of ditties ‘I Do Like to be Beside the Seaside’. Yet many British people now recognised that conflict was lapping very close to their shores. Norman Macleod, an Admiralty private secretary, ‘felt rather apprehensive (1) because [I am] entirely ag[ain]st the idea of war (2) for fear of financial and economic crisis – people were buying in large stocks of food supplies. Bank rate up to 10% … I thought this trouble would restrain jingo feeling.’ A delegation from the City called on the Chancellor of the Exchequer to argue that ‘the only means of saving the world was for their own country to stay out of the conflict so that it might remain the great market, the economic arbiter of the world’. On 1 August the Daily News carried an article by its editor A.G. Gardiner, headed ‘Why We Must Not Fight’. The writer demanded: ‘Where in the wide world do our interests clash with Germany? Nowhere. With Russia we have potential conflicts over the whole of South-Eastern Europe and Southern Asia.’ After the cabinet’s meetings that Saturday, Paul Cambon told Grey – in French, through an interpreter, for he resolutely confined himself to his own language in official exchanges – that he flatly refused to communicate to Paris its resolution, ‘or rather, lack of it’.
Many British people believed that responsibility for the unfolding nightmare rested in Belgrade and St Petersburg. The Economist warned that ‘the provocation begun by Serbia has been continued by Russia. If a great war begins, Russian mobilization will be the proximate cause. And we fear that the poisonous articles of The Times have encouraged the Tsar to hope for British support.’ A Viennese letter-writer to The Economist, Josef Redlich, demanded: ‘Public opinion throughout the Austrian dominions, without distinction of party, has throbbed with the one question, How long Austria is to tolerate such a conception of neighbourliness as dominates Serbia?’ Nine distinguished Cambridge academics wrote to The Times: ‘We regard Germany as a nation leading the way in Arts and Sciences, and we have all learnt and are learning from German scholars. War upon her in the interests of Serbia and Russia will be a sin against civilisation. If by reason of honourable obligations we be unhappily involved in war, patriotism might still our mouths, but at this juncture we consider ourselves justified in protesting against being drawn into the struggle with a nation so near akin to our own.’
That night of 1 August, Grey dined with his private secretary at Brooks’s Club in St James’s Street; after leaving the table, for a while they played billiards together. Meanwhile the prime minister retired to bed nursing a grievance: the crisis had obliged him to cancel a country weekend in the company of Venetia Stanley, twenty-six-year-old object of his amorous, if unconsummated, obsession: ‘I can honestly say that I have never had a more bitter disappointment,’ Asquith wrote to her. He had some difficulty achieving unconsciousness, he said, ‘but really I didn’t sleep badly in that betwixt & between of sleeping & waking, thank God the vision of you kept floating about me and brought me rest and peace’. The British prime minister’s prolific and compulsively indiscreet letters to Stanley do little to enhance his reputation, but provide a priceless insight into his thinking.
The most prominent left-wing newspapers – the Daily Chronicle, Daily News and Manchester Guardian – remained vehemently opposed to British intervention, but the government’s attitude was contrarily hardening. On Sunday, 2 August, Asquith breakfasted with the German ambassador, and warned the emotional Lichnowsky of dire consequences should his nation’s army fulfil its threat to march into neutral Belgium. Crowds gathered in Downing Street and Whitehall, and for the first time many anxious faces were seen. Conservative leader Bonar Law wrote to the prime minister, promising his party’s support for a British declaration of war – a missive designed to hasten such an outcome.
The cabinet met, and learned from Grey that the French fleet had mobilised. France, he told them, now counted upon Britain to secure the Channel and the North Sea, having concentrated its own strength in the Mediterranean in conformity with a secret pact made at the 1912 Anglo-French naval talks. Some ministers were astonished, indeed confounded, to learn for the first time of this momentous commitment. But the cabinet – with varying degrees of reluctance – agreed to honour its terms, and to deploy warships to protect the northern French coast. The Germans promptly promised to stay out of the Channel if Britain remained neutral, but when Paul Cambon heard of the Royal Navy’s commitment, his spirits soared: ‘this was the decision I had been waiting for … A great country cannot half-make war. From the moment it decided to do so at sea, it was inescapably fated to do so also on land.’
The cabinet still rejected such a proposition, however. That evening of 2 August Sir John French, Chief of the Imperial General Staff until his March resignation over the ‘Curragh Mutiny’, made a bizarre telephone call: he sought guidance about the government’s military intentions not from ministers, but from Sir George Riddell, owner of the News of the World. The little field-marshal asked Riddell: if war came, would an expeditionary force be sent to France, and who would command it? Riddell referred his questions to the government. Lloyd George sent back word that French should present himself at Downing Street at 10 o’clock next morning. When he did so, he was told there was still no question of Britain sending an army to the continent.
Now Belgium became the focus of British attention. At 3 p.m. on 2 August, the Belgian vice-consul in Cologne arrived at the Brussels Foreign Ministry to report that since 6 o’clock that morning he had been watching trains leaving the Rhine city’s stations every three or four minutes, crammed with troops: they were heading not towards France, but instead for Aix-la-Chapelle and the Belgian border. When word followed that German troops had entered Luxembourg and were expected imminently to invade Belgium, the foreign minister M. Jean Davignon said emotionally to his colleague Baron Gaiffier: ‘Let us go to mass and offer prayers for our poor country: never has it stood in such need of them!’
King Albert had visited Berlin in November 1913, and received a dark warning from the Kaiser and Moltke: ‘small countries, such as Belgium, would be well-advised to rally to the side of the strong if they wished to retain their independence’. On 2 August the Belgian monarch was confronted with the meaning of this threat: Germany summarily demanded for its armies a right of passage through his country. The French were uncertain how the Brussels government would respond: they considered large parts of Belgium to be Germanophile. It was Albert’s personal decision, as commander-in-chief of the armed forces as well as monarch, to reject Berlin’s demand – with the overwhelming support of his people.
‘The response [to Berlin’s ultimatum] was very easy to draft,’ said Baron Gaiffier. ‘We only had to translate in plain language onto paper the feelings that moved each one of us. We were sure that we correctly interpreted the views of the whole country.’ Yet that Sunday evening, though the Belgian government knew the worst, an innocence still pervaded the mood in Brussels, especially among its humbler citizens. At the end of a radiant summer’s day, a host of walkers who had been promenading in the surrounding countryside strolled back into the city, many of them singing and clutching armfuls of flowers.
Britain was among the guarantors of Belgian neutrality under the 1839 European treaty, made soon after the country separated from Holland. Late on 2 August, the Germans warned the British government of their intention to march through King Albert’s country, with or without his consent. At 7 o’clock next morning, Belgium’s rejection of the ultimatum was conveyed to Berlin. When the news was published, Brussels burst forth with tricolour flags. Most Germans regarded this show of defiance with contemptuous pity. ‘Oh, the poor fools,’ the counsellor at the German legation kept repeating, as he gazed out on streets ablaze with national tokens. ‘Oh, the poor fools. Why don’t they get out of the way of the steamroller? We don’t want to hurt them, but if they stand in our way they will be ground into the dirt. Oh, the poor fools!’
It has sometimes been suggested that King Albert’s people would have fared better had the monarch bowed to the inevitable, and granted the German army free passage. But why should he, or the ruler of any sovereign nation, have done so? Throughout modern history, the protection of small states from aggression has often been considered by larger democracies to create a moral imperative. In 1914 force majeure constituted a more formidable influence upon events than international law. But the view adopted by most of the British people, as well as by their government, was that Germany’s invasion of Belgium constituted