Tears and Bows: WW1 Ambassadors and Declarations of War March 4, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback
A recent post looked at the tensions created by ambassadors declaring war in WW2. Today, instead, some descriptions of declarations of war from World War 1. The initial impression is that there was more formality and more old world charm. Some of the ambassadors may have believed they would be back in their host capitals by Christmas… Here to start with is a very representative description from de Bunsen, Britain’s ambassador in Vienna, 12 Aug: the last declaration of war among the large powers. It gives a nice sense of ‘nothing personal, old chap’.
Count Berchtold received me at midday. I delivered my message, for which his Excellency did not seem to be unprepared… His Excellency received my communication with the courtesy which never leaves him. He deplored the unhappy complications which were drawing such good friends as Austria and England into war… I explained in a few words how circumstances had forced this unwelcome conflict upon us. We both avoided useless argument… I took leave of Count Berchtold with sincere regret, having received from the day of my arrival in Vienna, not quite nine months before, many marks of friendship and consideration from his Excellency. As I left I begged his Excellency to present my profound respects to the Emperor Francis Joseph, together with an expression of my hope that His Majesty would pass through these sad times with unimpaired health and strength. Count Berchtold was pleased to say he would deliver my message.
De Bunsen and his family and co-workers were brought to the station by an armed police guard and treated, as he remembered in a memoir in early September 1914, with extraordinary consideration by the Viennese.
Similar goodbyes took place in London. Von Lichnowsky the German ambassador in London was noted in Britain and Berlin as being a partisan against war generally and particularly between his home and adopted country. His loyalty was first to Germany, but the act of declaring war on Britain seems to have been physically painful to him: ‘Such was the end of my London mission. It was wrecked, not by the wiles of the British, but by the wiles of our policy.’ In the days leading up to the declaration, in a private meeting with Asquith, he actually burst into tears. This is his later description of the hours following the declaration of war
Before my departure Sir E. Grey [British foreign secretary] received me, on the fifth, at his house. I had called at his request. He was deeply moved. He told me he would always be prepared to mediate… The arrangements for our departure were perfectly dignified and calm. The King had previously sent his equerry, Sir E. Ponsonby, to express his regrets at my departure and that he could not see me himself. Princess Louise wrote to me that the whole family were sorry we were leaving. Mrs. Asquith and other friends came to the Embassy to take leave. A special train took us to Harwich, where a guard of honour was drawn up for me. I was treated like a departing Sovereign.
Needless to say these niceties were nowhere observed in the Second World War.
There was anger, of course, at times in 1914. Von Schoen, the decent German ambassador to Paris (pictured above), was jostled on his way to the French embassy. His leave-taking of Viviani, the French Foreign Secretary, was restricted to a cold bow on either side: though both men’s view of the war was essentially the same, they didn’t want it. Edward Goschen, British ambassador, described a tense but controlled meeting (‘somewhat painful interview’) between himself and the German foreign office: in which the famous phrase about a ‘scrap of paper’ was uttered. When Portallès, the German ambassador to Moscow, met Sazonov, the Russian Foreign Minister, and was refused a compromise he handed over the document that meant war ‘deeply moved and breathing heavily’: according to the Russian account he accidentally handed over the wrong document! But the meeting where tempers really flared was interestingly enough one that did not involve war: that between the German ambassador at Rome, von Flotow and the Italian leadership who told him that they would absolutely not enter the war. This was a sensible Italian decision that the country foolishly reversed a year later betraying the histrionics that von Flotow was put through. Though again not a declaration of war it is worth remembering the meeting between the Austrian ambassador at Belgrade and the Russian ambassador Hartwig in the middle of the July crisis, where, in a tense encounter, 10 July, Hartwig keeled over from a massive heart attack: the Serbs, of course, blamed Viennese poison, some even claiming that Hartwig’s chair had been electrified!
Other interesting WW1 declarations: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
14 Mar 2015: An outstanding piece from Stephen D. Loved this. ‘Reading your post on ambassadors at the start of Big Mistake One, I was struck by their cosmopolitan origins. You mentioned de Bunsen and Goschen as being, despite their surnames, British ambassadors in Vienna and Berlin, Hartwig as the German-named Russian ambassador in Belgrade, Lichnowski as German ambassador in London (where one could add his equally-misleadingly-named Russian counterpart was Benkendorff), and the apparently French Pourtalès as German ambassador in St Petersburg (where the Greek-sounding Paléologue represented France). I should add that the Slavic-sounding Tschirschky was German ambassador in Vienna. Diplomacy is perhaps unusually likely to generate such confusion. Domestic politics seems less affected: apart from the Slav-sounding Jagow as German foreign minister, I can only think of three other examples, all in France. There Viviani, Foreign Minister and later briefly PM, was not Italian. Albert Thomas, Minister for Munitions, was not a crony of Lloyd George’s. The great and resolute Gallieni was a non-Italian Military Governor of Paris in the crisis of 1914; when the French Government fled, as is customary on such occasions, to Bordeaux, shouting over their shoulders instructions to less eminent Frenchmen to stand firm. I wish I could remember more than a fragment of a version of the Marseillaise adapted for the occasion:
Aux gares, citoyens!
Montez en vos wagons!
Fuyons, fuyons
Qu’un Boche obscur
Parait aux horizons!
But I digress.
Several WWI fighter aces were also apparently misaligned. Who would have thought from their names that Arigi (32 victories), Ambrogi (14), Beaulieu-Marconnay (25), Ehrlich (18), Linke-Crawford (27), Marinovitch (21), Nungesser (45), Stojstaveljevic (10), Veltjens (35) and Waddington (12) were respectively Czech in Austrian service, French, German, French, Austrian, French, French, Austrian, German and French?
At sea, there was some room for confusion. Eduard Capelle was a German admiral; Eberhardt and von Essen, Russian; de Robeck, British.
On land, more room; especially in the Tannenberg campaign, where François and Prittwitz were German generals, and Paul von Rennenkampf was Russian. Elsewhere Svetoslav Boroevic was an Austrian general; Diaz was neither Spanish nor Portuguese, but Italian; Wenzel von Plehve, Russian.
And of course, French was Irish.’ Thanks Stephen
