War and the Big Picture 2: The Map Man

In the previous post on this subject we saw how Britain was keen to join in the great conflict of 1914, despite General Foch, then chief of France’s War College, rejecting (in 1910) our offer of military assistance and Germany looking for our neutrality (in 1912) in return for their not enlarging their fleet to rival ours.

Pace Foch’s stubborn pride, when King Edward VII toured Europe in 1908 the French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau told him

“When the time comes when France needs help, England’s sea power will not be enough... Napoleon was beaten at Waterloo, not Trafalgar.”

The King went on to visit the Russian Czar and the German Ambassador reported to Kaiser Wilhelm that Edward desired peace. The Kaiser wrote on the report:

“Lies. He wants war. But I have to start it so he does not have the odium.”

The 1839 Treaty of London provided that excuse.

As early as 1906 Colonel Repington, on behalf of our War Office, met the French military attaché in London, Major Victor Huguet and sought a confidential assurance that France would not be the first to violate Belgian neutrality as such an act would force Great Britain into the field to defend its obligations under the Treaty.

Eight years later on July 31, 1914, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey dispatched identical notes to both France and Germany asking if they would engage to respect the neutrality of Belgium. The French agreed the same day but the Germans declined, their Foreign Secretary stating that a reply would reveal their military campaign plan.

Bingo.

But why? Why did we want to pitch in?

It was going to be about more than historic Franco-German rivalry.

Clemenceau saw it as not only an issue for wider Europe but an existential issue for his country. On 5 May 1914 his newspaper l’Homme Libre stated in an editorial

“One would have to be deliberately blind not to see that the [German] lust for power, the impact of which makes Europe tremble each day, has fixed as its policy the extermination of France.”

Gallic excitability and overstatement fogs the lens: Berlin’s real objective was an invasion of Russia and Germany needed to secure her western border first and fast; crossing Belgium was to be the quick way. With France not annihilated but subjugated Germany could then turn East.

So the big picture as we saw it was, as when we had fought Napoleon, stopping anyone becoming master of Europe.

But the even bigger picture was the struggle for, or prevention of, mastery of the whole vast Eurasian landmass.

Which leads us to a damp and dreary day in London, at the Savile Row headquarters of the Royal Geographical Society. There, on 25 January 1904, a distinguished geographer called Halford Mackinder gave a lecture that some say established him as the father of geopolitical theory.

The next post will discuss this in detail.

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As before, here we have drawn on early chapters of Barbara Tuchman’s meticulous study “The Guns of August.”