The Mirrors of Downing Street | Page 7

remark to Lord Carnock. He smiled and made answer, "What charming nonsense!" I asked him what he thought was in my friend's mind. "Oh, I see what he meant," was the answer; "but it is a wild mind that would say any one man made the war." Later, after some remarks which I do not feel myself at liberty to repeat, he said: "Fifty years hence I think a historian will find it far more difficult than we do now to decide who made the war."
If Lord Carnock were to write his memoirs, not only would that volume help the historian to follow the immediate causes of the war to one intelligible origin, but it would also afford the people of England an opportunity of seeing the conspicuous difference between a statesman of the old school and a politician of these latter days.
When I think of this most amiable and cultivated person, and compare his way of looking at the evolution of human life with Mr. Lloyd George's way of reading the political heavens, a sentence in Bagehot's essay on Charles Dickens comes into my mind: "There is nothing less like the great lawyer, acquainted with broad principles and applying them with distinct deduction, than the attorney's clerk who catches at small points like a dog biting at flies."
No one could be less like the popular politician of our very noisy days than this slight and gentle person whose refinement of mind reveals itself in a face almost ascetic, whose intelligence is of a wide, comprehensive, and reflecting order, and whose manner is certainly the last thing in the world that would recommend itself to the mind of an advertising agent. But there is no living politician who watched so intelligently the long beginnings of the war or knew so certainly in the days of tension that war had come, as this modest and gracious gentleman whose devotion to principle and whose quiet faith in the power of simple honour had outwitted the chaotic policy and the makeshift diplomacy of the German long before the autumn of 1914.
This may be said without revealing any State secret or breaking any private confidence:
As Sir Arthur Nicolson, our Ambassador at St. Petersburg, Lord Carnock won for England, as no other man had done before him, the love of Russia. The rulers of Russia trusted him. He was their friend in a darkness which had begun to alarm them, a darkness which made them conscious of their country's weakness, and which brought to their ears again and again the rumbles of approaching storm. Lord Carnock, sincerely loving these people, received their confidence as one friend receives the confidence of another. His advice was honourable advice. He counselled these friends to set their house in order and to stand firm in the conviction of their strength. Their finances were a chaos, their army was disorganized; let them begin in those quarters; let them bring order into their finances and let them reorganize their army.
While he was at St. Petersburg, after a wide experience in other countries, he twice saw Russia humiliated by Germany. Twice he witnessed the agony of his Russian friends in having to bow before the threats of Prussia. Remember that the rulers of Russia in those days were the most charming and cultivated people in the world, whereas the Prussian as a diplomatist was the same Prussian whom, even as an ally of ours in 1815, Croker found "very insolent, and hardly less offensive to the English than to the French."[1] The Russians felt those humiliations as a gentleman would feel the bullying of an upstart.
Lord Carnock was at the Foreign Office in July, 1914. He alone knew that Russia would fight. For the rest of mankind, certainly for the German Kaiser, it was to be another bloodless humiliation of the Russian Bear. Admiral von Tirpitz wanted war: Bethmann-Hollweg did not. The great majority of the German people, in whom a genuine fear of Russia had increased under the astute propaganda of the War Party, hoped that the sword had only to be flashed in Russia's face for that vast barbarian to cower once again. Few statesmen in Europe thought otherwise. Sir Edward Grey, I have good reason to think, did not consider that Russia would fight. He erred with that great number of educated Germans who thought the sword had only to be rattled a little more loudly in the scabbard for Russia to weaken, and for Germany to gain, without cost, the supreme object of her policy--an increasing ascendancy in the Balkans. But this time Russia was ready, and this time Lord Carnock knew Russia would fight. I am not sure that Lord Carnock was not the only statesman in Europe who possessed this knowledge--the knowledge on which everything hung.
It