The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (65 page)

The Germans had always seen Delcassé as their main enemy in the French government and by the spring of 1905 they were becoming worried that he was about to make his position even stronger by offering to mediate in the continuing conflict between Russia and Japan. On 27 May the Japanese fleet had destroyed the Russian fleet at Tsushima and both sides were looking for a way to make peace. Delcassé, with his experience and the advantage of coming from a country with good relations with each of the combatants, would be an obvious choice and was himself eager to take the task on. Rouvier had naively let the Germans know this and they were appalled at the prospect. If Delcassé pulled it off, it would be a triumph for him and for France; it would tighten still further France’s relationship with Russia; and it might well lead to another triple alliance, of France, Russia and Britain, or perhaps, with Japan, a quadruple one.
³¹
As Delcassé himself later said, his position in the French government would have been unshakeable if he had acted to settle the Russo-Japanese War.
³²
Bülow wrote to his ambassador in Washington asking him to persuade President Roosevelt to offer his services as a mediator and so forestall a French or a British initiative. The Morocco question, Holstein said, was ‘infinitesimal’ by comparison with this prospect of success on the international scene for France or Britain.
³³

At the end of May the German government sent a series of increasingly forceful messages to the French government: Delcassé must go or they could not answer for the consequences.
³⁴
Rouvier was panicky and crumbling fast. He had been worrying all year about a possible German surprise attack which, in his view, would lead to defeat and revolution in France just as it had in 1870–71. That February he had met with leading members of the French parliament’s army and finance committees and asked for their assessment on the country’s state of military preparedness. ‘There is nothing,’ they told him, ‘no ammunition, no equipment, no stocks of provisions, and morale in the army and in the country is in an even worse state.’ Rouvier had burst into tears.
³⁵
Delcassé had not helped his own position by refusing to negotiate directly with the Germans or consult his colleagues. On 19 April his Morocco policy was attacked in parliament; speaker after speaker, from the right to the left, urged him to negotiate. Jaurès pointed out that Delcassé had started the crisis by demanding concessions from the government of
Morocco long before the Kaiser’s Tangier visit: ‘You ought also have taken the initiative in offering explanations and beginning negotiations.’ Delcassé now suggested direct talks to the Germans but Bülow, scenting victory, insisted on an international conference. Delcassé resisted and insisted that Germany was bluffing and that Britain was ready to offer its support if war came.
³⁶

His colleagues did not agree and by the first week of June Rouvier had caved in to German demands for his dismissal. At a Cabinet meeting on 6 June Rouvier, with unanimous support, told Delcassé that he was dismissed. In a forgivable act of revenge, Delcassé handed the Prime Minister a file of cables deciphered in the Quai d’Orsay which showed Rouvier’s secret dealings with the Germans.
³⁷
When the news of Delcassé’s dismissal came out, rumours of war ran through the French parliament and the salons in Paris and lots of men went out to buy heavy woollen socks and boots in preparation for mobilisation.
³⁸
In London there was consternation and shock. Lansdowne wondered whether the Entente Cordiale would survive; the French, he told Bertie, appeared to be on the run.
³⁹
In Berlin, by contrast, there was jubilation. ‘Delcassé was the instrument chosen by our enemies to destroy us,’ Bülow exclaimed and the Kaiser gave him the title of prince on the day of the dismissal, although Bülow himself always denied there was a connection.
⁴⁰
‘Our cleverest and most dangerous enemy’, said Holstein, ‘has fallen’, and ‘our friend’ Roosevelt was now mediating the end to the Russo-Japanese War so that neither France nor Britain would be able to gain any international prestige from that affair.
⁴¹

In their triumph over the French, the Germans then overplayed their hand. Rouvier, who had decided to be his own Foreign Minister, offered direct negotiations and promised that Germany would have compensation in the form of colonies elsewhere. Bülow, with Holstein urging him on in the background, continued to insist on an international conference, to show France that it was alone among the powers without support from either Russia or Britain when it came to Morocco. ‘If’, said the Kaiser later, ‘I had been told about this, I would have gone into it thoroughly and that idiotic Conference would never have taken place.’
⁴²
Although the French reluctantly agreed to the conference at the start of July, German pressure had put Rouvier’s back up; later that year he said to a close associate: ‘If Berlin thinks it can intimidate me,
it has made a mistake.’
⁴³
French public opinion was also swinging towards greater firmness with Germany and an appreciation of the value of the Entente Cordiale. The future ambassador to Russia in 1914, Maurice Paléologue, then at the Quai d’Orsay, wrote at the end of July: ‘There has been a recovery: no more fear, no more cowardice, no more bending to the German will; the idea of war is accepted.’
⁴⁴

The new mood in France reassured the British and Lansdowne let Paul Cambon, the French ambassador in London, know that the British would support the French on Morocco ‘by the means which France considered best’.
⁴⁵
While France and Germany quarrelled for the rest of the summer over the agenda for the conference, the British set out to demonstrate their friendship towards France to the world. Ships from the British navy paid a visit to the French Atlantic port of Brest during Bastille week in July. A month later French ships received a lavish welcome at Portsmouth and there was a huge banquet in Parliament’s Westminster Hall.
⁴⁶
The British and French navies may have started confidential talks about strategic co-operation that summer as well.
⁴⁷

At the end of 1905, the British government fell and a new Liberal government under Henry Campbell-Bannerman took office. Holstein, who continued to press for a hard line against France, took this to be good news since he believed that the Liberals wanted friendship with Germany.
⁴⁸
Yet again, he was wrong in his assumption. Campbell-Bannerman, who was already a sick man, largely left Britain’s foreign affairs to Sir Edward Grey, the new Foreign Secretary, who had no intention of making a sudden break with Lansdowne’s policies. Like Lansdowne, Grey believed that maintaining the Entente was of crucial importance for Britain; if it were broken, France, Germany, and Russia might well come to terms, leaving Britain isolated once again. Like his predecessor as well, Grey wanted to support France against Germany without encouraging the French to behave rashly. He promised Cambon ‘benevolent neutrality’ but also noted that British public opinion, which was strongly in support of France, would not support a war with Germany over Morocco.
⁴⁹
(Grey found the appeal to public opinion convenient as much when he did not want to do something as when he did.) As far as Germany was concerned, he would not make any sort of deal with it before the conference opened in spite of conciliatory messages from
Berlin. Bülow’s fine words, he remarked, ‘butter no parsnips, and if the parsnips are to be buttered, it must be done at the Conference. If that ends in conclusions not averse to the Anglo-French Entente there will be a real clearing of the sky …’
⁵⁰

The man who now was responsible for Britain’s foreign policy and would remain so until his resignation in 1916 was, in the view of the Kaiser, ‘a capable sort of country gentleman’ and for once he was not far wrong. Sir Edward Grey came from one of those old, well-connected, landowning families which for so long had played a leading role in British society. As a young man, he inherited a baronetcy and a comfortable estate, Fallodon, in the north-east of England, as well as his Liberal politics. He was conservative in instinct but a moderate reformer, who accepted that new classes and new leaders were bound to change the face of politics. He feared, like many of his contemporaries across Europe, that a major war would bring revolution but hoped for a peaceful evolution. ‘There are unpleasant years before us,’ he remarked in 1911, adding that ‘we shall work through to something better, though we who have been used to more than £500 a year may not think it better’.
⁵¹

Although his contemporaries at the famous old English school of Winchester considered him endowed with great talent, he showed much more interest in fly-fishing on the nearby River Itchen than in his studies. His time at Winchester left its mark, though: Grey was always proud to call himself a Wykehamist and he kept something of the decent and clever schoolboy who was shocked at dishonesty in his adult life. ‘German policy’, he once commented, ‘seems to have been based upon a deliberate belief that moral scruples and altruistic motives do not count in international affairs.’
⁵²
Like other high-minded people, he failed to recognise when he himself was being ruthless or devious, perhaps because he took for granted that his motives were pure. Naturally reserved, he also learned to hide his emotions; his colleagues were invariably impressed by his calmness during crises. It helped too that Grey looked like a Roman senator and spoke firmly but with restraint. Lloyd George, the Welsh radical from a humble background, felt that Grey went a long way on his appearance: ‘His striking physiognomy with the thin lips, the firmly closed mouth, and the chiselled features give the impression of cold hammered steel.’
⁵³

From Winchester, Grey went to Balliol College at Oxford, another
forcing house for future leaders, but again he did a minimum of work. He was sent away for a period to see if he would be less lazy but came back unrepentant and managed to scrape a third in his degree, something of an achievement in itself.
⁵⁴
He found his chief happiness at Fallodon, and, later on, at his small cottage on the Itchen as well, passing his days bird watching, fishing, walking, and reading. At the relatively young age of twenty-three, he married a woman who shared his passionate love of the English countryside. Dorothy would have been happy to spend the rest of her life there, avoiding London which she saw as a modern Sodom and Gomorrah, spewing out depravity and disease. She despised social life, perhaps because she was awkward and shy or perhaps because she felt herself superior to most others. ‘I believe’, she wrote complacently at the age of twenty-three, ‘we have arrived at the state when we have got all the good out of people that we shall ever get.’ She loved and admired her husband but when they returned from their honeymoon she made it clear to him that she abhorred sex. Grey, ever the gentleman, agreed that they should live together as brother and sister.
⁵⁵

Yet somewhere underneath Grey’s lackadaisical exterior was ambition, or at the very least a strong sense of duty. His family connections brought him an appointment as private secretary to a Cabinet minister and then, in 1885, he ran successfully for Parliament, so starting a political career which lasted until his resignation in 1916. He showed an unexpected capacity for hard work but he refused to take part in what he saw as time-wasting social activities. He and his wife escaped London as often as they could for their cottage, where they lived simply, with a single servant, and saw few visitors. ‘It was something special and sacred’, said Grey, ‘outside the normal stream of life.’
⁵⁶

In 1892 he was made the Parliamentary Undersecretary to the Liberal Foreign Secretary, Lord Rosebery. Grey was not an obvious choice for foreign affairs, then or later. Unlike his contemporary George Curzon, he had no interest in travel, unless it was to go shooting or fishing in Scotland, and never developed any. He scarcely knew the Continent and as Foreign Secretary would visit it only once, in 1914 as part of a royal visit to Paris. Nevertheless, when he took up his new post in 1905, he had developed a few firmly held ideas about the world. Within the Liberal Party he counted as an imperialist and supported a
large navy. On the other hand, he felt that the time of dividing up the world had passed and it was now Britain’s responsibility to rule what it already possessed wisely.
⁵⁷
He approved of Lansdowne’s move away from isolation and before the election made it clear that he intended to carry on his policies, including the Entente with France which he saw as the cornerstone of British policy in Europe. In September 1906 he wrote to his great friend Richard Haldane, a fellow Liberal imperialist, ‘I want to preserve the entente with France, but it isn’t easy, and if it is broken up I must go.’
⁵⁸
Germany, Grey held with equal firmness, was Britain’s chief enemy and posed the greatest threat and, in his view, there was little that could be done to change that. ‘I do not doubt’, he said in 1903, ‘that there are many Germans well disposed to us, but they are a minority; and the majority dislike us so intensely that the friendship of their Emperor or Government cannot be really useful to us.’
⁵⁹
As he saw it, Britain in the past had been too close to Germany and as a consequence was on bad terms with France and Russia. ‘We were sometimes on the brink of war with one or the other; & Germany took toll of us when it suited her.’
⁶⁰