The Scaremongers (RLE The First World War)

The Advocacy of War and Rearmament 1896-1914

A. Morris

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138018082
• eBook ISBN: 9781317701019
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

This revealing book illustrates how the passion for war was fostered and promoted. The author provides detailed evidence of how and why an image of Germany as a nation determined upon world hegemony was deliberately promoted by a group of British newspaper editors, proprietors and journalists. This book examines the role of these 'scaremongers'. Were they as influential as their critics claimed? Did they influence the minds of their readers and shape events? Were they guilty of creating a climate of opinion that ensured that their prophecies of inevitable Anglo-German war became fact in 1914?

• • • • • • • Part 1 • • • • • • •

Making friends and choosing enemies: the diplomats

• • • • • • • 1 • • • • • • •

The Kaiser sends a telegram and Chirol is aggrieved

The one failing of every German whether he is an exalted personage, a diplomat or of the lower classes is that he lies and lies without blushing.

Col L. V Swaine in a Memorandum to the Foreign Office

I was so incensed at the idea of your orders having been disobeyed and thereby Peace and the security also of my fellow countrymen endangered, that I thought it necessary to show that publicly. It has, I am sorry to say, been totally misunderstood by the British Press. I was standing up for law, order and obedience to a Sovereign whom I revere and admire.

William II to Victoria

You know how influential Chirol of The Times is. A few years ago, when correspondent here, he went so far as to write an article against his own government, and the yielding of the government was probably at least partially brought about by this article. After the Kruger telegram Chirol and I naturally drifted apart, as each of us defended his government.

Holstein to Hatzfeldt

The Queen’s Speech to Parliament in 1896 did not include the customary reference to continuing good relations with other nations. Thus Britain publicly acknowledged that she stood alone in the world. Some called this diplomatic isolation ‘splendid’, an inappropriate adjective for something that was more a matter of unavoidable circumstance than choice. The Morning Post’s observation was more accurate: ‘We have no friends and nobody loves us.’¹ Though Lord Salisbury, Britain’s venerable Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, did not seem particularly concerned, few shared his monumental composure. There were those bold enough to ask (though not too loudly) whether the marquis still maintained his former sound grip upon affairs.

Salisbury was a realist. To thwart Russian ambitions in Persia and Afghanistan he had worked closely with Germany. Reassuming responsibility for Britain’s foreign policy after the fall of Lord Rosebery’s short-lived Liberal ministry in June 1895, Salisbury recognised there would have to be changes made, but he was not inclined to hurry or be hurried. ‘We know that we shall maintain against all comers that which we possess, and we know, in spite of the jargon about isolation, that we are amply competent to do so.’²

The 1890s was a decade of change and uncertainty in British fortunes abroad, at the Foreign Office, and also at Printing House Square, home of The Times. When Arthur Fraser Walter succeeded his father as chief proprietor of that newspaper in 1894, he determined to increase its circulation, restore its finances, repair its tarnished image and resuscitate its influence both at home and abroad. George Buckle, editor of The Times since 1884, shared Walter’s concern about the recent decline of the paper, but was not without hope for the immediate future. Walter had issued a diktat that The Times should be less politically partisan. Buckle replied:

In quiet times, such as we trust we are entering on now, the ‘critical’ or ‘umpire’ attitude of the Paper … is certainly the right one. When a great national question comes up, the Paper has to take a strong line, and if possible, make its view prevail…. If I have any bias beyond a bias in favour of the great principles to which the Paper is committed you may be sure I shall do my best to shake it off.³

The exchange between Buckle and Walter had been prompted by domestic political issues, but both men’s minds were as much exercised by the newspaper’s recent comparatively poor coverage and comment on foreign affairs. In large part they attached the blame for this upon The Times’s Paris correspondent, the unique, flamboyant, irrepressible, Henri Stefan Opper de Blowitz.

Since his appointment in 1875 as Paris correspondent, de Blowitz had been such a dominant influence that he had largely determined the approach of The Times to foreign news. Fluent, dogmatic and opinionated, de Blowitz was convinced that the key to journalistic success was sentiment and sensationalism. Sadly, over the years, his ‘curiosity had outstripped his sense of accuracy, and his personal vanity his sense of discretion’.⁴ German diplomats, used to their own rigorously controlled press, had been much upset by ‘the unspeakable diatribes of the Paris correspondent regarded in Germany as the expression of British public opinion’. Their exasperation was shared ‘by the younger, more advanced members of the British Cabinet’, who had promised, according to Herbert Bismarck, that they would ‘do their utmost to induce “The Times” to cease opening its columns in future to its correspondents uncontrolled’.⁵ Ministerial and diplomatic displeasure had achieved nothing. Arthur Walter was not only determined to stifle de Blowitz, he had the power to do something about it.

Although The Times’s foreign service was still highly regarded in most of Europe, Walter knew that ‘the Standard, Morning Post and Daily Telegraph were often equal and sometimes superior in news and comment’. With his manager, C. F. Moberly Bell, he was determined to replan The Times’s foreign news service. Buckle would still retain overall editorial control, but Bell, his authority enhanced by the new regime instituted by Walter, would become a very important influence in deciding the paper’s stance on questions of foreign policy. Manager and proprietor created a new department for foreign news and appointed as its head the most experienced and distinguished correspondent available, Donald MacKenzie Wallace.

Wallace was not a big man physically, but he cut a formidable figure. By disposition more a scholar than journalist, in everything he did he was thorough, imperturbable, tactful and discreet. There could not have been a greater distinction of character, style and temperament than between him and de Blowitz. Wallace was never inclined to be subservient to governments, but he was anxious to work whenever possible in accord with the Foreign Office. He both liked and admired Salisbury, supported and trusted him. Cautious and conservative, Wallace could be counted upon to act as a brake on the resdess triumvirate of Buckle, Bell and Chirol. That was the opinion of the Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign Office, Thomas Sanderson, who thought the three men regarded the British Empire as ‘a sort of elephant to rush about trumpeting and knocking down everything that comes in its way’.⁶

Though initially reluctant, Bell had given in to Wallace’s insistence that Valentine Chirol should be appointed as the new Berlin correspondent of The Times. Chirol was then aged 40, ten years Wallace’s junior. He had joined the Foreign Office as a clerk in 1872 but had resigned four years later and never given any reason for this decision.⁷ For the next sixteen years he travelled extensively, supporting himself by his writing. He had very few close friends, but numbered among them were Sir Frank Lascelles, appointed British Ambassador to Berlin in 1895, and Lascelles’s son-in-law, Cecil Spring Rice, appointed Secretary to the Berlin embassy that same year. A life-long bachelor, Chirol’s appearance was invariably if over-fussily neat, his demeanour earnest, and he pursued his duties with what can only be described as an extraordinary conscientiousness. He had little sense of humour and would take affront at the least supposed slight to his considerable dignity. So secretive was he in conversation that he would peep about him constantly as though he supposed his every word might be overheard. No one ever trifled with him in an argument for he defended his views with a stubbornness that was born as much of a perverse nature as intellectual commitment.

When Chirol took up his appointment in Berlin, the German Chancellor was Count Caprivi who supported closer relations with Britain rather than Russia. He was also opposed to Germany pursuing a policy of unlimited colonial expansion. Caprivi was supported by all the leading representatives of the British press in Berlin, most notably, William Maxwell of the Standard, George Saunders of the Morning Post, and Chirol. When Caprivi was dismissed from office in 1894, they were more than a little suspicious of his successor, Hohenlohe, and openly hostile to those political groups that had engineered the Chancellor’s fall.

German policy now inclined towards Russia and away from England, and this was made abundantly apparent during the Sino-Japanese war. British diplomatic initiatives were summarily rejected while a Russian initiative was responded to with alacrity by the Germans. These actions prompted the British press to express concern and doubt. A leader in the Standard asked whether Germany’s new attitude was dictated ‘by a perverse desire to do the opposite of whatever Britain favoured’, or was it ‘no more than the sudden impulse of the German Ruler’?⁸ Despite these vagaries of German policy and a sharpening of the belligerence and invective of the German ‘kept’ press against England, Spring Rice informed a friend that Chirol remained ‘an ardent advocate of a good understanding with Germany [and] a great admirer of several members of the present administration’.⁹

The unhappy press relations between Germany and England were suddenly made much worse by two egregiously patronising editorials in the Standard written by its chief leader writer, the Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin. These effusions, written to mark a visit by Kaiser William to Cowes and intended to heal the rift between Germany and England, had the opposite effect. William, his amour propre already dented by a supposed snub from Salisbury, was hurt beyond measure. The German press erupted with hysterical condemnation of Britain and everything British. Because Austin was Salisbury’s friend, they supposed the Prime Minister was responsible for the editorials.

What had particularly incensed the Kaiser was Austin’s gauche implication that Germany had secured her colonies by an act of British charity. The Germans had hoped that Salisbury would have been easier to work with than Rosebery, but their hints of a closer alignment had been summarily rejected. Now, presumably at the Prime Minister’s request, insult had been added to injury. The Kaiser assumed the explanation was that Salisbury must be working covertly to strike a bargain with Russia. Assumption became conviction in William’s mind because of the attitude adopted by the British press during the Armenian crisis. The Kaiser, who chose to ignore the frothings and fulminations against Britain of German newspapers and journals, eagerly fastened upon every grubby morsel spewed out from Fleet Street. He insisted that ‘the purposeless scandal of the Armenian question is due entirely to the British press and its influence upon public opinion’.¹⁰ Despite frequent assurances to the contrary, the Germans were utterly convinced that the British government controlled much that was said by the press on foreign policy. English newspapers were eagerly and regularly scanned by the Kaiser, his Ambassador in London, Count Hatzfeldt, and by high officials in the German foreign office, the Wilhelmstrasse. If the Morning Post was belligerent towards Germany, then Hatzfeldt in London and the Kaiser in Berlin naturally supposed the offending articles were written by the command of Salisbury. They were not. The actual source of the newspaper’s anti-German comment was its Berlin correspondent, George Saunders.¹¹

With the Armenian problem still unsettled, another crisis, this time in South Africa, rocked Anglo-German relations. The fabulous wealth of the Witwatersrand gold reef in the Transvaal excited the greed of all European Powers and the political destiny of that infant republic was a subject of consuming interest. Celebrating the Kaiser’s birthday in Pretoria, President Paul Kruger alluded to Germany as the ‘grown-up Power that would stop England from kicking his child Republic’. Relations between Pretoria and Berlin were sedulously cultivated. Accorded special favours by Kruger, the Germans were only too eager to provide the Transvaal with capital and technical expertise to counter British influence there. German money and technicians contributed substantially to the building of a railway linking Pretoria with Delagoa Bay that gave the Transvaal independent access to the Indian Ocean. The British, unofficially but busily intent upon ‘absorbing’ the Transvaal, were angered by the help the Germans were giving Kruger. Their frustration was nowhere more evident than in Sir Edward Malet’s behaviour when quitting his post as Ambassador in Berlin. He blundy warned Marschall, the German Foreign Secretary, that any further encouragement of Kruger might well lead to ‘serious consequences’. When told of Malet’s outburst, the Kaiser immediately bearded the British military attache. ‘Sir Edward’, William shouted at Colonel Swaine, ‘went so far as to mention the astounding word “war”. For a few square miles full of niggers and palm trees, England has threatened her one true friend.’ The Kaiser concluded his extraordinary monologue to, by now, a thoroughly alarmed Swaine, with a warning: ‘England can only escape from her present complete isolation into which her policy of selfishness and bullying has plunged her by a frank and outspoken attitude either for or against the Triple Alliance.’¹²

When told of the Kaiser’s diatribe, Salisbury simply disavowed Malet’s words. In a spirit of sweet reasonableness he asked the German Ambassador how could the Transvaal ever be the cause of bad relations between their two countries when both Germany and Britain wanted to maintain the status quo? Either Salisbury’s question was purposely ingenuous or it reflected his profound ignorance and unconcern about what Chamberlain was plotting and planning at the Colonial Office. The Prime Minister was to show a similar imperturbability when he was told of the Jameson Raid, an enterprise intended to afford armed aid to an Uitlander uprising against the Boers which ended in fiasco.

The excitement triggered among all classes in England by the raid left Salisbury quite unmoved. ‘No great harm seems to have been done in the Transvaal,’ he wrote to Chamberlain. ‘If filibustering fails it is always disreputable.’¹³ Queen Victoria seemed to consider the Boers’ capture of‘the excellent and able’ Jameson almost a personal humiliation. Her subjects who, for the most part, shared her sentiments, were determined to view what was an ill-conceived and hopelessly bungled act of brigandage as a noble attempt to bring succour to a deserving group denied thei...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: Scaremongering: the charge rehearsed, accepted and enhanced
• Part 1: Making friends and choosing enemies: the diplomats
• Part 2: Alarums and excursions: the admirals and the generals
• Part 3: For national security and party advantage: the politicians
• Part 4: ‘And he gathered them in a place called ... Armageddon’
• Epilogue: Account rendered: the rewards of excess
• Sources and notes
• Select bibliography
• Biographical index
• Subject index