by Hew Strachan
It is tempting to argue that British military thought had already anticipated diplomacy in assuming a continental thrust. In 1903 and 1908 the Committee of Imperial Defence had concluded that British naval supremacy ensured that there was little prospect of a successful hostile invasion of Britain. Furthermore, the succession of alliances, ending with the 1907 Anglo-Russian convention, lessened the number of strategic options which the newly created general staff had to consider. The possibility of operations against Germany in Europe, first adumbrated in 1902 and the object of a war game in 1905, gradually grew in importance. But until 1907 any major continental operations which the army envisaged were centred on India, not—despite the 1906 Anglo-French staff talks—on Europe. The purpose of the latter was diplomatic, not strategic. They were fostered by the politicians, Grey and the secretary of war, Haldane, rather than by the soldiers, who had formed a low estimate of the French army.38 The British Expeditionary Force of six divisions, ready to be dispatched to any quarter of the globe, and fashioned by Haldane, was the fruit of cash constraints, not strategic reappraisal. The burgeoning costs of the navy, plus the Liberals’ domestic reforms, necessitated savings: between 1905/6 and 1909/10 Haldane had lopped £2.5 million from the army estimates. Haldane’s army was still the projectile of the navy, relying on sea-power for ubiquity and concentration, and so gaining in effectiveness and in flexibility while remaining small.39
Two factors contributed to the emerging dominance of continentalism in British military thought. First, the navy itself showed little interest in amphibious operations: the fleet wanted a big sea battle in the event of European war not the more mundane tasks of transporting and supplying limited land warfare on the European periphery. The one plan it did develop, that for a landing on the Baltic coast, was dismissed as unworkable by the army as early as the winter of 1908–9.40 Secondly, Henry Wilson, a noted Francophile, convinced that war in Europe was inevitable and possessed of political instincts few British soldiers could match, became director of military operations in August 1910. Wilson promptly began to give substance to the 1906 staff talks; he conveniently calculated that the British contribution of six divisions was sufficient to swing the balance in a Franco-German conflict, and set about planning the transport of those divisions to France. Thus, when in the wake of the Agadir crisis the Committee of Imperial Defence met on 23 August 1911 to review British strategy in the event of a European war, the army’s case was well developed and specific. By contrast, the presentation of Sir A. K. Wilson, Fisher’s successor as First Sea Lord, was shambling and ill-thought-out. The navy’s potential supporters were not present at the meeting; instead, Lloyd George and Winston Churchill—representatives of the radicals in the government—were convinced by the arguments for rapid continental intervention in the event of a Franco-German war. In the wake of that meeting Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty. The effect was to divide Churchill from Lloyd George, so weakening the radicals’ voice in the cabinet. The significance of this move became increasingly evident in late 1913 and early 1914, by which stage the chancellor of the exchequer regarded the European scene as increasingly peaceful and the case for a reduction in naval spending in 1915 as correspondingly stronger.41 Ostensibly Churchill’s task was to create a naval staff, so that the senior service could prepare itself as well as the army had done for strategic discussions, but it was also to bring the navy into line with continental thought. The French navy in 1906 had already decided to concentrate its strength in the Mediterranean, and Fisher’s redistribution had weighted the British navy towards the Atlantic and the Channel; these independent decisions were made complementary by the institution of Anglo-French naval talks in 1912. The Royal Navy was prepared to accept operational plans that confirmed its existing deployment, and consigned what was seen as a subsidiary theatre to the secondary naval power.
Although the consequence of the second Moroccan crisis was a closer identification between British strategy and French, no formal alliance resulted. The cabinet was informed in November 1911 of the Anglo-French staff talks, and a year later agreed, as the culmination of the naval discussions, that the two powers would consult each other in the event of an attack by a third party. In German eyes British diplomacy was now focused on the Entente, not on the concert of Europe, with the Foreign Office too ready to interpret every crisis, however fomented, as the consequence of a Berlin-driven conspiracy.42 Nonetheless, Grey warded off French pressure for an even tighter commitment, citing his fear of radical opposition in parliament and the accompanying danger that even these limited agreements could thus be undermined. The concert of Europe remained his ideal means of managing the continent; the Entente was a device by which Britain could maintain its free hand, while simultaneously cautioning the Germans and moderating French and German behaviour.43 Britain’s refusal to align itself unequivocally created an ambiguity in great power relations between 1911 and 1914, for Grey’s faith in the concert system was not reciprocated elsewhere. Conferences had, after all, not proved to be to Germany’s advantage.
French foreign policy, while not pursuing an entirely straight course after 1911, gained considerably in coherence and direction. Caillaux’s secret communications with Germany were intercepted and deciphered by the intelligence service of the very Foreign Ministry he was trying to bypass. In January 1912 the Germanophobe and radical, Georges Clemenceau, used this information to engineer the fall of Caillaux’s government. Raymond Poincaré, who formed the new ministry, had been rapporteur of the Senate commission to examine the Franco-German treaty of 4 November 1911, and assumed the foreign office portfolio himself. In January 1913 Poincaré became president, an office that he was to hold until 1920. He was thus able to provide the continuity which proved so elusive, given the endemic ministerial instability of the Third Republic. Partly by sheer hard work, partly by creating his own administrative structure, and partly by his direct access to intercepted diplomatic messages, he contrived to be independent of the machinations of the bureaux of the foreign ministry, and to a considerable degree to insulate foreign policy from the seven changes of government experienced by France between 1912 and 1914.
Poincaré himself was a Lorrainer; he was a patriot and he distrusted Germany. But it would be mistaken to conclude that France either sought war or did so to recover Alsace-Lorraine. If Germany and France found themselves at war for other reasons, the lost provinces would, quite clearly, become a war aim for France. Révanche figured large in German projections of French ambitions, but in practice mattered little to most Frenchmen. The provinces increasingly identified themselves with Germany, and not even the Zabern incident of 1913, which made abundantly clear the high-handedness of the German military presence, evoked an official French response.
Poincaré’s foreign policy had two main aims. Domestically, he hoped to establish a political consensus, drawing support from the left and right of the centre, and weakening Action française on the extreme right and socialism on the left. His chances of success were boosted by the fact that radicalism, like liberalism in Germany, was being split between left and right: at the beginning of the century anticlericalism had sponsored a fusion of the radicals and socialists, but after 1906 the socialists had been pulled away from the bourgeois radicals by the need to respond to the trades-union movement. Externally, Poincaré saw the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente as creating a European balance of power and fostering continental security through mutual rivalry. To that end, the coalition of the opposing alliance was as important as that of his own. The activities of Jules Cambon in Berlin, fostering Franco-German détente, were rebuffed as a threat to Entente solidarity; but so too were the efforts of Barrère, France’s ambassador in Rome, to draw Italy out of the Triple Alliance by exploiting Italian hostility for Austria-Hungary. One of the paradoxes of European security before 1914 was that each of the major players— Grey, Bethmann Hollweg, and Poincaré himself—sought to create stability, but each used different means as appropria
te to its achievement.
It followed from Poincaré’s commitment to the Entente that Franco-Russian relations, as well as Anglo-French, should be strengthened in 1912. From the German perspective such moves were far from reassuring: they cut across Bethmann Hollweg’s policy of détente and they confirmed fears of a two-front war. Poincaré’s policy did nothing to lessen the tensions in European relations, and to that extent he promoted war rather than averted it.44 Moreover, his policy in relation to Russia in 1912 was open to more than one interpretation. Poincaré’s defenders argue that his object was to manage Russia, not egg her on: the lack of Russian support for France during the 1911 crisis and German efforts to woo Russia combined with a desire to restrain Russia in her policies towards the Ottoman empire and the Balkans. But to the Russians themselves, and even to Henry Wilson, Poincaré could seem an adventurist.45 In July 1912 the French and Russian general staffs met, as they had been doing since 1892 under the terms of the military convention. The following month Poincaré visited Russia in order to learn more of Russian involvement in the Balkans. He assured the Russians that should Russia and Austria-Hungary come to blows over the Balkans, and should the Germans then support the Austrians, they could rely on French support. Poincaré gave this undertaking knowing that in all probability the Germans would strike against France first, in order to secure their rear before turning east. The commitment did not, therefore, represent a major shift in the French position; rather, it was vital to the plans of the French general staff who hoped thus to secure Russian support against any German attack on France. On 17 November 1912 Poincaré reiterated his undertaking to Russia: France’s concern for its own defence therefore allowed Russia to be more adventurous—not less so—in the Balkans. Poincaré reaffirmed his Russian policy by appointing Delcassé as France’s ambassador in St Petersburg in February 1913.46 In the summer, the French government intervened in Russian negotiations on the French stock market for a loan to finance railway construction. The French objective was to bring pressure to bear on the speed of Russian mobilization, so as to coordinate mutually supporting attacks on Germany from east and west: the French said they would concentrate 200,000 more troops than they had undertaken to do in 1892.47
All the threads of Poincaré’s foreign policy were brought together during the course of 1913 by the debate on the extension of the period of military service to three years. At one level this was a purely technical question. In 1905 the term of service was set at two years: loud and long were the complaints of regular soldiers, who felt that all their time was taken up with basic training and that the level of training then acquired was inadequate. Force was given to their arguments by the relative decline in the French population (France in 1910 had to take 83 per cent of her available manpower to produce the same size army as Germany did with 57.3 per cent),48 and by the need to match the increases authorized for the Germany army in 1912–13. Professional military wisdom therefore calculated that a longer period of service would produce an army that was both larger and more competent. The domestic arguments of the French army were of course at one with the strategy which the alliance with Russia now demanded: both Poincaré and the French general staff had committed France to taking the offensive against Germany if need be. The alliance and the three-year law therefore interlocked.49 So powerful were these arguments that the radicals could not unite on the issue, but split, some acknowledging the threat posed by the level of German military preparedness and others accepting the socialists’ preference for a short-term citizen army. The debate showed how relatively little French politics were polarized when foreign policy was employed in a domestic context: the radicals and socialists did form a fresh bloc in October 1913, but the issue that united them was less opposition to three-year service and more the advocacy of income tax as a means to finance it. Finally, although set in the context of popular nationalism, the three-year service law was presented by the government as a means of reassurance and of deterrence in Franco-German relations. The minister of war, addressing the army committee of the Chamber of Deputies on 11 March 1913, accepted that defensive requirements necessitated German manpower increases, given the threats to east and west: ‘Quite frankly, and I mean this most sincerely,’ he declared, ‘I do not think that at this moment, as I utter these words, or even yesterday, Germany has or had the intention to pounce upon France.’50
While the Moroccan crisis hardened the Entente, and in particular France’s advocacy of robustness as a means to deterrence, it alarmed Bethmann Hollweg. He did not abandon Weltpolitik, but he did soften it, recognizing that its pursuit should be harmonized at least with Britain. Furthermore, the chances of domestic support for a renewed attempt at an Anglo-German naval agreement seemed, on the face of it, reasonable. The naval budget had grown 134 per cent between 1904 and 1912, against an army increase of 47 per cent; naval spending now exceeded half the total military expenditure.51 By espousing the army’s case for attention Bethmann could deflect the navy’s, and so play off one against the other. Furthermore, the navy itself was divided by Tirpitz’s building programme: Henning von Holtzendorff, the commander of the High Seas Fleet, wanted to improve training and efficiency rather than to have more ships. On the political front, the composition of the Reichstag did not augur well for the navy’s chances of further funds: the January 1912 elections had been a triumph for the left and, in March 1912, introduction of a new inheritance tax undermined any residual support from the right. The Treasury and the Bundesrat—for similar financial reasons—backed Bethmann against Tirpitz. Finally, German hopes that the British Liberal government would be more amenable than it had been in 1909 and 1910 were buoyed by the anxiety of its more radical members at the heightened Anglo-German tension; Herbert Asquith’s cabinet (Asquith succeeded Campbell-Bannerman as prime minister in 1908) had to show its supporters that it had at least tried to reach an understanding with Germany.
In practice, the prospects of success were remote. Tirpitz was now openly set on a rate of construction that would proceed independently of Britain, and would give Germany a ratio of 2:3 in capital ships. He proposed a supplementary naval law, that would prevent a return to a building rate of two vessels per year as planned, and would instead commit Germany to three ships in each of 1912, 1914, and 1916. Domestically his cards were stronger than first appearances suggested. To those supportive of détente he could argue that Britain would never negotiate if Germany embarked on reductions unilaterally. The case for firmness was of course equally attractive to those who identified Britain as the primary author of Gemany’s humiliation at Agadir. And for Tirpitz himself, conscious of the domestic political pressures now mounting against the naval programme, an international agreement fixing rates of shipbuilding would at least secure the programme’s independence of the Reichstag. The Kaiser, listening to the naval attaché in London rather than to the German ambassador, backed Tirpitz and not Bethmann Hollweg. Bethmann’s domestic position was further weakened on 9 February 1912 when Churchill sarcastically and provocatively characterized the German navy as a ‘luxury fleet’.
Therefore, when the British emissary Haldane, the secretary of state for war and a student of German philosophy, arrived in Berlin, his expectations were not great. The Kaiser, it is true, was as usual using bluster and declamation as a substitute for diplomacy, and at bottom hoped and even believed that a strong line would bring Britain to terms more readily than overt conciliation. But Bethmann Hollweg still wished for a general undertaking of neutrality on Britain’s part, and his hopes were raised by Haldane’s apparent inclination to discuss political issues rather than naval matters. Even more encouraging was Churchill’s suggestion on 18 March of a ‘naval holiday. For most Germans this suggested that their strong line had triumphed; however, Tirpitz was momentarily nonplussed, since Churchill’s suggested ratio of sixteen British Dreadnoughts for ten German implied a break in the building tempo. Four days later the 1912 German supplementary naval law was published. Churchill calculated tha
t it would compel Britain to build five ships in one year and then four the next year over a six-year period, at a cost of an extra 3 million pounds a year.52 Whatever the financial burden, Britain was not prepared to be neutralized, to leave France to German domination, and so undermine its own strategic position. The talks reached an impasse. The Anglo-French naval agreement of 1912 was therefore in part a gesture of solidarity towards France after the flirtation with Germany. It was also profoundly pragmatic: to control naval building Britain had—given the 1912 German law—to ask France to take on responsibility for the Mediterranean in the name of the Entente.
The naval balance in the Mediterranean highlighted the fact that by the summer of 1912 both sides, and particularly Britain, were pursuing policies that were increasingly driven by factors in addition to those that determined their relationship with each other. Britain maintained a one-power standard in the Mediterranean, so that it would be equivalent to the next largest local navy after that of France. Thus the decision by Austria-Hungary to lay down two Dreadnoughts in 1910 and a further two in 1912 (so matching Italy’s programme) was both a driving force in the Anglo-French naval agreement and a factor in the abandonment of the idea of a ‘naval holiday’.53 Similarly Australia, New Zealand, and to a lesser extent Canada showed an interest in contributing to the Dreadnought programme, not so much because of the German threat in the North Sea as because of their worries about Japan in the Pacific. The equivalent German pressure was the Russian decision to replace the Baltic fleet lost at Tsushima. The effect of these secondary naval arms races was to compound the principal one, each side aggregating the forces of its opponent, although elements of its own building were a response to other pressures. In May 1912 Churchill declared that Britain would build two new ships for every additional German ship; the implication of his programme was that by 1917 Britain would have fifty-one Dreadnoughts to Germany’s twenty-eight.
