The centenary of the First World War was also a publishing deadline, with seemingly as many monographs to mark its passage as ceramic poppies—888,264, one for each British and colonial soldier killed—that spilled out of the Tower of London in November 2014. Millions more visited that installation, ‘Blood Swept Lands’ than will read about the war it memorialized, attesting not least to the enhanced official promotion of Remembrance Days in England in recent years. Yet the crimson solemnly affixed to buttonholes, or in moats, points to the paradox of official commemorations of the conflict; mourning for heroic sacrifice, and vindication of national honour and ultimate triumph. The cause of Britain was just: as contemporaries saw it, defence of gallant little Belgium ruthlessly invaded by the Hun, and as the better historians have since shown, saving Europe from domination by a German militarism more dangerous and reckless than any other power of the time.
Douglas Newton’s Darkest Days: The Truth Behind Britain’s Rush to War takes aim squarely at this version of 1914, and the mythologies surrounding it: that the Asquith government entered the war only after having exhausted the diplomatic alternatives—acting to restrain Russia and France and negotiate with Germany, to no avail, and finally stepping in at the last moment, to uphold treaty obligations to Belgian neutrality about which the nation was of one mind. Newton, an Australian historian whose simultaneous study Hell-Bent details the contribution of his own country’s political establishment to the carnage, focuses Darkest Days on the fortnight prior to Britain’s declaration of war on Germany, delivering a meticulous day-by-day narrative of the deliberations and manoeuvres at the top reaches of the British state that led to it. His central argument is a demolition of the legend that there was a broad unanimity behind the decision. On the contrary—he maintains—it is striking how much resistance emerged, without parallel in any other European capital, and what extreme measures of deception, circumvention and intimidation were necessary to quell it.
Darkest Days opens nearly a month after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo, when most of the British political class from the King downwards had nearly given up hope of heading off a civil war in Ireland over the introduction of Home Rule, and were either straining instead to see what shape it might take, or retreating to their seats in the countryside. The attentat in Sarajevo had not at first seemed very important. Not until the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia on 23 July were its possible consequences registered. Asquith, writing to his mistress the next evening, commented that a Balkan war could mean ‘Armageddon’ if it pulled in the rival continental powers, but ‘happily there seems to be no reason why we should be anything more than spectators.’ Three days later, on 27 July, Lewis Harcourt, the Colonial Secretary, counted eleven out of nineteen members of the government who shared this conviction, a ‘Peace Party which if necessary shall break up the Cabinet in the interest of our abstention.’
Yet within a week the Cabinet would be unbroken, and Britain at war. Darkest Days offers a vivid timeline of how this happened, as one calculated act of preemption, concealment and sabotage by the dominant trio under Asquith—Grey at the Foreign Office, Churchill at the Admiralty, and Haldane at the War Office—succeeded another, while the four-power crisis between Austria, Russia, Germany and France escalated on the continent. On 26 July, Churchill had already given a ‘stand fast order’ to the fleet at Portland, announcing it to the press the next morning, without informing the Cabinet. Two days later he sent it to war stations in the North Sea against the German fleet, again taking care not to consult the Cabinet, lest this ‘should mistakenly be considered a provocative action’. On the 29th Austria declared war on Serbia, and Russia ordered a general mobilization, for which it had secretly issued, with French encouragement, ‘partial’ instructions four days earlier. Bound in alliance to Austria, Germany now confronted the prospect of war not only with France, a contingency for which German military plans envisaged a swift advance on Paris through Belgium, but also Russia. Panicking at the news of Russian mobilization, Bethmann-Hollweg attempted to secure British neutrality by promising that if France were defeated, Germany would proceed to no annexations in Europe, leaving Belgium—post-hostilities—untouched, and taking only French colonies overseas, an offer brusquely dismissed as dishonourable by Grey and Asquith, ‘certain that the Cabinet would agree’.
On 31 July, in an apparent attempt to find a rationale for intervention more acceptable to Cabinet Radicals than adherence to the Entente, Grey decided on his own to telegram Paris and Berlin, asking for pledges from each that in the event of war, Belgian neutrality would be respected. When Russia looked like upsetting this plan, launching a general mobilization before Germany on 31 July, a half-hearted attempt was made to restrain it: Asquith roused the ‘poor King’ from bed to sign a plea to his beloved cousin ‘Nicky’—which Britain’s Ambassador in St Petersburg failed to deliver for a day, until after Germany had declared war, and then helped the Tsar reject in writing. The next day, after receiving an official British warning over Belgium, the German Ambassador to London asked Grey whether Britain would stand aside if Germany agreed both to respect Belgian neutrality, and to guarantee the territorial integrity of France and its colonies—whereupon Grey told him bluntly that Britain could not promise to remain neutral even if Germany did not invade Belgium. ‘In this way’, Newton writes, ‘Berlin was told of Britain’s inflexible position: a German decision to respect Belgian neutrality would win it neither credit nor advantage. Britain would still probably rush to the assistance of France and Russia if it came to war.’
The only condition under which Grey would—twenty-four hours later—contemplate Britain remaining neutral was if there was no war between Germany and France in the West, letting the Central Powers and Russia fight it out in the East, a prospect unthinkable for France, since the Serbian crisis often more bellicose than Russia itself, and outraging George V, who—with a conciliatory cable from his less beloved cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm, in hand—summoned Grey to the Palace for a dressing down and retraction. That night, Churchill fully mobilized the Naval Reserves, ‘notwithstanding the Cabinet decision’ against it, as he observed, and with no more than a complicit ‘look’ from Asquith after a dinner-party at Downing Street, attended by the Russian Ambassador. Two days later, in a long and meandering speech, Grey told the House of Commons that Britain must intervene if Belgian neutrality was violated. There was neither any Cabinet decision nor any Parliamentary vote on British entry into the war. Most ministers never even saw the ultimatum sent to Germany on 4 August, after its troops crossed the frontier of Belgium. Nor did they approve the formal declaration of war that followed it that night, a step taken in the Privy Council, composed of just three peers and the monarch.
Newton’s indictment of the sequence of diplomatic subterfuges that drew Britain into the Great War is damning. That these were so necessary speaks to his case that opposition in the Cabinet to the entry into war was a real obstacle to its architects, who could not afford such resignations from it as would bring down the government. But the fact remains that of the eleven ministers Harcourt claimed were firmly opposed to intervention, all but four accepted it; of the quartet who did resign, two returned within twenty-four hours after tearful exchanges with Asquith; and the other two—Gladstone’s biographer Morley, and Burns, the only workingman in the government—uttered not a squeak of objection in public. Their actions had nothing to do with the German invasion of Belgium. All four resignations, whether retracted or maintained, were in protest at British backing of the Entente, set in motion on 2 August, when Grey secured from his colleagues a pledge of naval support for France should the German fleet enter the Channel—a decision, said Burns, ‘tantamount to a declaration that we take part in this war.’ But once war was declared, opposition to it collapsed overnight. A handful of backbench Radical mps criticized the government, but none opposed War Credits for it.