The Mirrors of Downing Street | Page 7

1870-74;
Secretary to Earl Granville, 1872-74; Embassy at Berlin, 1874-76; at
Pekin, 1876-78; Chargé, Athens, 1884-85; Teheran, 1885-88;
Consul-General, Budapest, 1888-93; Embassy, Constantinople, 1894;
Minister, Morocco, 1895-1904; Ambassador, Madrid, 1904-5;
Ambassador, Russia, 1905-10; Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs,
1910-16. Author of the History of the German Constitution, 1873.
[Illustration: LORD CARNOCK]

CHAPTER II
LORD CARNOCK
_"Usually the greatest boasters are the smallest workers. The deep
rivers pay a larger tribute to the sea than shallow brooks, and yet empty
themselves with less noise."_--SECKER.
One evening in London I mentioned to a man well versed in foreign
affairs that I was that night meeting Lord Carnock at dinner. "Ah!" he
exclaimed, "the man who made the war."
I mentioned this 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