The Guns of August

by Barbara W. Tuchman

As for England, well, the German Navy was not built to hide in harbor. It would attack and probably be beaten. Germany would lose her ships, but England would lose mastery of the seas, which would pass to the United States, who would be the sole gainer from a European war.

When Melotte answered, “We will oppose with all our forces whatever power violates our frontiers,” Moltke pointed out smoothly that good intentions were not enough. “You must also have an army capable of fulfilling the duty which neutrality imposes.

On the basis of what he had heard in Berlin, he obtained de Broqueville’s agreement for a plan of campaign based on the hypothesis of a German invasion. He got his own and Galet’s nominee, an energetic officer named Colonel de Ryckel, appointed to carry out the work promised for April. By April it was still not ready. Meanwhile de Broqueville had appointed another officer, General de Selliers de Moranville, as Chief of Staff over De Ryckel’s head. In July four separate plans of concentration were still being considered.

On August 2, King Albert, presiding at the Council of State when it met at 9:00 P.M. in the palace, opened with the words: “Our answer must be ‘No,’ whatever the consequences. Our duty is to defend our territorial integrity. In this we must not fail.”

Premier de Broqueville warned waverers not to put faith in Germany’s promise to restore Belgian integrity after the war. “If Germany is victorious,” he said, “Belgium, whatever her attitude, will be annexed to the German Empire.”

When General de Selliers, the Chief of Staff, rose to explain the strategy of defense to be adopted, his Deputy Chief, Colonel de Ryckel, with whom his relations were, in the words of a colleague, “denuded of the amenities,” kept growling between his teeth, “Il faut piquer dedans, il faut piquer dedans” (We must hit them where it hurts).

Herr von Below’s nocturnal unrest reflected his government’s growing uneasiness about the effect of their ultimatum, now irrevocably committed to paper and irrevocably working upon Belgian national pride.

The Germans had been telling one another for years that Belgium would not fight, but now when the moment arrived they began to suffer an acute if belated anxiety. A valiant and ringing “No!” from Belgium would peal round the world with effect on the other neutral countries hardly beneficial to Germany.

Germany was not so worried about the attitude of neutral countries as she was about the delay that armed Belgian resistance would inflict upon her timetable. A Belgian Army that chose to fight rather than “line up along the road” would requi...

He informed van der Elst, who received him, that French dirigibles had dropped bombs and that French patrols had crossed the border. “Where did these events take place?” van der Elst asked. “In Germany,” was the reply. “In that case I fail to see the relevance of the information.”

Duuuuunked

At 2:30 A.M., the Council reconvened in the palace to approve the reply to Germany submitted by the Ministers. It stated that the Belgian government “would sacrifice the honor of the nation and betray its duty to Europe” if it accepted the German proposals. It declared itself “firmly resolved to repel by all means in its power every attack upon its rights.”

The last Minister to leave turned and saw King Albert standing with his back to the room and a copy of the reply in his hand, staring out of the window where the dawn was beginning to light the sky.

In Berlin, too, a late meeting was being held that night of August 2. At the Chancellor’s house, Bethmann-Hollweg, General von Moltke, and Admiral Tirpitz were conferring about a declaration of war on France as they had conferred the night before about Russia.

Bethmann pointed out that a declaration of war on France was necessary because Germany wanted to march through Belgium. Tirpitz repeated Ambassador Lichnowsky’s warnings from London that an invasion of Belgium would bring England in; he suggested that the entry into Belgium might be delayed.

French hostile acts during the days had already made war a fact. He was referring to the alleged reports of French bombings in the Nuremberg area which the German press had been blazing forth in extras all day with such effect that people in Berlin went about looking nervously at the sky. In fact, no bombings had taken place.

Tirpitz still deplored it. There could be no doubt in the world, he said, that the French were “at least intellectually the aggressors”; but owing to the carelessness of German politicians in not making this clear to the world, the invasion of Belgium, which was “a pure emergency measure,” would be made to appear unfairly “in the fateful light of a brutal act of violence.”

At precisely 7:00 A.M., the last moment of the twelve hours, Gaiffier rang the doorbell of the German Legation and delivered the reply to Herr von Below. On his way home he heard the cries of newsboys as the Monday morning papers announced the text of the ultimatum and the Belgian answer. He heard the sharp exclamations as people read the news and gathered in excited groups. Belgium’s defiant “No!” exhilarated the public.

Even in the palace and in the ministries some hope persisted; it was hard to believe that the Germans would deliberately choose to start the war by putting themselves in the wrong. The last hope vanished when the Kaiser’s belated reply to King Albert’s personal appeal of two days before was received on the evening of August 3. It was one more attempt to induce the Belgians to acquiesce without fighting.

“What does he take me for?” King Albert exclaimed in the first show of anger he had allowed himself since the crisis began. Assuming the supreme command, he at once gave orders for the blowing up of the Meuse bridges at Liège and of the railroad tunnels and bridges at the Luxembourg frontier.

He still postponed sending the appeal for military help and alliance to Britain and France. Belgian neutrality had been one collective act of the European Powers that almost succeeded. King Albert could not bring himself to sign its death certificate until the overt act of invasion had actually taken place.

No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard and fast and specific decision. Through the long afternoon the Cabinet squirmed uncomfortably, unready and unwilling to grasp the handle of final commitment.

Belgium, where there occurred one of the rare appearances of the hero in history, was lifted above herself by the uncomplicated conscience of her King and, faced with the choice to acquiesce or resist, took less than three hours to make her decision, knowing it might be mortal.

Britain had no Albert and no Alsace. Her weapons were ready but not her will. Over the past ten years she had studied and prepared for the war that was now upon her and had developed, since 1905, a system called the “War Book” which left nothing to the traditional British practice of muddling through.

The written pledge which that afternoon he handed to Cambon read, “If the German Fleet comes into the Channel or through the North Sea to undertake hostile operations against the French coasts or shipping, the British Fleet will give all protection in its power.” Grey added, however, that the pledge “does not bind us to go to war with Germany unless the German fleet took the action indicated.”

the naval pledge was only wrung from the Cabinet at the cost of the break that Asquith had been trying so hard to prevent. Two ministers, Lord Morley and John Burns, resigned; the formidable Lloyd George was still “doubtful.” Morley believed the dissolution of the Cabinet was “in full view that afternoon.” Asquith had to confess “we are on the brink of a split.”

Balfour replied that his party would be prepared to join a coalition, although if it came to that necessity he foresaw the country rent by an antiwar movement led by the seceding Liberals.

The underlying issue in the thinking of men like Churchill and Balfour, Haldane and Grey was the threatened German hegemony of Europe if France were crushed. But the policy that required support of France had developed behind closed doors and had never been fully admitted to the country.

To many, if not to most Englishmen, the crisis was another phase in the old quarrel between Germany and France, and none of England’s affair. To make it England’s affair in the eyes of the public, the violation of Belgium, child of English policy, where every step of the invaders would trample on a treaty of which England was architect and signatory, was required.

That evening as he was at dinner with Haldane, a Foreign Office messenger brought over a dispatch box with a telegram which, according to Haldane’s account, warned that “Germany was about to invade Belgium.” What this telegram was or from whom it came is not clear, but Grey must have considered it authentic.

Asquith again agreed, the more readily as he was uncomfortably conscious of the looming autocrat, Field Marshal Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, whom he had already been urged to appoint to the empty chair.

London was crammed with holiday crowds drawn to the capital instead of the seashore by the crisis. By midday they were so thick in Whitehall that cars could not get through, and the hum of milling people could be heard inside the Cabinet room where the ministers, meeting again in almost continuous session, were trying to make up their minds whether to fight on the issue of Belgium.

At eleven o’clock the Cabinet received news of Belgium’s decision to pit her six divisions against the German Empire. Half an hour later they received a declaration from the Conservative leaders, written before the ultimatum to Belgium was known, stating that it would be “fatal to the honor and security of the United Kingdom” to hesitate in support of France and Russia.

At three o’clock that afternoon of August 3, Grey was due in Parliament to make the government’s first official and public statement on the crisis. All Europe, as well as all England, was hanging on it. Grey’s task was to bring his country into war and bring her in united.

He had to explain to the oldest and most practiced parliamentary body in the world how Britain was committed to support France by virtue of something that was not a commitment. He must present Belgium as the cause without hiding France as the basic cause; he must appeal to Britain’s honor while making it clear that Britain’s interest was the deciding factor; he must stand where a tradition of debate on foreign affairs had flourished for three hundred years and, without the brilliance of Burke or the force of Pitt, without Canning’s mastery or Palmerston’s jaunty nerve, without the rhetoric of Gladstone or the wit of Disraeli, justify the course of British foreign policy under his stewardship and the war it could not prevent.

Lichnowsky entered anxiously, asking what had the Cabinet decided? What was Grey going to tell the House? Would it be a declaration of war? Grey answered that it would not be a declaration of war but “a statement of conditions.” Was the neutrality of Belgium one of the conditions? Lichnowsky asked. He “implored” Grey not to name it as one.

he could not suppose a “serious” violation was included in them, although German troops might traverse one small corner of Belgium. “If so,” Lichnowsky said, voicing the eternal epitaph of man’s surrender to events, “that could not be altered now.”

The House had gathered in total attendance for the first time since Gladstone brought in the Home Rule Bill in 1893.

Grey could not be regarded by anyone as a mettlesome mixer in foreign quarrels. He did not love foreign affairs or enjoy his job but deplored it as a necessary duty. He did not run over to the Continent for weekends but disappeared into the country. He spoke no foreign language beyond a schoolboy French. A widower at fifty-two, childless, nongregarious, he seemed as unattached to ordinary passions as to his office.

To give the subject all its due, Grey, wisely not relying on his own oratory, borrowed Gladstone’s thunder of 1870, “Could this country stand by and witness the direst crime that ever stained the pages of history and thus become participators in the sin?” From Gladstone too, he took a phrase to express the fundamental issue—that England must take her stand “against the unmeasured aggrandizement of any power whatsoever.”

He placed before them the “issue and the choice.” The House, which had listened in “painful absorption” for an hour and a quarter, broke into overwhelming applause, signifying its answer. The occasions when an individual is able to harness a nation are memorable, and Grey’s speech proved to be one of those junctures by which people afterward date events.

Ramsay MacDonald, speaking for the Laborites, said Britain should have remained neutral; Keir Hardie said he would raise the working classes against the war; and afterward in the lobby, a group of unconvinced Liberals adopted a resolution stating that Grey had failed to make a case for war. But Asquith was convinced that on the whole “our extreme peace lovers are silenced though they will soon find their tongues again.”

“What happens now?” Churchill asked Grey as they left the House together. “Now,” replied Grey, “we shall send them an ultimatum to stop the invasion of Belgium within 24 hours.” To Cambon, a few hours later, he said, “If they refuse, there will be war.”

The Germans took that chance because they expected a short war and because, despite the last-minute moans and apprehensions of their civilian leaders over what the British might do, the German General Staff had already taken British belligerency into account and discounted it as of little or no significance in a war they believed would be over in four months.

Clausewitz, a dead Prussian, and Norman Angell, a living if misunderstood professor, had combined to fasten the short-war concept upon the European mind. Quick, decisive victory was the German orthodoxy; the economic impossibility of a long war was everybody’s orthodoxy.

A diarist of German court society recorded on August 9 that Count Oppersdorff came in that afternoon and said things could not last ten weeks; Count Hochberg thought eight weeks, and after that, “You and I will be meeting again in England.”

A German officer leaving for the Western Front said he expected to take breakfast at the Café de la Paix in Paris on Sedan Day (September 2). Russian officers expected to be in Berlin about the same time; six weeks was the usual allowance. One officer of the Imperial Guard asked the opinion of the Czar’s physician whether he should pack at once his full-dress uniform to wear for the entry into Berlin or leave it to be brought by the next courier coming to the front.

In St. Petersburg the question was not whether the Russians could win but whether it would take them two months or three; pessimists who suggested six months were considered defeatists.

Germany had not planned on the need to hold out for long and upon entering the war had a stockpile of nitrates for making gunpowder sufficient for six months and no more. Only the later discovery of a method for fixing nitrogen out of the air enabled her war effort to continue. The French, gambling on a quick finish, risked no troops on what would have been a difficult defense of the Lorraine iron basin but allowed the Germans to take it on the theory that they would regain it with victory. As a result they lost 80 per cent of their iron ore for the duration and almost lost the war.

Moltke, foretelling the “long, wearisome struggle,” was one. Joffre was another. Questioned by ministers in 1912 he had said that if France won the first victory in a war, German national resistance would then commence, and vice versa. In either case other nations would be drawn in, and the result would be a war of “indefinite duration.”

The third—and the only one to act upon his vision—was Lord Kitchener, who had no part in the original planning. Hastily recalled to become War Minister on August 4, as he was about to board a Channel steamer to take him to Egypt, he brought forth from some fathomless oracular depths of his being the prediction that the war would last three years. To an incredulous colleague he said it might last even longer, but “three years will do to begin with. A nation like Germany, after having forced the issue, will only give in after it is beaten to the ground.