How telegraphy reshaped international politics
Like most new technology, telegraphy had a mixed reception from the authorities. Yes, it was good that news travelled fast, but it was less good that fast replies were needed. Edmond Harrison, Permanent Under-Secretary to the Foreign Office from 1854 to 1873, complained that the telegraph tended to make every person in a hurry, “and I do not know that with our business it is very desirable that it should be so for it tempted officials to answer off-hand points which had much better be considered.” Sir Horace Rumbold, British Ambassador to Vienna, deplored “the telegraphic demoralisation of those who formerly had to act for themselves and are now content to be at the end of the wire”. Similar comment was made by General Pelissier, the Commander of the French Army in the Crimean War. At the receiving end of the Paris-Crimea telegraph line, he had to listen to advice from Napoleon III who, apparently, believed in the sideways inheritability of military prowess.
Sometimes fast service was required, but the infrastructure was not there as yet. The news of the military disaster, known as the Indian Mutiny, came to London by a tortuous route. It started in Lucknow on 10 May, 1857. The report requesting help went by telegraph from Lucknow to Calcutta, by traditional overland transport to Bombay, by boat to Suez, overland to Alexandria and again by boat to Trieste, the nearest telegraph station. The message from Lucknow to Trieste travelled for 40 days. The British Government spent vast sums in ensuring uninterrupted communications with India, but it took time. It did not work properly until 1866.
There were other consequences of having or not having telegraphic communications. In 1870, the Ems telegram played a significant role in the outbreak of war between France and Prussia. Events started in Spain two years earlier when a pronunciamiento, something between a palace revolution and a coup d’etat, took place in Madrid: Isabel II was deposed from the throne. The reason was not her policies – she never pretended to have any – it was her choice of lovers.
Having got rid of Isabel II the Spaniards decided that they did want a monarch after all. Unfortunately, under the circumstances it was difficult to find anyone even mildly interested in the job. Those to whom the crown was offered politely but firmly declined. In desperation, the Spaniards approached Leopold who belonged to the Catholic branch of the Hohenzollern family. He thought he might as well have a go and said so to the Spanish delegate on 19 June 1870. And that is where the telegraph comes into the story. The delegate sent a coded telegram to Madrid saying that he would return by 26 June and present the results of his negotiations to the Cortes, which was to remain in session until 1 July. Unfortunately, owing to an error by a cipher-clerk, the date recorded was 9 July. Clearly it would have been too much to ask the members of the Cortes to brave the oppressive heat of Madrid until 9 July, so the session was prorogued until November. When the delegate arrived on 26 June and found the Parliament building deserted, he had to give a reason for the recall of the Cortes. The whole thing came out into the open. There was no chance of presenting the French with a fait accompli.
The news reached Paris on 3 July. The French military in the court of Napoleon III had a look at the map and discovered that France was threatened by Hohenzollerns on all sides. The Emperor of the French demanded that the King of Prussia, Wilhelm I, should persuade his distant relative to renounce his candidature. Wilhelm had for a long time been of the opinion that the Spanish throne was more bother than it was worth so he was quite willing to use his influence. Leopold, never too keen to take the job, was ready to call the whole thing off. On 12 July Leopold’s father renounced the throne on behalf of his son. That would have been the end of the story but for the ambitions of Napoleon III and of the Bonapartists in the court. They wanted to humiliate Prussia. The French Ambassador was Instructed to demand that Wilhelm should give an assurance that Leopold’s candidature would never be renewed. That was a bit too much for the King to swallow. He said, no.
With a bit of luck the crisis could have still been resolved had the normal procedures of diplomacy, valid in pre-telegraph times, been followed. The King taking the waters at the summer resort of Ems would have then sent a letter to Bismarck in Berlin who presumably would have travelled to Ems and after an audience with the King would have drafted a reply to the French. Since the King was 73 years old and did not hanker after military glory it is quite likely that the message reaching the French would have been worded with care to avoid an immediate confrontation. As it happened the King sent a long, rumbling telegram from Ems to Berlin describing his earlier meeting with the French Ambassador. At the end of the telegram he gave free hand to Bismarck to communicate what had been said to the ambassadors and the press. Bismarck first consulted the military. When he was assured that they were ready for war without any delay he had a go at the telegram. He did not change a single sentence. He just made it a lot shorter. The text the world got to know was rather terse.
“After the news of the renunciation of the Prince of Hohenzollern had been officially communicated to the imperial government of France by the royal government of Spain, the French Ambassador at Ems further demanded of his Majesty the King that he would authorize him to telegraph to Paris that his Majesty the King thereupon decided not to receive the French Ambassador again, and sent to tell him through the aid-the-camp on duty that his Majesty had nothing further to communicate to the ambassador.”
The French recognised a snub when they saw one. They did not even wait for their Ambassador to return from Ems. They declared war on 15 July. Seven weeks later the war was over. The principal French army and Napoleon III himself surrendered at Sedan.
In spite of her victory, Germany remained, in the words of Bismarck, a saturated power with no ambition of her own that could lead to war. The situation changed, however, in 1890 when Bismarck was dismissed by the young Kaiser, Wilhelm II. Germany started to flex her muscles. Britain’s domination of the world suddenly became threatened by a new power. The first indication of such a threat came with the so-called Kruger telegram sent by the Kaiser to the President of the Transval. The year was 1896, just after the Jameson raid was repulsed by the Boers. The British aim of acquiring the mines of Johannesburg suffered a setback. Th Kaiser made no secret of his sympathies as the text of the telegram shows:
“I sincerely congratulate you that, without appealing for the help of friendly powers, you with your people, by your own energy against the armed hordes which as disturbers of the peace broke into your country, have succeeded in re-establishing peace and maintaining the independence of your country against attacks from without.”
So the Germans had started to be troublesome-a bit unexpected from an old ally and from one that was ruled by the grandson of Queen Victoria. At the same time conflict was also looming with France, Britain’s traditional enemy.
Having lost the war of 1870-71, France looked for consolation in colonial expansion. The Fashoda crisis came about because the ambitions of France and Britain could not be simultaneously satisfied. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century both powers pushed forward the borders of their colonies with unseemly haste. The great British dream was to have a broad red stripe on the map stretching from Cairo to Cape-town along the Eastern coast of Africa. The French counter-dream was a continuous blue swath from Dakar on the Atlantic to Djibouti on the Red Sea. According to the rules of geometry at least one of the two powers was to fail in her ambition.
The French champion was Major Marchand whereas the colours of Britain were hoisted by General Kitchener. Marchand started the journey from the French Congo in West Africa in January 1897. The journey took quite some time. He arrived at Fashoda on the Nile on 6 July 1898 where he speedily unfurled the French tricolour. For the British the journey would have taken much less time since the Nile was navigable to Fashoda. Their difficulty was not the terrain and the elements but rather the Mahdi and his followers the dervishes, who some 17 years earlier had overrun the Sudan, taken Khartoum and killed General Gordon. Kitchener came with an army of some 26,000 men. He defeated the dervishes at Omdurman on 24 August. He did not stop for long celebrating his victory. By 10 September he was ready to sail to Fashoda 500 miles up the Nile. He arrived with five gunboats nine days later only to find Marchand in possession of the old fort. The meeting between Marchand and Kitchener was not entirely cordial. Neither of them was willing to yield but at least they observed the formalities of civilised behaviour. Some lukewarm whisky was offered to Marchand who accepted it but, as he remarked afterwards, drinking “cet affreux alcool enfume”, was one of the greatest sacrifices he has ever undertaken in the service of his country. At the end they agreed to disagree and let their respective governments sort things out. Kitchener planted the Egyptian flag, left a battalion of Sudanese infantry behind and sailed back to Omdurman from where he had a telegraph line to London. He described Marchand’s predicament in vivid terms:
“He is short of ammunition and supplies… He is cut off from the interior and his water transport is quite inadequate. He has no following in the country and had we been a fortnight later in crushing the Khalifa nothing would have saved him and his expedition from being annihilated by the dervishes. Marchand quite realises the futility of all their efforts and he seems quite as anxious to return as we are to facilitate his departure.”
Soldiers are usually pictured as blunt fellows who are in the habit of blurting out the truth. This particular telegram and those following it up, show Kitchener as a master of deception, of the same rank as the finest diplomats. Not a single statement concerning Marchand was true. He had plenty of ammunition, an excess of tinned food and he even had his own vegetable garden. He had better transport facilities than the garrison left behind by Kitchener. He had already signed treaties with the natives. He already had an encounter with the dervishes before Kitchener’s arrival and had forced them to withdraw. He was steadfast in his mission and had no intention whatsoever of giving up his post at Fashoda.
But Marchand had no communications with France. The French government knew only Kitchener’s version but even that was enough to inflame passions. The popular press, and not only the popular press, reacted angrily on both sides of the Channel. In Le Petit Journal, France was depicted as Little Red Riding Hood threatened by the Big Bad Wolf of heavily armed Albion. The cartoonist of Punch drew Marchand as a quarrelsome Gallic cock being reminded of the spirit of Wellington. In any case just to put a little more pressure on the French, the Mediterranean Fleet was alerted. Had Marchand had access to the French Press and had he been able to send telegrams every day depicting in dramatic terms his stand against British aggression it seems very unlikely that public opinion would have allowed any French government to climb down. As it happened they had some space to manoeuvre. After lengthy deliberations they climbed down. Marchand in spite of his protests, was given instructions to withdraw. The crisis was over.
The next time when a telegram rose to fame was in January 1917 when the Germans decided to step up their submarine campaign. The Americans did not like it, but the isolationist lobby was still strong in the Senate. What precipitated the entry of the Americans in the First World War was a telegram sent at the time by Zimmerman, the German Foreign Minister to his Ambassador in Mexico. Everything would have been O.K. for the Germans but for the inquisitiveness of British intelligence who managed to break the German cipher. The text of the telegram was amazing. It started by telling the Mexican government of the German intention to start unrestricted submarine warfare, and then went on:
“We make Mexico a proposal of alliance on the following basis: make war together, make peace together, generous financial support and an understanding on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona…”
The ambassador was further instructed to contact the Mexican President if war broke out and to ask for his services to recruit Japan into the alliance. Japan’s reward, although this was not in the telegram, would have been the State of California.
The telegram was released in America to a public partly horrified, partly incredulous. The pro-Entente lobby saw a proof of German expansionism: the isolationists maintained that the telegram was a forgery. Senator O’Gorman, a man of pure Irish descent, recognised the machinations of perfidious Albion. Fortunately for the Entente, all speculations about authenticity ended with Zimmerman’s admission at a press conference. “I cannot deny it, it is true.” What Zimmerman’s motives were in sending the telegram, and particularly in admitting authorship, has never been satisfactorily answered by historians. The likelihood is that German internal politics played a significant role. Whatever the motive was, the effect was a disaster for German foreign policy. American public opinion, mostly neutral up to that time, was incensed. The legislators could not ignore the pubic mood. On 2 April, the United States declared war on Germany. In the announcement the telegram was actually mentioned.
Telegraphy is dead, dead as a door nail. Are there any modern equivalents? Could a tweet from Trump start a war? It might.
