Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  Ramsay MacDonald spoke for Labour. He praised Grey’s oratory, but said: ‘He is wrong. I think the Government which he represents and for which he speaks is wrong. I think the verdict of history will be that they are wrong.’ He did not believe Grey’s point about honour, on which he blamed the conflicts in the Crimea and in South Africa. His party would support the defence of Belgium: but the war would not be confined to that. Given the labour movement’s detestation of the Autocrat of all the Russias, he was reluctant to fight in a war that would shore up Russian power. He challenged Grey to describe the danger in which France found herself; Grey had been reluctant to do that, preferring to justify war by talking of the obligation to Belgium. He ended with a low blow, saying British neutrality was more consistent with ‘the traditions of the party that are now in office.’275 His speech divided Labour, and once war was declared undermined him so much that he resigned the leadership on 6 August: Arthur Henderson replaced him. The previous evening, MacDonald had told Sir George Riddell that ‘in three months’ time there will be bread riots and we shall come in.’276

  Many MPs wanted to speak in the debate on Grey’s statement: Asquith said the House would have the opportunity to discuss the crisis, but it would not be that day. This caused consternation, and the Speaker adjourned the sitting for two and a half hours, until seven o’clock, so discussions could take place between the parties, and so Grey could update himself on events. In the Foreign Office, Nicolson, informed by his private secretary that Grey had had ‘a tremendous success’, reflected that ‘now the course is clear, but it will be a terrible business.’277 As Grey spoke the Germans asked the Belgians whether they could occupy Liège ‘peaceably’, requiring an answer within twelve hours. The Belgians said their troops would fire on any Germans on their territory ‘immediately’, and believed German troops had already crossed the Meuse.278 In reply to the French offer of five army corps, the Belgians said they were not, at that stage, appealing to their guarantors for help – though it reminded Germany that one guarantor of its independence had been the Kingdom of Prussia. This slowed down escalation of the conflict; and bought Britain a little more time.

  However, that evening Villiers told Grey the Germans were claiming that the French intended to invade Germany through Belgium, so troops were being prepared to defend Belgium against French attack. The Germans promised to ‘pay ready money for all necessaries of war and indemnify all losses caused in Belgium’ and to evacuate Belgian territory on the conclusion of peace if Belgium would let them through. Germany threatened Belgium that if it adopted a ‘hostile attitude’, relations between them would be ‘settled by arms’. The Belgians mocked Germany’s interpretation of French intentions, and promised ‘to repel by every means in her power’ an attack by Germany.279 At once, the German ambassador left Paris for Berlin: Germany had declared war on France. Haldane, having put through the mobilisation order, urged the sending of six infantry divisions.

  In London that evening flag-waving crowds stretched down the Mall from Trafalgar Square to Buckingham Palace. They had done so the night before too, prompting Asquith to recall Walpole’s remark that ‘now they are ringing their bells; in a few weeks they’ll be wringing their hands’.280 The war fever was prompted by a sense of the country’s standing up for justice and morality, in honouring the promise to defend Belgium; and helped by a complete lack of understanding of what modern war would actually mean. A nation reared on the imperial adventure stories of Rudyard Kipling and the Boy’s Own Paper, not to mention the years of anti-German scaremongering of Northcliffe, was about to have the chance to make its own contribution to British glory, in the name of justice and decency, against what would quickly come to be called ‘German frightfulness’.

  ‘Every few minutes,’ The Times reported, ‘the singing of patriotic songs was punctuated with loud cries for the King.’281 At 8.15, 9.00 and 9.45 p.m. the King and Queen appeared on the balcony to wave to the masses: ‘the demonstration of patriotism and loyalty became almost ecstatic.’ Grey had returned to the Commons at 7 p.m. and outlined the detail of the German note and the Belgian reply. He said the government was taking the significance of this into ‘grave consideration’.282 The King noted that Grey’s speech had ‘entirely changed public opinion’.283

  A dissenting voice rose from his back benches. It was Philip Morrell, who unusually for a Liberal was a scion of a brewing family, from Oxford. Educated at Eton and Balliol, he was on the fringes of the Bloomsbury group through his wife Lady Ottoline, half-sister of the Duke of Portland. Theirs was an unconventional marriage: both had numerous affairs (Lady Ottoline’s most notable conquest was Bertrand Russell) and Morrell fathered several illegitimate children. Lady Ottoline ran a salon of epic self-regard in Bedford Square: the Morrells were committed pacifists, and their country house at Garsington in Oxfordshire would become a refuge for various Bloomsbury conscientious objectors, including Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell and Duncan Grant. The speech her husband made that evening put him at the forefront of that movement.

  Claiming to speak for many Liberals, Morrell did not doubt Grey had done his best for peace: but did doubt whether ‘he has really made a sufficient attempt to make fair terms with Germany’.284 This betrayed a deep misunderstanding – Germany had by bullying Belgium shown it was beyond an understanding of ‘fair terms’ – but did hint at Grey’s initial inertia. As has been shown, Grey had for much of the preceding five weeks been passive, even though his officials (notably Nicolson) had spotted the potential for disaster almost from the moment of the Sarajevo assassinations. This was before shuttle diplomacy: but he could have reached Berlin in less than forty-eight hours, had he wished, and had face-to-face talks with Jagow that might, possibly, have altered history. However, given what in Berlin had come to be seen as the determination of the Prussian-dominated German army to have a war to assert national supremacy, efforts might have proved fruitless.

  Morrell claimed the Germans had promised to respect Belgian integrity: a heckler shouted ‘at the end of the war!’, which was the point.285 He said he would concede Britain must act if Germany annexed or occupied Belgium: which, within days, it mostly had. Caricaturing Grey’s reasoning, and ignoring his detailed exegesis on the treaties, Morrell claimed that ‘we are asked to go to war because there may be a few German regiments in a corner of Belgian territory. I am not prepared to support a government which goes to war under those circumstances.’ He believed ‘fear and jealousy of German ambition’, fostered by the press, were responsible. Certainly the press – especially those parts owned by Northcliffe – had long painted Germany as the natural enemy. But a study of the diplomatic background to the war makes it clear that such sentiments had nothing to do with Grey’s reluctant decision to advocate war. Morrell made common cause with the socialists, saying Britain was being asked to fight ‘as much to preserve the despotism of Russia as to interfere with German ambition.’286 Although no admirer of Germany, he admired Russia even less: and he thought an ‘honourable neutrality’ would be possible, though did not detain the House by analysing how Belgium and France, for a start, would see it; and he steadfastly ignored the arrogance and aggression of the German note to Brussels.

  Josiah Wedgwood, a Liberal MP from the Potteries and a descendant of the great potter himself, feared credit would run out, employment would dry up and people would starve, which would cause revolution. ‘People are not the docile serfs they were a hundred years ago,’ he proclaimed.287 (Wedgwood was among the first to volunteer when war came. He was wounded in the Dardanelles, awarded the DSO, and ended up a colonel.) Lloyd George said the government was considering how to secure food supplies in the event of war, and promised further details the next day. He admitted he would also be forced to make a statement about the currency, and the circulation of banknotes. One backbencher taunted him about the contrast between his anti-war stance in the Boer War and his readiness to fight now. He kept his counsel.

  Most MPs who spoke ignored the Austr
ian ancien régime’s determination to shore itself up against its internal critics by punishing Serbia, or of the German military leadership’s determination to override men such as Bethmann, Jagow and Lichnowsky, and have a war. Hardie, for Labour, saw no problem with Belgian neutrality being restored after a war, and leaving the Germans to slug it out with the French if necessary. Arthur Ponsonby, a Liberal who later sat in a Labour cabinet, made a more measured, and therefore more telling, objection, though one whose assumptions were still questionable. Ponsonby had been at Eton and Balliol with Morrell, and a Page of Honour to Queen Victoria: his father-in-law was Sir Hubert Parry. He felt he was witnessing:

  the most tragic moment I have yet seen. We are on the eve of a great war, and I hate to see people embarking on it with a light heart. The war fever has already begun. I saw it last night when I walked through the streets. I saw bands of half-drunken youths waving flags, and I saw a group outside a great club in St. James’s Street being encouraged by members of the club from the balcony. The war fever has begun, and that is what is called patriotism; I think we have plunged too quickly, and I think the Foreign Secretary’s speech shows that what has been rankling all these years is a deep animosity against German ambitions. The balance of power is responsible for this—this mad desire to keep up an impossibility in Europe, to try and divide the two sections of Europe into an armed camp, glaring at one another with suspicion and hostility and hatred, and arming all the time, and bleeding the people to pay for the armaments.288

  A decade after the war he published a book entitled Falsehood in War-time, Containing an Assortment of Lies Circulated Throughout the Nations During the Great War, which led to his being credited with the phrase ‘when war is declared, truth is the first casualty’, though he may have been quoting an American senator, Hiram Johnson. His opposition to the war would not waver. He became a prominent member of the Union of Democratic Control, a leading anti-war movement in which he served with, among others, MacDonald and George Cadbury, the confectioner.

  In defending Grey, Sir Arthur Markham, a coal-owner and Liberal MP for Mansfield, unwittingly took the pacifist line that this was about keeping Germany in its place, not about protecting Belgium, which was Grey’s priority. ‘No self-respecting country can admit the right of a great power in Europe to over-ride and beat down a small nationality,’ he said.289 He reflected the public mood in adding that ‘this great Empire to which we belong has not been built up on the foundation of allowing close to our shores a great Power to be erected which might be a menace to the interests of the British people. If we falter this time, we falter, in my opinion, for the end of the British Empire, for the reason that no self-respecting people of the continent will ever believe that we, who have stood for liberty in the past, will stand for it again.’

  A Liberal MP, Llewellyn Williams, blamed the press for creating enthusiasm for a war the public did not want, and accused Grey of trying to spread fear about German power, which another Liberal colleague felt could not possibly hold small countries in servitude in the way suggested. Robert Outhwaite, another Liberal, said that the Germans marching troops through Belgium to fight the French was but a ‘technical’ violation of neutrality and not a ‘conquest’.290 The House was reminded that it was despotic Russia that had, by mobilising, started the wider war, not the Germans. That, too, was an uncomfortable statement. As Joseph King, a Liberal MP, noted, the government was attacked (with one exception) from its own side, while Unionists remained silent. King asked: ‘I want to know whether the policy on which we are embarking has the support of a united Cabinet. We hear rumours, both inside the House and outside, that there are divisions, and that even one Cabinet minister has resigned.’291 Another shouted: ‘That is a wicked suggestion!’

  King, perfectly enunciating radical opinion on the matter, denounced the ‘atrocious tyrannical government’ of the Tsar and its ‘cruelty’ and ‘injustice’.292 Sir William Byles, another Liberal, asked whether Britain would fight France if it had marched into Belgium to attack the Germans. Eventually, after several hours of a stream of attacks on Grey, a Liberal – William Pringle, the MP for Lanarkshire – made a dignified speech about how the Liberal tradition required Britain to take ‘the side of international morality against the forces of blood and iron.’293 That was the cue, at last, for Balfour, the former Unionist prime minister, to plea for an end to what was an adjournment debate, and to await the opportunity Asquith had promised to discuss the policy properly, when he and Grey and others were in attendance – which they were not throughout the evening. The Unionists were keeping their powder dry.

  VII

  When Grey returned to the Foreign Office after his speech he received his friend and confidant J. A. Spender, editor of the Westminster Gazette and a devotee of the Liberal Party. A fortnight earlier, possibly at Grey’s suggestion, and when very little was being spoken about the European crisis, Spender had written an article (widely circulated abroad) urging Serbia to see that Austria–Hungary had a point, and to do all it could to avoid ‘warlike complications’.294 Now all that was consigned to history: the mainstream of Liberal ministerial opinion was convinced Britain had to fight, and the achievement in securing this support was almost entirely Grey’s. He wrote of his meeting with Spender: ‘We were standing at a window of my room in the Foreign Office. It was getting dusk, and the lamps were being lit in the space below on which we were looking. My friend recalls that I remarked on this with the words: “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.”’295

  Why was Grey convinced the struggle would take so long? As an experienced diplomat – he had been foreign secretary for the best part of nine years – he understood the motivations of all the other parties involved. He knew how weak the Tsarist regime was, and how a victory over Germany on behalf of fellow Slavs would be seen as a perfect means to shore up the Romanov dynasty. He knew too how the Germans regarded Russia as an uncivilised country comprising masses of barbarians entirely inimical to European culture, and how vigorously they would fight to repel them, and to expand their own influence in Eastern Europe. He knew the determination with which Austria–Hungary would fight to quell its upstart Serbian neighbour, for the sake of its own security but also because, with an Emperor of almost eighty-four and nationalist groups within its continental empire agitating for change, like Russia it needed to impress its people with a show of strength. Best of all, Grey knew that France was steeled not to repeat the humiliation of 1870–71, which had led to the Prussians walking off with Alsace and Lorraine, and would fight to the last man if necessary. Then there were other nations who had obligations to or understandings with the various powers – Italy, Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey. Europe, as many diplomats and politicians knew, had been living in unease with itself since the Congress of Berlin in 1878; a reordering was sure to happen one day, and when it came it would be a titanic, and possibly cataclysmic, struggle. Grey knew that moment had now come, and the fact that he had been unable to prevent it – or to ensure a reordering by more peaceful means – nearly crushed him, and took an awful toll on his health.

  At midnight on 3 August Asquith, who viewed things very much as Grey did but who would prove less adaptable to the demands of war, sat down in Downing Street and wrote to Morley ‘after 30 years of close and most affectionate association’ to say that ‘to lose you in the stress of a great crisis is a calamity which I shudder to contemplate, and which (if it should become a reality) I shall never cease to deplore.’296 Asquith begged him ‘with all my heart, to think twice and thrice, and as many times more as arithmetic can number, before you take a step which impoverishes the Government and leaves me stranded and almost alone.’297 Morley recalled that ‘nothing short of mental anguish held me by the throat’, but told Asquith his fundamental objection remained: ‘To swear ourselves to France is to bind ourselves to Russia … I am more distressed in making this reply to your generous and moving appeal than I have ever been i
n writing any letter of all my life.’298

  For most other ministers the German note to Belgium was the last straw. At 9.30 a.m. on 4 August, Grey asked Goschen to tell Berlin that ‘His Majesty’s Government are bound to protest against this violation of a treaty to which Germany is a party in common with themselves, and must request an assurance that the demand made upon Belgium will not be proceeded with, and that her neutrality will be respected by Germany.’ Goschen was told to ask for ‘an immediate reply.’ No sooner had this gone than the German embassy in London sent the Foreign Office a note from Bethmann that read: ‘Since France has, since 1st August, made repeated military attacks on Imperial territory, Germany is now in a state of war with France.’299 The mobilisation order, calling up all reservists and inviting applications for service from officers on the retired list, was issued that afternoon. Shortly afterwards, the Admiralty announced that Admiral Sir John Jellicoe would command the Home Fleets. Asquith now had to install Kitchener rapidly, for matters were moving swiftly.

  On the morning of 4 August Grey told Bertie he had advised the governments of Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium to resist any German attempt to pressurise them into departing from their neutrality. They would have Britain’s support in doing so, and would join Russia and France in ‘common action for the purpose of resisting use of force by Germany against them, and a guarantee to maintain their independence and integrity in future years.’300 He ordered Bertie to ask the French government to make a similar offer. Once the Germans entered Belgium and refused to leave, Britain would be at war with them. At 11.20 a.m. Grey heard from Villiers that the Germans had told the Belgian foreign minister that as his government had declined Germany’s ‘well-intentioned’ proposal they would ‘deeply to their regret be compelled to carry out, if necessary by force of arms, the measures considered indispensable in view of the French menaces.’ 301 At noon Lichnowsky showed the Foreign Office a wire from Jagow repeating a ‘formal assurance’ that Germany would ‘under no pretence whatever’ annex Belgian territory. ‘Please impress upon Sir E Grey,’ Jagow had continued, ‘that Germany’s army could not be exposed to French attack across Belgium, which was planned according to absolutely unimpeachable information. Germany had consequently to disregard Belgian neutrality, it being for her a question of life or death to prevent French advance.’302