Once in 1908 when Bethmann Hollweg was dining with Lloyd George, Germany’s chancellor became strident, waving his arms as he denounced the ‘iron ring’ enemies were forging around his nation: ‘England is embracing France. She is making friends with Russia. But it is not that you love each other; it is that you hate Germany!’ Bethmann was wrong. Britain’s adherence to the Entente was prompted much less by enthusiasm for embracing Russia and France as allies or partners against the Kaiser than by a desire to diminish the number of Britain’s enemies. It was increasingly understood, at least in Whitehall, that the vast empire of which the British people were so proud threatened to become an economic and strategic burden rather than a source of wealth. Russian power in central Asia, and the Great Game which derived from it, demanded much effort and expenditure to counter. Britain’s 1898 confrontation with France over Fashoda on the Upper Nile had reawakened visceral jealousies and enmities. What evolved during the first decade of the twentieth century was less a triple entente to which Britain was a committed partner, than two parallel processes of détente.
Sazonov, in St Petersburg, knew how badly his country and France needed Britain. He wrote on 31 December 1913: ‘Both powers [France and Russia] are scarcely capable of dealing Germany a mortal blow even in the event of success on the battlefield, which is always uncertain. But a struggle in which England took part might be fatal for Germany.’ Thus the foreign minister was infuriated by London’s ‘vacillating and self-effacing policy’, which he considered a critical impediment to deterrence. But British enthusiasm for Russia remained tepid. It was a source of embarrassment to many doughty democrats that their country should be associated with an absolutist autocracy, and worse still with its Balkan clients. In Paris near the climax of the July 1914 crisis, Raymond Recouly of Le Figaro met Sir Francis Bertie, the British ambassador, as he was about to enter the Quai d’Orsay. The Englishman, nicknamed ‘the Bull’ by colleagues, wrung his hands about Europe’s condition, then said: ‘Do you trust the Russians? We don’t, above half!’ He added: ‘I would say pretty much the same of the Serbs. That is why our country is not going to feel comfortable about entering a quarrel in which the Serbs and Russians are involved.’ Moreover, many British people, especially the elderly, were less than enthusiastic about entering any conflict on the same side as France. Lord Rosebery said crossly in 1904 when his Conservative colleagues welcomed the Entente: ‘You are all wrong. It means war with Germany in the end!’ Old Lady Londesborough, Wellington’s great-niece, told Osbert Sitwell in 1914: ‘It’s not the Germans but the French I’m frightened of!’
Such mistrust was reciprocal. A prime motive for President Poincaré’s determination to cling close to Russia as a military ally was his fear that Britain would not be there beside the French army on the day. While France and Russia had signed a bilateral treaty and were committed to support each other against attack, Britain was party to no such intimate pact, instead merely to expressions of good intentions, and army and naval staff talks. The first discussions of a possible expeditionary force to France took place in December 1908. Thereafter, a sub-committee meeting of the Committee of Imperial Defence on 23 August 1911, attended by Asquith and Churchill, addressed at length the contingency that Britain would be obliged to intervene in the event of a European war. One modern historian has suggested that this gathering ‘set the course for a military confrontation between Britain and Germany’. That seems a wild exaggeration: no one knew better than Asquith how reluctant might be his own party, and Parliament, to endorse participation in a European conflict.
The prime minister wrote sternly after the CID meeting that ‘all questions of policy have been & must be reserved for the decision of the Cabinet, & it is quite outside the function of military or naval officers to prejudge such questions’. The contemporary view of an exasperated senior British staff officer – Henry Wilson – was that ‘there was still no definite agreement with France to come in with her, nothing but a very grudging authorisation by our Gov to the General Staff on the theory of eventual co-operation’. This seems about right. The head of the Foreign Office, Sir Arthur Nicolson, reminded the foreign secretary in August 1914 that ‘you have over and over again promised M. Cambon [the French ambassador] that if Germany was the aggressor you would stand by France’. Grey replied in a manner that justified every French prejudice about Anglo-Saxon duplicity: ‘Yes, but he has nothing in writing.’
One recent chronicler of this period suggests that Asquith’s ministers and generals engaged in ‘enthusiastic planning for war’ following the 1911 meeting. Precautionary steps were certainly taken and plans made from that year onwards – for instance, earmarking Oxford University’s Examination Schools for use as a hospital. But it seems impossible justly to characterise these measures as enthusiastic. What was extraordinary about all British policy-making during the evolution of the Entente, reflected in attitudes struck at the 1911 CID meeting, was that the government acknowledged possible participation in a continental war, while proposing to contribute an absurdly small army to fulfilling such a purpose. Winston Churchill wrote later that as a young cavalry officer in the 1890s, he and his kind were so conscious of the insignificance of the British Army by comparison with its continental counterparts that ‘no Jingo lieutenant or fire-eating staff officer … even in his most sanguine moments, would have believed that our little Army would again be sent to Europe’. Fifteen years on, while Haldane had reformed the army’s structure, it remained tiny by continental standards. The 1913 Army Estimates made no mention whatsoever of a possible British ground role in a European conflict. The putative Expeditionary Force was given that designation because nobody knew where abroad it might be deployed – conceivably in India, Africa, the Middle East.
Here was a manifestation of a huge, historic British folly, repeated over many centuries including the twenty-first: the adoption of gesture strategy, committing small forces as an earnest of good intentions, heedless of their gross inadequacy for the military purpose at hand. Since 1907, Lord Northcliffe had been campaigning for conscription in his Daily Mail, to create a British army of a size to match the Empire’s greatness, but his crusade roused little support. The most grievous charge against the Asquith government, and explicitly against the foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey, is that they pursued policies which sensibly acknowledged a likelihood that Britain would be unable to remain neutral in the event of a general European war, because German hegemony on the continent would represent an intolerable outcome, but they declined to take appropriate practical measures to participate in such a struggle.
Grey is usually depicted as a gentle, civilised figure who lamented the coming of war in 1914 with unaccustomed eloquence, and wrote fine books on birdwatching and fly-fishing. A widower of fifty-two, his personal affairs were less arid than most of his contemporaries assumed. He conducted a lively love life, albeit much more discreetly than his colleague Lloyd George; Grey’s most recent biographer identifies two illegitimate children. Some of his contemporaries disdained him. Sir Eyre Crowe, a Foreign Office official who was admittedly prone to intemperance, called Grey ‘a futile, useless, weak fool’. The foreign secretary’s accustomed taciturnity caused Lloyd George, for one, to conclude that there was less to him than met the eye; that his economy with words reflected not strength of character, but debility. Grey spoke no foreign languages, and disliked Abroad. Although a highly intelligent man, he was also a narrow one, subject to violent mood swings.
Yet from 1905 to 1916 he ran Britain’s foreign policy as a private bailiwick. Lloyd George wrote: ‘During the eight years that preceded the war, the Cabinet devoted a ridiculously small percentage of its time to a consideration of foreign affairs.’ The Asquith government’s attitude to such matters, and to the other European powers, reflected an epic moral conceit, manifested in a condescension which especially upset the Germans. The French ambassador in London, Paul Cambon, observed sardonically that nothing gave greater pleasure to an Englishman than to discover that the interests of England matched those of mankind at large: ‘and where such a confluence does not exist, he does his best to create it’. At a dinner party where several members of the government were present, Lord Northcliffe asserted contemptuously that Britain’s newspaper editors were better