#21 1 August 1914 war in Belgium and France is off –
Ep 5 WW1: was it really Britain’s fault?

The Kaiser orders champagne, halts the German advance towards Belgium, and sends a telegram of congratulations to his cousin George V at Buckingham Palace. The Liberal British Cabinet had voted to remain neutral on 31 July. Earlier on 1 August Foreign Secretary Grey met the German ambassador Prince Lichnowsky (one of a string of meetings that week) to tell him that France might also remain neutral. A few hours later they met again and Grey added that even if France went to war Britain would not. So what went so catastrophically wrong in the next 72 hours?

The key problem for British diplomats in the years before 1914 was Russia. Russian expansion to the east was threatening British trade routes to India and newly discovered oil for the Royal Navy in Persia. Somehow the Russians had to be bought off or bullied back.

The British could have made common cause with the Germans - who also very much feared growing Russian power. But there was a powerful anti-German lobby in the British right-wing press and in the Foreign and War Offices. Without any evidence at all, they loudly – and quite seriously - protested that the Germans were plotting to take over Britain and her empire. It was nonsense. But it led the foreign Secretary Edward Grey to make secret military and naval commitments to France, Russia’s ally. Partly they were meant to contain this imaginary German threat. Partly Grey hoped they would buy the Russians off.

By 1914 this round-the-houses, long-shot of an unlikely policy was of course getting nowhere. Then the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand was killed by Serbian terrorists. It opened up the real danger of a war in the Balkans in which the Russians would seize more territory. What on earth should the British do? If they backed the Russians now, it would start a general European war.

On 28 June 1914, the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Bosnia by Serbian terrorists. It was in itself a tragic but minor incident. But in the heady volatility of 1914 it was a catastrophe.

Ask any ten people who’ve heard of the First World War and nine of them are likely to tell you that it was caused by the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. But, of course, no historical event is ever caused by a single event. There are innumerable layers of cause, concentric rings and chains of factors and events and personalities that collide to create a moment. The assassination is the text-book example of one cause among many.

Franz Ferdinand’s death, and that of his wife, exploded into the most complex of situations, some of which we have been sketching, if only from the way they were seen in Britain. In the wake of the killing, Austria would almost certainly seize the opportunity to take action against Serbia and attempt to expand its influence in the old Turkish Empire (besides damping down separatist stirrings among the many Balkan minorities within its own borders.)

But that would present the Russians not only with the opportunity but also with the necessity to move south and seize Balkan territory for themselves. Austria could not be allowed to seize this whole region for itself.

If the Russians mobilised, the Germans – long terrified of the threat to their own security from an expansionist Russia - would inevitably back the Austrians. Since the French were militarily committed to the Russians, they too would almost certainly be drawn in and might conceivably take advantage of an Eastern European war to seize back Alsace and Lorraine, lost to the Germans in 1870. German war planners, afraid above all of facing France and Russia simultaneously, believed that a pre-emptive German strike against France through Belgium would give them their only, slim, chance of survival. So a general European conflict would break out.

It could all be avoided if the Austrians were persuaded to protest at the assassination but take no further action.

British diplomats flattered themselves that the British held the key to this situation. In fact, to an extent they did. Diplomats across the continent anxiously discussed what the British would do. If the British decided to support the French, then the Germans would almost inevitably feel forced to make their pre-emptive strike for fear of a French attack. If the British remained neutral, then the French might decide to do nothing. And that, in turn, would probably give the Russians second thoughts also. It would then be down to persuading the Austrians to be reasonable. Without German support, they almost certainly would.

Now, as we saw in our first discussion on this subject, the British were not obliged to support either side. Whatever you learned at school about the ‘Triple Entente’ no such thing existed in law and Britain had signed no alliances or military agreements with anyone. The much talked-about treaty to defend Belgium was a dead letter.

As for Britain’s own safety, the best contemporary analysis was that it was completely secure, protected by what was then the best navy in the world. Whatever you were taught at school about an escalating Anglo-German Naval Race, at the time the British Royal Navy was extremely relaxed about its effortless superiority. In fact, at the end of June 1914 the British Royal Navy was enjoying a summer regatta as guests of the German Kaiser. A large British fleet had sailed over to Kiel to join up with the Kaiser’s Navy. For six days their sailors had competed at tug-of-war, shooting and running (all of which Germany won) and football (a draw). A German sailor who was there remembered British sailors flirting with the German women and taking free train trips to Berlin. The Kaiser entertained senior British and German officers aboard his imperial yacht. Although the Germans refused to allow British sailors aboard their up-to-date ships (for security reasons), the British had such enormous (and justified) confidence in their naval superiority that they allowed the Germans to scramble over almost all of theirs and happily discussed all the technical details.

The news of the assassination of the Kaiser’s hunting pal, Franz Ferdinand, dampened everyone’s spirits. But as the British steamed away two days later, on 30 June 1914, the British Commander Sir George Warrender signaled the German fleet the words: ‘friends in past and friends forever.’ Whatever the anti-German civil servants said, and whatever Winston Churchill, the politician in charge of the British Navy, may have thought, nobody actually serving aboard the British or German warships in June 1914 seems to have had the slightest idea that war was about to break out between them. Germans and British historically had a great deal in common and they certainly now had a great deal to gain by working together.

Back in London, the Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey’s response to the news of the assassination of the Archduke on 28 June was not, as British popular tradition might have imagined, to instruct his diplomats to investigate German intentions. Instead, a week later (we said he was lazy), on 8 July 1914, he finally got round to commissioning a report on Anglo-Russian relations. Whatever generations of schoolchildren have been taught, and whatever the anti-German Eyre Crowe and his colleagues at the Foreign Office may have argued, British foreign policy in 1914 hinged not on Germany but on the best way to contain Russian ambitions in the east.

The report landed on Grey’s desk on 21 July. It rehearsed the obvious problems. There was the Royal Navy’s Persian oil to protect. Disturbingly there were Russian ‘monks’ in Tibet (probably military advisers in fact), Russian farmers in China and Russian soldiers on the borders of India. The Russians were once again demanding more of a say in Afghanistan. India looked indefensible against this looming Russian presence.

But the report failed to consider the obvious solution. If the British recruited German backing to force an Austrian climb-down over the Balkans it would defuse the immediate problem. And longer term it would send a signal to the Russians that the British had had enough of their creeping expansion in the east.

Instead, the report that landed on Grey’s desk had the fingermarks of Eyre Crowe and the other anti-German civil servants all over it. With hindsight their conclusion almost beggars belief. They argued that Britain’s only option was to try to buy the Russians off by supporting them (or, in actual practice by supporting their French allies) against Germany in what they calmly accepted would become a general European war.

Foreign Secretary Edward Grey’s response to the assassination of Franz Ferdinand was to commission a report on the Russian problem in Persia. For the British this was the key to foreign policy, the one consideration that would determine its position in the urgent crisis facing Europe.

When it came back the report, clearly written by anti-German civil servants, recommended supporting the French against the Germans in a general European war. Since the French were allied to the Russians, this was supposed to buy off the Russians. 

For their part, the Russians understood what was at stake for the British. They were quite happy to use blackmail. On 25 July 1914 the British Ambassador to St Petersburg, George Buchanan, was summoned and informed that the Russians would not accept a British declaration of neutrality in the present crisis. For months the Russians had been informing Buchanan that, unless Britain supported Russia against Germany, the Russians would feel free completely to disregard anything in the already completely useless Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907. Now, in a telegram to London, Buchanan said the British had to ‘choose between giving Russia our active support or renouncing her friendship.’ If that happened, he added, Britain would ‘be faced with a situation where our very existence as an Empire will be at stake.’ What he meant was that the Russians would feel free to attack India, or at the very least, cut of British overland communications with her.

It was plainly a piece of diplomatic blackmail. Colonial Secretary Harcourt had long and urgently pointed out to Grey that Britain was under no obligation at all to back Russia or France in a war. The large majority of Cabinet ministers agreed. The Russians were much more afraid of the Germans on their western border than of anything the British could do in the middle east. The Brits could very viably now call the Russians’ bluff and back the Germans instead. The Brits had very little to lose. The Russians had broken all the agreements they had signed with the British in the past. 

But Grey had rejected the German option out of hand. He had been persuaded by his anti-German Foreign Office mandarins that the Germans were bent on taking over the British Empire, on world domination. He knew that the British army had covertly made an agreement with the French to go to war with them against the Germans. He also knew that Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, had made an identical – also unauthorised – agreement with the French Navy.

So he had left himself no option. He would have to throw in his hand with the Russians and the French. Instead of trying to defuse the emergency over Serbia, the British would put their weight behind the French and Russians and tip the Balkan crisis into a general European war.

However, there were still plenty of further twists to the story before the British army would embark for France.

Grey’s civil servants might not have left him a choice whether to support the Russians in the crisis over Serbia. But he would still have to persuade Cabinet, Parliament and the public, all of whom had long been bitterly opposed to supporting what were seen as the uncivilized, untrustworthy and expansionist Russians – let alone precipitating a European war.

And Grey would have to decide in what way Britain would support the Russians and French. For centuries the tried and tested strategy for the British had almost without any exception been to use its Navy. It was by far the best in the world. Judging by their relaxed behaviour in Kiel, Britain’s Naval Commanders remained supremely confident they could defeat anything the Germans sent out to fight them (so long as it was not tug-of-war, shooting or running.) And events would prove them completely right – and those historians who continue to talk about a ‘naval race’ completely wrong. The small German fleet would spend the war almost entirely in harbour, completely unable to take on the British. The Royal Navy was able, with considerable ease, to blockade access to the German coast and, eventually, to starve the Germans into submission. Which it did later.

So even if Grey dragged Britain into a war, it didn’t have to be the meat grinder of the trenches in Flanders. 

On the morning of Friday 31 July 1914 the Cabinet met. It voted by a very large majority, that Britain would not to go war. The Russians could make whatever threats they liked, but Britain would remain neutral.

What happened over the next five days could fill many podcasts, as it has already filled many books. It has recently been examined in enormous detail by historian Douglas Newton in his often angry study, The Darkest Days. The Truth behind Britain’s rush to War 1914  (2014). But you can sum it up in five words. Britain was tricked into war. What very few books tell you is that it came down in the end to four men, who pushed their country – and the world - into tragedy.

 *This is not the complete episode – to find out more, subscribe for free to the podcast