The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (75 page)

To complicate France’s response to Germany, its ally, Russia, made it clear that it was not interested in being dragged into a war over Morocco. Izvolsky, who had now become Russia’s ambassador in Paris, reminded the French that they had been lukewarm in supporting his country over the Bosnian crisis three years earlier. ‘Russia of course’, he said, ‘remains faithful to its alliance, but it would have difficulty making its public opinion accept a war over Morocco.’ And the Russians were not particularly clear about whether they would come to France’s aid if it were attacked. Russia’s army, Izvolsky claimed, would need at least
two years before it was ready to fight. The tsar gave a mixed message to the French ambassador in St Petersburg: he would honour his word to France if necessary but it would be sensible of the French to come to terms with Germany.
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Britain, France’s other key ally, initially took the position that France and Germany could sort matters out between them without its involvement. Apart from labour unrest, other domestic issues were preoccupying the government: the coronation of George V that June, renewed trouble over Irish Home Rule, increasingly large and sometimes violent demonstrations by suffragettes demanding votes for women, and the culmination of the struggle between the House of Commons and the House of Lords over parliamentary reform. On the international scene, Britain was having problems with both its entente partners. ‘How difficult it is to work with the French,’ said a member of the Foreign Office, ‘who never seem to act in a straightforward manner.’
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And Britain’s relations with Russia were taking a downturn again, especially in Persia where the two continued to vie for influence.
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By contrast, relations with Germany had been improving somewhat in spite of the stalemate over the naval race. That May, before the crisis started, the Kaiser came to London for the unveiling of a memorial to his grandmother and the visit seemed to go off well (although as he was leaving he complained loudly about Britain to Louis Battenberg, a German prince who happened to be a senior British admiral).
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In the Ottoman Empire German and British financial enterprises were cooperating in projects such as railways.
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Radical and moderate members of the Cabinet and their supporters in Parliament were attacking the high expenditure on the navy and were putting pressure on Grey to improve relations with Germany, demanding among other things that a Cabinet committee be set up to oversee foreign policy, especially where Germany was concerned.
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Grey himself liked the idea of Britain acting as it had in the past as an arbiter among the powers and was not concerned at the prospect of Germany expanding its colonies in Africa. He urged the French to be moderate while hinting to the Germans that Britain might have to support France. What was important, he told both sides, was that British interests were respected in any new settlement on Morocco. The Foreign Office, which was now under the direction of Sir Arthur Nicolson, who
was strongly anti-German, and the pro-French ambassador in Paris took a darker view from the start: the crisis was a rerun of the first Morocco affair and Grey must support the French strongly and visibly or the Entente was finished. Grey and his Prime Minister Asquith resisted the pressure until word reached London in the middle of July that Germany was demanding the whole of the French Congo.
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‘We begin to see light,’ Eyre Crowe, known for his deep suspicions of German foreign policy, wrote on a Foreign Office memorandum:

Germany is playing for the highest stakes. If her demands are acceded to either on the Congo or in Morocco, or – what she will, I believe, try for – in both regions, it will mean definitely the subjection of France. The conditions demanded are not such as a country having an independent foreign policy can possibly accept. The details of the terms are not so very important now. This is a trial of strength, if anything. Concession means not loss of interests or loss of prestige. It means defeat, with all its inevitable consequences.

Nicolson agreed: ‘If Germany saw the slightest weakening on our part her pressure on France would become intolerable to that country who would have to fight or surrender. In the latter case German hegemony would be solidly established, with all its consequences immediate and prospective.’
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The Cabinet approved a message from Grey to the Germans that, as a result of the arrival of the
Panther
, the British were now more deeply concerned about the crisis and that they were obliged to stand by France. The Germans, and it may have been an indication of their clumsy handling of the whole affair, did not bother to reply for over two weeks, which only further deepened British suspicions.

It was an uncomfortable summer for Grey. He had suffered another personal tragedy earlier that year when his beloved brother George was killed by a lion in Africa and the Morocco crisis was keeping him in London, far from the respite of his estate at Fallodon. The Cabinet was divided over how firm to be with Germany and how much support to offer France. In the country, the wave of strikes went on and the heatwave was breaking records. (In the evenings Churchill would collect Grey and take him for a swim at his club.) On 21 July, after considerable discussion, the Cabinet decided to tell Germany that Britain would not
accept any settlement over Morocco in which it did not participate. That evening Lloyd George spoke at a formal dinner at the official residence of the Lord Mayor of London. Britain, he claimed, had traditionally used its influence to support liberty and peace,

But if a situation were to be forced upon us in which peace could only be preserved by the surrender of the great and beneficent position Britain has won by centuries of heroism and achievement, by allowing Britain to be treated where her interests were vitally affected as if she were of no account in the Cabinet of nations, then I say emphatically that peace at that price would be a humiliation intolerable for a great country like ours to endure. National honour is no party question.
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The Mansion House speech caused a sensation in part because it came from a man who had been known for his moderate views towards Germany. The German ambassador protested against the belligerent tone.

In Germany, the hardening of the British position shook Kiderlen, who was already encountering difficulties. Germany’s ally Austria-Hungary was mildly disapproving. ‘We stand loyally with Germany in the east’, Aehrenthal told a confidant, ‘and will always be faithful to our alliance duties, but I can’t follow Kiderlen to Agadir … We can’t practise any politics of prestige.’
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The Kaiser, who for all the ferocity of his comments and marginalia, invariably shrank from the prospect of war, was threatening to come back from his summer cruise of Norway. ‘For I cannot let my Government act like this without me being on the spot and to oversee the consequences and to take a hand. Otherwise it would be inexcusable and make me look like a mere parliamentary ruler! Le roi s’amuse! And in the meantime we head for mobilisation! This must not happen with me away!’
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On 17 July word came from the Kaiser’s yacht that he did not want a war and by the end of the month he was back in Germany.

It is disconcerting in light of what was to come how jittery Europe was and how readily the possibility of war was accepted in what was after all a colonial dispute capable of being settled relatively easily by international agreement. By the start of August, the British army was
considering whether it could get an expeditionary force quickly to the Continent and there was consternation when the Admiralty lost track of the German navy for twenty-four hours.
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The British military authorities took some defensive measures, for example sending soldiers to guard weapons depots.
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Later that month, in response to the continuing crisis, a special meeting of the Committee of Imperial Defence was called to examine Britain’s strategic position and war plans and Grey came clean to his colleagues in Cabinet about the continuing staff talks between the British and the French armies. Rumours circulated that the German military was looking into landing troops at Agadir, even that Wilhelm had given the preparatory orders for mobilisation.
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On 4 September, Henry Wilson, Director of War Operations, was so spooked by reports coming in from British military attachés in Germany and by a story that Germany was buying stocks of wheat, that he phoned the Café Royal in Piccadilly to warn Churchill and Grey, who were dining there. The three men sat up late into the night at Wilson’s house discussing the situation.
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In Germany there was serious discussion of a preventive war and even Bethmann seems to have felt that it might do the German people good.
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‘The wretched Morocco story is beginning to get on my nerves,’ Moltke wrote to his wife, adding:

If we once again emerge from this affair with our tail between our legs, if we cannot bring ourselves to make energetic demands which we would be ready to force through with the sword, then I despair of the future of the German Reich. In that case I will leave. But before that I will make a request to get rid of the army, and to have us placed under a Japanese protectorate; then we can make money without being disturbed and we can turn completely simple-minded.
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On 1 August, after a meeting with the Kaiser at the Baltic port of Swinemunde (which was going to be badly damaged by Allied bombing in 1945), Kiderlen indicated that he was ready to drop his demands for the whole of the French Congo and seek a compromise with the French. The nationalist press in Germany moaned about ‘humiliation’, ‘shame’, and ‘ignominy’.
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‘If only we could have been spared this moment of unspeakable shame, of national dishonor,’ said a leading conservative paper. ‘Has the old Prussian spirit vanished, have we become a race of
women, ruled by the interests of a few racially alien merchants?’ Foreigners, the paper claimed, were calling the emperor ‘
Guillaume le timide, le valeureux poltroon!’
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Eminent businessmen led by Ballin, on the other hand, were calling for a settlement before Germany’s economic situation got worse. At the start of September, fears of war led to a collapse of the stock market in Berlin.

Kiderlen and Jules Cambon rapidly reached an agreement in principle: part of French Africa for Germany in return for German recognition of France’s dominance in Morocco. As so often happens with negotiations, they then spent three months haggling over the details, such as the banks of rivers or tiny villages in the interior of Africa which no one, apart from the locals whose wishes, of course, were not consulted, knew anything about. A little strip of territory nicknamed the Duck’s Beak in the north Cameroons caused particular trouble. Kiderlen also caused a stir when he chose to take a brief holiday in the French resort of Chamonix with his mistress, who was rumoured to be a French agent. Although he intended to travel incognito, they were greeted at the station by the local prefect and a guard of honour. The nationalist French press was furious, not at the mistress but at what it felt to be a tactless choice of place. Kiderlen left her there for a few weeks and his letters to her, which he might well have assumed would be seen by the French, warned that Germany might have to fight if it did not receive satisfaction in the negotiations.
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The treaty which was finally signed on 4 November gave France the right to establish a protectorate over Morocco with a commitment to respect German economic interests. In return Germany got some 100,000 square miles of central Africa. Kiderlen and Cambon exchanged photographs. ‘To my terrible adversary and charming friend’, said Kiderlen’s inscription, while Cambon put ‘To my charming adversary and terrible friend’.
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At the French railway station of Lyons, a porter recognised Cambon. ‘Aren’t you the ambassador at Berlin?’ Cambon replied that he was. ‘You and your brother in London have done us a great service. Without you we would have been in a fine mess.’
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As Grey said later, though: ‘The consequences of such a foreign crisis do not end with it. They seem to end, but they go underground and reappear later on.’
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The powers had fresh reasons to mistrust each other, and key decision-makers and their publics were closer to
accepting the likelihood of war. Izvolsky, now Russian ambassador to France, wrote back to his successor in St Petersburg, that Europe’s international order had been seriously weakened: ‘There is no doubt that every local clash between the powers must undoubtedly result in a general European war in which Russia as well as every single other European power will have to participate. With God’s help, the onset of this conflict can be delayed, but we have to take hourly into consideration that it can happen anytime, and we have to prepare ourselves every hour for this.’
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The Entente Cordiale between Britain and France had survived even though each side felt that the other had behaved badly. The French felt that the British could have backed them more firmly from the start while the British were annoyed with France for being difficult about the Congo and for trying to get hold of the Spanish area of Morocco.
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The British Cabinet continued to be uneasy about the Anglo-French military talks. In November the Cabinet had two stormy meetings at which some of the moderates who opposed military commitments to France threatened to resign. Even Asquith was getting cold feet; as he wrote to Grey that September, the talks were ‘rather dangerous’ and ‘the French ought not to be encouraged in the present circumstances to make their plans on any assumptions of this kind’.
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While Grey argued hard for a free hand in foreign affairs he was forced for the first time to accept a degree of control by the Cabinet. It was agreed that there should be no exchanges between the British and French general staffs that amounted to a commitment on the part of Britain of military or naval intervention in a war, and if such communications did occur it should only be with previous Cabinet approval. The military talks continued nevertheless and Henry Wilson continued to travel to France and reassure his French counterparts that Britain would stand by them. And naval talks started which were to lead to an agreement in February 1913 for cooperation in the Mediterranean and in the waters between Britain and France, with the French concentrating on the former and the British on the latter. The British could tell themselves that they had not signed a military alliance with the French but the ties that bound their two countries had thickened and increased.