As the Ottoman Empire continued to disintegrate, provinces sloughed away “like pieces falling off an old house.” Cyprus in 1878, Tunisia in 1881, Egypt in 1882, Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908, Tripoli in 1911. Exposure of Turkey’s weakness by Italy’s wrenching away of Tripoli spurred the ambitions of the small Christian states of the Balkans—Serbia, Montenegro, Greece, Bulgaria—themselves once provinces of the Ottoman Empire. In October 1912, these four powers suddenly attacked European Turkey. The Turkish Army collapsed. By November 3, the Bulgarian Army stood before the walls of Constantinople. On November 8, the Greek Army entered Salonika. On November 28, the Serbs took the port of Durazzo on the Adriatic, providing Serbia with a link to the sea. On December 3, the Turkish government begged the Balkan allies for an armistice.
The Ottoman defeat surprised and dismayed the three Great Powers of Central and Eastern Europe. Germany had been nurturing her relations with Turkey and constructing the Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway. Austria, expecting a quick humbling of the upstart Serbs, instead saw Serbia triumphant on the Adriatic. When Serbian troops entered Durazzo, Austria mobilized 900,000 men and demanded that the Serbs withdraw. If Austria moved against Serbia, Russia, which had endorsed the formation of the Balkan League and promised to defend its conquests from Turkey, would become involved and European war would be inevitable. Paradoxically, Russia was displeased by the success of Bulgaria; Russia had always intended Constantinople to be occupied by a Russian, not a Bulgarian, army.
Sir Edward Grey, seeking to contain the conflict, proposed a Conference of the Great Powers. The Powers agreed to meet in London, and the Conference opened on December 10, 1912. The Turks were willing to give up what they had lost to Serbia and Greece, but refused to cede Adrianople (now Turkish Edirne), still held by the Turkish Army, to Bulgaria. The Bulgars insisted; the Turks would not yield. In February, the armistice collapsed and a second war began. This time, Adrianople fell to a combined Bulgarian-Serbian army. Again, the Turks sued for peace. Austria insisted that, if the port of Durazzo were not returned to Turkey, it must become independent; it could not remain in Serbian hands. Under Russian pressure, the Serbs gave up Durazzo. On May 30, 1913, the Treaty of London was signed. Adrianople was awarded to Bulgaria, Salonika was given to Greece, and the new state of Albania was created out of Durazzo and the surrounding territory. Peace lasted only one month. On June 29, Bulgaria attacked her former allies, Serbia and Greece, seized Salonika, and defeated the ill-prepared Serbian Army. At this moment, Romania, which had remained neutral in the first two Balkan Wars, fell on Bulgaria’s undefended rear. The Romanian Army crossed the Danube and threatened Sofia. The Turks then took advantage of Bulgaria’s fresh troubles to emerge from Constantinople and recapture Adrianople. The Kaiser backed his cousin King Carol of Romania; the Tsar was unwilling to support the maverick Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria; and the Third Balkan War ended on August 6 with the Treaty of Bucharest. Bulgaria was stripped of most of the gains of her wars against Turkey, Salonika was returned to Greece, and a piece of Bulgarian territory was sliced off and incorporated into Romania.
For Europe, the significance of the three Balkan wars lay less in the backstabbing between allies or the subsequent shifts of territory than in the Great Power decision that little wars should not be allowed to spread. The Conference of London consisted of Grey, who took the Chair, and the Ambassadors to Great Britain of Germany, Austria, Russia, France, and Italy. Sessions, held in St. James’s Palace, were informal. “We met in the afternoons,1 generally about four o’clock,” Grey recorded, “and, with a short adjournment to an adjoining room for tea, we continued till six or seven o’clock.” Meetings occurred whenever any ambassador wished; many were so boring that Paul Cambon feared the Conference would continue until “there were six skeletons2 sitting around the table.” Nevertheless, useful work was done. When Austria announced that Serbia must give up its gains on the Adriatic and permit an independent Albania, Benckendorff of Russia replied—to the delighted surprise of Mensdorff of Austria—that Russia accepted. There was haggling over villages along the borders. Austria demanded that Montenegro give up the town of Scutari, which it had captured; the Powers supported Austria and discussed methods to induce Montenegro to withdraw. “Eventually,”3 Grey said, “a blend of threat of coercion and the offer of money compensation settled the matter to the satisfaction of Austria, perhaps also to the satisfaction of the King of Montenegro, and this danger to European peace was laid to rest.”
In August 1913, after ten months and with the signing of the Treaty of Bucharest, the Conference ended. “There was no formal finish,”4 Grey said. “Nobody went home, we were not photographed in a group; we had no votes of thanks; no valedictory speeches; we just left off meeting. We had not settled anything, not even all the details of Albanian boundaries; but we had served a useful purpose. We had been something to which point after point could be referred; we had been a means of keeping all the six Powers in direct and friendly touch. The mere fact that we were in existence, and that we should have to be broken up before peace was broken, was in itself an appreciable barrier against war. We were a means of gaining time and the longer we remained in being the more reluctance was there for us to disperse. The Governments concerned got used to us and to the habit of making us useful. When we ceased to meet, the present danger to the peace of Europe was over; the things that we did not settle were not threatening that peace; the things that had threatened the relations between the Great Powers in 1912–13 we had deprived of their dangerous features.”
Grey modestly described his part in the Conference as “very drab and humdrum,”5 but his prestige soared. It was clear to his confreres and to their governments that Grey was not interested in personal prestige or a triumph for British diplomacy; he worked to preserve the peace of Europe. After the war, Grey noted sadly the hope engendered by the Conference of London and the disappointment of that hope which lay ahead:
“In 1912–13 the current of European affairs6 was setting towards war. In agreeing to a Conference... it was as if we all put out anchors to prevent ourselves from being swept away. The anchors held. Then the current seemed to slacken and the anchors were pulled up. The Conference was allowed to dissolve. We seemed to be safe. In reality it was not so; the set of the current was the same, and in a year’s time we were all swept into the cataract of war.”
The London Conference had scarcely begun when Alfred von Kiderlen-Waechter died. To replace him, Bethmann-Hollweg summoned from the German Embassy in Rome a diminutive Prussian nobleman primarily known in Berlin for self-effacement and preoccupation with health. Gottlieb von Jagow was a protégé of Bülow. In 1895, when Bülow was ambassador to Italy, he had received a letter from an old regimental comrade, Hermann von Jagow. Jagow’s younger brother, Gottlieb, a nervous, puny man in poor health, yearned to be a diplomat. Could Bernhard, his old comrade in arms, find a place for him? Bülow, in the spirit of regimental camaraderie, cleared it with the Foreign Office and invited the young man to join his staff at the Palazzo Caffarelli. Bülow’s invitation was “the fulfillment of Gottlieb’s7 wildest dreams and hopes” and the new diplomat reported for duty where, Bülow reported, he was treated “as a son.”
When Bülow left Rome for the State Secretaryship in Berlin, his patronage of Gottlieb continued. Jagow was assigned wherever he wanted to go: to Hamburg, to Munich, then back for a prolonged stay in Rome. In 1906, he was summoned for a tour of duty in the Wilhelmstrasse. Jagow promptly went to see Bülow, then Chancellor. Pleading the strain of office work on his delicate health, Jagow asked for a Ministry abroad; Bülow gave him Luxembourg, where work was minimal. In 1909, Bülow suggested him as Ambassador to Italy. The Kaiser was astonished. He and Jagow had been members of the same exclusive student Corps at Bonn University; both were entitled to wear the peaked Stürmer cap and black and white ribbon of the elite Borussia Corps; bystanders were often surprised to hear the emperor addressing Jagow by the intimate Du used between Corpsbrüder. But the fraternal relationship had not affected William’s low opinion of Jagow. “What?”8 he said when Bülow proposed to send Jagow to Rome. “Do you really want to send that little squirt out into the world as an ambassador?” Bülow persisted and William agreed. Jagow was ecstatic. “My love for Your Highness9 will never cease as long as I live,” he said to Bülow and joyfully went off to Rome.
Jagow’s four years as ambassador were pleasant; thus his summons to Berlin to replace Kiderlen was unwelcome. In the State Secretaryship, he saw hard work combined with innumerable opportunities for failure. No ambassador since Bülow had willingly given up an embassy to take the Wilhelmstrasse and, of the four State Secretaries who preceded Jagow, two had died in office. Accordingly, Jagow resisted his new assignment, arguing that he lacked physical strength and professional ability. In vain. On January 5, 1913, he wrote to Bülow, who was then retired: “Nothing has helped.10 I am appointed.”
At the Wilhelmstrasse, Jagow was the opposite of his predecessor. Kiderlen was large and robust, Jagow small and frail. Kiderlen’s behavior fluctuated between warm good humor and coarse rudeness, and he considered his arrangement with Frau Krypke nobody’s business but his own. At forty-nine, Jagow was unmarried; he was cool, elitist, and insecure, glancing up furtively to check people’s reactions to himself. His purpose, during the eighteen months he held the State Secretaryship before the war, was to maintain the reputation he had achieved in Rome and to accommodate his two masters, the Chancellor and the Kaiser. He attempted no diplomatic initiatives; indeed, Jagow’s arrival signified that foreign policy, which had been in Kiderlen’s hands until the failure at Agadir, had passed to Bethmann. The Chancellor’s ambition was to improve relations with England. On February 7, 1913, only a fortnight after moving into the Wilhelmstrasse, Jagow said in the Reichstag:
“The intimate exchange of opinion11 which goes on between us and the English Government [Jagow referred to the London Conference] has done a great deal to remove difficulties of many kinds.... We have now seen that not only have we points of contact of a sentimental kind with England, but that common interests exist as well. I am no prophet, but I indulge in the hope that, on the ground of common interest which in politics is the most fruitful ground, we can continue to work with England and perhaps reap the harvest. But I must point out to you that we are dealing here with tender plants; we must not destroy them by premature acts or words.”
Jagow managed to please the Kaiser. Only a month after the new State Secretary’s arrival, William said to Müller, “He’s becoming admirably seasoned.12 The little man says he would be the first to recommend war to His Majesty if anyone tried to dispute Germany’s rights in Asia Minor.”
German diplomacy, in the years after Agadir, changed tactics. Although the Haldane mission had been rebuffed and Churchill’s Naval Holiday proposals turned aside, German policy toward Britain had been, in Churchill’s words, “not only correct but considerate.13... The personalities who expressed the foreign policy of Germany seemed for the first time to be men to whom we could talk and with whom common action was possible.” “The Kaiser was very cautious14 throughout the Balkan Wars,” Bethmann reported, “and remarked to me in November [1912] that ‘I shall not march against Paris or Moscow for the sake of Albania or Durazzo.’” William could not prevent himself from issuing snorts of disgust during the Conference about “eunuch-like statesmen”15 with their “everlasting talk about peace,” but on the whole his behavior was temperate, and Anglo-German relations were more cordial than they had been since before the Boer War.
This era of good feelings coincided with the arrival in London of the new German Ambassador, Prince Karl Max Lichnowsky. The Prince, sent to succeed the stricken Marschall von Bieberstein, reached London in November 1912, shortly before the opening of the London Conference. Lichnowsky’s wealth and social position set him apart from most German diplomats. He had spent twenty years in the diplomatic corps, serving in Bucharest, London, and Vienna and, for five years (1899–1904), as personnel director at the Wilhelmstrasse. He was responsible for choosing among applicants who wished to enter the service. Lichnowsky’s preference was for young men of good family. “I made it a practice16 to watch the candidate as he entered the room,” he explained. “Then I knew pretty well with whom I had to deal.” In the internal wars between Bülow and Holstein, Lichnowsky sided with Bülow, under whom he had served in Bucharest. Holstein responded by labelling Lichnowsky “a muddlehead”;17 Lichnowsky described Holstein as a man “who by his intimates18 was considered to be not quite normal.”
In 1904, Lichnowsky wearied of this squabbling and retired to look after his estates, spending eight years in Silesia surrounded by “flax and turnips,19 among meadows and horses.” To the end of his life, he said, he had no idea why William II suddenly plucked him from country life and sent him to London. When Bethmann, who was not consulted, expressed doubts, the Kaiser grew angry: “I send only my ambassador20 to London, who has my confidence, obeys my will, fulfills my orders with my instructions,” he told the Chancellor. Once Lichnowsky was installed in the massive German Embassy, he threw open the doors which the reclusive Metternich had kept closed. Invitations to luncheons, dinners, and balls flooded out to London society. The German Ambassador became a regular speaker before British commercial and financial audiences. He stressed the common needs of German and British business and trading interests. He was given the freedom of cities; in June 1914, Oxford University made him an honorary Doctor of Laws.
Lichnowsky’s opinions of the English were straightforward:
“The King, although not a genius,21 is a simple and well-meaning man with sound common sense....
“An Englishman either is a member of society or he would like to be one....
“British gentlemen of both parties have the same education, go to the same colleges and universities, have the same recreations—golf, cricket, lawn tennis, or polo—and spend the weekend in the country....
“The Briton loathes a bore, a schemer, and a prig; he likes a good fellow....”
Lichncwsky never cared for Asquith, whom he described as “a jovial bon vivant,22 fond of the ladies, especially the young and pretty ones... partial to cheerful society and good cooking... favoring an understanding with Germany, treated all questions with a cheery calm...” Nor was Asquith partial to Prince or Princess Lichnowsky, complaining to Venetia Stanley that the Ambassador’s voice was “raucous” and “querulous,” that an evening with the Lichnowsky couple was “rather trying23... he is loquacious and inquisitive about trifles... she took possession of the piano stool and strummed and drummed infernal patches of tuneless music for the rest of the evening.” Margot Asquith, however, liked Princess Lichnowsky and wrote, “In spite of black socks,24 white boots and her crazy tiaras, I could not but admire her.”
Lichnowsky’s favorite Englishman was Sir Edward Grey: “The simplicity and honesty25 of his ways secured him the esteem even of his opponents.... His authority was undisputed.... On important occasions he used to say, ‘I must first bring it before the Cabinet’; but this always agreed with his views.” From their first meeting at the Foreign Office on November 14, 1912, the two diplomats worked “hand in hand”26 to bring their countries closer together. To the annoyance of Berlin, and particularly the Kaiser, who had selected Lichnowsky as “my ambassador,” the Prince reported to Berlin truths it did not wish to hear. “Sir Edward Grey said27 that he wished above all that there might be no repetition of... 1909 [i.e., the Bosnian Crisis],” the Ambassador reported on the eve of the London Conference. “For he was convinced—and this sentence he twice repeated with special emphasis—that Russia would not a second time beat a retreat but would rather take up arms.... If a European war were to arise through Austria’s attacking Serbia, and Russia, compelled by public opinion, were to march... rather than again put up with a humiliation like that of 1909, thus forcing Germany to come to the aid of Austria, France would inevitably be drawn in and no one could foretell what further developments might follow [emphasis Lichnowsky’s].... England’s policy towards us is one of peace and friendship, but... no British Government could reconcile it with the vital interests of the country if it permitted France to be still further weakened. This attitude is based neither on secret treaties nor on the intrigues of Edward VII, nor on the after-effects of the Morocco crisis, but solely on the consideration... that after a second collapse of France like that of 1870, the British nation would find itself confronted by one single all-powerful Continental nation, a danger that must be avoided at all costs.”
During Lichnowsky’s embassy, the long-standing dispute about German penetration of the Middle East via the Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway was settled when Britain withdrew her opposition to the railway. In return for this concession, British traders were granted the same privileges as Germans on all parts of the railway. Control of navigation on the Tigris River and in the Persian Gulf was awarded to Britain. The treaty was initialled on June 15, 1914, and announced by Grey in the House of Commons on June 29, the day after the assassination at Sarajevo.
In April 1914, a shadow fell over Anglo-German relations. Since 1908, the German government, fearful of “encirclement,” had worried that Great Britain would extend the ententes with France and Russia to the status of full military alliances. In the spring of 1914, these apprehensions, constantly stirred by rumors of talks between French and British military staffs, were aggravated by reports that Britain and Russia were about to begin naval conversations. The reports were true.
The Russians had wanted a closer military connection with England. They had been rebuffed. In 1912, when Sergei Sazonov, the Russian Foreign Minister, suggested an Anglo-Russian naval understanding, Grey politely ignored the suggestion. In February 1914, Tsar Nicholas II proposed an Anglo-Russian defensive alliance to Sir George Buchanan, the British Ambassador in St. Petersburg. Buchanan replied that Parliament would not permit a peacetime alliance. The Tsar proposed a naval convention similar to the one between England and France. Again, Buchanan demurred. The Russians persisted. In mid-April, King George V, making the first ceremonial visit of his reign, travelled to Paris, capital of Britain’s principal Continental partner. Grey accompanied the sovereign; it was the first time the Foreign Secretary had been out of England in nine years of office. The weather was superb; the horse chestnuts were in flower. Grey rode in the procession in a carriage with the French Premier, Domergue, who did not speak English. Grey’s French was soon exhausted. They travelled in silence, occasionally waving to the crowds, and Grey had a good chance to study the two French cavalrymen who rode close beside the carriage. One was “swarthy... thick-set,28 sturdy... a typical son of the soil.... The other was fair, slender, almost frail in body, [with] a sensitive face, suggesting a possible artist or poet.... His helmet sat uneasily on him.... It brought home to me, as I had never felt it before, what conscription meant.... Each of these young men, at the age when life should be developing in different ways... must be trained to kill or be killed in defence of his country.”
On the last morning of the visit, Grey met the French Foreign Minister at the Quai d’Orsay and was confronted with an urgent request. On behalf of their Russian ally, the French Minister urged Grey to pay heed to the Tsar’s plea for a naval convention. Grey took the entreaty home with him for consideration. The strategic issues involved were easily dealt with: the Admiralty did not consider the Russian Fleet a valuable or even a useful potential ally. Most of the Tsar’s fleet had been annihilated at Port Arthur or Tsushima, and although the Duma had voted a new five-year program of battleship construction in 1912, these ships still were mostly blueprints. Geography was an additional barrier. “To my mind,”29 Grey said, “it seemed that in a war with Germany, the Russian fleet would not get out of the Baltic and the British fleet would not get into it.” Dealing with the diplomatic side of the proposal was more delicate. A flat refusal would offend the Russians by giving the impression that they were not being treated equally with the French. It was important, Grey believed, “to reassure Russia30 and keep her loyal.” In mid-May, on the understanding that there were to be no commitments which could drag Britain into a Continental war, the Cabinet reluctantly assented to secret naval conversations. Benckendorff informed Sazonov in St. Petersburg.
Since 1909, a German spy in the Russian Embassy in London had been reporting to Berlin all of Count Benckendorff’s correspondence with Count Sazonov. The spy’s report of the impending conversations alarmed the Wilhelmstrasse. German strategists were much less sure than Grey that in wartime a British fleet would not attempt to penetrate the Baltic to support a seaborne Russian invasion of Pomerania. Knowing that many in Britain would be opposed to any closer relationship between England and Russia, the Wilhelmstrasse decided to make public the news its spy had provided, in the hope that the talks might be frustrated before they started. Accordingly, the Berliner Tageblatt was given the story, although the source was protected. The London press picked up the Tageblatt story, and Grey, to his chagrin, was told that there would be questions in the Commons. On June 11, the Foreign Secretary was asked whether any conversations with a view to a naval agreement had taken place. Grey’s reply, true in the narrowest sense, was deliberately misleading: “No such negotiations31 are in progress and none are likely to be entered upon, as far as I can judge.” He went on to promise that the government would not involve itself in talks “which would restrict or hamper the freedom of the Government or of Parliament to decide whether or not Great Britain should participate in a war.”
Lichnowsky, kept ignorant by his own government of the spy’s activities, was assured that no British military alliance with Russia existed or would be entered into. The Ambassador advised Bethmann that Grey’s assurances “left nothing to be desired.”32 The Chancellor, although knowing the truth, played Grey’s game and told Lichnowsky that the Foreign Secretary’s statement had been “most satisfactory.”33 Jagow told Goschen how pleased he was and that Grey’s declaration had come as a “great relief.”34 In St. Petersburg, Sazonov not only buttressed Grey’s denial but carried it even further from the truth, telling the German Ambassador that Anglo-Russian naval conversations existed only “in the mind of the Berliner Tageblatt35 and on the moon.” The Wilhelmstrasse, concluding that very little was happening and that, in any case, it was preferable to leave their spy in place to continue to monitor events, rather than reveal him and embarrass Grey, let the matter drop.
In fact, very little happened. An eager Captain Volkov, the Russian Naval Attaché in London, had one conversation with Prince Louis of Battenberg, the First Sea Lord. Prince Louis found little to discuss and postponed any further conversations with Russian naval officers until his forthcoming visit to St. Petersburg in August 1914. Benckendorff reported this to Sazonov, adding that Sir Edward Grey wished the talks to go slowly. “He would find it difficult,”36 Benckendorff noted, “to at the same moment issue denials and to negotiate.”
In Britain, a sense of calm and security had replaced the alarm of earlier years over the German naval challenge. Churchill’s plea for a Naval Holiday had been rebuffed and building continued on both sides of the North Sea, but the margin of British dreadnought superiority was steadily increasing. In 1909, during the Navy Scare, the British Admiralty ordered eight dreadnoughts to Germany’s four. In 1910, the ratio slipped to seven to four, and in 1911, it slipped further, to five to four. But in 1912, the five super-dreadnoughts of the Queen Elizabeth class were matched only by the battleship Kronprinz Wilhelm and the battlecruiser Lützow. In 1913, another five British super-dreadnoughts of the Revenge class were ordered, and Germany answered with three ships. In the 1914 Naval Estimates, passed on the eve of the war, the Royal Navy was authorized to build another four dreadnoughts, while the High Seas Fleet was granted only a single new ship. In the aggregate, these numbers—thirty-four British dreadnoughts to eighteen German—substantially exceeded the 16:10 margin agreed to by Tirpitz; indeed, it fell only two vessels shy of a superiority of two to one. Addressing the Commons in July 1913, Churchill promised that “the coming months would see37 the biggest deliveries of warships to the Admiralty in the history of the British Fleet:... one torpedo boat a week... one light cruiser every thirty days... one super-dreadnought every forty-five days.”
Tirpitz accepted the 16:10 ratio in February 1913 because he had no choice. The reason was cost. In 1913, 170,000 men were added to the peacetime German Army, to bring its total to 870,000. The cost to the taxpayers was an additional £50 million. To add to this sum a demand for more dreadnoughts would be “a great political blunder,”38 Tirpitz wrote to Müller in London. “The bow is overstrung here as much as in England,” he explained. Besides, he added gloomily, any increase in German strength would only give Churchill a reason to increase the British program.
Lichnowsky always opposed the dreadnought competition. Soon after arriving in England, he reported to Bethmann: “To me it seems quite obvious39 that the British Empire, depending as it does on imports from overseas, should regard the protection of its trade routes as indispensable.... Great Britain as a world power stands or falls with her predominance at sea. If we ourselves were responsible for the safeguarding of an empire like that of Great Britain, we should without doubt strive to maintain our seapower with the same solicitude as that now shown by the British Ministers.” A few months later, the Ambassador endorsed the view of the Westminster Gazette: “If Germany succeeds40 in wresting from England her supremacy at sea, the result will be that the English Channel will practically disappear and that England will be forced to enter into definite military and naval alliances with other Powers.”
On April 30, 1913, Lichnowsky first met Winston Churchill at a dinner in honor of the King. The First Lord immediately declared that “the German fleet was the only obstacle41 to a really intimate understanding between the two countries.” Lichnowsky thought Churchill “thoroughly pleasant and genial,42 but—he wrote to Bethmann—“as he is very vain, and is bent, come what may, on playing a brilliant part, it will be necessary for us to humor his vanity and to avoid doing anything that might make him look ridiculous. I should not feel inclined to overestimate his influence on the Government’s foreign policy. Sir Edward Grey and Mr. Asquith... regard him as impulsive and flighty.” Churchill was indeed determined to play a part. In October 1913, the First Lord told a meeting of Liberal women in Dundee that strengthening43 the Royal Navy was essential to peace. Britain’s naval supremacy, he declared, accounted for the steady improvement in relations with Germany. “It was the feeling of insufficient security and not calm confidence in their own strength which gave rise to irritation between the nations of the earth. If men knew they were secure against any risk of attack, a feeling of calm security spread through the country and it caused freer and better relations with other nations.”
Churchill’s speech, telegraphed to Berlin, drew enthusiastic applause from the Kaiser, who seized on the First Lord’s thesis as a vindication for the German Navy. “What a triumph for Tirpitz!”44 wrote William II. “Best thanks for the compliment, Winston Churchill! For me and all who with me framed and extended the Navy Law... no more brilliant justification could be imagined or expected.... A fresh proof of the old theory I have so often maintained that only ruthless, manly, and unaffrighted maintenance of our own interests impresses the English and is at length compelling them to seek a rapprochement with us; never the so-called accommodation which they only and invariably take for flabbiness and cowardice. I shall therefore go on ruthlessly and implacably with the execution of the Navy Law down to the smallest detail in spite of all opposition.... England comes to us, not in spite of, but because of my Imperial Navy!!”
At the end of May 1914, the Admiralty announced that in June major units of the British Fleet would be making ceremonial visits to Baltic ports. Vice Admiral Sir George Warrender would lead the Second Battle Squadron, four of the latest dreadnoughts including King George V, Ajax, Audacious, and Centurion, into Kiel. Rear Admiral Sir David Beatty would take the First Battle Cruiser Squadron, including Lion, Princess Royal, Queen Mary, and New Zealand, up to Kronstadt, the naval harbor of St. Petersburg.
For a while, it seemed that Winston Churchill also might come to Kiel to meet his counterpart, Admiral Tirpitz, on the deck of a dreadnought. Ballin and Cassel, undeterred by the failure of the Haldane mission two years before, hoped that if the two men got together, the First Lord might persuade the State Secretary to moderate the arms race. Cassel reported that Churchill was excited by the prospect of grappling with Tirpitz. On May 20, Churchill proposed to Grey that he make the visit, suggesting that he might discuss limiting the size of capital ships and reducing concentrations of ships in Home Waters; reopen the question of a Naval Holiday; and banish the secrecy surrounding naval shipbuilding in British and German dockyards. “This policy of secrecy45 was instituted by the British Admiralty a few years ago with the worst results for us for we have been much less successful in keeping our secrets than the Germans,” Churchill wrote to Grey. “We should give naval attachés equal reciprocal facilities to visit the dockyards to see what was going on. This would reduce espionage on both sides which is a continuing cause of suspicion and ill-will.” Grey was dubious about a Churchill visit, fearing that more harm than good might result if he unleashed the First Lord on Admiral von Tirpitz. In Berlin, the Kaiser vetoed an invitation unless Asquith first asked for one. If this occurred, the First Lord “would be greeted with pleasure.”46 Grey was unenthusiastic and Asquith did not ask. Churchill did not accompany the battleships to Kiel, although until the last minute a harbor mooring buoy was reserved for the Enchantress.
On the early morning of June 23, the gray shapes of the Second Battle Squadron emerged from the mist ten miles off the German Baltic coast. When they entered the port, the mist had evaporated and Kiel Harbor was bathed in sunshine. Yachts and naval launches circled the ships, and the shore was black with spectators. Sir George Warrender and his captains boarded the German flagship, Friedrich der Grosse, to be welcomed by Admiral Friedrich von Ingenhol, Commander-in-Chief of the High Seas Fleet.
They went ashore to the Royal Castle, where Prince Henry and Princess Irene greeted them in unaccented English. In the afternoon Prince Henry visited the British flagship, King George V, and described her as “the finest ship afloat.”47 The following day, Admiral von Tirpitz arrived from Berlin, hoisted his flag in the battleship Friedrich Karl, and invited the English officers to his cabin. Again, English was spoken, and Tirpitz, sipping champagne, described for his guests the development of the German Navy. That afternoon, all ships in the harbor, British and German, thundered twenty-one-gun salutes as the Kaiser arrived, on board the Hohenzollern, which had passed through the Kiel Canal. Airplanes and a zeppelin circled overhead; this ceremony was marred when one of the planes crashed into the sea. Proceeding to its anchorage, the gold and white Hohenzollern passed the mammoth King George V, whose decks and turrets were lined by sailors in white and by red-jacketed marines. Once the Imperial yacht was anchored a signal fluttered up, inviting all British senior officers aboard. In full-dress uniform, the British admiral and captains climbed the Hohenzollern’s accommodation ladder and were received by the enthusiastic Emperor. On June 25, the Kaiser, wearing the uniform of a British Admiral of the Fleet, paid his first and only visit to a British dreadnought. Admiral Warrender served lunch. His guests were led to his private dining room, paneled in mahogony and furnished with comfortable leather chairs and sofas. They ate at small tables set with flowers, and listened to an orchestra playing works by German composers. Warrender gave a speech hailing the spirit of goodfellowship between the British and German fleets. William was in high spirits; he made jokes, poked fun at the top hat of a diplomat present, and asked whether sailors in the British Navy ever swore.
That same day the yacht regatta began. For the rest of the week the harbor and the sea approaches to Kiel were flecked with sails. On Friday the twenty-sixth, the Kaiser invited Warrender, the British Ambassador, Sir Edward Goschen, Prince Henry, and Tirpitz to race with him aboard the Meteor. Meanwhile, officers and sailors of the British squadron were fraternizing with German officers and with the townspeople of Kiel. German officers in white waistcoats, with gold braid on their trousers, sat drinking whiskey and soda in the wardrooms of British ships, while young British officers attended tennis matches, tea dances, dinner parties, and balls, where they flirted with German girls. Married English officers were invited to the homes of married German officers. The town of Kiel provided competitive games for English seamen: soccer matches, relay races, tugs of war. Every day, the German Admiralty offered hundreds of free railway passes so that English sailors could visit Berlin and Hamburg. In a somber moment, British and German officers stood bareheaded at the funeral of the pilot killed as the Hohenzollern entered the harbor.
There were moments when the fact that the two fleets had been built to fight each other could not be ignored. British officers heard whispers that the Kaiserin and her sons had not come because they so disliked England. German officers who seemed carried away by British goodfellowship found Commander von Müller, the German Naval Attaché in London, at their elbows, hissing urgently; “Be on your guard48 against the English. England is ready to strike; war is imminent, and the object of this visit is only spying. They want to see how prepared we are. Whatever you do, tell them nothing about our U-boats!” The only evidence of British “spying” was shaky. Fuddled old Lord Brassey, an ardent yachtsman and friend of the Kaiser’s, set off for shore one day with a single sailor in a dinghy from his yacht, Sunbeam, and found himself inside the U-boat dock of the Kiel building yards, which was closed to civilians. Arrested and kept under guard until identified, he was released in time for dinner. Admiral Warrender offered Admiral von Ingehol and his officers complete freedom of all British ships except for the wireless room and the fire-control section of the conning towers. The German Admiral was forced to refuse, as he could not respond by showing British officers through German ships. When Tirpitz and Ingehol came to lunch on board King George V, Warrender repeated his invitation. Tirpitz refused, but Ingehol consented to go inside one of the 13.5-inch gun turrets, which was rotated and the guns elevated for his inspection.
On Sunday, June 28, the Kaiser went racing again aboard the Meteor. At two-thirty that afternoon, a telegram arrived in Kiel announcing the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Admiral von Müller, Chief of the Naval Cabinet, ordered a launch and set out to find his master. “We overhauled the Meteor49 sailing on a northerly course with a faint breeze,” Müller wrote. “The Kaiser was standing in the stern with his guests, watching the arrival of our launch with some anxiety. I called out to him that I was the bearer of grave news and that I would throw the written message across. But His Majesty insisted upon knowing at once what it was all about so I gave him the message by word of mouth.... The Kaiser was very calm and merely asked, ‘Would it be better to abandon the race?’”
The character of Kiel Week changed. Flags were lowered to half-mast, and receptions, dinners, and a ball at the Royal Castle were cancelled. Early the next morning, the Kaiser departed, intending to go to Vienna and the Archduke’s funeral. Warrender struggled to preserve the spirit of the week. Speaking to a hall filled with sailors from both fleets, he spoke of the friendship between the two countries and called for three cheers for the German Navy. A German admiral called for three cheers for the British Navy. The two admirals shook hands. On the morning of June 30, the British squadron weighed anchor and left the harbor. The signal masts of German warships flew the signal “Pleasant journey.”50 From his flagship, Warrender sent a wireless message back to the German Fleet: “Friends in past and friends forever.”