Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914. Max Hastings
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troops gathering on the border, but still no panic: Serbs, with their boundless capacity for self-delusion, clung to a belief that somehow fate would pass them by.
On the evening of the 25th, Germany’s Social Democrats staged protests against war. Bethmann rejected conservative demands for a blanket ban on assemblies, but decreed that they must be confined to halls, staying off the streets. Over 100,000 people attended rallies around the country, at which SPD leaders proclaimed that Austria was picking a fight Germany should not join.
All politicians find it hard to address with conviction more than one emergency at a time. This goes far to explain why the British government was slow to engage with events in Europe. Until the last week of July, the minds of senior ministers were fixed upon the Ulster crisis, to the near-exclusion of all else. Prime minister Herbert Asquith mentioned the assassinations just once, almost immediately after the event, in his intimate letters to Venetia Stanley, then not again until 24 July. In the intervening period, a Hungarian woman acquaintance called on David Lloyd George and harangued him about the rash insouciance with which the British were treating the reverberations of Sarajevo; she argued that unless Austrian anger could be assuaged, a war was inevitable. The chancellor was unimpressed, for which he later expressed regret. A Times leader on 3 July headed ‘Efforts for Peace’ related to Ulster, not Europe. It seemed entirely plausible that the United Kingdom was about to be plunged into a civil war, in which Protestant Ulstermen would be pitted against the Liberal government. Not only the Conservative Party, but also much of the British aristocracy and many of the army’s officers, passionately supported the rebels.
In an age when every European nation measured power by breadth of empire, imperialists saw Britain’s greatness imperilled if its other island was permitted to secede. The Ulster crisis fell upon a society already stricken by industrial strife: there was a protracted lock-out in the building trades, together with conflicts in the mines, on railways and in the engineering industry. In a July speech Lloyd George warned that the industrial and Irish confrontations were alike ‘the gravest with which any government has had to deal for centuries’. He did not exaggerate. A historic constitutional clash beckoned, as King George V recognised when he summoned a conference of the warring parties at Buckingham Palace to seek a path to reconciliation.
Yet another Times leader, headed ‘The King and the Crisis’, on 20 July, referred to Ulster. Catholic passions were rising in step with those of Protestants: on Tuesday the 21st the Manchester Guardian reported that men of the Dublin Fusiliers, returning from camp training, were heard shouting: ‘We will have Home Rule at any cost!’ ‘A nation once again!’ A letter-writer to The Economist asked what would happen to Lord Roberts’ rash public assertion – made in support of the army’s Orange sympathisers – that soldiers must be allowed to exercise their consciences, if Irish nationalists wearing British khaki claimed such a right. There were extraordinary scenes as the foremost Home Rulers, Redmond and Dillon, walked towards Buckingham Palace to attend the King’s conference: Irish Guardsmen in uniform cheered them on their way.
On 22 July Ulster still dominated the columns of The Times, but the paper admitted that the growing tension between Austria-Hungary and Serbia had become ‘too serious to be ignored’, though ‘we have no wish to exaggerate the dangers … a cool perception of their greatness may enable the Powers to conjure them before it is too late’. The Times found it so evident that war would threaten the very existence of Austria-Hungary that it cherished every hope the Emperor would act ‘reasonably’. On the afternoon of the 24th, Asquith was obliged to tell the House of Commons that the King’s Irish conference had broken down without a resolution. The cabinet plunged into vexed debate about the prospective boundaries of the six Ulster counties now scheduled for exclusion from immediate implementation of Home Rule – this was a concession extracted by the Protestant rebels at gunpoint. But then the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, reported to his colleagues upon the draconian terms of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia. Winston Churchill has described in immortal phrases how ‘the parishes of Fermanagh and Tyrone faded back into the mists and squalls of Ireland, and a strange light began immediately, and by perceptible gradations, to fall and grow upon the map of Europe’.
Yet that night, few British people retired to their beds anticipating any consequences for themselves from the Balkan drama. It is only because European war caused the Irish crisis to be swept aside, the government to postpone implementation of Home Rule for the duration and then forever – because it was supplanted in 1921 by Irish partition and independence – that the savage hatreds, the magnitude of the threat to Britain’s political fabric, are often today underrated. The Ulster imbroglio also significantly influenced Berlin’s attitude: German leaders saw the British impaled upon their domestic troubles, and found it hard to imagine that a nation thus preoccupied and divided could menace their own purposes.
On the 25th, for the first time The Times acknowledged the gravity of the situation, saying – though still only in a second leader – that unless Austria-Hungary moderated its attitude towards Serbia, ‘we stand upon the edge of war, and of a war fraught with dangers that are incalculable to all the Great Powers … Austria-Hungary leaves a small and excitable Balkan kingdom to decide at a few hours’ notice whether there is, or is not, to be a third Balkan war, and a Balkan war this time in which one of the Great Powers will be involved as a principal from the first.’ It was widely remarked that, if Austria had been seriously interested in averting conflict, its ultimatum would have allowed a pause of more than forty-eight hours for the Serbian response, to give time for diplomacy to work.
But the British public still took more notice of such domestic trivia as ‘the motor-horn nuisance’ much discussed in The Times’s correspondence column. On 24 July Asquith mentioned the Balkans to Venetia Stanley in tones that still displayed Olympian detachment, though also sluggishly rising concern: ‘Russia is trying to drag us in … The curious thing is that on many, if not most, of the points Austria has a good and Serbia a very bad case, but the Austrians are quite the stupidest people in Europe … and there is a brutality about their mode of procedure which will make most people think that it is a case of a big Power wantonly bullying a little one. Anyhow it is the most dangerous situation of the last 40 years, and may have incidentally the good effect of throwing into the background the lurid pictures of “civil war” in Ulster.’ Asquith told the Archbishop of Canterbury that the Serbs deserved ‘a thorough thrashing’. On the afternoon of the 25th he presided at a diplomatic garden party at 10 Downing Street, where a string orchestra played while the German ambassador rubbed shoulders with the Serbian minister, and the Lloyd Georges mingled with assorted peers.
That same Saturday night the attorney-general, Sir John Simon, addressed a gathering of Manchester Liberals at Altrincham. He told them: ‘We have been so filled with our own political developments that some of us may not have noticed how serious a situation is threatening on the continent of Europe … Let us resolve that the part which this country plays … shall from beginning to end be the part of a mediator simply desirous of promoting better and more peaceful relations.’ It is understandable that many Europeans, both allies and enemies, recoiled from such self-righteousness.
In the press announcement of house parties for the forthcoming Cowes yachting week, it was stated that ‘Prince Henry of Prussia was to have been among the guests, but is unable to leave Germany at present owing to the crisis, though he may do so later should the situation improve.’ Walter Cunliffe, governor of the Bank of England, asserted confidently to his guests at Inverewe in the Scottish Highlands that a great war was impossible, because ‘the Germans haven’t got the credits’. The financier Sir Ernest Cassell gave the same assurance to Mrs George Keppel’s glittering summer house party across the Channel at Clingendaal House, near The Hague: a general European conflict could not be funded. However, a young guest declared that she must go home anyway – Violet Asquith wanted to be with her father in Downing Street. Some of the young men took a cue from her. Lord Lascelles, a Grenadier Guardsman, said to his friend Lord Castlerosse, ‘We had better get back.’ They motored to the coast, and caught a boat to England among other uneasy folk with the same idea.
Just before the 6 p.m. expiry of Austria’s deadline on the 25th, Serbia’s response was delivered by the prime minister personally to Austria’s