Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War

by Robert K. Massie

“Bertie has a remarkable social talent.27 He is lively, quick and sharp when his mind is set on anything, which is seldom.... But usually his intellect is of no more use than a pistol packed in the bottom of a trunk if one were attacked in the robber-infested Apennines.”

On this, Victoria was grimly determined. “I am anxious to repeat50... that my firm resolve, my irrevocable decision, [is] that his wishes—his plans—about everything, his views about everything are to be my law. And no human power will make me swerve from what he decided and wished! I am also determined that no one person—may he be ever so good, ever so devoted... is to lead or guide or dictate to me. I know how he would disapprove it.”

Gentlemen in Victorian England could amuse themselves as much as they liked with “actresses,” the term society applied to women of the streets and special houses. Approaches to unmarried girls of good family were strictly forbidden. Once married, a young woman in society must not be approached until she had borne her husband several sons to carry on the family name and inherit the estates. The essential rule underlying the entire structure was discretion; everything might be known, nothing must be said.

The Duke of Edinburgh, a full admiral in the navy and Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, informed the captain that the yacht could cast off. The captain apologized profusely and explained that he had no orders from the Queen.

On January 25, 1858, the wedding was celebrated in St. James’s Chapel, and the bridal couple left the church to the strains of Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March,” the first time this music had been used for an actual wedding.

When William was seven, lessons began at six A.M. and continued until six P.M. with two short breaks for meals and exercises.

Bismarck retaliated by issuing a decree establishing censorship of press articles that might “jeopardize the public welfare.”

“The Queen is extremely glad98 to hear that General Winterfeldt says he was received coldly... for such was her intention.

“We are no longer looked upon33 as the innocent victims of wrong, but rather as arrogant victors,” worried Crown Prince Frederick. Europe would see Germany, “this nation of thinkers and philosophers, poets and artists, idealists and enthusiasts... as a nation of conquerers and destroyers.”

“I have the unfortunate nature43 that everywhere I could be seems desirable to me,” he said, “and then dreary and boring as soon as I am there.”

Often, he lay awake until seven A.M., then slept until two P.M. Lying in bed, he mulled over grievances. “I have spent the whole night hating,”55 he said once. When no immediate object of hatred was available, he ransacked his memory to dredge up wrongs done him years before.

Gladstone had passionately denounced the Turks for their atrocities against the Bulgarian Christians. Turks, Gladstone had thundered, were “that inhuman exception17 to the human race.”

Salisbury wrote of his “lively... recollection of the kindness39 which your Highness showed me in Berlin in the years 1876 and 1878.” Bismarck replied, describing his pleasure in seeing “by your own words that our former personal intercourse,40 which I am glad to renew, has left with both of us the same sympathetic recollection.”

Bismarck, accustomed to sleeping late, then having a cup of tea, a warm bath, and a massage in order to prepare himself for the day, hurriedly got out of bed, dressed, and walked in a cold rain through the garden of the Chancellor’s palace to Herbert’s villa.

Part of the problem was the intensity of William’s effort. Englishmen preferred understatement; the German Emperor seemed flashy, operatic, unreliable, or—the Englishman’s ultimate word of censure—tiresome.

disinclined and set down in writing the reasons he would be unsuitable: 1. Age, poor memory, illness73 2. Poor public speaker 3. Unfamiliar with Prussian laws and politics 4. Not a soldier 5. Insufficient means. I could probably manage without the Governor General’s salary, but not in Berlin. I shall be ruined. 6. My Russian connections 7. I have been in public life for thirty years, am seventy-five years old and do not wish to start something which I know will be too much for me. These objections were overruled. Prince Hohenlohe was installed in office and served as Imperial Chancellor from 1894 to 1900.

Across Germany, professors proclaimed the glory of the Hohenzollern monarchy, the necessity for patriotic obedience, the historical inevitability of German expansion.

Above the philosophers and historians, the ministers and diplomats, the steel magnates, bankers, and shipping managers stood the leading advocate of Weltmacht, Kaiser William II.

Bülow’s aristocratic Italian mother-in-law ridiculed his absurdly exaggerated confidences. “Bernhard makes a secret19 of everything,” she declared. “He takes you by the arm, leads you to the window and says, ‘Don’t tell anyone but there’s a little dog down there who’s pissing.’”

“it will be sawing off the branch on which it sits.”

Special attention was devoted to newspapers in South Germany. Tirpitz’ officers visited universities seeking professors, especially economists, who would speak in favor of the Navy Bill, stressing the value of a fleet as a protector of German industry and foreign trade. Professors and their students were invited to visit Kiel and Wilhelmshaven, where they were received by eager naval officers and ships’ bands and escorted through the dockyards.

The Second Navy Law of 1900 provided the basic framework for Imperial Navy legislation, but three Supplementary Navy Laws (Novelles) followed in 1906, 1908, and 1912. In each instance, Tirpitz manipulated a sense of crisis and frustration in Germany to ensure passage.

Lolling on the Government Bench, he permitted himself to slide lower and lower, “as if,” said an observer in the Gallery, “to discover3 how nearly he could sit on his shoulder blades.” From this horizontal posture, he could rise up suddenly to intervene in debate. So great was Balfour’s charm and so intricate the dialectic of his arguments that most members even across the aisle delighted in him.

At Eton, he was tormented. “I am bullied6 from morning to night,” he wrote to his father. “I am obliged7 to hide myself all evening in some corner.... I am obnoxious to all of them because I can do verses, but will not do them for the others.” In London, during the holidays, he lived in such dread of meeting his schoolmates that he avoided major streets. Eventually, Robert was withdrawn from Eton and brought home.

Lord Robert replied that he was immune from worry on either count: “That which is my main expense11—traveling—is almost always undertaken under pressure, either from you or others, which will cease on my marriage. [And] the persons who will cut me because I marry Miss Alderson are precisely the persons of whose society I am so anxious to be quit.”

He believed in preserving traditional English views and institutions. He considered it the near-sacred duty of the Conservative Party to defend the hereditary rights and privileges of the propertied class. Democracy was a virus threatening to infect and strike down England. The votes of the working class were informed by a mingling of passion and greed which left no room for the patient, reasonable calculations required to guide the nation as a whole. Expecting government by numbers to produce government by the best was illogical, he said. “First rate men13 will not canvass mobs, and if they did, the mobs would not elect the first rate men.”

The Tsar’s army advanced through the Balkans and by January 1878 stood in the suburbs of Constantinople. In England, apprehension gave way to hysteria. The Queen, passionately anti-Russian, raged at Gladstone for his condemnation of the Turks, referring to her former and future Prime Minister as “that half-madman.”19 (The Duke of Sutherland went further and declared that Gladstone was “a Russian agent.”

Lord Salisbury was the father of ten. He treated his children like small foreign powers: not often noticed, but when recognized, regarded with unfailing politeness. “My father always treats me50 as if I were an ambassador,” reported one adolescent, “and I do like

On his bookshelves he had placed the works of all the classical authors mentioned by Gibbon in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Rhodes had ordered these authors translated for himself at a cost of £8,000. On his bedroom wall, Rhodes had hung a portrait of Bismarck.

the Kruger Telegram let loose in England against Germany contributed more than anything else to open the eyes of large sections of the German people to our economic position and the necessity for a fleet.”

In 1892, Chamberlain’s son Austen, twenty-nine, entered the House of Commons. A year later, wearing a monocle like his father, Austen gave his maiden speech.

William’s visit to Sandringham was a vexation to the Princess of Wales. She poked fun at the three valets and hairdresser brought along to maintain the Emperor and shook with laughter when told that there was an additional person, a hairdresser’s assistant, whose sole function was to curl the Imperial mustache.

What most foreign soldiers and civilians observed, once the German troops arrived, was a resurgence of raping and looting, which had died down. A British officer was not surprised by this behavior. “They say that the Kaiser,54 in his farewell speech told the men to act this way. They are strictly obeying orders.” Indeed, William’s demand that “the name of Germans resound through Chinese history” for a thousand years was on Waldersee’s mind. Determined to prove the mettle of German troops and to make the Chinese pay for the murder of Ketteler, the Field Marshal threw himself into the organization of punitive expeditions.

“I should like to say that I should profoundly regret the permanent absence of any of the distinguished men who lead the Parnellite Party.... If you sit opposite a man every day, and you are engaged in fighting him, you cannot help getting a liking for him whether he deserves it or not.”

Lansdowne’s service in New Delhi was as unremarkable as had been his service in Ottawa. (In India, he made himself unpopular by raising the age of consent for girls from ten to twelve.)

when a ship needed men, the captain sent a press gang ashore. They overpowered and captured as many civilians as were needed and carried them, subdued by violence or drink, back to the ship. Once aboard, there would be no escape for many years.

He had no difficulty pinpointing the date, the name of the British admiral, and the name of the battle in which Britain’s future would be decided. “Jellicoe to be Admiralissimo38 on October 21, 1914 when the Battle of Armageddon comes along,” he wrote in 1911. Fisher’s premise and most of the details of his prediction were correct. He picked the date because it corresponded with the probable completion of the deepening of the Kiel Canal, which would permit the passage of German dreadnoughts from the Baltic to the North Sea. War did come on a bank holiday weekend, although it was in August, not October, 1914. (The Kiel Canal had been completed in July.)

He unleashed his feelings against other tourists, particularly “the flood of Americans...121 so overwhelmingly nauseous and disagreeable... [that] I will never come abroad again.... Foreigners cannot distinguish them from English, and so I am not surprised we are so unpopular abroad.” There were too many Americans in Paris, too: “The Americans swarm122 so everywhere that the whole place abroad is quite nauseous to me. Such vulgar brutes they all are, both men and women.”

Fisher’s approach to ships which came into his dockyard for repairs was similar. One battleship came in needing replacement of a single heavy gun barrel, normally a two-day job. Fisher had a chair put on the gun platform the first morning, declaring that he would sit there until the job was done. At midday, a table was brought and his lunch was served. The new gun was installed in four hours.

On a day off, he visited Amsterdam, which he thought “detestable and smelly,” dined in “a beastly, stuffy142 little hole over a stinking canal,” and went to see Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch,” the only Dutch painting he decided he liked.

In New York, trading was halted for two minutes on the New York Stock Exchange so that the famous British visitor could address the members from the floor. His short speech, he was told, cost the exchange $100,000 a second in lost time.

Outside, a broad expanse of lawn stretched to a circle of giant ash, beech, spruce, and pine trees. On arrival at Belmont, C.B.’s first concern was to visit his trees, sometimes bowing to them and bidding them “Good morning.”

“Darling—shall I tell you61 what you have been and are to me? First, outwardly and physically unapproachable and unique. Then, in temperament and character, often baffling and elusive, but always more interesting and attractive and compelling than any woman I have ever seen or known. In solid intellect, and real insight into all situations, great or small, incomparably first. And above all, and beyond all, in the intimacy of perfect confidence and understanding, for two years past, the pole star and lode-star of my life.”

“I like to be alone at first after a strenuous time.... My squirrels come on to my writing table and take nuts from my hand as if I had never been away. There is something restful in the unconsciousness of animals—unconscious, that is, of all the things that matter so much to us and do not matter at all to them.”

Churchill himself later ruefully described what had happened: “In the end24 a curious and characteristic solution was reached. The Admiralty had demanded six ships; the economists offered four; and we finally compromised on eight.”

In Churchill’s words, “the vials of wrath2 were full.”

The assassin, Gavrilo Princip, was a native Bosnian,

The Governor of the Bank of England called on Lloyd George to let him know that the City was vehemently opposed to British intervention. Lloyd George later used this episode to refute the accusation that “this was a war intrigued65 and organized and dictated by financiers for their own purpose.” “I saw Money66 before the war,” the Chancellor wrote. “I lived with it for days and did my best to study its nerve, for I knew how much depended on restoring its confidence; and I say that Money was a frightened and trembling thing: Money shivered at the prospect. It is a foolish and ignorant libel to call this a financier’s war.”