diplomatic negotiations by which our Foreign Office achieved its design
of at last settling accounts with Germany at the most favourable moment
from the Militarist point of view, I shall have to exhibit our Secretary
of State for Foreign Affairs as behaving almost exactly as we have
accused the Kaiser of behaving. Yet I see him throughout as an honest
gentleman, "perplexed in the extreme," meaning well, revolted at the
last moment by the horror of war, clinging to the hope that in some
vague way he could persuade everybody to be reasonable if they would
only come and talk to him as they did when the big Powers were kept out
of the Balkan war, but hopelessly destitute of a positive policy of any
kind, and therefore unable to resist those who had positive business in
hand. And do not for a moment imagine that I think that the conscious
Sir Edward Grey was Othello, and the subconscious, Iago. I do think that
the Foreign Office, of which Sir Edward is merely the figure head, was
as deliberately and consciously bent on a long deferred Militarist war
with Germany as the Admiralty was; and that is saying a good deal. If
Sir Edward Grey did not know what he wanted, Mr. Winston Churchill was
in no such perplexity. He was not an "ist" of any sort, but a
straightforward holder of the popular opinion that if you are threatened
you should hit out, unless you are afraid to. Had he had the conduct of
the affair he might quite possibly have averted the war (and thereby
greatly disappointed himself and the British public) by simply
frightening the Kaiser. As it was, he had arranged for the co-operation
of the French and British fleets; was spoiling for the fight; and must
have restrained himself with great difficulty from taking off his coat
in public whilst Mr. Asquith and Sir Edward Grey were giving the country
the assurances which were misunderstood to mean that we were not bound
to go to war, and not more likely to do so than usual. But though Sir
Edward did not clear up the misunderstanding, I think he went to war
with the heavy heart of a Junker Liberal (such centaurs exist) and not
with the exultation of a Junker Jingo.
I may now, without more than the irreducible minimum of injustice to Sir
Edward Grey, proceed to tell the story of the diplomatic negotiations as
they will appear to the Congress which, I am assuming, will settle the
terms on which Europe is to live more or less happily ever after.
*Diplomatic History of the War.*
The evidence of how the Junker diplomatists of our Foreign Office let us
in for the war is in the White Paper, Miscellaneous No. 6 (1914),
containing correspondence respecting the European crisis, and since
reissued, with a later White Paper and some extra matter, as a penny
bluebook in miniature. In these much-cited and little-read documents we
see the Junkers of all the nations, the men who have been saying for
years "It's bound to come," and clamouring in England for compulsory
military service and expeditionary forces, momentarily staggered and not
a little frightened by the sudden realization that it has come at last.
They rush round from foreign office to embassy, and from embassy to
palace, twittering "This is awful. Can't you stop it? Won't you be
reasonable? Think of the consequences," etc., etc. One man among them
keeps his head and looks the facts in the face. That man is Sazonoff,
the Russian Secretary for Foreign Affairs. He keeps steadily trying to
make Sir Edward Grey face the inevitable. He says and reiterates, in
effect, "You know very well that you cannot keep out of a European war.
You know you are pledged to fight Germany if Germany attacks France. You
know that your arrangments for the fight are actually made; that already
the British army is commanded by a Franco-British Council of War; that
there is no possible honourable retreat for you. You know that this old
man in Austria, who would have been superannuated years ago if he had
been an exciseman, is resolved to make war on Servia, and sent that
silly forty-eight hours ultimatum when we were all out of town so that
he could begin fighting before we could get back to sit on his head. You
know that he has the Jingo mob of Vienna behind him. You know that if he
makes war, Russia must mobilize. You know that France is bound to come
in with us as you are with France. You know that the moment we mobilize,
Germany, the old man's ally, will have only one desperate chance of
victory, and that is to overwhelm our ally, France, with one superb rush
of her millions, and then sweep back and meet us on the Vistula. You
know that nothing can stop this except Germany remonstrating with
Austria, and insisting on the Servian case being dealt with by an
international tribunal and not by war. You know that Germany dares not
do this, because her alliance with Austria is her defence against the
Franco-Russian alliance, and that she does not want to do it in any
case, because the Kaiser naturally has a strong class prejudice against
the blowing up of Royal personages by irresponsible revolutionists, and
thinks nothing too bad for Servia after the assassination of the
Archduke. There is just one chance of avoiding Armageddon: a slender
one, but worth trying. You averted war in the Algeciras crisis, and
again in the Agadir crisis, by saying you would fight. Try it again. The
Kaiser is stiffnecked because he does not believe you are going to fight
this time. Well, convince him that you are. The odds against him will
then be so terrible that he may not dare to support the Austrian
ultimatum to Servia at such a price. And if Austria is thus forced to
proceed judicially against Servia, we Russians will be satisfied; and
there will be no war."
Sir Edward could not see it. He is a member of a Liberal Government, in
a country where there is no political career for the man who does not
put his party's tenure of office before every other consideration. What
would _The Daily News_ and _The Manchester Guardian_ have said had he,
Bismarck-like, said bluntly: "If war once breaks out, the old score
between England and Prussia will be settled, not by ambassadors' tea
parties and Areopaguses, but by blood and iron?" In vain did Sazonoff
repeat, "But if you are going to fight, as you know you are, why not say
so?" Sir Edward, being Sir Edward and not Winston Churchill or Lloyd
George, could not admit that he was going to fight. He might have
forestalled the dying Pope and his noble Christian "I bless peace" by a
noble, if heathen, "I fight war." Instead, he persuaded us all that he
was under no obligation whatever to fight. He persuaded Germany that he
had not the slightest serious intention of fighting. Sir Owen Seaman
wrote in _Punch_ an amusing and witty No-Intervention poem. Sporting
Liberals offered any odds that there would be no war for England. And
Germany, confident that with Austria's help she could break France with
one hand and Russia with the other if England held aloof, let Austria
throw the match into the magazine.
*The Battery Unmasked.*
Then the Foreign Office, always acting through its amiable and popular
but confused instrument Sir Edward, unmasked the Junker-Militarist
battery. He suddenly announced that England must take a hand in the war,
though he did not yet tell the English people so, it being against the
diplomatic tradition to tell them anything until it is too late for them
to object. But he told the German Ambassador, Prince Lichnowsky, caught
in a death trap, pleaded desperately for peace with Great Britain. Would
we promise to spare Germany if Belgium were left untouched? No. Would we
say on what conditions we would spare Germany? No. Not if the Germans
promised not to annex French territory? No. Not even if they promised
not to touch the French colonies? No. Was there no way out? Sir Edward
Grey was frank. He admitted there was just one chance; that Liberal
opinion might not stand the war if the neutrality of Belgium were not
violated. And he provided against that chance by committing England to
the war the day before he let the cat out of the bag in Parliament.
All this is recorded in the language of diplomacy in the White Paper on
or between the lines. That language is not so straightforward as my
language; but at the crucial points it is clear enough. Sazonoff's tone
is politely diplomatic in No. 6; but in No. 17 he lets himself go. "I do
not believe that Germany really wants war; but her attitude is decided
by yours. If you take your stand firmly with France and Russia there
will be no war. If you fail them now, rivers of blood will flow, and you
will in the end be dragged into war." He was precisely right; but he did
not realize that war was exactly what our Junkers wanted. They did not
dare to tell themselves so; and naturally they did not dare to tell him
so. And perhaps his own interest in war was too strong to make him
regret the rejection of his honest advice. To break up the Austrian
Empire and achieve for Russia the Slav Caliphate of South-East Europe
whilst defeating Prussia with the help of France and of Russia's old
enemy and Prussia's old ally England, was a temptation so enormous that
Sazonoff, in resisting it so far as to shew Sir Edward Grey frankly the
only chance of preventing it, proved himself the most genuine
humanitarian in the diplomatic world.
*Number 123.*
The decisive communication between Sir Edward Grey and Prince Lichnowsky
is recorded in the famous No. 123. With the rather childish subsequent
attempt to minimize No. 123 on the ground that the Prince was merely an
amiable nincompoop who did not really represent his fiendish sovereign,
neither I nor any other serious person need be concerned. What is beyond
all controversy is that after that conversation Prince Lichnowsky could
do nothing but tell the Kaiser that the _Entente_, having at last got
his imperial head in chancery, was not going to let him off on any
terms, and that it was now a fight to a finish between the British and
German empires. Then the Kaiser said: "We are Germans. God help us!"
When a crowd of foolish students came cheering for the war under his
windows, he bade them go to the churches and pray. His telegrams to the
Tsar (the omission of which from the penny bluebook is, to say the
least, not chivalrous) were dignified and pathetic. And when the
Germans, taking a line from the poet they call "unser Shakespeare,"
said: "Come the four quarters of the world in arms and we shall shock
them," it was, from the romantic militarist point of view, fine. What
Junker-led men could do they have since done to make that thrasonical
brag good. But there is no getting over the fact that, in Tommy Atkins's
phrase, they had asked for it. Their Junkers, like ours, had drunk to
The Day; and they should not have let us choose it after riling us for
so many years. And that is why Sir Edward had a great surprise when he
at last owned up in Parliament.
*How the Nation Took It.*
The moment he said that we could not "stand aside with our arms folded"
and see our friend and neighbour France "bombarded and battered," the
whole nation rose to applaud him. All the Foreign Office distrust of
public opinion, the concealment of the Anglo-French plan of campaign,
the disguise of the _Entente_ in a quaker's hat, the duping of the
British public and the Kaiser with one and the same prevarication, had
been totally unnecessary and unpopular, like most of these ingenuities
which diplomatists think subtle and Machiavellian. The British Public
had all along been behind Mr. Winston Churchill. It had wanted Sir
Edward to do just what Sazonoff wanted him to do, and what I, in the
columns of _The Daily News_ proposed he should do nine months ago (I
must really be allowed to claim that I am not merely wise after the
event), which was to arm to the teeth regardless of an expense which to
us would have been a mere fleabite, and tell Germany that if she, laid a
finger on France we would unite with France to defeat her, offering her
at the same time as consolation for that threat, the assurance that we
would do as much to France if she wantonly broke the peace in the like
fashion by attacking Germany. No unofficial Englishman worth his salt
wanted to snivel hypocritically about our love of peace and our respect
for treaties and our solemn acceptance of a painful duty, and all the
rest of the nauseous mixture of school-master's twaddle, parish magazine
cant, and cinematograph melodrama with which we were deluged. We were
perfectly ready to knock the Kaiser's head off just to teach him that if
he thought he was going to ride roughshod over Europe, including our new
friends the French, and the plucky little Belgians, he was reckoning
without old England. And in this pugnacious but perfectly
straightforward and human attitude the nation needed no excuses because
the nation honestly did not know that we were taking the Kaiser at a
disadvantage, or that the Franco-Russian alliance had been just as much
a menace to peace as the Austro-German one. But the Foreign Office knew
that very well, and therefore began to manufacture superfluous,
disingenuous, and rather sickening excuses at a great rate. The nation
had a clean conscience, and was really innocent of any aggressive
strategy: the Foreign Office was redhanded, and did not want to be found
out. Hence its sermons.
*Mr. H.G. Wells Hoists the Country's Flag.*
It was Mr. H.G. Wells who at the critical moment spoke with the nation's
voice. When he uttered his electric outburst of wrath against "this
drilling, trampling foolery in the heart of Europe" he gave expression
to the pent-up exasperation of years of smouldering revolt against swank
and domineer, guff and bugaboo, calling itself blood and iron, and
mailed fist, and God and conscience and anything else that sounded
superb. Like Nietzsche, we were "fed up" with the Kaiser's imprisonments
of democratic journalists for _Majestaetsbeleidigung_ (monarch
disparagement), with his ancestors, and his mission, and his gospel of
submission and obedience for poor men, and of authority, tempered by
duelling, for rich men. The world had become sore-headed, and desired
intensely that they who clatter the sword shall perish by the sword.
Nobody cared twopence about treaties: indeed, it was not for us, who had
seen the treaty of Berlin torn up by the brazen seizure of Bosnia and
Herzegovina by Austria in 1909, and taken that lying down, as Russia
did, to talk about the sacredness of treaties, even if the wastepaper
baskets of the Foreign Offices were not full of torn up "scraps of
paper," and a very good thing too; for General von Bernhardi's
assumption that circumstances alter treaties is not a page from
Machiavelli: it is a platitude from the law books. The man in the street
understood little or nothing about Servia or Russia or any of the cards
with which the diplomatists were playing their perpetual game of Beggar
my Neighbour. We were rasped beyond endurance by Prussian Militarism and
its contempt for us and for human happiness and common sense; and we
just rose at it and went for it. We have set out to smash the Kaiser
exactly as we set out to smash the Mahdi. Mr. Wells never mentioned a
treaty. He said, in effect: "There stands the monster all freedom-loving
men hate; and at last we are going to fight it." And the public, bored
by the diplomatists, said: "Now you're talking!" We did not stop to ask
our consciences whether the Prussian assumption that the dominion of the
civilized earth belongs to German culture is really any more bumptious
than the English assumption that the dominion of the sea belongs to
British commerce. And in our island security we were as little able as
ever to realize the terrible military danger of Germany's geographical
position between France and England on her west flank and Russia on her
east: all three leagued for her destruction; and how unreasonable it was
to ask Germany to lose the fraction of a second (much less Sir Maurice
de Runsen's naïve "a few days' delay") in dashing at her Western foe
when she could obtain no pledge as to Western intentions. "We are now in
a state of necessity; and Necessity knows no law," said the Imperial
Chancellor in the Reichstag. "It is a matter of life and death to us,"
said the German Minister for Foreign Affairs to our Ambassador in
Berlin, who had suddenly developed an extraordinary sense of the
sacredness of the Treaty of London, dated 1839, and still, as it
happened, inviolate among the torn fragments of many subsequent and
similar "scraps of paper." Our Ambassador seems to have been of Sir
Maurice's opinion that there could be no such tearing hurry. The Germans
could enter France through the line of forts between Verdun and Toul if
they were really too flustered to wait a few days on the chance of Sir
Edward Grey's persuasive conversation and charming character softening
Russia and bringing Austria to conviction of sin. Thereupon the Imperial
Chancellor, not being quite an angel, asked whether we had counted the
cost of crossing the path of an Empire fighting for its life (for these
Militarist statesmen do really believe that nations can be killed by
cannon shot). That was a threat; and as we cared nothing about Germany's
peril, and wouldn't stand being threatened any more by a Power of which
we now had the inside grip, the fat remained in the fire, blazing more
fiercely than ever. There was only one end possible to such a clash of
high tempers, national egotisms, and reciprocal ignorances.
*Delicate Position of Mr. Asquith.*
It seemed a splendid chance for the Government to place itself at the
head of the nation. But no British Government within my recollection has
ever understood the nation. Mr. Asquith, true to the Gladstonian
tradition (hardly just to Gladstone, by the way) that a Liberal Prime
Minister should know nothing concerning foreign politics and care less,
and calmly insensible to the real nature of the popular explosion, fell
back on 1839, picking up the obvious barrister's point about the
violation of the neutrality of Belgium, and tried the equally obvious
barrister's claptrap about "an infamous proposal" on the jury. He
assured us that nobody could have done more for peace than Sir Edward
Grey, though the rush to smash the Kaiser was the most popular thing Sir
Edward had ever done.
Besides, there was another difficulty. Mr. Asquith himself, though
serenely persuaded that he is a Liberal statesman, is, in effect, very
much what the Kaiser would have been if he had been a Yorkshireman and a
lawyer, instead of being only half English and the other half
Hohenzollern, and an anointed emperor to boot. As far as popular
liberties are concerned, history will make no distinction between Mr.
Asquith and Metternich. He is forced to keep on the safe academic ground
of Belgium by the very obvious consideration that if he began to talk of
the Kaiser's imprisonments of editors and democratic agitators and so
forth, a Homeric laughter, punctuated with cries of, "How about
Denshawai?" "What price Tom Mann?" "Votes for women!" "Been in India
lately?" "Make McKenna Kaiser," "Or dear old Herbert Gladstone," etc.,
etc., would promptly spoil that pose. The plain fact is that, Militarism
apart, Germany is in many ways more democratic in practice than England;
indeed the Kaiser has been openly reviled as a coward by his Junkers
because he falls short of Mr. Asquith in calm indifference to Liberal
principles and blank ignorance of working-class sympathies, opinions,
and interests.
Mr. Asquith had also to distract public attention from the fact that
three official members of his Government, all men of unquestioned and
conspicuous patriotism and intellectual honesty, walked straight out
into private life on the declaration of war. One of them, Mr. John
Burns, did so at an enormous personal sacrifice, and has since
maintained a grim silence far more eloquent than the famous speech
Germany invented for him. It is not generally believed that these three
statesmen were actuated by a passion for the violation of Belgian
neutrality.
On the whole, it was impossible for the Government to seize its grand
chance and put itself at the head of the popular movement that responded
to Sir Edward Grey's declaration: the very simple reason being that the
Government does not represent the nation, and is in its sympathies just
as much a Junker government as the Kaiser's. And so, what the Government
cannot do has to be done by unofficial persons with clean and brilliant
anti-Junker records like Mr. Wells, Mr. Arnold Bennett, Mr. Neil Lyons,
and Mr. Jerome K. Jerome. Neither Mr. Asquith nor Sir Edward Grey can
grasp, as these real spokesmen of their time do, the fact that we just
simply want to put an end to Potsdamnation, both at home and abroad.
Both of them probably think Potsdam a very fine and enviable
institution, and want England to out-Potsdam Potsdam and to monopolize
the command of the seas; a monstrous aspiration. We, I take it, want to
guarantee that command of the sea which is the common heritage of
mankind to the tiniest State and the humblest fisherman that depends on
the sea for a livelihood. We want the North Sea to be as safe for
everybody, English or German, as Portland Place.
*The Need for Recrimination.*
And now somebody who would rather I had not said all this (having
probably talked dreadful nonsense about Belgium and so forth for a month
past) is sure to ask: "Why all this recrimination? What is done is done.
Is it not now the duty of every Englishman to sink all differences in
the face of the common peril?" etc., etc. To all such prayers to be
shielded from that terrible thing, the truth, I must reply that history
consists mainly of recrimination, and that I am writing history because
an accurate knowledge of what has occurred is not only indispensable to
any sort of reasonable behaviour on our part in the face of Europe when
the inevitable day of settlement comes, but because it has a practical
bearing on the most perilously urgent and immediate business before us:
the business of the appeal to the nation for recruits and for enormous
sums of money. It has to decide the question whether that appeal shall
be addressed frankly to our love of freedom, and our tradition (none the
less noble and moving because it is so hard to reconcile with the
diplomatic facts) that England is a guardian of the world's liberty, and
not to bad law about an obsolete treaty, and cant about the diabolical
personal disposition of the Kaiser, and the wounded propriety of a
peace-loving England, and all the rest of the slosh and tosh that has
been making John Bull sick for months past. No doubt at first, when we
were all clasping one another's hands very hard and begging one another
not to be afraid, almost anything was excusable. Even the war notes of
Mr. Garvin, which stood out as the notes of a gentleman amid a welter of
scurrilous rubbish and a rather blackguardly _Punch_ cartoon mocking the
agony of Berlin (_Punch_ having turned its non-interventionist coat very
promptly), had sometimes to run: "We know absolutely nothing of what is
happening at the front, except that the heroism of the British troops
will thrill the ages to the last syllable of recorded time," or words to
that effect. But now it is time to pull ourselves together; to feel our
muscle; to realize the value of our strength and pluck; and to tell the
truth unashamed like men of courage and character, not to shirk it like
the official apologists of a Foreign Office plot.
*What Germany Should Have Done.*