British politics had become savage in temper and often irresponsible in conduct. Lord Halsbury, a veteran Conservative lawyer, denounced ‘government by a cabinet controlled by rank socialists’. A Tory MP hurled a rule book at Winston Churchill in the Commons library, striking 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 in the aftermath of a gun-running episode – 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.
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 highly plausible, and by no means intolerable, outcome of international tensions. Europe had twenty million regular soldiers and reservists, and each nation developed plans for every contingency in which they might be deployed. All the prospective belligerents proposed to attack. The British Army’s 1909 Field Service Regulations, largely drafted by Sir Douglas Haig, asserted: ‘Decisive success in battle can be gained only by a vigorous offensive.’ In February 1914, Russian military intelligence passed to its government two German memoranda, discussing the need to prepare public opinion for a two-front war. The Triple Alliance’s third party, Italy, was notionally committed to fight alongside Germany and Austria, which meant that the French must allocate troops not only to meet the Germans, but also to defend their south-eastern frontier. All the European powers remained nonetheless uncertain what Italy would do in the event of a war, as were Italians themselves. What seemed plain was that the Rome government would eventually offer support to whichever power promised to indulge its ambitions for territorial aggrandisement.
In Germany, chief of staff Helmuth von Moltke inherited in 1906 from his predecessor, Alfred Graf von Schlieffen, a scheme for a massive sweeping advance through northern France, around Paris, to smash the French army before turning on Russia. For the past century, Schlieffen’s vision has lain at the heart of all debate about whether Germany might have won the war in 1914. The confidence of the nation’s leadership that it could successfully launch a general European conflict rested entirely upon the Schlieffen concept, or more exactly Moltke’s modification of it.
The Kaiser liked to pretend that he ruled Germany, and occasionally he did so; his appointed chancellor, the liberal-conservative Bethmann Hollweg, exercised varying influence, while striving to manage an increasingly hostile Reichstag. But the most powerful single figure in the Wilhelmine Empire was Moltke, controlling the most formidable military machine in Europe. He was an unexpected general, a Christian Scientist who played the cello and was prey to deep melancholy – ‘der traurige Julius’ – ‘sad Julius’. Conspicuous in his life were devotion to his wife and a fascination with the afterlife, spiritualism and the occult, which she encouraged. Moltke believed that he occupied the most honourable position on earth. He and the army answered to no politician, only to the Kaiser.
The Great General Staff, which operated under his direction, was Germany’s most respected institution. It consisted of 625 officers, who worked in a building on Berlin’s Königsplatz in which Moltke and his family occupied a flat. Security was tight: there were no secretaries or clerks; staff officers drafted all documents. Once the cleaners left each morning, no women save Eliza Moltke and her maid entered the building. Each year when a new mobilisation plan was prepared, copies of the redundant version were meticulously destroyed. The Staff’s output owed little to technology: it owned no automobiles; even the influential Railway Department had only one typewriter; urgent telephone calls were made from a single box in a corridor. There was no canteen, and most officers brought in packed lunches to eat at their desks during working days of twelve to fourteen hours. Every member of the General Staff was taught to think of himself as one among a hallowed elite, subject to social rules which were meticulously observed: no man – for instance – might enter a bar frequented by socialists.
Moltke himself sought to convey an impression of personal strength that would soon prove to have been illusory, but which exercised a critical influence on the advance to war. A highly intelligent and cultured man, he rose through a close association with the Kaiser, which began when he served as adjutant to his uncle, ‘the great Moltke’, victor over France in 1870–71. Wilhelm found the hero’s nephew congenial, and clung to a conviction that the old man’s genius must have passed to the next generation. But the decision to appoint Helmuth chief of staff was controversial, indeed to some shocking. One of Moltke’s former military instructors wrote: ‘This man could be disastrous.’ Wilhelm’s choice plainly derived from their personal relationship: he found the general an agreeable companion with a pleasing bedside manner, that essential requirement for courtiers through the ages. Moltke had shown himself a competent officer without offering – or having much opportunity to display – evidence of military genius.
It was ironic that after 1890 the elder