#23 A short naval war? –
Ep 7 WW1: was it really Britain’s fault?

One day after Britain goes to war - ‘at sea’ - on 4 August 1914 the first War Council unceremoniously throws out the army’s secret plan to send a few divisions to meet the Germans head on and win quick, painless glory fighting alongside the French. Only then do the four men who had single-handedly thrown away the chance of avoiding a general European war, understand what Britain’s most prestigious soldier, Kitchener, has been warning since 1911. That a war with Germany would last at least 3 years and it would come down to ‘the last million men’ Britain could send.

On the afternoon of Monday 3 August 1914, the British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey stood in a packed House of Commons and delivered one of the most scandalously untruthful speeches the British Parliament has ever heard. He claimed that the Germans were bent on occupying western Europe, from Denmark to France. He claimed that they had refused to negotiate. He claimed that Britain was obliged to support the French and Belgians. Not a syllable of this was true.

Then came the biggest lie of all.

Grey stood in the House of Commons and spoke for an hour and a half. He created an entirely false picture of German aggression and of the obligation that lay on the British to assist the French in fighting it. But this was not the greatest scandal. Grey finally and very carefully gave the House of Commons and the assembled ambassadors in the galleries the impression that he was only proposing that Britain go to war at sea. He led MPs to believe that a naval campaign would be cheap and would save Europe from German tyranny and do no harm to British trade. ‘If we are engaged in war,’ said Grey, in what must stand as one of the most extraordinary statements in modern British political history, ‘we shall suffer but little more than we shall suffer if we stand aside.’

Not once in his speech did Grey even mention sending a British Army Expeditionary Force to France, even though he had – without any cabinet authorisation – already mobilised the British army and as good as given the French to believe they could expect it at any moment. 

But the outrage did not stop there. No debate was allowed. Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour leader stood to protest. He stated, entirely correctly, that Grey had barely mentioned Russia. As we have seen, the fundamental reason Britain was going to war, the one Grey’s civil servants had spent the last month frantically writing memos about, was Russian aggression on the India border, and the vain hope that the Russians might be bought off if the British supported the Franco-Russian alliance in its conflict with Germany. But the Russians were deeply unpopular in Britain. So in his mendacious fairy tale about Germany, Grey had not even discussed the real argument for going to war.

MacDonald sat down. The Prime Minister Asquith then got up and calmly vetoed any more speeches, saying there would be ‘an early opportunity’ to discuss it all. Every single individual in the House knew that it was another transparent lie. Within hours, there would be no ‘opportunity’ to discuss anything. The war would have started.

Now Asquith’s own Liberal backbenchers began loudly shouting and demanding a debate straight away. Finally the Speaker of the House was forced to concede that they should all meet later that evening and debate whether or not Britain should go to war.

When the House reconvened, Grey opened the debate by reading out Germany’s demand, which he had just received, to be allowed to send its troops through Belgium. Then he and Asquith walked out. For three and a half hours MPs bitterly criticized Grey and his policy. But not a single Government minister bothered to reply. Grey, Asquith, Haldane – none of them were even there to hear it. Just like the Cabinet over the preceding days, Parliament had been completely side-lined.

So where was Sir Edward Grey, the man most responsible for dragging Britain into the First World War, during that evening’s parliamentary debate? Well we know exactly where he was. Grey was in his room at the Foreign Office. We know because he was chatting with his Oxford friend, J.A. Spender, editor of the Westminster Gazette, a a highly influential Liberal paper aimed exclusively at London’s gentlemen’s clubs. Spender recalled that they looked out of the window at the streetlights and Grey said ‘the lamps are going out all over Europe, and we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’

It is Grey’s most famous line and it’s always quoted to show what a wise statesman he was. But let’s pause for a moment, looking out of that window, and reflect on the implication of what Sir Edward Grey is saying. This is the man who has just told Parliament he is taking the country into a short naval war in which Britain risks little or nothing.

Suddenly we are chilled by what we have just heard. Whatever he has just told MPs in the House of Commons, we now understand that Grey doesn’t share that common illusion, that this will be a quick war, over in a few days or weeks. This, he believes will be a generation of darkness.

Perhaps Grey supposes the Germans will prevail and conquer the continent, and that Britain is embarking on a decades-long struggle to see liberty restored. If that is so, then he has concealed it deliberately and consistently from cabinet and Parliament. He has let the British army believe it can win a quick and easy victory, and he has told everyone else that it will be an effortless naval war.

And at that very moment he is too much of a coward even to face the debaters in the House of Commons.

On 3 August Grey systematically and knowingly misled the British Parliament into the belief that the government was taking the nation into a brief naval war.

The Cabinet that met the next morning, Tuesday 4 August 1914, was understandably subdued. Asquith was still trying to hold on to the four ministers who had resigned. Then news arrived that Germany had invaded Belgium and declared war on France. Asquith wrote to his girlfriend Venetia that Churchill had ‘all his war paint on’. He was openly relishing the whole business.

The meeting descended into farce. Someone, perhaps Churchill, proposed seizing Germany’s colonies and Harcourt, Colonial Secretary, persuaded the Cabinet at least to ‘wait a bit.’ Then someone began talking about spies. ‘There are many German spies here now and have been for a long time,’ Harcourt scribbled in his notes on the meeting. ‘We have full evidence against them – and shall seize them at once now.’ As we’ve seen, there had never been more than a couple of dozen German agents in Britain and they and been trying to steal naval plans. The myth of a gigantic German army espionage system was a nonsense, got up by the press and the anti-German faction in the army and the civil service.

The Cabinet agreed to send a demand to Berlin to withdraw from Belgium. Even Harcourt, who up till now had been vehemently opposed to war, seems to have resigned himself to what was inevitable. But nobody that morning even mentioned sending the army. Everyone apparently still believed what they had been repeatedly assured in the preceding days. This was going to be a war at sea. Everyone that is except the PM, Grey, Churchill and Haldane.

Asquith and Grey stayed behind to draft the cable for Berlin. They set midnight as the deadline for a German answer. Nothing had been said in cabinet about declaring war. The documents are not even clear that the Cabinet had agreed to go to war even if the Germans refused to withdraw from Belgium. Some of the Foreign Office men fully expected the Cabinet to be recalled in the middle of the night to decide what to do.

That evening, the three old friends Asquith, Grey and Haldane were sitting at 10 Downing Street. Lloyd George, the Chancellor, had come round from next door. The Home Secretary Reginald McKenna was there too. They were waiting for a reply from Berlin.

But there was silence from Germany. Which is not surprising since telegraph cables to Berlin were being cut by the British soon after seven. At 9 o’clock an intercepted telegram from Berlin revealed that the Germans had regarded themselves at war with Britain ever since, earlier in the day, the British ambassador had declared he was leaving and asked for his passports.

Crowds were now gathering outside Buckingham Palace and waving banners saying ‘poor little Belgium’ and singing patriotic songs. But at the Kingsway Hall in Holborn two thousand women were meeting, led by the veteran campaigner Millicent Fawcett. We’ll discover a great deal more about her and her extraordinary success in winning the vote for women in our series about women’s suffrage. That evening the women passed a series of resolutions calling for peace. Then a delegation walked up to Whitehall and posted their resolutions through the letterbox at 10 Downing Street.

At roughly that same moment the men inside were deciding to bring the deadline forward. Why hang around when they’d already made the decision to go to war even if the rest of the Cabinet, Parliament and the country didn’t know? Midnight in Berlin was 11 o’clock in London, wasn’t it? So at that hour they called a special meeting of the Privy Council.

Now the British Privy Council consists of dozens – usually even hundreds of men. They are bishops and archibishops, distinguished politicians and judges, current and former government ministers, members of the royal family. In August 1914 its President was John Morley, one of the most outspoken critics of the government’s policy of going to war. But that night, 4 August 1914, the government summoned just two privy counsellors, both elderly members of the House of Lords. And, as tradition dictated, standing with the King, they formally declared a state of war to exist.

At 11.20 the War Telegram was dispatched to the armed forces. ‘War. Germany. Act.’ As Churchill would later boast, there had been no Cabinet decision. There had also been no Parliamentary approval. There had not even been a formal declaration of war on Germany.

The Colonial Secretary Harcourt arrived at Downing Street at 11.15 pm. He records that there was a ‘long discussion as to tactics.’ Churchill was all for blockading neutral ports like Amsterdam. Harcourt, now apparently in war mood – or simply accepting the inevitable - offered to send colonial forces to seize the important German wireless station in Togoland.

And now they finally talked openly about sending the Army to Flanders. But Harcourt reminded them that there were rumours of civil unrest in the North of England. They would need troops to keep order. He also pointed out – as if, after centuries of the British Empire it shouldn’t have been obvious to everyone – that the army’s priority was to defend the colonies.

What is completely clear from the voices in the room that night is that Grey, Haldane, Asquith and Churchill, who had led the country into war, had no clear idea what kind of war they had got themselves into, nor any strategy for fighting it.

Outside, when Big Ben struck midnight, the crowds fell silent. They didn’t know they had already been at war for an hour.

At 11 o’clock on the night of 4 August 1914 Britain was at war with Germany. There was no formal declaration. There had been no cabinet decision. Parliament had not agreed. Britain had been taken to war by the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, by Foreign Secretary Edward Grey, War Secretary Richard Haldane and First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill. They had been backed by the British army, eager to win glory lost in the Boer War, and by a clique of Germanophic civil servants. Without Britain’s entry, it is more than possible that the war would not have begun at all. A decision made by four British men would lead to the death and injury of 37 million.

The next morning, when the British cabinet met to discuss the new situation, the mood of some was suddenly

boyish. The colonial secretary Loulou Harcourt told them ‘I am nervous about Zanzibar & have turned out all Germans. I shall not seize Togoland yet.’ When that morning he met the military to discuss the Colonies, they decided to go immediately onto the offensive in India, New Guinea, Samoa and Nauru and to look into attacks on German South West Africa and the Cameroons.

In the Cabinet Churchill announced that his Navy was already hunting down German ships in the Mediterranean. Which is curious, since Edward Grey had assured the House of Commons less than two days before that only the French were patrolling the Mediterranean while the British were patrolling on the Channel. It was one of the arguments he had used to persuade Parliament that the British were obliged to enter the war alongside France.

That  morning of 5 August 1914 everybody in the Cabinet was assuming it was going to be a short, brisk war and Grey – who two days before had told a journalist friend that it could last a generation – did not offer to enlighten them. Prime Minister Asquith had been telling dinner guests about a war lasting between three weeks and three months. Like the German politicians, the British Government had made no plans at all for anything longer. There were no arrangements to make extra ammunition, no thought for getting supplies past German submarines, even though Britain imported nearly 80% of its wheat and 36% of its meat. There was only six weeks’ supply of sugar and the Government was hurriedly trying to purchase Cuba’s entire 300 000 ton crop. Nobody had thought about special taxes. Nor even about more uniforms.

Britain has historically had a right-wing press and the papers had for days been baying for blood. That morning they were full of maps and speculation about the naval war the journalists imagined was about to unfold. That was also the talk at Cabinet. When the ministers asked if, despite all his assurances to the contrary, Asquith now intended to send an expeditionary army to France or Belgium, he replied he was meeting the military that afternoon ‘to examine use, if any, of troops.’ Of course, as we’ve seen, the army had already been mobilised and the French notified. Since 1905 plans had been covertly worked out to send a British expeditionary force to Flanders to face the Germans. The British army, and above all its Director of Military Operations Henry Wilson, was extremely gung-ho about it. Wilson had spent weeks in Flanders recce-ing the battlefields, working out all the details with the French military command. He couldn’t wait.

But when the War Council met that afternoon at 4pm absolutely everything changed.

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