by John Buchan
On Thursday the 30th arrived Germany’s bid for British neutrality. It was the result of a council at Potsdam the night before. Provided Britain remained neutral, Germany undertook to seek no territorial gains at the expense of France, at any rate in Europe; and as for Belgium, “if she did not side against Germany, her integrity would also be respected, when the war was over.” This meant that Germany had resolved upon war, and it had an ominous hint of tampering with Belgium. Sir Edward Grey replied in words that could not be misconstrued. He rejected utterly the suggestion that Britain should bind herself to a disgraceful neutrality. He appealed once more to Germany to work with him to preserve the peace of Europe, and he concluded with the expression of a hope for a future league of nations, which at the moment seemed a vague academic notion, but which the terrors of war were one day to make a reality.
During the next two days Germany disclosed her hand. The partial mobilisation of Russia, which to Sir Edward Grey seemed a reasonable defensive precaution, was treated by her as a hostile act. She offered France neutrality on insulting terms. She proposed to Belgium a commercial bargain for the right to use her territory, which Belgium refused. For a moment it appeared that Austria was wavering, and Sir Edward Grey saw an eleventh-hour chance of peace. But by midday on the 31st ultimatums had gone from Germany to both Russia and France; henceforth the doings of Austria had no importance, for the conduct of affairs had been taken into stronger hands.
On the morning of the 31st the British Cabinet met to consider M. Paul Cambon’s appeal for an assurance that Britain, if war came, would stand by France’s side. The reply was that it could not yet guarantee the intervention of Britain, but must wait for the situation to develop. Sir Edward Grey was uncertain of the attitude of his countrymen. Long insensitiveness to foreign politics had unfitted British opinion to read the signs now written large on the sky. Mr. Bonar Law was doubtful about the views of the Conservative party, and high finance and the extreme Radical press were at one in their determination to avoid war. The Foreign Secretary was not less uncertain about his colleagues. There were perhaps four other men in the Cabinet of his own way of thinking, men who had been specially concerned with foreign or defence questions. But the majority refused to admit the possibility of Britain being involved — a perfectly honourable attitude on the facts before them. It would have been a disgrace had there not been a peace party when the situation was so uncertain. The enforced caution of Britain had no effect on German policy. Had the news of a military alliance between France and Britain been published that day Germany would not, and could not, have swerved one hair’s breadth from her plan.
That day the King received a message from the President of the French Republic, who, while admitting that Britain was under no formal obligation, appealed to her to declare herself on France’s side as offering the one chance of peace. That chance had already gone, but M. Poincaré’s message is proof, if proof were needed, of the earnest desire of France to avert war. The King, after consulting his Ministers, replied on the following morning with the same answer as Sir Edward Grey had already given to M. Cambon. There was still a faint hope of peace, and till that had departed the pledge asked for could not be given. But before many hours had passed that hope had vanished even from the minds of the British Cabinet.
On Saturday, August 1st, came the German order for general mobilisation, followed in the afternoon by France’s. War between Germany and Russia began that evening. The centre of interest now moved to Belgium. Sir Edward Grey had asked the French and German governments for a promise that they would respect Belgium’s neutrality so long as no other Power violated it. France gave the assurance gladly, but the German reply was disquieting. She could not answer without “disclosing part of her plan of campaign in the event of war ensuing”; besides, she considered that Belgium had already committed certain hostile acts. It looked as if the stage were being set for a new version of the fable of the Wolf and the Lamb. With this news Sir Edward Grey attended a meeting of the Cabinet. The situation was changing and some of the strongest non-interventionists had begun to waver. Belgium was clearly threatened, and the question of Belgium directly touched British interests and British honour. It was resolved that Germany must be warned that here lay a plain cause of strife, unless the required pledge were forthwith given.
The week-end was such as no one then living had ever known. For so widespread a sense of foundations destroyed and a world turned topsy-turvy we must go back to the days of the French Revolution. In Britain it was fortunately the season of the August Bank Holiday, and, though the Bank rate had risen to ten per cent., the chaos into which markets were falling was not widely realised. But an air of great and terrible things impending impressed the most casual spectator. Crowds hung about telegraph offices and railway stations; men stood in the streets in little groups; there was not much talking, but long spells of tense silence. The country was uneasy. It dreaded war; it was beginning to realise the immensity of the crisis; many feared, too, a dishonourable and improvident peace.
In the broiling weather of Sunday, August 2nd, things marched fast in Europe. Shortly after dawn German troops entered Luxembourg territory, and about the same time German cavalry patrols crossed the Alsace border and had a brush with French pickets. That evening Germany presented her ultimatum to Belgium, demanding a passage for her troops. In London the Cabinet sat from eleven till two, and again in the late afternoon, and revealed much difference of view. But anxiety about Belgium was making converts. Sir Edward Grey was authorised to inform France that if the German fleet came into the Channel or through the North Sea to attack the French ports, the British Navy would give her all the protection in its power. It was a step which in common decency we were bound to take, since France by arrangement with us had depleted her Atlantic and Channel defences and concentrated in the Mediterranean. That day the Opposition leaders, collected hurriedly from distant country houses, sent the Prime Minister a note offering their unqualified support in any step which he might take on behalf of the honour and security of Britain. It was now plain that, if Belgium resisted, our entry into the war was assured.
On the morning of Monday the 3rd, twelve hours after the receipt of the ultimatum, Belgium made her answer. “The Belgian Government, if they were to accept the proposal made to them, would sacrifice the honour of their nation and betray their duty towards Europe. . . . They are firmly resolved to repel by all the means in their power every attack upon their rights.” This bold defiance, delivered while Britain still seemed to hesitate, was like the sudden wind that sweeps a morning fog from the valleys. At the same hour King Albert telegraphed to King George making a last appeal for the diplomatic intervention of Britain to safeguard the integrity of his country. But the hour for diplomacy had passed, since the enemy was already marching. When the British Cabinet met that morning it was now unanimous, having shed its dissidents. In Sir Edward Grey’s words, we “began all to face the same way, for we had our backs to the same straight wall.” Mr. Churchill informed his colleagues that he had taken timely steps, and that the whole sea power of Britain was in readiness for war. An hour before, Lord Haldane, acting for the Prime Minister at the War Office, had ordered the mobilisation of the Army, an act of incalculable importance at a time when every hour was vital.
The views of the House of Commons had still to be ascertained. The day was a Bank Holiday, and that afternoon everywhere in the land crowds waited at post offices for the first news of the Foreign Secretary’s speech. His statement was such as only he could have made. It was the expression, in plain words without rhetoric or passion, of a most honest and peace-loving mind, which had left no channel of mediation untried, which had striven against every rebuff to avert calamity, and which now sadly but inevitably was forced towards war. The gist of his speech was, in the words which he wrote later, that “if we did not stand by France and stand up for Belgium against this aggression, we should be isolated, discredited and hated, and there would be before us no
thing but a miserable and ignoble future.” The House of Commons received his statement with almost unanimous approval. The twelve days had ended when diplomacy had laboured to buttress the tottering barrier. Britain, thanks partly to the wisdom of her leaders, but mainly to chance, faced war with a united government, a united people, and a united Empire.
Ever since that day it has been debated whether an earlier decision on our part might not have averted tragedy. Hypothetics is at its best a barren game, but it is one to which the human mind is prone, when it remembers its fallibility. It is certain that any attempt in the years before 1914 to enlarge the British Army to a continental scale would have precipitated the crisis. What is arguable is that the transformation of the entente with France into a defensive alliance, could it have been accomplished peaceably at an earlier date, might have given pause to Germany’s ambition. The right answer seems to be that it was not possible in the then mood of the country, and that any Government which had proposed it would have been turned out of office; the criticism on this score is not of British statesmen but of the British nation.
On the policy of the final month two things may be said. So unprepared was the national mind to contemplate war as a fact, that a declaration that we would stand by France, if made any time before August 3rd, would have split the Cabinet, would have been repudiated by the House of Commons, and would probably not have been accepted by the great majority of the people. Britain had to be educated into a new mood, and it was only the crisis of Belgium which expedited that education. The second thing is that such a declaration would not have altered Germany’s purpose one jot. She was in the grip of the military machine which she had fashioned, and whose heavy movement, once it began, could not be checked without a general disruption. She did not believe that Britain’s entrance into the War would make much difference. Her civilian statesmen and, intermittently, her Emperor had heavy thoughts, but the monster which they had begot brushed them aside. When at the very end the Emperor would have left Belgium alone and turned his eyes eastward, he was told by Moltke that the advance of armies of millions of men was the result of years of painstaking work and could not possibly be changed. The truth is that the pent-up forces of strife had been weakening the containing walls for a decade, and no last-moment reinforcement could have saved the dam. The War was made by the General Staffs, not of Germany only, with behind them as a propelling force a great weight of popular arrogance and greed and fear; and no action on the part of Britain, a Power outside that sinister community, could have held them back. In all history there is no more solemn warning of the calamity which ensues when the servant becomes the master.
III
The imagination fastens on the ultimate stage of the drama, the moments before the storm broke. The last official acts of Britain were curiously informal. The overrunning of Belgium, which began on the morning of Tuesday the 4th, had raised a moral issue which put all political consideration out of court. The Cabinet left the drafting of the ultimatum to Germany to the Prime Minister and Sir Edward Grey. Unless a satisfactory reply was given before midnight the British Ambassador in Berlin was instructed to ask for his passports.
Every man now in middle life who was then in England must retain a sharp recollection of how the War came to him. In my own memory certain scenes stand out from the blurred impression of crowded streets and faces hourly growing more anxious. One is of a dinner of Conservative members of the House of Commons less than a week before the climax, when all were sceptical of Britain entering the War, and one or two well-known politicians were as firm in their pacifism as any Radical. Another is of the City, which resembled nothing so much as a beehive which has been overturned. There were leaders of finance who fortunately kept their heads and faced the unknown bravely and calmly, but there were many distracted prophets of doom, who succeeded in impressing Lord Morley but not the robust Prime Minister. “The greatest ninnies I ever had to tackle,” Mr. Asquith wrote. “I found them all in a state of funk like old women chattering over tea-cups in a cathedral town.” Small blame to them, perhaps, for they saw the structure on which their life’s work was based dissolving furiously before their eyes, and could conceive of no possible resurrection.
I have also memories of some of the protagonists: Sir Edward Grey, when I breakfasted with him on the Saturday morning, pale and a little haggard but steadfast as a rock; Mr. Churchill’s high spirits, which sobered now and then when he remembered the desperate issues; Lord Haldane’s uncanny placidity; Prince Lichnowsky’s grey face and tragic eyes. Then, as the hours passed and war became certain, one’s friends in the Services disappeared on urgent errands. The Fleet had already moved into the northern solitudes. A man of letters, sailing his boat past the English capes, had a strange vision at dawn.
Like ghosts, like things themselves made out of mist, there passed, between me and the newly risen sun, a procession of great forms, all in line, hastening northward. It was the Fleet recalled. The slight haze along the distant waters had thickened, perhaps, imperceptibly; or perhaps the great speed of the men-of-war buried them too quickly in the distance. But, for whatever cause, this marvel was of short duration. It was seen for a moment, and in a moment it was gone. Then I knew that war would come, and my mind was changed.
The mind was changed; that is the truest description of what happened to the British nation during those ultimate days. People were desperately puzzled; they could not step, as the French could, immediately into recognition of a catastrophe which had always been at the back of their thoughts. But everyone realised that a great test had come, that Britain had not strayed idly into war, but must meet with clear eyes a challenge which threatened her existence and every decency of life. What would be left at the end of it not only of material comfort but of spiritual health? Men faced the question according to their natures, and the enforced idleness of the Bank Holiday gave opportunity for thought.
One conviction was universal: it was a monstrous hazard about which prediction was futile. To many serious men it seemed like the drawing down of a black curtain on all that was old and happy. Sir Edward Grey, watching from the windows of the Foreign Office the lights springing out in the dusk, said to a friend, “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” Whatever happened, the world would never be the same again, for we were embarking upon untried and uncharted seas. To some, especially young men perplexed and disillusioned by the pre-war confusion, it seemed like the opening of barred doors into a freer air. Many, behind their anxiety, felt almost a sense of relief. The unknown peril which they had so long dreaded had at last taken concrete form, and could be faced and fought. There was a stirring, too, throughout the whole land of national pride, the sense of a common interest knit together again after all the envious rents of party strife, and people drew towards the mystic centre of their unity. On the Sunday night great masses surrounded Buckingham Palace and acclaimed the King and Queen, and the duties of statesmen in Whitehall were performed to the accompaniment of echoes, borne across the Park, of the National Anthem and the Marseillaise.
When the British ultimatum arrived in Berlin the Imperial Chancellor was speaking in the Reichstag the historic passage in which he defended his country’s action in Belgium by that necessity which is above law. “The wrong — I speak frankly — that we are committing we will try to make good as soon as our military goal is reached. He who is threatened as we are threatened and is fighting for his all can have but the one thought — how he is to hack his way through.” In the evening he saw the British Ambassador. He was deeply agitated. “He said that the step taken by His Majesty’s Government was terrible to a degree: just for a word—’neutrality,’ a word which in war time had so often been disregarded — just for a scrap of paper Great Britain was going to make war on a kindred nation who desired nothing better than to be friends with her.” Had Britain considered the price? he asked excitedly; to which the Ambassador answered that fear of consequences was not an
excuse for breaking solemn engagements. Germany made no formal reply to the ultimatum which expired at midnight. By ten o’clock the news had leaked out, the newsboys in the streets were shouting war with Britain, and presently the crashing of glass in the Embassy windows told that the Berlin mob had awakened to the fact that the strife was not to be confined to the continent of Europe, but was to rage through the wide world. “The British change the whole situation,” the Emperor told Mr. Gerard a few days later. “An obstinate nation! They will keep up the war. It cannot end soon.”
In London the last hours passed calmly. “Truth hath a quiet breast.” The Prime Minister and Sir Edward Grey sat in the Cabinet room in Downing Street, a silent place except for the far-away singing of the great crowds around the Palace. Big Ben struck eleven — midnight by German time — and War had come. Presently Mr. Churchill arrived from the Admiralty. The war telegram had gone to every ship of the British Navy throughout the world.
