1916 Read Free Page B

This continues to be the case today as the many books dealing with the outbreak of the war rarely take into account the Irish crisis. And yet there can be little doubt about the veracity of Professor Stewart’s assertion. Indeed, on 26 July 1914 the Belgian ambassador in Berlin, Baron Henri Beyens, wrote that Germany could now wage war ‘in extremely favourable circumstances’. Among the reasons he mentioned was the situation in the United Kingdom: ‘England … is paralysed by her internal dissensions and her Irish quarrels’. 22 Beyens could not have known how right he was for on the very same day a British regiment opened fire on a nationalist crowd in Dublin after a gun-running operation for the Irish Volunteers at Howth. Four people died and forty were wounded. The incident became known as the Bachelor’s Walk massacre. The long-awaited civil war looked to be on its way. The next day Albert Ballin, the German ship owner and personal friend of the Kaiser, reported from London, where he had been sent to ascertain the political situation, that Britain’s reaction to Austria-Hungary’s ultimatum to Serbia had been very ‘mild’. He related it to the ‘present situation’. 23 Undoubtedly, Ballin had the Irish crisis in mind.
    Still on 27 July Germany rejected a British offer of mediation emanating from Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, and advised the Austro-Hungarians to also reject it. 24 They took this piece of advice. 25 Indeed, why should they accept the offer of a disunited United Kingdom? Besides, on 12 July, twelve days before the Austro-Hungarians’ fateful ultimatum to the Serbians, their ambassador in Berlin, Count Ladislaus Szögyény, had already informed them that the Germans thought that ‘above all, England is anything but bellicose at the moment’. 26 In Britain politicians at the highest level and of all shades of opinion began to suspect that the Central Powers were taking into account the Irish crisis in the formulation of their policy. On 30 July Prime Minister Herbert Asquith secretly met his political opponents, Andrew Bonar Law (leader of the Conservative party) and Sir Edward Carson (leader of the Unionist party), somewhere in the suburbs of London. Bonar Law and Carson wanted the prime minister ‘to postpone for the time being the second reading of the Amending bill [which provided for the possible exclusion from home rule of certain Ulster counties] … in the interest of the international situation’. Asquith replied: ‘I agreed and read to them the latest telegrams from Berlin which, in my judgement, assume that the German government are calculating upon our internal weakness to affect our foreign policy.’ A short time later he met John Redmond, the leader of the Irish party, to whom he related his rather extraordinary meeting. Redmond ‘thought it an excellent chance of putting off the Amending bill’. 27
    On 3 August 1914, when Germany declared war on France, Field Marshal Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, the Austro-Hungarian commander in chief, wrote: ‘England’s attitude proves to be unfriendly and doubtful. To [our] military attaché [in London], it seems, however, that there is no desire for war for the time being, taking into account the Ulster crisis and the civil war.’ 28 To point out that Conrad and his military attaché were wrong, as there was no civil war, is to miss the point. What matters here is their interpretation, and this interpretation must have encouraged Conrad and others in persevering in their offensive against Serbia. That there was no civil war in Ireland was largely due to Redmond’s intervention in the House of Commons on 3 August when he put forward that the UVF and the Irish Volunteers would defend Ireland against a foreign (i.e. German) invasion. It can be safely said that Redmond spoiled Berlin and Vienna’s expectations. It also helps to explain why the British cabinet was so hesitant in committing itself to help France and Russia. On 1