#19 Bicycling holidays along the French-Belgian border –
Ep 3 WW1: was it really Britain’s fault?

How did what friendly chats between British and French generals since 1905 turn into a commitment to send a small British Expeditionary Force to France at the start of a war with Germany? A commitment that had not been agreed by Cabinet, Parliament or the Navy?

Before the First World War, anti-German hysteria in the right-wing British press was echoed by strong anti-German sentiment in the languid corridors of the British Foreign Office. Here bureaucrats like Eyre Crowe were inclined to misinterpret anything the Germans did. It was all, wrote Crowe, part of a masterplan, a dark design to achieve ‘a German hegemony, at first in Europe and eventually in the world.’

One of the most glaring examples, claimed these men, was the German shipbuilding programme. Surely any nation building new warships on the scale the Germans were could only have one thing in mind – to challenge Britain’s mastery of the seas. 

The anti-German bureaucrats at the British foreign office, and their contacts in the right-wing press, loudly protested that the Germans were building a navy to drive the British off the oceans and out of their Empire. It’s something that school students have been taught ever since. But it’s hot air.

Leaving aside the ranting press and their Foreign Office friends, what’s the evidence? Well, since 1898, the Germans had been building three new warships a year, which they stepped up to four between 1908 and 1912. After 1906 the ships were dramatically bigger than before. Of course it reflected the success of Germany’s well-organised industrial revolution, which had rapidly overhauled the shambolic British. But was it a threat to the British Empire?

You just have to do a bit of basic mathematics. Britain’s naval building programme meant that by 1912 she would have thirty-four up-to-date warships at sea or under construction, including two huge new Queen Elizabeth class super-Dreadnought battleships and three more on order. The Germans, by comparison, would only have twenty and would not be able to afford any of the new super-Dreadnoughts at all.

More important, as the Germans well knew and as events in the First War were to prove, the German coast was extremely, fatally easy to blockade. It was a simple job for the British Royal Navy to prevent any ships ever entering or leaving any of the German ports. What makes the whole idea of a German naval conspiracy a nonsense is that it was the Germans who were supplying the steel to build the British Dreadnoughts.

The German naval programme presented no serious threat to the British. Don’t take our word for it. Look at the top British admirals at the time. They were certainly losing no sleep over the Germans. The German naval programme was all so insignificant that they didn’t even bother to make any contingency plans to deal with a German naval attack. When they were asked to present the War Office with their plan if war broke out with Germany, their reply was so back-of-an-envelope they were almost laughed out of the room. One of those at the meeting - who was sympathetic to the Navy - said that their plans looked as though they had been ‘cocked up (sic) in the dinner hour.’ They probably had.

But, paradoxically, the Navy’s unimpressive but (as events proved) well-informed nonchalance made it easier for Crowe and his serious-minded anti-German cronies in the Foreign Office to win over the Foreign Secretary Edward Grey. Germans didn’t keep their word. They said. They had agendas of their own. Anybody who had had dealings with Russians, of course, knew that they were just the same. Perhaps even worse. They were actually, actively, in real life, threatening Britain’s lines to India. The French also posed a real threat to British interests in Africa and relations – negotiations indeed - between Britain and France had always been difficult. But the Foreign Office bureaucrats were very happy to negotiate conventions and ententes with the Russians and the French.

They believed however that the Germans could not be trusted. There could be no ententes or agreements with them. It was, in some indefinable way, for which there was of course not yet any hard evidence, the Germans who were plotting to take over the British empire. Invade Britain. Rule the world. It was no good talking to the Germans. Unlike the French and Russians they would not keep their word. It was a bizarre inversion of what was really happening. But the right-wing press loved it and the Foreign Office mandarins convinced themselves it was true. Something had better be done.

Well, the first thing to do was to track down all those German spies, who were – according to the press - so dangerously infiltrating British society. You remember that Lieutenant Colonel James Edmonds, head of a ‘Special Section’ for intelligence at the War Office.’ He had, as we’ve seen, been presented with a massive pile of letters written to the Daily Mail, many of them in a jokey bid to win its £10 reward for stories about German spies. At the time the paper was serialising Le Queux’s latest best-selling novel about a German invasion. In 1909 Edmonds presented a stack of these ridiculous claims about German espionage to a committee of the War Office. One of the committee who heard the ‘evidence’ wrote that Edmonds was just a ‘silly witness from the war office.’

But the key man in the room was the War Secretary, Richard Haldane. He was a brilliant scholar with a soft spot for the Germans. Like many men of his generation he had studied at a German university – Göttingen in his case. He spoke excellent German. He had even published an English translation of the German philosopher Schopenhauer.

But Haldane now found the senior civil servants in the room unaccountably and forcibly advising him to take this crazy Lieutenant Colonel’s evidence seriously. We, of course, now understand why. So, on the back of Edmonds’s ridiculous testimony, based on nothing but joke letters written in to the Daily Mail, the civil servants persuaded Haldane to set up a Secret Service Bureau exclusively to hunt down German spies. It would eventually become MI5 and MI6.

The first director of the Secret Service Bureau was Captain Vernon Kell (he gave himself the codename… K). He was assisted by the retired head of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, William Melville (codename …M). Melville operated under the alias ‘W. Morgan, General Agent.’  By 1914 K and M had spent five years hunting German spies. Because of the Daily Mail’s anti-German hysteria the public had clogged their offices with so many alleged sightings they could barely cope. In the autumn of 1913 alone, they received 9 000 tip-offs. And that was just in London.

But were there actually any German spies in Britain?

By 1909 anti-German hysteria was spreading through British society. It was fed not on any facts about German policy but by popular novels and the right-wing press. It had also seeped into the lazy corridors of the foreign and war offices. That year, 1909, they persuaded the Secretary for War to set up a new secret service bureau under its chiefs K and M. Their only task was to track down and destroy the huge spy network the Germans were, according to the press, running in preparation for an invasion of Britain.

But were there any German spies in Britain? Well, yes there were. In 1901 the Germans had set up a small but well-funded outfit in Britain, the Nachrichten-Abteilung. K and M, with their talent for secrecy, codenamed it … N. These German agents in Britain were run by Gustav Steinhauer, who had trained at the world-renowned Pinkerton Detective Agency in Chicago. The official historian of British Intelligence, Christopher Andrew, writes that M in fact knew Steinhauer well. (Maybe he called him S?) Back in 1901 they’d been working together on the tail of their common enemy, the dreaded Okhrana, the Russian secret police, who were running operatives across Europe. Together S and M had chased three Russian assassins at Queen Victoria’s funeral.

But such was the influence of the anti-Germans in Foreign and War Offices that within a few years M and Steinhauer found themselves not working together but against each other.

What K and M’s boy scouting failed to discover, however, was that Steinhauer’s spy outfit N had nothing to do with the German army or with invasion. N was run by the German navy and only ever had a couple of dozen agents in Britain. What they were chiefly trying to do was to steal naval plans. N was certainly never interested in an invasion of Britain. The reality was, as we now know, that, by stark contrast and whatever the press, and Lt Colonel Edmonds, or K and M claimed, the German Army never had a single agent in Britain before the First World War.

Even so, in whispered conversations in the Foreign Office and at the War Office, the new military counterintelligence enthusiasts, says Christopher Andrew, simply ‘assumed’ the German Army was running a full-scale espionage system. It tied in very neatly indeed with the black picture Eyre Crowe and his friends - not to mention Le Queux and the Daily Mail, along with K and M  - were creating. Germany was poised to invade Britain. Somewhere, somehow, sooner or later, some evidence would surely turn up to prove it. Wouldn’t it?

Now all this anti-German hysteria had serious political implications. It was why the secret talks, which last time we saw starting up between the British and the French armies late in 1905, stealthily hardened over the years into government policy. Somehow, the British army’s search for a new role after the debacle of the Boer War, - the hope for a cheap, quick and dashing victory in Flanders - transformed itself into a hard commitment to go to war against Germany. Even though it had never been agreed by Cabinet or Parliament, British soldiers were quietly being committed to fighting on the ground alongside the French if the Germans ever invaded.

Starting from the time the new Liberal Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey took office in December 1905, well-placed anti-Germans in the Foreign Office took action to make sure he would not interfere in the secret talks with the French Army. Grey’s Private Secretary Louis Mallet wrote behind his back to Bertie ‘the Bull’ the ambassador in Paris. He told him Grey was a ‘miserable creature’ who needed ‘bucking up.’ Bertie fired back an official letter to Grey and told him that the French would feel ‘deserted’ unless Britain agreed to send troops.

Grey had a reputation for doing whatever his advisors told him. As a student he had been sent home from Oxford for being idle. He’d never been abroad. But he mistrusted the Germans as much as Eyre Crowe or Bertie did. He remembered his grandfather showing him the Aurora Borealis when he was a small boy in 1870, toward the end of the Franco-Prussian war. That, said Grey’s grandpa, could almost be the light from the Germans burning Paris.

Even before he became Foreign Secretary, Grey had been writing that ‘Germany is our worst enemy and greatest danger.’ He was never therefore going to obstruct the Army talks or the Foreign Office Germanophobes. Nor was the new Prime Minister, Campbell Bannerman, a man so pro-French he was known to take the steamer to Calais and back just to take lunch. And one of the shocking things about foreign policy in the period before the first World War is that hardly anyone outside the Foreign Office could influence what the Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister did.

The reason was historical. Foreign policy had always been the private prerogative of the monarch. By the twentieth century, monarchs, of course, had very little influence. But foreign policy was still only discussed with the Foreign Secretary, the Colonial Secretary, the India Secretary and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Oh, and occasionally, the Prime Minister. ‘In reality, writes Thomas Otte, ‘the Cabinet was no effective check on the powers of the Foreign Secretary.’ And in Edward Grey’s case, that meant no effective check on the men who made up his mind for him. And by 1910 that meant men like Eyre Crowe and the equally anti-German Sir Charles Hardinge, a man who was notoriously just as indolent as Grey, but who was so ruthless and so well-connected that he was knighted six times and was nicknamed ‘the Grand Pan Jan Drum.’ He became Viceroy of India in 1910. 

The consequence of all this was that, instead of making common cause with Germany to prevent the rising threat of Russia and maintain stability in Europe, the Foreign Office, Sir Edward Grey and hence Britain found itself doing exactly the opposite. Britain would align itself with the French and Russians against the imaginary aggression of Germany. The result of that, of course, was vastly to increase German fears for their own safety. They put more money into armaments. And that in turn meant enormously increasing the chances of a brutal and protracted European war.

By the time a new Liberal Govt took over in 1905 British foreign policy had been under the influence of a German-hating clique in the Foreign Office. It tallied all too neatly with the talks we’ve mentioned before between the British generals and their French opposite numbers. The French were also of course deeply suspicious of the Germans. 

Since 1905 the British army had been conducting covert talks with the French to agree a plan to fight together in France and Belgium when the expected German invasion came. Hardly anyone in Government knew about it and Parliament and the Liberal Cabinet would certainly not have agreed had it known.

In 1910 the army appointed a new Director of Military Operations. He was Brigadier General Henry Wilson, an abrasive Ulsterman who was even more anti-German, than his predecessors, perhaps because – unlike most upper class English - he had largely been brought up not by a German Governess, but by a French one. While Commander of the Staff College at Camberley, he had become a firm family friend of his opposite number at the French War College, the Ecole Supérieure de la Guerre. His name was Ferdinand Foch, [Fosh]. Wilson and Fosh had already discussed in detail the part British soldiers would play in defending France against a German invasion.

The first thing Wilson did on his new appointment, as Director of Military Operations in 1910, was to hang a huge map of the Franco-Belgian border on his wall. Then he went on ‘holiday’. Seventeen times. Cycling around the battlefields where he expected a British army ‘expeditionary force’ to fight. An article on him in the Army and Navy Gazette commented on his ‘passion for the scenery along the Franco-German border.’ But it wasn’t the scenery Wilson was looking at. It was the lie of the battlefields. On one occasion he stopped at the statue of a woman representing ‘France’ at Mars-la-Tour near Metz. He later wrote that he ‘laid at her feet a small bit of map I have been carrying showing the areas of concentration of the British forces on her territory.’ He spent many days in Paris chewing over the details with Foch [Fosh] and other French generals, including Joseph Joffre, the new French Commander-in-Chief. 

By 1911, the anti-German brigade at the Foreign Office realised that sooner-or-later these covert Anglo-French Army talks were going to have to receive some kind of official government approval. And sooner rather than later. Opinion in the Liberal Cabinet that summer was running very much against getting involved with the French against the Germans. The two were deep in another spat over Morocco and a large majority of the Cabinet did not want the French to drag them in.

The anti-German Foreign Office contingent knew that they needed to head this anti-French Cabinet sentiment off before it got enshrined in any kind of policy. The campaign was kicked off early in August 1911 by a memo from Lord ‘the Bull’ Bertie, the strongly anti-German British ambassador in Paris. Bertie bullishly reported conversations his military attaché had been having with the French Commander-in-Chief Joffre. They discussed war with Germany. Joffre, wrote Bertie airily, ‘attaches the very greatest importance to the co-operation of a British expeditionary force.’ In other words, a British army fighting alongside the French, in France. Bertie made it clear in his memo that Joffre had agreed all the details of a joint British-French operation, down to where and on which day of the campaign the British soldiers would arrive. It was, of course, the result of all Brigadier General Wilson’s cycling holidays.

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