A Perfect Balance Part 4

At this point-August 25th, the same day on which the British fell back from Mons and Kluck resumed his march toward Paris-there occurred one of those small, strange events that sometimes alter the fates of nations. This one was weirdly like what had happened, in the American Civil War, the 1st time

                                                           Robert E. Lee

invaded the north; a copy of Lee's orders was found in a Maryland road wrapped around a packet of cigars. The discovery led directly to a stinging Confederate defeat and the end of Lee's offensive. The East Prussian counterpart to this incident was the discovery, on the body of a Russian officer killed in a skirmish, of the plans for both Russian Armies. It seemed too good to be true, but the plans' authenticity was soon corroborated by uncoded Russian radio message intercepted by the Germans.

The intelligence that the Germans now had in their hands indicated that Samsonov intended to continue moving westward, which would increase the distance between the two Russian armies unless Rennenkampf moved too. What the Germans didn't know was that Samsonov was being drawn forward by a glimpse that his troops had caught of the backward movement of a German infantry corps. This move had been nothing more than a minor tactical adjustment; the commander of the corps was shifting to a ridge stronger than his original position. But Samsonov leaped to the conclusion that the Germans were in retreat. He intended to press forward, keep the Germans moving, try to overrun them. A radio message sent from his headquarters, when intercepted, told the Germans exactly what direction he intended to take and what timetable he intended to follow. It stated also, not surprisingly, that he wanted Rennenkampf to come forward to join him.

Rennenkampf's messages indicated that he had other things in mind. He didn't know what happened to the German force that had attacked him at Gumbinnen, and so, like Rennenkampf, he guessed. His guess was that the Germans had decided to withdraw to the north, toward or even into the coastal fortress of  Konigsberg(kingstown, the principal city of East Prussia and where the rulers of Prussia have always been crowned). Focusing his attention in that direction, he could see no need to move toward Samsonov; he didn't suspect that the main German force might be between them. If he laid siege to Konigsberg and bottled up the 8th Army inside it, all the rest of East Prussia would be undefended. He was in no hurry, however, because there was no way of being sure how far the Germans had moved. He had no way of knowing(but might have guessed, the reasons being so obvious) that allowing himself to be trapped inside Konigsberg was the one thing Moltke had ordered Prittwitz not to do.

For the Germans, the situation really did seem too good to be true. By continuing to move forward alone, Samsonov was practically inviting the Germans to lay a trap. By declining to come forward, Rennenkampf was making certain that his army would be unable to rescue Samsonov from that trap.
Together they were eliminating the need for the Germans to proceed cautiously. They were freeing the Germans to throw everything into their attack on Samsonov.

Hoffmann had received the Russian messages after his initial meeting with Ludendorff, who had departed by car with Hindedburg. He showed them to the 8th Army's quartermaster general,

                                                       Major General Grunert

offering them as confirmation that the entire 8th Army could safely be sent against Samsonov. Grunert was skeptical; what seems too good to be true, after all, usually is. it seemed inconceivable to him that the Russian commanders would violate one of the fundamentals of military doctrine by keeping their forces divided in the presence of the enemy.

Max Hoffmann may have been the only man on earth who was junior to Grunert in rank and yet able to win him over at this critical juncture. Hoffmann was one of Germany's experts on the Russian army, and a decade earlier he had been sent as an observer to the Russo-Japanese War. There he had observed Samsonov and Rennenkampf in action. One of the war's minor legends is that, by an astonishing coincidence, Hoffmann had been present when the 2 Russian generals literally came to blows at a train station in Manchuria. Though it is now regarded as unlikely that anything of the kind actually happended, Hoffmann did know that Rennenkampf and Samsonov belonged to rival factions of the Russian general staff and disliked each other intensely. He was convinced that neither would exert himself to help the other. When he explained this history, Grunert was persuaded. The 2 got into a staff car and sped off, catching up with Hindedburg and Ludendorff and showing them the intercepted messages. All reservations about risking everything were immediately dissolved.

                                                     General Pavel von Rennenkampf

Commander, Russian 1st Army. Failed to respond to Samsonov's Pleas for help.
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Risking everything meant exactly that: the Germans posted only a single division of cavalry opposite Rennenkampf's army. This was not a serious blocking force but merely a screen; its only function was to keep the Russians from seeing that nothing was behind it. All the rest of the 8th Army was moved south and west into Samsonov's path. many of the troops were able to move a 100 miles overnight. 9 divisions were formed into an arc that was open to the southeast and 60 miles across. This arc was intentionally weak in the center but had 2 strong wings. The idea was for Samsonov, as he continued forward, to strike the center, find himself able to drive it backward, and thus be encouraged to keep moving. When he had gone far enough, the wings would move in on him from both sides.

The very fact that they had 2 armies inside East Prussia by this date was, for the Russians, a great achievement. The Germans had hoped that Russian mobilization would take 6 weeks, and they had not given sufficient weight to the fact that 2/5 of Russia's regular army was stationed in Poland when the war began and so was near East Prussia and nearly ready for action. The result had been Rennenkampf's arrival in East Prussia in just over 2 weeks, with Samsonov close behind. This much speed was also, however, an act of folly; the Russians had begun their advance without adequate provision for supplying their troops, for dealing with the wounded, or for communicating. (Hence the uncoded radio messages that proved such a boon to the Germans.) Some of their soldiers were without shoes, marching with their feet wrapped in rags. Some had no rifles. They were worn out long before making contact with the enemy. Rennenkampf's troops had been on the march for a week by the time they crossed into East Prussia, and their supply system was already failing badly.

These problems were the work of

                                                           General Yakov Zhilinski

commander of the Russian North-West Front and therefore in charge of the 2 invading armies. 2 years earlier, while serving as chief of the Russian general staff, Zhilinski had promised the French that he could have his forces in the field 15 days after mobilization. Now he was keeping his promise. Far to the rear-his headquarters were more than 150 miles from the showdown that was now taking place-he thought he was masterminding a historic victory.


On August 26th, fearing a possible sudden forward lunge by Rennenkampf and unsettled by rumors of substantial Russian forces arriving from Rennenkampf's direction, a nervous Ludendorff tried to spring the trap on Samsonov. When he ordered an attack, however, the usually aggressive

                                                        General Hermann von Francois
curtly refused. His troops were still detraining. They didn't yet have their ammunition, their heavy artillery, or all of their field artillery. If they attacked, he said, they would have to do so with bayonets. When Ludendorff repeated his order, Francois went through the motions of complying but limited himself to occupying an uncontested ridge. In yet another of the odd and unintended twists in this oddest of battles, his failure to strike worked to the Germans' advantage. It allowed Samsonov to continue to believe that he was in contact with a weak enemy force and so to continue pushing forward into the trap. Both of his flanks were encountering German troops and being badly mauled, but his communications were so faulty and he had moved the divisions that formed those flanks so far out from his center that throughout most of the day he knew almost nothing of this. The Germans, meanwhile, were eager to engage him. Much of the 8th Army was made up of East Prussians, men with personal reasons for wanting to clear the region of invaders. One officer, on August 26th, found himself directing artillery fire on his own house after the Russians took possession of it.

Zhilinski continued to prod Samsonov to keep moving and to stay on his present course. When the scanty intelligence reaching Samsonov began to indicate that worrisome numbers of German troops were on his left, he sent a message to Zhilinski suggesting that perhaps he should confront this enemy force-whatever it was-by turning toward it. "I will not allow Genernal Samsonov to play coward," Zhilinski imperiously replied. "I insist that he continue the offensive."

Samsonov followed orders, but by the end of the day he understood that he was in serious trouble. A cautious withdrawal would have been the right next step. But perhaps because of Zhilinski's rebuke, he decided not to pull back, or even to stay where he was while watching the situation develop, but to continue moving forward. Though his flanks were in increasing disarray, and though his troops had no food and were low on ammunition, his center remained intact. That night he sent plaintive messages asking for confirmation that Rennenkampf was coming to join him. There was no answer.

Rennenkampf's failure to move need not be attributed to any hatred for Samsonov. He had lost 17,000 men in the Gumbinnen fight, 1,000's more before that at Stalluponen. He still thought that much or even most of the 8th Army was to his north, near Konigsberg, and that if he moved westward it could fall on his flank. He feared also that a pursuit of the Germans might hurry them across the Vistula before Samsonov could cut them off. Within the limits of the information available, he was thinking rationally if too cautiously.

At this point Moltke, never having been informed that the situation of the 8th Army was not nearly as alarming as he and Ludendorff had believed when they met in Koblenz, had his chief of staff telephone Ludendorff and announce that 3 infantry corps were being detached from the right wing in France and sent by rail to East Prussia. Ludendorff replied that reinforcements were not needed. He didn't, however, state categorically that they shouldn't be sent. Moltke ultimately decided to send 2 corps instead of 3, and Ludendorff would find plenty of use for them after their arrival.

At 4 A.M. on August 27th, ready for action at last, Francois opened an artillery barrage that devastated Samsonov's left wing. Confused and starving Russian soldiers, exhausted after having marched 10 and 12 hours daily for a week, broke and ran. Francois sent his troops forward in what he intended to be an encircling maneuver, but this was blocked. Samsonov, almost incredibly, then resumed the advance of his center. He advanced so aggressively that Ludendorff began to worry that the Russians were going to break through and out of the trap. He decided to call Francois's corps back to reinforce the center-a move that would have made an encirclement impossible. Hindedburg gently overruled him.

At dawn on August 28th Francois again attacked and discovered that the Russian left had evaporated. Its troops had had enough and fled en masse into the nearby woods. Everything began to fall into place for the Germans. Francois, meeting almost no resistance, swung his corps around to the south and cut off Samsonov's escape. Other elements of the 8th Army converged from the nooks and crannies of the East Prussian landscape. A corps hit Samsonov from the west. A division emerged from the northwest and attacked the Russians there. When a corps that had been stationed to the northeast in case Rennenkampf showed up finally turned around and also marched toward Samsonov, the trap was complete. Samsonov, saying that he had failed the tsar and could not go home, walked off alone into the woods and shot himself.

It was now just a matter of mopping up. But still Ludendorff was tortured, his judgement distorted by his fears. When he learned that Francois had spread his corps in a thin line along 35 miles of road southeast of the encircled Russians, he ordered him to pull it together more compactly. Francois ignored him; he had witnessed the disintegration of Samsonov's army and knew that the only remaining need was to intercept the bewildered and demoralized enemy soldiers as they came stumbling toward Poland. In the course of the next 3 days, Francois's thin net hauled in 60,000 prisoners. Overall the Germans captured 92,000 Russians. Total casualties were 250,000 for the Russians, about 37,000 for the Germans. The Germans decided to call what had just happened the Battle of Tannenberg because a nearby town of that name had been the site of a terrible German defeat at the hands of the Poles 100's of years before. Hindenburg's ancestors had taken part in that battle.

On the same day that Samsonov's left collapsed, a very different story was unfolding to the south. Conrad's Austro-Hungarian Armies, having launched an offensive against superior Russian forces in Galicia, were suffering a defeat even worse than the one inflicted on them earlier by the Serbs. Conrad never should have attacked(the Russians outnumbered him by an immense margin, and he had the Carpathian Mountains in which to stand on the defensive), but the fact that he did was not entirely his fault. Moltke, fearing that if Conrad did not engage the Russians they would send more of their armies into East Prussia, had demanded action. Promising to send help within 6 weeks, as soon as France had been defeated, he tried to ease Conrad's reservations by assuring him that "the fate of Russia will be decided not on the Bug(a Galician River) but on the Seine." In other words, defeating the Russians was for the moment less important than simply keeping them occupied.

In fact, Conrad's offensive may have contributed to making Tannenberg possible. It not only kept Russia's Galician forces in Galicia but drew out of Poland reserves that otherwise might have gone to East Prussia. But the long-term results would be disastrous. Austria's ability to deal with the Russians, to provide Germany with a strong ally, was going up in flames. And at the same time, almost withing sight of Paris, the in the west was suddenly and decisively changing. Across Europe a mixture of successes and failures was emerging on both sides, a balance so perfect as to seem almost mysterious. It would make victory impossible for either side and ensure that the terrible carnage of the war's 1st month was barely the beginning.

                                             A Perfect Balance Part 3


With the BEF and Lnarezac's army in almost headlong flight it seemed to many on Motlke's staff that the Germans had already won the west; "complete victories" were being declared. Belgium was firmly in hand, and the right wing was in France and staying on Schiefflen's schedule. The German 4th and 5th armies had broken the back of the French offensive in the Ardennes, and in the southeast

                                                        Crown Prince Rupprecht

of Bavaria continued to report that he was gaining ground, taking 1'000's of prisoners and capturing guns. Rupprecht was also continuing to badger Moltke for more troops with which to press his advantage. Moltke agreed. He also decided to send 3 infantry corps and a cavalry division to East Prussia. These were fateful moves. Combined with Moltke's earlier adjustments-the use of 2 corps to besiege Antwerp, and of another to besiege a French strong hold at Maubeuge-they would reduce his right wing from 17 corps to fewer than 12. This was a reduction of 275,00 men, and it was in addition to the Germans battlefield losses. The hammer upon which Schlieffen had wanted to bet everything thus shrank by nearly a 1/3.

Meanwhile Joffre was doing the opposite, using his rail lines to transfer increasing numbers of troops from his right to his left. Even as the Germans continued their advance, in terms of manpower the balance at the western end of the front was gradually shifting in France's favor.

Moltke's decision to dispatch troops to East Prussia has been much criticized but is easy to understand. He had good reason to be alarmed not only by the situation in East Prussia but by what was happening all across the eastern theater. He knew that the Austrian invasion of Serbia-an invasion he had opposed, arguing rightly that all of the Hapsburg empires available troops were needed against Russia-had ended in total defeat. He knew too that massive Russian forces were engaging the Austrians on the Galician plan to the north of Serbia, and that if this too ended badley, Conrad's position would become desperate, And his own commander in East Prussia had told Moltke that the German position there was already desperate.

That commander, the fat and elderly

                                                      Max von Prittwitz

and intelligent enough general but one with no combat experience, had at his disposal a single army of some 155,000 men-11 undermanned divisions of infantry and 1 of cavalry, barley 1/10 of Germany's available total. Moving against this 8th army, a small one by the standards of 1914, were 2 exceptionally large Russian armies that out numbered it by a huge margin.

The Russian 1st army commanded by

                                                    General Paval Von Rennenkampf

had been 1st to cross the border into Germany territory, approaching from the east. Thereafter it had continued to move forward, capturing towns, burning the farms of the Junkers, and clashing with elements of Prittwitz's army 1st at Stallaponen and the at Gumbinnen. It was shortly after the Gumbinnen fight, and upon learning that the Russian 2nd army under

                                                                General Alexander Samsonov

was entering East Prussia from the south with 14 1/2 infantry divisions, 4 divisions of cavalry, 1,160 guns, that Prittwitz had telephoned Moltke and told him that he had to abandon East Prussia. He was afraid that if he stayed where he was, Samsonov would soon be behind him and able to block his escape. The situation was ripe for an encirclement that would end in the destruction of the 8th army and leave Germany defenseless in the East. There was no alternative to withdrawing behind the north-south Vistula River, Prittwitz said. Moltke didn't demur. Giving up the Prussian homeland was an intolerable thought, but everything being accomplished in France would become meaningless if the 8th army were lost.

That Prussian homeland was already involved in the war more directly than any other part of Germany, with the invaders inevitably clashing with the inhabitants and outrages being committed on both sides. An Englishman, John Morse, was serving among the Russian troops, and he later wrote of the brutalities he witnessed. "The Cossack had a strong disinclination to be taken prisoner," he observed, "and I knew several of them sacrificing their lives rather than fall into the hands of the Germans, who heartily detest these men, and usually murdered such as they succeeded in catching-and murdered them after preliminary tortures, according to reports which reached us. The country people certainly showed no mercy to stragglers falling into their hand. They usually pitch-forked them to death; and this lethal weapon was a favorite with the ladies on both sides of the border, many a fine Teuton meeting his end by thrusts from this implement."

Members of Moltkes' staff began telephoning the commanders of the 4 corps that made up the 8th Army. The technology of the day made this a laborious process, requiring much waiting for connections, much shouting into receivers, much uncertainty about what the faint and fuzzy voice on the other end of the line was saying. Moltke's men had one question; was a retreat really necessary? The answer was unanimously negative; the 8th Army need not, must not, fall back. This was reported to Moltke, who concluded that Prittwitz had lost his nerve and could not be left in command.

Prittwitz himself, however, was having his mind changed too. This was accomplished by a new member of his staff, the tall, chubby, hard-drinking, and colorfully un-Prussian

                                                       Lieutenant Colonel Max Hoffmann,

who had been sent from Alsace to join the 8th Army when mobilization was declared and now took the 1st of the steps by which he would establish himself as one of the war's master tacticians. Using a map and compass, Hoffmann showed Prittwitz that Samsonov's army was already closer to the Vistula River than the main German force, so that clean escape was no longer possible. He outlined a plan aimed not only at making withdrawal unnecessary but at defeating both Russian armies. 1st the Germans would strike again at Rennenkampf, who was still at Gumbinnen, apparently regrouping after the clash there. Finishing off Rennenkampf, Hoffmann calculated, would only a few days; at a minimum his army could be rendered incapable of pursuit. The Germans would then be free to deal with Samsonov.

His composure restored, Prittwitz agreed that there need be no retreat. He didn't, however, accept Hoffmann's plan without amendment. He decided to go after Samsonov without 1st attacking Rennenkampf. Speed was essential-everything depended on wrecking one of the invading armies before the 2 of them could combine into a single force too big to be coped with. Expecting his troops to deal with 2 big armies in just a few days, Prittwitz wisely decided, would be asking to much.

But in the excited rush to prepare, Prittwitz made 2 mistakes. He neglected to tell Hoffmann or anyone else on his staff of his conversation with Moltke-His announcement of a retreat-and after changing his mind he failed to inform Moltke that he had done so. Moltke continued to believe that the 8th Army was beginning to withdraw.

Fearful of the consequences if the 8th didn't stand and fight, Moltke looked about for a solution. And he thought of

                                                            Erich Ludendorff

who had been an important member of his planning staff until 1913 and was now the hero of Liege. " I know of no other man in whom I have such absolute trust," Moltke said. He sent orders for Ludendorff to join the 8th Army not as commanding officer-he was too young for that, too junior in rank, and definitely too much the parvenu commoner-but as chief of staff.

On his way east Ludendorff stopped at Koblenz to confer with Moltke, and the 2 agreed that the situation in East Prussia was not yet hopeless. When Ludendorff suggested attacking the Russian armies one by one before they could combine, Moltke agreed. That Hoffmann and Ludendorff came up with exactly the same idea, and that they had no difficulty in winning over Prittwitz and Moltke, is not as astonishing as it may seem. The German general staff had given much thought to the defense of East Prussia, had anticipated the arrival of Russian forces from 2 directions, and had planned accordingly. Ludendorff and Hoffmann were simply drawing upon established doctrine in making their proposals, and in giving their assent Moltke and Prittwitz were simply endorsing that same doctrine.


Before departing Koblenz, Ludendorff was taken to see Kaiser Wilhelm, receiving from him the Pour le Merite (Germany's highest military honor, higher than the Iron Cross, created and named by the Francophile Frederick the Great) and learning that a new commanding general of the 8th army had just been appointed. This was the 67 year old

                                                Paul von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg,

who was being called out of retirement because of his reputation for steadiness and the fact that he, like Ludendorff, knew the complicated East Prussian terrain. Then Ludendorff was again on his way east, traveling in a special train, stopping along the way to pick up his wife so that she could join him for part of the trip. Hindedburg dressed in the outdated uniform in which he had ended his long career 2 years earlier, came aboard at Hanover at 4 a.m. The talked briefly-Ludendorff outlined the plan he had discussed with Moltke-and retired for a few hour's sleep.

Upon their arrival in East Prussia the next morning, they had much to do. Hindenburg had to tell Prittwitz, who happened to be his wife's cousin, that he was being put on the army's inactive list effective immediatley. Ludendorff meanwhile got a staff briefing. When Hoffmann outlined his plan and explained that it was already being put in motion, Ludendorrf of course approved it without change. The 2 knew each other well-had even lived in the same quarters for 4 years earlier in their careers. Despite being very different kinds of men, they respected each other's abilities. From the start they were able to work together easily.

The situation was challenging in the extreme, requiring the 8th Army to fight its own two-front war. Its complications began with the landscape of East Prussia, a region pocked with lakes and marshes and studded with woods and low hills, difficult for large armies to maneuver in, especially in the sectors nearest to Russia. Running north-south was a jumble of irregular-shaped bodies of water known as the Masurian Lakes. Rennenkampf's army was north of the lakes, Samsonov's south. They would have to move westward in order to unite.

Between them were the Germans, already west of the lakes and in position from which they could attack in either direction. They also had the advantage of knowing the terrain intimately-it was often setting for their annual maneuvers. And they had installed the rail lines needed for the execution of their plans.

It was obvious that the Russians should converge without delay. If they did so, the 8th Army was doomed. It was equally obvious that the Germans must proceed with extreme caution. If they attacked one of the Russian armies, they would have to leave enough troops behind to protect themselves from an advance by the other. It was far from clear that they had enough troops to do both things.

I apologize to my blog readers for the really long delay between my blogs. I recently had a death in

the family. I'm working on the next part now and will try and have it published soon. Please bare

with me. I will get back in the groove =)

                                               A Perfect Balance Part II



    Elsewhere along the Western Front the Germans were scoring victory after victory. They were turning back French assault, achieving a high rate of success with their own offensives, and usually losing far fewer men. The reason isn't to be found in numbers as we have seen, the 2 sides were numerically just about equal. Even the German right wing had no consistent manpower advantage. A French counterattack that marked the climax of the Charleroi fight, for example, ended with 3 German divisions not only only stopping 9 of Lanrezac's divisions but ultimately driving them back 7 miles-even though the French force included 10 regiments of elite colonial troops, veterans akin to the men of the BEF.  Clearly the Germans were doing something right, or the French were doing something wrong, or both.

The answer is "both". Even in the face of repeated bad results, generals throughout the French army threw their infantry against the Germans whatever the circumstances and kept doing so no matter how grisly the results. Lanrezac was a rare exception; he had been reluctant to attack at Charleroi, doing so only because 2 of his corps commanders insisted. Joffre's other commanders believed that French troops were supposed to charge, not crawl in the earth like worms. They were to win at the point of their bayonets, not by firing steel-clad packets of high explosives into the sky. The Germans, by contrasts, quickly became adroit, upon making contact with the enemy, at digging in, waiting to be attacked, and mowing down the attacker with rifle fire, machine guns capable of firing up to 600 heavy-caliber rounds per minute, and above all artillery. (From the start of the war to end, cannon would account for most of the killing.)

When the attackers fell back, the Germans would continue punishing them with their field artillery, firing shrapnel and high explosives. Then they would come out of their holes and keep the fleeing enemy on the move. From the start they were even better than the British at creating defenses for themselves with the trenching tools every man carried plus picks and shovels brought forward by combat engineers. The difference in the tactics of the 2 sides explains why, despite the lives they squandered at Mons and Le Cateau and later in other, bigger fights, the Germans had significantly lower casualties on the Western Front in 1914 than the French and British.

But as French casualties climbed without producing a single victory of consequence - it was "the most terrible August in the history of the world," said British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle-Joffre found it necessary to conclude -that the French army's "cult of the offensive" had to be abandoned. On August 24th he unhappily announced that the armies of France were for the time being "forced to take defensive action based on our fortified positions and on the strong natural obstacles provided by the terrain, so as to hold on as long as possible, taking, meanwhile, all steps to wear down the enemy's strength and resume the offensive in due course." He ordered his left wing-his 3rd, 4th, and 5th armies to begin what would come to be known as the Great Retreat. Day after day, in relentless heat, weary French soldiers in their 100's of 1000's trudged farther and farther south. The BEF marched with them, covering more than a 190 miles in 13 days. One of its battalions retreated 55 miles in 36 hours.

Joffre also ordered the creation of a new army to lengthen his left. The 6th army was to be "capable of taking up the offensive again while the other armies contained the enemy's effort for the requisite period," Joffre said, but its position near Paris obviously had defensive implications. The Germans continued pursuit of Lanrezac's army after the defeat at Le Cateau ha awakened the government to the fact that Paris was in jeopardy.
                                                              Minister of War

                                                              Adolphe Messimy

examined the city's defenses and was alarmed by what he found. They were in a sorry state of neglect, at least in part because the army's fixation on the offensive had caused it to give little attention to defenses of any kind.

Messimy turned not to Joffre but to

                                                       General Joseph Gallieni
for help, asking him to become military governor of Paris and offering him near-dictatorial powers to organize a defense of the city. Gallieni, who had been in semi retirement at the start of the war, agreed on one condition. He said he would need not only the garrison forces inside the city walls but a substantial mobile force capable of engaging the Germans as they approached. At least 6 corps would be needed for this purpose, he said.(A corps was usually made up of 2 sometimes 3 divisions of nearly 20,000 men each). Messimy agreed without hesitation, but in fact he had no authority to fulfill his pledge. It was Joffre alone who decided the deployment of troops, and Joffre showed no interest in assisting, or even consulting with him, either Gallieni or the government.

Nevertheless, Gallieni set to work immediately to ready Paris for a siege, bringing herds of livestock inside the walls to provide a supply of food, installing new lines of trenches, positioning artillery, and demolishing buildings to give the guns a clear line of fire. As this work proceeded, a political crisis erupted over the city's failure to start preparing earlier, the government fell, and Messimy was displaced(in part, ironically, for refusing to agree to the dismissal of Joffre). He took up his reserve army commission and went off to the front as a major. When Gallieni finally got his mobile force, it came to him in the form of Joffre's new 6th army, which was still in the early stages of being assembled. The 1st elements of this army, many of them brought in by train from stabilizing sectors at the eastern end of the front, were moved inside the Paris defensive perimeter as part of the Great Retreat. They were completely out of touch with Lanrezac and the BEF and not nearly ready for action in any case. Joffre evidently decided that he might as well let Gallieni have them, if only temporarily and if only to quiet the complaints coming from the government.

Behind the retreating French armies, sometimes even beside them in the spreading confusion, marched masses of Germans, tired but energized by the thought that they had the enemy on the run, that victory lay ahead. Joffre's plan was to pull back only as far as a line along the east-west course of the river Somme, call a halt there and , when circumstances were right, counterattack. This plan proved infeasible; when the French got to the Somme, the enemy was still right behind them. They had no choice but to cross the river and keep going.

Nobody, not even the high generals in their headquarters, had detailed understanding of what was happening along the front. British and French newspapers carried hair-raising but inspiring stories of how the Germans, the Huns, were committing suicide in throwing themselves against the guns and bayonets of the valiant defenders of civilization. In the German papers it was civilizations defenders who were advancing victoriously, moving constantly forward on the soil of a nation that had conspired to destroy their homeland. On both sides, anything that wasn't an outright defeat was made a cause for celebration, and every setback was either treated as a canny tactical adjustment or, more commonly ignored. Journalists were kept far from the action. Even the senior commanders, flooded with reports some of which were accurate and many of which weren't, could have little confidence that they knew what the enemy was doing or which side was doing more killing.

                                                    A Perfect Balance Part One


The commander of the British Expeditionary Force, Sir John French, had arrived in France with little knowledge of where the Germans were or what they were doing or even what he was supposed to do when he found them.

   

                                               French-the same Sir John French
who had resigned as Chief of the Imperial General staff at the time of the Curragh Mutiny-carried with him written instructions from the new Secretary of State for War, the formidable

                                                                   Field Marshal Earl Kitchener
of Khartoum. These instructions weren't however, what a man in his position might have expected. They didn't urge him to pursue and engage the invading Germans with all possible vigor, to remember that England expected victory, or even to support his French allies to the fullest possible extent in their hour of desperate need.

In fact, he found himself under orders to do very nearly the opposite of these things. He was to remember that his little command-a mere 5 divisions, 4 of infantry and 1 of cavalry-included most of Britain's regular army and couldn't be spread. "It will be obvious that the greatest care must be exercised towards a minimum of loss and waste," Kitchener had written. "I wish you to distinctly understand that your force is an entirely independent one and you will in no case come under the orders of any Allied General."

In other words, French wasn't to rush his army and wasn't to regard himself as subordinate to Joffre or Lanrezac or any other French General. By taking this approach Kitchener created an abundance of problems.

Certainly the BEF, compared with vast forces that France and Germany had already sent to the Western Front, seemed so small as to rush being trampled. Kaiser Wilhelm, drawing upon his deep reserves of foolishness in exhorting his troops to victory, had called it Britain's "Contemptibly Little Army". But man for man the BEF was as good as any fighting force in the world; well trained and disciplined, accustomed to being sent out to the far corners of the world whenever the empire's great navy wasn't enough. The BEF was also an appealingly human, high spirited army. Even the rank and file were career soldiers for the most part, volunteers drawn mainly from Britain's urban poor and working classes, more loyal to their regiments and to one another than to any sentimental notions of imperial glory, and ready to make a joke of anything.

When they learned what the Kaiser had said about them, they began to call themselves "The Old Contemptibles". When the 1st shiploads of them crossed from South Hampton to Le Havre, they found the harbor jammed with crowds who burst into the French national anthem, "La Marseillaise". The 1,000's of British troops-Tommies, they were called at home-responded by bursting spontaneously not into "God Save The King" but into one of the indelicate music hall songs with which they entertained themselves while on the march. The French watched and listened reverently, some with their hands on their hearts, not understanding a word and thinking that this must be the anthem of the United Kingdom.

The BEF moved 1st to an assembly point just south of Belgium, and on August 20th began moving north to link up with Lanrezac's 5th army and extend the French left wing. They were still en route when, on August 21st, the units that Lanrezac had positioned near Charleroi on the River Sambre were struck by Bulow's German 2nd army. Sir John French when he learned of this encounter, ordered his 1st Corps(2 divisions commanded by Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien) to move up towards the town of Mons, about 8 miles west of Charleroi. From there, it was to cover Lanrezac's Flank.

On the next day, with Germans and French alternately attacking each other on the Sambre(Lunderndorff who happened to be in the area as a member of Bulow's staff, organized the seizure of the bridges across the river), a scouting party of British cavalry encountered German cavalry coming out of the north. The Germans withdrew. The British, savvy veterans that they were, dismounted and began using their trenching tools to throw up earthwork defenses while

                                                                   Smith Dorriens
infantry came up from behind and joined them. They didn't know what to expect when the sun rose, but they intended to be as ready as it was possible for men armed with little more than rifles to be.

Ahead of them in the darkness was the entire German 1st army. Its commander, Kluck, knew nothing except that his scouts had run into armed horsemen, and that they claimed those horsemen were British. It didn't wound serious; Kluck's intelligence indicated that the main British force was either not yet in France or , at worst, still a good many miles away. There seemed no need to mount an immediate attack.

Kluck at this point was an angry, frustrate man who didn't want to be where he was, and in fact shouldn't have been there. He had recently been put under orders of the more cautious Burlow, whose army was on his left. The Germans, like the French, were still in the early stages of learning to manage warfare on this scale, and they hadn't yet seen the value of creating a new level of command to direct forces as large as their right wing. Neither side had yet seen that when 2 or 3 armies are operating together and need to be coordinated, the answer is not to put the leader of one of those armies in charge of the others. It's almost inevitable, human nature being what it is, that a commander made 1st among equals in this way will give to much weight to the objectives and needs of his own army.

This is exactly what happened between the rough-hewn Kluck and the careful, highborn Bulow. Kluck wanted to swing wide to the right, well clear of the French. Bulow insisted that he stay close, so that their 2 armies-plus

                                                           Max von Hausen's
3rd army on his left-would be able to deal with Lanrezac together. Kluck protested, but to no effect. Bulow was a solid professional who had long held senior positions in the German army, and a decade earlier he had been a leading candidate to succeed Schlieffen as head of the General Staff, losing out to Moltke largely because he favored a direct attack on the French in case of war, rather than envelopment. His approach in August 1914 was conventional military practice; if his army locked head to head with Lanrezac's, Kluck and Hausen would be able to protect his flanks and then try to work around Lanrezac's flanks and surround him. But Bulow's orthodoxy(obviously the war would have opened in an entirely different way if he rather than Moltke had been in charge of planning since 1905)cost the Germans a huge opportunity.

Left free to go where he wished, Kluck would have looped around not only the French but also the forward elements of the BEF. He then could have taken Smith-Dorrien's corps in the flank, broken it up, and pushed its disordered fragments into Lanrezac's flank. The possible consequences were incalculable; the destruction of Lanrezac's army-of any of the armies in the long French line-could have led to a quick end to the war in the west. Continuing to protest, appealing to Moltke but finding no support there, Kluck had no choice but to follow orders. Doing so caused him to run directly into the head of the British forces, engage them where they were strongest instead of weakest, and give them a night to consolidate their defenses more dangerous than a roving cavalry detachment.

On the morning of August 23rd(a day marked by Japan's declaration of war on Germany), Kluck ordered an artillery bombardment of the enemy positions in his path. When this ended at 9:30, thinking that the defenders must now be in disarray, his troops attacked-and were quickly shot to pieces in a field of fire so devastating that many of them thought they must be facing an army of machine guns. They attacked repeatedly and were cut down every time. What they were up against was the fruit of years of emphasis on what the British still called musketry. Every private in the BEF carried a .303 Lee Enfield fitted with easily changed 10 round magazines and had been trained to hit a target 15x a minute at a range of 300 yards. Most could do better than that. Every soldier was routinely given all the ammunition he wanted for practice, and high scores were rewarded with cash. These practices had been put in place after the South African War at the turn of the century, when the Tommies had found themselves outgunned by Boer farmers fighting as guerrillas, and this was the payoff. But as the day wore on, hour by hour and yard by bloody yard, the persistence of the Germans and the sheer weight of their numbers forced the British back. When the day ended, more than 1,600 of Smith-Dorrien's men had been killed, and the Germans had lost at least 5,000. Kluck and his army had been stopped for a full day. But if the Germans could be stopped for another day and another after that, Moltke's entire campaign would begin to fall to pieces.

After sundown, the BEF's 2nd Corps under

                       

Sir Douglas Haig

Having come forward to join Smith-Dorrien's, the British again went to work on their defenses. But during the night an English liaison officer arrived at French's headquarters with stunning news; Lanrezac, rather than holding his ground at Charleroi, was pulling back. This exposed the British right and gave them no choice but to pull back as well. French reacted bitterly. He regarded Lanrezac's withdrawal-which probably saved his army and was conducted with great skill under difficult circumstances-as unnecessary. He had entered the war with a very British disdain for the French. That disdain now began to turn into entirely unjustified contempt.

Now in the after math of this battle arose the strangest and most beautiful legend of the war. It was said that, when the British peril was at its height, a majestic figure appeared high in the sky with an arm upraised. Some said it had been pointing to victory, others that it held back the Germans as the Tommies got away. It came to be known as the Angel of Mons. Even more colorful was the simultaneous legend of the Archer of Agincourt. In the late Middle Ages at Agincourt-not a great distance from Mons-English yeoman armed with longbows had won a great victory over a much bigger force of mounted and armored French Knights. 499 years later there were stories of German soldiers found at Mons with arrows through their bodies.

It was all nonsense. The disappointing truth, established beyond doubt by postwar investigations, is that the legends were journalistic inventions, and that they 1st emerged long after the battle. No one ever found a witness who had personally seen an angel, arrows, or anything of the kind.

When the Germans resumed their attack on the morning of August 24th, braced this time for tough resistance, they found nothing in front of them but abandoned entrenchments. They got back on the road, caught up with the BEF after 2 days of hard pursuit, and on Agust 26th hit Smith-Dorrien's corps at the Le Cateau. Under severe pressure, his men exhausted, Smith-Dorrien found it impossible to disengage and resume his retreat when ordered to do so by French. He was the proverbial man with a wolf by the ears, unable to take the initiative and unable to escape. He organized a rear guard that managed by the narrowest of margins to fight off envelopment. Le Cateau turned into a bigger, bloodier fight than the on at Mons, with 55,000 British desperately holding off 140,000 Germans.

Ultimately when the Germans found it necessary to pull back and regroup, the British were able to resume their retreat. They had taken some 8,000 casualties(more than Wellington's at Waterloo) and lost 36 pieces of artillery. And already-strained relationships within the BEF command were-worsened. French, who had disliked Smith-Dorrien for years and hadn't wanted him in his command, refused to believe that he hadn't been willfully disobedient. Smith-Dorrien, for his part, thought that Haig had been too slow in entering the fights both at Mons and at Le Cateau. Its a mark of how desperate the British were for something to feed into their propaganda machine that Le Cateau was celebrated, at the time and long afterward, as a British triumph. The only thing to celebrate was the BEF was sitll intact when it made its escape.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                             1914 London


 For Alexander von Kluck, the unexpected collision with British troops on August 23rd wasn't a great deal more than a serious inconvenience.

The men of the British Expeditionary Force

were some of the world's best soldiers, hardened in their empire's colonial wars, but there were simply not enough of them to stop the avalanchlike advance of 

Kluck's 1st army.

For the French, politicians and generals alike, the very fact that Britain was in the war was a dream come true, something toward which they had been bending national policy for years. It meant that, if the war turned out to be a long one, they would have on their side the richest nation in Europe and the world's greatest navy.

Now for the British themselves, both in favor and not in favor of war, the whole thing must have seemed strangely improbable. Nothing had been less inevitable, as Berlin, Paris, St. Petersburg and Vienna stumbled toward catastrophe in July 1914, then that London would be drawn in as well.

Even though

Sir Edward Grey's

foreign office had involved itself in the crisis from the start, its efforts had been directed at preserving the peace. So to that end it had maintained a posture of almost excessive impartiality, doing nothing to inflame the public opinion. Because the public attention and most of the governments attention in London, had been focused meanwhile on a crisis closer to home-one that involved Ireland, the nearest and most troublesome part of the British Empire.

Legally, officially, Ireland was no longer a British possession at all, no longer a colony but rather as a integral part of the United Kingdom as Scotland and Wales. Its elected representatives sat in Parliament. They were numerous enough not only to influence policy but, when the House of Commons was narrowly divided, to cause governments to rise and fall. For the mainly Catholic Nationalists of  Ireland, such power not nearly enough. They agreed, and not implausibly, that in reality their homeland was still what it had been for centuries; conquered and oppressed; They wanted their own Parliament and Government-Home Rule. But for the Ulstermen of Northern Ireland, descendants of the Protestants transplanted from Scotland by

Oliver Cromwell

2 1/2 centuries earlier when to be a Catholic was crime. Home Rule meant subjection to the Pope in Rome. They-The Unionists-were prepared to fight Home Rule to the death.

By the summer of 1914 the Liberal Party had been in power in London for more than 8 years. Its popularity had, inevitably, been worn down by year after year of struggle and crisis and controversy, by the things it had done as well as by those it had failed to do. It was, compared with its Conservative or Tory rivals, a reformist government, the champion of such things as national health insurance and a government system of old age pensions. Governments in Britain fall and are replaced when they can no longer command a majority of the votes in Commons, and by 1914 the Liberals were dependent for their majority on a bloc of 30 Irish Nationalists.

The price for this support was Home Rule, and the Nationalist, aware of how essential they had become to the government, were demanding to be paid now.

Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith

and his cabinet knew that they had to deliver or be replaced. Thus they were moving a Home Rule bill through Parliament. This bill was passionately opposed by the Conservatives, who were passionately supported by the Unionists. Compromise seemed impossible, so that the struggle became increasingly dangerous.

Weapons were being smuggled into Northern Ireland, where the Unionists were organizing a 100,000 Ulstermen into militias with the threat that they would rise in armed rebellion rather than become an impotent minority in an autonomous Ireland.

Tensions began to rise as the House Rule Bill moved toward passage, and the dangers of the situation were multiplied by the fact that much of the army's leadership was Anglo-Irish, Unionist, and implacably opposed to the Asquith government. As it became clear that implementation of Home Rule was likely to require military suppression of a Unionist rebellion, the crisis began to boil over. In the spring the war office had announced that no British officers whose family homes were in Ireland would be required to participate in putting down a Protestant rebellion. All others would be expected to follow whatever orders they were given. Anyone who found this policy unacceptable were to state their objections and expect to be discharged.

This of course sparked what was called the Curragh Mutiny. A large number of the army's senior officers openly declared that they supported the Unionists, and that the only crime the Unionists' committed, was being loyal to the United Kingdom and that portraying the Unionists as disloyal was an outrage. 57 of the 70 officers of a cavalry brigade based at Curragh in Ireland, their commanding general among them, announced that they would prefer dismissal to waging war against Ulster.

Things rapidly went from bad to worse. The secretary of state for war attempted to defuse the situation by offering assurances that there would be no armed suppression of the Protestants. When the Prime Minister repudiated these assurances, 

Field Marshal Sir John French

resigned as Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Other senior officers resigned also. The King found it necessary to intervene, and leaders on both sides began to step back gingerly from the edge of chaos. By the end of May it was widely accepted that, in spite of the objections of the nationalists, Ireland was going to have to be partitioned. Some part of the North would be retained as part of the U.K. This situation continued to absorb the government in the weeks following the assassination of

Franz Ferdinand.

The day when Vienna delivered its ultimatum to Serbia, the Buckingham Palace had a conference on how to partition Ireland-a conference called by 

King George himself-

ended in failure. On Sunday, July 26th, 6 days before the French and Germans mobilized, British troops fired on a crowd of demonstrators in Dublin. Civil War seemed imminent.

Meanwhile, and with the public barley noticing, Britain was slowly being drawn into the European crisis. London had long based its foreign policy on maintenance of a balance of power on the continent, its aim being to ensure that no country or alliance could become dominant enough to threaten British security. Throughout all the generations when France was the most powerful nation in Europe, it was also, automatically, Britain's enemy. After the fall of 

Napoleon,

When Russia rose for a time to preeminence relations between it and Britain became so badly strained that in the 1850's the 2 went to war against each other in the Crimea-with France now on Britain's side.

Prussia had often been England's ally, but after 1870 the emergence of the German Empire and the corresponding decline of France changed that too. Suddenly the Germans, who for centuries had been too fragmented and backward to threaten anyone, appeared to have become the leading threat to an evenly divided and therefore safe Europe.

London's concerns were intensified when 

Kaiser Wilhelm II

made it his goal to build a High Seas Fleet big and modern enough to challenge the Royal Navy. This more than any other factor implanted in many British minds the belief that the next war was likely to be with Germany, and that , in order to keep the Germans from ruling Europe, it was going to be necessary to keep them from overwhelming France.

This kind of thinking was conspicuous at the headquarters of the British army, especially among those Unionist officers who thought(rightly as it turned out) that British involvement in a European war would mean the death of the Home Rule Bill.

For years before 1914 British general staff members had been meeting secretly with their French counterparts to plan a joint war against Germany. The chief military liaison to Paris, 

General Sir Henry Wilson,

was an almost violently passionate Unionist. He was heard to say that his loyalty to Ulster transcended his loyalty to Britain. His contempt for Asquith, whom he called "Squiff" in his diary, and for Asquith's "filthy cabinet," was only somewhat extreme example of the prevailing army attitude.

Wilson's talks with the French led gradually to the development of detailed plans for the movement of a British Expeditionary Force to France in the event of war. Only the "imperialists" minority in the Asquith cabinet was allowed to know the details of this planning, however. When other members asked for information, Grey would assure them that they need not be concerned, that nothing had been done to commit Britain. But the skeptical majority wasn't reassured when, early in the summer, it was revealed(in German newspapers)that British military and naval authorities were now also engaged in secret talks with Russia.

Grey publicly denied that any such talks had taken place, but he was lying. Here as in the July crisis that followed the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, his position was excruciatingly difficult. He had agreed to talks with the Russians only out of fear that without evidence of British interest-of possible British support in case of war-the Russians might abandon their Entente with France. Some influential Russians thought it absurd that the Romanov regime should be allied with Republican France. Nor, such men thought, did it  make sense for Russia to be allied with Britain, which to protect its overseas interests had consistently blocked Russian expansion to the south. More than a few British, by the same token, were scornful of a possible alliance with autocratic; repressive court of St. Petersburg. An agreement worked out with Russia in 1907 was basically, as London saw it, a way of relieving pressure on an empire that had grown too big for even the Royal Navy to defend. It was a quid poo quo affair; a willingness to be friendly toward Russia on the continent of Europe in return for Russia's willingness not to threaten India, Britain's portion of Persia(Iran to us), or Afghanistan.

Only gradually was the attention of Asquith's government drawn from the Irish problem to the worsening crisis in Europe. The cabinet was divided, with a solid majority opposed to involvement in a war that now seemed increasingly likely. The men who made up this majority had varied motives. Some believed that Britain should be allied with Germany, not France or Russia, and that the anti-German bias of the imperialists was irrational and sure to lead to trouble. Some warned that, instead of ensuring a balance of power, the defeat of Germany would make tsarist Russia dominant in Europe-an unappealing prospect to say the least. Some were simply convinced that there was no justification for going to war, that saving France wasn't Britain's business, and that the human and material costs would for outweigh any possible gain.

A cabinet meeting on Saturday July 25th, showed plainly that the antiwar majority would resign rather than approve any declaration of war. Such resignations would mean the end of the Asquith government, its near-certain replacement by a Conservative government under the dour Unionist. 

Andrew Bonar Law

and the undoing of everything the Liberals had achieved or expected to achieve in Ireland and at home. It would also mean war, because the Conservatives wanted war, and not incidentally it would mean the loss of every cabinet member's job. Not even the most vociferous members of the majority were eager to bring the government down.

It would be unfair to say that the cabinets' imperialists minority actively wanted war. Such an accusation might have some plausibility if directed at the flamboyantly adventurous young

Winston Churchill

Who as First Lord of The Admiralty had responsibility for the Royal Navy and admitted to being thrilled by the prospect of a fight. Asquith and Grey were more sober in their views. Both agreed that war, if it came, was likely to be a disaster for winners and losers alike, though they remained convinced that allowing Germany to crush France would be an even more terrible disaster. Russia mattered only as one of the means by which France could be saved. If a successful war increased Russia's size and power, that would be regrettable.

The problem of finding a way through all these complexities fell almost heavily on the thin shoulders of Sir Edward Grey, and it presented him with 2 distinct dilemmas. The 1st one was an immediate one; he had to try to use the influence of the British Empire to avert war while not saying or doing more than the cabinets majority would tolerate and thereby triggering resignations. In this he failed, though his failure wasn't his fault. The divisions of the cabinet made it impossible for him to intervene in ways that might have made a difference. Grey's other dilemma had to do with persuading both the cabinet and the House of Commons-it too was mainly against war as August came to and end-to agree to intervention if the continental powers went to war. In this he was ultimately successful, but his success like his failure rose out of factors beyond his control. It was made possible by an issue that emerged abruptly, as if out of nowhere(actually it was Kaiser Wilhelm who brought it to light), and ultimately swept the opposition aside.

Grey, 52 years old in 1914, was the very model of what an Englishman was suppose to be at the zenith of the British Empire. He also had the requisite firm belief that Britain was at least one large notch above the Europeans in the realm of morals and ethics, and that in serving the interests of the empire he was serving civilization. Work was becoming difficult for him because his eyesight was failing.

Prime Minister Asquith was more than content to leave the hard work of diplomacy in Grey's hands. Asquith was 61 in 1914. He had been in Parliament for 3 decades and had survived at the head of the Liberal government through 6 eventful years. Though he wasn't without principles, he appears to have been dedicated above all other things to staying in power without exerting himself overmuch-without having to give up the pleasures of society, his nightly game of bridge, or the pursuit of desirable women. Staying in power meant holding together his increasingly fragile Liberal majority, a combustible coalition that ranged from the Irish nationalists to the fiery Welsh reformer

David Lloyd George

from near-pacifists to the bellicose Churchill. Accomplishing this in July 1914 required skills of the highest order.

From Saturday July 25th on, the cabinet met almost daily, and it remained clear that any attempt to bring a majority around to the support of France could lead to nothing but the end of the government. Grey could do little more than hang on and wait. By Monday it was obvious that Grey's proposal for referring the Austro-Serbian dispute to a conference of Britain, France, Germany, and Italy wasn't going to work. The proposal itself had been naive, doomed by the fact that the London conference of 1913 had settled the 2nd Balkan War in a way that Austria-Hungary and Germany found thoroughly unsatisfactory. By using the London conference to their own advantage, the other powers had destroyed the potential of conferences generally.

On Wednesday members of the cabinets' majority suggested a resolution by which Britain would declare itself to be unconditionally neutral in case of war. Grey told his fellow ministers that he wasn't the man to implement such a resolution, and that if it were approved he would resign. When Asquith supported him, the majority drew back. Everything remained unresolved. The pressure on the government-on Grey in particular- was intense and coming from many directions. General Wilson, the Asquith-hating director of military operations, was demanding that the army be mobilized. The French were doing everything possible to persuade the British to support them, while 

German Ambassador Lichnowsky

was virtually begging Grey to remain neutral and and trying to persuade him that Germany neither wanted war nor had hostile intentions where British interests were concerned. The position that Grey and Asquith had taken with the cabinet might have had a powerful impact if the Germans had learned of it, but it remained secret.

General Wilson began insisting with almost hysterical fever that the government had a moral obligation to stand with France-that the years of military consultation justified the French in expecting nothing less. He pointed out that France had demonstrated its trust in Britain by agreeing to move its navy to the Mediterranean, leaving the defense of northern waters to the Royal Navy.

The antiwar ministers, annoyed, replied that over the years they had repeatedly expressed concern that joint military planning would draw Britain into commitments to France, and that they had been assured that such concerns were unfounded.

Thursday was the day when 

Tsar Nicholas

consented to mobilization. Grey, to his credit, had been urging the Russians to delay, but he and his Ambassador in St. Petersburgh had less influence there than France's

Ambassador Paleologue, 

who from the start had been urging action. This was also the day when 

French President Poincare

sent word to Grey that he believed Britain could stop the slide to war if it warned Berlin that it was prepared to support France. Grey, clinging to his pose of impartiality, responded in almost the feeblest way imaginable, saying only that he doubted Britain's ability to make that big a difference. Privately, he now took a step for which he didn't have cabinet approval. He told Lichnowsky, whom he knew to regard the prospect of a war between their 2 countries with horror, that in his opinion a German war with France would mean war with Britain as well.

By Friday, with everyone's options narrowing and the cabinet's majority still against war, Grey pressed upon Lichnowsky his Stop-in-Belgrade idea. When Vienna rejected the proposal despite Kaiser Wilhelm's endorsement, that option too was at an end. It was then that the Kaiser, desperate for a way out, instructed Lichnowsky to promise Grey that if Britain would remain neutral, Germany would pledge itself to restore the borders of France and Belgium if war came and Germany won.

Now Belgium; Germany's raising of this subject introduced an explosive new element into the drama. Even the antiwar ministers saw immediately that this was a momentous questions. The cabinet authorized Grey to ask France and Germany for an explicit guarantee of Belgium's neutrality and autonomy. The inability of the Germans to respond said everything. And so, in a matter of hours, the question of British intervention was cast in an entirely new context. The issue was no longer whether Britain should go to war in support of France and Russia-of whether the British public could possibly be brought to support such a war. Now it was a question of whether Britain would compromise its own interests by allowing a small but strategically important neutral nation, a nation whose neutrality Britain had pledged to uphold, to be invaded. This was something that the public would have no difficulty understanding.

Now on the last weekend of peace, the weekend when Germany and France both mobilized, the cabinet remained divided with 8 members favoring war if Germany invaded Belgium and 11 opposed. Churchill, Grey, and the Prime Minister were in favor. The most prominent figure on the other side-but careful not to allow himself to be positioned as the leader of the antiwar group, which would destroy his freedom to maneuver-was the Chancellor of The Exchequer, David Lloyd George. Though the opponents of intervention had maintained their majority, several were no longer firm.

Asquith and Grey had deftly softened the ground on which their opponents stood by misleading them into thinking and allowing them to hop, at a minimum, that Britain's role in the coming war would be a strictly naval one and therefore relatively low in risk and cost. The situation was moving away from the antiwar faction, and few still believed that resignations could make a difference. Some of the most senior members of the antiwar faction saw the whole matter as a kind of bait-and-switch ruse. 

Lord John Morley

and aging bulwark of the Liberal Party and one of the small number of cabinet members who in the end did resign rather than assert to war, said, "The precipitate and peremptory blaze about Belgium was due less to indignation at the violation of a Treaty than to natural perception of the plea that would furnish for intervention on behalf of France, for expeditionary force, and all the rest of it."

This resentful view would be supported years later by the woman who served as Lloyd George's private secretary(and mistress) in 1914, saw him swing around to support a declaration of war early in August. She later became his wife.

Frances Stevenson Lloyd George

"My own opinion," she wrote 40 years later, "is that L.G.'s mind was really made up from the 1st, that he knew we would have to go in, and that the invasion of Belgium was, to be cynical, a heaven-sent excuse for supporting a declaration of war."

On Sunday, August 2nd, things still hung in the balance. "I suppose," Asquith wrote that day to the young woman he was conducting his own romantic intrigue, "that a good 3/4 of our own party in the House of Commons are for absolute non-interference at any price." But as he wrote, the Germans were moving their army into Luxembourg and launching small raids into France. In the evening Berlin sent its ultimatum to Belgium, lamely stating that it had to invade Belgium before France could do so and demanding unobstructed passage for its troops. The French meanwhile were still holding their forces back from the borders, doing everything possible to make certain that Britain and the world would see the Germans as the aggressors.

Early on Monday King Albert of Belgium issues his refusal of Germany's demands. Later in the day Germany declared war on France. Grey, the eyes of Europe on him, addressed the House of Commons. He spoke for an hour, putting all of his emphasis on the government's efforts to keep the war from happening, on the threat that a violation of Belgium would be to Britain itself, and on his conviction that Britain must respond or surrender its honor. He kept his arguments on a high moral plane, artfully avoiding less lofty subjects such as the continental balance of power.

Not everyone was persuaded. "The Liberals, very few of them, cheered at all," one member of the House noted. But the Conservatives "shouted with delight." In any case a majority of the Commons was won over, and so was the public. The sole remaining questions were whether the Germans were going to pass through only a small corner of Belgium or move into its heartland and whether the Belgians were going to resist.(The Germans, in demanding free passage through Belgium, had promised to pay for all damage done by their army.)

Tuesday brought the answers. Masses of German troops began crossing the border into Belgium and moved on Liege. King Albert made it clear that he and his countrymen intended to fight. It was done. Before midnight Britain and Germany were at war. Some members of the cabinet resigned, but only a few, and they knew that no one cared. The pretense that only the Royal Navy would be involved was quickly forgotten. The British army prepared to fight in western Europe for the 1st time in exactly 100 years.

Lloyd George, having maneuvered in such a way as to keep his position in the government without seeming to compromise the principles that had long since made him a prominent anti-imperialists, found himself cheered on August 3rd as he rode through London. "This isn't my crowd," he said to his companions. "I never wanted to be cleared by a war crowd."

"It is curious," wrote Asquith, "how going to and from the House, we are now always surrounded and escorted by cheering crowds of loafers and holiday makers. I have never before been a popular character with the man in the street; and in all this dark and dangerous business it gives me a scant pleasure. How one loathes such levity."