Consciousness of Sheep
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Remembrance Day, first commemorated on 11 November 1919, has become an annual memorial not just to those who fell in the First World War, but to Britain’s military dead in all conflicts. Initially intended as the beginning of a national healing process, also marked by the interring of the unknown soldier in Westminster Abbey and the construction of the Cenotaph in Whitehall in 1920, the “act of remembrance” has come to obscure more than it reveals. As I explained six years ago, the focus on the millions who died before the armistice was signed served to hide the unnecessary slaughter which took place in the six hours between the signing and the guns falling silent – the British, for example, assaulting the Belgian town of Mons which they could have walked into just minutes later, and the Americans losing more men than died on Omaha beach on D-Day making an opposed crossing of the Meuse river as the preliminary to a bigger (cancelled) assault on 14 November 1918.
Was it calculated evil or “just” stupidity? That is a question left hanging by the historians, and it is left to the reader to draw a conclusion… a conclusion which will be biased by one’s view of human nature. Since most of us tend unconsciously to assume the best in people, those who do evil in the world tend to be excused as fools. Lacking orders to the contrary, the donkeys leading the allied troops on that last day of the war blindly carried out the orders issued the day before. The fact that British generals might have been attempting to restore their reputation by taking the Belgian town that they had fled from in August 1914, or that racism may have played a part in American commanders’ decision to march a black division toward the German machine guns in those final hours was glossed over in the post-war rush to turn generals into heroes.
This same question of evil versus stupidity was there at the beginning of that unnecessary conflict too. Because the explanation, insofar as the historians offer us one at all, is that everyone involved was a fool. Kaiser Wilhelm gave Austria-Hungary his “blank cheque,” and then went off on a cruise of the Norwegian fiords. Count Berchtold issued Austria’s ultimatum to Serbia despite having no means of enforcing it. Tsar Nicholas casually issued Russia’s mobilisation order without understanding that it was a death sentence for his country and his family, Sir Edward Grey learned of the Austrian ultimatum, but chose to go fishing rather than respond. Sir George Buchanan and Maurice Paléologue (British and French Ambassadors to Russia) developed an extreme blindness to the troop movements on the streets outside their St. Petersburg offices during the last few days in which war might have been prevented.
In the wake of the two world wars, the caricature of the upper class twit was enshrined in British satire. But is it conceivable that so many top-ranking officials within the most powerful empires ever to exist at that point in time were really a bunch of simpletons or that Europe simply sleepwalked its way into carnage? Or might something far more sinister have been involved?
Britain’s role in the official story of the outbreak of war is that of an observer forced against its will to intervene only when the despicable Hun invaded plucky little Belgium. Britain’s unlikely – but to this day longest-serving – Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey, appears (not unlike Neville Chamberlain 24 years later) as a well-meaning but ineffectual mediator doing all in his power to find a peaceful solution to the July Crisis… overtaken, as Clive Ponting argues, by the backward state of diplomatic communication of the period – telegrams often arriving in European capitals hours after they might have halted the march to war. As Grey told Parliament on 3 August 1914:
“First of all let me say, very shortly, that we have consistently worked with a single mind, with all the earnestness in our power, to preserve peace. The House may be satisfied on that point…
“In the present crisis, it has not been possible to secure the peace of Europe; because there has been little time, and there has been a disposition—at any rate in some quarters on which I will not dwell—to force things rapidly to an issue, at any rate, to the great risk of peace, and, as we now know, the result of that is that the policy of peace, as far as the Great Powers generally are concerned, is in danger. I do not want to dwell on that, and to comment on it, and to say where the blame seems to us to lie, which Powers were most in favour of peace, which were most disposed to risk or endanger peace, because I would like the House to approach this crisis in which we are now, from the point of view of British interests, British honour, and British’ obligations, free from all passion as to why peace has not been preserved.”
Note, however, that never during the July crisis did Grey, or any other foreign office official, seek to stay Russia’s or France’s hand. All of Grey’s overtures were to Germany alone… not even to the Austrian aggressor, whose demands on Serbia were leading inexorably to the European conflict Grey claimed to wish to prevent. Far from being a neutral referee in the July Crisis, Britain’s one-sided diplomacy put it solidly on the side of France and Russia.
After the war, victors’ justice determined that the “quarters” who “forced things rapidly to an issue” were the beastly Germans. Although it was those same Germans who, in the last days of peace, were the only ones seeking a diplomatic way out… particularly when they discovered that a lack of Austrian planning had left the eastern front wide open. In any case, it is the last part of that quote from Sir Edward Grey which gives the game away. What, exactly, were those British interests and especially obligations which made war against Germany a matter of honour?
To understand this (as is true of events generally) we must take a long view of the history. And in this instance, it is a history of growing British weakness. Although by far the wealthiest and strongest (on paper) empire the world had ever known, as the first nation to industrialise, and suffering the effect of combined and uneven development, by the 1880s, Britain had been overtaken by both Germany and the USA. This economic weakness was probably overstated, but in the final quarter of the nineteenth century, British newspapers regularly complained about the volume of German goods appearing in the shops. In military affairs too, defeat of the professional army by a relative handful of Boer farmers, and a growing recognition that the Royal Navy could no longer afford to police the world’s oceans, led to the desire for allies which all failing empires resort to. Naval concerns resulted in the British empire’s first formal alliance – the 1902 treaty with Japan, which allowed Britain to withdraw from the Pacific without endangering its interests in China (the Japanese navy would later escort ships carrying ANZAC troops to the European war fronts).
On land, Britain’s obvious ally would have been Germany – by far the most powerful land force in the world at that point. Moreover, an alliance with Germany might have enforced caution on an expanding Russian empire which was encroaching on British possessions in India, Persia, and China. Not least because Russia was the one power which was immune to blockade or invasion by the Royal Navy.
When Kaiser Wilhelm appointed Admiral Tirpitz as head of what was then a small German navy in 1897, all prospects of an alliance with Britain were lost. Britain’s Naval policy was to maintain a fleet greater in size and power than the next two leading navies combined. Tirpitz set out to challenge this by creating a “fleet in being” large enough to sink enough British ships to leave Britain’s empire vulnerable – and thus to deter naval action against Germany. That this was a fool’s errand – costing Germany a fortune in the process – was obvious given the geography and borne out by the fact that there was just one inconclusive fleet action (off Jutland in May 1916) in the entire war. And while apologists for Germany point out that the naval race was over long before war broke out, the costs to Britain of having to outbuild Germany two-to-one in heavy ships led Britain into the opposite camp.
King Edward VII famously led the British rapprochement with the millennium-long French adversary. However, it was British statesmen (permanent and elected) who navigated the path to the 1904 “entente cordiale.” The conceit was that this was not an alliance and it in no way bound Britain to act in France’s defence. The formal informality of the agreement would come back to bite Britain during the July crisis, since it excluded them from the secret diplomatic and military obligations between France and Russia. In any case, it wasn’t true. By siding with France – and thus with Russia – Britain aimed to achieve a permanent settlement with Russia over China, India, and Persia. But this drew Britain ever deeper into military and naval commitments to both… something particularly troubling given the nature of the British government swept into office in February 1906.
The failures revealed by the Boer War – two-in-five recruits were unfit to serve – together with economic problems at home resulted in the last ever Liberal majority under the leadership of the pacifist Henry Campbell-Bannerman. This threatened the developing non-alliance alliance with France and Russia, not only because Campbell-Bannerman would not countenance any military agreements – formal or otherwise – with anyone, but because in the eyes of most Liberals, Tsarist Russia was a pariah state. But two years later, Campbell-Bannerman was gone, retired – some say pushed out – on grounds of ill-health, and replaced by his more belligerent Chancellor, Herbert Henry Asquith.
Although still officially the party of peace, under Asquith, a four-man (possibly five if we include David Lloyd George) war party within the peace party was in place – Lord Haldane as Secretary of State for War, Sir Edward Grey as Foreign Secretary, Winston Churchill as President of the Board of Trade (later First Lord of the Admiralty) and Asquith as Prime Minister. Under these four men – and without the knowledge of the Cabinet, still less the Parliamentary Liberal Party – an Anglo-French naval agreement was developed (formally agreed in 1912) which Bound Britain to defend the north and west coasts of France in the event of war between France and Germany (the treaty didn’t mention Germany, but it was hardly designed to protect against Norway or Holland). Meanwhile, under the supervision of Haldane (although again, without the knowledge of the Cabinet) General Henry Hughes Wilson spent several summers touring the likely battlegrounds in Belgium and France while becoming close friends with the head of the French military college, General Foch. This led to the informal – but mostly adhered to – plan for deploying the British Expeditionary Force on the left wing of the French Fifth Army in Belgium (yes, the British and French had also planned to invade Belgium if Germany hadn’t done it first). Arrangements with Russia were less defined, although Anglo-Russian naval talks were taking place immediately prior to the outbreak of war in 1914.
These, then, were the obligations that Sir Edward Grey was referring to in his speech to Parliament – a speech which, for the first time to all but a handful of MPs, made clear that war was imminent. Many MPs, including the Labour leader Ramsey MacDonald, spoke passionately in favour of peace. But there was no vote. Former Tory leader Arthur Balfour promised there would be a vote, but by the following evening Britain was at war. Indeed, the whole process had been meticulously steered by the war party.
Churchill had already defied the Cabinet by mobilising the Royal Navy’s Home Fleet on 28 July 1914. As Sean McMeekin notes:
“The only official in London who seems to have sensed the mounting danger was Churchill. Without consulting Grey, much less his even less belligerent Liberal colleagues in the cabinet (although he did inform Asquith, from whom he received ‘a sort of grunt’ implying approval), at five PM on Tuesday Churchill ordered the First Fleet to proceed northwards to its war station at Scapa Flow, passing through the Straits of Dover under cover of darkness.”
Although this action was a necessary first step to honouring Britain’s treaty to defend the French coast, it was likely also informed by a plan developed by former First Sea Lord John “Jacky” Fisher, to land marines in Antwerp to deny the port to the invading Germans. Either way, it was a British mobilisation which predated the German mobilisation by four days.
Indeed, as both McMeekin and Ponting show, the first, and entirely unnecessary (unless the aim was to provoke a war) mobilisation was ordered by Russia on 25 July, and thereby rendered all of the official diplomatic initiatives by Edward Grey worthless. But that may have been the point if Britain was also bent on war with Germany. A telegram from Sir George Buchanan in St. Petersburg provided Sir Edward Grey on 24 July (before anyone had mobilised) with the precise words needed to deter the German and Austrian governments from military action against Serbia:
“I thought you might be prepared to represent strongly at Vienna and Berlin danger to European peace of an Austrian attack on Servia. You might perhaps point out that it would in all probability force Russia to intervene, that this would bring Germany and France into the field, and that if war became general, it would be difficult for England to remain neutral.”
Given that the German government had bet the house on Britain remaining neutral, repeating that statement to German officials in London and Berlin may well have brought about a very different outcome. But Grey pointedly stated on multiple occasions that Britain would remain neutral. Only at the last minute – after German officials had informed the British of their intention to invade Belgium – did the horrible truth dawn on the German government that not only would they face a two-front war with Russia and France, but they would do so in the face of a crippling British naval blockade.
But even as German officials were digesting this, British Cabinet members were blissfully unaware. Indeed, right up until the last minute they had been (deliberately?) distracted by the threat of army mutiny and civil war in Ireland. Only in the fractious emergency meetings on 2 August 1914 did the British Cabinet realise that it had been led down the path to war. But even then, there was no vote. Asquith simply informed them that if they didn’t acquiesce the government would fall and be replaced by an even more pro-war Tory administration. And so, the best they could hope for was to remain in government as war broke out.
At this point the mercurial peace activist Lloyd George swayed the outcome. Accepting the German invasion of Belgium as a legitimate casus belli, Lloyd George switched sides to the war party, bringing most of the Cabinet with him (although some historians have suggested that Lloyd George was part of the war party all along). But even then, there was no vote. Asquith simply wore the opposition down in the same way as Grey and Balfour wore down Parliament the following day.
Certainly, the contemporary act of remembrance hides the anti-democratic British march to war by a handful of elected members – elected, that is, by a minority of the population in an electorate that included no women and only property-owning men – along with members of what we might today call “the deep state.” But was this, as Docherty and MacGregor argue, an act of malign design, or was it merely a cabal of upper-class twits stumbling their way into a conflict which they never understood? Much depends upon one’s view of human nature, since while the facts are broadly agreed upon, the purpose of those involved is lost to the mist of time and the fog of war (along with a couple of convenient fires in Paris and St. Petersburg which destroyed key evidence).
A third alternative presents itself, however. This is seldom accepted by historians, but it is there in the evidence base. It is simply that by July 1914, everybody had a plan. Following the Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908, and the 1912 and 1913 Balkan Wars, each of the European powers came to believe that sooner or later war would arrive. And so, each developed plans to respond. Most obviously, the German military developed plans based upon those drawn up by Alfred von Schlieffen. But less obviously, the French had developed their Plan XVII for an aggressive thrust through Alsace-Lorraine and on to the Rhine. Moreover, the French government had underwritten loans to Russia to develop its military following the 1905 defeat by Japan and the ensuing revolution. Most importantly, these loans included the development of railways from the population centres to the Austrian and German fronts, designed to dramatically lower the time required for Russian mobilisation (negating the German plan to rapidly defeat France before the Russians could strike in the east).
It is likely – but because of those convenient fires in St. Petersburg and Paris, we will never know for sure – that the summit meeting between French president Poincaré and Tsar Nicholas from 20 to 23 July 1914 resulted in concrete plans to use the excuse of Austrian aggression against Serbia as a pretext for war against Germany… something which would explain the otherwise counterproductive Russian mobilisation which began on 25 July. Russia at that time was in the middle of a rearmament which was due to be completed in 1917, so that unless encouraged by the French president, it was in Russia’s interest to delay war, even if senior Russian planners believed war to be inevitable.
German government and military leaders seem to have arrived at a similar conclusion. Aware of Russian rearmament, and of the development of the railway networks pointing toward East Prussia and Galicia, German officials seem to have concluded that since war with Russia was inevitable, better to start it before Russia had rearmed and finished developing its railways… and not least because the more time passed, the less reliable its Austrian and Italian allies would become.
All three empires were united on one crucial detail, however, that they should do nothing to alienate Britain. Only the Austrian empire threw caution to the wind in this respect, issuing the unanswerable ultimatum on 23 July and then declaring war on Serbia on 28 July. Both France and Russia hid their mobilisations from British observers, the French even inventing the myth of the 10km demilitarised zone along the German frontier. Germany, in turn, clutched at every straw offering or suggesting that Britain would remain neutral… including a last-minute telegram from Edward Grey, the fakery of which earned him a dressing down from King George V.
Britain though, was not to be wooed for the simple – but largely hidden from history – reason that Britain had a plan of its own… and not the one which attached a mere five divisions and a cavalry brigade to the left of the French Fifth Army. As Nicholas Lambert explains, British officials developed a plan for economic warfare in which they would deliberately collapse world markets as a means of rapidly undermining the German economy. The expectation being that, unable to maintain and supply its armies, Germany would be forced to sue for peace. Seen in this light, the Anglo-French naval agreement and the deployment of the BEF were solely a means of ensuring that France and Russia took to the field of battle, since without war the economic ruination of Germany couldn’t be brought about. And again, the longer the Germans avoided war, the more resilient their economy would become.
One must remember here that, although the evidence was there in the experience of the Russo-Japanese War and the American Civil War, few European leaders in 1914 had the faintest grasp of the horrors of industrial warfare. Just as the Kaiser famously expected it all to be over before the leaves had fallen from the trees, all of the key decision makers across Europe assumed that war would be quick. In Britain, only Kitchener (who had seen the logistics of war firsthand in Sudan and Egypt) understood that the war would be prolonged, urging Asquith and Haldane to plan for a three-year war.
But as we know, plans seldom survive first contact. And after more than half-a-million corpses had been left to rot beneath the August sun in the fields of Belgium and France, the reversal on the Marne and the “race to the sea” (in reality a series of attempts to turn the enemy flanks, ending with the first Battle of Ypres) led to an entrenched stalemate which took another four years to break. The reality of war, in short, was very different to the war the various statesmen assumed they were getting into.
In this sense, the tiny cabal within the British government who planned for and helped to provoke a war fell somewhere between malice and stupidity. As a warning from history, evil was the consequence rather than the purpose of their planning. Stupidity resulted merely from the fact of war down the ages – that it never goes the way it was planned… and millions of dead and wounded, soldiers and civilians, have always paid the price in blood.
… lest we forget.
As you made it to the end…
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