Meanwhile, the Tory Party in Churchill’s Oldham District was fed up with him. So it was that Churchill crossed over to the Liberal Party. His timing proved perfect as he rode into power and into the Cabinet in the Liberal landslide of 1906. By 1911, he was First Lord and the most forceful advocate in the Cabinet for Britain’s immediate entry into any Franco-German war.
THE SCHLIEFFEN PLAN
IN PRODDING THE CABINET into war, the ace of trumps for Grey and Churchill was Belgium. Seventy-five years earlier, France, Prussia, and Great Britain had signed a treaty guaranteeing Belgium’s neutrality. The 1839 pact was grounded in British history. Believing that control of the Channel coast opposite Dover by a great hostile power was a threat to her vital interests, England had gone to war with Philip II of Spain, Louis XIV, and Napoleon. After Belgium had been torn from the carcass of Napoleon’s empire, Britain had extracted a guarantee of Belgium’s neutrality. The European powers respected this as a vital British interest. When France was maneuvered into war by Bismarck in 1870, the Iron Chancellor had given assurances to Gladstone that when von Moltke’s army marched into France, it would not tread on Belgian soil. With Belgium unmolested, Gladstone saw no vital interest in who prevailed in the Franco-Prussian war.
The 1839 treaty, however, had an exit clause: It authorized, but did not require, Britain to go to war should any nation violate the neutrality of Belgium:
The language of the 1839 treaty was unusual on one point: It gave the the signatories the right, but not the duty, of intervention in case of violation. In 1914, as the possibility of German violation loomed, the noninterventionists in the Cabinet clung to this point. Britain, they said, had no obligation to defend Belgium, especially if Belgium itself chose not to fight.22
And the world had changed since 1839. Napoleon had said of Prussia that it “was hatched from a cannon ball.” By 1914, the cannonball was the heart of a nation of seventy million, stretching from France to Russia and the Baltic to the Alps, that produced 15 percent of the world’s goods to Britain’s 14 percent—and twice as much steel. Germany was the most powerful nation in Europe and, after Russia, the most populous. In 1870, Germany had crushed France in six weeks. Her army was the greatest fighting force on earth. But Germany was virtually friendless, and the arrogance and bellicosity of the Kaiser and his haughty countrymen were among the causes. In his travel notes Crown Prince Henry wrote, “Our country is not much loved anywhere and indeed frequently hated.”23 Writes German historian Andreas Hillgruber:
Public opinion in other European nations slowly came to sense a threat, less because of the goals of German policy per se than the crude, overbearing style that Germany projected on the international stage. Without this background, one cannot understand the truly radical hate for Germany and all things German that broke out in the Entente countries with the war of 1914.24
In France she was especially hated. The Kaiser’s grandfather, against the advice of Bismarck, had amputated Alsace and Lorraine after the 1870 war. The Prussian General Staff had persuaded the emperor that the provinces must be annexed to keep France permanently on the defensive. But their loss had made of France a mortal enemy resolute upon revenge. Of Alsace-Lorraine, the French had a saying, first attributed to Gambetta: “Speak of it never, think of it always!”
Russia was now France’s ally. And given her size, resources, and population, Germans feared, Russia must soon assume leadership of all the Slavic peoples. The German General Staff, with an unreliable ally in Italy, a crumbling ally in Austria, and an immense Russian Empire growing in power as she laid down railroad tracks into Poland, preferred that if war must come, it come sooner rather than later. Time was not on Germany’s side. “The future [belongs] to Russia, which grows and grows, and which hangs over us like an increasingly horrible incubus,” said Bethmann-Hollweg. “In a few years there will be no defense against it.”25
Germany’s war plans were dictated by geography. Wedged between a hostile France and a rising Russia, Germany had to prepare for a two-front war, with the French attacking in Alsace and Russia marching into Prussia. The elder Moltke, the field marshal who had led Prussia to her victories over Austria and France, had adopted a defensive strategy against France, with a limited offensive in the east to drive Russia out of Poland, then to allow “its enemies to wreck their armies by hurling them against walls of [German] fire and steel.”26
“We should exploit in the West the great advantages which the Rhine and our powerful fortifications offer to the defensive,” Moltke had said as early as 1879, and “apply all the fighting forces which are not absolutely indispensable for an imposing offensive against the east.”27
This remained strategic doctrine until a new figure arrived in Berlin: the legendary Count Alfred von Schlieffen, Chief of the General Staff from 1891 to 1906, a “man without hobbies [who] often worked until midnight, then relaxed by reading military history to his daughters.”28
The Schlieffen Plan, laid down in virtual tablets of stone, called for the German army, no matter where war erupted, to strike first and hardest to crush Germany’s strongest enemy, France, then to shift her armies by rail to meet the Russian steamroller before it rumbled into East Prussia. When the great war comes, Count Schlieffen instructed his generals, “the whole of Germany must throw itself upon one enemy, the strongest, most powerful, most dangerous enemy, and that can only be France.”29 In the Prussian-led German army, the Schlieffen Plan was sacred text. “It was often said in 1914, and has often been repeated since [that] ‘mobilization means war,’” writes historian A.J.P. Taylor: “This was not true.”30
All the Powers except one could mobilize and yet go on with diplomacy, keeping their armies within their frontiers. Mobilization was a threat of a high order, but still a threat. The Germans, however, had run mobilization and war into one. In this sense, Schlieffen…though dead, was the real maker of the First World War. “Mobilization means war” was his idea. In 1914, his dead hand automatically pulled the trigger.31
However, a rapid defeat of France required not only that the German army mobilize and move swiftly on unalterable timetables, but also that it not be halted, pinioned, and bled on the great French fortresses of Belfort-Epinal and Toul-Verdun. The solution was Belgium. Under the Schlieffen Plan, weak German forces in Alsace and Lorraine were to hold out against an anticipated French invasion, while the German right wing, seven-eighths of the army in the west, smashed into Belgium, far to the north of the French forts. After storming through Belgium, which would hopefully yield without a fight, the army would break out into the undefended north of France and execute a giant wheeling movement, enveloping Paris and the French army from the rear. “When you march into France,” Count Schlieffen admonished his generals, “let the last man on the right brush the Channel with his sleeve.”32
Schlieffen had died at eighty in 1913. On his deathbed, he was heard to mutter, “It must come to a fight. Only make the right wing strong.”33
From the marshaling of men and munitions, trains and horses, to the designated stepping-off points on the frontier, every detail of Schlieffen’s plan had been engraved on the minds of the General Staff. The plan could not be altered. Its core principle was that France must be defeated first and swiftly, and the only avenue to certain victory passed through Belgium. If Belgium resisted, she must be mercilessly crushed. German survival commanded it. Dismissing quibbles over Belgian neutrality, Moltke’s nephew, who now headed the General Staff, declared, “We must put aside all commonplaces as to the responsibility of the aggressor. Success alone justifies war.”34
The British were largely unaware of the Schlieffen Plan, and few had any idea that a seventy-five-year-old treaty to defend Belgian neutrality might drag them into a great European war most had no desire to fight. But the supremely confident German General Staff was unconcerned. Warned that violating Belgium’s neutrality could bring a British army across the Channel, Moltke told Tirpitz, “The more English the better.”35 A few British divi
sions would not stop the German juggernaut, and any British soldiers in France would be caught in the net along with the French, and be unavailable for fighting elsewhere.
The Germans had forgotten Bismarck, who warned that preventive war is “like committing suicide out of fear of death.”36 It would be the arrival of a British Expeditionary Force of 120,000 men that crossed the Channel in the first two weeks without hindrance from the High Seas Fleet that would blunt the German advance and defeat the Schlieffen Plan.
“WINSTON ALONE WAS BUOYANT”
BY SATURDAY, AUGUST 1, Russia had begun to mobilize and Germany and France were on the brink. Yet Asquith’s Cabinet remained divided. Most of his ministers were willing to consider war if Belgium was invaded. But some opposed war, no matter the provocation. Grey sought to move the Cabinet toward war without forcing resignations. Privately, Asquith supported him. Publicly, he temporized to hold the government together.
Of Asquith, Churchill would write, “When the need required it, his mind opened and shut smoothly and exactly, like the breach of a gun.”37 But Asquith had not yet decided to force the issue.
The First Lord took the lead. “Winston very bellicose and demanding immediate mobilization,” wrote Asquith, “occupied at least half the time.”38
By that evening, Germany had declared war on Russia, which had refused to halt its mobilization, and on France, which had refused to declare neutrality. Sunday morning, Grey convinced a Cabinet majority to agree that the Royal Navy would block any move by the High Seas Fleet into the Channel to attack French shipping or bombard the coast. Saturday night, exceeding his authority, Grey had already given that assurance to Cambon, the French ambassador. Cabinet Minister John Burns immediately resigned.
“The Cabinet sat almost continuously throughout Sunday [August 2],” wrote Asquith’s daughter Violet. “When they broke up for an interval at luncheon time all those I saw looked racked with anxiety and some stricken with grief. Winston alone was buoyant.”39
By the end of the second Cabinet meeting on Sunday, a majority had agreed: If Germany invaded Belgium, and the Belgians fought and called on Britain for aid, British honor and the 1839 treaty meant she must fight. Five Cabinet members were about to join Burns and resign. Seeing no cause to justify a vast expenditure of British blood and treasure in a Franco-German war, they pleaded with Lloyd George to lead them out. Had Lloyd George agreed, and had all six ministers resigned Monday, Asquith’s Cabinet would have broken up, his government might have fallen, and history would have taken another course.
“The key figure was Lloyd George, and Churchill played a major role in winning his support for a declaration of war,” writes Charmley.40 As Lloyd George vacillated, Churchill pressed him to take his stand on the issue of Belgium’s neutrality. Churchill knew public opinion would swing around to war when the Germans invaded Belgium, as they must. He believed that Lloyd George would swing with it. Churchill knew his man.
As late as July 27, Lloyd George had volunteered that he “knew of no Minister who would be in favour of it [war],” adding, “[T]here could be no question of our taking part in any war.”41 But the Chancellor could see the Unionists uniting behind Grey and Churchill. Having opposed the Boer War, Lloyd George did not want to repeat the painful experience “of standing out against a war-inflamed populace.”42 If the nation was going to fight, he would stand with the nation. For Lloyd George knew that if he did not, his position as heir apparent to leadership of the Liberal Party, a position he had spent twenty-five years building, would be lost, probably to his young rival, the First Lord. Lloyd George might then end his brilliant career as a backbencher in a Liberal Party led by Winston Churchill.
“It was an historic disaster—though not for his own career—that Lloyd George did not support the opponents of intervention at this crucial juncture,” writes Ferguson.43 That there was opportunism in Lloyd George’s refusal to lead the antiwar ministers out of the Cabinet, and in his quiet campaign to persuade them to hold off resigning until they learned whether the German Army would violate the neutrality of Belgium, seems undeniable. Biographer Peter Rowland writes, “The truth of the matter was, quite simply, he did not want to resign…. [H]e was looking around, during those last days of July, for a face-saving formula which would enable him to stay put as Asquith’s second-in-command.”44
Lloyd George’s secretary and mistress, later his wife, confirms it. Wrote Frances Stevenson Lloyd George, forty years later: “My own opinion is that L.G.’s mind was really made up from the first, that he knew we would have to go in, and that the invasion of Belgium was, to be cynical, a heaven-sent excuse for supporting a declaration of war.”45
After Churchill wrote a note to Lloyd George in Cabinet to “bring your mighty aid to the discharge of our duty,” the Chancellor, at the August 1 Cabinet meeting, shoved a note back across the table to the First Lord: “If you do not press us too hard tonight, we might come together.”46
Yet there was cynicism and opportunism also in Churchill’s clucking concern for Belgium. As Manchester writes, Churchill “didn’t care for the Belgians; he thought their behavior in the Congo disgraceful.”47 Of all the colonial powers in Africa, none had acted with greater barbarity than the Belgium of King Leopold.
Such was the rapacity of his regime that the cost in human life due to murder, starvation, disease and reduced fertility has been estimated at ten million: half the existing population. There was nothing hyperbolic about Joseph Conrad’s portrayal of “the horror” of this in The Heart of Darkness.48
Churchill also “suspected the existence of a secret agreement between Brussels and Berlin which would permit the Germans to cross Belgium on their way to France.”49 There was another reason the First Lord did not consider a violation of Belgium’s neutrality to be a casus belli. If war came, Churchill was determined to violate Belgian neutrality himself by ordering the Royal Navy to blockade Antwerp to prevent its becoming a port of entry for goods destined for Germany.
“[I]f Germany had not violated Belgian neutrality in 1914, Britain would have,” writes Niall Ferguson. “This puts the British government’s much-vaunted moral superiority in fighting ‘for Belgian neutrality’ in another light.”50 The German invasion of Belgium enabled the British war party to put a high moral gloss on a war they had already decided to fight for reasons of realpolitik. As early as 1911, during the second Moroccan crisis, Churchill had confided to Lloyd George his real reason for committing himself morally and secretly to bringing Britain into any Franco-German war.
It is not for Morocco, nor indeed for Belgium, that I would take part in this terrible business. One cause alone should justify our participation—to prevent France from being trampled down & looted by the Prussian junkers—a disaster ruinous to the world, & swiftly fatal to our country.51
Late Sunday, word came of Berlin’s ultimatum to Brussels. Asquith ordered mobilization. By Monday morning, Lloyd George had deserted the anti-interventionists and enlisted in the war party. Two years later, he would replace Asquith and lead Britain to victory.
Over that weekend the mood of the British people underwent a sea change. A peace demonstration scheduled for Sunday in Trafalgar Square dissolved. Millions who did not want to go to war for France were suddenly wildly enthusiastic about war for Belgium. As Lloyd George observed, a poll on August 1 “would have shown 95 per cent against…hostilities…. A poll on the following Tuesday (4 August) would have resulted in a vote of 99 percent in favor.”52
Said Churchill, “[E]very British heart burned for little Belgium.”53
By Monday morning’s Cabinet meeting, King George had a request from King Albert, calling on Britain to fulfill its obligation under the 1839 treaty. Belgium would fight rather than let the Kaiser make her a doormat on which German soldiers wiped their boots as they marched into France. That afternoon, Sir Edward Grey called on the House to defend “British interests, British honour, and British obligations.” The invasion of Belgium, said Grey, was “the d
irest crime that ever stained the pages of history.”54
The British interests were to prevent Germany from crushing France as a Great Power and occupying the Channel coast. British obligations, said Grey, had been written into the 1839 treaty. British honor had been placed on the line when Britain had persuaded France to transfer the French fleet to the Mediterranean. Said Sir Edward,
[I]f the German fleet came down the English Channel and bombarded and battered the undefended coasts of France, we could not stand aside [cheers broke out in the House] and see the thing going on practically in sight of our eyes, with our arms folded, looking on dispassionately, doing nothing!55
Grey’s address carried the House and prepared the nation for the ultimatum that would bring a declaration of war on August 4. When he returned to his office, Grey received U.S. ambassador Walter Hines Page. Tears in his eyes, he told Page, “Thus, the efforts of a lifetime go for nothing. I feel like a man who wasted his life.”56
That evening Grey stood with a friend looking out at St. James Park as the lamps were being lit. “The lamps are going out all over Europe,” said Grey. “We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”57
On August 4, after von Kluck’s divisions crossed the Belgian frontier, the prime minister’s wife came to see him in his office.
Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War Page 5
