Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War by Max Hastings Page A

him in the face. Before the great Ulster struggle, rival party leaders were often seen in the same drawing room, but now they and their respective followers were socially estranged. When Margot Asquith wrote to protest at being excluded from Lord Curzon’s May ball, attended by the King and Queen, Curzon replied haughtily that it would be ‘impolitic to invite, even to a social gathering, the wife and daughter of the head of a Government to which the majority of my friends are inflexibly opposed’.
    The Scottish-Canadian Bonar Law had succeeded Arthur Balfour as Tory standard-bearer in November 1911, and played the Ulster ‘Orange card’ as a cynical gambit against the Liberals. On 28 November 1913, the leader of ‘His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition’ publicly appealed to the British Army not to enforce Home Rule in northern Ireland. This was a staggering piece of constitutional impropriety, which nonetheless commanded the support of his party and most of the aristocracy, while not provoking the censure of the King. Prominent among the Unionists was the lawyer Sir Edward Carson, courtroom nemesis of Oscar Wilde and aptly characterised as ‘an intelligent fanatic’. Captain James Craig, leader of the rebellious Ulstermen, wrote: ‘There is a spirit spreading abroad which I can testify to from my personal knowledge, that Germany and the German Emperor would be preferable to the rule of John Redmond [and his Irish Home Rulers].’
    Field-Marshal Lord Roberts, Britain’s most famous old soldier, publicly applauded the April 1914 shipment of guns to the Protestant rebels, and declared that any attempt to coerce Ulster would be ‘the ruin of the army’. Thousands of openly armed men paraded in Belfast, addressed by Carson, Craig and that most incendiary of Conservatives, F.E. Smith. And all the while the British government did – nothing. In southern Ireland, militant nationalists took their cue from Carson and his success in defying Parliament: they set about procuring their own weapons. The British Army proved much less indulgent to nationalist militancy than to the Ulstermen’s excesses. On Sunday, 26 July 1914 at Bachelor’s Walk in Dublin, troops fired on unarmed civilians – admittedly engaged in gun-running – killing three and injuring thirty-eight.
    If the British Empire was viewed around the world as rich and powerful, the Asquith government was seen as chronically weak. It was conspicuously failing to quell violent industrial action or the Ulster madness. It seemed unable effectively to address even the suffragette movement, whose clamorous campaign for votes for women had become deafening. Militants were smashing windows all over London; using acid to burn slogans on golf club greens; hunger-striking in prison. In June 1913 Emily Davison was killed after being struck by the King’s horse at the Derby. In the first seven months of 1914, 107 buildings were set on fire by suffragettes.
    Asquith’s critics ignored an obvious point: no man could have contained or suppressed the huge social and political forces shaking Britain. George Dangerfield wrote: ‘Very few prime ministers in history have been afflicted by so many plagues and in so short a space of time.’ The prominent Irish Home Ruler John Dillon told Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: ‘the country is menaced with revolution’. Domestic strife made a powerful impression on opinion abroad: a great democracy was seen to be sinking into decadence and decay. Britain’s allies, France and Russia, were dismayed. Its prospective enemies, notably in Germany, found it hard to imagine that a country convulsed in such a fashion – with even its little army riven by faction – could threaten their continental power and ambitions.
    2 BATTLE PLANS
    Many Europeans anticipated with varying degrees of enthusiasm that their two rival alliances would sooner or later come to blows. Far from being regarded as unthinkable, continental war was viewed as a highlyplausible, and