Nearly one week into the war, on walking down King Charles Street on his way to the Office, Eyre Crowe

Few diplomats had any real conception of what lay ahead in August 1914. Armaments, the political uses of armed force, and the prospect of conflict had, of course, been the underlying themes of the internal debates that had shaped the ‘Foreign Office mind’ since the late 1860s. But the slaughter of the Somme was beyond their imagination. It was, indeed, the end of an era. The long nineteenth century had come to a violent end. And it was, perhaps, little wonder that even a seasoned diplomat like Sir Edward Goschen, Britain’s ambassador at Berlin, broke down in tears when that end came.

Even so, few senior officials and diplomats really understood the full implications of the conflict that had been unleashed. Their failure to anticipate the horrors of the carnage in Flanders fields should not be held against them. They were the products of their times and their class. Britain’s diplomats formed a small, self-contained and exclusive group, with a strong corporate spirit and ethos. It was a group recruited from a small section of society; and it reflected the strengths and weaknesses of Britain’s upper classes, their virtues as much as their failings. Studying the records they left behind cannot fail but to increase one’s respect for the diplomats of this period. They were not the Wooster-ish types that stride along the corridors of power in the pages of popular fiction or in certain forms of popular history. They were, on the contrary, able, conscientious and intelligent public servants: ‘The speed of response, the clarity of analysis and the attention to detail was indeed impressive.’ And they acted in the belief that their ‘supreme duty is … to the State’.