The Lost History of 1914 Page 12

  Churchill agreed: “The Army have done what the Opposition failed to do.” That conclusion was ineluctable. Home rule could be put on the statute books; it could not be enforced in Ulster without shattering the army. As in America’s Civil War, some officers would throw in with Ulster, others with the government. “Ulster,” a letter to the Times proclaimed, “is free.”47

  Asquith submitting home rule bill to General French. Carson and Law are whispering sedition to the general. After the Curragh Mutiny, the army could not be counted on to suppress rebellion in Ulster.

  A third party now entered the conflict: The majority Catholic population in the south of Ireland. Home rule was their reconciling dream. Before Parnell placed it at heart of party politics, Ireland, under “regular law” for only five years during the nineteenth century, had been wracked by rural terrorism—including the “houghing” of livestock with scythes and the “carding” of humans with nail-studded boards. “Physical force is physical farce,” the Nationalist Party politicians admonished the gunmen of the secret republican societies. With home rule Ireland could live in peace and dignity under the British crown. The politics of patience calmed Ireland for more than two decades. But Ulster’s defiance of the rule of law lent new life to the secret societies and stirred new faith in their dream of a free Ireland and their tools to get it—the gun and the bomb.

  An article published in An Claidheamh Soluis, a Gaelic League paper, in November 1913, “The North Began,” hailed the reemergence of physical force in Ulster as a model for the rest of Ireland. In the newspaper of Sinn Féin, an organization dedicated “to the re-establishment of Irish independence,” Patrick Pearse, a young Gaelic poet and schoolteacher, professed himself “glad that the North has ‘begun’… glad that the Orangemen have armed for it was a goodly thing to see arms in Irish hands.” Guns would deliver Ireland: “A thing that stands demonstrable is nationhood is not achieved otherwise than in arms … We must accustom ourselves to the thought of arms. We may make mistakes in the beginning and shoot the wrong people; but bloodshed is a cleansing and sanctifying thing … There are many things more horrible than bloodshed; and slavery is one of them.” That exalted blood talk motivated much shooting of the wrong people, and not just in the beginning. Pearse himself was shot by a British firing squad for his leading role in the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. His martyrdom proved his prophecy that “from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations.”48

  The North had begun; the South would follow. Of the post-Curragh mood in the North, a reporter wrote: “They will not even discuss concessions. They have lost interest in the parliamentary cause. They are not talking politics; they are talking rifles.” After a sensational April landing of German rifles at Larne in Ulster (to which the commander of the destroyers Churchill ordered to blockade such shipments later said he had “turned a blind eye”), the Roscommon Herald, in the South, struck the same note of tribal belligerence: “If nationalist Ireland means to hold its own, it must cease talking and dreaming; it must get down to real practical work, and that work is to get in the guns and get the men to use them.”49

  A late 1913 government embargo on the importation of arms to Ireland stimulated ingenuity to get in the guns. Getting the men was easy, especially after the Curragh took lawful force against Ulster off the table.

  Addressing Carson in the House, Churchill referenced a cartoon of a British soldier asking an Irish Nationalist, “Do you think I am going to fight for you?” That, Churchill said, was “a favorite point with the right hon. Gentleman, but what is the answer which the Nationalist is bound to make? It is a very simple one. ‘Will you let me fight for myself ?’ ” Spurred by the government’s diffidence about prosecuting the UVF leaders behind the Larne gunrunning, thousands of such men (seventy-five thousand by May), deciding to fight for themselves, joined the Irish Volunteers, the South’s answer to the UVF, and pending guns drilled with broomsticks.50

  The civil war scenario now shifted from the UVF versus the army to the UVF versus the Volunteers, which, with units in the North, had the longer reach. A Nationalist MP stated succinctly the insoluble turn the crisis had taken: “It was now abundantly clear that if passing Home Rule meant civil war, so also would abandonment of Home Rule.” Writing to the king, Asquith made the same point: “If the ship, after so many stormy voyages, were now to be wrecked in sight of port, it is difficult to overrate the shock, or its consequences … It is not too much to say that Ireland would become ungovernable.”

  Ireland in 1914 was hastening toward a guerrilla war between Protestant and Catholic paramilitaries—some fighting for home rule, others against, yet others for Irish independence—with the British army in the middle. Think of a bloodier version of The Troubles that erupted in the late 1960s and ground on until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, which brought the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, Sinn Féin, into a power-sharing government in Belfast with the Ulster Unionist party. Home Rule at last!

  Unwilling to punish rebellion in the North, the government fostered it in the South. To the Nationalist in the cartoon who wanted to fight for himself, the government, Churchill said, must say, “ ‘No, you shall be obliged to confine yourself to constitutional action,’ and we are bound to make sure that constitutional action is not frustrated by lawless violence.” But they had not made sure.51

  “If the Government are not going to enforce the law in one part of Ireland they have no right to it in another,” Bonar Law had the cheek to declare. “There is anarchy in Ireland.” That verdict on the Liberals and Ireland left out the blocking roles of Law and his Tories, Carson and the Protestant People of Ulster, the Redmond veto, and the army strike. “Between these difficulties,” Churchill wrote, “Mr. Asquith’s Government sought to thread their way.”52

  “Complete disaster is now but a few weeks—it may be only a few days—away,” the Times asserted on June 29, in the same edition carrying the news of the assassination in Sarajevo of the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand. The editorial got the time right—“a few weeks”—but the disaster wrong.

  Writing in 1923, Churchill remarked on “the strange calm” glazing the surface of European affairs in the years nearest the war. In July 1914 this yielded to a manipulated calm. After Sarajevo, Austria-Hungary launched a judicial inquest into the Serbian government’s alleged participation in the assassination. European capitals were reassured: Vienna was proceeding carefully. Led by the kaiser, who, instead of sailing up the Norwegian coast on his summer cruise, departed and anchored off Bergen for two weeks, high military and government figures left Vienna and Berlin on holiday. Bethmann Hollweg orchestrated this ruse to lull the Entente and convey the appearance of German nescience regarding any pending conflict between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, while at the same time secretly handing Vienna a “blank check”—cashable in war—to “square accounts” with Serbia.

  Churchill and Kaiser Wilhelm at the German army maneuvers in 1909. In May 1940, with Hitler poised to invade Holland, where the kaiser went into exile in November 1918, Prime Minister Churchill offered him asylum in Britain.

  Britain had worked strenuously to prevent the Balkan War of 1913 between Serbia and Bulgaria from touching off a European conflagration. If Bethmann had not “deliberately deceive[d] him,” while Austrian soldiers on “harvest leave” used the time to complete their work in the fields before quietly returning to the colors, Sir Edward Grey might have repeated this performance after Sarajevo.

  Instead, and perhaps to focus public attention away from the impending cliff of Ulster, the government sounded eupeptic on Europe. Ten days after Sarajevo, Lloyd George assured his auditors at London’s Guildhall that “in the matter of external affairs, the sky has never been more perfectly blue.” As late as July 22, describing the recent course of Anglo-German relations, the chancellor said, “There is none of the snarling which we used to see.” Until the last days of July the headlines—MACHINE GUNS FOR ULSTER, 30,000 RIFLES AND 10,000 ROUNDS
LAND IN BELFAST, 3000 TRAINED NURSES FOR ULSTER—heralded civil war.53

  With Parliament paralyzed by the onrushing fatality, on July 21 the king convened an emergency peace conference at “my house,” Buckingham Palace. Led by Asquith and Bonar Law, the politicians filed silently by the press waiting at the gates. Left to themselves, the two English parties might have struck a deal, but they were hostage to their Irish wings, and though after the first day of the conference Redmond told associates that “as an Irishman you could not help being proud to see how [Sir Edward Carson] towered above the others” and the two leaders shook hands warmly yet, a Redmond ally wrote, “there was a point beyond which neither of them could take their followers, and these points could not be brought to meet.” When they were reached on the third day, the conference broke up.54

  The Times blamed the Nationalists: “The British Empire numbers over 400 million human beings … The whole of this vast structure is to be imperiled, and for what reason? Because Mr. Redmond wants to get control of two counties in the North of Ireland with a total population of 204,000, and the Government dares not say him nay.” Asquith had persuaded Redmond to accept the time-limit scheme for excluding Ulster from home rule, but Redmond dug in his heels over the counties to be excluded. He wanted the majority Catholic ones under home rule from the start.55

  Churchill wrapped the stalemate over these counties in a memorable flourish:

  And so, turning this way and that in search of an exit from the deadlock, the Cabinet toiled around the muddy by-ways of Fermanagh and Tyrone. One had hoped that the events … at the Curragh and in Belfast would have shocked British public opinion, and formed a unity sufficient to force a settlement on the Irish factions. Apparently they had been insufficient … The discussion had reached its inclusive end, and the Cabinet was about to separate, when the quiet grave tones of Sir Edward Grey’s voice was heard reading a document which had just been brought to him from the Foreign Office. It was the Austrian note to Serbia … It was an ultimatum such as had never been penned in modern times … No State in the world could accept it [nor fail to see] that any acceptance, however abject, would satisfy the aggressor. The parishes of Fermanagh and Tyrone faded back into the mists and squalls of Ireland, and a strange light began immediately, but by perceptible gradations, to fall and grow upon the map of Europe.56

  But days later, the mists parted and Fermanagh and Tyrone were still there, daubed with blood. The Times for July 28, which announced Austria’s declaration of war on Serbia, led with the headline SHOOTING IN BACHELOR’S WALK above a bulletin of the worst news yet from Ireland.57

  A landing of 1,500 Mauser rifles for the Irish Volunteers in Howth Harbor outside Dublin had ended in mayhem, when soldiers from the King’s Own Scottish Borderers shot into a crowd of stone-throwing Dubliners, killing three and wounding thirty-six. Addressing the House of Commons, mild John Redmond sounded militant: “Four-fifths of the Irish people will not submit any longer to be bullied, or punished, or penalized, or shot, for conduct which is permitted to go scot-free in the open light of day in every county of Ulster by other sections of their countrymen.”58

  The “Bachelor’s Walk Massacre” fueled rage across the South. In Roscommon a speaker arraigned the “dirty hacks of the English government” as cowards and murderers. Stokestown showed a “grim determination of revenge.” In Sligo three hundred Volunteers heard a speaker bewail the Irish blood shed by “the cursed dogs of England” and their “cursed Scottish hounds” and threaten the UVF: “We will not stand any nonsense in the future … if a shot is fired at our people in the North we are prepared to meet them … I say here publicly, in the presence of the press, that Ireland is out for blood and murder.” Ireland, North and South, was out for blood and murder. “One spark,” the Times judged, “may serve to set off the long-dreaded conflagration.”59

  With civil war a spark away, the Times caught the moment when war irrevocably overtook Ulster in the race of disasters. It came on July 27 in the House. The Tories had been blistering the government over Ulster when “suddenly the atmosphere changed as Mr. Bonar Law advanced to the table and asked the Foreign Secretary for information about the situation between Austria and Serbia.”60

  Edward Grey rose; the House fell still. “It must be obvious to any person who reflects upon the situation,” Grey said, “that the moment the dispute ceases to be one between Austria-Hungary and Serbia and becomes one in which another Great Power [Russia] is involved, it can but end in the greatest catastrophe that has ever befallen the continent of Europe.”

  Amid news of Serb engineers blowing up a bridge across the Danube, of pink paper notices announcing the mobilization of four million men going up on hoardings in St. Petersburg, of Kaiser Wilhelm proclaiming, “The sword has been forced into our hands!” from the balcony of the Royal Palace in Berlin, of German troops seizing French locomotives in Alsace, the Times voiced the thought of Britain: “Civil war in these islands seems unthinkable at such a time.” It even seemed unthinkable in Ulster. “Over the last forty-eight hours [there] has been a sudden and complete change in the Irish attitude,” the Times correspondent reported from Belfast. “On Wednesday night Ulstermen and Nationalists were … going on deliberately with their preparations for combat. Then came the grave words … in the House of Commons on Thursday … Now Irishmen of all complexions have suddenly become Britons.”61

  It remained for the politicians to register the change. After the Buckingham Palace Conference impasse, Asquith finally dared to say Redmond nay. He prepared an Amending Bill permitting any Ulster county to vote itself permanently out of the home rule scheme. This about-face carried political risk. Appeasement of Carson’s Unionists might roil Redmond’s Nationalists to vote against the government, bringing it down. But Redmond, recognizing that replacing the Liberals with the Unionists would only doom his cause, had “reluctantly agreed” to accept exclusion when the Bachelor’s Walk Massacre made that politically impossible.62

  Austrian and Serbian forces had already engaged in a firefight along the Sava River when the House met to take up the Amending Bill on July 31. “At this moment unparalleled in the experience of any one of us,” the prime minister told the House, it was necessary “to present a united front and to be able to speak and act with the authority of an undivided nation.” In that spirit, he postponed the Amending Bill indefinitely. There would be no civil war. Only one barrier to British intervention in the European war remained: the Liberalism of the Liberal Party.63

  On August 2, as the Times went to press, it received word from the French ambassador that GERMANY HAS INVADED FRANCE WITHOUT DECLARATION OF WAR. In this desperate hour, the editors were “stupefied to learn that a section of Mr. Asquith’s Cabinet is in favour of leaving France in the lurch … France crushed means Britain degraded.” Indeed, as Asquith confided to Ms. Stanley, “a good ¾ of our own party in the House of Commons are for absolute non-interference at any price.” Churchill judged that the same percentage of the cabinet, invoking the Liberal tradition of keeping clear of Europe’s wars, would vote to remain neutral. Asquith had two incompatible goals: to take the country, and his party, into war. Ulster helped him merge them in an unexpected way.64

  In the decisive cabinet meeting of August 2, Asquith, speaking as a politician to fellow politicians, wrapped the war in party loyalty, party preservation, and repugnance toward the opposition party. “The P. M. is anxious we should see this thing through as a Party,” one minister reported to his wife. Another recalled Asquith arguing that “if a block were to leave the Government at this juncture, their action would necessitate a Coalition Government which would be the grave of Liberalism.” Since the coalition with the hawkish Unionists would be a war government, quitting the cabinet might salve the Liberal conscience but would not keep Britain out of the war. And, Asquith said, looking around the cabinet table at colleagues who had stood in the arena together through many battles for many years, men from “the other party” would fill their places, m
en whose conduct over Ulster had exposed their unfitness to govern. Principle retreating before party spirit and partisan animus, Asquith secured a cabinet majority. In the end only two of twenty ministers resigned. Germany’s invasion of Belgium, meanwhile, swung the Liberal backbenchers behind war.65

  Asquith did not make his strongest argument: He knew that loyalty to him would work powerfully on his colleagues. Asquith’s intellect and eloquence commanded respect, but his readiness to praise inspired affection. His notes to his colleagues display an appreciation not merely of what they did but of who they were. For example, when, to allay public doubts raised by the “shells crisis” that rocked the government in May 1915, Lloyd George stepped down as chancellor of the exchequer to fill the newly created post of minister of munitions, Asquith wrote him:

  My dear Lloyd George,

  I cannot let this troubled & tumultuous chapter in our history close without trying to let you know what an incalculable help & support I have found in you all through. I shall never forget your devotion, your unselfishness, your powers of resource, what is (after all) the best of all things your self-forgetfulness.

  These are rare things that make the drudgery and squalor of politics, with its constant revelation of the large part played by petty & personal motives, endurable, and give to its drabness a lightning streak of nobility.*

  I thank you with all my heart.

  Always yours affectionately

  H. H. Asquith