The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (66 page)

Grey’s directions to Sir Arthur Nicolson, the British delegate to the international conference on Morocco, were straightforward:

The Morocco Conference is going to be difficult if not critical. As far as I can discover the Germans will refuse altogether to concede to France the special position in Morocco, which we have promised France not only to concede to her but to help her by diplomatic methods to obtain. If she can succeed in getting this with our help it will be a great success for the Anglo-French
Entente
; if she fails the prestige of the
Entente
will suffer and its vitality will be diminished. Our main object therefore must be to help France to carry her point at the Conference.
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The conference opened on 16 January 1906 in the Spanish city of Algeciras, just to the north-east of Gibraltar. Shortly afterwards, Grey suffered a tragedy; his wife was thrown from her pony cart at Fallodon and died of her injuries. ‘Thought was arrested’, he remarked in his memoirs, ‘and work was crippled.’
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Grey offered to resign but Campbell-Bannerman encouraged him to carry on.

The conference provided distraction of a sort. By the time it started, the Germans had managed to persuade most international opinion that Germany was intent on picking a quarrel with France.
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A quarrel there was, and by February the conference was deadlocked, apparently, over the issue of which foreign nations would train and command the Moroccan police (the French insisted on themselves and the Spanish and the Germans wanted an international condominium) and who would manage the State Bank. In reality the question was the ultimate control of the country itself. ‘Morocco’, Bülow said, ‘has become a question of honour for us and especially the Kaiser.’
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Germany, however, was increasingly isolated. Its only dependable ally, Austria-Hungary, was pressuring it to give way on the police issue.
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Italy was lukewarm and its representative did its best to avoid controversy. From the United States, Roosevelt was also urging a compromise.
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Nicolson followed his instructions to maintain Britain’s support behind France. On 28 February a large British fleet arrived off nearby Gibraltar, just to underscore what that support might one day involve. Russia, which the Germans still hoped could be enticed into its camp, remained firmly behind its French ally. The Russians had little choice. Their finances were a wreck thanks to the Russo-Japanese War and the continuing revolution at home. Russia badly needed a major foreign loan if it were not to go bankrupt and France was the most likely source. The French made it a condition of any loans to Russia that they get co-operation at Algeciras.

By the end of March, Bülow was prepared to cut Germany’s losses in spite of Holstein’s advice to stand firm. An agreement was reached on 27 March that made France the senior partner in the organisation of the police and the dominant voice in the new State Bank. The Moroccans themselves were stunned; ‘they had thought that the Conference would be like a court where France was reprimanded and powers would give some gentle advice on reforms’.
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While the Germans put a good face on it, they knew that they had suffered a defeat. Although Germany had had a good case for insisting on international management of Morocco, and although international events had been running in its favour in the previous months, inept German diplomacy had thrown those advantages away. Bülow and Holstein had tried to do what Bismarck would have done, keeping potential enemies apart and building relationships with all, but they did not have his skill. Holstein
threatened to resign again and this time Bülow manoeuvred to have his resignation accepted. So ended fifty years of Holstein’s service for Germany. In his remaining years he was lonely, embittered, and poor (he had lost his money in a speculation) but did his best to keep pulling strings from behind the scenes. He stirred up Germany’s best-known journalist, Maximilian Harden, to attack the Kaiser’s favourite, Eulenburg, whom Holstein had long suspected of being soft on Madrid and had at least the satisfaction of seeing Eulenburg accused of homosexuality, dragged into the courts, and exiled from the Kaiser’s inner circle. Bülow’s own position with the Kaiser was shaken because of Morocco and rumours went round that he was about to be dismissed. During a Reichstag debate on the Algeciras Conference in April, the Chancellor collapsed and was obliged to leave Berlin for a long convalescence.
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The Kaiser himself was depressed. He had always been against making Morocco a cause for war, in part because he felt that conditions in Germany were too dangerous. The Socialists were planning big demonstrations for January 1906 to protest against the highly restricted franchise for the Prussian parliament. On New Year’s Eve, he wrote a panicky letter to Bülow: ‘First cow the Socialists, behead them and make them harmless, with a blood bath if necessary and then make war abroad. But not before and not both together.’
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Germany, facing a hostile coalition of the Latin powers of France, Spain and Italy under Britain’s dominance, temporarily replaced the Yellow Peril in the Kaiser’s thinking. In one of his marginal notes on the minutes, he mourned: ‘We have no friends any longer whereas these unsexed relics of the ethnic chaos left behind by Rome hate us cordially.’
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What is frightening in retrospect is how readily the countries involved in the Morocco crisis anticipated war. Grey, for example, told his friend Haldane that he was getting many reports that Germany intended to attack France in the spring of 1906 while in Berlin Bülow was expecting the same from France and Britain.
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And there were some in the ruling circles in Germany who seriously contemplated a preventive war. After all, the recent success of Japan in its war with Russia seemed to show that striking first worked. Schlieffen, who was working on his last words on his plan before his retirement, may well have advocated a preventive war on France and it is certain that other senior military leaders were in favour.
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The head of the Press Bureau in
the Foreign Office received a memorandum from his superiors in December 1905 to alert him to the possibility that the Algeciras Conference might well put Germany in the position of either losing prestige in the eyes of the world or going to war: ‘such a conflict in the spring is expected by many here, and desired by many’.
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In spite of German hopes, Russia had remained true to the alliance with France. As soon as the conference ended, Raymond Poincaré, then the Minister of Finance, told the Russian ambassador in Paris that the talks about a loan could resume. On 16 April a representative of the Russian government signed an agreement for a huge loan with a consortium of banks, led by French ones who provided half the funds. ‘He talked about the services rendered at Algeciras’, said Poincaré, ‘in a tone which was almost embarrassing for me. He complained of the demands of the French banks which are, it is true, rather avaricious.’
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In a shortsighted move, the German government forbade German banks to participate in any Russian loans in retaliation for Algeciras; ‘… they won’t get a penny from us!’ said the Kaiser.
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The new friendship between Britain and France had passed its first test and was considerably stronger as a result. In 1908 a Franco-British Exhibition opened in London to celebrate the Entente Cordiale. ‘That adroit and charming phrase,’ said an English guide, ‘the general adoption of which among us is a delicate compliment to the French language, suggests more than it expresses. It stands for mutual appreciation and good-will, for common aims and interests; it covers sentiment, understanding and material relations …’
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Delcassé and Paul Cambon certainly thought it covered more, that the British had offered them a defensive alliance at one point.
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The British felt they had avoided making a firm commitment but recognised that the Entente was now closer. Grey wrote at the height of the deadlock at Algeciras:

If there is war between France and Germany it will be very difficult for us to keep out of it. The Entente and still more the constant and emphatic demonstrations of affection (official, naval, political, commercial, Municipal and in the Press), have created in France a belief that we should support her in war. The last report from our naval attaché at Toulon said that all the French officers took this for granted, if the war was between France and Germany about
Morocco. If this expectation is disappointed the French will never forgive us.

And he hinted that his position, as a supporter of the Entente, would become impossible if Britain failed to back France. ‘On the other hand’, he added, ‘the prospect of a European War and of our being involved in it is horrible.’
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He continued to balance in the years before 1914, between working with France yet refusing to commit to a more formal alliance or make binding promises.

His balancing act was undermined by the official approval which he gave in the middle of January to talks, which had already taken place informally, between the Director of British Military Operations and the French military attaché in London. These were, as Grey described them to the handful of colleagues he informed, merely to find out what sort of help the two countries could offer each other. ‘The whole matter’, he insisted, ‘was being studied academically.’
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From this small beginning, however, grew a series of talks between the French and the British armies over the next years where information was exchanged and plans drawn up. French intelligence on Germany, France’s war plans, the possible numbers of British troops and horses to be sent to France, port facilities, railway transportation, many of the sorts of details and arrangements which would be necessary if Britain were to send troops to support France against a German attack, were discussed and worked out before 1914. Their two navies also held discussions from time to time but formal conversations were not authorised by the British Cabinet until the summer of 1912.

It is the military conversations that have remained the most controversial over the years. Did Grey, that upright Wykehamist, deliberately deceive the Cabinet and the British people by keeping the talks and the arrangements that were being made secret? More importantly, did the conversations commit Britain to come to France’s support in the event of a German attack on France? Grey himself repeatedly answered No to both questions before and after 1914 but the reality is less clear-cut. When the conversations started in 1906, Grey informed the Prime Minister, Campbell-Bannerman, but he did not tell the full Cabinet, perhaps because he feared opposition from the radical wing of the Liberal Party. The Cabinet was not officially informed of the
conversations until 1911, during another serious crisis over Morocco. (The House of Commons and the public did not learn about them until Britain was about to go to war in 1914.) According to Lloyd George, most of the Cabinet were shocked: ‘Hostility barely represents the strength of the sentiment which the revelation aroused: it was more akin to consternation.’ Grey reassured his colleagues by saying that Great Britain was still quite free to do what it pleased.
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Again this is debatable.

It is true that Grey, his colleagues and subordinates generally talked to the French in the conditional. Britain might, quite probably, come to France’s aid but, so the British insisted, nothing in the talks could be taken as constituting a firm promise. Britain in this view kept its freedom to decide what it would do in the event of a war. In 1911 the Cabinet went so far as to pass a formal resolution to underline that Britain was not committed, directly or indirectly, to military or naval intervention.
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Nevertheless, the repeated support that Britain gave to France diplomatically, over Morocco for example, was an indication of how strongly Grey felt about maintaining the Entente. For Grey and those, many of them senior officials in the Foreign Office, who felt like him, France’s friendship was essential, and so increasingly was Russia’s, if Britain were not to find itself isolated again as it had been during the Boer War.
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And diplomatic support without the threat of force behind it in the end would not work, either with France’s enemies or France itself. If the French did not feel that they could rely on Britain, to the point of military support, they might well make the best of a bad job and come to terms with Germany.

British strategic thinking was shifting in a way that made intervention on the side of France more likely. Up until 1907 the main concern of the British army had been the empire. The improvement of relations with the United States at the turn of the century, in part because of British recognition of American dominance in the New World, meant that Britain no longer had to worry about its North American colonies. The Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 removed much British apprehension about the Russian threat to the jewel in the crown, India. The army had been reorganised and reformed after the Boer War and was now in a position to assess its role. It was responsible, as it had always been, for the defence of the British Isles in case of invasion but
increasingly its leaders thought in terms of an expeditionary force to the Continent.
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The growth of German power brought out the old British fear of a single nation dominating the coasts of the Netherlands, Belgium and perhaps even France, across which so much of Britain’s trade flowed. Germany’s control of the coasts would also put it in a position to invade Britain if it chose.
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