Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War.

by Gerry Docherty

  The disparity between the gun-running in Ulster, with 24,000 modern rifles landed at Larne, and the 1,500 aged weapons that made it to Howth, was very obvious. However, if carefully crafted, the subjective historian and the biased journalist, the corrupt politician and the prejudiced observer could say that both sides were armed for civil war. Reduced to a single headline, Germany had armed the Nationalist Volunteers.

  By July, the words ‘civil war’ and ‘inevitable’ hung around Britain like the proverbial albatross. King George V was certain of it because ‘the cry of civil war is on the lips of the most responsible and sober-minded of my people’.82 He was asked to call an all-party conference on Home Rule, but his intervention was to no purpose. There was no spirit of compromise, no last-minute reprieve. The time had not yet come. Edward Carson added to the drama of the moment: ‘I see no hopes of peace. I see nothing at present but darkness and shadows. We shall have once more to assert the manhood of our race.’83 This was melodrama of the highest order, for there was no possibility of Ireland bursting into flames as long as Carson continued to keep Ulster in close check. The opposing Irish Volunteers had neither the weapons nor the will to wage a debilitating war on Ulster. The British Army would not have permitted it. Civil war was an illusion conjured by politicians and newspapers loyal to the Secret Elite. They and they alone were in control. The hopelessness and tension that filled the spring and early summer of 1914 were genuine. The despair of the Ulster Protestants and the well-versed concerns voiced in Parliament were mostly sincere. Scaremongering was a strategic ploy, for in the realm of ‘higher politics’ the few connected to the Secret Elite knew precisely what they had done. Do not lose sight of the fact that these individuals had been planning war with Germany for over a decade.

  Looking back with the advantage of hindsight, something disturbing emerges from these episodes, something that jars. These folklore ‘heroes’ of both the north and the south of Ireland who defied the Crown, armed civilians and gave credence to a coming civil war enjoyed most unusual careers thereafter. Immediately war with Germany was declared, the Admiralty telegraphed the headquarters of the Irish Volunteers in Dublin directly and requested that Erskine Childers make urgent contact with them. The Admiralty Intelligence Department knew where to find Erskine Childers, and they knew about the Asgard and the gun-running. It was organised by and through them. How else could the yacht have passed through the midst of the greatest fleet ever assembled without being stopped and searched? Winston Churchill, prompted by his personal secretary Eddie Marsh, one of Childers’ closest friends, had personally ordered his naval staff to contact Childers, the man who knew Germany’s North Sea coastline in great detail.84 One can only wonder what the Irish Volunteers would have thought had they seen Erskine Childers shaking hands with Winston Churchill and saluting Admiral Lord Jellicoe on 22 August 1914, before stepping into his own office in the Admiralty.85

  What was it really about? We know that the Secret Elite and the Committee of Imperial Defence had long been prepared for war against Germany, and that it was of the utmost importance that Germany appeared to take the first steps. What would have happened had General Moltke decided to abandon the well-advertised Schlieffen Plan and attacked France on a different frontier? Had Belgium’s neutrality been honoured, what could the Secret Elite have done? There had to be a Plan B, an alternative scenario that would create such an outrage that war with Germany would follow. Consider the following. Germany had supplied both sides of the Irish divide with arms. The guns and ammunition had been sourced in Hamburg and were all traceable back there. Imagine the outcry if a cowardly explosion in a Belfast lodge or a Dublin pub had slain dozens of innocents in early August 1914, or rogue gunmen had slaughtered unarmed civilians in the name of either cause? Blame would have quickly focused on the fall guy who had allowed the illicit weapons deals to go through: the kaiser. Why was so little made of Germany’s part in the gun-running? Remember the covenanter motto: ‘put your trust in God and keep your powder dry’. The Secret Elite were able to keep their powder dry because they did not have to revert to Plan B.

  SUMMARY: CHAPTER 25 – IRELAND – PLAN B

  The Secret Elite had long known that the Schlieffen Plan meant large numbers of German troops would pass through Belgium. This breach of Belgian neutrality would become the casus belli, the justification for war. If the Germans avoided Belgium, the Secret Elite required a fall-back position. Ireland became Plan B.

  Age-old religious animosities were deliberately stirred in order to bring the Protestant majority in Ulster into a state of potential conflict with the predominantly Catholic south. Both sides were armed by the Secret Elite with weapons purchased in Germany. If required, ‘civil war’ would have been declared and Germany blamed. At every stage, the Secret Elite were in control.

  The introduction of a Home Rule Bill was used to generate unrest. Edward Carson was sent to Ulster to take charge. He created a large Protestant paramilitary wing, the Ulster Volunteer Force, comprising some 100,000 men who had signed the covenant. It was a large and illegal private army that the British Establishment actively supported.

  Alfred Milner assured Carson that he would not allow the British Army to take up arms against the UVF. Army officers at the Curragh were encouraged to refuse to move against the UVF. Senior figures in the army, the government and the opposition front bench colluded to make this possible.

  Secret Elite funds were used to procure weapons and ammunition in Germany. UVF officers brought them by sea to the north-west coast of Ireland and distributed them throughout Ulster. Officials in the police, coastguard and British Army were ordered to turn a blind eye.

  In the south, a large nationalist Catholic force formed spontaneously as a reaction to the arming of the UVF. Through John Redmond, the Secret Elite moved quickly to ensure their control over it. Erskine Childers, an agent of the Secret Elite who had earlier infiltrated the nationalist movement and won their trust, proceeded to arm them. He and a group of upper-class Protestant friends with close links to the British Establishment and Secret Elite funded the purchase of weapons and ammunition from Germany, and delivered them to the south in their yachts.

  The scene was set for civil war should the Secret Elite need it to provide the casus belli. In addition, the entire venture provided a convenient distraction and smokescreen behind which preparations for war were rapidly progressed.

  CHAPTER 26

  August 1914 – Of Neutrality and Just Causes

  IN THE LAST WEEK OF an epoch that was rushing towards oblivion, the warmongers in London, Paris and St Petersburg forced the pace with unrelenting determination. Localised Austrian retribution on Serbia had deliberately been transformed by the Secret Elite into an altogether greater cause for carnage. Diplomacy had been made to fail. Dishonest men could now throw up their hands in horror and cry ‘inevitable’ war. Democracy was contemptuously abused by hidden forces that had the political and financial power to manipulate public opinion. Propaganda misrepresented motive, moulding fear into hysteria and empowering the madness that swept reason aside. The great plan for war against Germany that would establish the primacy of the British Empire was almost complete. The last requirement was the ‘just cause’ to win over and inspire the British people.

  On Saturday, 1 August, Isvolsky sent a telegram from Paris to St Petersburg:

  The French War Minister informed me, in hearty high spirits, that the Government have firmly decided on war, and begged me to endorse the hope of the French General Staff that all efforts will be directed against Germany …1

  France had ‘firmly decided on war’ almost 24 hours before Germany had announced mobilisation or declared war on Russia. General Joffre was straining at the leash. He sent Poincaré a personal ultimatum that he would no longer accept responsibility for the command of the French army unless a general mobilisation was ordered.2 Poincaré did not need much encouragement. At 4 p.m. that day, telegrams ordering the French general mobilisation were sent fro
m the central telegraph office in Paris. By that point, Serbia, Austria, Russia, France and Great Britain had begun military measures of one sort or another. Germany alone among the powers concerned had not yet done so.3

  That afternoon, the German leaders gathered at the kaiser’s palace in Berlin. Bethmann and von Jagow arrived with sensational news from Lichnowsky in London: the British government had just given a promise that France would remain neutral under a British guarantee. Hugely relieved, the kaiser called for champagne. He sent a telegram to King George: ‘If Britain guarantees the neutrality of France, I will abandon all action against her.’4 The king summoned Grey to Buckingham Palace that Saturday evening to help frame a response. King George replied: ‘I think there must be some misunderstanding of a suggestion that passed in friendly conversation between Prince Lichnowsky and Sir Edward Grey.’5 There was no British guarantee of French neutrality. It had simply been another delaying tactic, a ruse to gain whatever advantage.

  At 5 p.m., after waiting in vain for twenty-four hours for an answer to his telegram demanding that the Russians stop all military movements on his border, the kaiser ordered general mobilisation. Germany was the last of the continental powers to take that irrevocable step. How does that possibly fit with the claim that Germany started the First World War? An hour later in St Petersburg, Pourtales, the German ambassador, went to Sazonov and asked him three times if the Russian government would halt the mobilisation. In the full knowledge that it meant a European war, Sazonov replied that it would continue. Count Pourtales handed him Germany’s declaration of war and burst into tears.6 Time: 6 p.m., 1 August.

  Germany’s declaration was an understandable reaction but a tactical mistake. Russia had been mobilising with the definite intent of attacking Germany, but Sazonov had been instructed that he should not make an actual declaration of war. The vital message oft repeated by Grey to Poincaré and Sazonov was that France and Russia must, as far as possible, conceal their military preparations and intent on war until Germany had swallowed the bait. The British people would never support the aggressor in a European war, and it was imperative that Germany should be made to appear the aggressor. It was akin to bullies goading, threatening and ganging up on a single boy in the school playground, but the moment he had the audacity to defend himself, he was to blame.

  What else could Germany have done? She was provoked into a struggle for life or death. It was a stark choice: await certain destruction or strike out to defend herself. Kaiser Wilhelm had exposed his country to grave danger and almost lost the one precious advantage Germany had by delaying countermeasures to the Russian mobilisation in the forlorn hope of peace. The German army depended entirely upon lightning success at the very start of a war on two fronts. Germany’s only effective defence was through offence.

  On 1 August, the London Daily News declared:

  The greatest calamity in history is upon us … At this moment our fate is being sealed by hands that we know not, by motives alien to our interests, by influences that if we knew we should certainly repudiate …7

  The Daily News had summed up the situation perfectly. The British people knew nothing of the hands that were sealing their fate. They would never have gone to war in support of Russia. Indeed, in a war between Russia and Germany, there was every chance that the man in the street would support Germany. Public opinion was not clamouring for war; every liberal, radical and socialist paper in the kingdom stood against participation in a European conflict. Nor was there any obvious sign of rabid jingoism. Yet.

  The Secret Elite knew precisely what would move public opinion: Belgium. If Britain’s excuse for entering the war was focused well away from Russia, then Grey’s final requirement would fall into place and the lock would be sprung. The people would clamour for war if the cause became the defence of ‘gallant little Belgium’ against a contemptible German invasion. It was Belgian neutrality that would furnish him with the best excuse for entering the war.

  Grey turned Belgian neutrality into his cause célèbre. He told the German ambassador, Prince Lichnowsky, that it would be extremely difficult to restrain public feeling in Britain if Germany violated Belgian neutrality. Lichnowsky asked whether Grey could ‘give me a definite declaration of the neutrality of Great Britain on the condition that we [Germany] respected Belgian neutrality’.8 It was an astonishing suggestion, an enormous concession and one that could have spared Britain and Belgium the horrors of war. Lichnowsky was prepared to concede exactly what Grey claimed the British Cabinet wanted. Belgian sovereignty would be respected in exchange for a promise of Britain’s neutrality. Duplicitous as ever, Grey blurred the issue and avoided an honest reply, reassuring Lichnowsky that ‘for the present there was not the slightest intention of proceeding to hostilities against Germany’.9

  When the kaiser read the diplomatic note from his ambassador, he wrote in the margin:

  My impression is that Mr Grey is a false dog who is afraid of his own meanness and false policy, but who will not come out into the open against us, preferring to let himself be forced by us to do it.10

  Right again, Wilhelm, though Grey still had two objectives: to gain as much time as possible for Russia and to turn the public in favour of war.

  Astonishingly, Lichnowsky’s proposal on neutrality was never revealed to the Cabinet or House of Commons. Had it been, a significant majority would likely have agreed to it. Grey’s deception might never have come to light had Chancellor Bethmann not exposed this offer in the Reichstag on 4 August:

  We have informed the British Government, that as long as Great Britain remains neutral, our fleet will not attack the northern coast of France, and that we will not violate the territorial integrity and independence of Belgium. These assurances I now repeat before the world …11

  Grey ensured that every offer of peace and neutrality from Berlin was rejected or suppressed, while at the same time his Cabinet colleagues were informed that he was outraged by the way in which Germany had ‘put aside all attempts at accommodation while marching steadily to war’.12

  Inside Asquith’s Cabinet, Charles Hobhouse saw a marked change in the foreign secretary at this time. Hobhouse wrote in his diary that from the moment it became clear that Germany would violate Belgian neutrality, Grey, who was ‘sincerity itself, became violently pro-French and eventually the author of our rupture with Germany’.13 Grey became violently pro-French? How little Hobhouse and most of his Cabinet colleagues knew of the real Grey, knew of his years of secret planning for war on Germany, knew of the agreements he had put in place with France. Their ignorance was, to an extent, understandable. On four separate occasions over the previous two years, Grey and Asquith stood at the despatch box in the House of Commons and solemnly assured Parliament that Britain was entirely free from any secret obligations to any other European country.14 In a private letter to his ambassador in Paris, Grey noted: ‘there would be a row in Parliament here if I had used words which implied the possibility of a secret engagement unknown to Parliament all these years committing us to a European war …’15

  Hobhouse was not witnessing a sudden change in Grey’s attitude but an unmasking, the revelation of his real commitment to a cause that could not be named: the Secret Elite’s war to destroy Germany. Hobhouse saw Grey in a new light as the ‘author of our rupture with Germany’.16 Did he belatedly realise that Sir Edward Grey bore heavy responsibility for the First World War?

  Clearly, Grey was poisoning the Cabinet atmosphere with pro-French, anti-German rhetoric. Crucially, he now placed Belgium at the centre of the heated discussions. The issue was suddenly about loyalty to Belgium and about Britain’s standing as a Great Power, which would be damaged for ever if she stood aside while Belgium was ‘crushed’. He diverted the arguments away from Russian mobilisation, misrepresented the kaiser’s intentions and made no mention of Serbia. He cited the treaty dating from 1839, falsely claiming that it obliged Britain to take up arms in defence of Belgium. Asquith and Churchill agreed, but Grey met
strong resistance from the majority of the Cabinet.17

  He later claimed that the question of Belgian neutrality emerged for the first time at the end of July 1914. Long after the war ended, when the Secret Elite had to mask and carefully reinterpret their pre-war actions, he wrote that Chancellor Bethmann’s very mention of Belgium on 29 July ‘lit up an aspect that had not been looked at’,18 as if it had suddenly dawned on him and the Foreign Office that Belgium would play a strategic part in a continental war. It was an outrageous lie, and one that has been perpetuated ever since. Sir Hew Strachan, professor of the history of war and a fellow of All Souls at Oxford University, gave a different interpretation: ‘But Belgium was not decided that the invader would be German. Right up until the war’s outbreak it continued to espouse a policy of pure neutrality, treating all its neighbours as potential enemies.’19 That is profoundly untrue. Belgium was in cahoots with the entente countries, most specifically Britain. Belgium was not some unknown and forgotten corner of Europe that history bypassed on a regular basis. It had long been a battlefield in continental wars, and sat in a natural basin between the Jura Mountains and the English Channel. Belgium was the northern gateway to Paris or, indeed, Berlin.

  Confidential Belgian documents, to which we made detailed reference in Chapter 6, completely refuted Grey’s nonsense and proved that top-secret military agreements between Britain and Belgium had been in place since 1906, when the Committee of Imperial Defence and the War Office began the process of modernising the British Army. This accord included comprehensive arrangements for military cooperation and elaborate plans for the landing of British troops20 who were scheduled to disembark at Dunkirk and Calais in such numbers that half of the British Army could be transported to Belgium within eight days of mobilisation. The British supply base was to be moved from the French coast to Antwerp in Belgium as soon as the North Sea had been cleared of German warships. Lieutenant Colonel Barnardiston, the British military attaché to Brussels, had emphasised to the chief of the Belgian general staff, Major-General Ducarme, that these arrangements had to be kept ‘absolutely confidential’ and known only to his minister and the British general staff.21