The Sleepwalkers (92 page)

These were the worst days of Paul Cambon's life. From the moment when he learned of the Austrian note to Belgrade, he was convinced that a European war was imminent. Although he had sometimes been critical of Poincaré's encouragement of Russia's Balkan commitments, he now took the view that the Franco-Russian Alliance must hold firm in the face of the Austrian threat to Serbia. Indeed he left London on the afternoon of 25 July in order to brief the inexperienced acting foreign minister Bienvenu-Martin; it was probably as a consequence of Cambon's prompting that the acting minister issued the firm response to the German ambassador that so delighted Poincaré when he learned of it at sea on 28 July.
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For Cambon, just as for Wilhelm, everything depended upon Britain. ‘If the British government puts its foot on the whole thing today, peace might be saved,' he told the journalist André Géraud on 24 July.
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At a meeting with Grey early on 28 July, he pressed the same argument: ‘if once it were assumed that Britain would certainly stand aside from a European war, the chance of preserving peace would be very much imperilled'.
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Here again was that reflex deflection of responsibility that placed the onus of deciding between peace and war on another's shoulders. It was, by this reading, Britain that now carried the responsibility for preserving peace by adding its immense naval and commercial might to the balance against Berlin and thereby deterring it from supporting its ally. For years Cambon had been telling his political masters that they could rely absolutely on British support.

He was in an unenviable situation. This was not, after all, strictly speaking a defensive war, but one in which France had been called upon to support Russia's intervention in a Balkan conflict – an obligation about which he himself had earlier expressed concern. The French government did its utmost to offset this disadvantage by scrupulously avoiding any aggressive measures against Germany: on the morning of 30 July, the Council of Ministers in Paris agreed that French covering troops would take positions along a line from the Vosges mountains to Luxembourg, but without getting closer than ten kilometres from the frontier. The idea was to avoid any possibility of border skirmishes with German patrols and to persuade London of the pacific nature of French policy. It was felt that the moral effect and propaganda value of the exclusion zone outweighed the military risks. London was immediately notified through Cambon of the new policy.
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But the fact remained that Britain was not, as Grey repeatedly pointed out, a party to the alliance which supposedly obliged France to intervene, nor had it been officially apprised of the terms of that alliance. Neither Russia nor France had been attacked or placed under direct threat of attack. It was all very well for Cambon to plead with Grey that France was ‘obliged to aid Russia in the event of her being attacked', but for the moment there was no indication that either Austria or Germany intended to attack Russia.
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Nor did it seem very likely that a British declaration of intention to intervene would deter the central powers from a policy they had embarked upon without consulting Britain.

Underlying this predicament was a divergence of perspectives rooted deep in the history of the Anglo-French Entente. Cambon had always wishfully presumed that Britain, like France, viewed the Entente as an instrument for balancing and containing Germany. He failed to see that for British policy-makers, the Entente served more complex objectives. It was, among other things, a means of deflecting the threat posed to the dispersed territories of the British Empire by the power best placed to do them harm, namely Russia. One likely reason for Cambon's misprision was that he came to depend too much on the assurances and advice of the permanent under-secretary Sir Arthur Nicolson, who was passionately attached to the Russian and the French connection and intent on seeing both hardened into a fully-fledged alliance. But Nicolson, though influential, was not the arbiter of policy in London, and his views were increasingly out of sync with the group around Grey who were becoming increasingly distrustful of Russia and increasingly open to a more pro-German (or at least less anti-German) course.
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This is a classic example of how difficult even the best informed contemporaries found it to read the intentions of allies and enemies.

Divergences in geopolitical perspective were reinforced by the profound antipathy of the British political establishment to any form of binding commitment, an antipathy compounded by deep hostility towards Russia, especially among leading liberal radicals. The Entente Cordiale thus came to represent two rather different things to the two partners.
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Throughout the lifetime of the alliance, the Foreign Office ‘sought to minimise the extent of the Entente, while the Quai d'Orsay took pains to make the very most of it'.
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And all these dissonances were amplified by the two individuals who personifed the Entente in London – Edward Grey and Paul Cambon, the former wary, evasive and totally ignorant of France and of Europe, the latter hypertrophically French and utterly invested in the Entente, which was and remained the crowning achievement not just of his political career but of his life as a patriot.

Grey, too, was operating under narrow constraints. He failed to secure cabinet support for intervention on 27 July. He failed again two days later, when his request for a formal promise of assistance to France was supported by only four of his colleagues (Asquith, Haldane, Churchill and Crewe). This was the meeting at which the cabinet rejected the view that Britain's status as a signatory to the 1839 Belgian neutrality treaty obliged it to oppose a German breach with military force. The obligation to uphold the treaty did not fall on Britain specifically, the radicals argued, but on all of the signatory powers. Should the matter arise, the cabinet resolved, the decision would be ‘one of policy rather than legal obligation'.
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Both the French and Russians were insisting that only a clear declaration of British solidarity with the Anglo-French alliance would persuade Germany and Austria to ‘draw in their horns'.
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And Grey was under pressure from his own closest colleagues – Nicolson and Eyre Crowe were both pushing him hard towards a declaration of solidarity with the Entente states. In a memorandum of 31 July, Crowe provided Grey with ammunition to use against his opponents in cabinet. There might be no obligation to France, he wrote, but Britain's ‘moral' obligation to its ‘friend' across the Channel was surely undeniable:

The argument that there is no written bond binding us to France is strictly correct. There is no contractual obligation. But the Entente has been made, strengthened, put to the test and celebrated in a manner justifying the belief that a moral bond was being forged. The whole policy of the Entente can have no meaning if it does not signify that in a just quarrel England would stand by her friends. This honourable expectation has been raised. We cannot repudiate it without exposing our good name to grave criticism.
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Nicolson, by contrast, focused on Belgium and the British obligation to defend its neutrality. But the conditions under which the Grey group had made policy in the past no longer prevailed. The epicentre of the decision-making process had shifted from the Foreign Office to the cabinet, leaving Grey's penumbra of Ententiste advisers out in the cold.

After a morning cabinet meeting on 1 August, Grey explained to a distraught Cambon that the cabinet was quite simply opposed to any intervention. Cambon protested that he would not transmit this message to Paris; he would simply state that no decision had been reached. But there
was
a decision, Grey retorted. Cabinet had decided that British interests were not deeply enough implicated to justify the sending of an expeditionary force to the continent. Desperate, the French ambassador shifted the ground of the argument: he reminded Grey that under the terms of the naval convention of 1912, France had denuded its northern ports of naval defences, in effect entrusting the security of its coastline to the Royal Navy. Even in the absence of a formal alliance, he pleaded, ‘does not Britain have a moral obligation to help us, to at least give us the help of your fleet, since it is on your advice that we have sent ours away?' It is rather extraordinary that Grey needed to be told this by Cambon, but the argument struck home. The foreign secretary acknowledged that a German attack on the French coastline and/or a German violation of Belgian neutrality might alter the complexion of British public opinion. Most importantly of all, he undertook to raise the question of the French coasts in cabinet on the following day. Cambon left this meeting as white as a sheet and close to tears. Staggering into the ambassadors' room next to Grey's office, he was guided to a chair by Nicolson, muttering, ‘They are going to drop us. They are going to drop us.'
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In fact, the position was less dire than Cambon supposed. In the crisis situation of the first days of August 1914, emotions were running high. The fear of abandonment for Cambon and the fear, for Grey, of being drawn out of his depth before there had been time to secure support for his policy produced a heightening and polarization of utterance that may lead us to misread the underlying realities of the situation. The balance of initiative was already shifting by imperceptible degrees in favour of a British continental intervention. On 29 July, the cabinet had agreed to Churchill's request as First Lord for a precautionary mobilization of the fleet. And on that evening, Asquith managed to convey to Churchill by means of a ‘hard stare' and a ‘sort of grunt' his tacit consent to a deployment of the fleet to war stations. On 1 August, without securing the agreement of cabinet (but with the prime minister's implicit approval) Churchill mobilized his fleet.

At the same time, the Conservative opposition started to lobby in earnest for intervention. The Tory press had already begun to come out in favour of a British intervention. While the
Manchester Guardian
, the
Daily News
and the
Standard
, all Liberal organs, stuck to a policy of neutrality,
The Times
led the Tory papers in demanding a strong stand against Austria and Germany and participation in the imminent continental war. And behind the scenes, the director of military operations, Henry Wilson, a staunch supporter of intervention who was often seen during these days darting between the French embassy and the Foreign Office, alerted the Conservative leadership that Britain was in danger of abandoning France.

On 1 August, shortly after Cambon's interview with Grey, the Conservative MP George Lloyd paid a call on the French ambassador. Cambon was still incensed: what, he asked, had become of the Anglo-French naval arrangements or the General Staff consultations, both of which presupposed an interlocked security policy? And what of the many assurances of British support over recent years? ‘All our plans have been arranged in common,' the ambassador exclaimed. ‘Our General Staffs have consulted. You have seen all our schemes and preparations.'
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Overcoming his consternation, Cambon handled his interlocutor skilfully. The Foreign Office, he said, had in effect placed the blame for its own inaction on the Conservative opposition, by suggesting that the Tories could not be relied upon to support any initiative that might lead to war. Lloyd vigorously denied this and left the meeting determined to mobilize a Conservative pro-intervention lobby. A meeting took place late that night at the home of Austen Chamberlain and by ten o'clock the next morning (2 August), a troupe of prominent Conservatives, including Lansdowne and Bonar Law, the Conservative leaders in the two Houses of Parliament, had been won over to the cause of positive action. A letter was sent to Asquith stating that the opposition would support intervention and warning that a decision for British neutrality would not only damage the country's reputation, but undermine its security.
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It was in the cabinet, however, that the crucial battle would be fought. Here, opinion was still firmly on the side of non-intervention. The majority were suspicious of the Entente with France and deeply hostile to the Convention with Russia.
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‘Everybody longs to stand aside,' Asquith told Venetia Stanley on 31 July.
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At least three quarters of its members, Churchill later recalled, were determined not be drawn into a ‘European quarrel' unless Britain itself were attacked, ‘which seemed unlikely'.
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And the anti-interventionists could claim, with some justice, to have the support of the banking and commercial interests in London – on 31 July, a delegation of City financiers visited Asquith to warn him against allowing Britain to be drawn into a European conflict.

The cabinet meeting on the morning of 1 August brought a polarization and clarification of views. Morley and Simon led the anti-interventionist group, calling for a declaration, ‘now and at once' that ‘
in no circumstances
' would the British government take a hand. Churchill, by contrast, was ‘very bellicose' and demanded ‘immediate mobilization'. Grey appeared likely to resign if the cabinet committed itself to neutrality. Haldane was ‘diffuse' and ‘nebulous'.
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The cabinet decided against the immediate deployment of the British Expeditionary Force to the continent – a decision that was not opposed by Grey or the other liberal imperialists (this was the decision that plunged Paul Cambon into despair). So sure was John Morley of non-intervention that he flaunted the victory of the ‘peace party' before Churchill, saying: ‘We have beaten you after all'.
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And yet, by the close of the following day – Sunday 2 August – the British government had taken the crucial steps towards intervention. At the first cabinet meeting of that day, from eleven in the morning until two in the afternoon, Grey was authorized to inform the French ambassador that if the German fleet crossed the North Sea or entered the Channel in order either to disrupt French shipping or to attack the French coast, the British fleet would extend full protection. Walter Runciman, president of the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries, later described this as ‘the Cabinet which decided that war with Germany was inevitable'.
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At a later meeting, held between 6.30 and 8 p.m., it was agreed that a ‘substantial violation' of Belgian neutrality would ‘compel us to take action'.
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It was understood that this latter undertaking would inevitably entail intervention, since the Germans had made it clear to the British government that they intended to advance on France through Belgium. Recognizing that the writing was on the wall for the proponents of non-intervention, Burns announced his retirement after the first meeting; at the end of the second, Viscount John Morley, too, gave notice of his imminent retirement. The ‘peace party' was in disarray.