"...almost now way in late October and November of 1918 to avoid it. Newspapers chronicling the escalating war of words from the continent were flying off the shelves so fast that there were, for the first time in British history, a shortage of morning papers for all who wanted to read one in some parts of the country. Without as much skin in the game, Britain's famously yellow press avoided some of the truly absurd and destabilizing sensationalism and rhetoric that was almost passe in French, Belgian, and German papers within weeks, but nonetheless, it was a story nobody could keep their eyes off of, much in the way motorists slow down to observe a particularly spectacular collision on the side of the road.
For the Chamberlain government, however, it was not just an absurd and lurid story, it was a bonafide geopolitical crisis, easily the biggest to engulf Europe since the near-war over Siam in 1892 that the Prime Minister's father had narrowly helped defuse, and once again it featured the same protagonists, in France and Germany with Belgium thrown in as the unlikely instigator. By the end of the November, the government had largely agreed to take a wait-and-see approach, if only because they could do little else. Everybody in Whitehall, across Europe, indeed in all the halls of government in the world all stopped and took in a deep breathe, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
The most immediate question in the Hofburg Crisis, as the British press termed it, was how exactly the trial that looked likely for mid-January would go. Austria, like most of continental Europe, used an inquisitorial justice system rather than an adversarial one, and British experts on civil code law suggested to the British government that the mere fact that an Austrian judge had found sufficient need in an investigation to prosecute the case against Prince Stephane Clement was a sign that he was likely to be convicted. As November wore on and turned to December, the Cabinet - full of accomplished attorneys and barristers - began to grow less convinced. What concerned them most, in particular Lord Crewe, was the very serious accusation levied by Germany against Belgium, that it had entered into an explicit defensive alliance with France and Austria-Hungary aimed at Germany in the wake of the Second Congo Crisis, over and above the stipulations of the Treaty of London. What bedeviled British civil servants, envoys, and spies across Europe in those crucial weeks at the end of 1918 was how to ascertain if this was definitively true, hearsay but with a likelihood of accuracy, or a remarkably inflammatory suggestion. The answer to that question was an answer on which the future of Europe potentially hinged.
As the level-headed Crewe explained, the Treaty of London's stipulations were bidirectional. Belgium's territorial integrity was undersigned by Britian, France, and Prussia (Austria and Russia technically as well, but their lack of physical proximity made this more of a formal legal point than one with any particular practical impact). No Great Power could invade her or attempt to partition her without - in theory - triggering a war in which other Great Powers were then to come to her aid. While this settlement clearly benefitted Belgium a great deal, it was also designed to benefit the other Great Powers, especially Britain, which avoided one of France or Germany controlling the port of Antwerp, amongst the most strategic points on the northern European coast from a British perspective. The bargain, as Crewe reminded the Cabinet, was that Belgium's independence was guaranteed by Britain in return for Belgium actually adhering to the neutrality that Britain demanded in return. Implied in this was that if Belgium had reneged on this key point and now was aligned officially with France, then Britain had no duty to defend her come what way. If Belgium had in fact not gone over to Paris formally, however, then a German-Belgian war, depending on who fired first, would leave Britain duty-bound to Belgium, which meant a British intervention on the continent for the first time since Crimea, against a much more potent and direct threat.
To say that none of the Cabinet was much interested in a conflict with Germany was an understatement. Some, like Chamberlain, were Germanophiles, much in the fashion of the King; others, like Crewe, were more skeptical of long-term German interests, but were instinctively mediators who saw little to gain for Britain to leap in on Brussels' behalf. It was also the case that Belgium had worn out her welcome years ago with its repeated insistence on a colonial regime in the Congo so brutal that it had nearly invited European intervention by a concert of the other powers, and her princes, apples having fallen close to their father's tree, shocked and scandalized the European aristocracy going back well over a decade. With some distance from the circumstances at hand, Crewe in particular took the view that Stephane Clement had only himself to blame for putting himself in the dock, and that it was insane for France and Belgium to threaten war over German insistence that he stand trial and face punishment for his very serious two crimes.
With Germanophobes such as Edward Grey a fairly minor voice in the Cabinet, and pacifists dominant amongst a Liberal inner circle that was high on their triumphant solution to Ireland and looking ahead to what executing the transfer of power in February might look like, the appetite for a general European war was low. The decision not to intervene was not taken then, but it may as well have been; as Christmas approached, it was increasingly clear that Whitehall - even those who were increasingly seeing the Germans as a growing threat alongside the French and Russians, Malcolm-Jagow be damned - was looking less likely to step in and save Belgium from itself than it had even at the start of the burgeoning crisis..."
- The Second Act of the Georgian Age: Britain 1906-1924