Tragicomedy in August 1914

The little side door on the steps leading from The Mall to the Duke of York's Column used to be a private entrance to the Carlton House German Embassy. There, on 4 August 1914 after 11 o'clock at night the young Foreign Office attaché, Harold Nicolson, was sent with an important communication from the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, for the German Ambassador, Prince Lichnowsky. The Embassy's front door was already closed and Nicolson had to ring long till a surly footman opened and said that the Ambassador had already gone to bed and was not to be disturbed. "You must tell the butler immediately that I must see His Excellency with an urgent message."

War had already been declared between Great Britain and Germany, but the British Declaration of War sent earlier had referred mistakenly to Germany having declared war on Great Britain, whereas it then emerged that Germany would send no reply to the British ultimatum to respect Belgium's neutrality. So Nicolson had to retrieve the earlier document for one which made clear that a state of war existed because of the expiry of the ultimatum without any response having been received from Berlin.

Nicolson was finally taken up to the Ambassador's private apartment. Prince Lichnowsky, in his pyjamas, rested on a brass bedstead. Nicolson told him that there had been a slight error in the document previously sent and he had come to substitute for it the correct version. Prince Lichnowsky, still shattered by the outbreak of war which he had long struggled to prevent, pointed to the table: "You will find it there", he said. It seemed that the Ambassador had not read the communication, but guessed its significance, since the passports of the German Embassy staff were enclosed, and left the envelope lying there in his despair.

Nicolson had to have a signed receipt and took the blotting pad across the bed, dipped the pen into the ink. While the Ambassador was signing, Nicolson heard the sound of shouting coming up from the Mall and then of crowds streaming back from Buckingham Palace and singing the Marseillaise. Prince Lichnowsky turned out the pink lamp beside the bed and then, feeling that he had perhaps been uncivil, he again lighted it. "Give my best regards to your father. I shall not in all probability see him before my departure." Nicolson's father was then Permanent Head of the Foreign Office, later Lord Carnock, whose biography the son was to write mentioning this historic episode.

Thirteen years later Harold Nicolson visited Prince Lichnowsky at his shooting lodge in Silesia where the former London Ambassador, disgraced for having fought for peace rather than war in 1914, was living in comparative penury. In all those years, Nicolson writes, he had wanted to ask the question he had not dared ask on that fatal August night in London: had the Ambassador known that he had been given the wrong Declaration of War? But again he dared not ask the question.