aloud: ‘Commence hostilities against Germany at once.’ This was received with applause by the assembled officers, many of whom would be dead within a year. Britain’s dominions and colonies, led by India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, were not consulted in any way about the decision to fight: their governors-general merely issued proclamations on their own authority, declaring them to be in a state of war with Germany, alongside the Mother Country. Only a few old Boers’ voices were raised in demurral. One of them, Jacobus Deventer, summoned his commando then telegraphed his former general, Louis Botha, now South Africa’s prime minister: ‘All my burghers armed, mounted and ready. Whom do we fight – the British or the Germans?’ He eventually accepted an order to join a force mustering to invade German South-West Africa, though some others mounted a short-lived anti-British rebellion.
Even many intelligent and informed Europeans failed to grasp the gravity of the course of action to which they had committed themselves. This is emphasised by the remarks of British leaders who expressed gratitude that war had reprieved the country from a bloody showdown in Ireland. In Grey’s Commons speech of 3 August he made an almost frivolous aside: ‘One thing I would say: the one bright spot in the very dreadful situation is Ireland.’ Sir William Birdwood, secretary to the government of India, wrote: ‘What a real piece of luck this war has been as regards Ireland – just averted a Civil War and when it is over we may all be tired of fighting.’
Ramsay MacDonald, who resigned the Labour Party leadership when his followers – like their German counterparts – decided to vote in favour of war credits, won some cheers when he told the Commons that Britain should have remained neutral, though when he went on to assert that ‘in the deepest parts of our hearts we believe that [would have been] right, and that alone was consistent with the honour of this country and the traditions of the party now in office’, he was received with a derisive laughter that sensitive witnesses thought unseemly. Mr Ponsonby, MP for Stirling Burghs, said that ‘we were on the eve of a great war and he hated to see people embarking on it with a light heart’, which prompted some assenting voices. Another MP, Mr Wedgwood, said that this was not going to be ‘one of the dear old wars of the 18th century … but a matter of sustaining the civilisation which it had taken centuries to bring about’. Perhaps the wisest comment, though at the time it received scant applause, also came from Ramsay MacDonald: ‘no war is at first unpopular’.
In the last days of the crisis, many of the principals – the greatest men of their nations, the most powerful people in the world – experienced moments when they shrank in size. They glimpsed the horror of the consequences of the courses they were pursuing, and looked back over their shoulders in yearning. This was true of the Kaiser, Bethmann and Tsar Nicholas; but not, apparently, of any of the Austrians, or Moltke, or Sazonov. The French were astonishingly fatalistic about the need to support Russia, if only because they were convinced – almost certainly correctly – that the German army would anyway fall upon themselves as a partner in the Entente. The British, save a few wild men such as Churchill, were least eager for war, but identified in the violation of Belgium a justification for joining the struggle. Because Britain was a Great Power, they believed that when great issues were at stake, it must be seen to play a great part.
In the last days of peace Vernon Kell, director of the British security service MI5, stayed at his office in Watergate House around the clock, organising arrests of known German agents. Although his infant organisation boasted a staff of only seventeen, he had forged effective links with county chief constables: between 3 and 16 August, twenty-two arrests were made. Some spies escaped in the fashion of Walter Rimann, a language teacher in Hull who caught the Zeebrugge ferry. It is thought that a few others remained undetected, but if so they made little contribution to Germany’s war effort.
Most of those caught had been identified through the interception of their correspondence with Germany’s intelligence service, the Nachrichten-Abteilung, under Home Office warrant – a system fostered by Winston Churchill. The Kaiser raged about the incompetence of his spy chiefs. Gustav Steinhauer, ringmaster of the British network, recorded Wilhelm demanding: ‘Am I surrounded by dolts? Who is responsible?’ German military intelligence had focused its efforts exclusively on France, leaving the navy to handle Britain. Steinhauer, who often travelled there in the pre-war period, had recruited agents chiefly by writing unsolicited letters to German expatriates; his most active ‘postman’ was Karl Ernst, a Pentonville barber, who approached seaman customers for information. German wartime intelligence in Britain never recovered from the 1914 round-up: as late as 21 August, Berlin was unaware that a British Expeditionary Force had been convoyed to France.
Meanwhile, Bernard Shaw wired his German translator: ‘YOU AND I AT WAR CAN ABSURDITY GO NO FURTHER. MY FRIENDLIEST WISHES GO WITH YOU UNDER ALL CIRCUMSTANCES.’ Lord Northcliffe said to his erstwhile Vienna correspondent Wickham Steed, ‘Well it’s come!’ Steed answered, ‘Yes, thank God!’ Memories of Queen Victoria caused many Russians to refer to England as ‘Anglichanka’ – the Englishwoman. A peasant said in August 1914 that ‘he was glad that the Anglichanka was with Russia, because first she was clever and would help; secondly, if things went badly with Russia, she was good and would help; thirdly, if it came to making peace, she was determined and would not give way’.
Fran Šuklje was a well-known Slovenian sage, sixty-five in 1914. On 4 August this unwilling subject of the Hapsburgs was sitting under the trees in the famous Stembur garden in Kandija when he read the news of Britain’s declaration of war. He told the little crowd of disciples around him: ‘Now you will give thanks to God if this war is over in three years.’ His words quickly spread among his fellow citizens, ‘whose unanimous judgement was that I had gone mad. They assume an outcome in three weeks, three months at the most.’ In Berlin, Frederick Wiles of the Daily Mail described scenes at the British embassy that day: ‘the realisation of what was now upon them turned the Germans into infuriated barbarians … Stones, keys, sticks, knives, umbrellas – any and everything which could be thrown were hurtling through the smashed windows.’
At an English country tennis party, the writer Jerome K. Jerome expressed ‘relief and thankfulness … I was so afraid Grey would climb down at the last moment … It was Asquith I was doubtful of. I didn’t think the old man had the grit … Thank God, we shan’t read “Made in Germany” for some little time to come.’ On the night of 4 August, as mindless crowds roared and sang outside Buckingham Palace, Maurice Baring watched a drunken man in evening dress harangue passers-by from the roof of a taxi in Trafalgar Square.
Even after war was declared, impassioned dissenters remained. On 5 August C.P. Scott argued in the Manchester Guardian: ‘By some hidden contract England has been technically committed behind her back to the ruinous madness of a share in the violent gamble of a war between two militarist leagues … It will be a war in which we risk everything of which we are proud, and in which we stand to gain nothing … Some day we will regret it.’ Many British people in the twenty-first century believe that Scott was right, chiefly in the light of the horror of the experience that followed, but also because they are unpersuaded that it was necessary to resist in arms the Kaiser’s Germany at such cost.
Would any of the Entente Powers have acted differently had they known of the profound complicity of the Serbian army, though not the government, in the murder of Franz Ferdinand? Almost certainly not, because this was not why the Austrians and Germans acted, or their opponents reacted. The Russians simply considered the extinction of a small Slav state as an excessive and indeed intolerable punishment for the crime of Princip, and for that matter Apis. Unless France had swiftly declared its neutrality and surrendered its frontier fortresses as Germany demanded, its alliance with Russia would have caused Moltke to attack in the West. The British were entirely unmoved by Serbia’s impending fate, and acted only in response to the German violation of Belgian neutrality and the threat to France. The various participants in what would soon become the Great War had very different motives for belligerence, and objectives with little in common. Three conflicts – that in the Balkans over East European issues, the continental struggle to determine whether
