It was quickly forgotten, for within a week Churchill found himself in deep trouble. He and Seely were worried about the loyalty of British soldiers in Ireland. A high proportion of them were natives of Ulster. Moreover, they were badly deployed for the approaching climax; of the twenty-three thousand regulars on the island, only nine thousand were stationed in the north. Mutinous mutters had met proposals for a redistribution which would transfer troops billeted on the Curragh plain, outside Dublin, to Belfast. Even if the men remained subordinate, it was reported, Ulster officials of the Great Northern Railway might refuse to carry them northward. However, it was feasible to send them up by sea. Encouraged by Lloyd George, the two service ministers, with the approval of Asquith and the King, decided to take precautionary steps. Guards at the Ulster arms depots of Armagh, Omagh, Enniskillen, and Carrickfergus were doubled. Winston signaled the vice admiral commanding his Third Battle Squadron: “Admiralty, 19 March 1914. Secret. Proceed at once at ordinary speed to Lamlash…. Acknowledge and report dates of arrival. WSC.” This would put eight battleships, a cruiser, and three destroyers in Irish waters.195
The warships never reached the North Channel. General Henry Wilson sent word of their destination to Brigadier General Hubert Gough, commander of the Curragh garrison. Gough resigned his commission, whereupon fifty-seven of his seventy officers resigned, whereupon Sir John French, the chief of the Imperial General Staff, also resigned. The prime minister faced an army revolt. He countermanded Churchill’s orders and canceled Seely’s plans to reinforce Ulster. That wasn’t enough for Gough. He sent Asquith a message through Wilson: “In the event of the present Home Rule Bill becoming law, can we be called upon to enforce it under the expression of maintaining law and order?” To make certain that his position was understood, he came to London and demanded assurances in writing. He got them. The prime minister wrote that it had all been “a misunderstanding”; that, though His Majesty’s government had the right to employ crown forces anywhere, it had “no intention of taking advantage of this right to crush political opposition to the policy or principles of the Home Rule Bill.” Gough and his officers then withdrew their resignations. Timothy M. Healy, an Irish Nationalist MP, concluded: “Asquith threw over Churchill, Seely and Lloyd George and refused to back up their actions.”196
Wilson leaked all this to Bonar Law, and there was a storm in the House. The Tory press was jubilant over Asquith’s “complete surrender”; the Liberals and Irish Nationalists were furious. Scapegoats were needed, so Seely and his two chief advisers resigned. The prime minister—who had initialed all the military arrangements—claimed ignorance of them. That left the first lord of the Admiralty to face the music. It would seem that twenty-five thousand rifles in the hands of Orangemen justified precautions of some sort, but the Tories believed that he had been trying to goad the Ulster Volunteers into open rebellion. One Conservative MP accused him of hatching a “plot” designed to create an excuse for an “Ulster pogrom.” Balfour added scathingly: “There is one character disgusting to every policeman and which even the meanest criminal thinks inferior to himself in point of morals, and that character is the agent provocateur.”197
On April 28 Churchill blazed back: “What we are now witnessing in the House is uncommonly like a vote of censure by the criminal classes upon the police.” A Tory interjected: “You have not arrested them.” He replied: “Is that the complaint—that we have been too lenient?” He declared that the Conservatives, “the party of the comfortable, the wealthy… who have most to gain by the continuance of the existing social order,” were now “committed to a policy of armed violence and utter defiance of lawfully constituted authority… to tampering with the discipline of the Army and the Navy… to overpowering police, coastguards and Customs officials… to smuggling in arms by moonlight.” If this was an example of “how much they care for law, how much they value order when it stands in the way of anything they like,” what would be the impact on England’s impoverished millions, on “the great audiences that watch in India,” on the Germans who believed that Britain was paralyzed by factions “and need not be taken into account as a factor in the European situation?” He said: “I wish to make it perfectly clear that if rebellion comes we shall put it down, and if it comes to civil war, we shall do our best to conquer in the civil war. But there will be neither rebellion nor civil war unless it is of your making.”198
At this point he altered his tone dramatically and ended on a propitiatory note. He appealed directly to Carson: “The right honourable Gentleman… is running great risks in strife. Why will he not run some risk for peace? The key is in his hands now. Why cannot the right honourable and learned Gentleman say boldly: ‘Give me the Amendments to this Home Rule Bill which I ask for, to safeguard the dignity and the interests of Protestant Ulster, and I in return will use all my influence and good will to make Ireland an integral unit in a federal system’?” The House was stirred. Balfour, while describing Churchill’s earlier remarks as “an outburst of demagogic rhetoric,” declared that he was “heartily in sympathy with the First Lord’s proposal,” and Carson went so far as to say that he was “not very far from the First Lord.” Negotiations were reopened. Liberals and Irish Nationalists, who insisted that northern Ireland must yield, protested angrily. Winston’s position in the party was still shaky; he wrote Clementine that his plea for a truce was “the biggest risk I have taken.” His cabinet colleagues, generous with their “hear, hears” when he had taken the offensive, had sat on their hands when he offered Carson an olive branch.199
But the negotiations stalled and were again discontinued. The general feeling was that it was too late for one man to halt the drift toward fratricide. Churchill himself said wearily, “A little red blood had got to flow,” though he quickly added: “We shall give no provocation. The Ulstermen will have no excuse, and we think that public opinion will not support them if they wantonly attack.” On May 26 the Home Rule bill passed for the third and last time. Officially it was now law. The possibility of enforcing it, however, was as remote as ever. Each side was still waiting for the other to shoot first. On July 20 the King intervened, summoning an all-party conference to Buckingham Palace. The Speaker of the House presided as the delegates wrangled for four days. Winston wrote Clementine: “We are to go ahead with the Amending Bill, abolishing the time limit and letting any Ulster county vote itself out if it chooses. The [southern] Irish acquiesced in this reluctantly. We must judge further events in Ulster when they occur.”200
Asquith’s cabinet met on the afternoon of Friday, July 24, 1914, to discuss the final conclusions of the King’s conference. The report was sterile; absolutely nothing had been accomplished. It was at this point that the Irish issue, foremost in everyone’s mind, so certain to burst into flames at any moment, was unexpectedly deferred, destined not to re-emerge for years, by which time the whole cast of characters would have changed. The ministers were about to break up when Grey began reading in quiet, grave tones a document which had just been sent in to him from the Foreign Office. It was an Austrian note to Serbia. Churchill was very tired; several minutes passed before he could disengage his mind from the tedium which had just ended. Gradually the phrases and sentences began to take shape and meaning. The foreign secretary was reading an ultimatum. Winston had never heard anything like it. He did not see how any country could accept it, or how any acceptance, however abject, could satisfy the government which had sent it. He later recalled: “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.”201
Churchill later blamed three men for the outbreak of the Great War: the Serb assassin, the Austrian foreign minister who had written that first ultimatum, and the kaiser, who could have stopped the chain reaction of governments bound by military alliances. But the initial culprit was an incompetent chauffeur whose name has not survived. On June 28, 1914, four
weeks before the delivery of the fateful note to Serbia, Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his morganatic wife, Sophie, had been riding through the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo when the driver took a wrong turn. Realizing his mistake, he came to a dead halt—right in front of a Serbian fanatic armed with a revolver. Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were shot dead on the spot. In Vienna the toils of vengeance, like everything else in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, moved very slowly. But they were moving. Meanwhile, Britain stood aside. There was every reason to believe Britain would remain there. It had nothing at stake. Grey’s “moral obligation,” assumed eight years earlier, had been given privately and was not binding. Britain’s only commitment on the Continent was to defend Belgian independence, which hardly seemed threatened then, and even that was vague. Winston didn’t care for the Belgians; he thought their behavior in the Congo disgraceful. At the Admiralty he lunched with Kitchener, on leave from Egypt and soon to be Seely’s successor at the War Office. Both suspected the existence of a secret agreement between Brussels and Berlin which would permit German troops to cross Belgium on their way to France. For England, they agreed, such an “invasion” would be an inadequate casus belli. But it was all very speculative, very remote, quite nebulous.
The Admiralty’s trial mobilization had begun, as scheduled, in the middle of July, over two weeks after the Sarajevo murders. The grand review was held on July 18. Churchill called it “incomparably the greatest assemblage of naval power ever witnessed in the world”—223 battleships, armored cruisers, light cruisers, destroyers, minesweepers, and submarines parading past the royal yacht and the Enchantress at Spithead, with the King and his first lord taking the salute. Normally, the next step would have been demobilization of all three fleets, accompanied by liberty for the regular tars and tickets home for the reservists. It wasn’t taken. Churchill, concerned about rumors from central Europe, published an Admiralty notice in the newspapers of July 20: “Orders have been given to the First Fleet, which is concentrated at Portland, not to disperse for naval leave at the present. All vessels of the Second Fleet are remaining at their home ports in proximity to their balance crews.” Yet he was confident that negotiations would settle the differences between Vienna and Belgrade. In a letter to Grey two days later, drawing an analogy between that problem and the more urgent situation in Ulster, he wrote that if the question were how to uphold British interests on the Continent, “you wd proceed by two stages. First you wd labour to stop Austria & Russia going to war: second, if that failed, you wd try to prevent England, France, Germany & Italy being drawn in.” In either instance, mediation was the solution. The following day Lloyd George, who concurred, assured the House that “civilization” would have no difficulty in regulating disputes which arose between nations, by means of “some sane and well-ordered arbitrament.”202
After studying the note Grey had read to the cabinet, however, Churchill wrote Clementine: “Europe is trembling on the verge of a general war, the Austrian ultimatum to Servia [sic] being the most insolent document of its kind ever devised.” It was in fact remarkable. Serbia was required to suppress all criticism of Austria-Hungary in newspapers, magazines, societies, and schools; Serbain officials and teachers who had spoken unfavorably of Austrians were to be dismissed; certain Serbs known to be unfriendly to Austria were to be arrested at once; and Austrian officers were to enter Serbia to enforce all these demands and investigate the Sarajevo assassinations. Belgrade must reply to this ultimatum within forty-eight hours. A request for an extension was denied. In Vienna the foreign minister acknowledged that the tone of the note was “such that we must reckon on the probability of war.”203
“Happily,” Asquith wrote the King, “there seems to be no reason why we should be anything more than spectators.” Churchill shared his view. At Overstrand, on the Norfolk coast, he had rented a little holiday house called Pear Tree Cottage for Clementine and the children—Goonie Churchill and her two young sons had taken nearby Beehive Cottage—and Friday evening he postponed an Admiralty meeting which had been scheduled for Saturday morning, preferring to spend the weekend at the shore. He wrote: “My darling one, I have managed to put off my naval conference and am coming to you & the kittens tomorrow by the 1 o’clock train.” Before he left London, good news arrived: Serbia had accepted all demands upon it except the supervision of compliance by Austrian officers, and Belgrade offered to submit that question to the Hague Court. Even the kaiser believed this reply had removed “every reason for war.” Winston told Prince Louis to run the Admiralty in his absence; he would stay in touch by phone. On the beach he organized the children, distributed buckets and spades, and directed them while they built a sand castle against the rising tide. The surf leveled it. As he remembered later: “We dammed the little rivulets which trickled down to the sea as the tide went out. It was a very beautiful day. The North Sea sparkled to a far horizon.”204
Pear Tree Cottage had no telephone, but their nearest neighbor, Sir Edgar Speyer, a rich German Jew, had offered the use of his. It was here, at noon on Sunday, that Churchill heard the latest development from Prince Louis. Vienna had declared the Serbian response unsatisfactory, severed diplomatic relations with Belgrade, and ordered partial mobilization against the Serbs—who had already mobilized their army. Winston was on the next London train. There newsboys were hawking extras; Vienna had “burst into a frenzy of delight, vast crowds parading in the streets and singing patriotic songs.” At the Admiralty he learned that the first sea lord had anticipated him; the Third Fleet had completed its test mobilization and was scheduled to disperse, but Prince Louis had ordered it to remain ready for battle, and at 4:05 P.M. he had telegraphed: “Admiralty to C in C Home Fleets. Decypher. No ships of First Fleet or Flotillas are to leave Portland until further orders. Acknowledge.” Churchill approved and began a ten-day shuttle between his office, Whitehall, No. 10, and Admiralty House, catching sleep in brief naps. Other ministers grew wan. He thrived.205
The following morning, Monday, July 27, the cabinet met for the first discussion of the crisis on the Continent. Clearly the Austrians meant to invade Serbia. That might bring in Russia, the Serbs’ ally, which might bring in Germany, Austria’s ally, which might bring in France, Russia’s ally. The kaiser, aware of the threat on his western frontier, might launch a preemptive strike into northern France. If that happened, the Liberal militants thought, England might become involved. A majority of the ministers disagreed. The Entente Cordiale of 1904 was not binding, they pointed out; it was merely “a sentimental liaison.” Grey’s assurance to the French had been unofficial. In an unpublished note Churchill wrote afterward: “The Cabinet was absolutely against war and would never have agreed to being committed to war at this moment.” A message arrived from Pear Tree Cottage: “Goodnight my Dearest One. I trust the news may be better tomorrow. Surely every hour of delay must make the forces of peace more powerful. It would be a wicked war.” Winston had no intention of making it wickeder by being caught off guard. That night he telegraphed all British fleets, squadrons, and flotillas, scattered over five oceans: “European political situation makes war between Triple Alliance and Triple Entente Powers by no means impossible. This is not the Warning Telegram but be prepared to shadow possible hostile men-of-war…. Measure is purely precautionary. The utmost secrecy is to be observed and no unnecessary person is to be informed.”206
Austria-Hungary declared war on Tuesday, July 28, and bombed Belgrade. Both Winston and Prince Louis were worried about the position of the First Fleet, now anchored off the Isle of Wight. It was vulnerable there, and a navy’s primary duty, as Mahan had written, was to remain “a fleet in being”; Churchill pointed out that the admiral commanding the Home Fleet was the only man in Europe who could “lose the war in the course of an afternoon.” The ships’ war station was Scottish waters, where they would be secure and a deterrent to any sudden German attack, at the same time serving notice that England was prepared. Yet Winston “feared to bring this matter before the
Cabinet,” he wrote, “lest it should be mistakenly considered a provocative action likely to damage the chances of peace.” Instead, he went to No. 10 and told Asquith he was going to act on his own authority. The prime minister, he recalled, “looked at me with a hard stare and gave a sort of grunt. I did not require anything else.” That night, on his instructions, an eighteen-mile-long procession of darkened ships steamed through the Strait of Dover. Dawn found the battleships in Scapa Flow and the battle cruisers off Rosyth, in the Firth of Forth. “A surprise torpedo attack,” wrote Winston, was “at any rate one nightmare gone forever.”207