FRANCIS NEILSON HAD BEEN TOLD by someone that a meeting of MPs opposed to the policy of the Foreign Secretary was to be held in a committee room. This was the second meeting of the day of Arthur Ponsonby’s committee. Neilson doubted whether it would attract more than about half a dozen, since it was too late for opposition to be effective. To his surprise, when he went into the room he found that fifteen or twenty MPs had already arrived. More came in, just ones and twos at first; then the arrivals increased. Evidently this room had become the focus of opposition to British war entry.1
But there were no Labour MPs. Leonard Outhwaite remarked, ‘Not a single Labour Member!’ and someone else added sarcastically, ‘Where are our great representatives of the working classes who believe in peace?’ But they spoke too soon. Into the room walked the Labour Leader. Neilson recalled Outhwaite’s reaction: he ‘stammered in amazement, ‘Ramsay MacDonald!’2
MacDonald was later joined by Labour’s Secretary, Arthur Henderson.
The committee decided to issue a statement. After the events downstairs in the chamber, it was not going to be easy to get one decided and supported. The effect of the Foreign Secretary’s speech on some of the Members was evident. Arthur Ponsonby told his wife that, ‘I had great trouble in getting a resolution passed: it took more than an hour.’
What was said? The lack of minutes leaves us largely guessing. However, among Ponsonby’s papers are the resolution and the voting figures:
After hearing Sir Edward Grey’s statement this meeting is of the opinion no sufficient reason exists in the present circumstances for Great Britain intervening in the war and most strongly urges His Majesty’s Government to continue negotiations with Germany with a view to maintaining our neutrality. This was passed by nineteen votes to five, with three abstentions.3
The Daily News has the detail that an amendment making the violation of Belgium grounds for war was defeated only by sixteen votes to thirteen.4
At the meeting was Christopher Addison. He voted against Arthur Ponsonby’s motion. Addison’s account, written up a month later, is confused. He thought that the vote on the war was on the previous Friday and that the Monday meeting was about relief of home distress and ‘crushing of Kaiserism’. The avalanche of events which followed (including Addison joining the Government) will have had something to do with the considerable garbling of memory. But Addison’s account does have pieces of information which help to reconstruct this meeting. It mentions that it was large and that most of those present did not vote. Taking those who did vote, therefore, as a minority of the attendance we have over sixty, perhaps well over sixty, as the eventual attendance. There were clearly plenty who did not yet see British war entry as a done deal. There were also the Labour’s MPs, mostly not here but whose leader had spoken against Grey’s proposal.5
The presence of Ramsay MacDonald and Arthur Henderson confirmed the hints which MacDonald had been dropping about a new political alliance. This meeting would prove to contain the first seed of the movement which became the Union of Democratic Control.
Arthur Ponsonby’s letter to his wife continues his account of the day: ‘I was then torn to pieces by people who wanted to see me and finally had a few moments on the terrace with Massingham and a few others.’6 The terrace, a strolling and sitting area for MPs and their guests, overlooked the river. Then there was just time to eat: ‘. . . a very hurried early dinner which I could not pay for as I only have 1/6 [one shilling and sixpence] left’.
By the time MPs gathered for the evening debate the British Army had received mobilisation orders. Arthur Ponsonby reported to Dolly that the reassembled House was again ‘crowded to the full and excited’.
The Prime Minister moved the formal motion for the adjournment debate and the Foreign Secretary gave an update on events. He had further news about the ultimatum given by Germany to Belgium at 7 p.m. the previous evening, with a twelve-hour limit, threatening in the case of refusal to treat Belgium as an enemy. Belgium, said Sir Edward, ‘is firmly resolved to repel aggression by all possible means’.
Asquith and Grey soon disappeared. Apart from a brief appearance by Lloyd George, Cabinet ministers were nowhere to be seen. The debate was downgraded by the virtual boycott. The Government did not want off-message speeches getting publicity.
With the Conservatives watching closely but not making speeches, the floor was largely left to Liberal backbenchers. A viewer in the galleries, panning across the chamber, would have observed that from three-quarters of the assembly most of the time there was hardly anyone getting up to speak. But they would have seen in the Radical and Labour quarter a succession of MPs rising to make points about the Foreign Secretary’s speech. Nearly all of these either rejected Grey’s proposal for British intervention in the European war or called for further attempts at conciliation. It was not that the House had turned anti-war since the afternoon. War supporters wanted to get on with fighting Germany rather than making speeches to justify British participation, which seemed to have been secured. But it did mean that there was a significant minority opposed to Grey’s call.
Just one MP in the Radical and Labour part of the House spoke in favour of British intervention in the war. William Pringle invoked Gladstone on the rights of small nations such as Belgium and argued that British entry into the war was required in order to uphold international law. The Westminster Gazette, leading its Liberal readers away from neutralism, noted that Pringle was speaking from below the gangway, which meant a breaking in the previously solid anti-war ranks of the Radicals.7
Pringle’s speech influenced his friend Alexander MacCallum Scott. The Glasgow MP had not been convinced by Grey’s speech. He was unmoved, as he wrote in his diary, by the argument of an obligation of honour to assist France and he thought that the Foreign Secretary’s appeal to each man ‘to look into his own heart’ was ‘sharp practice’. However, he said:
I am impressed by Pringle’s contention that the issue is which policy is to prevail in Europe, the policy of blood and iron alone or the policy of enforcing international obligations. May we not use this calamity to set up an international court of arbitration in Europe. Will they try?8
Here was the start of rationalisation of the war as ‘the war to end wars’, whereby nations with right on their side would employ their might to defeat wrong and then use their triumph to install a civilised way of ordering relations between nations in the future. The Pringle/Scott view saw the war as international policing, bringing to book a lawless rogue state.
Others below the gangway did not think much of Pringle’s conversion to war. They shouted ‘Persia! Persia!’ reminding the MP that Britain’s prospective ally in the war had broken international law by its plundering of Persia. Russia was an unlikely Concert of Europe policeman.
Several speeches on various issues implied support for war but only two set out a case for it – Pringle’s, and that of a Nottinghamshire Liberal above the gangway. Sir Arthur Markham, who employed 25,000 people in coal mines and iron foundries, conceded that he had always opposed the Triple Entente, and predicted that the war would be unpopular, but urged that Belgium must not be allowed to be overrun by Germany. He compared the situation of the Belgians with that of the Boers.
The case against going to war was led by Philip Morrell. He looked at the two reasons presented for intervention – protection of the northern coasts of France and prevention of the passage of German troops through Belgium. He argued that neither required Britain to go in. On northern French coast defence Morrell reminded the House of the German offer:
With regard to the coast of France, he made it perfectly clear that the German Government had offered to this country, that if we would pledge ourselves to neutrality, Germany would undertake not to attack the northern coast of France. That was an undertaking which was cheered from this side of the House and which found a good deal of sympathy.9
He looked at the matter of German troops in Belgium:
We are asked now to involve this country in all the perils of this great adventure because Germany is going to insist on her right to march some troops – [Interruption] – because Germany insists on her point of view. I am quite prepared to admit that if Germany threatened to annex Belgium, or if she disregarded the rights of nationality, we might be bound under our treaty obligation to go to war to protect Belgium. But what after all is the actual fact? What is it we are asked to do? We are asked to go to war because there may be a few German regiments in a corner of Belgian territory. I am not prepared to support a Government which goes to war under those circumstances.
The speech was interrupted by furious yells. Indeed the estimate that German troops would be in just a corner of Belgian territory would be very wide of the mark: the invasion would be wholesale. However, Morrell was correct in saying that the international treaties were meant to protect against any state attacking Belgium in order to subvert its independence and that the treaties did not say that if a general European war began with a particular country invading Belgium in order to get at its enemy that should mean other countries joining in.
The Burnley MP was one of those who invoked John Bright:
I ask myself whether we have not in times past suffered enough, paid enough treasure, and paid enough of the blood of the subjects of this country in order to preserve what John Bright once called that ‘foul fetish – the balance of power in Europe’.
Bright, Liberal Member for Manchester, famous for his opposition to the Crimean War, was quoted by a number of MPs in this debate. The Speaker James Lowther, in his memoir account of this day, called to mind Bright’s speech on the eve of that war: ‘when he spoke of the Angel of Death and the fluttering of his wings – almost audible in the House itself’.10
A succession of neutralist speeches followed Morrell. Richard Denman challenged the argument of moral crusade for Belgium:
Does anyone really think that it is in the best interests of Belgium to make it the cockpit of this Armageddon? To make Belgium the scene of a vast European war is not in the best interests of the country whose neutrality we wish to guarantee.
Denman then addressed his appeal personally to the Speaker, as a fellow Cumbrian MP. He invoked the history of the wars between the Scots and the English which plagued the border country in medieval times and suggested that, had the Speaker been living in those days, he would not have wanted his backyard to be a battlefield. Lowther was not moved: his autobiography describes the debate as ‘discursive, desultory and deplorable’.11
Discursive it certainly was. But that was scarcely the fault of the MPs participating. This was an adjournment debate in which odds and ends like future Commons business arrangements were allowed to butt in, breaking the flow of arguments about the war.
But at least there was a chance for those who disagreed with the plunge to war to register their indignation. The war fervour came under examination from Sir William Byles:
We saw here a remarkable scene. The House crowded at every corner, the galleries crowded and great eagerness on the part of Members. If one goes outside the House one sees the same excitement, because Europe is plunging into war, which I am afraid will far too soon become popular. We heard the shouts of exultation which came from the other side. It is not more than a dozen men in Europe that have brought this thing about, yet tens or hundreds of thousands of people in these four or five nations will be reduced to terrible misery. That is what men shout about with glee! It is not a war to defend our hearths and homes. It is to defend our honour. It is for honour that a German duellist fights his fellow officer. Whether he kills his opponent or is killed by him, honour is revenged. So it is to be now. We are to hire a number of men, a number of soldiers, to go and blow out the brains of another number of men – to vindicate our honour.12
The kind of ‘honour’ which was being invoked in Europe, as Avner Offer’s study has shown, was based on the continental military code, especially the German one, inspired by the conventions of duelling. British honour evoked the rules of public school sport or proper business behaviour. Continental honour was about the throwing down and acceptance of challenges, and about prestige. It was to the European version of honour that MPs were being asked to subscribe. The French requirement for British war support was nothing to do with any moral cause. It was simply a matter of allies supporting each other on a point of honour, just as France was supporting Russia.13
The Salford MP was interrupted by a call of: ‘Why do you not serve yourself?’ Sir William had been the butt of Tory bloods before. He asked whether Britain would go to war if it were French troops violating the sovereignty of Belgium, continuing through interruptions:
In my judgement it is the duty of the Government to defend its own people and look after their happiness and develop the arts of peace, and it is violating that duty to plunge the nation into war. There is no declaration and the House of Commons can stop it. There is still time. I am an old man and have been fighting for peace all my life. I implore [the Government] now not to lead the nation into disaster.
The likely effects of war were examined in a number of speeches. Leonard Outhwaite wondered how his Potteries constituency would fare: ‘I go to my constituency tomorrow; there the factories are already closing down – for they do not make war with earthenware.’14 Unemployment would indeed soar during the early months of the war. It was one of the reasons why so many men volunteered to join the Army.15
The Hanley MP examined the Foreign Secretary’s speech. He saw demonization of Germany:
All through his speech he seemed to be actuated by a veiled hostility to Germany. Germany was the enemy . . . Germany terrorising the world and eating up smaller states in military aggrandisement.
He went on:
The right hon. Gentleman suppressed one great main factor. I do not think that during the whole of that speech he mentioned Russia . . . I do not see an all-conquering Germany as a result of this. I see a Germany crushed, and an all-conquering Russia. Power in the end in such a war as this rests with that nation which can bring its last hundreds of thousands to the slaughter, and it is Russia which can bring her peasantry last into the field.
Outhwaite then turned to the question of Belgium:
[Grey] talked of the neutrality of Belgium. While I can undoubtedly see a technical violation of the neutrality of Belgium in the marching of troops through Belgium, that is very different to the conquest of Belgium by force and the holding of Belgium by force.
Outhwaite was one of those who pointed out the selective nature of the argument that violation of Belgium by Germany required Britain to enter the war. There had been no call for Britain to take on Russia when Russia ‘suppressed the integrity of Finland’ or when Northern Persia was ‘overrun by Russian troops’. The Hanley MP described Russia as ‘this semi-civilised, barbaric and brutal race’. A number of speeches of war opponents had more than a tinge of Russophobia, but there was real concern about the regime of Britain’s prospective ally. The majority of Russia’s 164 million peasants had been in serfdom until only a generation earlier. Russia was now industrialising. The Tsars, fearing that this would lead to demands for further political reform, suppressed dissent with some brutality. Russia had a degree of absolutism which was alien to Western Europe.16
Outhwaite challenged the moral grounds for war:
I honestly hoped for a justification of the war from the Foreign Secretary but I did not find it. I looked for some justification from him for the shedding of blood, and for the casting on one side of the moral obligations that I always thought greater than any treaty obligations, but I did not get it. I recall the words of John Bright: . . . ‘I cannot believe that civilisation in its journey towards the sun will enter endless night to gratify the ambition of those men who seek to wade through slaughter to a throne and shut the gates of mercy on mankind.’
The longest speech came from Joseph King. He was greeted by hostile yells. He was perplexed about the lack of speeches in support of British intervention in the war:
Although we have evidence of great numbers of supporters of the Government backing them up – although we have the whole of the official Opposition supporting the Government – we have heard during the course of this debate, I think, only one whole-hearted speech supporting the policy outlined by the Foreign Secretary this afternoon. Why is it that the supporters of this policy have lost their voice? Are they afraid, or are they ashamed? Why is it that the Leader of the Opposition is not here now?17
He had a rough reception. There were shouts of ‘Divide! Divide!’ (that is, have a vote to end the debate). The MP taunted the Ulster Unionists with being desirous of fighting ‘the most Protestant power on the continent of Europe’, causing according to the Westminster Gazette, ‘a slight sensation’.
The Somerset MP was another anti-war MP who examined the ally about whom the Foreign Secretary had been silent: ‘If we are fighting for Russia at the present time, we are fighting for an amount of tyranny and injustice and cruelty which it is quite impossible to think of without the deepest indignation . . .’ King pointed out that 100,000 people were in prison in Russia without trial and that executions in Russia under martial law were currently running at a thousand a year.
The speech brought an intervention from a Conservative, Sir John Rees:
Is the hon. Member in order in accusing a friendly Power of atrocious tyrannical government? I believe it has been ruled that an hon. Member is not in order in using such language in regard to this particular Power.
For some MPs, Russia was a friendly power and that was that. Ethics did not come into it.
A regular critic of the Government’s foreign policy, Josiah Wedgwood, delivered a warning about the Foreign Secretary’s ‘wonderful Jingo speech’:
Members must realise that this is not going to be one of the dear old-fashioned wars of the eighteenth century over again. This is going to be a war in which it is not going to be a question of feeding your armies, but of feeding the people left behind . . . Starvation is coming in this country and the people are not the docile serfs they were a hundred years ago. They are not going to put up with starvation. When it comes you will see something far more important than a European War – you will see a revolution.18
This followed the theory of Norman Angell that war between the nations of Europe would bring unemployment, starvation and economic ruin. Government committees had been deliberating for years about feeding the people in the event of war and the management of unemployment. Blockade had always been a part of war between maritime powers and in the case of industrialised societies starvation was a risk. The British Government later had a Ministry of Blockade, effective in creating food shortages in Germany, with a substantial number of German deaths by starvation at the end of the war attributed to it. And the German U-boat campaign brought critically serious food worries to Britain in 1917. Josiah Wedgwood was correct to link war with the risk of starvation.19
Arthur Ponsonby felt that Josiah Wedgwood’s speech was ‘too wild’. However, though revolution did not happen in Britain, it did come to Russia in 1917 and to parts of Germany and (briefly) to Hungary at the end of the war. As for Britain, had the German U-boat campaign succeeded in bringing starvation, who knows?20
Wedgwood reported in a family letter that he received ‘oceans of letters’ in support of his speech.21
Arthur Ponsonby was not going to make a speech. He had not had time to prepare. However, he was persuaded to speak by Philip Morrell. He told the Commons what he had witnessed on the streets:
I cannot remain seated at what I feel to be the most tragic moment I have yet seen. We are on the eve of a great war, and I hate to see people embarking on it with a light heart. The war fever has already begun. I saw it last night when I walked through the streets. I saw bands of half-drunken youths waving flags, and I saw a group outside a great club in St James Street being encouraged by members of the club from the balcony. The war fever has begun, and that is what is called patriotism. I think we have plunged too quickly . . .22
He turned to the balance of power system:
I think the Foreign Secretary’s speech shows that what has been rankling all these years is a deep animosity against German ambitions. The balance of power is responsible for this – the mad desire to keep up an impossibility in Europe, to try to divide the two sections of Europe into an armed camp, glaring at one another with suspicion and hostility and hatred, and arming all the time, and bleeding the people to pay for the armaments.
How fair was this? It could be said that ‘the balance of terror’ after the Second World War between NATO and the Warsaw Pact in the end did not result in a clash of nuclear weapons. But it nearly did, in the Cuban Missile crisis of 1962. As Margaret MacMillan interestingly mentions, US President John F. Kennedy, who resisted pressure from his military to take action and instead started talks with the Soviet Union, had just read Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, about 1914. In 1914, as events were showing, the balance of power in Europe had demonstrably failed to prevent general war.
Ponsonby went on:
I believe there is still a ray of hope. I regret the tone of the Foreign Secretary’s speech. I felt it was in keeping with the scenes I had seen last night. But still he declared that not yet has the fatal step been taken. It is by this House of Commons that the decision must be taken, and however small a minority we may be who consider that we have abandoned our attitude of neutrality too soon . . . I think that in the country we have a very large body of opinion with us. I trust that, even though it may be late, the Foreign Secretary will use every endeavour to the very last moment, looking to the great central interests of humanity and civilisation, to keep this country in a state of peace.
The Westminster Gazette reported a hostile reaction to the speech from MPs:
Mr Ponsonby angered the House by attacking the tone of Sir Edward Grey’s speech as bellicose and his appeal to the great central interests of humanity and civilisation rather lost their [sic] effect after this.23
Writing to his wife, Ponsonby described his reception:
I had as I always do for some reason or other dead silence and rapt attention. I shot out half a dozen sentences amid protests and a few feeble cheers. My reference to Grey’s speech was much resented but I genuinely felt it at the time.24
A stinging denunciation of the Government came from Liberal Percy Molteno, who represented Dumfriesshire. Molteno, a ship-owner and barrister of South African birth, was the son of Cape Colony’s first Prime Minister. He was a supporter of African nationalism in South Africa and had been shocked by the white racist laws which were introduced in the Union of South Africa. He was one of the friends in the British Parliament of the new African National Congress. (But he was one of those for whom democracy stopped short of women’s suffrage.) Molteno declared:
No part of this country has been invaded at present; no vital interest in this country has been attacked. Yet we are asked to assent to war with all its terrible consequences . . . This is a continuation of that old and disastrous system where a few men in charge of the state, wielding the whole force of the state, make secret engagements and secret arrangements, carefully veiled from the knowledge of the people who are as dumb driven cattle without a voice.25
The fact that the Government wanted to take the country into a great European war with all its perils when Britain was not under attack or threat of attack was an affront to some on the Liberal backbenches.
Molteno was one of the MPs who had suspected the now confirmed collusion between French and British military and diplomatic personnel and ministers about continental war. The fury expressed in this debate by Molteno and others about the subversion of democracy did not fade. More would be heard in the coming years about the abuse of executive power that had stitched Britain into what amounted to a war alliance.
There was one speech which resonated especially strongly. It came from Edmund Harvey. The Leeds MP called for a positive response to Germany’s offer to keep its fleet out of the Channel if Britain stayed neutral. He protested that this war was not wanted by the people:
I am convinced that this war, for the great masses of the countries of Europe, and not for our own country alone, is no people’s war. It is a war that has been made – I am not referring to our leaders here – by men in high places, by diplomatists working in secret, by bureaucrats who are out of touch with the peoples of the world . . . I want to make an appeal on behalf of the people, who are voiceless except in this House, that there should be a supreme effort made to save this terrible wreckage of human life, that we may not make this further sacrifice upon the altar of the terrible, blood-stained idol of the balance of power, but should be willing to make great sacrifices of patience in the sacred cause of peace.26
The MP called on Asquith and Grey to take the role of ‘great mediators’.
Sitting nearby was Harvey’s brother-in-law. Arnold Rowntree scribbled a note to his wife on her brother’s speech, calling it ‘quite the best speech made against the Government and excellently received’. Rowntree in his own speech asked whether Britain should be fighting against German civilisation:
Do not let us forget that when we go to war against Germany we go to war against a people who hold largely the ideals which we hold. I do not mean the military element, but the German civilisation is in many ways near the British civilisation. We think of their literature, we think of what they have done for progressive religious thought, we think of what they have done for philosophy, and we say these are not the men we want to fight. I, as a very humble Member want, at any rate, to take this opportunity of saying that I for one will have nothing to do with this war.27
The affinities between British and Germans were deep. Sir Harry Johnston’s 1913 Common Sense in Foreign Policy goes as far as to say that: ‘England and the south east of Scotland constitute the oldest, the most successful, and the most complete of German colonies beyond the limit of Germany.’28
The historical ties-ups between the nations which Johnston lists in considerable detail include the monarchy, use of German troops by Britain and so on. One could add the kinship of the English and German languages. In recent times there had been the attempted move in the direction of a German alliance between 1898 and 1901 by the Conservative Colonial Secretary Sir Joseph Chamberlain. There were a hundred thousand Germans currently in Britain. Germans could enter without a passport. The publicity for the Anglo-German exhibition at the Crystal Palace in 1913 urged, ‘Cousins should not be allowed to drift apart.’ The relationship went much deeper than the cousin monarchs heading the two nations. Efforts in the years before 1914 to try to forge an alliance or an understanding between Britain and Germany are strange only in the retrospect of a later history which could not be predicted.29
Any positive words about Germany, it might be thought, are refuted by the twentieth-century history of German aggression. It has been argued that Germany’s move in 1914 was the culmination of a long-prepared bid for domination of Europe. The real history was much messier. German aggressive military planning was certainly there. It related to fear that the balance of power would turn against it as Russia’s strength grew in alliance with France, leaving Germany hemmed in and weakened. General Helmuth von Moltke was of the view that war against the Triple Entente was sure to break out not much later than 1916 or 1917 and that Germany would be beaten unless it launched an immediate preventative attack. It was military theory, but in 1914 a chain of events ran out of control.30
What about the Kaiser? Wilhelm II was an unbalanced ruler, notorious for his ranting call to German soldiers setting off to put down the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900, to be like the Huns of history: ‘anyone who falls into your hands falls to your sword’. Some German troops did behave very badly, but the Russian and the French allies of the Germans were also very bloodthirsty. It was an ugly patch of history which threw into question the civilised values of Europeans generally. There was of course Kitchener at Omdurman and in South Africa. The anti-war MPs in this debate hated European aggression and shared common cause with like-minded people in Germany and elsewhere who had been trying to promote a more humane approach.31
Then there is the special argument that the genocide committed by Germany in South-West Africa in its colonial war of 1904–8 was a precursor of Nazi history. This is misconceived. Genocide in various forms featured shockingly in the colonial expansion across the world of the European races, who considered themselves superior to others. In recent years there had been the genocide and slavery perpetrated by the agents of Belgium’s King Leopold in the Congo. Atrocities were not some sort of racial or national speciality of Germans, though Germans were certainly among the Europeans who committed them. Naziism was a product of the First World War. Had the arguments of Arnold Rowntree and his allies been accepted and had Britain not expanded the war by joining it in 1914, the poison of Naziism would probably never have happened. Arnold Rowntree’s defence of the better aspects of German culture as a reason for not going to war is not invalidated either by previous or subsequent history.32
Germany was actually a complicated mix. The Reichstag had been elected by universal male suffrage since 1912, a more democratic electorate than that of Britain. German science, scholarship and thought were admired in Britain and there was British progressive approval, Lloyd George included, of German advances in state welfare. There was, it is true, the German love of regimentation, exemplified in everything from pedantry in classification to an exaggerated respect for military rank. And there was the aggressiveness of the German military, and the great fuss which German society made of its army. Arnold Rowntree and his friends loathed this aspect. But it was just one side of German culture. There was plenty of Anglo-German cross-fertilisation. In 1913–14 the thirty-four German students, some of them Rhodes Scholars, who matriculated at Oxford made up the largest group of foreign students at the university. A letter from a group of British intellectuals published in The Times at the start of August 1914 praised Germany as ‘a nation leading the way in Arts and Sciences’. Had the conflict of 1914 not become a prolonged world war, the twentieth-century history of Germany might been very different and Germany’s progressive elements, rather than the unlovely ones which the First World War fostered, might have led that nation.33
Wails of woe from the Liberal backbenches were not going to quench the war steam on the Conservative and Irish Nationalist benches. The only chance would be an indication that the Labour movement was not going to deliver the manpower and the goods required for war. But where were the Labour speakers? Labour MPs seemed to have been struck by reticence, unless of course they were unluckily failing to catch the Speaker’s eye. There was one exception. It was Keir Hardie.
The Merthyr MP took a class line on the war:
Both Houses of Parliament have passed, with absolute unanimity, a bill for the relief of the Stock Exchange. We Members, from these benches, offered no objection, but we now demand to be informed what is going to be done for relief of the inevitable destitution which is bound to prevail among the poor? . . . We are far more interested in the sufferings of the poor than we are in the inconvenience to members of the Stock Exchange. Most of the Members of this House have a more direct interest in the Stock Exchange than they have in the sufferings of the poor.
HON. MEMBERS: No! No! Shame! and Name! [calling on the Speaker to suspend the MP].
Arthur Ponsonby commented in his letter to Dolly that Hardie ‘dwelt on a bad point’. It was not the best time for vintage class venom.
Hardie continued:
We belong to a party which is international. In Germany, in France, in Belgium, and in Austria, the party corresponding to our own is taking all manner of risks to promote and preserve peace . . . Some of us will do all we can to rouse the working classes of the country in opposition to this proposal of the Government.
The Merthyr MP voiced the complaint heard many times during this evening – the lack of democratic consultation:
The decision of the Government has been come to without consulting the country. It remains to be seen whether the Government and the House of Commons represent the country on this question. So far as some of us are concerned – here I do not speak for the party with which I am connected for the present moment but for myself personally – I shall endeavour to ascertain what is the real feeling of the country, in regard to the decision of the Government.34
The differentiation by Hardie of himself and his party suggests that already Labour’s previously solid opposition to the war was falling away.
Mythology dies hard. One stubborn nugget of these days is that Labour MP Will Crooks led the Commons in singing the National Anthem. There was no such scene. It was on 18 September at the prorogation when Crooks got the Commons to their feet. That was a month and a half into the war.35
It was left to the Liberal backbenches to sustain the flow of the arguments for staying out. Sir John Jardine, Member for Roxburghshire, had observed the mixing of crisis-viewing and holiday recreation among the crowds: ‘We are entering on this venture in somewhat the same spirit as we might take part in a gorgeous parade or in a magnificent picnic at somebody else’s expense.’36
Jardine had been acting Chief Justice in the Imperial government of India and Vice-Chancellor of Bombay University. His comment here is echoed by Keith Robbins, who describes popular reactions on streets across Europe in 1914 as like ‘a fete involving a temporary suspension of social behaviour and an indulgence in unproductive expenditure’. Some of the aspects of military culture are listed by Douglas Newton: children’s imperialist adventure stories, school textbooks, military-orientated youth movements, invasion novels and plays, military and imperial leagues, military pageants and ‘the all-pervasive military and imperial themes in everyday advertising and public memorials’. This culture was resonating now. While Sir Edward Grey was making his speech, big columns of troops were marching by the Palace of Westminster and crowds cheering them could be heard in the House.37
Jardine remarked on the suddenness of what had been sprung on the Commons:
It is only a few days since I returned from Scotland, and I can tell the House that there was not the least suspicion there that anything like this was going to be debated. Speeches in profusion on Irish Home Rule but not a single word said about the balance of power in Europe or about the fact that we were likely to be involved in war on that account.
Another Liberal Llewelyn Williams demanded to know:
What is going to become of our social reform if we embark on this hideous carnage? I urge the Government in the name of common sense as well as humanity to stay their hand and to avert this terrible danger from our country.38
Annan Bryce saw the network of honour leading to carnage on a huge scale:
We have the French joining the Russians on a point of honour and we are joining the French on a point of honour – a regular house that Jack built! We are being asked to undertake an enterprise which is going to lead to the loss of perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives.39
The prediction would prove to be an understatement. Over 700,000 British lives were lost.
The neutralists would have expected a speech from a Government minister replying to the debate and dealing with their points. But there was no one on the Government front bench to perform this role. Instead there was a remarkable occurrence which looks like a prefiguring of the history of the following years. From the Conservative front bench Arthur Balfour rose to wind up for the Government. At least that is what it amounted to.
Balfour presented no arguments on the war, but described the anti-war speakers as ‘the dregs and lees of the debate’. His attitude was with Leo Amery, who recorded in his diary that, ‘a string of the radical crank section aired their protests’.40
Was the Unionist (Conservative) Party guiding the destinies of the Empire as Balfour had once said that it always did? The ex-Prime Minister, nephew of Lord Salisbury, had taken over this debate and his blessing was on British participation in the war and his contempt was for those who spoke against it. The aristocracy, which had lost ground in the political struggle of recent years, was apparently back in charge tonight. Balfour, Conservative grandee par excellence, was the spokesman in this debate of the new emerging war establishment. The emotions of Britain’s war would be Conservative ones. They would dominate the British twentieth century. They were, in Gerard DeGroot’s analysis, ‘nationalism, traditionalism and an enduring sense of cultural superiority’. On this night, as Britain prepared for entry into the European war, Peers versus People, and its Unionism versus Home Rule proxy, was set aside as the nation rallied behind its traditional rulers in the name of war. It was the same in Germany, where the challenge of the Social Democrats to the dominant classes now yielded to a military agenda.41
Arthur Balfour’s call for the close of the debate was accepted by the Speaker. Balfour assured those who still wanted to speak that there would be ‘a full opportunity for a debate upon a Vote of Credit’. This would be when the Government applied to borrow from Parliament the money which would be required in order to fight the war. But by then the issue would be determined. The democratic process such as it was, was over. It had been over before the start of this bits and pieces adjournment debate.
Arthur Ponsonby was not giving up. He was preparing for further debate. A declaration of war on Germany would require grounds for entry. Grey’s remarks about Belgium suggested that it would be German violation of Belgian neutrality. Ponsonby now made some notes, putting together a detailed case against war entry with the Belgium casus belli.
He set out the perils which Britain would incur by entering such a war:
Great Britain is to go to war if Germany does not withdraw from Belgian territory. That is the only Government decision as declared by Sir Edward Grey. It is plainly the only casus belli that any Government could find for joining in a quarrel in which England has no interest and no concern. But is it a casus belli for the sake of which the people of England are justified in risking the existence of the Empire and in increasing the magnitude of the greatest catastrophe in history? The answer is and must be an emphatic ‘No’.42
Ponsonby was not an imperialist but he did not want to see Britain’s empire lost to the Germans in a military adventure.
What about the treaties?
The war cliques say that we are bound by Treaty and in honour to declare war on any Power that sends its troops into Belgian territory. It is a wild distortion of the truth. Britain has no obligation, legal or moral, to enter on a European war for such a course.
Ponsonby set out what it would mean. Britain would somehow have to put troops into Belgium to repel invading forces, ‘either French or German’. Britain, while protecting Belgium, would need to keep out of the European war. Clearly this was impossible:
No state is bound to attempt the impossible, and to incur the intolerable risks that attempt may involve . . . Britain cannot by taking part in the war save Belgium from becoming the theatre of operations. She will indeed merely precipitate and incalculably magnify misfortunes, which there is a hope that Belgium may otherwise avoid.
Britain, argued Ponsonby, could keep out of the war and by so doing help Belgium:
Britain can best save the independence of Belgium today, not by plunging into a general European war which she has no obligation to undertake, but by accepting the guarantee of Belgian integrity which Germany has offered. If Britain remains neutral, she will be strong enough at the conclusion of the war to insist that Germany lives up to her promise.
He concluded:
If [Britain] enters on a General European war she will be risking her existence to achieve a doubtful result. She will in all probability only be completing the wreckage of that state system, to render stable a part of which was the main object of the guarantee to which the war party is now so unscrupulously appealing.
He was ready to argue the case but his hopes were not good. Sir Edward Grey’s speech that afternoon had attached Britain firmly to the Armageddon train, which a week earlier Asquith had thought that Britain would observe as a spectator.