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

by Gerry Docherty

  SUMMARY: CHAPTER 26 – AUGUST 1914 – OF NEUTRALITY AND JUST CAUSES

  As the Great Powers in Europe hurled themselves towards a continental war, the Secret Elite required a just cause for British involvement.

  The German chancellor, Bethmann, handed the perfect excuse to Sir Edward Grey through promises about the future status of Belgium as a bargaining pawn for British neutrality.

  Grey’s pretence in his memoirs that the issue of Belgium was an aspect that had not been previously considered was an outrageous lie. The Secret Elite had known that Belgium and northern France would be the prime location for the British forces since discussions first got under way with France in 1905.

  It was vital to Grey’s plan that Belgium remained outwardly neutral even though the secret arrangements meant that Belgian neutrality was a deception.

  Primed and supported by Sir Eyre Crowe and Sir Arthur Nicolson in the Foreign Office, Grey planned his assault on an unsuspecting Cabinet to stop them voting against British involvement in the coming war. Gaining their support proved a daunting task.

  He and Asquith secretly liaised with and advised Secret Elite politicians in the Conservative and Unionist parties to bring them on board and guarantee a parliamentary majority in support of war.

  Cabinet members were subjected to immense moral pressure on the issue of Belgium’s future, especially from Grey, Haldane and Churchill. Asquith posed as an impartial chair but let it be known that he too would resign with Grey if the Cabinet went against the foreign secretary.

  Lloyd George would have been a formidable leader of the non-interventionists had he decided to oppose the war, but in fact his actions misled his Cabinet colleagues.

  Cabinet opponents to the war were in a majority, but were either neutralised (Lloyd George) or browbeaten into accepting that the best option for the country was to wait until Grey had spoken in Parliament on 3 August before resignations took place.

  Unbeknown to the Cabinet, and without permission, Churchill mobilised the fleet and Asquith sent Haldane to the War Office to mobilise the army. Grey contacted Paul Cambon, the French ambassador, to confirm that Britain would defend the French coast from any attack by the German fleet, thus ending any semblance of British neutrality.

  CHAPTER 27

  The Speech That Cost a Million Dead

  CONSIDER THIS UNQUESTIONABLE FACT. The final act which transformed the continental war into a world war was ordained by the Secret Elite. The person who fronted that decision, who did indeed snuff out the lamps all over Europe, was the man who allegedly made that observation, the secretary of state for foreign affairs, Sir Edward Grey.1 The tipping point was his statement to the House of Commons on Monday, 3 August 1914, and its subsequent impact on Parliament, the nation and the Empire.

  To most Members of Parliament, the events of that Bank Holiday Monday came in a blur of excitement and disbelief. One Irish Member recalled how it was only at the point where parliamentary attendants began to set out additional seats in the chamber of the Commons that he realised ‘something wholly unusual was expected’.2 So many Members of Parliament crammed into the claustrophobic chamber that even the additional seating could not cope. There was an electricity of expectation, an uncertainty, an apprehension that few had ever experienced.

  Yet even before they had time to gather, the Relugas Three took preparation for war to the brink. On Asquith’s instructions, Haldane returned to his old stamping ground at the War Office and summoned the Army Council. By his own account, the generals had their breath ‘somewhat taken away’ when he announced that he carried the prime minister’s authority to immediately mobilise the Expeditionary and Territorial forces, the Special Reserve and the Officers’ Training Corps. To the astonishment of the public, trains to Newhaven and Southampton were requisitioned for the exclusive use of the military. He wrote that ‘it was a matter of life and death’.3 All of this took place before Grey rose to speak.

  In all that follows, it is important that the reader fully understands that Sir Edward Grey made a statement to Parliament, and through Parliament and the press to the nation.4 It was not a debate. Grey was not subjected to questions from MPs, nor asked to explain himself. Time and again he and his co-conspirators had promised that any British military commitments or naval agreements with France or Russia would require the official approval of the House of Commons. All understood this to mean an informed debate in Parliament followed by a vote. There was no debate. There was no vote. The Secret Elite and their agents did not seek democratic approval for anything they had previously organised or engineered, and they did not seek parliamentary approval for taking Britain to war. By clever turn of phrase and repetitive lie, Grey deceived the House of Commons into believing that it ‘was free to make the most momentous decision in history’.5

  The warmongers hailed Grey’s position as statesman-like and noble, and talked of duty and loyalty, obligations and integrity. The many voices raised against this same speech were drowned out by Secret Elite agents in Parliament, dismissed by most of the daily newspapers, and have been more or less ignored altogether by historians. It was not a great speech – Leo Amery mocked it as narrow and uninspiring6 – but, nevertheless, it was of monumental importance. The House of Commons has rarely hung on the words of a secretary of state for foreign affairs with such studied attention. Sir Edward Grey set the tone by announcing that peace in Europe ‘cannot be preserved’7 and distanced himself and the Foreign Office from any previous involvement or collusion. His moral stance stemmed from a claim that ‘we have consistently worked with a single mind, with all the earnestness in our power, to preserve peace’.8 Given his connivance with Isvolsky and Sazonov, Poincaré, the Committee of Imperial Defence, the secret agreements and understandings, and all of the scheming that had encouraged Berchtold and the Austrians to make the demands on Serbia, that was a breathtaking lie. He accepted that Russia and Germany had declared war on each other, almost as if to say, what could be done about that? The implication that Britain, and British diplomats, had had nothing to do with these events was entirely false.

  Grey’s appeal to British interests, British honour and British obligations was lifted from Sir Eyre Crowe’s memorandum,9 which is hardly surprising since he would have carefully rehearsed his speech with his Foreign Office accomplices before facing the Commons. He stressed that the House was ‘free to decide what the British attitude should be’ and promised to publish parliamentary evidence that would prove how ‘genuine and whole-hearted his efforts for peace were’.10 When these were made available to Parliament at a later date, the diplomatic notes had been carefully selected and included three telegrams that had never actually been sent.11 Worse still were the carefully amended versions: absolute proof of Foreign Office double-dealings.

  Grey admitted that ‘conversations’ had been going on for some time between British and French naval and military experts, but MPs did not realise that he had sanctioned these since 1906, without seeking permission of the Cabinet. He produced a letter from the French ambassador, Paul Cambon, which conveniently explained that whatever the disposition of the French and British fleets, they were not based on a commitment to cooperate in war. It was a downright lie, but MPs and the British people had to be misled. In response to an interruption from Lord Charles Beresford, Grey was obliged to confess that the letter had been written some two years previously, yet had never been revealed to Parliament. Much worse than that, he read out only part of a formal letter between his office and the French authorities, deliberately omitting the crucial final sentence: ‘If these measures involved action, the plans of the General Staffs would at once be taken into consideration and the governments would then decide what effect should be given to them.’12

  The plans of the general staffs? What plans? How did this come about? There would have been uproar amongst the Liberals, the Labour Party and Irish Home Rulers had Grey revealed that plans for joint military action had been agreed between the general staffs of bot
h nations. All of the denials that had been made to Prince Lichnowsky and the kaiser would instantly have been unmasked. All of Prime Minister Asquith’s previous statements in Parliament denying that secret agreements tied Britain to France in the event of a war with Germany would have been revealed as deliberate deceptions.13 In his personal memoirs, published in 1925, Sir Edward Grey claimed that the charge of omitting the final sentence was not brought to his notice till 1923. He could only imagine that he had been interrupted when reading the letter or ‘perhaps I thought the last sentence unimportant, as it did not affect the sense or main purport of what had already been read out’.14 Ridiculous. Truly and utterly ridiculous. That final sentence would have destroyed Grey’s speech and exposed years of secret preparation for war.

  Grey repeatedly stressed that the government and the House of Commons was perfectly free to decide what to do and that no previous diplomatic arrangements stood in the way of democratic decision making. In fact, he had absolutely no intention of asking the House of Commons for its opinion. The Secret Elite’s was the only opinion that mattered.

  When he reminded the House that Britain had a long-standing friendship with France, a voice from the surrounding seats shouted ‘and with Germany’, but the remark was pointedly ignored. With amazing hypocrisy and deceptiveness he painted a fanciful picture of the northern and western coasts of France standing ‘absolutely undefended’. He asked how the public would react if a foreign fleet (everyone knew it could only be German) bombarded the undefended coasts of France within sight of Britain’s shores. He admitted that he had assured the French ambassador that in the event of hostile operations against the French coasts or shipping, the British fleet would step in to support and protect them, subject, as always, to the mythical approval of the House of Commons.

  What a stunning confession. Two days previously, Grey’s under-secretary, Sir Arthur Nicolson, had reminded him that it was at Britain’s behest that France had moved her fleets to the Mediterranean in 1912 on the absolute understanding that the British navy would protect her northern and western coasts.15 Grey was describing a strategy that the Admiralty and Foreign Office had initiated two years earlier but was falsely implying that it had only just been agreed because of the escalating European crisis. The entire construct was false. He admitted that the fleet had been mobilised and the army was in the process of full mobilisation, though he felt it necessary to add that, as yet, no troops had left the country.

  The foreign secretary took some time warming up his audience before unveiling the focal point of his statement: Belgian neutrality. His trump card was his greatest lie, for Belgium was neutral only in name. The heavy veil of secrecy that had been drawn over Belgium’s preparations to side with Britain and France against Germany proved its worth. In a moment of time that caught the purpose of Grey’s dramatic delivery, this was his coup de théâtre. The stunning presentation of ‘neutral’ Belgium as the innocent victim of German aggression was biblical in its imagery and grotesque in its deceit. The Treaty of 1839,16 which allegedly obliged Britain to defend Belgian neutrality, was dredged up as the reason for taking Britain to war. This despite repeated pronouncements by Asquith and others which denied that there were any treaties or alliances which compelled Britain to go to war.17

  An emotional telegram from the King of the Belgians to his good friend King George pleading for assistance was read to the crowded Commons. The fact that it had been delivered from Buckingham Palace hot foot to Grey was intended as a signal to MPs from the king that the country had an obligation towards Belgium. Grey invoked emotional blackmail. If Belgian neutrality was abused by Germany, he asked, would Britain, endowed as it was with influence and power, ‘stand by and witness the perpetration of the direst crime that ever stained the pages of history, and thus become participators in the sin’?18

  The ‘direst crime that ever stained the pages of history’? Had no one in the Foreign Office read Edith Durham’s account of the slaughter of thousands of innocents in the Balkans? Were the massacres in Albania, Serbia and Bulgaria of no consequence? Had Grey forgotten the atrocities in the Congo, where the Belgian king’s mercenaries slaughtered millions, outraging world opinion in 1908?19 But then most of these people were black or Muslims or from other such ethnic groups, and therefore of little value in Secret Elite thinking. Sir Edward Grey’s hyperbole and melodramatic statements were truly worthy of ridicule, but his words were greeted with loud cheers from the jingoistic Conservatives on the opposition benches.20

  Grey had long known that his entire argument would be predicated on Belgian neutrality. It had been absolutely vital that Belgium remained apart from the entente and did not seek membership, so that its neutrality could be construed as a sacred issue, a point of principle that necessitated British support when the time came. Consider the whole charade of neutrality that the Secret Elite used to manipulate British foreign policy. No formula for British neutrality could ever square with the naval and military obligations that had been agreed directly with France, and more indirectly with Russia. There was no neutrality; it was another lie, a shameless posture to deceive Germany and bring about war.

  He painted a picture of Europe in a state of collapse, stating that if Belgium fell, ‘the independence of Holland will follow … and then Denmark’. Neither happened. He was strident in his determination to present the case for war as inevitable. His claims became ever more excitable. The impact of going to war was described as such that ‘we shall suffer but little more than we shall suffer even if we stand aside’. Grey prophesied an end to foreign trade – a ridiculous assertion, given the power of the British navy and the spread of the British Empire. The Guardian later lambasted his lack of commercial knowledge and his ignorance of the workings of trade,21 but he was pushing every alarm button, raising every fear, pandering to every prejudice.

  Yet he found one bright spot in all of his well-rehearsed alarm: Ireland. In the midst of all the doom and gloom and talk of imminent civil war, he asserted that the Irish question was no longer an issue ‘which we feel we have now to take into account’. Why? What had happened to justify such an unexpected claim? From what authority could he suddenly draw the conclusion that the ‘general feeling throughout Ireland’ was in favour of British foreign policy?

  Edward Grey’s double-speak lent him the appearance of a man of honour. In reality, he was deliberately guiding the nation to a world war. He could not contemplate Britain’s ‘unconditional neutrality’. Such action was bound to ‘sacrifice our respect and good name and reputation before the world, and should not escape the most serious and grave economic consequences’. His doom-laden statement promised suffering and misery ‘from which no country in Europe will escape and from which no abdication or neutrality will save us’.22 He made great play of the notion that ‘the most awful responsibility is resting upon the government in deciding what to advise the House of Commons to do’. The House of Commons was not being offered a choice; it was being advised that there was no choice.

  He sat down to a storm of cheering and acclaim from the Conservatives, part orchestrated, part genuine. Leo Amery caustically found it ‘so long and so dull that I more than once fell asleep’.23 As an inner-circle member of the Secret Elite, Grey’s speech would have come as no surprise to Amery, but he admitted that it was better received by the Liberals than the government had expected.24 The majority of Liberal MPs were stunned by what they had heard. Suddenly, without debate, consensus or warning, the government, their Liberal government, was on the brink of declaring war. Irish Members were bemused to hear that the Irish question was about to suddenly evaporate and no longer pose a problem should Britain go to war. Had the Ulster Unionists promised unconditional support? Had the south?

  What followed was truly remarkable. The leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party, Bonar Law, solemnly acknowledged that the government had done everything in its power to preserve peace, but ‘if any other course is taken, it is because it is forced upon them,
and that they have no alternative’. This same man had described Asquith, Churchill, Lloyd George and Grey as ‘the most incompetent, policy-less people to be found on earth’25 and warned they were drifting to disaster. Barely three weeks before, Bonar Law boldly told Edward Grey that if he could not use his influence to preserve peace in his own land (Ireland), he could do no good abroad.26

  These members of the Secret Elite played the parliamentary game of charades to preserve the facade of democracy. Sir Edward Grey knew well in advance that fellow placemen in the Conservative Party would support war. Churchill had carefully vetted their attitude27 and Asquith was sent a personal letter of unqualified Conservative support. Hours before Grey’s speech, Asquith had yet again been reassured that the Conservatives would stand with him by Bonar Law and Lord Lansdowne.28 Conservative support in the House of Commons was a prearranged pantomime, a pantomime that played well to the press gallery. The Secret Elite had never let party politics interfere with its spheres of influence. They controlled them all.

  That John Redmond, leading member of the Irish Home Rule party, should have risen to promise the support of Catholic Ireland appeared much more astonishing. His bold suggestion that Ireland could defend itself, thus releasing the British Army for service elsewhere, was astounding but effective. Asquith noted gratefully that Redmond ‘cut in effectively’ to offer support to the government.29 Even his very language had a sense of stage-management. No one on the Irish Home Rule benches expected Redmond to make any comment. There had been no prior consultation, as was both customary and obligatory on important issues. Redmond was, by understanding and agreement, more of a party chairman than a leader. John Dillon, the most important of the Irish Home-Rulers, was in Dublin on that fateful afternoon. Redmond acted in his own right30 and officially there had been no consultation between him and the government. It appeared that he had simply been swept away by Grey’s rhetoric, but an article in The Times on 1 August, stating that government troops could be withdrawn safely from Ireland,31 exposed that as a lie. There was also evidence that Redmond met with Asquith immediately before Grey’s speech.32 The Times? Secret meetings? Deals? What was Redmond’s association with the Secret Elite?