BRITAIN’S ‘MORAL COMMITMENT’ TO FRANCE IN AUGUST 1914

TREVOR WILSON

University of Adelaide

Architects of Nemesis Sir Edward Grey, Liberal Foreign Secretary 1905-16, was the willing puppet of the FO [Foreign Office] Francophiles, and systematically misled parliament and cabinet colleagues. . . . General Henry Wilson was the centre of a web of intrigue which committed Britain, in 1914, to a vast land-war fought on behalf of French interests. . . .’ Captions to illustrations in Paul Johnson, The Offhore Islanders (London, 1972).

The view has long been widely held that, when war came to Europe in 1914, Britain was not free to intervene or stand aside as it chose. Irrespec- tive of the circumstances in which the war broke out, or of German action towards Belgium, Britain was ‘morally committed‘ to fight alongside France.

This view was stated, from the moment of British intervention, by the small but distinguished group of Liberals and Socialists who opposed entry into the war. They claimed that Britain had not gone to war to uphold its treaty obligations to a small country subject to ruthless aggression. Had there been no invasion of Belgium, they argued, Britain would still have intervened. For Britain, without the knowledge or consent of Parliament, had become fatally entangled in a web of international undertakings from which, when the crisis came, there was no escape. It was, according to one Liberal M.P. (Arthur Ponsonby), a diplomats’ not a people’s war. And its cause was not the particular wickedness of any one country, but the absence of ‘democratic control’ over foreign policy in every country- including Britain.’

After 1918, the view that Britain was committed beyond recall to a system of alliances which left it no freedom of manoeuvre became some- thing of an historical orthodoxy. Revulsion against the war guilt clause of the Treaty of Versailles predisposed many British (and other) historians to adopt an ‘impartial’ view: this meant attributing the war not to any particu- lar country but to the alliance system, for which all major countries-even though some less than others-were responsible. Many ‘non-impartial’ historians came to a similar view. Some of the more conservative, feeling no love for the pre-war Liberal government, were ready to indict that government for having embarked on a diplomatic process certain to involve Britain in a war for which no adequate preparations were being made. As for those historians attracted to the Leninist interpretation, which saw the war as the product of capitalism at its highest stage, they

I Ponsonby bas a modern disciple in the journalist-turned-historian Paul Johnson. Accord- ing to Johnson, the English might have ‘escaped involvement in the catastrophe’ of the First World War. But: ‘They were dragged in as a result of a malfunction in their political system, a narrow but crucial failure in the democratic process.’ (The Offhore Islanders, pp. 365-66.)

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could hardly exclude from culpability that country which had pioneered industrial capitalism and possessed the largest empire. And although their explanation required no reference at all to diplomacy, which could be seen as simply part of the ‘superstructure’, most Marxist historians did not take this position. They were very concerned to show that British diplomats were not just the playthings of profound economic forces, but were acting consciously in a way that was both reprehensible and was bringing their country to disaster.

These trends in historical writing were encouraged by the opening of the diplomatic archives after 1918. Powerful evidence seemed to be forthcom- ing from them that Britain by 1914 had become fatally involved in the alliance system. The most telling pieces of evidence concerned the ‘conver- sations’ between the military staff of France and Britain which commenced in 1905 and continued to the outbreak of war. These had established the circumstances of British military action should the two countries become involved in a war with Germany. Not only had such conversations occurred without the knowledge of the British parliament, but until 1911 many members of the cabinet had been kept in the dark. Evidence of the lack of ‘democratic control’ over foreign policy could hardly be more complete. For it appeared that these military arrangements were binding in a way that the well-known naval arrangement, whereby from 1912 the British fleet was concentrated in the North Sea and the French fleet in the Mediterra- nean, was not. The reason was that the latter involved Britain in at most a limited action against Germany, to keep the German fleet out of the Channel-something which any British government would have required whatever its existing relations with France; and, as the opening days of August 1914 revealed, it was possible to secure this object without becom- ing involved in war with Germany, because the Germans had no plans to send their fleet into the Channel. The military arrangements between Bri- tain and France were seemingly another matter. Once the British Expeditionary Force had taken its place alongside the French army, Britain was committed to total involvement in the war on the Continent. And although this ‘once’ might seem to be a big qualification, it has not been so regarded by many historians. Certainly the military conversations were accompanied by firm statements on the British side that these were only contingency plans, and did not commit Britain to fight alongside France in all circumstances. But such disclaimers have been judged of no effect, except to salve the consciences of Liberal politicians who did not care to admit what they were doing to their country.

At the present time, the view that Britain by 1914 had become irrevocably committed to side with France in any war which broke out between France and Germany is widely held. For example, A. J. P. Taylor and John Ter- raine, who disagree about much else, are of one mind on this. The former writes:

The two service departments [the Admiralty and the War Office] had long planned deliberately for war against Germany. . . . By 1914 the Admiralty perhaps thought that they had re-established British naval supremacy without a war. The War Office however had devised the dispatch of an expeditionary force

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to France and had given commitments to the French that were binding in all but name.*

And the latter, who discusses the matter at length in his book Zmpacts of War, states: ‘Staff Talks must constitute an undertaking, practical and moral, because (as Britain discovered with surprise and some horror in August 1914) if they are at all fruitful they must inevitably dictate actual plans.’ As for the claim of the War Minister, R. B. Haldane, that he had ‘put in writing’ that the military staff talks ‘were not to prejudice the complete freedom of the two Governments’ (so Haldane wrote in his Autobiography), John Terraine regards this as of no account. Indeed he writes: ‘There is something pathetic, even at this distance, in this belief in the virtues of putting peculiar arrangements “in writing”-something odd in the fact that an acumen like Haldane’s should accept such a de~ ice . ’~

Why is this so-seeing that on the face of it ‘peculiar’ arrangements are the very ones which need to be put in writing so that their limitations may be fully understood? The argument is that one party to the arrangement (the French) were incapable of comprehending the limitations; and so, for the other party (the British), the limitations could not operate. John Ter- raine writes: ‘No amount of “writing”, no signature to a piece of paper, could alter the impression of the transaction on the second party-France.’

What was ‘the impression’ formed by the French which cancelled out the written stipulation? Terraine quotes a post-war statement by General Huguet, one of the parties to the initial staff talks. Huguet says:

It was understood that the [British Government] retained full liberty of action and that-if the likelihood of war between France and Germany were realised-the Government of the day would be the sole judge of the line of action to be taken, without being tied in any sense by the studies which might have been previously undertaken. There was nothing surprising in this reserva- tion which conforms to the traditional British attitude to foreign affairs. . . .

Nevertheless, Huguet goes on, the French were somewhat surprised at the readiness with which the military staff talks were authorized in 1906, because the British politicians who authorized them were ‘too shrewd and wary not to realize that the studies which were being entered upon-no matter what the reservations-constituted nevertheless an undertaking of sorts, at any rate a moral

What this passage seems to show is that the French had formed, not one impression but two, and that these impressions flatly contradicted each other. That the French should then have attached importance only to the impression which suited their book, and ignored the other which did not, is no cause for wonder. What is surprising is the assumption that the British were bound to accept the French view, even though this meant rejecting an equally plausible impression and one which ‘conforms to the traditional British attitude to foreign affairs’. Yet this assumption is widely made.

’ A. J . P. Taylor. in a review of Zara Steiner, Britain arid the Origins of the First World War, in the Observer (England), 5 February 1978.

John Terraine, Impacts of war: IYI4 & lY18 (London, I970), pp. 18-1 9. General Huguet, Britain and the War: a French Indicrment (London, 1928), quoted in

Terraine. Impacts of War, p. 19.

TREVOR WILSON 383 ‘Huguet’s conclusion’, says Terraine, ’is the heart of the matter.’ The refer- ence is to the second of Huguet’s conclusions: that the military staff con- versations, no matter what the reservations in writing, constituted ‘an undertaking of sorts, at any rate a moral one.’

What is a moral obligation, a commitment ‘binding in all but name’, in the field of international relations? Considering the importance attached to this concept in explaining Britain’s involvement in the Great War, it requires clear definition. After all, foreign policy is usually conducted not on some transcendental notion of obligation or morality, but on the basis of how nations perceive their fundamental interests: that is, on grounds of self-interest. If Britain in 1914 was not supporting France so as to guard its own basic interests, but for some other type of reason, then that type is a rare species and deserves close examination. Yet the many writings on this subject do not offer such examination. They tell us that Britain behaved as it did because it was morally obliged to do so, and leave it at that.

Is it possible to make good this omission? One definition of a moral obligation is plain. It is that a country will act in accordance with clearly- expressed undertakings stated in writing. Yet that will not help in the present case, For quite explicitly, and in writing, Britain had stated that it was not committed to side with France in the event of a war breaking out between France and Germany. So if Britain had a moral obligation to act in terms of its written undertakings, this was an obligation to refrain from automatically taking the side of France. It should consult its own interests and act accordingly. Those who write of Britain’s ‘moral obligations’ in 1914 are saying specifically that Britain was not free so to act, and are therefore invoking some other canon of international morality than that of abiding by written undertakings.

Another view suggests itself. It may be argued that the French military staff, as a result of their conversations with the British, had so comported their strategic arrangements that their entire plan of campaign depended on British co-operation, and would fall in ruins if the British failed to participate. In these circumstances Britain might feel obliged to act along- side the French. But such a hypothesis runs up against two serious difficul- ties. In the first place, it presumes stupidity on the part of the French high command that they would render their strategy dependent on a power which stated that it could not be relied on. Secondly, given the relatively tiny numbers of the British Expeditionary Force, it is hard to imagine a strategy which could have assigned to the British so crucial a position in the French plan of campaign.

As it happens, the refutation of this interpretation of moral obligation is provided by a leading figure in the British military hierarchy (whose views are endorsed by John Terraine).5 In a post-war book, Field-Marshal Sir William Robertson cites the British O f i i a l History as saying that, although there was an ‘obligation of honour’, there was no actual undertak- ing to send the Expeditionary Force, or any part of it, ‘to any particular

Field Marshall Sir William Rohertson, Soldiers and Sturesrnen 1914-18 (London, 1926), vol. 1. pp, 48-49, quoted in Terraine. In~prrcts of Wnr, pp. 21 -22.

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point or, in fact, anywhere at all’. (As an encapsulation of the muddle- headedness surrounding the notion of ‘obligation of honour’, this state- ment by the OfJicial History would be hard to beat.) Robertson goes on:

Moreover, since there was no such undertaking the French authorities were forced to frame their plan of campaign not knowing whether they would or would not receive British assistance. . . .

It suggests an ambiguity in Terraine’s position that he approves of this statement, for it runs counter to his view that ‘Staff Talks must constitute an undertaking’ because ‘if they are at all fruitful they must inevitably dictate actual plans.’ Robertson’s ‘penetrating conclusion’, as Terraine describes it, is different: that because the British Cabinet was ‘unaware of the conversations’ and ‘declined to endorse [the military staff arrangements] with its formal approval’ , therefore the French did not make their plans on the basis of certain British assistance. The plans which the French implemented on the outbreak of war bear Robertson out. The French army made its great effort on the right wing, with the aim of liberating Alsace and Lorraine and striking forward to the Rhine. The B.E.F. was placed on the French left wing, as far as possible from this crucial action. To the left of the B.E.F., between it and the sea, was no regular military force at all. Unless we are to believe that the French high command had calculated that the German right wing would reach just as far as the B.E.F., but not a single mile further, it must be concluded that the British force did not occupy a vital place in their schemes, and that their ‘actual plans’ for the opening phases of the war had not been ‘inevitably dictate[d]’ by the assurance of British assistance. (This is not to say that the French were not desperately concerned to secure Britain’s entry into the war. Should the war be long, Britain would be needed to render enormous assistance in the form of naval, economic, and ultimately military power. And although it is a truism that everyone-except Kitchener-imagined at the beginning that this would be a short war, on all sides men began behaving from the start as if they thought it might not be.)

Here then is another definition of moral obligation which, when investi- gated, proves inapplicable to Britain’s relations with France in 1914.

There is of course a large, and obvious, sense in which it may be argued that Britain was morally obliged to fight alongside France in 1914. But, on inquiry, this has nothing to do with military staff talks, or promises implied if not explicit, or any view that the French might be likely to take of Albion honourable or perfidious. It has to do with the fundamental bases of British foreign policy.

It need hardly be said that Britain did not traditionally conduct its fore- ign policy according to disinterested or beneficent standards: according to what other countries thought Britain ought to do on their behalf; or accord- ing to what clearly would be to the benefit of other countries (perhaps ‘little’ countries) in whose welfare Britain had no direct concern-‘little Serbia’, for example. Admittedly in 1839 Britain had guaranteed the ter- ritorial integrity of Belgium. But this was not because Britain made a practice of guaranteeing small countries. In guaranteeing Belgium, Britain was safeguarding a vital British interest-and one whose importance was to

TREVOR WILSON 385 increase very substantially throughout the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century. Again, in 1904 Britain had entered into an entente with France; soon after, its military staff entered into conversations with their French counterparts. But this was because Britain was facing an ominously changing world, in which Germany was becoming ever more threatening and Britain ever more vulnerable. Ill-feeling towards France on account of colonial differences was a luxury Britain could no longer afford. And some day, its survival as a great power might require the action of a mass army on the Continent, which Britain did not possess and had no wish to acquire. On the left of British politics, a mass conscript army was viewed with real repugnance. On the right, there were some elements which talked about the virtues of compulsory military training. But few Conservatives showed enthusiasm for meeting the cost of an army on the Continental scale. It will be recalled that in 1909, when required to pay the taxes which would finance-among other things-the additional battleships they had been clamouring for, the Conservatives incited the House of Lords to reject the budget. It was therefore entirely to Britain’s advantage to clear up its colonial differences with France, and to acquire close relations with the only army in existence which might, should the worst come to the worst, secure its purposes, namely the army of France. But Britain did not choose to enter into an alliance with France or bind its forces to serve alongside the French, because the dangers inherent in such a course were likely to outweigh the advantages. For example, a British alliance might encourage the French to take British support for granted and to provoke Germany into the very conflict which Britain was anxious to avoid.

Now this course of British policy-the continuing commitment to Bel- gian independence, and the entente with France-made sense in terms of Britain’s vital needs. That is, it served Britain’s turn in a world where the menace of Germany was great and growing, even though it was not yet certain that Germany meant to subdue Western Europe, crush the liberal states on the Continent, and seize control of the Channel. Viewed dispas- sionately, this was a policy of enlightened self-interest. Yet for many Englishmen, the pursuit of this policy was not just self-interested: it was also the path of morality and the course of honour. It was so because Britain itself was an honourable, moral power; was indeed the nation, above all other nations, which was a beneficent force in the world-thanks to its liberal parliamentary system of government, its cultural heritage, its Protestant faith, its practice of religious toleration and its great economic advancement. It was also an honourable, moral power because in its con- duct of international affairs it did not behave aggressively to other Euro- pean countries (aggression against non-European peoples was another matter, because non-European peoples were another matter). What was more, it did not encourage European states friendly to itself to behave aggressively towards others by making binding alliances with them. For many Englishmen, therefore, when Germany declared war on France in 1914 Britain was morally obliged to act, because implicit in France’s survi- val was the highest of all moral causes: the survival of Britain.

When Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, spoke in the House of Commons on 3 August 1914, he made it quite plain that in his world view self-interest and morality went hand in hand. ‘I ask the House, from the

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point of view of British interests, to consider what is at stake.’ What was at stake, warned Grey, was as follows: if France was ‘beaten to her knees’ and rendered subordinate ‘to the will and power of one greater than herself’ while Britain stood aside, he did not believe that ‘we should be in a posi- tion, a material position,’ to undo what had happened, ‘to prevent the whole of Western Europe opposite to us . . . falling under the domination of a single power, and I am quite sure that our moral position would be such as to have lost us all respect.’ In short, the loss of respect, the loss of ‘our moral position’, would be consequent on Britain’s failing to uphold one of its most vital interests: preventing ‘the whole of Western Europe opposite to us . . . falling under the domination of a single power’.

This interpretation of ‘moral obligation’ is far removed from that of the writers quoted earlier. But it does attribute some sort of meaning to an expression which has so far been without one.

It is not wonderful that there were people in 1914, and have been ever since, saying that Britain was bound morally and in honour to take the side of France in its quarrel with Germany. They were using the expression, without definition, to convey many different things.

The anti-war Liberals were urging that the war was none of Britain’s business: as one of them stated in the House of Commons, ‘no vital inter- est’ of Britain ‘has been attacked.’6 Why then, they had to say, was a Liberal government leading them along this path? The answer lay in Bri- tain’s commitment to France, undertaken by the Foreign Office without reference to the nation or its representatives. To the rejoinder that no such commitment could be shown to exist, they answered that it existed in an unwritten form: in the form of expectations which had been created and promises half-given although not committed to paper. If asked why, with ‘no vital interest’ of Britain at stake, so unscrupulous a body as the Foreign Office should feel bound to honour these expectations and half-promises, the anti-war Liberals could have given no answer-xcept to regard the question as absurd. For, in a strange way, they were condemning British diplomats for being honourable men: having improperly committed them- selves and so their country, the diplomats felt bound to honour these commitments; for ‘an Englishman’s word is his bond‘, and although the Foreign Office consisted of Englishmen who had let down their country, they were Englishmen nevertheless.

The French ambassador also believed that Britain was honour-bound to take the side of France in the crisis of 1914. When on 1 August he found that he could extract no assurances of British support, he asked the ‘searing question”: ‘Et l’honneur? Est-ce-que 1’Angleterre comprend ce que c’est l’honneur?’ Cambon was choosing to ignore the clear warnings that he had been given that the British cabinet did not hold itself bound by the military and naval arrangements. This is not surprising. His own nation was in desperate plight. British support might be crucial to its survival. He could

P. A. Molteno, Liberal member for Dumfries, in the House of Commons on 3 August 1914. ’ Terraine, Impacts uf War, p. 41.

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not appeal to Britain’s written undertakings, because none existed, so he appealed to British honour. In this instance, the touchstone of British honour was France’s vital interest. In itself, it was not an appeal which could carry much weight: there were few Englishmen who so construed their country’s honour.

But many influential Englishmen, aided by the essential ambiguity of the concept to which Cambon was appealing, were prepared to appear to agree with him at this moment. Grey was among them. Certainly he sent Cambon away empty-handed, as he was bound to do given the state of opinion in the cabinet that day. (Unlike many subsequent writers, Grey seemed to believe that it was the cabinet, not some clique within the War Office or the Foreign Office, which alone had the power to decide for or against war. But then, given Asquiths firm declarations on 1 and 2 August that Britain was not bound to enter the war on France’s side, Grey was not in a position to entertain novel theories about where authority lay in the British constitu- tion.) Even so, the Foreign Secretary did not dismiss Cambon’s appeal to British honour out of hand. For he too considered honour to be involved in this crisis. But for him thc test of honour was Britain’s interests, not France’s. At this moment, of course, the distinction was not significant. The only army on which Britain could call just then to assert one of its vital interests, that of preventing Western Europe from being overrun by Ger- man militarism, was the French army; if, because Britain stood aside, the French failed ultimately in this work of defence, he did not believe that Britain single-handed would ever liberate the Continent. Nevertheless, it was to British interests that he was appealing when he spoke of British honour. The distinction which Grey’s critics from the left were making, that, on grounds of moral obligation, he was embarking on a course which involved no vital British interests, was beyond his comprehension.

Where has this investigation taken us? Before any attempt is made at a summing-up, two points need to be stated categorically.

The first is that there was never any suggestion that Britain was bound to take the French side in a Franco-German war whatever the circumstances in which that war broke out. On both sides of the Channel it was recog- nized that, in some circumstances, Britain most certainly would not inter- vene. Should Frenchmen decide that the moment for revanche had come, and that they were justified in launching a pre-emptive strike so as to liberate Alsace and Lorraine, then they would assuredly fight alone in the West. The British government would never side with the French in a war initiated or plainly provoked by France. This point is so obvious that, in historical writings, it is virtually never made. Yet in the present context it needs not just to be made but to be shouted from the housetops. For if Britain by 1914 was committed to take the side of France in any Franco- German war, then the question of who was the aggressor was of no conse- quence. Indeed the view which attributes the war in general to the exis- tence of the system of alliances, and Britain’s participation in particular to its military arrangements with France, argues that the circumstances in which the war broke out are n o t significant. Yet clearly had the war broken out in some circumstances the British government would have declined to participate. The notion of an irresistible obligation based on the existence

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of contingent military plans becomes, in such circumstances, without sub- stance.

The second point requiring firm statement is that it is possible to give an entirely coherent account of Britain’s entry into the First World War which does not incorporate the notion of a binding commitment to France. This account will be briefly stated.

For a number of centuries, the framers of British foreign policy had seen their country’s survival as dependent on two things: command of the seas, so that Britain could not be invaded or deprived of overseas commerce; and preservation of a European balance of power, so that no single country would be able to impose its will first upon all of Continental Europe and ultimately upon Britain as well. The importance of the former considera- tion had not lessened during the nineteenth century. Indeed it had increased greatly. For, as Britain’s population had multiplied some three or four times during the century following Waterloo, so the country had ceased to possess the land surface whereby it might feed itself. By 1900 Britain was vulnerable to naval attack as never before, because, if by chance it lost command of the seas, it would be subject not just to grave economic damage and the threat of invasion but to starvation in very short order. Also quite fundamental to Britain’s survival, anyway as a Great Power rather than as a client state, was the second consideration: that of preventing Western Europe as a whole, and in particular that part of it just across the Channel, from falling under the subjection of a single over- mighty country. For, as one historian has pointed out, Britain’s island position sheltered her from the Continent, but it did no more than that; it did not isolate her.

The consolidation of Europe under one potentially hostile regime was rightly considered fatal to Britain’s political, economic, and strategic security. In that event she would risk being shut out of one of her richest markets, faced with an antagonistic political system, and menaced simultaneously from an overwhelm- ing number of offensive bases. To counter this awful possibility it was essential for Britain to have an auxiliary on the mainland to complement the offshore strength of the Royal Navy.8

For a happy period in the nineteenth century, British security was not threatened in either respect, and Britain basked in splendid isolation. But splendid isolation was not a tradition of British policy. It was the response of traditional policies to a peculiar, and (unfortunately for Britain) transit- ory situation. By 1900, British naval supremacy and the Continental bal- ance of power were both under threat, and from the same country. Ger- many had established its military predominance in the years 1866-71, and its growth thereafter in manpower, industrial might, and military strength had by 1900 rendered it capable of defeating any other Continental coun- try and probably any combination of countries. At the same time it had embarked on a direct and quite specific challenge to Britain’s command of

’ Kenneth Bvurne, The Foreign Policy of Victorian England 1830-1902 (Oxford, 1970), pp. 7-8.

TREVOR WILSON 389 the North Sea, which if not effectively countered would reduce Britain to the status of a vassal c o ~ n t r y . ~

Britain had no choice but to respond to this situation. It might respond by doing nothing at all. But that would be a very positive response. Britain would be abdicating its position as a Great Power. If it was not to do this it must act, both at sea and on land. This Britain did. At sea it increased the size and capability of its navy; but it also abandoned i t s position of naval supremacy in the Mediterranean and the Pacific, so that the German chal- lenge in the North Sea had even without conflict forced a contraction of Britain’s world-wide authority. On land, Britain sought the goodwill of countries which also felt menaced by Germany, and which possessed the mass armies which Britain did not possess and had no wish to raise. The stages in this process are too well-known to require more than enumera- tion: the naval build-up whose most dramatic expressions were the crea- tion and accumulation of Dreadnought battleships; the formation of the ententes with France and then Russia; the Anglo-French military staff talks; the diplomatic alignment with France in the two Moroccan crises; and the concentration of the battleship fleet in the North Sea.

But there was never a commitment to a policy of waging war against Germany at an appropriate moment. Britain was not prepared to dispose of the German naval challenge by striking down the German fleet while it could do so without risk. And it would not surrender its liberty of action to friendly countries lest they should instigate a war and so rob Britain’s position of its moral base. Further, the British government at various points sought a modus vivendi with Germany by trying to negotiate an agreed limitation on naval expansion. This policy, in so far as it was designed to dissuade Germany from embarking on a war, did not succeed, because the means to make it succeed did not rest in British hands. But as a policy to provide Britain’s basic requirements of security, without aban- doning Britain’s liberty of action or its sense of having behaved uprightly in international matters, it succeeded remarkably well. When war came to Western Europe at the beginning of August 1914, it had clearly been initiated by Germany. For Grey and those of his persuasion, that in itself was definition enough: self-interest and morality met when Germany declared war upon France. For many of his colleagues in the Liberal cabinet, the situation required an extra element of definition, a further injection of moral purpose. This the invasion of Belgium provided.

Two points have been set out in this section: first, that Britain would not have fought alongside France in certain circumstances; and second, that we can account for Britain’s entry into the war without ever positing the existence of a de fucto alliance resulting from a decision (‘the most fateful’ in English history) ‘taken secretly, in an atmosphere which smacks of con- spiracy.’’O If these points be accepted, where does this leave the argument

Paul Johnson’s The Offshore Islanders (p. 367), in accounting for Britain’s entry into the war, devotes precisely threc lines to Germany’s naval challenge to Britain, describing it as something which, ‘in itself, might nut have mattered.’ In the same section, some hundred or more lines are devoted to the personality and attitude of Sir Edward Grey, King Edward VII, and the personnel of the Foreign Office. It is claimed. hut not argued, that these ’mattered’ very much.

In Johnson, The Offshore Isiariders, p. 369.

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that Britain was dragged into the war by ‘commitments to the French that were binding in all but name’?’’ Something which emerges very clearly is that, at the time, this argument served as an excellent debating point. For those who believed that Britain ought not to be entering the war, it served as an explanation of something which was otherwise inexplicable: why their country was being taken into a war from which, in their view, it stood to gain nothing. For those who believed, on the other side, that Britain’s interests were certainly involved in the threat posed by Germany to France, it helped to counter any elements of doubt which might assert themselves, and it served as an argument to use on those who obtusely refused to recognize their country’s interests. (Some Englishmen in high places had for a number of years been advocating a binding alliance with France, and had sought to influence the doubtful by claiming that the staff talks were tantamount to an alliance anyway.) But of neither group can it be said that the action they favoured was determined by the issue of moral obligations. The anti-war element, of course, resisted Britain’s entry into the conflict: in their view, the ‘binding commitments’ ought not to bind. The pro-war group had no doubt that Britain’s vital interests demanded British intervention, quite apart from the question of French expectations. One looks in vain for a single individual who argued that Britain’s vital interests were not involved in the war between France and Germany, but that nevertheless Britain must enter the war because it was bound in hon- our to do so.

In short, the notion of moral obligation was for some people a necessary device for explaining their country’s otherwise inexplicable actions, as for others it served as further justification for a course of action already consi- dered warranted. The one thing it never seems to have been was a prime move, a determinant of action, the sine qua non of Englishmen’s decision to take up arms.

It is time the history books began making this clear.

l 1 See above, p. 4.