by ALEXANDER ZEVIN
The centenary of the First World War was also a publishing deadline, with seemingly as many monographs to mark its passage as ceramic poppies—888,264, one for each British and colonial soldier killed—that spilled out of the Tower of London in November 2014. [1] Millions more visited that installation, ‘Blood Swept Lands’ than will read about the war it memorialized, attesting not least to the enhanced official promotion of Remembrance Days in England in recent years. Yet the crimson solemnly affixed to buttonholes, or in moats, points to the paradox of official commemorations of the conflict; mourning for heroic sacrifice, and vindication of national honour and ultimate triumph. The cause of Britain was just: as contemporaries saw it, defence of gallant little Belgium ruthlessly invaded by the Hun, and as the better historians have since shown, saving Europe from domination by a German militarism more dangerous and reckless than any other power of the time.
Douglas Newton’s Darkest Days: The Truth Behind Britain’s Rush to War takes aim squarely at this version of 1914, and the mythologies surrounding it: that the Asquith government entered the war only after having exhausted the diplomatic alternatives—acting to restrain Russia and France and negotiate with Germany, to no avail, and finally stepping in at the last moment, to uphold treaty obligations to Belgian neutrality about which the nation was of one mind. Newton, an Australian historian whose simultaneous study Hell-Bent details the contribution of his own country’s political establishment to the carnage, focuses Darkest Days on the fortnight prior to Britain’s declaration of war on Germany, delivering a meticulous day-by-day narrative of the deliberations and manoeuvres at the top reaches of the British state that led to it. His central argument is a demolition of the legend that there was a broad unanimity behind the decision. On the contrary—he maintains—it is striking how much resistance emerged, without parallel in any other European capital, and what extreme measures of deception, circumvention and intimidation were necessary to quell it.
Darkest Days opens nearly a month after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Serbia, when most of the British political class from the King downwards had nearly given up hope of heading off a civil war in Ireland over the introduction of Home Rule, and were either straining instead to see what shape it might take, or retreating to their seats in the countryside. The attentat in Sarajevo had not at first seemed very important. Not until the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia on 23 July were its possible consequences registered. Asquith, writing to his mistress the next evening, commented that a Balkan war could mean ‘Armageddon’ if it pulled in the rival continental powers, but ‘happily there seems to be no reason why we should be anything more than spectators.’ Three days later, on 27 July, Lewis Harcourt, the Colonial Secretary, counted eleven out of nineteen members of the government who shared this conviction, a ‘Peace Party which if necessary shall break up the Cabinet in the interest of our abstention.’
Yet within a week the Cabinet would be unbroken, and Britain at war. Darkest Days offers a vivid timeline of how this happened, as one calculated act of preemption, concealment and sabotage by the dominant trio under Asquith—Grey at the Foreign Office, Churchill at the Admiralty, and Haldane at the War Office—succeeded another, while the four-power crisis between Austria, Russia, Germany and France escalated on the continent. On 26 July, Churchill had already given a ‘stand fast order’ to the fleet at Portland, announcing it to the press the next morning, without informing the Cabinet. Two days later he sent it to war stations in the North Sea against the German fleet, again taking care not to consult the Cabinet, lest this ‘should mistakenly be considered a provocative action’. On the 29th Austria declared war on Serbia, and Russia ordered a general mobilization, for which it had secretly issued, with French encouragement, ‘partial’ instructions four days earlier. Bound in alliance to Austria, Germany now confronted the prospect of war not only with France, a contingency for which German military plans envisaged a swift advance on Paris through Belgium, but also Russia. Panicking at the news of Russian mobilization, Bethmann-Hollweg attempted to secure British neutrality by promising that if France were defeated, Germany would proceed to no annexations in Europe, leaving Belgium—post-hostilities—untouched, and taking only French colonies overseas, an offer brusquely dismissed as dishonourable by Grey and Asquith, ‘certain that the Cabinet would agree’.
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