The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (86 page)

Asquith was also was capable on occasion of considerable political courage, in the prolonged political struggle between the Commons and the Lords over Lloyd George’s Budget of 1909 or in the severe crises which were to follow. By 1914, however, he was clearly less interested
than he had once been in the mundane but essential details of politics. His political enemies nicknamed him ‘Wait and See’ as his propensity for delaying decisions to get consensus turned into delay for its own sake. His great friend and fellow Liberal, Richard Haldane, who was Secretary of State for War between 1905 and 1912, commented: ‘London Society came, however, to have a great attraction for him, and he grew by degrees diverted from the sterner outlook on life which he and I for long shared.’
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Another old friend found him ‘red and bloated – quite different from what he used to be’.
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It was unfortunate that, as his energies waned, Asquith’s government faced increasingly intractable domestic problems. While the struggle between the British workers and their employers went on, a new conflict had broken out between women from all classes and all political persuasions who demanded the right to vote and their opponents who included, among others, Asquith himself. His own Cabinet was divided on the issue. While most of the suffragettes were peaceable and relatively law-abiding, a vociferous radical fringe led by the formidable Mrs Pankhurst and her equally intransigent daughter Christabel threw themselves into the fight using a variety of ingenious weapons. Their supporters disrupted meetings, spat at opponents of votes for women, chained themselves to railings, harassed government ministers, slashed paintings in art galleries, and smashed windows, even in Downing Street itself. ‘I nearly vomited with terror,’ Margot Asquith complained.
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In 1913 a bomb destroyed a new house Lloyd George was having built on the outskirts of London, even though he supported votes for women. Between January and July 1914, militant suffragettes set over a hundred buildings, including churches and schools, on fire. When the women were caught and sentenced to prison, they responded by going on hunger strike. The movement got its first martyr in 1913 when a suffragette threw herself in front of King George V’s horse at the Derby and the authorities seemed, for a time, determined to create even more by allowing the police to manhandle women marchers and demonstrators and by forcibly feeding the hunger strikers. By the summer of 1914 Asquith was ready to give up his opposition and bring a bill for female suffrage before Parliament but the Great War intervened and votes for women had to wait.

Most dangerous of all for Britain in those years was the Irish
question. Demands for Home Rule for Ireland had been gathering strength, particularly in the Catholic South. One wing of the Liberals, following the example of their great leader Gladstone, was sympathetic, but political exigencies also played their part. After the elections of 1910, the Liberal government no longer had a majority and so depended on the votes of the Irish nationalists. At the beginning of 1912, the government brought in a Home Rule Bill which would have given Ireland its own parliament within a federal Britain. Unfortunately a significant minority in Ireland, mainly those Protestants who were in a majority in Ulster in the north part of the island, did not want Home Rule which, in their view, would leave them under Catholic domination, and they were supported in their resistance by a large part of the Conservative Party in Britain including its leader Bonar Law, himself from Ulster Protestant stock.

The question of Irish Home Rule divided British society; old friends cut each other dead and people refused to sit next to each other at dinner parties. This was, however, mere froth on what were much more sinister currents. In Ireland the Ulster Unionists, as they liked to call themselves, issued a programme in 1911 in which they declared that they were ready to set up their own government if Home Rule passed. At the start of 1912 the first paramilitary forces, the Volunteers, started drilling and acquiring arms, an example soon to be followed by Irish Home Rulers in the South. At the end of September nearly 300,000 men of Ulster signed a covenant, some apparently using their own blood, pledging to defeat Home Rule. From Britain, Bonar Law and senior Conservatives openly encouraged them, using recklessly emotive and provocative language. In July 1912, Law and many of his colleagues from the House of Commons along with a collection of Conservative peers, attended a large rally at the Duke of Marlborough’s Blenheim Palace. In a long and passionate speech, Law declared that the government was behaving unconstitutionally in proposing Home Rule for Ireland and, in a threat he was to make repeatedly, accused it of risking civil war. ‘I can imagine’, he concluded, ‘no length of resistance to which Ulster will go, in which I shall not be ready to support them, and in which they will not be supported by the overwhelming majority of the British people.’
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While Law was throwing fuel on the fires he claimed to fear, another Ulsterman, Sir Henry Wilson, chief of military operations at the War
Office, who loathed Asquith (‘Squiff’), and indeed most Liberals, was encouraging the wilder supporters of Ulster in their plans to seize power by force in the event of Home Rule.
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(He could well have been cashiered, which would have presumably had a damaging effect on Britain’s military deployment at the start of the Great War.) More, Wilson was feeding the Conservatives with confidential information about the army and its reactions to the crisis. Since many of the officers and enlisted men came from Ulster or from the Protestants of the South, the Home Rule crisis was causing considerable anxiety that they might be obliged to move against rebellious compatriots.

In March 1914 the crisis took an even more serious turn. The House of Commons had passed the Home Rule Bill twice and the House of Lords, dominated as it was by Unionist peers, rejected it each time. Asquith suggested a compromise – keeping the six counties of Ulster out of the area for Home Rule for the time being – but his opponents refused to consider it. Indeed, there was a move in the Lords to put pressure on the government by rejecting the bill to authorise the existence of the army, which had been passed without debate every year since 1688, and Law certainly toyed with the idea of supporting the ‘Die-Hard peers’, as they came to be known. (There is a parallel in recent American politics with the refusal of the Republicans to allow the customary approval of an increased debt ceiling for the government so that it can carry on borrowing the funds it needs for its operations.) That same month there then came the most worrying incident of all, the so-called Curragh Mutiny among British army officers stationed in the south of Ireland. As a result of stupidity, muddle and perhaps malevolence on the part of the Secretary of State for War, the incompetent Sir John Seely, and the commander-in-chief in Ireland, Sir Arthur Paget, officers at the base of Curragh were warned that they might be ordered to take military action against the Ulster Volunteers and that, if they did not want to, they could absent themselves or resign. Some dozens of officers made it clear that they would resign, at which point Seely allowed himself to be persuaded to send them an assurance that they would not be asked to force Home Rule on Ulster. Asquith preferred not to push the issue but he eased Seely out and took over the War Office himself.

As spring turned to summer in 1914, the Liberals and Conservatives
remained as far apart as ever and on the ground, in Ireland, the arms continued to flow in to both sides and the drilling went on. In July, in a last attempt to get a compromise, the king called a conference at Buckingham Palace of the main leaders from both sides. The British ruling classes, the British public, and the British press were almost completely preoccupied by the Irish question and paid little attention to what was happening on the Continent, even when Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian throne was assassinated in Sarajevo on 28 June. Asquith, who had now fallen in love with the much younger Venetia Stanley, only mentioned the growing crisis on the Continent for the first time in his daily letters to her on 24 July, the day the Buckingham Palace conference ended in yet another failure. If the British were not noticing their neighbours, though, the European powers were for their part transfixed by the spectacle of British society apparently trembling on the edge of civil war. He found the situation in Britain difficult to understand, the tsar told the British ambassador, and he hoped it would not affect Britain’s international position.
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Germany and Austria-Hungary had a different view; with any luck Britain would be too divided internally to fight if war should come.
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At the start of 1914 that seemed to most Europeans no more or less likely than it had done for the past decade. Of course, there were the familiar tensions: Britain and Germany were still engaged in their naval race; France and Germany were no closer to being friendly; and Russia and Austria-Hungary still manoeuvred against each other in the Balkans. By 1914 Russian nationalists were also busily stirring up trouble among the Ruthenians in Austrian Galicia, something which both irritated and worried Vienna.
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(It cut both ways; the Monarchy was also encouraging Catholic priests to go over the border to proselytise among Russia’s own Ruthenians.) And there were strains as well within the alliances. After the Balkan wars, relations between Germany and Austria-Hungary worsened; the Germans felt that their allies had recklessly risked war with Russia while in Austria-Hungary there was resentment that Germany had been a poor friend. The Monarchy also deeply resented growing German investment and influence in the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire. Despite the Triple Alliance, Italy and Austria-Hungary continued to vie for influence in Albania and Italian public opinion continued to concern itself with the rights of Italian speakers
within the Dual Monarchy. Relations between the two powers had reached such a low point by the summer of 1914 that neither the Italian king nor an official representative attended Franz Ferdinand’s funeral.
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In 1912 Germany and Austria-Hungary agreed to renew the Triple Alliance early, perhaps to reassure each other of their reliability, but also to try to keep Italy tied in.

‘The Triple Entente’, said the Russian ambassador in Germany, ‘always are in agreement with themselves, on the other hand, the Triple Alliance is usually the complete opposite. If Austria-Hungary thinks of something, it hurries to carry out its thought. Italy sometimes takes the other side, and Germany, which announces its intentions in the last moment, is mostly forced to support its allies for better or worse.’
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Within the Triple Entente, though, the rivalry between Britain and Russia over Central Asia and Persia had never really gone away and by the spring of 1914 Grey and his chief advisers were afraid that the deal where Russia had a sphere of influence in the north of Persia with Britain having the same in the south was about to break down.

The anticipated disintegration of the Ottoman Empire offered its own temptations to outside powers to vie with each other, over the Straits and Constantinople as well as in the largely Turkish-speaking Asia Minor and its vast Arab territories which included today’s Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and most of the Saudi peninsula. The Russian government may have recognised how limited its capacity to seize the Straits was, but Russian nationalists continued to agitate for Russia to take what they saw as its rightful heritage. Austria-Hungary, which had largely stayed out of the scramble for colonies, now showed an interest in establishing a presence in Asia Minor, partly to compensate for its recent string of disasters in the Balkans. That caused trouble with both of its allies; Germany and Italy had their own dreams of creating colonies in the Middle East when the Ottoman Empire vanished.
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And the invalid itself showed some surprising signs of life. The Young Turks, by now firmly back in control, were trying to centralise and rein-vigorate the government. They were strengthening their military and were buying three dreadnoughts from Britain which, once they were delivered, would shift the balance of power decisively against the Russian navy. Russia responded by starting to build its own dreadnoughts but the Ottoman Empire would have an advantage between 1913 and 1915.
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At the end of 1913 there was a ripple of concern among the Entente powers when news leaked out that the Germans were increasing their military mission to the Ottoman Empire and had sent as commander a senior general, Otto Liman von Sanders. Since he was to have extensive powers over training and promotion in the Ottoman forces as well as direct command of an army corps based in Constantinople, this would sharply increase German influence in the Ottoman Empire. Wilhelm, who had drawn up the plans in secret with his closest military advisers, told Liman dramatically: ‘Either the German flag will soon fly over the fortifications on the Bosphorus or I shall share the sad fate of the great exile on St Helena.’
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Yet again the German civilian leadership found themselves dealing with the unwelcome fallout from the actions of an irresponsible and independent emperor.

Up to this point Russia and Germany had in fact been co-operating fairly successfully in the Ottoman Empire. In November 1910 Tsar Nicholas had visited Wilhelm at Potsdam and the two had signed an agreement on the Ottoman Empire which removed at least one source of tension: Russia promised not to undermine the new Young Turk government and Germany undertook to support reforms in the Ottoman Empire. The Germans also recognised Russia’s sphere of influence in the north of Persia and assuaged Russian apprehensions by moving the projected Berlin-to-Baghdad railway further south. Bethmann was pleased: ‘The Russian visit went better than expected. Both sovereigns treated each other openly and relaxedly, in best, almost gay spirits.’
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The two rulers met again on their yachts in the summer of 1912 at Russia’s Baltic Port (today Paldiski in Estonia) just before the crisis in the Balkans blew up. Alexandra, according to Sazonov, ‘displayed nothing but weariness, as she did on such occasions’, but the meetings had ‘a peaceful and friendly tone’. Kokovtsov and Bethmann, who were also in attendance, complained quietly to each other about how hard it was to resist pressures from the public for increased defence spending. Wilhelm told endless loud jokes. ‘I must confess’, said Sazonov, ‘that not all of them were to my taste.’ The Kaiser also advised the tsar to look eastwards and build up his strength against Japan. Nicholas listened with his usual reserve. ‘Thank heaven!’ he said to Kokovtsov after the meeting was over. ‘Now one does not have to watch one’s every word lest it be construed in a way one had not even dreamed.’ Nicholas
was relieved, though, because Wilhelm had repeatedly said he would not let the situation in the Balkans lead to a world war.
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