The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (12 page)

On 30 January, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance was signed. Although the British had hoped that it might cover India as well, the Japanese had insisted that it remain restricted to China. The two countries promised to follow an Open Door policy (although Japan’s particular interest in Korea was conceded); to remain neutral if attacked by a third party; and to come to each other’s aid if two or more powers attacked. There was also a secret clause covering naval power in the region. The British and the Japanese navies were going to start talking to each other about co-operation against potential enemies in the Pacific such as France or Russia. News of the treaty was greeted with considerable excitement in Japan, where there were public demonstrations in support of it. In Britain the reaction was more muted and the government preferred it that way.

Britain had abandoned a policy which, if not strictly speaking was either one of isolation or centuries old, had served it well. For much of the nineteenth century it had been able to comfortably build its trade and its empire without worrying too much about combinations of powers against it. The world had changed though and France and Russia together now made a formidable opponent. New powers such as Germany, the United States, and Japan itself were also undermining British global hegemony. Its treaty with Japan was a way of testing the waters, to see if it wanted to plunge further into the entanglements of alliances. In 1902, things were looking up for Britain. The Boer War had finally ended in May and Transvaal and the Orange Free State were now part of the British Empire. And hopes that Germany could be made into a firmer friend had certainly not gone away completely. In Germany, the reaction initially was one of mild pleasure. By allying itself with Japan, Britain was a step closer to a confrontation with Russia in Asia and possibly with France as well. When the British ambassador in Berlin informed the Kaiser about the new treaty, Wilhelm’s initial reaction was: ‘the noodles seem to have had a lucid interval’.
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CHAPTER 3
‘Woe to the country that has a child for King!’ Wilhelm II and Germany

‘It
almost breaks
my heart’, wrote Queen Victoria in the spring of 1859 to her uncle Leopold, the king of the Belgians, ‘
not
to witness our
first grandchild
christened! I don’t think I
ever
felt
so
bitterly disappointed
about anything
as about this! And then it is an
occasion
so gratifying to both
Nations
, which brings them
so much
together, that it is
most
peculiarly mortifying!’
¹
The child, born in Prussia to her oldest daughter Victoria, was the future Wilhelm II of Germany and the proud grandmother’s hopes for both it and the future friendship between their peoples promised to come true.

A British–German partnership made a lot of sense. Germany was a great land power, Britain a sea one. Germany’s interests lay mainly in Europe, Britain’s overseas. Until the 1890s while Bismarck was still in control, Germany was content to be a continental power so the two countries were not rivals for empire. It helped too that they had a common enemy in France and shared an apprehension about French ambitions. After all, Prussia and Britain had fought side by side to defeat Napoleon. When Prussia, under Bismarck’s skilful leadership, united the German states into the new Germany in 1870, Britain watched with
benevolent neutrality. The great intellectual Thomas Carlyle (who wrote an admiring biography of Frederick the Great) spoke for many of his peers when he said publicly: ‘That noble, patient, pious, and solid Germany should be at length welded into a nation, and become Queen of the Continent, instead of vapouring, vain-glorious, gesticulating, quarrelsome, restless, and over-sensitive France, seems to me the hope-fullest public fact that has occurred in my time.’
²
Germany’s growing prosperity, later the subject of concern in prewar British circles, was initially welcomed as trade between the two countries increased.

3. Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, was a consummate Prussian statesman who, through a mix of skilful diplomacy and force, had brought about the creation of Germany in 1871. In the succeeding decades he had made Germany the centre of European politics, playing one nation off against another and ensuring that France, Germany’s bitter foe, remained isolated. Wilhelm II, who became Kaiser in 1888, resented Bismarck’s dominance and, in 1890, dismissed him with the result that Germany’s foreign policy fell into less skilled hands.

Surely the similarities between the German and English peoples too
demonstrated that both were part of the Teutonic race, sharing the same sensible and sober values, as perhaps they had always done. Some historians argued that both – the continental and the island branches – had stoutly resisted the Roman Empire and had developed their own sound political and social institutions over the centuries. Religion, which still counted for much in the nineteenth century, was another link, at least if you were among the majority of Protestants in each country. Moreover, in both countries the elites were largely Protestant.
³

Each found much to admire in the other. For the British, it was German culture and science. German universities and higher technical schools became models for British educators. British students in such fields as medicine had to learn German in order to read the latest scientific work. Germans dominated the important fields of biblical scholarship and archaeology, and German history, with its stress on archival work, the amassing of facts, and the use of evidence was felt to show the past ‘as it really was’. For their part Germans admired English literature, especially Shakespeare, and the British way of life. Even during the Great War, the Cecilienhof at Potsdam, built for the crown prince, took as its model an English Tudor house. Its bookshelves to this day are filled with the works of popular British authors from P. J. Wodehouse to Dornford Yates.

At the personal level there were many links, from the business communities in each other’s cities to marriage. Robert Graves, that most English of poets, had a German mother. Eyre Crowe, later famous in the Foreign Office as a firm opponent of Germany, was born to a mixed couple in Germany and educated almost completely in German. Higher up the social scale, English women such as Evelyn Stapleton-Bretherton, born in Sussex, married Prince Blucher, a descendant of the great Prussian marshal, and Daisy Cornwallis-West of North Wales became Princess of Pless, wife of one of the richest men, from one of the oldest families, in Germany. At the very top were the royal families themselves. Queen Victoria was descended from two German royal families, the Hanoverians and, through her mother, the Saxe-Coburgs. She then married a Saxe-Coburg cousin, Prince Albert. Between them they were related to virtually every ruling family in Germany (and most throughout Europe as well). In 1858, when their daughter married the future heir to the Prussian throne, it appeared that another important strand
had been added to the web that connected the British and the Germans.

Why did things go so badly wrong? Political scientists might say that the fact that Germany and Britain found themselves on opposite sides in the Great War was foreordained, the result of the clash between a major global power feeling its advantage slip away and a rising challenger. Such transitions, they argue, are rarely managed peacefully. The established power is too often arrogant, lecturing the rest of the world about how to manage its affairs, and too often insensitive to the fears and concerns of lesser powers. Such a power, as Britain was then, and the United States is today, inevitably resists its own intimations of mortality and the rising one is impatient to get its fair share of whatever is on offer, whether colonies, trade, resources or influence.

In the nineteenth century, Britain had the world’s largest empire and dominated the seas and world trade. Understandably perhaps, it showed little sympathy for the aspirations and concerns of other nations. As Winston Churchill, always a statesman with a strong sense of history, wrote shortly before the Great War:

We have engrossed to ourselves, in a time when other powerful nations were paralysed by barbarism or internal war, an altogether disproportionate share of the wealth and traffic of the world. We have got all we want in territory, and our claim to be left in the unmolested enjoyment of vast and splendid possessions, mainly acquired by violence, largely maintained by force, often seems less reasonable to others than to us.

Moreover, Britain frequently irritated the other European powers with its confident assumption of superiority, for example, to the institutions and politics on the Continent, by its reluctance to uphold the Concert of Europe, and the way in which it carefully intervened in conflicts only when it saw a clear gain for itself. In the scramble for colonies, British statesmen tended to claim that they were taking on more territory merely for the security of their existing possessions or perhaps out of benevolence towards the subject peoples, while other nations were motivated entirely by greed.

Germany by contrast showed both the insecurities and the ambitions of a rising world power. It was sensitive to criticism and endlessly
concerned that it was not being taken seriously enough. It was a big country at the heart of Europe, and economically and militarily stronger, as well as more dynamic, than its largest neighbours of France, Russia and Austria-Hungary. Yet in its gloomier moments it saw itself as being encircled. Its trade was soaring around the world and increasingly cutting into Britain’s share but that was not enough. It did not have the colonies, along with the concomitant naval bases, coaling stations, and telegraph junctions which were held to be the mark of a global power. Moreover, when it tried to take territory overseas, in Africa or the South Pacific, Britain invariably appeared to raise objections. So when the new Foreign Secretary, Bernhard von Bülow, gave a stirring speech to the Reichstag in 1897 in which he talked about Germany demanding its place in the sun, it was well received by his countrymen.

Britain, like other dominant powers before and since, was aware that the world was changing and that it faced new challenges. Its empire was too big and too spread out – which prompted arguments from imperialists at home to take even more territories to protect existing ones and the crucial shipping and telegraph routes. Its industrial output, while still great, was less in terms of the world’s total as new powers such as Germany and the United States were catching up fast and older ones such as Japan and Russia were entering the industrial age at high speed. And being first can lead to problems in the long run. Britain’s industrial infrastructure was old and not being renewed quickly enough. Its education system was turning out too many classicists and not enough engineers and scientists.

Yet the question still remains: why did Britain find itself with Germany as its main enemy when there so easily could have been others? Germany was after all only one among several threats to Britain’s world dominance. Other powers wanted their equivalent of a place in the sun. In the years before 1914, there could have been a war over colonial issues between Britain and the United States, Britain and France, or Britain and Russia – and in each case there nearly was. Those potentially dangerous relationships, though, were managed and the main sources of conflict dealt with. (We have to hope today that the United States and China will be as sensible and as successful.)

True, there were strains in the relationship between Britain and Germany over the years, a tendency to suspect the motives of the other,
and to take offence too readily. The Kruger telegram of 1896 when the Kaiser impetuously dispatched his congratulations to the President of the little independent Transvaal on the Afrikaners’ success in holding off the Jameson Raid (a gang of British adventurers had tried to seize control of the Transvaal) led to angry comment in Britain. ‘The German Emperor has taken a very grave step’, said
The Times
, ‘which must be regarded as distinctly unfriendly to this country.’
⁴
Salisbury was at a dinner party when he received the news and is reported to have said to his neighbour, one of Queen Victoria’s daughters, ‘What cheek, Madame, what cheek!’
⁵
British public opinion was enraged. Wilhelm had recently been made honorary colonel of the Royal Dragoons; his fellow officers apparently cut up his portrait and threw the pieces into the fire.
⁶
Paul Hatzfeldt, the German ambassador in London, reported to Berlin: ‘The general feeling was such – of this I have no doubt – that if the Government had lost its head, or on any ground wished for war, it would have had the whole public behind it.’
⁷
On the eve of the Great War, Sir Edward Goschen, the British ambassador in Berlin, said to a colleague that in his view the Kruger telegram was the start of the division between Britain and Germany.
⁸