He was none of these. He appreciated the Austro-German threat. He was determined to stand by France and Russia. Belgium’s “perpetual” neutrality, guaranteed by the great powers by 1839, was to Grey neither a “legal” nor a “contractual” matter, but rather a power-political calculation. He played for time. He urged caution on the involved parties. He offered four-power mediation. Above all, he was uncertain of how the cabinet would react to war over Sarajevo.
Three events rudely interrupted Grey’s insouciance—the tenor of the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum (“the most formidable document I have ever seen addressed by one state to another that was independent”) delivered at Belgrade on 23 July; Berlin’s rejection of his offer of mediation by the less interested powers on 28 July; and Russia’s partial mobilization of the military districts of Odessa, Kiev, Moscow, and Kazan the following day. Still, when Grey on 29 July suggested to the cabinet that defense of Belgium and France lay in Britain’s vital interest, the majority rejected this view and, in president of the Board of Trade John Burns’s famous words, “decided not to decide.”57
Although the cabinet kept no formal records of its minutes and votes, historian Keith Wilson has argued that its nineteen members by 1 August fell into three unequal groups: The largest, led by Asquith, was undecided; a smaller middle group of about five demanded an immediate declaration of British neutrality; and only Grey and First Lord of the Admiralty Winston S. Churchill (“the naval war will be cheap”) favored intervention on the Continent.58 Grey was thus in a weak position. A good deal of it was due to his secretiveness. For years, he had studiously avoided formal discussion of whether a German attack on France would involve Britain’s vital security interests. In what historian Elie Halévy has called “an ignorance whose true name was connivance,”59 he had declined even a cursory mention in cabinet of the fact that in 1911 he had, quite on his own, authorized “military conversations” with the French General Staff.
Nor was Asquith more forthcoming. Foreign policy, after all, was Grey’s bailiwick. While the prime minister feared that Vienna’s ultimatum to Belgrade might lead to war between France and Germany and/or between Austria-Hungary and Russia—“a real Armageddon”—he nevertheless saw “no reason why we should be more than spectators.” Ten days later, he shared with the socialite Venetia Stanley his firm conviction that Britain had “no obligations of any kind either to France or Russia to give them military or naval help,” and that it was “out of the question” at this time (2 August) to “dispatch” any “Expeditionary Forces” to France.60 An astute politician, Asquith had taken stock of the deep divisions within the cabinet over the issue of a “continental commitment.” As late as 2 August, he estimated that “a good 3/4 of our own [Liberal] party in the H[ouse] of Commons are for absolute noninterference at any price.”61
But Asquith was also plagued by fear of German domination of the Continent. France was a “long-standing and intimate” friend. Belgium counted on Britain to “prevent her being utilized and absorbed by Germany.” In terms of naked realpolitik, Britain could not “allow Germany to use the Channel as a hostile base.” It was not in the nation’s “interests that France should be wiped out as a Great Power.”62 And how would the country react to a Liberal government that jettisoned the hallowed principle of the balance of power, whereby Britain since the days of Louis XIV had formed coalitions to deny all hegemonic aspirations on the Continent? Yet if he opted for military deployment in Europe, would the substantial stubborn group of ministers that refused to countenance intervention in France bring down his government? And how would even a perceived refusal as part of the Triple Entente to stand up against Germany play in Paris? French ambassador Paul Cambon reported the British conundrum to his government, wondering whether the word honor had been “struck out of the English vocabulary.”63 Finally, if Asquith did not back Grey, would the state secretary’s certain resignation bring down the government? “No more distressing moment can ever face a British government,” historian Barbara Tuchman cheekily remarked, “than that which requires it to come to a hard and fast and specific decision.”64
Germany saved Grey and Asquith from their dilemma. During the evening of Sunday, 1 August, news arrived in London that Germany had declared war on Russia and that Germany and France had begun to mobilize their armies. Obviously, whatever war was in the offing could no longer be “localized” in the Balkans. On the morning of 3 August, Belgium rejected the German ultimatum of the previous day to permit its troops unfettered passage through the country. “Poor little Belgium” was later given out as the decisive “moral issue” on which Grey and Asquith rallied the country. Put differently, German violation of Belgian neutrality spared the cabinet what promised to be an unpleasant debate: whether war on the side of France was in Britain’s vital interests. But according to historian Wilson, “poor little Belgium” hardly figured in most of Asquith’s and Grey’s deliberations.
The cabinet in London “never did make a decision for war.” The only decisions taken by Asquith’s ministers were “either to resign (two), or to resign and retract (two) or to remain in office (the rest).”65 The Unionist opposition, led by Andrew Bonar Law and Lord Lansdowne, let it be known that it would support a policy of intervention on behalf of France and Russia—unqualified by any reference to Belgium. Thus emboldened, Grey put his cards on the table at two cabinet meetings on 2 August. “Outraged” that Berlin had spurned his offer of mediation and “marched steadily towards war,”66 he demanded that the country come to the aid of Belgium and France. He declined to inform the ministers that Ambassador von Lichnowsky that morning had assured him that Germany would not invade France if Britain remained neutral.
The confusion that still gripped much of official London as late as 2 August can be gleaned from a telephone call that Field Marshal Sir John French made to Chancellor of the Exchequer Lloyd George and Sir George Riddell of the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association as they dined with Labour Party leader Ramsay MacDonald. “Can you tell me, old chap,” French queried Riddell, “whether we are going to be in this war? If so, are we going to put an army on the Continent, and, if we are, who is going to command it?”67 Resolution came after Riddell conferred with Lloyd George. Britain would be in the war; it would send an army to the Continent; and French would command it.
Grey carried his case in the cabinet, largely it seems, through intervention from an unlikely source: Herbert Samuel, president of the Local Government Board, who argued that the cabinet needed to hold together in the face of the German threat.68 When news arrived that evening that Germany had invaded Luxembourg, the dice were cast: Grey was instructed to inform the House of Commons the next day that a German invasion of Belgium would constitute the casus belli. An antiwar demonstration that day in Trafalgar Square drew only a thin crowd. The bankers in The City alone were opposed to war, fearing that a European war would cause the collapse of the foreign exchange.
At 3 PM on 3 August, Grey, “pale, haggard and worn,” addressed a packed House of Commons. He asked its members to ponder whether it would be in the nation’s interests for France to be “in a struggle of life and death, beaten to her knees … subordinate to the power of one greater than herself?” The “whole of the West of Europe,” he went on, could fall “under the domination of a single Power.” Britain’s “moral position,” if it stood by and allowed Germany to subjugate Belgium and France, would be “such as have lost us all respect.”69 The House accorded him enthusiastic applause.
The next day, the cabinet learned that Germany had invaded Belgium. A British ultimatum that Berlin withdraw its troops at once, set to expire at midnight German time, went without reply. As Big Ben struck 11 PM, Britain declared war on Germany. While Grey is best remembered for his memorable comment that “the lamps” were “going out all over Europe” and that “we shall not see them lit again in our life-time,”70 more revealing for his rationale in urging war was his comment that Britain would suffer hardly more if it went to war with Germ
any than if it stayed out. For Grey had adopted the conviction of fellow interventionist Churchill that what was about to come would only be a “short, cleansing thunderstorm,” after which it would be “business as usual.”
If any further moral position was required, it was provided by Bethmann Hollweg’s comment that the 1839 accord, which guaranteed Belgium’s neutrality, was but “a scrap of paper,” and by his Machiavellian pronouncement in the Reichstag on 4 August that “necessity knows no law.”71 Apparently, no one in Berlin remembered Bismarck’s dire warning that a German invasion of Belgium or the Low Countries would constitute “complete idiocy,” as it would immediately bring Britain into such a war.72
In the end, historian Wilson has argued,73 the decision for war resulted from a combination of factors: Grey’s determination to resign if Britain did not opt for war; Asquith’s “determination to follow Grey;” Samuel’s ability to rally the cabinet behind Grey and Asquith; Bonar Law’s and Lord Lansdowne’s timely support for intervention; and the slowness and dysfunction of the noninterventionists in making their case stick. As well, fear of German domination of the Continent, and with it France’s Channel and Atlantic ports, played its role in convincing the Asquith government that it lay in its best interests to uphold the territorial integrity of Belgium and France.
To sum up, decision-making coteries in Vienna, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Paris, and London carefully assessed their situations, weighed their options, calculated the risks, and then decided that war lay in the national interests. These coteries saw their states to be in decline or at least to be seriously threatened. To check that perceived decline and threat, they felt the recourse to arms to be imperative. There was no “unexpected slide” into “the boiling cauldron of war,” as David Lloyd George would later famously claim. The major powers had not simply “glided, or rather staggered and stumbled” into the conflict, had not “slithered over the brink into the boiling cauldron of war without any trace of apprehension or dismay.”74 Instead, strategic considerations had been paramount in their deliberations.
BRITISH POET RUPERT BROOKE’S words about “a world grown old and cold and weary” in many ways summarize the much-debated “spirit of 1914.” For, whatever their arguments about the level and the location of war “enthusiasm” in 1914, historians largely agree that the generation of 1914 had grown “cold and weary” of their flaccid times. The “foul peace” (Conrad von Hötzendorf) that Bismarck had imposed on Europe with his pax Germanica was much resented.75 The young in Germany especially were bored by the endless palaver of their fathers and grandfathers at beer halls and wine taverns about their glorious deeds in the wars of 1866 and 1870. Many had taken refuge in youth groups, where they retreated into a mystical past replete with hikes, campfires, guitars, chansons, and medieval castles. July 1914 offered action, chivalry, dash, and daring—in short, relief from boredom and a chance to create their own legends and myths.
The war would be short. Statesmen such as Churchill in Britain, Poincaré in France, and Ottokar Count Czernin in Austria-Hungary used the image of a “thunderstorm” to convey the prevailing mood. Somewhere in northeast France or Russian Poland, there would take place the decisive Armageddon. Few cared for the past dire warnings of outsiders such as the Polish financier Ivan S. Bloch and the German Socialist Friedrich Engels that future wars would be “world wars” that could easily last three or four years. Engels had predicted that armies of “eight to ten million soldiers” would be engaged in such a “world war,” and that they would “decimate Europe as no swarm of locusts ever did,” ending with “famine, pestilence, and the general barbarization of both armies and peoples.”76
Thus, the young volunteered for war. While German published estimates of between 1.3 and 2 million volunteers were grossly exaggerated, military lists revealed a total of 185,000 accepted in 1914.77 Unfortunately, we know little about their motivation. Fortunately, Paul Plaut of the Institute for Applied Psychology at Potsdam realized a research opportunity and sent his staff out into the streets to canvass the volunteers.78 Most allowed that they saw the war as a chance for adventure and action, as an escape from the dreariness of everyday life. Many stated that they were fulfilling their civic “duty;” or defending home and hearth (Heimat) against the foreign threat; or wanting just to be “part of it,” not to miss what they vaguely perceived to be a great historical moment. Some joined up to prove their “patriotism,” others their “manliness.” Only a few offered hatred of the enemy (except “perfidious Albion”) as a reason for enlisting. The minute it got wind of Plaut’s activities, the Prussian army ended the polling.
The literary elite, as always, left their impressions for future generations.79 In Germany, the novelist Thomas Mann, “tired, sick and tired” of Bismarck’s uninspiring peace, saw the war as “a purification, a liberation, an enormous hope.” His colleague Hermann Hesse was delighted that his countrymen would finally be “torn out of a capitalistic peace” and uplifted by war to a “higher” moral value. The sociologist Max Weber opined that “regardless of the outcome—this war is great and wonderful.” The economist Johann Plenge contrasted the German “ideas of 1914”—duty, order, justice—with the French “ideas of 1789”—liberty, fraternity, equality. Gertrud Bäumer of the Federation of German Women’s Associations called on her sisters to put their demands for greater equality aside during the war: “We are the Volk.” Perhaps best remembered by the next generation was the reaction to the news of war by Adolf Hitler, who volunteered for the Bavarian army. “The war liberated me from the painful feelings of my youth,” he later wrote in Mein Kampf. “I fell down on my knees and thanked heaven with an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune to be alive at this time.”80 Another Habsburg citizen, Franz Kafka, was of a more sober mind-set: The war, he noted, had above all been “caused by a tremendous lack of imagination.”81
Nor was war enthusiasm absent in France.82 On 28 July, the capital was rocked by the sensational news that Madame Caillaux had been acquitted of the murder of Gaston Calmette. Many of France’s best-selling newspapers, such as Le Temps, Le Petit Parisien, and L’Echo de Paris, devoted twice the coverage to the Caillaux trial as they did to the mounting European crisis. Yet when Poincaré and Viviani returned to the capital, they were received by ecstatic crowds chanting, “Vive la France.” Soon those chants changed to “Vive l’armée.”
Britain, in fact, became the first country in which the coming of the war was cheered in the streets even before the cabinet had decided on a “continental commitment.” The third of August was the traditional Bank Holiday Monday. It was a delightfully sunny day. There was drink and entertainment. The next afternoon, as the ministers drove to Parliament to deliver the declaration of war against Germany, they were hailed lustily by what the prime minister called “cheering crowds of loafers & holiday makers.”83 General Sir William Birdwood, secretary to the government of India in the Army Department, no doubt spoke for many when, a few months into the war, he recalled: “What a real piece of luck this war has been as regards Ireland—just averted a Civil War and when it is over we may all be tired of fighting.”84
In a country without a tradition of conscription, young men rallied to the colors: 8,193 British men in the first week of August, 43,354 in the second, and 49,982 in the third.85 Most came from the commercial and professional classes, far fewer from the agricultural sector. “Urban civic pride” came to the fore as 224 so-called Pals battalions—made up of friends linked mainly by educational, professional, and recreational ties—were raised locally. Few had any idea of the realities of modern warfare.
Historians have questioned the war euphoria of August 1914.86 Unsurprisingly, Germans and Frenchmen alike viewed the coming of war not as a monolithic, robotic, nationalist bloc, but rather on the basis of their age, class, gender, and locale.87 By and large, war enthusiasm was a product of the educated and professional classes in urban centers. It was driven primarily by students and clerks—and by army and governme
nt officials. There were few workers among these crowds. There were more males than females. The enthusiasm came slowly. At first, the crowds that gathered at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris and the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin numbered only in the hundreds, rarely in the thousands. Even at the height of the putative euphoria, the crowd in Berlin reached only thirty thousand, less than 1 percent of the capital’s population. Beyond Berlin, the crowds in cities such as Cologne, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Leipzig, Munich, and Nürnberg were perhaps a thousand each.
Observers noted the prevalence of drink among students and a carnival-like atmosphere. But after Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war against Serbia on 28 July, the public mood became somber, then fatalistic, and finally fearful. Hoarding of food and other essential items became commonplace. Small middle-class investors, mostly women, made a run on the banks, afraid that their savings would soon disappear. Employment levels in major cities plummeted anywhere between 24 and 70 percent as Europe began to retool from consumer to war materials production.88 Stories of spies caused near panic. Prussian soldiers in “strange” army uniforms were mistakenly arrested in Nürnberg; Bavarians with “strange accents” in Cologne. In Munich, news reverberated that “several Slavs” had been captured and shot while trying to blow up the army’s ammunition dump at Schleißheim; spies “dressed as nuns” had supposedly tried to dynamite railway bridges; and Russians “dressed up as ladies” apparently had been arrested at the main train station.89 There were also reports of French bombs falling on Nürnberg, flour and water wells poisoned in Strasbourg, Russian spies in Berlin disguised as doctors and nurses, and eighty million francs bound for Russia seized at Stuttgart.90 Especially, rumors of spies in automobiles laden with gold refused to go away. In London, the Metropolitan Police had received almost nine thousand reports of enemy aliens at work; Frederick Lord Roberts estimated their number at eighty thousand.
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