"We had a compact with France," said Mr. Lloyd George in August, 1918, "that, if she were wantonly attacked, the United Kingdom would go to her support."
In reply to an objection he added:
"There was no compact as to what force we should bring into the arena. In any discussion that ever took place, either in this country or outside, there was no idea that we should ever be able to supply a greater force than six divisions."
Later still he borrowed the qualifying language of predecessors who had tried to keep faith with France and Great Britain at the same time:
"I think," he said, "the word 'compact' was too strong for use in that connection. In my judgement it was an obligation of honour...."
So much for bad faith. The people of England, apart from occasional panics and blood-lusts, are justified in claiming that they did not want war; misled—and it is hard to refrain from adding "wilfully misled"—by their rulers, they were given no chance of preserving peace.
The public, which was left to pay the bill, is unlikely to know for many years how many members of the government shared with the prime minister and the foreign secretary the responsibility of misleading the House of Commons and the country. It is fair to assume that the terms of this compact, which was not an obligation, but only a debt of honour, were divulged to Lord Haldane before he carried out his peace mission to Potsdam; and to so consistent a champion of peace, of retrenchment on armaments and of social reform as Mr. Lloyd George, before he lectured Germany in his Mansion House speech during the Agadir crisis of 1911; and to Mr. Churchill, before he changed in a night from a "little-navy" man to a "big-navy" man; and to any one else who, like Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Churchill, forced the cabinet door to see what manner of skeleton lay behind. It is equally fair to assume that the smaller fry of the ministry were not admitted to the guilty secret; nothing but ignorance could justify so egregious a speech as that in which one member informed the public that "he could conceive no circumstance in which continental operations would not be a crime against the people of this country."
From Agadir to Armageddon, those who believed in the word of the government believed also that nothing in the international position of those days could involve Great Britain in a continental war. Sir Edward Grey's adroitness and love of peace had steered Europe through a Moroccan crisis and two Balkan wars; when Austria hurled her bullying ultimatum at Servia, it was hoped that his intervention would again be successful and that, whatever the foreign ministers might achieve, the world would not commit suicide in revenge for the assassination of an Austrian archduke.
No one troubled; no one, surely, had reason to trouble. London in 1914 was an exaggerated caricature of London in 1913 or 1912. The carnival moved with the inconsequent speed and false recklessness of a revue. Of the thousands who besieged every railway-station on the last Friday of July, bound for all parts of England and for every kind of holiday, few can have fancied that it was their last holiday in a world at peace.