The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (24 page)

In March 1908 Tirpitz got through the Reichstag a new supplementary naval bill, the Second Novelle, which shortened the lives of the existing ships in the German navy and therefore speeded up the rate of replacements (and small ships could be replaced by larger ones). Instead of three new battleships per year, the rate increased to four for the next four years, after which it would drop to three per year for, as Tirpitz hoped, eternity. The Reichstag would yet again approve a naval programme over which it would have no further control. By 1914 Germany would have had the equivalent of twenty-one dreadnoughts, which would have significantly narrowed the gap between Britain and Germany if Britain had chosen not to respond.
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Tirpitz assured the Kaiser that Germany would get away with the increase: ‘I have framed the
Novelle
as your Highness wished it, so that internationally and domestically it looks as small and harmless as possible.’
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Wilhelm sent a long personal
letter intended to be reassuring to Lord Tweedmouth, now the First Lord of the Admiralty: ‘The German Naval Bill is not aimed at England and is not a “Challenge to British Supremacy of the Sea”, which will remain unchallenged to generations to come.’
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Edward VII was not pleased at what he saw as extraordinary interference by his nephew in writing to a British minister and many in Britain shared that view.
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Bülow, who had the unenviable role of trying to find money to carry out Tirpitz’s new building programme, was coming round to the opinion that Germany could not afford the strongest army and the second largest navy in Europe. ‘We cannot weaken the army’, he wrote in 1908, ‘for our destiny will be decided on land.’
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His government faced a serious financial crisis. Germany’s national debt had nearly doubled since 1900 and it was proving difficult to increase revenue. Some 90 per cent of all central government spending went on the army and navy and in the twelve years between 1896 and 1908, thanks in large part to naval spending, the total expenditure on the military had doubled and was going up for the foreseeable future. When Bülow tried to raise the issue of reining in naval spending, one of Wilhelm’s entourage begged him not to because it only made the Kaiser ‘very unhappy’.
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Bülow struggled on throughout 1908 trying to put together a plan for tax reforms which could get through the Reichstag but his proposals for expanding inheritance taxes infuriated the right and new consumption taxes had a similar impact on the left. He finally submitted his resignation to Wilhelm in July 1909, having failed to solve the problem. Tirpitz prevailed because in the end he had the Kaiser behind him.

In the meantime, the British had started to take notice of the increased tempo of German naval building. Initially, as he had hoped would be the case, they had not reacted to Tirpitz’s first Novelle of 1906. In December 1907 the Admiralty had in fact proposed slowing down the rate of building for battleships so that in 1908–9 it would construct only one dreadnought and one heavy cruiser. This was also in line with what the Liberal government, which had promised both to make savings and spend on social programmes, wanted. Over the summer of 1908, however, concern, both among the public and in government circles, began to mount. The German fleet cruised in the Atlantic. What did that mean? An anonymous article, ‘The German Peril’, published in the respected
Quarterly Review
in July, warned that if Germany and Britain
got into a conflict, the Germans were likely to invade. ‘Her naval officers have sounded and sketched our harbours and studied every detail of our coasts.’ According to the author (who was J. L. Garvin, the editor of the Sunday paper the
Observer
) some 50,000 Germans, disguised as waiters, were already in place in Britain ready to spring into action when the signal was given. Shortly after the article appeared, the famous German aviator Count Zeppelin flew to Switzerland in his new dirigible. That sent Garvin, now writing under his own name in the
Observer
, into fresh predictions of the menaces gathering around Britain.
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In August that year, Edward VII paid a visit to his nephew Wilhelm in the pretty little town of Kronberg. Although the king had been armed with a paper by the British government outlining its concerns about German naval spending, he thought it wiser not to raise the issue with Wilhelm. It might, Edward thought, ‘possibly have spoilt the happy effect of the conversation which had taken place between them’. After lunch, the Kaiser, still in a cheerful mood, asked Sir Charles Hardinge, the permanent head of the Foreign Office, to smoke a cigar with him. The two men sat side by side on a billiard table. He thought, said Wilhelm, that relations between Britain and Germany were quite good. Hardinge, as he wrote in his memorandum of their discussion, had to disagree: ‘There could be no concealment of the fact that a genuine apprehension was felt in England as to the reasons and intention underlying the construction of a large German fleet.’ He warned that, if the German programme went ahead, the British government would be obliged to ask Parliament to approve an extensive shipbuilding programme and he had no doubt that Parliament would agree. That would be, in Hardinge’s opinion, a most unfortunate development: ‘There could be no doubt that this naval rivalry between the two countries would embitter their relations to each other, and might in a few years’ time lead to a very critical situation in the event of a serious, or even a trivial, dispute arising between the two countries.’

Wilhelm replied sharply, and inaccurately, that there was no reason for British apprehensions, that the German building programme was not a new one, and that the relative proportion of the German and British fleets remained the same. (According to the melodramatic account he sent Bülow, he told Hardinge, ‘That is sheer idiocy. Who has been pulling your leg?’) Furthermore, Wilhelm said, it had become a
point of national honour for Germany that its naval building programme should be completed. ‘No discussion with a foreign Government could be tolerated; such a proposal would be contrary to the national dignity, and would give rise to internal troubles if the Government were to accept it. He would rather go to war than submit to such dictation.’ Hardinge stood his ground and said that he was merely suggesting that their two governments should have a friendly discussion and that there was no question of dictation.

He also challenged the Kaiser’s assertion that Britain would have three times as many battleships as Germany in 1909. ‘I said that I was at a loss to understand how His Majesty arrived at the figures of the relative strength of the two navies in battle-ships in 1909, and could only assume that the sixty-two first-class battle-ships of the British fleet comprised every obsolete vessel that could be found floating in British harbours and that had not been sold as scrap iron.’ Wilhelm claimed in his version of the conversation that he put Hardinge in his place: ‘I too am admiral of the British Fleet and know it well – far better than you, since you are only a civilian and know nothing at all about it.’ At this point the Kaiser sent an aide for a summary of naval strength published annually by the German admiralty which would show that the German figures were right. Hardinge said dryly that the Kaiser gave him a copy ‘for my own edification and conviction’ and that he had told Wilhelm that he only wished he could accept the figures as correct.

Wilhelm’s version is characteristically quite different: Hardinge had a look of ‘speechless astonishment’ and Lascelles, who, Wilhelm claimed, completely accepted the German figures, ‘had difficulty in restraining his laughter’. The conversation ended, so the Kaiser told Bülow, with Hardinge plaintively asking, ‘Can’t you stop building? Or build less ships?’ to which Wilhelm responded, ‘Then we shall fight, for it is a question of national honour and dignity.’ He looked Hardinge squarely in the face and the latter had flushed, bowed deeply, and asked to be forgiven for his ‘ill-considered expressions’. The Kaiser was delighted with himself. ‘Didn’t I give it properly to Sir Charles?’ Bülow had trouble believing this account and his suspicions were confirmed by his colleagues who had been present at the conversation which, they said, was quite amicable. Hardinge had been frank but respectful and the Kaiser had remained in good temper.

It is unfortunate but not surprising that the conversation failed to produce a greater understanding between Britain and Germany. Hardinge’s warning that, if Germany continued to up the tempo of its naval building, his government would be forced by public opinion to undertake ‘a large counter-programme of naval construction’ was ignored. Indeed, according to Bülow, Wilhelm came away from the Kronberg meetings convinced that he had persuaded his British visitors of the rightness of Germany’s position. What is more Moltke, his army chief of staff, had assured him that Germany was fully prepared militarily. Therefore there was no reason for Germany to be cautious or to slow down the rate of its naval building. ‘With Englishmen’, Wilhelm assured Bülow, ‘the only thing that worked was frankness; ruthless, even brutal frankness, – that was the best method to use with them!’
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In reality British suspicions were growing stronger, aided that same summer by what was in fact an innocent move by the German navy to support German shipyards. Schichau, a large shipbuilder in Danzig, asked in the summer of 1908 for an early contract to build one of the large battleships scheduled for the following year. Otherwise, so its management feared, it might have to lay off its skilled workers and the whole economy of Danzig would suffer. (When Danzig, as Gdansk, became part of Poland after 1945, the Schichau works were made part of the Lenin shipyard and later still were the site of the Solidarity movement of the 1980s.) The German navy agreed but, although the completion date for the battleship remained unchanged, the decision inadvertently set off alarms in Britain. That autumn the British naval attaché in Berlin informed his government that an extra battleship was being built and the British drew the conclusion, correct in fact but based on the wrong evidence, that the Germans had speeded up the tempo of their naval building.
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At this stage there occurred one of those unfortunate incidents which seemed to mark relations between Britain and Germany in the years before 1914. On 28 October the
Daily Telegraph
published what was described as an interview with the Kaiser. In fact it was a journalist’s version of conversations which had taken place the previous year between Wilhelm and an English landowner, Colonel Edward Stuart-Wortley, who had lent his house to the Kaiser for a private stay. The two men chatted on several occasions, or rather, it seems, Wilhelm held
forth about how he had always wanted good relations between Germany and Britain and how the British did not appreciate all he had done for them. He criticised Britain’s new friendship with France. The British alliance with Japan was also a great mistake and he made dark reference to the Yellow Peril: ‘But much as I may be misunderstood, I have built my fleet to support you.’ Stuart-Wortley, who listened credulously to all this, decided that if only the British could read Wilhelm’s real views instead of being misled by a malicious anti-German press, relations between their two countries would somehow mend overnight. In September 1908, Stuart-Wortley handed over his notes of the conversations to a journalist from the
Daily Telegraph
who wrote them up as an interview and the result was sent on to Wilhelm for his approval.

Wilhelm, rather unusually, behaved correctly and sent the ‘interview’ to his Chancellor. Perhaps because Bülow was busy, as he later claimed, or, as his enemies charged, too much the courtier to challenge his master, he merely glanced at the document and sent it on to the Foreign Ministry for its views. Again the ‘interview’ slipped through without proper scrutiny, in yet another example of the chaotic manner in which the German government worked. Someone along the way should have taken proper care because the Kaiser was known for his indiscretions. On more than one occasion the German authorities had been obliged to use their influence, even pay handsomely to suppress his potentially embarrassing effusions.
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As it was, the document made its way into the pages of the
Daily Telegraph
accompanied by Wilhelm’s fond hopes that he could win the British over.
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For someone who liked to tell his officials frequently that he understood the British much better than they did, Wilhelm got it wrong both in tone, which was self-pitying and accusatory, and in substance. The British, he complained, ‘are mad, mad, mad as March hares’. How could they fail to see that Wilhelm was their friend and that all he wanted was to live on good and peaceful terms with them? ‘My actions ought to speak for themselves, but you listen not to them but to those who misinterpret and distort them. That is a personal insult which I feel and resent.’
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After more in this vein, Wilhelm then turned to the vitally important help he had given Britain during the Boer War. He had, he pointed out with some truth, prevented the other European powers from intervening against Britain during the Boer War. What is more,
with his own hands, he had drawn up a plan of campaign for the British forces; his own general staff had reviewed it before he sent it on to the British government. He was amazed, he went on, that the British seemed to think the German navy was directed against them when it was quite clear that Germany needed its navy for its growing empire and trade. Britain would be glad of Germany’s navy one day when it realised that Japan was not its friend and that he and his country were.