The Hidden Perspective

The Military Conversations 1906-1914

David Owen

• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781908323989, 9781908323668
• eBook ISBN: 9781908323675
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In 1905, British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey agreed to speak secretly with his French counterparts about sending a British expeditionary force to France in the event of a German attack. Neither Parliament nor the rest of the Cabinet was informed. The Hidden Perspective takes readers back to these tense years leading up to World War I and re-creates the stormy Cabinet meetings in the fall of 1911 when the details of the military conversations were finally revealed.

Using contemporary historical documents, David Owen, himself a former foreign secretary, shows how the foreign office's underlying belief in Britain's moral obligation to send troops to the Continent influenced political decision-making and helped create the impression that war was inevitable. Had Britain's diplomatic and naval strategy been handled more skillfully during these years, Owen contends, the carnage of World War I might have been prevented altogether.

Chapter One

From Balance of Power to Entente

Great Britain’s geopolitical power base was weakened by the Boer War. When it started on 11 October 1899, some believed, as in 1914, that the Boer War would be over by Christmas. Yet it proved to be the costliest, bloodiest, longest and most humiliating war Britain had fought between 1815 and 1914. There were over 100,000 casualties of all kinds amongst the 365,000 imperial and 82,742 colonial soldiers who fought, and 22,000 of them were buried in South Africa.

The central tactical lesson of the Boer War, according to Thomas Pakenham, its historian, drawing on an article in the Journal of the Royal United Services Institute of December 1901 by Jean de Bloch, ‘was that the smokeless, long-range, high-velocity, small bore magazine bullet from rifle or machine-gun – plus the trench – had decisively tilted the balance against attack and in favour of defence.’¹ That lesson eluded all but a few back in London, whether military or political decision-makers. A notable exception was Winston Churchill, who had been involved in the Boer War. Speaking in the House of Commons on 13 May 1901, he warned that a European war could only end ‘in the ruin of the vanquished and the scarcely less fatal commercial dislocation and exhaustion of the conquerors’².

In her recent illuminating book The War That Ended Peace, Margaret MacMillan devotes much-needed attention to warnings of experts ‘that offensives would end in stalemates with neither side strong enough to overcome the other, while societies were drained of their resources, from men to munitions.’³ She explains why Bloch’s three lectures at the Royal United Services Institute in the summer of 1900, to an audience of largely military men, were dismissed. Bloch was a Warsaw financier, and as a Jew, a pacifist and a banker he was everything they tended to dislike: ‘namby-pamby so-called humanitarianism’ was one reaction. But according to Bloch’s ‘meticulous calculations a hundred men in a trench would be able to kill an attacking force up to four times as numerous, as the latter tried to cross a 300-yard wide “fire-zone”’.⁴

Continental Europe had never experienced anything like the carnage of the Boer War. Its last war of 1870 had ended on 10 May 1871 with France having to transfer almost all of Alsace and part of Lorraine to Germany, but the Franco-Prussian War did not involve mass loss of life and devastation, though it contained within it the seeds of a continuing French fear and hatred of Germany. It was a war in which Great Britain deliberately avoided any involvement. Resentment still simmered in France over its defeat by Germany. The statue for Strasbourg in the Place de la Concorde remained draped in black. Every year those graduating from the French cavalry school went to the border to look down the slope in the Vosges mountains which they would charge down when, as they thought, hostilities would inevitably be resumed between France and Germany. For Great Britain there was no need to harbour traditional animosities from across the Channel. The most recent war Britain had fought in Europe was in the Crimea, and so although the French continued to distrust ‘Perfidious Albion’ there was not the intense fear and hatred engendered by a combat with Germany within living memory.

In 1888 the German Emperor Wilhelm I died; he was succeeded by his son Frederik who died 98 days later of cancer of the throat. His son became Wilhelm II. It soon became apparent that Wilhelm, who on succession became known as the Kaiser, had an odd personality – which some analysts put down to an arm withered from birth – for which he compensated by attempting to be even more militaristic than his predecessors. He removed Bismarck, as if to demonstrate that henceforth he would be in charge of foreign policy. Bismarck, the ‘Iron Chancellor’, had made Wilhelm I Emperor and proclaimed the German (united) Empire in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles – something the French never forgot and therefore insisted that the peace treaty of 1919 which followed the First World War be signed there too.

In December 1895 the Kaiser unleashed ‘a torrent of outrage in the British press and a corresponding wave of jubilation in Germany’⁵ with the release of the Kruger Telegram. Addressed to Paul Kruger, President of the Transvaal, it offered congratulations on the defeat of Jameson’s raid on the Republic. Although mildly worded, and considered to be gesture politics, the telegram was nevertheless withdrawn under protest. After nugatory British concessions to the Transvaal, Germany was excluded from any further involvement in the future of South Africa. The real casualty of the Jameson Raid, however, was the then Colonial Secretary, ‘Joe’ Chamberlain, who only survived his complicity because of the steadfast support of Salisbury and Balfour. Another aspect of the Transvaal Crisis was that between November 1885 and June 1886 the Channel Fleet did not leave Portland, a fact observed by the German navy. This should have been a warning to Admiral Tirpitz that his assumption that the British would never assemble the greater part of the Royal Navy in the North Sea was plain wrong, as would be demonstrated from 1912 onwards.⁶

In the spring of 1898 Admiral Tirpitz, who was appointed as a government minister, pushed his Navy Bill through the Reichstag. The size of the German navy then was 78,000; by 1914 it was 1.1 million. Norman Stone, in a stimulating book on the First World War, pithily describes this naval expansion. ‘The last thing that Germany needed was a problem with Great Britain, and the greatest mistake of the twentieth century was made when Germany built a navy designed to attack her.’⁷

A brash, immature, strutting bully, the Kaiser, according to the historian Christopher Clark, wrote in a letter to his uncle the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), ‘I am the sole master of German policy.’ But he was boasting, for in 1890, without Bismarck at the Kaiser’s side, the decision was taken to reject the Tsar’s offer to negotiate the three-year Reinsurance Treaty without any reference to him and without his prior knowledge. In January 1904 he told King Leopold that he expected Belgium to side with Germany in the event of an attack and that the Belgians would gain new territories in northern France; otherwise he would proceed ‘on purely strategic principles’. In other words invade Belgium. But the boast disguised the fact that this premise was based on the French attacking first. A sober, revelatory assessment from Clark about the Kaiser’s actual influence ‘suggests a fluctuating and ultimately relatively modest impact on actual policy outcomes.’⁸

British foreign policy was still in 1890 one of ‘splendid isolation’, a much-used phrase but with less and less meaning as other countries began to gain in strength, in particular the USA, Germany and Japan. In 1892–4 Gladstone formed his last government and, rather too adamantly for some of his fellow Liberals, refused any association with Germany and Austria. Meanwhile Russia, responding to the German refusal to renew their treaty, signed a Franco-Russian Agreement in 1891 that included a clause obliging France to give Russia diplomatic support in any colonial conflict with Great Britain. A Military Convention followed in 1894, covering Russia and France being attacked by Germany. This Franco-Russian agreement with specific military clauses⁹, what George Kennan would later call the ‘fateful alliance’, started to fuel a German sense of encirclement. When, after the 1904 Entente Cordiale, this agreement was extended to include Britain in the Triple Entente, that feeling of encirclement, specifically denied by Germany at the time as one would expect, grew more intense. It is revealing that Grey in his autobiography explains the theory of the encircling policy as having been encouraged by the Germans to hold their public to high levels of defence expenditure.¹⁰ The dilemma within the Triple Entente is well described in a chapter on Great Britain and Russia 1907–14. For Russia, the policy would be a success if it promoted a grand design in Europe, for England it would be a success if it did no more than stabilise Anglo-Russian rivalries in Central Asia and Persia, while there could also be an additional benefit for British policy if it steadied the wavering Russian commitment to the Franco-Russian alliance.¹¹

The Triple Entente never had the historic significance of its predecessor, the Entente Cordiale. Militarily Russia never lived up to the hopes vested in it by France in particular and, although it took heavy casualties in its share of the fighting from the onset of war in 1914, by 1917 the cracks in Russian society had widened into a ravine. On 12 March the Tsar was due to return to the capital when 17,000 men in the garrison there demonstrated against him in the streets. By 15 March the Tsar had abdicated in favour of his son. The Bolshevik Revolution was under way and Germany felt vindicated for its 1890 refusal to renew the Reinsurance Treaty. Indeed, Berlin had for some time done much to foment unrest in Russia. Britain had made a poor long-term choice over its alignment with Russia, but fortunately from February 1917 the USA, foreseeing the threat from German submarines, was ready to consider committing troops to the war in Europe.

Henry Kissinger wrote in Diplomacy of the Triple Entente,

It was the beginning of the end for the operation of the balance of power. The balance of power works best if at least one of the following conditions pertains: First each nation must feel itself free to align with any other state, depending on the circumstances of the moment. Through much of the eighteenth century, the equilibrium was adjusted by constantly shifting alignments; it was also the case in the Bismarck period until 1890. Second, when there are fixed alliances but a balancer sees to it that none of the existing coalitions become predominant – the situation after the Franco-Russian treaty, when Great Britain continued to act as the balancer and was in fact being wooed by both sides. Third, when there are alliances and no balancer exists, but the cohesion of the alliances is relatively low so that on any given issue, there are either compromises or changes in alignment.

When none of these conditions prevails, diplomacy turns rigid. A zero sum game develops in which any gain of one side is conceived as a loss for the other. Armament races and mounting tensions become inevitable. This was the situation during the Cold War, and in Europe tacitly after Great Britain joined the Franco-Russian alliance, thereby forming the Triple Entente starting in 1908.¹²

Yet the Triple Entente is often seen as starting on 31 August 1907 with the Anglo-Russian Convention, which covered practical arrangements over Afghanistan – the Russians accepted that it was in the British sphere of influence and that all Russian dealings with its leaders would go through Britain. On Persia it was agreed that there would be a Russian sphere of influence in the north and a British in the south. Even the term Triple Entente, much favoured by the French, was rarely used by Russia and Britain, and it is not to be confused with the Triple Alliance of 1882 between Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy.

Lord Salisbury became Prime Minister for the third time in 1895. Unusually, he combined the role with that of Foreign Secretary, but his health was bad, and in 1900 Lord Lansdowne took on that role. He had presided over the Viceregal administration in India, but had not modernised the War Office as Secretary of State. To some surprise the Marquess of Lansdowne as Foreign Secretary was interested and willing to push ahead with organisational changes, ‘so ideas were worked, in 1904, into a more detailed reform scheme by a committee, established by Sanderson (the Permanent Under Secretary, PUS) and chaired by W Chauncey Cartwright who, as chief clerk, was in charge of the Foreign Office establishment.’¹³ A central Registry was created, with a separate cyphering department, and the new scheme started on 1 January 1906 under the newly appointed Foreign Secretary Edward Grey. The Foreign Office in 1884 was small, its establishment numbering 44 officials, and by 1914 it had risen to only 51 (first-class clerks). The Diplomatic Service by 1914 had 135 diplomats. The Royal Commission on the Civil Service concluded that same year that ‘the Foreign Office was the same as it was 50 years ago … still appointed mostly Etonians to vacant posts. Of the 21 entrants between 1907–13, sixteen were educated at Eton.’¹⁴ The Foreign Secretary had power of patronage until 1907, when nominations were transferred to a Board of Selection.

Lansdowne agreed with ‘Joe’ Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary, that ‘splendid isolation’ had to be reviewed. Never a man shy in stating his opinions, at the Imperial Conference of 1902 Chamberlain depicted the British Empire as a ‘weary Titan staggering under the too vast orb of its own fate’. Described by Roy Hattersley in The Edwardians as having a mind which was ‘as capricious as it was fertile’¹⁵, Chamberlain argued in a speech at Leicester reported in The Times on 1 December 1899 for an alliance of Great Britain, the United States and Germany; what he called ‘a new triple alliance between the Teutonic race and the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race’. Hattersley, like Chamberlain MP for Birmingham for many years, writes perceptively about him as a thruster who by the age of 40 had made a fortune. For Chamberlain, the underlying issue was Germany’s growing industrial strength. He saw geopolitics through the prism of having been a manufacturer of goods,¹⁶ while other politicians were listening to a public opinion hostile to Germany and a diplomatic class more in favour of accommodating France. On 10 December 1900 Lloyd George attacked in Parliament Arthur Chamberlain, Joe’s younger brother. He treated the entire family as profiteers from the Boer War fomented by the head of the clan, though he did not attack Joe or Austen, both themselves members of the government, by name. Joe Chamberlain, no shrinking violet, seeing on the Liberal Opposition benches many members of the privileged classes, landed gentry and legal profession, hit back. ‘My relations are all men of business. They are all men who have to make their own fortunes or obtain their own subsistence. I come of a family which boasts nothing of distinguished birth, or of inherited wealth but who have a record – an unbroken record of nearly two centuries – of unstained commercial integrity and honour.’ He knew more than most in Parliament that Germany was posing an increasing threat to England’s prosperity. In 1862 German manufacturing had held the fifth largest share of world industrial production at 4.99 per cent while Britain held first place with 19.29 per cent. Between 1880 and 1890 Germany rose to third place and in 1913 it was second only to the USA, Britain having slumped to third place.

Count Bernhard von Bülow, then still German Foreign Secretary, who Chamberlain had met in Britain before he made his speech on 11 December 1899, then spoke to the Bundesrat and in effect replied negatively to Chamberlain and those who thought like him by simply advocating increases in German naval expenditure. Salisbury, too – as soon as he returned from the official period of deep mourning following his wife’s death on 3 November – replied to Chamberlain and ‘politely put paid to any German alliance proposals’, according to his recent biographer.¹⁷ To Salisbury, Bülow’s response was an all or nothing gambit; to Bülow, Salisbury’s attitude was provincialism.

It is worth recording Bülow’s thoughts on a country it was not at that time an exaggeration to call Great Britain: ‘English politicians know little about the Continent. From a continental point of view they know as much as we do about ideas in Peru or Siam. They are naive in their conscious egotism and in a certain blind confidence. They find it difficult to credit really bad intentions in others. They are very quiet, very phlegmatic and very optimistic …’¹⁸

Whereas Salisbury thought, ‘Except during his [Napoleon’s] reign we have never even been in danger; and therefore, it is impossible for us to judge whether the “isolation” under which we are supposed to suffer, does or does not contain in it any elements of peril. It would hardly be wise to incur novel and most onerous obligations, in order to guard against a danger in whose existence we have no historical reason for believing.’¹⁹

Thereafter Lansdowne tried to keep talking to Germany, with the support of Balfour, who was to become Prime Minister in 1902. Balfour did not lack experience of foreign affairs since in the late 1890s, with Salisbury not always able to carry out his responsibilities as Foreign Secretary to the full, he had deputised for his uncle. As Leader of the House of Commons Balfour patiently negotiated an agreement with Germany with Chamberlain’s help where both countries were to help Portugal financially.²⁰ The Portuguese backed off that agreement, but it was a positive sign that cooperation over Africa with Germany was feasible and sadly not utilised to the full during the Haldane Mission in 1912 (see Chapter Four). The Salisbury Cabinet was ready to consider an entente with Germany but not an alliance, the distinction being that a full-scale alliance with commitments was too inflexible, whereas an entente was no more than an understanding. That distinction was important in order to keep open the possibility of improving relations with Germany and also to allow public opinion to adapt to the reality that the Germans were bound to want more respect and influence while becoming a major European power. Yet an entente would not automatically carry the weight to demand a dramatic reduction in Germany’s naval shipbuilding programme. While the emergence of a strong German navy was inevitable therefore, its pre-eminence was neither inevitable nor desirable.

The emerging Germany of this period was very different from the Germany that developed in the 1930s under Hitler and to elide the two is a grave error of judgement. But it is very easy in the 21st century to do so, subconsciously at least. In truth, what Germany became under Hitler was heavily influenced by the effect of the First World War and its aftermath. Defeat on the battlefield, humiliation in the reparations and the global restructuring of the Paris Treaty of 1919 had a huge impact on the German psyche.

The political and diplomatic priority in both countries at the turn of the century should have been to build upon thos...

Table of contents

• The Hidden Perspective
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter One: From Balance of Power to Entente
• Chapter Two: The Military Conversations
• Chapter Three: The Cabinet Asserts Itself in 1911
• Chapter Four: Last Chances for Peace – the Haldane and Tyrrell Missions
• Appendix
• Notes