474. The Road to The Great War: The Lights Go Out (Part 6)

Yes, it's all up. I sat down beside him with a feeling of numbness in my limbs and absently watched through the half-open door, the backs of moving men. A secretary came in with foreign office boxes. He put them down and went out of the room. Henry sat at his writing table, leaning back with a pen in his hand.

What was he thinking of? His sons? Would they all have to fight? I got up and lent my head against his. We could not speak for tears.

So that was Margot Asquith, the wife of Herbert Henry Asquith, the Prime Minister of Britain, writing in her autobiography. She was remembering the evening of Tuesday, the 4th of August, 1914, which was the night that Britain entered the Great War, the First World War, probably the greatest calamity in modern history, from which so much else flowed. So many of the great horrors that scarred the history of the 20th century. And for the Asquiths themselves, it was devastating. It destroyed the Prime Minister's premiership, but also the premonitions were right.

The Asquith sons did indeed join up, fight, and their elder son, Raymond, was killed exactly two years and two weeks later at the Battle of the Somme, the memory of which is still such a scar on the British historical memory. So, Dominic, I mean, that's a brilliant and sobering reminder of everything that is at stake.

I think they know only too well what is coming. I mean, that moment would his sons have to fight that, as you said, the premonition. And we'll see later in this final episode that that was shared not just by the high and mighty, but by people all across society who knew that something terrible was coming at the end of all this.

They've basically fallen out with each other. The Kaiser is ranting and raving about shopkeepers and-.

So overnight they had a massive row, the Kaiser's commanders and his ministers, because their whole plan was predicated on speed, but now they've realized they're in danger of falling behind the Russians. So midday, they get a telegram from St. Petersburg confirming the Russians have moved from partial mobilization to general mobilization. In other words, they're getting all of their men into line and moving to the borders, preparing for war. And they decide that they will move to this thing that they talked about, we talked about last time, that the Kaiser will declare a state of imminent danger of war.

So that will mean martial law in Germany, the censorship of the press, the railways taken over by the military, the frontiers taken over by the military, and so on and so forth. I mean, Wilhelm is a man who loves ritual and ceremony, and he loves playing the part of a king and emperor. And so that afternoon they meet in the Royal Palace in Berlin, in their star chamber. And Wilhelm is, he's sort of ranting a bit, as he often does, under stress and saying this is all the Russians, what absolute dogs. they are, terrible people.

His staff give him the order to sign and he insists. He says, I must stand up to sign it. So he stands up and he signs this thing. And Erich von Falkenhayn, his Prussian war minister, says, his bearing and language were worthy of a German emperor, worthy of a Prussian king. Finally, the Kaiser has risen to the moment and not disgraced himself by behaving like Mr.

Toad. And the same day they send two ultimatums, one to Russia and one to France. To Russia they say, you must halt your military preparations, which are clearly aimed at us. If you don't, we will make preparations ourselves. And to France, they say, you have basically until tomorrow afternoon to declare your neutrality, otherwise the gloves are off.

They've got better things to think about.

The Bank of England suspended payments in gold. And they've actually, for the first time in history, had to close the stock exchange to try to prevent a massive crash as people panic. So absolutely, people in Britain now are realizing something is up. And they get a message from the Germans. So, sorry, to answer your question, Tom, is there an ultimatum to Britain?

Not an ultimatum. There is a message, basically begging the British to stay out. So the German Chancellor, Thérbald Bertmann-Holweg, sends a message to the British Foreign Secretary, Sverdlov Gray. And he says, please, if we promise that we won't annex any French territory, if there's a war, will you stay out? And Gray says, no, I cannot give you that guarantee.

Such a bargain would be a disgrace from which the good name of this country could never recover.

Or are there more Machiavellian reasons? Are there reasons to do with British self-interest? that is about more than just matters of principle? I mean, what is at stake there?

They say, what obligation do we have to France? And the fact that Gray has in private assured the French ambassador, oh, we'll always.

Everybody abroad thinks you can never count on the British. They will always desert you and stab you in the back. Now, of course, there are some people associated with this podcast, Tom, who would suggest that this is precisely what Britain should have done. However, we will discuss that in due course. Now, the cabinet meets later that day, by and large, Gray is obviously moving much more towards intervention now, but most of his colleagues are still, no, no, it would be much better to stay out.

Churchill, the young Churchill is very aggressive. But, as Asquith writes to his, would be girlfriend, the girlfriend of his dreams, anyway, Venetia, Stanley. His daughter's friend. Yeah. He's 84 years, his junior, or whatever it is.

And he says to her, everybody longs to stand aside. So the cabinet meeting breaks up and they have not decided to join the war in support of France. They all agree, at an extraordinary concession from them in circumstances of Edwardian England, that they won't go to the country, to their country estates. So Edward can't go fishing. He cannot go fishing, a bad blow for us all.

But actually, Tom, an even bigger blow for Asquith. Asquith has been planning that he will go to a country house for a country house, house party. Margot will come to, of course, but Venetia.

He says he cannot sleep. Not because he's worried about the war. He's the real victim in all this, Tom. Yeah, he is. So, however, the great thing about liberal politicians of the 1910s was they had tremendous composure and poise.

So he's able to put that disappointment behind him because Sir Edward Grey has gone to his club to have dinner and to play billiards. I so admire that. I genuinely admire that. He goes to number 10 to play bridge with the Asquiths, Margot said in her journal or whatever it was. So Edward came in and played bridge.

He was very grave and silent, but he was in quite good form. Grey has in some ways an undeveloped schoolboy side to him, but he's quite as unupsettable as Henry is. So that's fine. They're playing their cards and stuff. And after this, Grey says, well, maybe we should make one last diplomatic effort.

So he and Asquith, I'm sure port has been taken or whatever. They say, let's write a telegram. Let's get George V in on the telegram action. So a telegram to send to the Tsar to say, would you consider halting your mobilisation and giving us, the British, more time to try and mediate? So it's half past one now.

Drink has definitely been taken at this point. But the.

They get into the taxi, off, they go to Buckingham palace. They basically have to get the King out of bed. Asquith says to himself, he was wearing a brown dressing gown over his nightshirt and had showed copious signs of having been wakened from his beauty sleep. So the King is standing there like bleary eyed in this dressing gown. Asquith reads him the message.

The King says fine, but he insists on one change. He wants to actually make it more personal. So he puts in the words, my dear Nicky, at the beginning, and then he insists on signing it, Georgie, which is very sweet, but actually does no good at all. It's a total and utter waste of time, this telegram. So finally, the King is allowed to go back to bed.

They all go to bed. Saturday, the 1st of August. Really, I think now this is just an exercise in kind of blaming each other while the clock ticks.

Delivering an ultimatum. Yes. And you've talked regularly about how ambassadors in this period all have the wrong name. Yeah. So the German ambassador has a French name.

Yeah. Count Portales. Portales. Yeah,

Benckendorf, Rychnowski, they're all the ambassador from the wrong country to the wrong place. I think that's fair to say. And the Austrians are the worst for this. Anyway. So the French cabinet is meeting that morning and deciding on mobilization.

still in Britain. The sense is we will stay out. There's only really one newspaper that has been really keen on getting involved, and that's always been the Times. Your paper. Always a very anti-German paper.

Most of the papers are still at this point. And don't forget, Britain is only three days away from joining the war. But still, the Daily Chronicle, we must not fight the Germans. It says, the great people whose civilization is in many ways the most akin in Europe to our own. The idea of a ruinous conflict between us seems more unqualifiedly distasteful now than it has,

And now they're very conscious that if the cabinet splits, actually, what happens to Britain? What happens is the government falls, and after this long period of intense partisanship about Ireland, about the House of Lords, about taxes, all of these things, the Liberals are booted out, and the Tories come in, or the Unionists, as they were called then. And say, what is the Tory position on this? Let's get stuck in. We love a war.

That's their position. They have met privately, the Tory leaders, Bonalor, Balfour, F.E. Smith, and they have decided that they are all for the war. They want to stand by France, and they want to get stuck in. I mean, it's an interesting question about why the Tories, I have to confess, I'm not sufficiently well-read on Tory politics in the early 1910s to know the answer about why they're so keen.

I think they regard it as the patriotic thing to do, and they like the idea of flexing Britain's muscles and not staying out. And maybe also, it's just a way of getting the Liberals out. Of course, it's a way of getting the Liberals out, exactly. So the cabinet meeting this time, again, breaks up, no decision. Now, interestingly, Churchill wanted to mobilize the fleet.

Everybody said, no, terrible idea, very provocative. And at the end, they all go out. And on this way out, Churchill says to Asquith, how about it? Let me mobilize the fleet. And Churchill said, he looked at me with a hard stare and gave a sort of grunt.

I did not require anything else. So Churchill actually is getting the fleet to its kind of war stations in readiness. The French, however, are horrified that the British have still not come to a decision. So remember Paul Cambon, who refuses to speak any English. Well, can't speak English, apparently.

And doesn't agree with the idea of people and French people going to English schools. So bad news for our producer, Theo. Cambon meets Gray, and he is virtually in tears. He is white. And he says to him, this point that you made, Tom, you promised us, we sent away our fleet because we thought your fleet would protect us.

Will you not help us? Yeah. And doesn't he?

You know, he really believes it. And in the foreign office, there are some people who are actually threatening to resign. Air Crow.

And you could say, this is the problem when you run informal, secret foreign policy, that actually you've made promises and maybe, you know, you're not, you don't have the capacity to keep them. You have issued checks. You've issued checks.

The ambassador that you mentioned, Tom, Count Portales, is admitted to the Russian foreign ministry. And Sergei Sazonov, the foreign minister, is waiting to receive him. And Portales says to him three times, will you stop your military measures? And Sazonov says, no, no, net, net, or probably non. They're probably speaking French.

actually. He says, non, non, non. And Portales is very moved. He's kind of shaking. He's breathing heavily.

And he says, in that case, Monsieur le Ministre, I am commanded to give you this note. And the note is the declaration of war. And at that point, Portales totally loses. it, breaks down in tears, puts his hand to his head, and says, I never would have believed that I would leave St. Petersburg under circumstances like this.

I can't believe it. And he's crying. And incredibly, Sazonov starts crying as well and says to him in French, believe me, one day we will meet again. And they embraced each other before Portales went out of the room.

Now, if that's emotional, even more emotional and frankly bizarre is the scene in Berlin. Wilhelm, who's obviously been kept out of this capital as much as possible to avoid creating a scene, is driven in from Potsdam. He goes down the main, the Great Avenue, Unter den Linden in Berlin, and he's dressed up. We know the Kaiser loves to dress up.

And he signs it, Tom, at a table hewn from the wood of HMS Victory, of Nelson's flagship.

So in the course of that, they've taken some of the timber and used it to help make a table.

And they've all got tears in their eyes and they're all shaking hands. The Kaiser goes onto the balcony of the palace and there's a huge crowd outside and they sing the Lutheran hymn, Now, thank we all our God. And that had been a huge patriotic anthem in Prussia because Frederick, the great soldiers, had sung it on the battlefield. So it's a very sort of stirring scene if you're German. And the Kaiser then gives this very famous speech where he says, Ich kenne keine Parteien mehr, ich kenne nur Deutsche.

I no longer see political parties, I see only Germans. All that matters now is that we stand together like brothers, and God will help the German sword to victory.

To wage war until victory is won. And that idea, all those petty divisions, are gone. We are Germans, stroke Britons.

And I think those people, Sigmund Freud, we quoted him a couple of episodes ago. People feel, you know, rather like, the only comparison I can think of in Britain in recent years, perhaps when COVID struck, perhaps when the Queen died, a genuine sense. Yeah. For once, we're all, you know, we're all together. All the silly divisions and squabbles are forgotten.

And this is that, but magnified to an extraordinary degree. Now, the Kaiser comes in from the balcony, and they're all sort of standing around, you know, discussing logistics. And suddenly, Bethman-Holweg, the Chancellor, bursts into the room and he says, I have a telegram from London. And do you know what he calls it, Tom? It's a bombshell.

A bombshell. It's an absolute bombshell. It changes everything. This is the greatest twist in world history, this bombshell. Because they've had news from Prince Lichnowsky, the ambassador in London, Edward Grey has made up his mind, the British have decided, and they will remain neutral.

And not only that, absolutely beyond the Kaiser's wildest dreams, the British will not only stay out themselves, they will guarantee that France will stay out. And when the Germans hear this-.

He's so happy. He says to General Von Moltke, stop the mobilization, stop going westwards. Now, he says, we will march the entire army to the east. And everybody's like hurrah, and they're clenching their fists and slap each other on the backs.

Right now, seven out of every eight soldiers in the German army is moving westwards. Their advanced troops have already crossed the border into Luxembourg. And, as Moltke says, if we stop now, first of all, the whole apparatus will fall apart. We'll have loads of trains going in the wrong direction.

Now, this is von Moltke, the elder, the man in whose shadow Moltke, the younger, has lived for so long. And Moltke at that, I mean, it sounds bizarre. He basically breaks down and starts crying. As he says later, I thought my heart would break. I was broken and shed tears of despair.

And the war minister, Erich von Falkenhayn, has to take him aside to console him because he is crying and to be humiliated like this in front of everybody else. And his whole plan is falling apart. He sees the French walking in. He's in floods of tears. He actually has to leave the palace and he's basically sent home.

The man who commands the German war machine, as he's taken out, he's saying to people, I was happy to fight the French and the Russians. I can't fight the Kaiser as well. This is mad. He goes home still crying. And when he gets home, he seems to have had either a breakdown or his wife later believed he had a stroke.

He had a minor stroke. It's very like Viviani, the French.

And the Kaiser is already getting to work on his telegram to George V, monarch to monarch, cousin to cousin. I am absolutely thrilled with this deal. I'm delighted. Thank you so much. Now, we have to keep moving the men west.

But he says, and I quote, the troops on my frontier are in the act. Right now, we are stopping them by telegraph and telephone from crossing into France. Let's sort this out. Brilliant. This is what we've always wanted.

Yeah, I think they don't mind fighting France. I think they'd be quite happy to fight the French. But the thought of fighting the Russians on their own, brilliant. And a great relief, right? You're about to fight a world war and you're told half of your opponents are no longer in the ring.

Yeah. What a tremendous relief that is. If you really want to fight the French, deal with them afterwards. But you can deal with the Russians right now. I personally think for all that the Kaiser ranted and raved about the British, he never really wanted to fight them.

I think this is the perfect example of this. And actually, what really bears your point out is that it was what he does. now. He calls for champagne and he says, I want my family around me. We're having champagne.

Let's go to the garden.

Yeah. But this is the up of ups. It is a transcendently joyful moment that the British have blinked. They're going to compel the French to blink as well. But even as he's drinking his champagne, Tom, another twist.

Hello, welcome back to the rest of history, the final part of our epic series on how Europe went to war. And we left you on a cliffhanger. The Kaiser seems to have received a telegram from George V, basically saying that Britain is going to keep out of the war and that the British will pressurise the French to stay neutral as well. And so the Kaiser has cracked open the champagne to toast this and to toast the fact that he won't be fighting a war on two fronts. He's only got to fight the Russians.

So he's sipping his champagne. And then, Dominic, another telegram arrives. And this is also from George V. And George V has wired. Um, I think there must be some misunderstanding as to a suggestion that passed in friendly conversation between Prince Lichnowsky and Sir Edward Grey this afternoon, when they were discussing how actual fighting between German and French armies might be avoided.

And basically, the Kaiser's got the wrong end of the stick. There is no such British offer.

And they've sent the proposal to Berlin.

And he can't believe that now they are mobilising, they are preparing, and all of this kind of thing. And he blames, he says there was a war party in Berlin, which I don't think is quite right. There was a party that was definitely happy to accept the challenge if they felt it was offered. But whether they wanted to start a world war in the summer of 1914, I think most historians would say they didn't want to. Now, maybe you can blame them and say that their recklessness or their insouciance, their irresponsibility, was a large part of what went wrong.

But I don't think Lichnowsky is right, that they engineered it, as it were. But it's undoubtedly true. This deal that the Kaiser thinks he's about to sign with his cousin just doesn't exist. And when he gets that telegram from George V, he's been drinking champagne, emotions have been so high, and he's such a voluble, volatile man. His disappointment is total.

He is ranting and raving. He says, Grey must be mad or an idiot, a false dog who is afraid of his own baseness.

Lichnowsky, whose scheme seems to have failed, goes to 10 Downing Street. And he's a broken man. He is crying, all of this stuff.

And it's up to the Germans. If they don't invade Belgium, if they don't send their fleet into the channel to attack the unprotected north coast of France, then we will stand aside. Now, of course, he's basically asking the Germans not to fight in the West. And it's hard to see that they're not going to do that. But we'll come to that in due course.

And later on that Sunday, Margot Asquith goes to see the Lichnowskis. The princess was in tears on the sofa and he was walking up and down in silence. He called me by the hand and said, oh, say, there is not going to be war. Dear, dear, Mrs. Asquith, can we not stop it?

I put my arms around Mikhtil on the sofa and we both cried. Actually, I've been a bit harsh there by doing that voice.

So across Europe generally now, the mood is awful. Actually, it's not all celebrations. So the news has spread that the great powers, not yet Britain, of course, but the great powers are at war, going to war. And actually, three examples that give the lie to the idea of the great celebrations. The preeminent German kind of bourgeois middle class newspaper of the day was the Frankfurter Zeitung.

Over everything hangs a great gravity and their quiet rooms, wives and young women sit nursing their somber thoughts about the immediate future. Great fear of terrible things, of what may be to come. That's the mood in Germany. In Austria, in Alexander Watson's brilliant book, Ring of Steel, which is all about Germany and Austria in the first world war. He quotes a priest from the town of Jablunkov, which was in Austrian Silesia.

And the priest wrote in his diary that when the mobilization orders were put up.

At the end of that book, at the very end, he describes a town in the French Alps called Vatilia. And it's an account from a schoolmaster, the town schoolmaster. And he said, basically, they're ringing a bell, a toxin to bring people in from the fields. Because of course, most people in France, as in Germany, as in Russia, were peasants at this point, they worked in their land and they come in and they're all still carrying their pitchforks. And the schoolmaster wrote, what can it mean?

What was going to happen to us? Asked the women, wives, children, husbands, all were overcome by emotion. The wives clung to the arms of their husbands. The children, seeing their mothers weeping, started to cry too. All around us was alarm and consternation.

So this idea that people didn't know, it's not right. They knew. I mean, I think that that's something that we've.

It is. And that's the sort of thing I look for actually in the Church of England. And you don't get any more, do you? No. It's all very much about inclusivity and not enough about smouldering towns.

Not enough apocalyptic, foreboding. Right, exactly. So unusually, extraordinarily, the cabinet is meeting on a Sunday. yet again. Outside in Trafalgar Square, there's a huge anti-war demonstration addressed by the great sort of founding figure, the leonine figure of the Labour Party, Keir Hardie, who is against the war.

After whom Keir Starmer is named. After whom Keir Starmer is named, exactly. And they all gather. They know that the Tories support the war. So if they split and the result is then Tory government, then Britain will go to war.

So the cabinet meet, 11 o'clock, and Gray says, look, we've had a load of meetings. And as the time has come, he says for plain speaking, war is coming. And I don't believe we can afford to see France crushed. We have led France to rely upon us. unless we support her in her agony.

I cannot continue at the foreign office. I mean, finally, finally, his cards are on the table. And the amazing thing is that even at this point, don't forget, no German has yet entered Belgium. Even at this point, most of the Liberal cabinet do not agree. So on the point of Britain's honour,

Yeah, they could have done that. Cabinet collective responsibility does not hold. We don't have to do this.

In what way is it different? I think the difference to them is that the threat of the reality of Germany to them now, in 1914, is immeasurably greater than the threat or reality of Prussia in 1870..

But they have convinced themselves, a lot of them, that strategically it's impossible. It will mean death to the British empire if somebody controls this. And of course, Germany in 1914 is a different prospect than Germany in 1870, precisely because it is such a huge industrial and economic powerhouse in a way that it wasn't even in 1870.. So the stakes seem very high to them, I think. And don't forget, I think, that mood that we've talked about so much in this story of fatalism, of a dread of disintegration and decline, that seems so overwrought in many ways.

The British have been reading all the same books that the Germans and the Austrians have. And they have this same, you know, it's now or never, the clock is ticking, the hour is dark, all that kind of stuff.

I admire this so much. Yeah. Because.

No, I disagree. Because I think that, listening to birdsong, for instance, I think it does have a calming effect. Yeah, fine. I think it can kind of ease anxieties, nightmares, it can bring clarity. Okay, well, Edward Grey joining us there on the podcast.

So I'm completely with Sir Edward on that. Yeah, of course. I mean, you know,

And actually, by now, it's obvious that Belgium is going to be a massive issue. And I think it's Thomas Ottey in his book, July Crisis, says, what a perfect issue for the liberals. Because the liberals are, of course, the do gooding party in British politics. They are the party of an ethical foreign policy, international law. Prune juice.

Vegetarianism, whatever. If you said to them, let's go to war because it's in Britain's interests to defend our ally, to preserve our empire, they'd be a little bit jittery about it. If you said, let's go to war, even if it's against our interests, but to uphold international law, they'd be like, oh, brilliant. Can't wait. Pile in.

Feed it into my veins or whatever. So on this, the Belgium issue is really, really crucial. And now the Germans make probably, I would say, the single most ludicrous error, the worst error that anybody made in this entire crisis. Don't forget, the British had discussed the Germans going into Belgium. And they'd said, if they just go through the bottom, there's not much we're really going to do about it realistically.

What they do is that evening, their ambassador in Brussels gives the Belgians an ultimatum. Now they could have gone through, but the reason they didn't was because the German foreign officer said, we can't take the risk of the British getting involved. We have to try to forestall it. Basically, we have to persuade the Belgians to give us a deal and to let us through.

We will be as quick as we can. We'll reimburse you for anything we eat as we come through. And we'll recompense you for the damage. But on the other hand, if you say, no, we will crush you. And King Albert, straight away, he says, well, there's no way.

I'm going to accept this. We can't allow ourselves to just be a puppet of Germany. And he's made up his mind, even as night falls on that Sunday. So now we come to Monday, the 3rd of August, which is a very famous day in British history, because, as luck would.

So the cricket ground that is home to Surrey County Cricket Club, who at this point are leading the county championship, the championship between the various cricketing counties, doing tremendously well. And they are playing that day at the oval against Nottinghamshire. 15,000 people queue up to watch the match. Jack Hobbs, the greatest batsman in England, playing for Surrey. He scores a century.

Surrey rack up an enormous total. It's golden age stuff. Yeah. Great sportsman, the Corinthian spirit, the green turf, all that kind of thing. But what the Surrey authorities do not know, and what the crowds watching that cricket match do not know, is that the war officers have already made plans to requisition the oval.

Oh really? For the war effort. For what? It's designed to be a place where they will practice bayonetting. Oh, God.

Right. So, in the event, it's only requisitioned for two weeks, but that is enough to finish off the cricket.

Madame Tussauds, the famous waxworks, had a special exhibition, The Crisis of Europe, with a wax model of Franz Joseph, of King George, of the King of Serbia, and other sovereigns of Europe. Do they have the Kaiser? I don't think they do, actually. I suppose you can understand why they wouldn't. He'd be a brilliant waxwork.

Massive moustache. Well, I mean, he looks a bit like a waxwork, as it is. Yeah. But I suppose.

Very, very bad. To that very small and well-maintained museum in Sarajevo, which I recommend to all the listeners, but the waxworks could be improved upon. So, while everybody is celebrating, going to the beach and watching crickets, the news begins to arrive in London that Belgium has rejected the German ultimatum, that there are huge crowds assembling in Belgian cities with Belgian flags. There's a story that the counselor at the German legation in Brussels looked out of his window at these crowds with Belgian flags, and he said, the poor fools, why don't they get out of the way of the steamroller? We don't want to hurt them, but if they stand in our way, we will grind them into the dirt.

Oh, the poor fools.

That's fine. We can't be party to it because we're more pacifist kind of inclination, but we're not going to make a great fuss about it. We will support you from the back benches, but we just don't want to be parties to the decision. Gray tells his colleagues that Belgium has rejected the ultimatum. There's a lot of emotion in the room.

There's probably a lot that it seems to have been quite a lot of tears, but they are calm. They all accept that this is what's coming. And then Gray goes to the commons and he gives what some people I think could reasonably say. one of the two or three greatest speeches in the commons is history. A brilliant lawyer's brief, very powerful, perfectly calculated mixture of national interest and kind of moral authority.

And he says to the MPs, you know, we don't have a recording of it because Parliament wasn't recorded, of course, in those days. He says, this is about British interests, British honor and British obligations. He says, no one can deny we have this friendship with France. So every member to look into his own heart and his own feelings and to construe the extent of.

He's not wrong about that. He's not wrong. He says, we guarantee the independence of Belgium. We promised them that we would stand by them if they were ever attacked. Again, he's telling the truth.

And he says, I want you to think what happens if France is beaten and we've stayed out? What happens if Belgium is defeated? What happens if-?

he invents the propagandistic British story of the First World War. So, the longstanding friendship with France, for generations we've stood with the French, when that's obviously rubbish. We've only had the Entente Cordiale for what, 10 years? I mean, France is our ancestral enemy, not our ancestral partner in arms. He doesn't talk about Austria and Serbia.

He talks about Belgium. I mean, it's a brilliant piece of rhetoric. No one at this point is, I mean, everybody has forgotten Franz Ferdinand. It's all about Belgium. He's condensed the issue to Belgium.

And of course, when you do that, then it becomes, seems much more clear cut.

What? And the number of people who said, does Belgium independence mean nothing to you? All of this kind of thing. Now, of course, there were people in the foreign office, many of them, the most vociferous advocates and most influential voices, who were arguing for Britain to join the war long before the Belgian issue ever materialized. The Belgian issue was the most, I mean, I'm not saying it's nothing, of course not.

But for somebody like Gray, the Belgian issue is not just important in and of itself, but it's the most wonderful vehicle to get people on board. And also, the other idea that he sells quite brilliantly is the idea that Germany has a long cherished plan to take over the continent and effectively the world, and that that is a deadly threat to Britain's empire.

. I mean, that does seem to me, I mean, you can't argue that.

He's actually jostled and they has to be escorted by police to get in. He goes in to see poor René Viviani, who's already a broken man himself. Schoen gives Viviani his card on the way out. And on the back he's written, c'est le suicide de l'Europe. It's the suicide of Europe.

So he's devastated as well. Viviani is sort of trembling and stuff. The only person who's really delighted is President Poincaré, the man of Lorraine. He's got the war he, deep down, probably always wanted. Britain still hasn't entered.

It's that night. actually, it's before Britain has entered the war. Gray is standing at his window, looking out over Birdcage Walk.

Then he's in his uniform, he gets on a charger, a horse. He rides to the streets of Brussels at the head of a procession of carriages, one of which holds his wife and children. And he rides all the way to the Belgian parliament. And he goes into the chamber in his uniform and he says in French to the assembled deputies, or whatever they are, gentlemen, are you determined at any cost to preserve the sacred heritage of our forefathers? And as a man, they get to their feet and they're shouting, we, we, we.

You know, it's proper stirring stuff.

He would approve of that. He would. Being a Frenchman, he would probably say something disobliging about the Belgian accent.

So that morning, the cabinet met again in London to sign off an ultimatum to Germany, telling them to withdraw from Belgium. Gray met the American ambassadors, the first mention of the Americans in this whole story that afternoon. And Gray said to him, thus the efforts of a lifetime go for nothing. I feel like a man who has wasted his life. And Margot Asquith, she went to see the German ambassador again, Lichnowsky.

And Lichnowsky said to her, you knew we must go through Belgium. There is no other way. We never counted on that old, old treaty. Oh dear. Oh dear.

Don't go to war. I felt too sad to speak, wrote Margot. We sat and cried on the green sofa. I mean, you know, it's quite, it's moving stuff.

Such was the end of my London mission.

He's in his helmet. He's in his uniform. He has his new title. He is now the Supreme Warlord.

That are absolutely acts of aggression and they're proud about it. Yeah, you're absolutely right. But in this, that's not happening.

if you don't understand that basically everybody in Germany, with the exception of Prince Lewandowski, thinks they are blameless. They did the right thing and they've been betrayed and stabbed in the back, and that they're fighting a defensive war. Bethmann-Holwek addresses the Reichstag deputies, the chancellor. And he says, we are fighting for our lives. Yes, we are breaking the law by going through Belgium and Luxembourg.

And we know it is wrong, but we will make it good as soon as we are safe. When you are as imperiled as we are fighting for everything we hold dear, you can only think of how you will cut your way out. I mean, that's how they justify it to themselves. Because some of this may be thinking, how do the Germans justify it? And they effectively say, we have been forced.

We have no option, because the only other option is death.

It's so interesting how they all use analogies and sort of idioms drawn from sport or school stories. You never hit a man when he's down. That's what they're saying.

Great Britain is going to make war on a kindred nation who want nothing better than to be friends with her.

Exactly. And at the end of that interview, so it's Bethmann-Holweg and the British ambassador who's called Sir Edward Goshen.

And that's what happens.

And they're just waiting for news from Berlin to see, if the reply comes to the ultimatum, whether they're going to get out of Belgium. and no news comes. And the reason is the telegraph lines have already been cut, because of course, there's no way the Germans are going to change their mind now. And at 11 o'clock, Big Ben strikes and they hear through the windows, the sound of a great crowd that's assembled outside the Palace of Westminster singing, God, save the King, greeting the arrival of the declaration of war. And it's just a few minutes after that, that a signal flashes from the Admiralty to Britain's fleet across the world.

And the signal reads simply, commence hostilities at once against Germany.

And that's the French Revolution. And we will be beginning that by looking at yet more Habsburg shenanigans, because we will be looking at Marie Antoinette. So thank you very much for listening. Thank you, Dominic, for absolutely brilliant narrative tour de force. And thank you, everyone who has listened to it.

Bye-bye. Bye-bye.