The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (23 page)

Oddly enough, the man who articulated the Foreign Office concerns about Germany most forcefully was himself partly German and married to a German. In his admiration for the great German historians, his love of music – he played the piano extremely well and was a gifted amateur composer – his slight German accent, and, some would say, his enormous capacity for work, Eyre Crowe was always something of an oddity in a Foreign Office still staffed largely by the British upper classes. The son of a British consul and a German mother, he had grown up in Germany, in a cultivated upper-middle-class world which resembled that which had produced Tirpitz. His parents had known the doomed emperor Friedrich Wilhelm and his English wife Princess Victoria and shared their liberal hopes for Germany. Crowe had deep affection for Germany and German culture but he deplored what he saw as the triumph of Prussianism with its authoritarianism and stress on military values. He was also highly critical of what he saw as ‘the erratic, domineering, and often frankly aggressive spirit’, which, in his opinion, animated German public life. Germany was looking for a place in the world commensurate with its new power; that much Crowe understood and indeed sympathised with. But he objected strongly to the way in which Germany’s leaders had gone about it, demanding colonies, for example, from other powers and using its military power as a threat. As he said in a letter to his mother in 1896, Germany had got used to thinking that it could treat Britain badly ‘like kicking a dead ass. The animal coming alive and displaying the features of a lion instead, has somewhat bewildered those sportsmen.’
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He made it his mission in the Foreign Office to urge his superiors to stand up to what he described as German blackmail.

On New Year’s Day 1907 Crowe, who had recently been put in charge of the part of the Foreign Office which looked after Germany and the other western European states, submitted what became his
most famous memorandum to Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary. In its forceful arguments, its grasp of history, and its attempt to understand Germany’s motivations, it can be compared to George Kennan’s ‘Long Telegram’ to Washington at the start of the Cold War which laid out the sources of Soviet conduct and the policy of containment. Crowe argued, as Kennan did later, that his country was facing an opponent which would continuously try to seize the advantage unless it was checked. ‘To give way to the blackmailer’s menaces enriches him, but it has long been proved by uniform experience that, although this may secure for the victim temporary peace, it is certain to lead to renewed molestation and higher demands after ever-shortening periods of amicable forbearance. The blackmailer’s trade is generally ruined by the first resolute stand made against his exactions and the determination rather to face all risks of a possibly disagreeable situation than to continue in the path of endless concessions. But, failing such determination, it is more than probable that the relations between the two parties will grow steadily worse.’
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Britain’s foreign and defence policy, Crowe argued, was determined by geography, both its position on the periphery of Europe and its possession of a huge overseas empire. It was almost ‘a law of nature’ that the British would favour a balance of power to prevent a single country gaining control of the Continent.
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Nor could Britain concede control of the seas to another power without endangering its very existence. Germany’s policy of building up its navy might be part of an overall strategy to challenge Britain’s position in the world or it might be the result of ‘a vague, confused, and unpractical statesmanship, not fully realizing its own drift’.
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From Britain’s point of view it did not really matter. In either case, Britain must meet the German naval challenge, yet do so firmly and calmly. (Kennan was to give similar advice about the Soviet Union forty years later.) ‘Nothing’, Crowe wrote, ‘is more likely to produce in Germany the impression of the practical hopelessness of a never-ending succession of costly naval programmes than the conviction, based on ocular demonstration, that for every German ship England will inevitably lay down two, so maintaining the present, relative British preponderance.’
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Once the British had made their move to build the first dreadnought, Tirpitz and the Kaiser and their supporters were indeed faced
with a clear choice: to give up the race and try to mend fences with Britain or respond by trying to keep up in the race and build their equivalent of the dreadnoughts. If they chose the latter Germany would face considerable increased costs: new materials and technologies, higher maintenance and repair, and bigger crews all added up to a sum double that of the existing battleships. In addition, docks would have to be rebuilt to handle the bigger ships and the Kiel Canal, which allowed them to be built in the secure shipyards on the Baltic coast and then be brought through in safety to German ports on the North Sea, would have to be widened and deepened.
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Moreover, money absorbed by the navy would not be available to the army, which was facing a growing threat from Russia. The decision as to which path to take could not be postponed for long lest Britain get too far ahead.

In the early part of 1905, months before the keel for
Dreadnought
was laid, the German naval attaché in London reported back to Berlin that the British were planning a new type of battleship, more powerful than any in existence.
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In March 1905 Selborne presented the estimates for the navy for the coming year to Parliament. They included one new battleship but he did not provide any details, and while he mentioned Fisher’s committee, he said that no public good would be served by making its report public. That summer Tirpitz retreated, as he liked to do, to his house in the Black Forest. There, amidst the pines and firs, he consulted with some of his most trusted advisers. By the autumn, he had made his decision; Germany would build battleships as well as battlecruisers to match the new British ones. As Holger Herwig, a leading historian of the German naval race, has observed: ‘It speaks volumes for the nature of the decision-making process in Wilhelmian Germany that the British challenge was accepted without input from the chancery, the foreign office, the treasury, or the two agencies directly responsible for naval strategic planning, the admiralty staff and the High Seas Fleet!’
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Tirpitz presented a new naval bill which provided for increased spending – some 35 per cent over the naval bill of 1900 – to cover the costs of dreadnoughts as well as six new cruisers. Germany would build two dreadnoughts and one heavy cruiser per year.

Not all Germans by any means shared the fears or accepted the need for a large and expensive navy. Even in the navy itself, there was grumbling that Tirpitz’s focus on more and more ships meant that there was
not enough money for personnel or training.
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In the Reichstag, deputies from the centre and left but also from the right attacked the growing deficits, which were caused in part by the naval budget. The Chancellor, Bülow, was already struggling to plug the holes in the German budget and deal with a Reichstag which was reluctant to raise taxes, but fortuitously there was a major crisis and war scare over Morocco as the new navy bill, the Novelle, reached the Reichstag and it was passed by a large margin in May 1906.
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Bülow nevertheless became increasingly worried about the financial crisis looming for Germany and his own difficulties in dealing with the Reichstag. And there seemed to be no end in sight to the naval spending: ‘When will you be sufficiently advanced with your fleet’, he asked Tirpitz pointedly in 1907, ‘so that the … unbearable political situation will be relieved?’
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Tirpitz’s timetable for getting out of the danger zone (as Germany quietly tried to get to the point where it had a navy strong enough to pressure Britain) kept being extended further into the future.

As far as the Kaiser and Tirpitz were concerned the responsibility for taking the naval race to a new level rested with what Wilhelm called the ‘entirely
crazy Dreadnought policy
of Sir J. Fisher and His Majesty’. The Germans were prone to see Edward VII as bent on a policy of encircling Germany. The British had made a mistake in building dreadnoughts and heavy cruisers, in Tirpitz’s view, and they were angry about it: ‘This annoyance will increase as they see that we follow them immediately.’
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That did not stop the German leadership from being anxious about the immediate future. Tirpitz’s danger zone had just got longer and, so far, the British showed no signs of wanting to make an agreement with Germany. ‘No allies in sight,’ said Holstein sardonically to Bülow.
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Who could tell what the British might do? Did their history not show them to be hypocritical, devious and ruthless? Fears of a ‘Kopenhagen’, a sudden British attack just like the one in 1807 when the British navy had bombarded Copenhagen and seized the Danish fleet, were never far from the thoughts of the German leadership once the naval race had started. On Christmas Eve in 1904, when the war between Russia and Japan was causing international tensions, Bülow told Ambassador Lascelles that the German government had seriously feared that Britain, which was allied to Japan, might attack Germany, which had been offering considerable support to Russia. Fortunately the German ambassador
in London who had been summoned back to Berlin had managed to persuade his superiors, including a very worried Kaiser, that the British had no intention of starting a war.
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Such fears spread out into German society and caused bursts of panic. At the start of 1907, parents in the Baltic port of Kiel kept their children home from school because they had heard that Fisher was about to invade. That spring, too, Lascelles wrote to Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary: ‘The day before yesterday, Berlin went stark raving mad. There was a fall of six points in German securities on the Bourse and a general impression that war was about to break out between England and Germany.’
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Taking out the German fleet in a sudden action did occur to some in Britain, notably Fisher, who suggested it on a couple of occasions. ‘My God, Fisher, you must be mad!’ the king said, and the idea went nowhere.
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In the military and civilian circles around the Kaiser, however, the possibility of war with Britain was increasingly discussed as a realistic prospect. And if war was coming then it was important to step up Germany’s preparations and deal as well with the ‘unpatriotic’ Germans such as the Social Democrats who resisted higher defence spending and who advocated a policy of friendship towards other European powers. The German Navy League became increasingly strident in its warnings of impending danger and its demands for more and more naval spending, even turning on its patron Tirpitz for not acting quickly enough. Indeed, so some leading figures on the right thought, it might be possible to kill two birds with one stone: the government should challenge the left and the liberal moderates by presenting a greatly increased budget for the navy, more than Tirpitz wanted, to the Reichstag. If the deputies rejected it, that would be an excellent opportunity for the Kaiser to dissolve the Reichstag and try for a more favourable nationalist majority or perhaps even carry out the coup he had talked about in the past and get rid of such inconveniences as a free press, universal male suffrage, elections, or the Reichstag itself. In late 1905, as Tirpitz was preparing his Novelle, he grew concerned that his beloved navy was going to be used as a ‘battering ram’ to force through political and constitutional change in Germany. He had no objections to crushing the left but he worried about whether the attempt would succeed without serious internal upheavals and that it might make the British finally notice that Germany’s navy was expanding fast.
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By 1908, as the tensions in Europe rose again over the Bosnian crisis, Bülow was increasingly sceptical about the value of Tirpitz’s navy and Germany’s isolation in Europe. Could Germany, he demanded of Tirpitz, ‘calmly and with confidence envisage an English attack?’
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Tirpitz, who later said he felt deserted, replied that Britain was unlikely to attack at present and that therefore the best policy for Germany was to continue to build up the navy. ‘Every new ship added to our battle-fleet means an increase in risk for England if she attacks us.’ He dismissed the warnings from Count Paul Metternich, the German ambassador in London, that it was the German naval programme that was alienating Britain. The main reason for British hostility was economic rivalry with Germany, and that was not going to vanish.
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Backing down would cause serious political troubles at home. ‘If we undermine the Navy Law which is already in great danger due to the whole situation’, he wrote to one of his loyal aides in 1909, ‘we do not know where the journey is going to take us to.’
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Tirpitz’s final argument for keeping up the naval race was one that has been used repeatedly to justify continuing programmes or wars: Germany had already poured in so many resources that backing down would nullify the sacrifices that had been made. ‘If the British fleet can be made permanently so strong’, he wrote in 1910, ‘that it would incur no risk in attacking Germany, then German naval development will have been a mistake from the historical point of view.’
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