British protest over Dutch sand

On 15 July 1918, according to the British chronology of the war, the British government lodged a formal protest against the “sand and gravel agreement” between Germany and the Netherlands. It concerned the May agreement under which the Dutch, under German pressure, had resumed the transit of German sand and gravel to occupied Belgium, agreed to the export of their own gravel and again let German goods through Limburg by rail. The chronology does not give the content of the note. The dispute it concerned can, however, be reconstructed from reports in the Dutch press and from British official publications.

The British objections had been the same since 1917. The sand and gravel carried by barge down the Rhine were ingredients of the concrete from which the Germans built fortifications in Flanders. In a note of October 1917, later published, the Foreign Office wrote of an “enormous” German demand for such materials for purely military purposes, such as fortifications. London regarded German certificates of the peaceful use of the cargoes as an insufficient guarantee. Ernest Fayle, the official historian of British seaborne trade, wrote that the British government had protested firmly but in vain against this transit, and that in 1918 it was strongly supported in this by the United States.

The new dispute broke out over what the Allies had agreed to at the end of April, in the most heated days of the crisis. On 13 July the Amsterdam daily De Telegraaf, considered well informed about London’s intentions, reported “new difficulties”. According to the paper, the Allies maintained that their acquiescence covered only the transit through Limburg of purely civilian goods, as before the war. The Dutch foreign minister, John Loudon, on the other hand, believed that they had accepted the Dutch concession, and therefore also that the goods carried might indirectly serve the military. The Allies replied that excluding weapons, ammunition, aircraft and military supplies did not guarantee that timber, cement, steel or iron would not reach the front. They therefore demanded full Dutch control over the entire transit. The Germans considered such control unnecessary, and the Dutch government believed that, having concluded the agreement, it could no longer demand it of them. The paper also wrote of joint steps by the ministers of the United States, France and Britain in The Hague and predicted that they would be followed by concrete demands, threatening new economic reprisals.

The protest reached a government that was by then only caretaker. Pieter Cort van der Linden’s cabinet had resigned on 2 July, after the parliamentary elections, and remained in office until its successors were appointed. De Telegraaf even suggested that the cabinet’s hasty retreat was connected with expected trouble abroad. How The Hague replied to the note itself is not stated in reliable sources. The dispute over transit through the Netherlands was inherited by the government of Charles Ruijs de Beerenbrouck, which took office on 9 September 1918.