by John Buchan
It was a world formally at peace but with no ease, a world without strong faiths or inspirations, confident, but with its confidence often nervously cracking. Now and then something happened to “tease us out of thought.” The sinking of the Titanic in April 1912 showed that Nature, which we thought we had shackled, could turn in her bonds and make sport of us. And the news which came to England early next year of the death of Captain Scott and his comrades in the Antarctic wastes, a failure more glorious than any victory, reminded us, almost with a shock, of that virtue which is the chief end of man.
CHAPTER IV. DESCENSUS AVERNI
The first seven months of 1914 saw the British nation living like some prosperous settlement on the glacis of a volcano — a merry and full life with a background of creeping fears. One part of the volcanic skirts was already shaken with tremors, and to this anxious eyes were turned when a preoccupied people had leisure for thought. But another part was in the mind only of the few. This had threatened danger in the past, but it was for the moment quiescent, and only an occasional muttering told of the hidden fires. But these few understood only too well how thin was the crust, and how at any moment it might be rent by chaos and death.
I
The immediate preoccupation was Ireland. Ulster had organised a provisional Government, to come into force if the Home Rule Bill became law, and a volunteer army to resist coercion. Arms were being imported, and men were drilling in every parish. This challenge could not be ignored by the Nationalists, and a similar activity was soon afoot in Dublin. Mr. Redmond believed that the best policy was to let Ulster alone, in the hope that the trouble would blow over, for he feared that any coercion of the north would wake in the south new forces of disorder, of whose power he was already cognisant and which he knew that he could not control. The British Government accepted his advice the more readily as the discussions of the previous year had shown them that the Ulster leader was no irresponsible rebel.
Sir Edward Carson, himself not an Ulsterman, had begun his crusade in the hope that Ulster’s resistance would kill Home Rule for the whole island. He had been an impenitent die-hard on the House of Lords question, and would have accepted the creation of new peers, because he believed that it might lead to a reformed Upper House, and that any such chamber would make the Government’s Home Rule scheme impossible. His policy was for Ireland as a whole, not for a province. But as the months passed he became convinced that Ulster’s problem must be taken as a thing by itself, and that the best tactics were to insist upon her exclusion from the Bill. On this point the Cabinet had shown itself willing to treat, and the dispute was now a question of details. He was proving himself much less intransigent, as he was much less rhetorical, than the non-Irish Conservative leaders, for he realised, as few Ministers realised, that our decorous British democracy had elements in it of peril and surprise, and that sleeping dogs were being roused which it was better to let lie.
But in the early spring one of these dogs stirred uneasily. If no agreement was reached and Ulster in fact rebelled, coercion might follow, as it had followed half a century before in the American Civil War. The instrument of such coercion must be the British Army. What was likely to be the temper of that Army? There was already acute anxiety among many officers, and it was decided — wisely enough — that, if the Army had to be used against the Ulster volunteers, officers with an Ulster domicile should be excused service without prejudice to their professional careers. Now began a series of disastrous blunders. It was obviously necessary to take steps to protect stores and munitions in the disaffected areas, and the measures adopted for the purpose were needlessly inflammatory. Mr. Churchill arranged that the forthcoming practice of one of the battle squadrons should take place off the island of Arran, which is not very far from Belfast Lough. Wild rumours reached the House of Commons, and on March 19th, in the debate on a vote of censure, Sir Edward Carson declared that the Government were mobilising troops for coercion, and walked out of the House; while Mr. Bonar Law laid down the doctrine that in a case of mere disorder the Army must obey, but that in a civil war soldiers were citizens like other people. Next day that happened at the Curragh which put a match to the tinder.
Sir Arthur Paget, the Commander-in-Chief in Ireland, summoned his officers and assured them that permission would be given in certain contingencies for officers domiciled in Ulster to “disappear,” a concession already familiar in the Indian Army. But he went further; he told the rest that, if they were not willing to carry out any duties assigned to them, they must say so at once and be dismissed. The natural assumption was that officers were being ordered to express their views on Government policy, and to declare their willingness to serve against Ulster or to leave the service. Brigadier-General Hubert Gough and fifty-seven of his colleagues of the 3rd Cavalry Brigade accepted their dismissal.
The fat was now fairly in the fire. There was a cry of mutiny among the Government followers, but there could be no mutiny in men accepting one of the alternatives put before them by their superiors. The Cabinet had been imperfectly advised about the whole business, and so great was the muddle that the King had not been informed at all. General Gough and the others were summoned to London and the situation explained to them, after which they returned to their duties. A Cabinet memorandum, issued later as an Army order, laid it down that “no officer or soldier should in future be questioned by his superior officer as to the attitude he will adopt, or as to his action, in the event of his being required to obey orders dependent on future or hypothetical contingencies,” and that “an officer or soldier is forbidden in future to ask for assurances as to orders which he may be required to obey.” The Prime Minister took his stand on the principle laid down by the elder Pitt during the Jacobite Rising of 1745. “The right of inquiring what measures may conduce to the advantage and security of the public belongs not to the Army but to this House. . . . Our armies have no better right to determine for themselves than any other body of men, nor are we to suffer them to prescribe laws to the legislature, or to govern those by whose authority they subsist.”
But the chapter of blunders was not ended. Colonel Seely, the Secretary of State for War, in forwarding this memorandum to General Gough, added two paragraphs on his own account, one of which declared that the Government had no intention of using the forces of the Crown “to crush political opposition to the policy or principles of the Home Rule Bill,” and the addendum was initialled by Sir John French, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and by the Adjutant-General. This, in Liberal, Labour and Nationalist eyes, was selling the pass with a vengeance. Colonel Seely and the two soldiers resigned, and Mr. Asquith himself took on the War Office. The debates in the Commons during March were bitter and confused, the Prime Minister repeating his refusal to permit the entrance of “hypothetical contingencies” into a soldier’s duties, and Labour members pointing out gleefully what an excellent precedent it all afforded for the next industrial dispute. The hidden fires were beginning to crackle.
They crackled more noisily in the following weeks. At the end of April there was a great gun-running on the Ulster coast, when, with the assistance of 12,000 men, 25,000 rifles and 3,000,000 cartridges were landed and distributed. Police proceedings were useless, for no jury would convict. There was a violent scene in the House of Commons on May 21st, when the third reading of the Home Rule Bill was moved. After it was carried Sir Edward Carson left for Belfast “to make arrangements for the final scene.” It was known that in southern Ireland there was already a fighting force of 100,000 volunteers.
If it was a difficult time for Ministers, it was more difficult for the King. He was head of the Army, and the Curragh incident had revealed to him that the partition had worn thin between order and anarchy. He was being urged from every side to intervene, to refuse the royal assent to the Home Rule Bill, to appeal himself to the nation, to avert at any cost civil war. Throughout the agitation he had kept a cool head, and had been untiring in his efforts for peace. But few
men have ever been in a harder position, and there was pathos in his quotation, in a letter to Mr. Asquith at the beginning of June, of a sentence from his Coronation message: “Whatever perplexities or difficulties may lie before me and my people, we shall all unite in facing them resolutely, calmly, and with public spirit, confident that, under divine guidance, the ultimate outcome may be to the common good.”
He made one last effort to achieve this hope, and gladly acceded to the Prime Minister’s request that he should summon in his own name a conference of the party-leaders at Buckingham Palace. Only two points of controversy remained: the exact size of the excluded Ulster, and the terms on which a future union with the rest of Ireland might be effected. There were eight members of the Conference — the Prime Minister and Mr. Lloyd George for the Government, Lord Lansdowne and Mr. Bonar Law for the Opposition, Mr. Redmond and Mr. Dillon for the Nationalists, and Sir Edward Carson and Captain Craig for Ulster. For the second time in four years the King had called into council others besides his official advisers. The Conference held only four sittings, and on July 24th its failure was announced to the world. Two days after there was a big gun-running at Howth, near Dublin, which involved a conflict with British regular troops. The Home Rule Bill must become law at once in order to take advantage of the Parliament Act. When that moment arrived it seemed that nothing but a miracle could prevent civil war.
A world earthquake was to forestall a local landslide. Would that landslide have come if the greater shock had not intervened? I find it hard to believe it. Both of the parties in the dispute had allowed themselves to be manoeuvred into a position where concession was difficult. But the ultimate core of difference had become ludicrously small — a few parishes in County Tyrone, and certain provisions about the future. It is true that most of the great contests of history have been fought on fine points and narrow margins, but these points and margins have been matters of principle, not of detail. Mr. Asquith’s intention was to pass concurrently with the Bill an amending measure, which would allow the disputed counties to vote themselves in or out, and would drop the proposal for Ulster’s automatic inclusion under a Dublin Parliament after a term of years. Moreover, he would have announced that after a short winter session the Government would go to the country early in 1915.
It is difficult to believe that Sir Edward Carson, who was by far the most powerful agent in the matter, would have allowed things to proceed to extremities. He had shown himself the most conciliatory of his party. He was well aware that the success of his cause depended largely on how it was regarded by the people of Britain. He was not forgetful of the solemn appeal which the King had made when he summoned the Conference:
We have in the past endeavoured to act as a civilising example to the world, and to me it is unthinkable, as it must be to you, that we should be brought to the brink of fratricidal strife upon issues apparently so capable of adjustment as those you are now asked to consider, if handled in a spirit of generous compromise.
Had there been no world war, it seems likely that, with the amending Bill and the promise of an early dissolution, the change of feeling in England and Scotland would have had a cooling effect on Ulster, and that after the election in the beginning of 1915 a Conservative Government would have come into office which would have removed her fears. How such a Government would have placated southern Ireland is another question.
II
On the afternoon of Friday, July 24th, a dispirited Cabinet was considering the breakdown of the Buckingham Palace Conference, and the kind of announcement that must be made to Parliament. At the end, just as Ministers were rising to go back to the Chamber, Sir Edward Grey’s voice was heard with a special gravity in it. He was reading a document which had just reached him from the Foreign Office. It was Austria’s Note to Serbia.
On the more perilous part of the volcano’s skirts during the first half of 1914 there had been a curious peace. In the principal continental countries there was much military and naval activity and no decrease of suspicion, but there were few untoward incidents. All suggestion of limiting naval competition between Britain and Germany was, indeed, received by the latter with scorn, and the mission of the American, Colonel House, in May was no more successful than the mission of Lord Haldane in 1912, or Mr. Churchill’s proposed naval holiday in 1913. But, apart from that, there seemed to be a better understanding between the two countries, and most of the old matters of difference appeared to have been settled. There was a German Ambassador, Prince Lichnowsky, now in London, who was widely popular and who made no secret of his desire for friendship and peace. In spite of Ireland there was a more optimistic feeling in Britain, aided by the Budget with its surplus of nine millions, and the magnificent trade returns. The King had visited Paris in April as an ordinary matter of etiquette, and the golden spring weather and the warmth of his welcome had made the occasion seem a festival of peace. . . . But Sir Edward Grey, who accompanied him, had had odd premonitions. He observed that one of the soldiers riding beside his carriage was not the ordinary robust cavalryman, but slender and frail and with the sensitive face of a poet, and he realised with a shock what conscription meant and the awful menace of war.
On Sunday, June 28th, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were murdered in the Bosnian town of Serajevo. The heir to the Austrian throne was not a popular figure, a morose, silent man, oppressed with the imminence of a fatal disease, whose one passion was for holocausts of game at shooting-parties; and his federalist politics were anathema to the Austrian governing classes. But he was an intimate of the German Emperor, and a fortnight before, among the roses of Konopischt, they had pledged their friendship. The crime that June morning of a printer’s devil and a schoolboy stripped off the diplomatic covering, and laid bare certain iron facts to the eyes of the world.
This is not the place to trace the tangled skein of events, some of them still uncertain, which brought about war. The Serajevo murder gave Austria the chance, for which she had been waiting, of removing once and for all the Slav menace. Her General Staff had long had an understanding with the German Staff, which provided for co-operation in a war in which the opponents were envisaged as Russia and France. Berlin encouraged her in making demands on Serbia, which Serbia could not accept without ceasing to be a nation, and this with full appreciation of the fact that Russia could not stand aside. A dispatch from the German Ambassador in Vienna was annotated by the German Emperor, “Now or never.” At a meeting at Potsdam on July 5th, a letter was read from the Emperor Franz Joseph, and Germany promised Austria support in whatever course she pursued. In Vienna Count Berchtold had his way, and the warnings of the far abler Count Tisza were disregarded. With the cognisance of Germany an impossible Note was presented to Belgrade, at a moment when there were domestic troubles in each of the nations of the Triple Entente and their diplomatic machines were out of gear. Serbia, having consulted Russia, went to the extreme limit of complaisance, accepting all Austria’s demands, with two reservations, on which she asked for a reference to the Hague Tribunal. But the Austrian Note was in the nature of a rhetorical question: it did not expect an answer. Forty-five minutes after Serbia’s reply was received the Austrian Minister left Belgrade. On July 28th Austria declared war.
The consequences that followed were as startling and inevitable as the explosions which attend the firing of a powder train. Russia could not look on unmoved, and on the 29th ordered a partial mobilisation. Germany, determined on some kind of war, but anxious to limit it if possible, and unwilling to drop the mask of reasonableness, made a parade of peace-making. It is needless to trace the steps in these clumsy manoeuvres which deceived nobody. The soldiers were in charge, and there could be no going back. In Russia partial mobilisation was followed by a general one; Germany mobilised in turn and sent Russia an ultimatum; France was compelled to follow the example of her ally. By the end of the month Austria was at war with Serbia, and Germany, France and Russia were waiting to march. Mobilisation is the first step i
n a campaign, and Germany from long preparation was in that game far ahead of her rivals; she could afford to wait, for her well-oiled machine moved fast. The question of the responsibility for the War will no doubt be debated for many years, but certain facts stand out clear in the mists of ingenious dialectic. Austria was the immediate cause, but the spur behind her was Germany. As for personalities, Berchtold and Conrad in Austria must bear the chief blame, and in Germany the army and navy chiefs. The German civilian statesmen were negligible, and the Emperor a bombastic echo of stronger men.
But it is with Britain that we are concerned. The burden in that last week lay especially upon two men, the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister, who was now also Secretary of State for War. Sir Edward Grey, to whom the duty of first action fell, had two purposes — to persuade the Powers concerned to come into conference, and to keep Britain’s liberty of ultimate decision uncompromised. There must be no risk of our drifting blindly into war. He had three convictions: that a general European war under modern conditions would be an unthinkable disaster; that Germany, who controlled Austria, had the key of the situation; that, if war came and France was involved, Britain dare not stand aside.
His first step was to approach Germany, France and Italy with a view to calling a conference in London to mediate in the Austro-Serbian quarrel. It was perhaps a blunder that Austria was not included in the invitation. From Paris and Rome he received a cordial response, from Berlin a flat refusal. He returned to the charge, and proposed that, if the principle of mediation were accepted, Germany herself should suggest the lines on which it should be conducted. On the 28th Bethmann-Hollweg, the Imperial Chancellor, sent for the British Ambassador and told him that a conference was impossible, since it would look like sitting in judgment on sovereign Powers, but that he was anxious for peace, and was advising Vienna to negotiate directly with Petrograd. Next day Sir Edward Grey very seriously and courteously warned Prince Lichnowsky of the dangerous road Germany was walking. “While [the situation] was restricted to the countries actually involved, we had no thought of interfering in it. But if Germany becomes involved in it, and then France, its area might be so great that it would involve all European interests; and I did not wish him to be misled by the friendly tone of our conversations — which I hoped might continue — into thinking that we should stand aside.” It was on a report of this talk that the Emperor scribbled: “The low scoundrel! genuinely English!”