The Sleepwalkers (84 page)

Ulster was still consuming the attention of the British government when the news from Sarajevo broke. The prime minister did not keep a diary, but his intimate correspondence with his young friend and soulmate Venetia Stanley, an elegant and intelligent socialite, is diary-like in its candid and detailed accounts of Asquith's daily preoccupations. The letters suggest that the violent death of the ‘Austrian royalties' on 28 June scarcely impinged on the prime minister's political awareness, which was wholly focused on ‘the queer things that are going on about Ulster'.
⁴
Asquith made no further mention of the international situation until 24 July, when he reported ruefully that yet another round of haggling over Ulster had collapsed, stymied by the complex confessional geography of Tyrone and Fermanagh. Only at the end of a long discussion of Northern Irish matters did the prime minister mention, almost as an afterthought, that Austria had just sent ‘a bullying and humiliating Ultimatum to Servia, who cannot possibly accept it'.

We are within measurable, or imaginable distance of a real Armageddon, which would dwarf the Ulster and Nationalist Volunteers to their true proportion. Happily there seems to be no reason why we should be anything more than spectators.
⁵

This letter opened with the startling announcement that ‘the light has failed', but Asquith was referring to Venetia's departure from London that morning for her family's country home on Anglesey, not to the impending extinction of European civilization.

For Edward Grey, these were days heavy with personal preoccupations: his sight was deteriorating – he was finding it increasingly difficult to follow the ball during games of squash and could no longer pick out his favourite star at night. He was planning to spend more time in the country and there was talk of a visit to a renowned German oculist. By contrast with Asquith, however, Grey immediately perceived the seriousness of the crisis brewing in south-eastern Europe.

In his conversations during July with the London ambassadors of the powers, Grey plotted, as so often before, a meandering path that steered clear of straightforward commitments. On 8 July, he warned Paul Cambon that if the Austrian Emperor were forced by Austrian public opinion to undertake a démarche against Serbia, France and Britain would have to do everything in their power to calm St Petersburg; Cambon ‘warmly agreed'.
⁶
On the same day, Grey reminded the Russian ambassador that Berlin was nervous about the recent Anglo-Russian naval conversations and that it was crucial Russia not give Germany any reason to suspect that a coup was being prepared against her.
⁷
On 9 July, he assured the German ambassador, Count Lichnowsky, that there existed no secret and binding understandings between Britain and France or Russia. But he also added that Britain's relations with its Entente partners had lost nothing of their ‘warmth' and that Lichnowsky should be aware that certain ‘conversations' had taken place since 1906 between the various military and naval authorities, albeit without any ‘aggressive intent'.
⁸

The foreign secretary's talks with the Austrian ambassador were polite, but reserved and noncommittal. When Count Mensdorff complained to Grey on 17 July of the excesses of the Belgrade press, Grey enquired – rather oddly – whether there was not perhaps
one
Serbian paper that had behaved decently. Mensdorff conceded that this might be the case, but went on to say that the dual monarchy could no longer tolerate political subversion at this level of intensity. ‘Sir Edward Grey conceded this,' Mensdorff reported, ‘but did not enter into any further discussion of the subject.'
⁹
After receiving the text of the Austrian note to Belgrade, Grey invited Mensdorff to come to see him again on 24 July – it was on that occasion that he described the note as the most ‘formidable' document of its type that he had ever seen. But even on that occasion, the foreign secretary conceded that Austria's claims concerning the complicity of certain Serbian state agencies and even some of the demands listed in the note were ‘justified'.
¹⁰
On the same day, after securing approval from the cabinet, he proposed that a concert of the four powers less directly involved in the quarrel – Britain, France, Italy and Germany – should intervene in the event of a flare-up between Russia and Austria.
¹¹

None of this gave any indication that Grey intended to enter the conflict. He had often remarked that public opinion (by which he essentially meant published opinion) would be the ultimate determinant of British action, but there was little support for intervention in that sphere. Almost all the major papers viewed the prospect of British participation in a European war with distaste. The
Manchester Guardian
declared that Britain was in no danger of being dragged into the Austro-Serbian conflict by ‘treaties of alliance' and famously announced that Manchester cared for Belgrade as little as Belgrade cared for Manchester. On 29 July, the
Daily News
expressed disgust at the notion that British lives might be sacrificed ‘for the sake of Russian hegemony of the Slav world'.
¹²
On 1 August, its liberal editor, Alfred George Gardiner, published a piece entitled ‘Why we must not fight', of which the two central arguments were that there were no fundamental conflicts of interest between Britain and Germany, and that crushing Germany would in effect establish a Russian dictatorship over ‘Europe and Asia'. These were liberal titles, but even the Tory papers were unenthusiastic. The
Yorkshire Post
, for example, was doubtful that an Austro-German victory over the Franco-Russian Alliance would leave England any worse off than a Franco-Russian victory and could ‘see no reason why Britain should be drawn in'. The
Cambridge Daily News
agreed on 28 July that Britain's interest in the looming conflict was negligible and the
Oxford Chronicle
announced on 31 July that the government's duty was to localize the quarrel and keep well out of it.
¹³
Only
The Times
argued consistently for British intervention: although there was moderately sympathetic coverage of the Austrian position by Wickham Steed on 17 July, the paper anticipated a continental conflict from 22 July and spoke out on 27, 29 and 31 July in favour of British involvement. Particularly vehement were the rantings of the journalist, self-publicist and fraudster Horatio Bottomley, whose editorial for his own
John Bull
in the first week of July opened with the words: ‘We have always looked at Serbia as a hotbed of cold-blooded conspiracy and subterfuge' and demanded ‘Servia must be wiped out' before going on, inconsequentially, to recommend that British government ‘avail itself of the crisis' to ‘annihilate' the German fleet.
¹⁴
The Serbian minister in London, Bosković, was so appalled by the coverage in
John Bull
that he presented a formal protest to the British foreign office and sought legal advice on suing the paper for its ‘lies' about Serbia.
¹⁵

At least until the beginning of August, then, it cannot be said that public opinion was pressuring the British government to intervene. Nor did it seem likely that the cabinet would seize the initiative. The majority of the ministers was still staunchly non-interventionist. It was the same constellation that had produced the cabinet revolt against Grey's policy in November 1911. This was the fundamental problem Grey had always had to confront: that his foreign policy was distrusted by a large part of his own party. He had been able to count for some time on the support of the Conservatives in parliament, but in the summer of 1914, with anti-Home-Rule feeling running high, this support base, too, looked fragile. In the face of these pressures, he fell back on his customary practice of confining discussions of the international situation to his three liberal imperialist associates Asquith, Haldane and Churchill.

Not until the cabinet meeting of 24 July, after long and and difficult discussions on the minutiae of local government boundaries in Ulster, did he raise the issue of British policy on the current crisis, proposing that a concert of the four powers less closely connected with the Austro-Serbian quarrel be established to mediate between the two antagonists. It was the first time the cabinet had discussed foreign policy for more than a month. In a slightly purple but oddly effective passage, Churchill later evoked the cabinet's dawning awareness of the import of Grey's words: ‘The parishes of Fermanagh and Tyrone faded back into the mists and squalls of Ireland and a strange light began by perceptible gradations to fall upon the map of Europe.'
¹⁶
The cabinet approved Grey's proposal for a four-power intervention and then broke up for the weekend.

As the fourth week of July reached its end, Grey began to press harder for a clarification of the circumstances under which the government might be prepared to intervene. On Monday 27 July, he enquired whether the cabinet would support intervention if France were to be attacked by Germany. Grey's old opponents, Morley, Simon, Burns, Beauchamp and Harcourt, all threatened to resign immediately if such a decision were taken. At a late-night meeting on 29–30 July, after a long discussion failed to produce a resolution, Grey pressed for a promise of support for France. Only four cabinet colleagues (including Asquith, Haldane and Churchill) backed the proposal; the rest were opposed.

Even the question of Belgium seemed unlikely to trigger an intervention. It was widely assumed, on the basis both of military intelligence secured by the French General Staff and of military inference, that the Germans would approach France through Belgium, breaching the 1839 international treaty guaranteeing its neutrality. But the cabinet took the view that, while Britain was indeed a signatory to the treaty, the obligation to uphold it fell on all the signatories collectively, not on any one of them individually. Should the matter actually arise, they concluded, the British response would be ‘one of policy rather than obligation'.
¹⁷
Indeed, it is striking with what sang-froid senior British military and political leaders contemplated a German breach of Belgian neutrality. On the basis of Anglo-French staff conversations in 1911, Henry Wilson had come to the conclusion that the Germans would choose to cross the Ardennes through southern Belgium, confining their troops to the area south of the rivers Sambre and Meuse; these findings were presented to the 114th meeting of the Committee of Imperial Defence.
¹⁸
The same scenario was discussed by the cabinet on 29 July, when Lloyd George showed, using a map, why it was likely that the Germans would cross ‘only [. . .] the furthest southern corner' of Belgium. Far from greeting this prospect with outrage, the ministers accepted it as strategically necessary (from Germany's standpoint) and thus virtually inevitable. British strategic concerns were focused primarily on Antwerp and the mouth of the river Schelde, which had always been regarded as one of the keys to British security. ‘I don't see,' Churchill commented, ‘why we should come in if they go only a little way into Belgium.'
¹⁹
Lloyd George later claimed that he would have refused to go to war if the German invasion of Belgium had been confined to the route through the Ardennes.
²⁰
British policy-makers assumed in any case that the Belgians themselves would not make their last stand in the south, but would, after offering token resistance to demonstrate that they had not permitted the violation, fall back on their lines of fortification further to the north.
²¹
There would thus be nothing automatic about the relationship between a German invasion of Belgium and British intervention in the conflict.

It would be a mistake, however, to infer from these indications of reluctance that Grey himself or his closest associates had abandoned their long-standing commitment to the Entente. On the contrary, Grey viewed the crisis unfolding in Europe almost entirely through the lens of the Entente. The prospect that parliament might not honour the moral obligation to France that he had worked so hard to create and protect caused him profound anxiety. He shared the personal distaste of his colleagues for the adventurist politics of Belgrade and was aware of the massacres and harassment in the newly conquered areas. He certainly possessed enough information to understand the kind of threat that Serbia posed to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. He expressed disgust at the notion that any great power should be ‘dragged into a war by Servia'.
²²
Yet he showed no interest in the kind of intervention that might have provided Austria with other options than the ultimatum. The four-power mediation proposed at the cabinet meeting of 24 July was a non-starter.
²³
Of the four powers involved (Britain, Germany, Italy and France) only one was likely to defend the interests of Austria-Hungary. Moreover, Austria-Hungary and the international system lacked the means to ensure compliance with whatever stipulations might have been agreed. Finally, the great power most directly involved in sponsoring Serbian irredentism would not have been involved in, or bound by, the decisions of the concert. Grey's confidence in his ability to patch together some form of mediation doubtless derived in part from the good fame he had earned by chairing the Ambassadors' Conference of 1913 in London. But arguments over Albanian border strips and a peace–war mediation among the great powers were very different things.

In his reactions to the crisis, Grey subordinated his understanding of the Austro-Serbian quarrel to the larger imperatives of the Entente, which meant, in effect, tacitly supporting Russian policy. Grey did speak at intervals of the importance of ‘calming' Russia, and he did ask St Petersburg to avoid unnecessarily provocative measures, but he showed remarkably little knowledge of, or interest in, what was actually happening in Russia during the crucial days following the presentation of the Austrian note. This ignorance was not entirely his fault, for the Russians deliberately concealed the extent of their ‘clandestine preparations' from Sir George Buchanan, telling him on 26 July that the ‘protective measures' in Moscow and St Petersburg had been put into effect merely to deal with a wave of strikes currently disrupting Russian industry. Buchanan was not entirely convinced: in a brief dispatch to Grey on 26 July, he noted that, since the strikes were ‘practically over', the measures he had observed must ‘doubtless' be connected with ‘intending mobilization'.
²⁴
But Grey was not interested; there was no attempt on Buchanan's part to follow up on these indications, and no instruction from London to do so. And this approach was characteristic of the Foreign Ministry's handling of communications with Russia. On 26 July, the day Buchanan filed his report, Nicolson met with Count Lichnowsky, who appeared with an urgent telegram from his government reporting that Russia seemed to be calling in ‘classes of reserves', which in effect signalled mobilization. Nicolson replied that London ‘had no information as to a general mobilization or indeed of any mobilization immediately'. But then he added: