Still more did I then, and do I still, respect them for the deliberate choice they made to accept what was certain to be a vivid, and might be a very dangerous unpopularity, when the first shots should be fired. These men were convinced that it would be to the advantage of their country if the Continental forces should be left to thrash out their own decisions. They were opposed, perhaps, to the majority of their countrymen at the time (it is not so sure; for the mass of their countrymen had hardly had time to decide, so swift was the last rush of events). They would certainly be opposed, as they knew, to the vast majority of their countrymen in a few days. They were the more English, the more characteristic of the blood which they boasted, in that they took such a decision fearlessly. I can believe that to this day the best of them still thinks that his judgment was sound and that great evils now passed, and other evils dreadfully threatening us now, more than ten years after, would have been saved us altogether, if England had refused war. But the best-instructed opinion, the opinion with the widest view, was opposed to them. War followed; with what full fruits only men now young can live to discover.
There is not perhaps in all history (of the sort which has full records behind it) any group of days on which men will debate more and will find it less easy to establish a permanent conclusion than those last days of July and first days of August, 1914. But there are certain structural lines supporting even the most confused and the most debated of records. Thus, men will never be exactly certain what Harold did at the Court of William, nor of how the first directive events of that great quarrel lay. Men will never arrive at a fixed and general conclusion upon the initiative responsible for the revolutionary wars, nor even, perhaps, for the renewed attack upon Napoleon, or by Napoleon, after Elba. But these debates are, for all that, built round a solid skeleton of certain conclusions, and in this great matter of the Great War I do not think that posterity will depart from the general conclusion of our own times (which is certainly mine) that an early declaration of the British attitude would have prevented war.
It is a question easily confused with a totally different one, and the two must be kept carefully apart. The _right_ of Great Britain to remain neutral should surely be admitted, not only in law but in common sense. In law there was no definite agreement with the French. There was no accepted obligation to support the French in the West or elsewhere. A great number of acts had been accomplished which could have had only such a support for their object; the military situation had been studied, contingent military dispositions had been carefully planned in detail. The general policy of the preceding years, especially after Agadir, had pointed to the same end; but the Government of this country had always, in the most insistent manner, affirmed and provided for its freedom of choice when the crisis should come. And the very fact that it had thus so continuously maintained that freedom of choice, and specifically asserted it, is proof that every other step, however obviously designed for common action in arms, was _not_ to be given the interpretation of a binding alliance.
Since this great point in history involves a moral judgment quite as much as the mere interpretation of texts, it should also, I think, be laid down that, in matters of life and death, a nation, like an individual, has the right to stretch even a formal text to the very limits of interpretation.
I would say that even if a formal and solemn alliance had existed, any one holding authority in England at that moment and conceiving that participation in the Continental war would ultimately ruin Great Britain, had a right to seek for any phrase in the written pact which could save his country from disaster—and such phrases can always be found. I will go further: I will say that the certitude of disaster on such a scale would excuse even a breach of faith: but I know that this is passing the bounds ordinarily allowed; and I say it only because there seems to me an implied distinction between war for a local object which could do no more than advantage or hurt a country somewhat, and war of a sort which this war turned out to be, wherein the whole structure of human society was imperilled. In the same way, if I have promised to help a man and support him in various details of his domestic life, even though I have taken good consideration for my services, I have the right to fly from his house if it catches fire in order to save my child from being burnt to death. A vast difference in the scale between the reasonably expected effects of a compact and the suddenly discovered real effects would seem to release a man from the obligation of that compact.
But in this case there was not even a definite compact. Therefore, no one could advance a moral plea against the hesitation which our politicians showed in that grave moment. No, what is to be advanced against the politicians who so lamentably bungled that affair is a charge drawn from the intellectual, not from the moral side of our nature. They acted stupidly, as indeed their trade leads men to act: for professional politics is a trade in which the sly outweigh the wise. It was bad judgment to leave the matter in doubt to the last; and the decision was deferred and deferred again, simply because your professional politician, always absorbed in a wretched personal intrigue, blinked and was bewildered by a great issue suddenly thrust upon him.
You will often hear it said war could not but come when once the three great Continental Powers had mobilised. It has been repeated that the act of mobilisation—of full mobilisation—renders war necessary. The statement is untrue. Certainly the French mobilisation did not, even up to the very last moment, render war necessary; and the same is true of the German.
Again, it is still said by fanatics that the Russian Government intended and provoked the war. And many men not fanatics, but ignorant of Europe, or at issue with Christendom, repeat the myth. Those who plead in favour of Prussia and of the German General Staff (they are numerous in England to-day) still pretend, as do all the German writers, that the mobilisation ordered from Berlin was but a reply to the earlier orders issued from Saint Petersburg.
History will not accept that. There is altogether too much against it. There is the connection between the ‘Lokal Anzeiger’ and the German General Staff. Still more there is the nature of German mobilisation, which was so designed that _preliminary_ orders were, to its general scheme, what _final_ orders were in any other country. The Prussian scheme of mobilisation may be compared to a loaded gun. If I know that a man has his gun loaded and he aims it at me, my then loading mine is not a provocation.
Much more is there, against so strained and distorted a piece of special pleading, the truth obvious to any one, even the most superficial, who had seen Germany since 1911: the whole mass of that population supported its government in a determination for what was believed would prove a short and highly lucrative campaign, and one not only highly lucrative, but settling forever the security of that great experiment which Prussia had not quite consolidated by her series of rapid victories a lifetime before.
But though the German mobilisation was indeed proof of the truth that Prussia and her subjects desired war, that war so eagerly desired was a Continental war only. The Continental war envisaged at Berlin excluded the factor of English intervention. Not that it was believed such intervention would make any great difference in what was assumed would be an immediate and crushing victory in the West, but that sea power continuously exercised could not but have given pause upon what Berlin thought would be the probable result of the struggle in the East. Granted an immediate and certain German victory in the West (as a fact it failed), there would still be an Eastern campaign which the German General Staff believed to be necessarily prolonged and which they dreaded; blockade during _that_ trial they dared not face.
Two men, I think, deserved well of their country at that moment, granted that an entry into the war sooner or later was inevitable. One was Mr. Winston Churchill, who upon his own initiative mobilised the Fleet; and the other was Lord Haldane, who convinced his colleagues of the nature of the peril and who, it should be remembered, had made possible the coöperation of Britain in the war by his scheme for mobilisation. All that followed was based upon the work originally done by him at the War Office at a time when, to the great bulk of his countrymen, the idea of such a conflict was still quite unfamiliar and its enormous implications incredible.
For the rest, it is neither generous nor wise to pick out any particular set of misjudgments; for the whole of Europe, all its culture and all its intelligence, was at fault in estimates of the war. You may say of all the mass of stuff that has been written since the Armistice that it can be graded in degrees of intelligence according to its admission of the unexpected and the fortuitous throughout those terrible years. The less intelligent the writer the more he ascribes this or that development to a plan; the more intelligent he is the more he admits factors independent of our wills and our intelligences: factors proceeding, as our fathers would have said, and as I believe, consciously from a Will above humanity or (as it is the modern fashion to affirm) coming into human affairs from _no_ god, but blindly—at any rate, factors external to human direction. In the individual actions can be traced clearly enough what measure of conclusion their success involved, or what lack of it their failure was due to. But, in the general lines of the turmoil, it is not so. Here and there a chance guess proved right, but it was no more than a guess, unless we except Lord Kitchener’s warning that the war would last at least three years: he gave it when most men thought it might not last three months.