It seems mistaken to suppose that neutrality in 1914 would have yielded a happy outcome for the British Empire. The authoritarian and acquisitive instincts of Germany’s leadership would scarcely have been moderated by triumph on the battlefield. The Kaiser’s regime did not enter the war with a grand plan for world domination, but its leaders were in no doubt that they required huge booty as a reward for the victory they anticipated. Bethmann Hollweg drafted a personal list of demands on 9 September 1914, when Berlin saw victory within its grasp. ‘The aim of the war,’ he wrote, ‘is to provide us with [security] guarantees, from east to west, for the foreseeable future, through the enfeeblement of our adversaries.’
France was to cede to Germany the Briey iron deposits; Belfort; a coastal strip from Dunkirk to Boulogne; the western slope of the Vosges mountains. Her strategic fortresses were to be demolished. Just as after 1870, cash reparations would be exacted sufficient to ensure that ‘France is incapable of spending considerable sums on armaments for the next eighteen to twenty years’. Elsewhere, Luxembourg would be annexed outright; Belgium and Holland transformed into vassal states; Russia’s borders drastically shrunken; a vast colonial empire created in central Africa; a German economic union extending from Scandinavia to Turkey.
Georges-Henri Soutou has convincingly argued that Bethmann was never as serious about his territorial demands – he strove to dissuade the Kaiser from insisting upon annexation of Belgium – as about the intention to impose a customs union on the continent. But whatever means Berlin proposed to employ, the purpose was not in doubt; in Soutou’s words, ‘it is well understood that customs union must thereby make possible Germany’s control of Europe’. While other German leaders advanced different shopping lists, all took it for granted that the war could not end without their nation receiving what they deemed ‘appropriate’ territorial and financial rewards. Having vanquished its only important continental rivals, it is implausible that Germany would thereafter have been content to make a generous accommodation with a neutral Great Britain, or to acquiesce in its global naval mastery.
The Asquith government is often accused of opacity in European affairs, both strategic – between 1906 and 1914 – and tactical – during the July crisis. While Britain made itself a party to the Triple Entente, uncertainty persisted in all the capitals of Europe, London included, about whether it would join a European war. Yet the British had little power to control events. Though the Germans preferred not to fight them, they were seen in Berlin as marginal in a clash of continental forces. Only if Britain had adopted the domestically unacceptable course of creating a large standing army might it have been capable of playing an effective deterrent role in 1914. The most grievous British error was to suppose the nation could maintain its cherished balance of power on the continent without a credible mass of soldiers to support its diplomacy. But failure to create a conscript army can scarcely be characterised as warmongering.
The argument that Britain should have declared in advance of the 1914 crisis its determination to participate in any Russo-French clash with Germany ignores the nature of democracies, and the requirements of prudent statesmanship. No government could have commanded the support of Parliament for an open-ended commitment to join a European conflict without heed to the circumstances in which this evolved, and there is no reason why it should have done so. If in July 1914 Asquith had offered France and Russia unconditional support, he would have been guilty of the very recklessness – the issue of a ‘blank cheque’ – for which Germany has been justly condemned in its conduct towards Austria-Hungary, and to a lesser degree France also in its commitment to Russia.
Britain cherished the status quo, and was committed to peace, because it still appeared to be global top dog. The Asquith government harboured a sensible unease about Russia and the follies of which its government was capable; it had no desire to promote French bellicosity. Thus its only rational course in the decade preceding the war, and indeed in July 1914, was to offer its allies goodwill and provisional support, the scope and nature of which must depend on events and exact circumstances. The failure of this policy is self-evident: Britain’s tentative approach to European commitments, and especially to the Entente, sufficed to involve it in history’s greatest conflict, but not to prevent such a disaster. It nonetheless seems hard to conceive of any alternative pre-war British diplomatic path which would have commanded domestic political support, and persuaded Germany that the risk of war was unacceptable.
Those who claim that a general conflict was avoidable even after Austria declared war on Serbia, and who hold Russia responsible for what followed, imply that Austria and its German guarantor should have been allowed to have their way at gunpoint in the Balkans, in Belgium and indeed across Europe. Only the German ultimatum to Belgium enabled the war party in the British cabinet to obtain a mandate. It is sometimes said that this was a mere pretext – a figleaf – since Grey, Churchill and several of their colleagues were bent upon belligerence even before the issue of Belgium emerged. But it remains doubtful that they could have carried their point but for the violation of Belgian neutrality. It does not seem ignoble or foolish that much of the Commons and the British people seized upon this as a just casus belli, whereas they recoiled from going to war to support Serbia, or for that matter merely to fulfil Britain’s ill-defined commitment to the Triple Entente. Even if Germany is acquitted of pursuing a design for general European war in 1914, it still seems deserving of most blame, because it had power to prevent this and did not exercise it.
On 3 August the Kaiser told his orderlies to lay out field-grey uniform, topboots, brown gloves, and a helmet without plumes for his address to the Reichstag on the morrow. Then he decided that a more magnificent show was appropriate. He chose to appear in full dress, accompanied by every available senior officer in Berlin, adorned with their medals and sashes. In all his splendour as Germany’s Supreme Warlord, with much emotion he told the assembled members next day: ‘From the bottom of my heart I thank you for your expressions of love and fidelity. In the struggle now ahead of us, I see no more parties in my Volk’ – ‘Ich kenne keine Parteien mehr, ich kenne nur Deutsche’ – ‘among us there are only Germans’. Wilhelm was now to experience a few joyous weeks of the military glory he had always dreamed of. Thereafter, however, the shades would close in upon him – and upon Europe.
‘The Superb Spectacle of the World Bursting Into Flames’
Across continental Europe, for the last time in history proclamations of war were accompanied musically as well as figuratively by a clarion call. In cities such as Freiburg a trumpeter and a police officer toured the city’s main squares in a chugging automobile, halting at each one to rehearse the tidings. Most of the newly warring nations accomplished the transition from peace with doom-laden efficiency. Lt. Col. Gerhard Tappen, Moltke’s chief of operations, admitted to a ‘peculiar feeling’ as he unlocked the office safe and withdrew Germany’s ‘Deployment Plan 1914/15’, but mobilisation represented the greatest professional triumph of the chief of staff’s career. Before war came, Berlin feared that socialist-inspired rail strikes might cause disruptions, but none occurred. There were few absentees among the four million men summoned to the colours.
Governments’ contingency plans extended well beyond the mechanics of mobilisation. Maurice Hankey, secretary of Britain’s Committee for Imperial Defence, had since 1910 produced annually updated editions of ‘The War Book’. This was a red quarto volume, sub-headed in gold lettering ‘Co-Ordination of departmental action on the OCCURRENCE OF STRAINED RELATIONS and on the OUTBREAK OF WAR’. The latest edition, circulated throughout Whitehall on 30 June 1914, contained 318 grey-blue pages, detailing the responsibilities of every department of state, first in the ‘Precautionary stage’: ‘The Secretary of State [for foreign affairs], foreseeing the danger of this country being involved in war in the near future,