Before the War

by Viscount R. B. Haldane Haldane

As regards Russia, Isvolsky, who had never forgiven the Austrian Foreign Minister, Count d'Aerenthal, for his diplomatic victory in getting the annexation to Austria of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908, was very hostile to Austria, and consequently to her Ally. In the case of France, again, it was indeed true that M. Jules Cambon had repeatedly emphasized to the ex-Chancellor the desire for more intimate relations between France and Germany. But the French had never forgiven the driving of Delcassé out of office, and the result of the Algeciras conference had not healed the wound. Besides this, there was the undying question of Alsace-Lorraine.

The outcome of the precarious situation, says the ex-Chancellor, was that England, following her traditional policy of balancing the Powers of Europe, was taking a firm position on the side of France and Russia, while Germany was increasing her naval power and giving a very definite direction to her policy in the East. The commercial rivalry between England and Germany was being rendered acute politically by the growth of the German fleet. In this state of things Bethmann Hollweg formed the opinion that there was only one thing that could be done, to aim at withdrawing from the Dual Alliance the backing of England for its anti-German policy. The Emperor entirely agreed with him, and it was resolved to attempt to attain this purpose by coming to an understanding with England.

Reading between the lines, it is pretty obvious that the ex-Chancellor was at times embarrassed by the public utterances of his imperial Master. Him he defends throughout the book with conspicuous loyalty, and is emphatic about his desire to keep the peace, a desire founded in religious conviction. But the Emperor's way was to see only one thing at the moment. I translate[5] a passage from his Chancellor's book:

"If from time to time he indulged in passionate expressions about the strong position in the world of Germany, his desire was that the nation, whose development beyond all expectation was filling him with conscious pride, should be spurred on to a fresh heightening of its energies. He sought to give it a continuous impulse with the energy of his enthusiastic nature. He wished his people to be strong and powerful in capacity to arm for their defense, but the German mission, which was for him a consuming faith, was yet to be a mission of work and of peace. That this work and this peace should not be destroyed by the dangers that surrounded us, was his increasing anxiety. Again and again has the Kaiser told me that his journey to Tangier in 1904, as to which he was quite unaware that it would lead to dangerous complications, was undertaken much against his own will, and only under pressure from his political advisers. Moreover, his personal influence was strongly exerted for a settlement of the Morocco crisis of 1905. And the same sense of the need of peace gave rise to his attitude during the Boer War and also during the Russo-Japanese War. To a ruler who really wanted war, opportunities for military intervention in the affairs of the world were truly not lacking.

"Critics in Germany had in that period frequently pressed the point that a too frequent insistence in public on our readiness for peace was less likely to further it than, on the contrary, to strengthen the Entente in its policy of altering the status quo. In a period of Imperialism in which the talk about material power was loud, and in which the preservation of the peace of the world was considered only accidentally, like the ten years before the war, considerations such as these are undoubtedly full of significance, and perhaps the same sort of thing explains a good deal of strong language on the part of the Kaiser about Germany's capacity in case of war. It is certain that such utterances did not lessen the feeling of nervousness that filled the international atmosphere. But the true ground of such nervousness was the policy of the balance of power, which had split Europe into two armed camps full of distrust of each other. The Ambassadors of the Great Powers knew the Kaiser intimately enough to realize what his intentions, in spite of everything, were, and it required an untruthfulness only explicable by the psychological effect of war to permit the suggestion of a hateful and distorted picture of him as a tyrant seeking for the domination of the world and for war and bloodshed."

I have translated this passage from the book because I think it is instructive in its disclosure of uneasy self-consciousness on the part of the author. Obviously, the Emperor made his quiet-loving Minister at times uncomfortable. I do not doubt that the Emperor really desired peace, just as Herr von Bethmann Hollweg tells us. Yet he not only indulged himself in warlike talk, but was surrounded by a group of military and naval advisers who were preaching openly that war was inevitable, and were instructing many of the prominent intellectual leaders in their doctrine. The Emperor may well have been in a difficult situation. But he was playing with fire when he made such speeches to the world as he frequently did. I believe him to have most genuinely desired to keep the peace. But I doubt whether he was willing to pay the price for entry on the only path along which it could have been made secure. He was a man of many sides, with a genius for speaking winged words as part of his equipment. He was a dangerous leader for Germany under conditions which had already caused even a Bismarck concern. The result was that the world took him to be the ally, not of Bethmann Hollweg, but of Tirpitz, and what that meant we shall see when we come to the latter's book. I can not say that I think the judgment of the world was other than, to put the matter at its lowest, the natural and probable result of his language, and I find nothing in the ex-Chancellor's volume to lead me to a different conclusion.

The argument of that volume is that England should never have entered the Entente, for that by doing so she strengthened France and Russia so as to enable them to indulge the will for war. He assumes that there was this will as beyond doubt. But suppose England had not entered the Entente, what then? On Herr von Bethmann Hollweg's own showing France and Russia would have remained too weak to entertain the hope of success in a conflict with the Triple Alliance. Germany could, under these circumstances, have herself compelled these Powers to an entente or even an alliance. England would have been in such a case left in isolation in days in which isolation had ceased to be "splendid." For great as was her navy, it could not have been relied upon as sufficient to protect her adequately against the combined navies of Germany, France, Russia, and Austria, with that of Italy possibly added. It was the apprehension occasioned by Germany's warlike policy that made it an unavoidable act of prudence to enter into the Entente. It was our only means of making our sea power secure and able to protect us against threats of invasions by great Continental armies. The Emperor and his Chancellor should therefore have thought of some other way of securing the peace than that of trying to detach us from the Entente.

The alternative was obvious. Germany should have offered to cease to pile up armaments, if our desire for friendly relations all round could be so extended as to bring all the Powers belonging to both groups into them, along with England. But the German policy of relying on superior strength in armaments as the true guarantee of peace did not admit of this. I am no admirer of the principle of the balance of power. I should like to say good-bye to it. I prefer the principle of a League of Nations, if that be practicable, or, at the very least, of an Entente comprising all the Powers. But if neither of these alternatives be possible there remains, for the people who desire to be secure, only the method of the balance of power. Now Germany drove us to this by her indisposition to change her traditional policy and to be content to rely on the settlement of specific differences for the good feeling that always tends to result. She had, it is true, the misfortune for so strong a nation to have been born a hundred years too late. She had got less in Africa than she might have had. We were ready to help her to a place in the sun there and elsewhere in the world, and to give up something for this end, if only we could secure peace and contentment on her part. But she would not have it so, and she chose to follow the principle of relying on the "Mailed Fist." Of this policy, when pursued recklessly, Bismarck well understood the danger. "Prestige politics," as he called them, he hated. In February, 1888, he laid down in a well-known speech what he held to be the true principle. "Every Great Power which seeks to exert pressure on the politics of other countries, and to direct affairs outside the sphere of interest which God has assigned to it, carries on politics of power, and not of interest; it works for prestige." But that principle was not consistently followed by William the Second. Into the detailed story of his departure from it I have not space to enter. But those who wish to follow this will do well to read the narrative contained in an admirable and open-minded book by Mr. Harbutt Dawson, "The German Empire from 1867 to 1914," in the second volume of which the story is told in detail.

Instead of trying to alter the traditional attitude of Germany to her neighbors, Herr von Bethmann Hollweg let it continue. That he did not want it to continue I am pretty sure. At page 130 of his book he appeals to me, personally, to recall the words he used in a conversation we had one evening in February, 1912, words in which he sought to show me that "a proper understanding between our two nations would guarantee the peace of the world, and would lead the Powers by degrees from the phantom of armed Imperialism to the opposite pole of peaceful work together in the world." I remember his words, and with them I would remind him that I wholly agreed. I had myself used similar language in anticipation, and had begged him not to insist on our accepting an obligation of absolute neutrality under all conditions which might prove inconsistent with our duty of loyalty to France, now a friendly neighbor, a duty which rested on no military obligation, but on kindly feeling and regard. It was such friendship and mutual regard that I was striving, with the assent of the British Cabinet, to bring about with Germany also, and by the same means through which it had been accomplished in the case of France. Not by any secret military convention, for we had entered into no communications which bound us to do more than study conceivable possibilities in a fashion which the German General Staff would look on as mere matter of routine for a country the shores of which lay so near to those of France, but by removing all material causes of friction. And when Herr von Bethmann Hollweg adds of my reply that "even he preferred the power of English Dreadnoughts and the friendship of France," I must remind him of the words sanctioned beforehand when submitted by me to Sir Edward Grey, with which I began our conversation. I reproduce them from the record I made immediately after the conversation to which I have already referred in the preceding chapter, on which I again draw for further minor details. And I wish to say, in passing, that both Herr von Bethmann Hollweg and Admiral von Tirpitz have given in their books accounts of what passed in my conversations with them which tally substantially, so far as the words used are concerned, with my own notes and recollections. It is mainly as to the inferences they now draw from my then attitude that I have any controversy with them, and, in the case of Admiral von Tirpitz, to some slight inaccuracies which have arisen from misconstruction.

The ex-Imperial Chancellor asked the question whether I was to talk to him officially, the difficulty being that he could not divest himself of his official position, and that it would be awkward to speak with me in a purely private capacity. I said I had come officially, so far as the approval of the King and the Cabinet was concerned, but merely to talk over the ground, and not to commit either himself or my own Government at this stage to definite propositions. At the first interview, which took place in the British Embassy, on Thursday, February 8, 1912, and lasted for more than an hour and a half, I began by giving him a message of good wishes for the Conversations and for the future of Anglo-German relations, with which the King had entrusted me at the audience I had before leaving London. I proceeded to ask whether he wished to make the first observations himself, or desired that I should begin. He wished me to begin, and I went on at once to speak to him in the sense arranged in the discussions I had with Sir Edward Grey before leaving London.