A world on the brink... and a British PM furious his weekend with his young mistress was ruined: The human stories behind the outbreak of the First World War

In the first extract on Saturday from his masterly new book marking the centenary of World War I, Max Hastings told how an unpopular Austrian aristocrat blundered into the path of an assassin’s bullet in Serbia — and how his death was the trigger for the horrific conflagration that would follow. Here, he tells how a largely doubting Britain was finally persuaded to enter a war which would cost it a million lives . . .

Newly-arrived in France to fight the Hun, the cocky soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force were greeted like heroes.

‘We were seized by the local inhabitants and dosed with cider,’ recalled Lt Guy Harcourt-Vernon.

That first night in August 1914, the cafés in the town square of Amiens rang with toasts and rousing choruses of God Save The King.

Only the old women who supervised the local public baths shook their heads and mopped their eyes as they muttered to themselves: ‘Pauvres petits anglais, ils vont bientôt être tués’ — ‘poor English boys, soon they will be dead.’

War opinions: Prime Minister Herbert Asquith told his mistress Venetia Stanley that the Austrian people were' the stupidest' in Europe

It was a terrible — and true — prediction. Close to a million British fighting men would lose their lives in the four years of World War I, the centenary of whose outbreak takes place next year.

The first deaths came soon enough — though to begin with they were mainly German.

Deployed to positions just outside the Belgian town of Mons, the British soldiers peppered the Kaiser’s oncoming army with state-of-the-art Lee-Enfield rifles and Vickers machine guns.

‘They came at us in solid, square blocks,’ a British NCO recalled, ‘and you couldn’t help hitting them.’ ‘We steadied our rifles and took aim,’ said another, ‘and they were simply blasted away to Heaven by a volley at 700 yards.’

But the Germans took their casualties and kept coming in overwhelming numbers, supported by cannons and howitzers.

‘God! How their artillery do fire!’ exclaimed a frightened British soldier at what was a new and unwelcome experience for almost every member of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF).



Confidante: Prime Minister Asquith told the truth to Venetia Stanley

‘There were four of us in a rifle-pit,’ recalled a private, ‘and our officer walked over to us and I remember thinking: “Get down, you silly bugger.”

‘The poor man was killed. Then the man next to me was hit. He was firing away and suddenly he gave a grunt and lay still. I’d never seen a dead man before.’

Harcourt-Vernon wrote: ‘Funny how everyone ducks at the sound of a bullet. It is past you by then, but down goes your head every time.’

Soon, too many bullets and shells were passing for any man to have time to duck as they rammed clip after five-round clip into their hot weapons.

The British fell back until, by nightfall, the Germans — though they had taken colossal casualties — had captured Mons.

In that first encounter, the BEF lost an estimated 1,600 men, many of them taken prisoner, and was now on the run.

The next day there were brave rallies. The 9th Lancers and Dragoon Guards charged German guns across a mile of open ground, an extraordinary piece of folly even by the standards of British cavalry.



They were led by a colonel who had once won a Grand National steeplechase.

But nothing could stop the rout as the BEF was systematically bested by the German forces.



As they retreated from an enemy they had been convinced they would trounce, a major in the Grenadiers described ‘a long and trying march in great heat and over very bad and dusty roads.

'The men very tired and rather puzzled as to what we are at’.

Many must have wondered what they were doing there in the first place. It was a good question.

How and why Britain had joined in what was essentially a solely European war was largely down to one man — Sir Edward Grey, Britain’s Foreign Secretary.

In many ways he was a strange choice for that important position. He disliked ‘Abroad’ and spoke no foreign languages — indeed he was so taciturn generally that he rarely spoke at all.

An official who worked closely with him thought him ‘a futile, useless fool’. A leading general dismissed him as ‘ignorant, vain and weak’.

Yet this was the man who found himself conducting Britain’s response to the outbreak of international posturing, sabre-rattling and mobilising of armies that in the summer of 1914 threatening to escalate into world war.

Outbreak: British troops marching through the streets of London after war is declared in 1914

He is usually depicted as a gentle, civilised figure who lamented the coming of war — as exemplified in his famously nostalgic line that ‘the lamps are going out all over Europe [and] we shall not see them lit again in our life-time’.

Yet he more than any other single person — including the always belligerent Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty — was the one who insisted that Britain fulfil its international obligations and stand up against the German bully.

As Austria launched its invasion of Serbia, the Russian Tsar ordered the mobilisation of his vast conscript armies and the German Kaiser cast covetous eyes on France, opinion in Britain to these continental shenanigans was mixed.

There was little enthusiasm for the autocratic Tsar. ‘Don’t trust the Russians!’ whispered one ambassador.

TIPPERARY: THE HIT THE MAIL MADE

As they first disembarked in France, the Irish soldiers of the Connaught Rangers burst into ‘It’s A Long Way To Tipperary’. George Curnock, Daily Mail star reporter, heard the song and mentioned it in a dispatch.

The paper’s news editor wrote in his diary: ‘The chief [Lord Northcliffe] has given us orders to boom it, to print the music so that everybody shall know it.

'He says, thanks to Curnock’s genius, we shall soon have everybody singing it.’

And so they did.

Prime Minister Herbert Asquith confided to the Archbishop of Canterbury that the Serbs deserved ‘a through thrashing’, but to his 26-year-old girlfriend he was less diplomatic.

Although married to his second wife, a baronet’s daughter, after his first died of typhoid, he told young Venetia Stanley: ‘The Austrians are quite the stupidest people in Europe’.



But the idea of backing the French against the Germans had many hands wringing in horror.

With history on her side, one ancient lady, the great-niece of the Duke of Wellington, declared: ‘It’s not the Germans but the French I’m frightened of.’

Many of the population endorsed the idea of neutrality, feeling that what was happening in Europe was a sideshow best not to be drawn into.

The Cabinet was split. Asquith, Grey and the ‘war-painted’ Churchill (as the prime minister called him) wanted to stand foursquare with the French, but David Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer, stubbornly dug his heels in for staying out of a continental conflict.

The prime minister, meanwhile, was furious that the crisis meant the ‘bitter disappointment’ of cancelling a country weekend flirting with the alluring Miss Stanley.

But he was sufficiently on the ball that Sunday — August 2 — to warn the German ambassador over breakfast that there would be dire consequences if German carried out its threat to march on France via neutral Belgium.

Britain, he pointed out in no uncertain terms, was a guarantor of Belgian neutrality under a 75-year-old international treaty and would not flinch from its obligations.

By now the countdown to war was accelerating fast.

Prepare for battle: 'The Daily Mail War Map - 1914', which showed the war strength of the Great Powers, was sold via the newspaper for 2 shillings

In Germany, trains crammed with troops were leaving Cologne every three or four minutes heading for the Belgian border, while a message received by the Belgian king demanded passage for the German army through his country.

He refused point blank, and the people of Brussels erupted with pride, filling the streets with flags.

‘Oh, the poor fools,’ a German envoy declared as he watched this patriotic display. ‘Why don’t they get out of the way of the steamroller? We don’t want to hurt them, but if they stand in our way they will be ground into the dirt.’

That evening, the Germans notified the British government of their intention to march through King Albert’s country, with or without his consent.

It has sometimes been suggested that the Belgians would have been better off bowing to the inevitable, and granting the German troops free passage. But why should any sovereign nation have done so?



Germany’s invasion of Belgium constituted an affront to morality as well as to the European order — the view now adopted by most of the British people, as well as by their government.

Early days of power: Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, was urging the Cabinet to take action on Europe

This was the tipping point.

The moment the Kaiser’s armies crossed into Belgium, any pretence of German innocence ended. The perceived martyrdom of King Albert and his people rallied to the cause of war millions of British people who had hitherto opposed it.

Some maintain this was a mere pretext — a fig leaf — since Foreign Secretary Grey and his colleagues were bent upon belligerence even before the issue of Belgium emerged.



But I doubt they could have carried their point but for Germany’s violation of Belgian neutrality. Whereas they recoiled from going to war to support Serbia, the British people seized upon this as a just casus belli.



At last they identified moral certainty amid a sea of Balkan and European confusions — the doubter-in-chief, Lloyd George, among them.

He eventually fell into line as Asquith gave the order to mobilise the Army.

Captain Maurice Festing, of the Royal Marines, got the call while playing in a cricket match.



He was 66 not out and had just smashed a ball through the window of the sergeants’ mess.

On the afternoon of August 3, Grey rose in the Commons to invite the House to back Britain going to war.



‘British interests, British honour and British obligation’ were at stake, he told them with a passion this mild-mannered politician had never displayed before in his 29 years as an MP.

‘Could this country stand by and watch the direst crime that ever stained the face of history, and thus become participators in the sin?’ he demanded.

‘We would sacrifice our respect and good name and reputation’ if we did not take a stand ‘against the unmeasured aggrandisement’ of the Kaiser’s Germany.

The stunned Commons received his eloquence with overwhelming acclaim. Opposition to war melted away.

Just after 8 o’clock the next morning, August 4, German troops duly crossed the Belgian border, and London sent an ultimatum to Berlin demanding they withdraw by midnight — 11pm in London.

War supporter: Sir Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon and Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, was the person most keen to take up arms against Germany

As darkness fell in Downing Street that night, the Cabinet sat together until Big Ben struck the first note of eleven. Twenty minutes later, a War Telegram was dispatched in plain language to the British Army.

In the Royal Marines mess at Chatham, a waiter handed a telegram to the corps commandant, who read it aloud: ‘Commence hostilities against Germany at once.’ This was received with applause by the assembled officers, many of whom would be dead within a year.

The civilian population rallied to the cause, too.

Diarist and civil servant Norman Macleod was astonished by the ‘extraordinary change in public feeling’. Twenty-four hours previously there had been a strong anti-war sentiment, he wrote, ‘but German refusal to respect neutrality of Belgium absolutely destroyed it’.

There was now ‘a feeling of complete confidence in the government’.

WITHIN HOURS, MI5 SMASHES A SPY RING

As the last hours of peace ticked away, Walter Rimann, a German spy who had been masquerading as a language teacher in Hull, hurriedly caught the Zeebrugge ferry. He fled just in time to avoid arrest.

For days, Vernon Kell, director of MI5, had been at his desk around the clock, organising the round-up of known German intelligence agents.

Although his infant organisation had a staff of only 17, he had forged effective links with county chief constables. Now they pounced and 22 arrests were swiftly made.

Among them was Karl Ernst, a barber in Pentonville, North London, whose spy-craft consisted of approaching customers who were seamen for information.

He also acted as the spy ring’s ‘postman’, receiving letters with instructions from Germany and passing them (and payment) to other agents in Britain.

Like most of those caught, he had been identified through the interception of his correspondence, under Home Office warrant.

A few, like Rimann, got away and others may have remained undetected, but German wartime intelligence in Britain never recovered from the initial round-up.

Its performance was so poor that Berlin was unaware that the British Expeditionary Force had been dispatched to France until it actually got there.

At an English country tennis party, the writer Jerome K. Jerome expressed ‘relief and thankfulness.

'I was so afraid Grey would climb down at the last moment. It was Asquith I was doubtful of. I didn’t think the old man had the grit.

'Thank God, we shan’t read “Made in Germany” for some little time to come’.

Some opposition remained. The writer Bernard Shaw wired his German translator: ‘You and I are at war. Absurdity can go no further.



'My friendliest wishes go with you under all circumstances.’

Even after war was declared, impassioned dissenters remained.

On August 5, C. P. Scott argued in the Manchester Guardian he both owned and edited: ‘By some hidden contract England has been technically committed behind her back to the ruinous madness of a share in the violent gamble of a war between two militarist leagues.

‘It will be a war in which we risk everything of which we are proud, and in which we stand to gain nothing. Some day we will regret it.’

Many British people in the 21st century believe that Scott was right, chiefly in the light of the horrors that followed.



They are un-persuaded that it was necessary to resist the Kaiser’s Germany at such cost. Many have argued in the century since 1914 that the price of participation in the war was so appalling that no purpose could conceivably justify it. More than a few blame Grey for willing Britain’s involvement.

But, granted Germany’s determination to dominate Europe and what that would have meant for Britain, would any foreign secretary have acted responsibly if he had taken no steps designed to avert such an outcome?

Dominance was the purpose of the Kaiser’s Germany, achieved by peaceful means if possible, but by war if necessary.

And though its policies cannot be equated with that of the Nazis a generation later, they could scarcely be described as enlightened. German behaviour during the invasion of Belgium and France included massacres of civilians endorsed at the highest level.

Though these pale against what took place in World War II, they nonetheless convey a profoundly disturbing image of the regime that aspired to rule Europe in 1914.

A few modern sensationalists suggest that a German victory would merely have created an entity resembling the European Union half a century before it was created, but this seems to me frivolous nonsense.

Nor would there have been a happy outcome for Britain if we had stayed out of the war. It is implausible that a victorious Germany would have been content to make a generous accommodation with a neutral Britain.

The resulting war: British infantrymen occupying a rudimentary shallow trench in a devastated landscape in France before an advance in 1916

I think it unlikely that any course of action adopted by Asquith’s government could have averted war in 1914. I cannot conceive of any alternative British diplomatic path which would have persuaded Germany that the risk of war was unacceptable.

The Germans — contemptuous of Britain’s military prowess — had already discounted British intervention. They were also undeterred by the economic perils posed by the Royal Navy’s ability to impose a blockade, because they intended to win the war in six weeks, before economic sanctions mattered.

Only by allowing the Germans to have their way at gunpoint in Belgium and indeed across Europe could a general conflict have been avoided — and Britain, rightly, was not prepared to do that.

There was, however, one grievous British error at this time — one which those poor British soldiers fleeing for their lives from Mons were now suffering from.

The government’s mistake in the summer of 1914 was to suppose the nation could maintain its cherished balance of power on the continent without a credible mass of soldiers to support its diplomacy. ‘What happens now?’ Churchill had demanded as he and Grey left the House of Commons after winning the vote for war.

It was a good question. The decision had been taken to fight, but what sort of war we were going into and how precisely we would engage the enemy was left up in the air.

The initial moves were tentative. There was no full-scale mobilisation and no enlistment of volunteers, as in other countries. Instead, the small BEF consisting of just six divisions of regular soldiers was assembled — ‘our funny little army’ in the words of General Sir Henry Wilson, director of military operations.

The BEF trundled around France in the weeks ahead, uncertain of its role, before meeting its match at Mons.

Here was a manifestation of a huge, historic British folly, repeated over many centuries including today — the adoption of gesture strategy, committing small forces as an earnest of good intentions, heedless of their gross inadequacy for the military purpose at hand.

The size and nature of Britain’s military commitment would have to change drastically, and it did as more troops poured across the Channel in the years ahead.

But almost a century on, it seems there are still lessons to be learned from 1914.