Dreadnought

by Robert K. Massie

  “No, that I shall resist.”

  “Do you know, Captain, that this affair may set England and France at war?”

  Marchand bowed without replying.

  “You have achieved something remarkable, very remarkable, but you know the French Government will not back you up.”

  Marchand replied that, in any case, he would wait for his government’s instructions. In the meantime, he declared, he would die before hauling down the flag of France.

  Kitchener then turned slowly around and gazed at his own expedition of thousands of officers and men, flushed with victory. “We are the stronger,”11 he observed. Marchand bowed again. They reached a compromise: the Egyptian flag was raised over an outlying section of the fort and the French flag remained where it was. Kitchener then detailed a strong force to garrison Fashoda and sailed away to Khartoum, Cairo, and eventually to Europe. Marchand remained behind, still awaiting orders. Colonel Reginald Wingate, who accompanied Kitchener to Fashoda, reported to a superior: “Here is Marchand12 in a perfectly untenable place, from which the state of the country makes retreat impossible, cut off from his nearest support by hundreds of miles of the most difficult country, short of ammunition and supplies and within easy striking distance of a huge Dervish army.... In short, our expedition has rescued the French expedition and... all of them thoroughly realize it.... I hope the instructions for Marchand’s recall will not be long in coming... for the sake of the poor men who need feeding up and care after all their hardships.”

  At stake was not a mud fort, but two visions of Africa and the interest of two empires. Lord Salisbury instructed Sir Edmund Monson, the British Ambassador in Paris, to tell Théophile Delcassé, who had replaced M. Hanotaux as Foreign Minister, that “no title of occupation13 could be created by a secret expedition across unknown and unexplored wastes, at a distance from the French border, by Monsieur Marchand and a scanty escort.” Indeed, Delcassé was to be told, all territories formerly subject to the Khedive and temporarily held by the Khalifa had passed by right of former possession and reconquest to the Egyptian government. This right, Salisbury declared, was not open to discussion. Indeed, “so long as the French flag flew14 at Fashoda, it was impossible for the British government to enter upon any territorial discussions.” From this position, the Prime Minister and the British government did not waver. People, press, and opposition all ranked themselves firmly behind Lord Salisbury. Lord Rosebery, the most recent Liberal Prime Minister, declared at Epsom that “Great Britain has been treated15 rather too much as what the French call a quantité négligeable in recent periods.... If the nations of the world are under the impression that the ancient spirit of Great Britain is dead or that her resources are weakened, or her population less determined than ever it was to maintain the rights and honor of its flag, they make a mistake which can only end in a disastrous conflagration.” The Admiralty mobilized a strong reserve squadron in the Channel. Some newspapers spoke of preventive war. “Fashoda is the last straw,”16 announced the Sheffield Daily Telegraph. “A war with France would cut a good many Gordian knots in diplomacy... and when it was over, we should be able to start with a clean sheet.” The Queen, however, worried about the consequences of war. “It seems a deadlock,”17 she telegraphed Lord Salisbury on October 2. “The French Government do not telegraph Marchand to leave and he will be starved out and unable to remain for lack of water. Could we not delay till the French Government receive his report which can, I believe, come only through us.” The Prime Minister, determined to see his policy through, did what he could to reassure the monarch: “I deeply sympathize18 with your Majesty’s dissatisfaction at the present deadlock. We are, however, doing nothing, but only waiting and we cannot do anything else. No offer of territorial concession on our part would be endured by public opinion here.” Queen Victoria resolved to trust Salisbury. “Received your cypher.19 Quite agree. We cannot give way.... If we wait, I think the force of circumstances will bring the French to their senses.”

  Across the Channel, Frenchmen saw things differently. According to the claims of possession and valor, France had a superior right to Fashoda and the Upper Nile. Marchand had survived an epic march; he had arrived first; he had planted the flag of the French Republic where no white men had ever been; he was a national hero. These arguments put Delcassé in an impossible position. He could not disavow Marchand without national shame and political disgrace. But the way to Fashoda lay through Egypt, and Egypt was in British hands. Marchand was isolated in the heart of Africa with a tiny band of brave men, dependent for supplies and security on the British Army. “We have only arguments20 down there and they have soldiers,” Delcassé noted sadly. Britain was clearly ready to go to war over Fashoda; with public opinion split over the reopening of the Dreyfus case, France was not. The British Navy could destroy France’s navy, cut all sea communications, and one by one pluck off France’s colonies around the globe. Russia, abhorring the idea of war over a tiny colonial outpost in the middle of Africa, declared that the Franco-Russian Alliance applied only to Europe and refused any assistance. Delcassé thus faced the prospect of war with England, of losing the French colonial empire, of abandonment by Russia, all the while leaving a powerful, belligerent German Empire on France’s European border.

  When Delcassé struggled with this dilemma, the Queen of England insisted on peace. “Not a stone21 should be left unturned to prevent war,” Queen Victoria instructed Lord Salisbury on October 25, “for I felt what an awful responsibility to God and man it would be were we to go to war and what a sacrifice of thousands of lives.” Salisbury was anxious for a peaceful solution, providing France backed down. He understood that the most effective agent on the French side for reaching this solution was Delcassé. The French Foreign Minister made clear to his British adversaries that, unless he was permitted to retain a shred of self-respect, he would resign and turn his post over to someone less sensitive to the danger of war. Salisbury and Monson worked to convince Delcassé that “there would be no humiliation22 in withdrawing an expedition to which he had never explicitly given an official character and which had never been ordered to the Nile by the French Government. His [Delcassé’s] position,” Monson reported to his chief, “is that he must either accept a humiliation or go to war. His patriotism rejects the one solution; his conviction of the calamitous consequences to the two countries and the whole of Europe rejects the other.” Lord Salisbury did what he could to help by describing Captain Marchand as merely “a French explorer23 who finds himself in a difficult position on the Upper Nile.” The Queen continued to bring pressure: “I think a war24 for so miserable and small an object is what I could hardly bring myself to consent to,” she telegraphed the Prime Minister from Balmoral on October 30. “We must try to save France from humiliation.”

  By then, the crisis was almost over. On October 28, Marchand arrived in Cairo, having come down the river on a British gunboat. Delcassé, furious at Marchand for having left Fashoda without instructions, ordered him back immediately. Meanwhile, on the twenty-seventh, Lord Kitchener landed at Dover. On November 3 he was sitting next to the Queen at dinner in Windsor Castle—“very agreeable,25 full of information,” the Queen noted of her guest. The following night, November 4, the Sirdar was the guest of honor at a Guildhall banquet. Lord Salisbury was present, and when it came his turn to speak he rose and announced, “I have received from the French ambassador26 this afternoon the information that the French Government had come to the conclusion that the occupation of Fashoda was of no sort of value to the French Republic.” On December 11, Marchand departed Fashoda for a second time, taking his men with him. A month later, Salisbury opened negotiations with Paul Cambon, a new French ambassador dispatched to London by Delcassé to work toward a rapprochement with England. On March 21, 1899, the Prime Minister telegraphed the Queen that he had reached an agreement with Cambon which “keeps the French entirely out27 of the Upper Nile valley.” The watersheds of the two great African rivers, the Nile
and the Congo, were to be the dividing line between the British and French spheres of influence; Britain would not move westward from the headwaters of the Nile; everything from there to the Atlantic would belong to France.

  Settlement of the dispute disappointed the Kaiser, who had keenly looked forward to an Anglo-French war. From his yacht cruising in the Mediterranean, William had telegraphed the Tsar on October 28, 1898: “I have received news28 from London and Paris that both countries are mobilizing their fleets.... In case a collision between the two countries should occur, your position vis-à-vis them would be of the greatest value to me. How do you look at the situation?” Nicholas II replied that he “had no knowledge29 of an impending conflict between England and France” and added that “one might await events before taking any decision, the more so as it is always awkward to interfere without being asked with others’ business.” The Kaiser had a final comment on the Fashoda crisis: “Poor France:30 She acknowledges herself beaten without a shot having been fired. That is abdication on the sea. They have not read Mahan.”

  fn1 “My father was much impressed5 with him,” said Lord Edward Cecil, the Prime Minister’s soldier-son, who accompanied Kitchener’s army to Khartoum. “That I clearly remember, for my father was not often impressed.”

  Chapter 14

  Samoa and William’s Visit to Windsor

  Joseph Chamberlain’s second attempt to achieve an Anglo-German alliance was delayed by a squabble over a cluster of volcanic islands in the South Pacific and by a fuss over a birthday party. The Samoan archipelago, lying between the Hawaiian Islands and the northern tip of New Zealand, had been colonized in 1878 by British, German, and American traders. Ten years later, a treaty established a tripartite protectorate over the islands. In the spring of 1899, the King of Samoa died. The succession was contested, violence ensued, and British and American warships bombarded buildings, including, mistakenly, the German consulate. The German government accepted an American apology for an errant American shell, but promptly proposed to Great Britain that Britain join her in asking America to withdraw from Samoa. Lord Salisbury declined. “You ask me1 to put my hand into a wasp’s nest,” he said. Germany then suggested that Britain give up her stake in Samoa in return for compensation elsewhere. Chamberlain, still aggrieved by the rejection of his alliance proposal the year before, rejected the German proposal. “Last year we offered2 you everything. Now it is too late,” he said to Eckardstein. Tempers flared. Suddenly, the distant islands appeared on the front pages of newspapers in London, Berlin, and Washington. “Instead of compliance,3 England has shown us harsh and open hostility,” Bülow complained.

  The Kaiser was indignant, not only because of thwarted German ambitions in Samoa, but because he had not been invited to Queen Victoria’s eightieth birthday party on May 24. “I suspect4 that a great deal of His Majesty’s ill-humor is due to the fact that he was not allowed to carry out his cherished scheme of presenting his younger children to the Queen on the occasion of her eightieth birthday,” Sir Frank Lascelles, British Ambassador in Berlin, wrote to Lord Salisbury. Lascelles had mentioned this suspicion to Bülow, who—the Ambassador reported to Salisbury—“said that it was not5 for him to criticize the language of his sovereign, but I, who knew the Emperor so well, must know that his Majesty’s impetuosity sometimes led to exaggeration of expression.... His Majesty was in fact more than half an Englishman and was extraordinarily sensitive to anything which he could regard as a slight either from the Royal Family or from Her Majesty’s Government.”

  The Kaiser decided that both his troubles over Samoa and his exclusion from Windsor emanated from the same source: his old enemy, Lord Salisbury. On May 27, three days after the Queen’s birthday, the German Emperor wrote:

  Dearest Grandmama:6

  ...I think it my duty to point out that public feeling [in Germany] has been very much agitated and stirred to the depths by the most unhappy way in which Lord Salisbury has treated Germany in the Samoan business... a way which was utterly at variance with the manners which regulate the relations between Great Powers according to European rules of civility.... This way of treating Germany’s interests and feelings has come upon the people like an electric shock, and has evoked the impression that Lord Salisbury cares no more for us than for Portugal, Chile, or the Patagonians.... If this sort of high-handed treatment of German affairs by Lord Salisbury’s Government is suffered to continue, I am afraid that there will be a permanent source of misunderstandings and recriminations between the two nations, which may in the end lead to bad blood.

  I, of course, have been silent as to what I have personally gone through these last six months, the shame and pain I have suffered, and how my heart has bled when to my despair I had to watch how the arduous work of years was destroyed, to make the two nations understand and respect their aspirations and wishes, by one blow by the high-handed and disdainful treatment of [your] Ministers.... Now you will understand, dear Grandmama, why I so ardently hoped to be able to go over for your birthday. That visit would have been perfectly understood over here, as the duty of the grandson to his grandmother, putting ‘Emperor,’ etc., apart.... But a pleasure trip to Cowes, after all that has happened and with respect to the temperature of our public opinion here, is utterly impossible now.... I can assure you there is no man more deeply grieved and unhappy than me! and all that on account of a stupid island which is a hairpin to England compared to the thousands of square miles she is annexing right and left unopposed every year.... Good-bye most beloved Grandmama.

  With much love and respect, believe me,

  ever your most dutiful and devoted Grandson,

  WILLIAM I.R.

  Before replying, the Queen sent the Kaiser’s letter to Lord Salisbury for comment. The Prime Minister carefully refuted the Kaiser’s accusations of negligence and disrespect in dealing with Germany. He sent the memorandum to the Queen, noting dryly, “He [Lord Salisbury] entirely agrees7 with your Majesty in thinking that it is quite new for a Sovereign to attack in a private letter the Minister of another Sovereign; especially one to whom he is so closely related. It is not a desireable innovation and might produce some confusion.”

  The Queen’s own reply was the angriest letter Queen Victoria ever wrote to her grandson. Her rebuff came from the heights, not of her throne, but of her position in the family. The German Emperor might have been a small boy in short pants standing before an outraged grandparent:

  Dear William:8

  Your... letter, I must say, has greatly astonished me. The tone in which you write about Lord Salisbury I can only attribute to a temporary irritation on your part, as I do not think you would otherwise have written in such a manner, and I doubt whether any Sovereign ever wrote in such terms to another Sovereign, and that Sovereign his own Grandmother, about their Prime Minister. I never should do such a thing, and I never personally attacked or complained of Prince Bismarck, though I knew well what a bitter enemy he was to England and all the harm he did.... [As to] your visit to Osborne, not to Cowes,... I can only repeat that, if you are able to come, I shall be happy to receive you at the end of July or August. I can have you and two of your sons as well as two gentlemen in the house at Osborne, and you would leave the rest of your suite on board your yacht.

  Believe me, always your very affectionate grandmother,

  V.R.I.

  The Queen left it at that, but not Lord Salisbury. The Prime Minister repaid his assailant with every delay available in his diplomatic drawer. For weeks, he kept the Wilhelmstrasse and the Kaiser on tenterhooks about both Samoa and the Emperor’s desired visit to England. To Eckardstein, pressing for an answer, he declared that he “wouldn’t be dictated to9 by Berlin with a stop-watch.” Holstein, infuriated by the delay, instructed Hatzfeldt to let it be known that, unless a Samoan settlement favorable to Germany was arrived at quickly, the German Ambassador would ask for his passport. Lord Salisbury reacted with sardonic lack of interest. “I am waiting daily10 for Berlin’s ultimatum a
bout Samoa,” he told the Duke of Devonshire. “Unfortunately it has not as yet arrived. For Germany, if it doesn’t send the ultimatum, will miss a splendid opportunity of getting rid respectably, not only of Samoa, but of all the colonies that have cost so much. We English would then be in a position to come to a permanent understanding with France by means of satisfactory colonial concessions.”

  The more Salisbury toyed with them, the angrier the Germans became. Chamberlain, still hoping eventually to improve the relationship between the two countries, had proposed that the dispute be settled by Germany abandoning her claims in Samoa in return for compensation in West Africa, adjacent to the German colony of Togoland. Commercially, this offer was favorable to Germany. But German eyes were fixed on Samoa; to the Kaiser it had become a matter of personal honor; Tirpitz, thinking of overseas naval stations for the future German fleet, insisted on Samoa in a letter which Eckardstein described as “a document of frothy flummery11, sauced with bloody tears to suit the Kaiser’s taste.” German national pride had become involved. Eckardstein noted ironically that most Germans knew not “whether Samoa was the name12 of a fish, fowl, or foreign queen” but now that the issue had been raised, they insisted “that this thing was German and for all time German it must remain.” Bülow brought up his master’s favorite project: “What has happened in Samoa13 is a new proof that overseas policy cannot be conducted without an adequate fleet,” he told the Kaiser. “What I have preached14 all through ten years to those blockheads... [in] the Reichstag,” the Kaiser applauded in the margin. William said that he might never set foot in England again.

  These German threats, disdained by Lord Salisbury during the summer, were not so pleasant for Joseph Chamberlain when autumn arrived. Over these weeks, the situation in South Africa had deteriorated. War with the Boers seemed imminent. Britain, in the Colonial Secretary’s words, “stood alone.”15 A margin of safety might be secured if German neutrality in South Africa could be established and publicly proclaimed. Nothing would give a clearer signal of this neutrality than a visit to England by the Emperor William, and Chamberlain did everything in his power to ensure that the visit would take place.