was a
potent commercial argument against war. Imperialism, as Bethmann Hollweg tried to show in his pursuit of détente, could be made to cut across the alliance blocs. Furthermore, even if economic factors are helpful in explaining the long-range causes, it is hard to see how they fit into the precise mechanics of the July crisis itself. Commercial circles in July were appalled at the prospect of war and anticipated the collapse of credit; Bethmann Hollweg, the Tsar, and Grey envisaged economic dislocation and social collapse. In the short term, the Leninist interpretation of the war as a final stage in the decline of capitalism and imperialism, of war as a way of regulating external economic imbalance and of resolving internal crises, cannot be appropriate as an explanation of the causes of the First World War.

  Indeed, what remains striking about those hot July weeks is the role, not of collective forces nor of long-range factors, but of the individual. Negatively put, such an argument concludes that the statesmen of 1914 were pygmies, that Bethmann Hollweg was no Bismarck. Nobody, with the possible exception— and for a few days only—of Grey, was prepared to fight wholeheartedly for peace as an end in itself. Domestically Berchtold, Sazonov, and Bethmann Hollweg had acquired reputations for diplomatic weakness, which they now felt the need to counter by appearing strong. But even this interpretation fuses the individual with wider national pressures. More bizarre is the conjunction of the individual with accident—the wrong turn of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s driver, and the fortuitous positioning of Princip who had already assumed that his assassination attempt had failed. If Bethmann Hollweg’s wife had not died in May would he—it seems reasonable to ask—have been less fatalistic, less resigned in his mood in July? And Conrad von Hötzendorff, whose advocacy of preventive war proved so important to Austrian calculations at the beginning of July—were his motives patriotic or personal? He calculated that, as a war hero, he would be free to marry his beloved Gina von Reininghaus, already the wife of another.176 Conrad’s infatuation cannot, obviously, explain the outbreak of the First World War. But it remains a reminder that the most banal and maudlin emotions, as well as the most deeply felt, interacted with the wider context.