Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War by Max Hastings

when the London wine merchants Berry Bros charged ninety-six shillings a dozen for Veuve Clicquot champagne, sixty shillings a dozen for 1898 Nuits Saint-Georges. That year, over thirty-eight million working days were lost to strikes. Nor was it hard to understand workers’ grievances: in October 1913 an explosion at Senghenydd colliery, caused by criminal management safety negligence, cost 439 lives. In the Commons tears ran down the face of Herbert Asquith, the prime minister, as he appealed to striking workers to return to the pits. Asquith’s wife Margot, a raffish creature of indifferent judgement but forceful personality, sought to negotiate privately with the miners’ leader to resolve the dispute. When he refused, she wrote crossly: ‘I don’t see why anyone should know we have met.’ Between 1910 and 1914, trade union membership rose from 2.37 million to almost four million. In the seven months before the outbreak of war, British industry was hit by 937 strikes.
    Yet at least as grave as industrial warfare was the Ulster crisis. Between 1912 and 1914 this created a real prospect of civil war within the United Kingdom. Home Rule for Ireland was the price Asquith had agreed to pay for the support of Irish MPs in passing his bitterly divisive 1909 budget, seed of the Welfare State. Thereafter the Protestants of Ulster, determined to resist becoming a minority in a Catholic-ruled society, armed themselves. Their rejection of the Home Rule legislation then passing through Parliament won the support of the Conservative Party and its leaders, even unto preparing violent resistance to its implementation. Much of the aristocracy owned Irish property, which spawned a special sense of outrage against Asquith.
    In March 1914, some army officers made explicit their refusal to participate in coercion of the Ulster rebels through the so-called ‘Curragh Mutiny’, which precipitated the resignation of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field-Marshal Sir John French, and the secretary for war, Col. Jack Seely. The latter, in a moment of madness, told the commander-in-chief that officers who did not wish to serve in Ulster could ‘disappear’. Maj. Gen. Sir Henry Wilson, director of military operations at the War Office, wrote triumphantly in his diary: ‘we soldiers beat Asquith and his vile tricks’. The prime minister temporarily took on the war portfolio himself.
    The Liberals whom Asquith led formed one of the most talented administrations in British history, dominated in 1914 by such figures as Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer; Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty; Richard Haldane, a former reforming war minister, nowLord Chancellor. The prime minister himself was a survivor of an earlier era, old enough to have seen, as a boy of twelve in 1864, the bodies of five murderers dangling from the gallows outside Newgate, their heads concealed by white hoods. A lawyer of modest middle-class origins, ‘a Roman reserve was always natural to Asquith’, in the words of his biographer. ‘He fought against any expression of his stronger feelings.’ George Dangerfield went further, asserting that Asquith lacked imagination and passion; that, for all his high intelligence, he failed convincingly to address any of the great crises which overtook Britain during his years of office: ‘He was ingenious but not subtle, he could improvise quite brilliantly on somebody else’s theme. He was moderately imperialist, moderately progressive, moderately humorous, and being the most fastidious of Liberal politicians, only moderately evasive.’ If this judgement was cynical, it is plain that by August 1914 Asquith was a tired old man.
    British politics had become savage in temper and often irresponsible in conduct. Lord Halsbury, a veteran Conservative lawyer, denounced ‘government by a cabinet controlled by rank socialists’. A Tory MP hurled a rule book at Winston Churchill in the Commons library, striking