The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (25 page)

At any other time the British might not have paid much attention to Wilhelm’s words but they were published when the naval race was entering an ominous new stage and after a summer of public apprehension about a German invasion. In addition there was a serious crisis in the Balkans over Bosnia and tensions between France and Germany over Morocco which some feared might lead to war. While many simply took the interview as further evidence that the Kaiser was unbalanced, Crowe prepared an immediate analysis for the Foreign Office in which he concluded that it was part of a concerted attempt by Germany to lull British public opinion, and supporters of a big navy called for more spending. Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, did his best to calm emotions in London and wrote privately to a friend, ‘The German Kaiser is ageing me; he is like a battleship with steam up and screws going, but with no rudder, and he will run into something some day and cause a catastrophe.’
⁸⁸

There nearly was a catastrophe this time but it was in Germany and came close to finishing the Kaiser. ‘A mood first of bewilderment’, wrote one of the inner circle, ‘and later of despair and indignation took hold of all circles of the people.’
⁸⁹
Germans were appalled and enraged that their ruler would make such a fool of himself, and not for the first time. Conservatives and nationalists disliked his professions of friendship for the British and the liberals and the left wing felt that it was high time that the Kaiser and his regime were brought under parliamentary control. Ominously, the Prussian War Minister was one of the few of his officials to offer strong support; General Karl von Einem told the Kaiser that the army was loyal and could deal with the Reichstag if necessary. Bülow made a very half-hearted defence of his master in the Reichstag and Wilhelm, who carried on with his usual round of autumn visits and shooting, suddenly collapsed into a profound depression. It must have been unnerving for his fellow guests on the beat as he
alternated between fits of weeping and moments of fury.
⁹⁰
As one said: ‘I had the feeling that in William the Second I had before me a man who was looking with astonishment for the first time in his life on the world as it really is.’
⁹¹
Von Einem for one felt that something had broken in his master and that Wilhelm was never the same confident ruler again.
⁹²
Although the storm blew over and Wilhelm kept his throne, both he and the monarchy were seriously weakened. He never forgave Bülow for what he saw as a betrayal and the affair became another reason to dismiss his Chancellor.

In Britain the
Daily Telegraph
affair became part of the context for a passionate debate within the governing Liberal Party. The Liberals had been elected with pledges to carry out both economies and social reforms, in particular to provide old-age pensions, yet they found themselves, thanks to the naval race, facing increased expenditure rather than less. They could not, however, ignore what seemed to be a serious threat from Germany and rising public concern. The Admiralty had abandoned its modest programme of 1907 and had rather come to the conclusion that it needed a minimum of six new dreadnoughts. In December 1908, the First Lord, Reginald McKenna, brought the proposal to Cabinet. The new Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, was sympathetic but had to deal with a deeply divided Cabinet.

The main opposition to the sharp increase in the naval budget came from ‘the economists’ led by two of the most interesting and controversial politicians in modern British politics. David Lloyd George, the radical from a modest Welsh background, made common cause with that maverick member of the British aristocracy, Winston Churchill, to resist what both men saw as unnecessary spending which would threaten the social reforms they wanted. As Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd George would have to find the £38 million for the dreadnoughts if they were approved. He told Asquith that the Liberals were losing support in the country by failing to tackle ‘the gigantic expenditure on armaments built up by the recklessness of our predecessors’. Lloyd George warned his leader of the possible consequences: ‘When the £38 million navy estimates are announced the disaffection of these good Liberals will break into open sedition and the usefulness of this Parliament will be at an end.’
⁹³

The Conservative opposition, much of the press, and bodies such as
the Navy League and the Defence Committee of the London Chamber of Commerce weighed in. So did armaments manufacturers who had been hit by the depression of 1908; shipyards, for example, had been laying off engineers and workers. A Conservative leaflet said: ‘Our Navy and our unemployed may both be starved together; and soon will be if you don’t turn this Government out.’
⁹⁴
The king let it be known that he wanted eight dreadnoughts. And he was in tune with much of public opinion. ‘We want eight and we won’t wait’ was the popular slogan coined by a Conservative MP.

In February 1909, Asquith managed to broker a compromise that the Cabinet accepted: Britain would start four dreadnoughts in the coming financial year and four more by the spring of 1910 if it became apparent they were needed. (In the end the four extra dreadnoughts were built after Germany’s allies Austria-Hungary and Italy started their own programmes.) The Liberals fell in line and the government easily defeated a motion of censure brought by the Conservatives to the effect that its policy was not securing the safety of the empire. The press campaign gradually died down and public attention focussed on the Budget Lloyd George proposed at the end of April 1909. In his speech Lloyd George was still very much a radical but one who had become concerned over Britain’s position in the world. The Budget was designed to raise money to change the lives of Britain’s poor, to wage war ‘against poverty and squalidness’. He had, though, no intention of neglecting the country’s defences. ‘Such a stupendous act of folly would, in the present temper of nations, not be Liberalism but lunacy. We don’t intend to put in jeopardy the naval supremacy which is so essential not only to our national existence, but, in our judgement, to the vital interests of Western civilisation.’ To pay for both the social reforms and defence, he proposed to raise old taxes, from ones on alcohol to death duties, and institute new ones, on land. The rich, including the landed aristocracy, complained bitterly. The People’s Budget, as it was coming to be known, was bringing a revolution in British society. The landed classes threatened to lay off estate workers and the Duke of Buccleuch announced that he would have to cancel his annual subscription of one guinea to the local football club. Lloyd George, who loved a good fight, was unrepentant. The rich had wanted the dreadnoughts, he said, and now they did not want to pay. And of what value, after all, were the
aristocracy? ‘A fully-equipped duke costs as much to keep up as two Dreadnoughts – and they are just as great a terror – and they last longer.’
⁹⁵

The House of Lords, perhaps as Lloyd George had intended, rejected his Budget in November 1909 even though it was unprecedented for the upper chamber to reject a Finance Bill. Asquith dissolved Parliament and fought an election in January 1910 on that issue. His government won, although with a reduced majority, and the following April the Lords wisely let the Budget pass. The next year, after a prolonged political storm, the House of Lords accepted the Parliament Bill which ended its dominance for ever. Unlike Germany, Britain was able both to surmount its financial crisis and keep firm parliamentary control over its affairs. It also won the naval race: when the time the Great War broke out Britain had twenty dreadnoughts to Germany’s thirteen and a decisive advantage in all the other categories of ships.

The naval race is the key factor in understanding the growing hostility between Britain and Germany. Trade rivalry, competition for colonies, nationalist public opinion, all played their part but those factors also existed in whole or in part in the relationships between Britain and each of France, Russia and the United States. Yet in none of those cases did they lead to the deepening suspicions and fears that came to mark the relations between Britain and Germany in the years before 1914. And it so easily could have been different. Germany and Britain were each other’s largest trading partners before 1914 (an inconvenient example for those who argue that the more nations trade with each other, the less likely they are to fight). Their strategic interests could have meshed so neatly, with Germany the biggest land power in Europe and Britain the biggest at sea.

Yet once Germany started to build a strong fleet, it was bound to make Britain uneasy. The Germans may have wanted a blue-water fleet, as they so frequently said, to protect their overseas trade and their colonies, and because big navies were a sign of being a major power just as nuclear weapons are today. The British could have lived with that as they lived with growing Russian or American or Japanese naval power. What they could not accept were the consequences of geography. Whether the German fleet was in the Baltic or in its ports on the German North Sea coast, it was concentrated close to the British Isles.
And by 1914 with the widening of the Kiel Canal (completed in June that year), the German ships could avoid the riskier passages leading past Denmark, Sweden and Norway into the North Sea.

Far from forcing Britain into friendship, as Tirpitz planned, the naval race created a deep gulf between Germany and Britain and brought the hardening of both elite and public opinion in both countries against the other. Equally important, it persuaded Britain that it needed to find new allies to counterbalance the German threat. Bülow was right when he wrote to Tirpitz after the Great War, that even if Germany had been dragged into the war through ‘our clumsy handling of a Balkan problem … there is the question of whether France and particularly Russia would have let it come to war had public opinion in England not been so greatly enraged precisely at the construction of our great ships’.
⁹⁶

And what if some of the funds poured into the navy had gone to the army? If it had been able to add men and weapons, so that German land forces had been stronger in 1914, would its attack on France have succeeded that summer, as it so nearly did? What would that have meant for the Great War and for Europe? The naval race also raises the issue of how important individuals are in history. There could not have been a naval race without the economic, manufacturing and technological capacity in each country to sustain it. Nor could it have gone on without public support. It would not have started in the first place, however, without the determination and drive of Tirpitz and the Kaiser’s willingness – and ability, allowed him under the imperfect German constitution – to back him to the hilt. When Tirpitz became Secretary for the Navy, there was not a strong lobby within the governing elites for a big navy and not yet strong public support. Both were to come later, as the navy grew.

Thanks to the naval race, the options for maintaining Europe’s long peace were narrowing and the path towards war was becoming more pronounced. Britain’s first major foreign policy initiative as a result of the naval race – its move towards mending relations with France – was a defensive one but in retrospect it is easy to see how that too tilted the odds in favour of war. What is noticeable, too, in that decade before 1914 is how frequently and easily the possibility of war, even a general war, was part of ordinary discussion throughout Europe.

CHAPTER 6
Unlikely Friends: The Entente Cordiale between France and Britain

In 1898 a tiny mud-brick village on the Upper Nile with a ruined fort and a handful of inhabitants barely getting by on subsistence farming nearly caused a war between France and Britain. Fashoda, now Kodok in the new state of South Sudan, was where French and British imperial ambitions in the north half of Africa came up against each other. France, with its ambitions to build a great empire stretching from its possessions on the west coast of Africa across to the Nile, was moving eastwards across Africa. Britain, which controlled Egypt and assumed Egypt’s interests in the Sudan, was moving southwards towards its existing colonies in East Africa. In their chess match played out on the map of Africa, one imperial power was bound to check the other. What also complicated their game is that other players – Italy and Germany – were looking to join in so that the time to make moves was getting shorter.

The French had never forgiven the British for seizing control of Egypt when there were widespread disturbances there in 1882, even though it was through the ineptitude and indecision of the French government that Britain had acted alone. Although the British had expected their occupation to be temporary they had found it easier to get in than out. As the years went by the expanding British administration added to
French chagrin. For Germany, Egypt was a handy wedge to keep France and Britain apart. Within France an active colonial lobby reminded French politicians and the French public of France’s historic ties to Egypt – had Napoleon not conquered it and had the Suez Canal not been built by the great French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps? – and demanded that France acquire colonies elsewhere in compensation. Morocco, next to the French colony of Algeria, was one attractive possibility and Sudan, lost to Egypt since an Anglo-Egyptian force under General Charles Gordon was defeated by the Mahdi in 1885, another. A French engineer also caught the interest of the French government in 1893 by pointing out that dams on the Upper Nile could cause all sorts of problems downstream in Egypt. The decision was taken in Paris to send an expedition to claim Fashoda and the surrounding territory.