The Last Lion

His inspections of ships continued to be popular with bluejackets. After his first year in office the monthly magazine Fleet, which echoed forecastle views, commented: “No First Lord in the history of the Navy has shown himself more practically sympathetic with the conditions of the Lower Deck than Winston Churchill.” The brass took another view. Churchill’s predecessors had given the sea lords free rein, but he regarded them as subordinates and issued them blunt instructions. When Bridgeman rebelled, he was swiftly retired, ostensibly on grounds of poor health, with Prince Louis replacing him. Tories protested in the House, and career officers were scandalized. Rear Admiral Dudley de Chair, who succeeded Beatty as navy secretary, was shocked by the first lord’s cursory judgment of men, often based on a few minutes of conversation. De Chair found him “impulsive, headstrong and even at times obstinate.” His tours of the fleet were also controversial. He encouraged junior officers and ratings to criticize their commanding officers. When a commander dared complain of this, Churchill proposed to relieve him and was dissuaded only when the second, third, and fourth sea lords threatened to resign in protest. At the end of a strategy conference, one of the admirals accused the first lord of impugning the traditions of the Royal Navy. “And what are they?” asked Winston. “I shall tell you in three words. Rum, sodomy, and the lash. Good morning, gentlemen.”¹⁶⁵

No profession is more wedded to the folklore of the past than the armed services. Since the last major conflict on the Continent, technology had clanked out an astonishing array of contraptions suitable for war, and the generals and admirals of Europe, regardless of national allegiance, viewed them all with deep distrust. They belonged to that generation which called electricity “the electric,” and regarded it as newfangled. Being new was enough to make a device suspect. Haig thought the machine gun “a much over-rated weapon,” and believed “two per battalion should be sufficient.” Joffre of France refused to use a telephone, pretending that he did not “understand the mechanism.” The Stokes mortar was twice rejected at the British War Office and finally introduced by Lloyd George, who begged the money for it from an Indian maharaja and was as a consequence considered “ungentlemanly” by British officers. Kitchener dismissed the tank as a “toy.” It was, in fact, a pet project of Churchill’s. Winston wasn’t always right, however; Jellicoe was impressed by a flight in a zeppelin, and at his urging Churchill approved pilot models. Then he lost interest. As he said later, “I rated the Zeppelin much lower as a weapon of war than almost anyone else. I believed that this enormous bladder of combustible and explosive gas would prove easily destructible.” As a result, in 1914 the navy had no reconnaissance airships. He also failed to provide adequate submarine defenses in Scapa and the Firth of Forth, but that was because he became entangled in red tape; unlike H. G. Wells, who predicted that the “blind fumblings” of U-boats would limit them to the torpedoing of hulks in harbors, he was fully aware of their minatory potential.¹⁶⁶

The new weapon which fascinated him most was the airplane. In 1910 General Ferdinand Foch had spoken for most professional officers when he ridiculed the idea of an air force in wartime. “Tout ça, c’est du sport,” he said contemptuously; as far as the French army was concerned, “l’avion c’est zéro!” In the British navy it was otherwise. As early as February 25, 1909, when he was still at the Board of Trade, Churchill had told the cabinet that aviation would be “most important” in the future and suggested that “we should place ourselves in communication with Mr [Orville] Wright and avail ourselves of his knowledge.” The following year he presented a Daily Mail check for £10,000 to two airmen who had taken off from the Dominion of Newfoundland and landed on a field in, as he put it, “the future equally happy and prosperous Dominion of Ireland”—poor political prophecy, but no other national figure had come to greet them. Arriving at the Admiralty, he had sought out the small band of adventurous officers who were the pioneers of naval aviation. In 1912 he founded the Royal Naval Air Service—a precursor of the Royal Flying Corps and, later, the Royal Air Force—to provide “aerial protection to our naval harbours, oil tanks and vulnerable points, and also for a general strengthening of our exiguous and inadequate aviation.” A larval helicopter was built; he inspected it. In tests it proved unstable, and prone to crash, after it had risen about three hundred feet. Winston proposed a hollow propeller containing a parachute. The suggestion was completely impractical, but his encouragement of experimentation elsewhere led to breakthroughs. Because of his efforts, England became the first country to equip a plane with a machine gun, and the first to launch an airborne torpedo. He coined the words seaplane, and flight to designate a given number of aircraft, usually four.¹⁶⁷

To Clementine’s alarm, he decided to fly himself. He regarded his first ride, in 1912, as a matter of duty. Discovering that he enjoyed it, he made repeated ascents. The craft were primitive, the techniques slap-dash. On one bumpy trip, in the teeth of a gale, nearly three hours were required to cover the sixteen miles from Gravesend to Grain, and “after landing Churchill safely,” the pilot reported, “my seaplane ‘took off’ again, landing trolley and all over the sea wall, as it was being brought up the slipway, and was more or less wrecked.” The hazards whetted Winston’s appetite. In October 1913, at the Eastchurch naval flying center, he went up in three different craft. That evening he wrote Clementine: “Darling, We have had a vy jolly day in the air… it has been as good as one of those old days in the S. African War, & I have lived entirely in the moment, with no care for all those tiresome party politics & searching newspapers, and awkward by-elections…. For good luck before I started I put your locket on. It has been lying in my desk since it got bent—& as usual it worked like a charm.” She wired her dismay from the Enchantress and then followed up with a note: “I hope my telegram will not have vexed you, but please be kind & don’t fly any more just now.”¹⁶⁸

It was a postage stamp wasted. Churchill with the bit in his teeth was incorrigible. Deeply as he loved his wife, at that moment he loved the excitement of flying more. To the consternation of the barnstormers who had been taking him up, he declared that he wanted to be a pilot himself. He was too old, they protested; thirty-two was regarded as the top age for a novice, and he was thirty-eight. He invoked his powers as first lord, ordered them to shut up, and began taking lessons in managing controls at Apavon. One of his instructors, Ivon Courtney, later recalled: “Before our first flight together he said to me: ‘We are in the Stephenson age of flying. Now our machines are frail. One day they will be robust, and of value to our country.’ He had already done a lot of flying. ‘I want some more instruction,’ he said.” Aircraft were not equipped with headphones then; the two men sat in separate cockpits, Churchill in the rear, and shouted at each other, hoping their voices would carry above the wind. The instruments were encased in a box, but most airmen scorned them, preferring to rely on what they called “ear.” Winston, however, was fascinated by the dials and needles. He would crouch down, peering at them, “and,” Courtney wrote, “he was right to do so. He saw that one day the box of instruments would be more important than the pilot’s ear.”¹⁶⁹

They went up as often as ten times a day. Every officer on the instruction staff worried about their eminent student. “We were all scared stiff,” said Courtney, “of having a smashed First Lord on our hands.” Eugene Gerrard, later air commodore, said: “WSC has had as much as twenty-five hours in the air, but no one will risk letting him solo; if anything happened to WSC the career of the man who had allowed him a solo flight would be finished.” Sir Philip Joubert de la Ferté, later air chief marshal, remembered Winston as “a very fair pilot once he was in the air, but more than uncertain in his take-off and landing. His instructors usually took over the controls to make the final approach and touchdown.” Another future RAF marshal, Hugh Trenchard, gave him lower marks. After watching him “wallowing about the sky,” as he put it, he decided Winston was “altogether too impatient for a good pupil.”¹⁷⁰

But Churchill persevered. He spent the afternoon of Saturday, November 29, 1913, in the air with Captain Gilbert Wildman-Lushington of the Royal Marines. After they had parted, the captain wrote his fiancée: “I started Winston off on his instruction about 12.15 & he got so bitten with it, I could hardly get him out of the machine, in fact except for about ¾ hour for lunch we were in the machine till about 3.30. He showed great promise, & is coming down again for further instruction & practice.” Winston himself was dissatisfied. Once he had set his mind on an objective, anything short of total conquest was unacceptable. Back in his Admiralty office that evening he wrote Lushington: “I wish you would clear up the question of the steering control and let me know what was the real difficulty I had in making the rudder act. Probably the explanation is that I was pushing against myself…. Could you not go up with another flying officer and, sitting yourself in the back seat, see whether there is great stiffness and difficulty in steering, or whether it was all my clumsiness.” Then he dropped Clementine a line: “I have been very naughty today about flying…. With twenty machines in the air at once and thousands of flights made without mishap, it is not possible to look upon it as a vy serious risk. Do not be vexed with me.”¹⁷¹

She wasn’t vexed; she was frantic. By the time this letter reached her, Lushington was dead; coming in to land at Eastchurch on Sunday, he sideslipped and crashed. F.E. wrote Winston: “Why do you do such a foolish thing as fly repeatedly? Surely it is unfair to your family, your career & your friends.” It was; it was thoughtless, the act of a supreme egoist. H. G. Wells wrote: “There are times when the evil spirit comes upon him and I think of him as a very intractable, a very mischievous, dangerous little boy, a knee-worthy little boy. Only thinking of him in that way can I go on liking him.” The fact is that His Majesty’s first lord of the Admiralty deserved a good spanking. Despite his instructor’s death and his wife’s appeals, he refused to stay on the ground. At Easter Clementine wrote him from Spain, where she and Mrs. Keppel were Cassel’s guests: “I have been seized by a dreadful anxiety that you are making use of my absence to fly even more often than you do when I am there—I beg of you not to do it at all, at any rate till I can be there.” It was a shrewd guess. That very day he had not only flown; he had been shaken up when engine failure forced his new instructor to make an emergency landing. Undaunted, he took off again two days later. Clementine and the children were now staying with her mother in Dieppe, and on May 29, 1914, he wrote her there: “I have been at the Central Flying School for a couple of days—flying a little in good & careful hands & under perfect conditions. So I did not write you from there as I knew you would be vexed.”¹⁷²

She replied: “I felt what you were doing before I read about it, but I felt too weak & tired to struggle against it. It is like beating one’s head against a stone wall…. Perhaps if I saw you, I could love and pet you, but you have been so naughty that I can’t do it on paper. I must be ‘brought round’ first.” She signed the letter with the sketch of a cat, its ears down. She did see him the following week; he crossed on the Enchantress to spend a day with her and the children. They discussed his flying, and he assured her that the airfield he was using, at Sheerness in Kent, had every modern facility. Yet in her next letter the tension was still there: “I cannot help knowing that you are going to fly as you go to Sheerness & it fills me with anxiety. I know nothing will stop you from doing it so I will not weary you with tedious entreaties, but don’t forget that I am thinking about it all the time & so, do it as little & as moderately as you can, & only with the very best Pilot. I feel very ‘ears down’ about it.” Her fear haunted her; she was five months pregnant with their third child—it would be another daughter, Sarah—and thought, not unreasonably, that she was entitled to more consideration from her husband. In her next letter she described a nightmare. She had dreamed she had had her baby, but the doctor and nurse hid it. Finding the infant in a darkened room, she feverishly counted its fingers and toes only to find that it was a gaping idiot. “And then the worst thing of all happened—I wanted the Doctor to kill it—but he was shocked & took it away & I was mad too.” The evening before, she had received a cable from Winston, telling her he was safely home. “Every time I see a telegram now,” she wrote, “I think it is to announce that you have been killed flying. I had a fright but went to sleep relieved; but this morning after the nightmare I looked at it again for consolation & found to my horror it was from Sheerness & not from Dover where I thought you were going first—so you are probably at it again at this very moment. Goodbye my Dear but Cruel One, Your loving Clemmie.”¹⁷³

Winston instantly replied: “My darling one, I will not fly any more until at any rate you have recovered from your kitten.” He had been callous, but he recognized a cry of despair when he heard it. Mulling it over, he realized that her anxiety had been fully justified. Prewar aviation was, in fact, a risky business, even for skillful airmen; only a few days earlier, Gustav Hamel, a celebrated monoplane aviator and a friend of both the Churchills, had disappeared over the Channel. Abandoning flight was “a wrench,” Winston wrote Clementine, “because I was on the verge of taking my pilot’s certificate; & I am confident of my ability to achieve it vy respectably. I shd greatly have liked to reach this point wh wd have made a suitable moment for breaking off. But I must admit that the numerous fatalities of this year wd justify you in complaining if I continued to share the risks—as I am proud to do—of these good fellows. So I give it up decidedly for many months & perhaps for ever. This is a gift—so stupidly am I made—wh costs me more than anything wh cd be bought with money. So I am vy glad to lay it at your feet, because I know it will rejoice & relieve your heart. Anyhow I can feel I know a good deal about this fascinating new art. I can manage a machine with ease in the air, even with high winds, & only a little more practice in landings wd have enabled me to go up with reasonable safety alone. I have been up nearly 140 times, with many pilots, & all kinds of machines, so I know the difficulties the dangers & the joys of the air—well enough to appreciate them, & to understand all the questions of policy wh will arise in the near future…. You will give me some kisses and forgive me for past distresses—I am sure. Though I had no need & perhaps no right to do it—it was an important part of my life during the last 7 months, & I am sure my nerve, my spirits & my virtue were all improved by it. But at your expense my poor pussy cat! I am so sorry.”¹⁷⁴

It is astonishing to reflect that Churchill was flying over Kent before the young RAF pilots who won the Battle of Britain, dogfighting in those same skies, were even born. By then, of course, no one questioned the absolute necessity of a strong air arm. In Winston’s cockpit days it was regarded as a frill, however, and he was hard put to justify it in an Admiralty budget already swollen by the need to stay ahead of Germany. Alarmed by the expensive arms race, in April 1912 he had proposed a “Naval Holiday,” during which both nations would suspend the laying of new keels. The kaiser rejected the idea; such an agreement, he said, could be reached only between allies. But Albert Ballin, director of the Hamburg-American Steamship Line, told Cassel that the “frankness and honesty” of Churchill’s offer had “flustered… the leading parties in Germany, and has caused a torrent of [comment] in the Press.” Winston wrote Cassel a conciliatory letter, meant for der hohe Herr’s eyes. It accomplished nothing. Ballin thought Churchill should visit Berlin; he believed he would be well received, and could “have some useful conversation with Admiral Tirpitz.” Winston declined on the ground that “all that could be said on our part wd be that till Germany dropped the naval challenge her policy wd be continually viewed here with deepening suspicion and apprehension; but that any slackening on her part wd produce an immediate détente, with much good will from England. Failing that I see little in prospect but politeness and preparation.” On October 24, 1913, he again suggested a shipbuilding suspension, forwarding the recommendation to der hohe Herr through Ballin and advising the cabinet: “The simultaneous building by so many powers great and small of capital ships, their general naval expansion, are causes of deep anxiety to us…. Naval strength to other powers is a mere panache. But as the frog said to the boy in the fable ‘It is sport to you: it is death to us.’ ” This time his proposal wasn’t even acknowledged.¹⁷⁵

All overtures to the kaiser having failed, he and Jack Seely, who had succeeded Haldane as war minister, pushed for higher military appropriations. At the end of the year Churchill submitted his naval estimates for 1914. They were shocking: £50,694,800—the largest in British history, the largest in the world. The chancellor of the Exchequer was stunned. Winston and Lloyd George were still friends, but they were no longer partners in political counterpoint. The first lord had become militant, even belligerent; the chancellor, whose own position was softening again, complained that Churchill was “getting more and more absorbed in boilers.” The cabinet was divided. Asquith accepted the estimates, but Margot wrote Lloyd George: “Don’t let Winston have too much money—it will hurt our party in every way—Labour and even Liberals. If one can’t be a little economical when all foreign countries are peaceful I don’t know when we can.”¹⁷⁶

The split was deep, and involved more than money. Asquith, Churchill, Seely, and Grey believed that the integrity of France was vital to England’s national interest; that, as Grey put it, “if Germany dominated the Continent it would be disagreeable to us as well as to others, for we should be isolated.” The Tories agreed, but among Liberals, even within the cabinet, it was a minority view. Their leader there, Lord Morley, believed he could count on “eight or nine likely to agree with us” in opposing the policies being advanced by Grey with “strenuous simplicity” and by Churchill with “daemonic energy.” Morley described himself as “a pacifist at heart.” He had been Gladstone’s friend and biographer, and he and those who agreed with him believed they were acting on Gladstonian principles. The fights they loved were those fought for Free Trade, social reforms, Irish Home Rule, and the defeat of the arrogant dukes. They were unmoved by France. Only an appeal for help from a little country like Belgium could reach their hearts, and even that was uncertain.¹⁷⁷

Thus Lloyd George had friends in power when, on New Year’s Day, 1914, he told a Daily Chronicle reporter that Churchill’s plan for “exorbitant expenditure on armaments” violated Lord Randolph’s memory. Replying, Winston rebuked him; he said he never granted newspaper interviews “on important subjects of this character while they are under the consideration of the Cabinet.” One of the two ministers, it seemed, would have to resign. While refusing to be quoted, Churchill became the source of sensational rumors. He was pondering a return to the Conservative party; he had become doubtful about Home Rule; if he left the Admiralty, the four sea lords would quit in protest. As tempers rose, the two principals sat down for five hours of what Winston called “polite but deadly” negotiation. The prime minister joined them, and his strong support of the estimates decided the issue. To save Lloyd George’s face, 2 percent was cut from the naval budget, further economies were promised for the following year, and expensive maneuvers planned for the following summer were canceled, to be replaced by a trial mobilization of the fleet. George avoided mortification by pretending that he had changed his mind. He invited Churchill to breakfast at No. 11 Downing Street, the traditional home of the chancellors. He said his wife had told him that he ought to let “that nice Mr Churchill” have his dreadnoughts, arguing that it would be better to have too many than too few. “So,” he said, “I have decided to let you build them. Let’s go in to breakfast.” Winston wrote his mother: “I think the naval estimates are now past the danger point & if so the situation will be satisfactory. But it has been a long and wearing business wh has caused me at times vy gt perplexity.”¹⁷⁸

In March he presented his naval estimates to the House. The Liberals were tepid, the Conservatives enthusiastic. The Daily Telegraph hailed his address as “the most weighty and eloquent speech to which the House of Commons have listened [from a first lord of the Admiralty] during the present generation.”¹⁷⁹ This was praise Churchill didn’t need. Indeed, though Tories publicly approved of his naval expansion, behind his back they said it was inspired by a personal pursuit of glory. Winston’s defection from their ranks, his humiliation of Joe Chamberlain, and his corrosive invective in political campaigns and parliamentary struggles could be neither forgotten nor forgiven. His political advancement—even survival—depended on his strength with his adopted party, where, more and more, MPs on the back benches were saying: “He’s not really a Liberal.” He had to prove that he was. In that four-year interval between the end of the Edwardian era and the outbreak of the Kaiser’s War there were many disputes between the Asquith government and the Opposition, but Churchill needed a dramatic issue. One appeared. It seemed ideal: explosive, emotional, and above all a matter of principle. And it was unavoidable. The eighty-four Irish Nationalist MPs had presented their bill for services rendered in unmanning the House of Lords, and payment was now due.

By later Irish standards they were mild—“Gentlemen first, Irishmen second” had been their muted war cry—and as gentlemen they had been patient. Their cause had been hopeless in the fourteen years between Parnell’s death in Kitty O’Shea’s arms and the fall of the Balfour government, but the Liberals had been in power since 1906 and had done nothing to redeem Gladstone’s promise. Winston had prodded the cabinet; on February 13, 1910, Blunt had noted in his diary that Churchill had said it was “the ambition of my life to bring in a Home Rule Bill.” But neither Asquith nor Lloyd George found the issue appealing, and even Winston, who had been offered the post of chief secretary for Ireland, had turned down what was known as the “hoodoo job of the Cabinet.” Ireland had always been a political minefield, and it had been doubly treacherous since Lord Randolph had played what he called his “ace of trumps, the Orange card.”¹⁸⁰

Ulster—the nine counties around Belfast, in northern Ireland—was largely populated by Protestants, descendants of Scots who had settled there before the Mayflower sighted Plymouth. Under Home Rule, the entire island would be ruled by a parliament in Dublin. Inevitably Catholics from southern Ireland would dominate it. Before they would accept that, Ulstermen swore, they would die fighting. “Home Rule,” they said, meant “Rome Rule.” The differences between the northern Unionists and the southern Nationalists had been, were, and always would be irreconcilable. The southerners found the status quo intolerable. For nearly eight centuries they had been governed like serfs by English viceroys entrenched in Dublin Castle. The finest estates in what is now Eire then belonged to an Anglo-Irish aristocracy, the Protestant Ascendancy. Gladstone had told these overlords again and again that the southern yearning for freedom was an indestructible passion, but they preferred to quote Queen Victoria: “I think it very unwise to give up what we hold.” After the coronation of George V, however, the Irish Nationalists, under pressure from home, prepared to drop their genteel manners. They wanted their own parliament, and they wanted it immediately. “The Irish question,” Churchill wrote afterward, “now cut jaggedly across the British political scene.” By this time, he had completely emerged from his father’s shadow and was one of the most vigorous champions of a united Ireland, governed from Dublin. Because he was Randolph’s son as well as the ablest parliamentarian in the cabinet, Asquith chose him as point man for the issue. In Dundee, on October 4, 1911, Winston declared: “Next year we propose to introduce the Home Rule Bill, and we propose to carry it forward with all our strength.” The crowd, knowing he had been born and bred a Unionist, was taken aback. Someone called: “Ulster will fight, Ulster will be right!” Churchill snapped: “That is a slogan from which every street bully with a brickbat and every crazy fanatic fumbling with a pistol may draw inspiration.”¹⁸¹

Early the following year he announced that he had accepted an invitation from the Ulster Liberal Association to speak in Belfast’s Ulster Hall, where Lord Randolph had spoken, on February 12. The Irish Unionist party erupted. “What a man to select!” thundered Sir Edward Carson, former solicitor general and a leader of the Ulster Unionists in the House. “The most provocative speaker in the whole party, going under the most provocative circumstances to a place where the words of his own father are still ringing in the ear!” Death threats arrived at Admiralty House by post and telephone. One Unionist warned him in an open letter: “The heather is on fire and Belfast today is the rallying ground of the clans. The fiery cross has sped through hill and glen, and with the undying spirit of their forbears the Ulstermen are answering to the message…. It would be well if Mr Churchill would read the writing on the wall, for there is great fear that harm may happen to him.” Clementine decided to accompany her husband, hoping that would discourage violence. At the last minute Winston’s cousin Freddie Guest joined the party, carrying a revolver in his pocket.¹⁸²

Crossing the Irish Sea, the Churchills were kept awake all night by women who stood outside their cabin window chanting: “Votes for women! Votes for women!” Policemen patrolled the eighteen-mile railroad line from Larne, where they docked, to Belfast. Arriving at Belfast Station, Churchill was told that four infantry battalions—thirty-five hundred troops—had been called up to line his route. Even so, the risks were grave; glass had been removed from the windows of their car because demonstrators were carrying stones. The drive to the Grand Centre Hotel was a tribulation in itself. Winston stared out at a burning effigy of himself. At one point, the Guardian reported, the mob lifted the car’s back wheels eighteen inches off the ground. The Times correspondent wrote that “men thrust their heads in and uttered fearful menaces and imprecations. It seemed to me that Mr Churchill was taking a greater risk than ever he expected…. Yet he never flinched and took hostility visualised as well as vocalised calmly and no harm befell him.” This observer noted that he “smilingly raised his hat whenever the crowd groaned.” Clementine, badly frightened herself, thought that “the opposition and threats seemed to ‘ginger him up.’ ”¹⁸³

Nevertheless, it was clear that he had misjudged Ulster’s mood. A hostile throng of ten thousand awaited them at the hotel. Businessmen in the lobby angrily shook their fists. The windows of their suite were heavily draped; when Winston tried to peek out, a roar of boos and oaths swelled up from below. Meeting in Ulster Hall was out of the question. The local Unionist Council, which had resolved to prevent his appearance “in the centre of the loyal city of Belfast,” had occupied it with armed “Hooligan Corner Boys,” as they were called. Evicting them would cost the lives of at least six policemen. A dozen plots were afoot to murder Churchill if he even approached the hall. The rally was therefore moved to Celtic Park in the Falls neighborhood, a Catholic stronghold, where a heavy rain began falling at 2:00 P.M. as Winston, standing beneath a leaking canvas marquee, rose to address a drenched crowd of five thousand Irish Nationalists and a handful of Unionist hecklers. The Tories, he told them, were trying to regain office by using Ireland as a cat’s-paw, but “the flame of Irish nationality is inextinguishable.” Of his father he said: “The reverence which I feel for his memory, and the care with which I have studied his public life, make me quite content to leave others to judge how far there is continuity or discontinuity between his work and any I have tried to do.” Then he ended audaciously, ringing a change on Lord Randolph’s most famous words: “If Ulster would fight for the honor of Ireland, for reconciliation of races and for forgiveness of ancient wrongs, for the consolidation of the Empire, then indeed Ulster will fight, and Ulster will be right.”¹⁸⁴

The apologetic Liberals of Ulster presented Winston and Clementine with blackthorns, stout walking sticks—a pleasant gesture which was swiftly forgotten when, as they mounted the Larne gangplank for the journey home, dockers pelted them with rotten fish. It was a fitting farewell; in the eight centuries since Pope Adrian IV gave Ireland to Henry II, the relationship between England and Ireland had been marked by wave after wave of violence, and now new fury was rising. Churchill wasn’t even safe in the House of Commons. In June, Ronald MacNeill, a prominent Unionist MP, picked up a copy of the House’s standing orders from the ledge of the Speaker’s chair and flung it at the first lord, cutting him in the forehead. Next day MacNeill apologized. Churchill assured him he hadn’t minded at all, which was true; he was enjoying the battle, and if tempers on the other side grew frayed, he was the first to admit that his own remarks were incendiary. His treatment in Ulster, he said, was proof that Carson and Bonar Law, leader of the Tories in the House, had plotted war on the British army and had “even suggested that this process in Ireland should be accompanied by the lynching of His Majesty’s Ministers.” Captain James Craig, an Ulster MP, called him “contemptible.” Winston replied: “If I valued the honourable Gentleman’s opinion I might get angry.” He enjoyed a studied insult, even when he was its victim, and chortled when he read that Lord Charles Beresford, during a Hyde Park rally, referred to him as a “Lilliput Napoleon—a man with an unbalanced mind, an egomaniac whose one absorbing thought is personal vindictiveness towards Ulster.” He didn’t even mind when feelings ran so high in the House that only a quick-thinking Labour MP, who started everyone singing “Auld Lang Syne,” prevented fistfights on the floor.¹⁸⁵

He was, however, troubled by talk of Belfast’s gutters running red with British blood. Abuse was tolerable only up to a certain point. Carson passed it when he called him “Lord Randolph’s renegade son, who wants to be handed down to posterity as the Belfast butcher who threatened to shoot down those who took his father’s advice.” Though his language was less blistering, Law went even farther. He said: “Ireland is two nations. The Ulster people will submit to no ascendancy, and I can imagine no lengths to which they might go in which they would not be supported by the overwhelming majority of the British people.” This was an open invitation to revolt, from the man who would be prime minister in a Conservative government. Such speeches were fanning the flame of discord in northern Ireland. Protestant volunteers were already forming insurgent regiments. Law warned the House that Ulster might explode at any moment; if blood were shed, he said, the cabinet would be answerable for it. Winston retorted that “those who talk of revolution ought to be prepared for the guillotine.” In a letter to The Times he said: “Mr Bonar Law and his lieutenant Sir Edward Carson have…. incited the Orangemen to wage civil war…. All this talk of violence, of bullets and bayonets, of rebellion and civil war has come from one side alone.” He wouldn’t budge: “Whatever Ulster’s rights may be, she cannot stand in the way of the whole of the rest of Ireland.”¹⁸⁶

One reason the Irish crisis grew is that it was given time to grow. Asquith introduced his Home Rule bill on April 11, 1912, two months after Churchill’s Belfast speech, and the issue was still before the country in the summer of 1914. The House of Lords was responsible for the delay. The peers no longer possessed an absolute veto, but they retained some power to obstruct; if they stonewalled, as they did in this instance, they could force the House of Commons to pass a bill in three successive parliamentary sessions. As the seasons passed, the Orangemen’s enmity hardened. For more than two years, Churchill later calculated, the question “absorbed nine-tenths of the political field.” Meanwhile, he and his fellow ministers were struggling to find a compromise which would give Ireland both Home Rule and peace. His first proposals were naive. He saw the Transvaal constitution as a sound precedent, though it would be hard to imagine two breeds less alike than the Boers and the Irish. Lloyd George suggested a “referendum…. each of the Ulster counties is to have the option of exclusion from the Home Rule Bill,” which was equally impractical. The idea of partition was first mooted in June 1912, when two MPs introduced an amendment to the bill exempting four Ulster counties from Home Rule. Carson, believing that “if Ulster were left out, Home Rule would be impossible,” supported their measure in the hope of defeating the bill in its entirety.¹⁸⁷

It was rejected, but the idea remained. On August 31 Churchill wrote John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Nationalists, that “something should be done to afford the characteristically Protestant and Orange counties the option of several years before acceding to an Irish Parliament.” This was the first indication that he might be receptive to partition. At the time he thought of it as a temporary measure. With the Ulster Volunteers drilling, and Carson designated head of a “provisional government,” he appealed for a fresh approach at Dundee in October 1913. By this time Home Rule had passed the Commons twice and been spurned twice by the Lords. Its enactment was now certain. Churchill, however, was looking beyond that, to the practical problems of enforcement. The Unionists’ claim for special treatment, he said, was “very different from the claim to bar and defer Home Rule and block the path of the rest of Ireland.” He added significantly: “Our bill is not unalterable.” The Liberals could pass it without a single Tory vote, “but it will take more than one party to make it a lasting success. A settlement by agreement… would offer advantages far beyond anything now in sight. Peace is better than triumph provided it is peace with honour…. Only one thing would make it worth while or even possible to recast a measure on which so much depends: It is a very simple thing—good will.” Redmond, afraid that his most powerful ally might be weakening, denounced the “two-nation theory” as “an abomination and a blasphemy.” Carson was scornful. One solitary Conservative, F. E. Smith—who, astonishingly, remained close to Winston through all this—said he had “shown a grasp of those facts which are fundamental which none of his colleagues, at least in public, has displayed.”¹⁸⁸

If his motive in entering this donnybrook had been political—and surely that was among his reasons—he had chosen the wrong arena. To be sure, he was reestablishing his credentials as a Liberal, but the cost was prohibitive. By agreeing to be Asquith’s chief spokesman on Home Rule, he had added his name to that long list of English public men who had intervened in the Irish question and emerged bloodied. Other members of Asquith’s cabinet could speak out in support of Winston when his decision was popular and remain silent when it wasn’t. This was even true of the prime minister. Eventually Asquith would have to commit himself, but in the interim he could leave the stump to Churchill. Moreover, Winston couldn’t confine himself to polemics. He had to search for a solution, a hopeless task which was bound to antagonize partisans in both Belfast and Dublin. Twice in the autumn of 1913 he conferred with Conservative leaders in the hope of finding middle ground, talking to Bonar Law at Balmoral in September, and then to Austen Chamberlain aboard the Enchantress in late November. Chamberlain’s memorandum on their discussion, written immediately afterward, shows how far Churchill was prepared to go at that time to reach a settlement: “In answer to W’s opening remark I said that I had assumed that… he was prepared to [exempt] Ulster. He replied: ‘We have never excluded that possibility—never.’ Of course Redmond hated it, but they were not absolutely bound to R. and he was not indispensable to them. They would not allow Ulster to veto Home Rule, but they had never excluded the possibility of separate treatment for Ulster. This was repeated more than once in the course of our talk.”¹⁸⁹

Winston was still not considering permanent partition. His papers leave no room for doubt on that point. He was merely contemplating a transition period for the northern counties. Yet it hardly seemed to matter. Neither side was interested in finding a middle course. Right or wrong, Ulster was preparing to fight. On September 12, 1912, Carson had drawn up a covenant, not against Home Rule for Ulster, but against any version of Home Rule, and a half-million Orangemen had signed it, some in their own blood:

Being convinced in our consciences that Home Rule would be disastrous to the material well-being of Ulster as well as the whole of Ireland, subversive to our civil and religious freedoms, destructive of our citizenship, and perilous to the unity of the Empire, we whose names are undersigned, men of Ulster, loyal subjects of His Gracious Majesty King George V, humbly relying on the God whom our fathers in days of stress and trial confidently trusted, do hereby pledge ourselves in solemn Covenant throughout this our time of threatened calamity to stand by one another in defending for ourselves and our children our cherished position of equal citizenship in the United Kingdom, and in using all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland. And in the event of such a Parliament being forced upon us we further solemnly and mutually pledge ourselves to refuse to recognize its authority. In sure confidence that God will defend the right we hereto subscribe our names…. God save the King.

Now, a year later, the deterioration of the situation was alarming. The month after the Enchantress conference, Belfast police reported that British army depots there might be raided. Carson publicly boasted that the soldiers would neither resist such raids nor fire on Orangemen. “The Army,” he said, “are with us.” General Henry Wilson, Seely’s director of military operations, agreed; should the army be ordered to coerce Ulster, he said, there would be “wholesale defections.” Law told the House: “If Ulster does resist by force, there are stronger influences than Parliamentary majorities… no Government would dare to use their troops to drive them out.” Then, speaking to a massive Unionist rally at Blenheim, he declared: “I can imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster will go in which I shall not be ready to support them.”¹⁹⁰

Lloyd George warned: “We are confronted with the gravest issue raised in this country since the days of the Stuarts.”¹⁹¹ The signers of the Belfast Covenant had pledged armed resistance to the last man. And they had arms. In the early spring of 1914, a German lighter bearing 25,000 Mauser rifles and 2,500,000 rounds of ammunition had slipped out of Hamburg port and transshipped its cargo to a Norwegian tramp, the Fanny. Before Danish Customs officials could inspect the Fanny at the Kattegat, between Sweden and Denmark, the skipper had made a run for it and disappeared into the mists of the North Sea. Anchoring in a remote cove, the crew changed the steamer’s appearance and renamed her the Doreen. Danish Customs having raised the alarm, Churchill had patrol boats searching these waters, but as the Doreen the renegade ship reached Yarmouth, then Lundy Island in Bristol Channel, and finally, on the night of April 19, Tuskar Rock off county Antrim in the Irish Sea. There she rendezvoused with the Clydevalley, an ancient collier black with coal dust and red with rust. The two masters lashed the hulls together and ran a single set of navigation lights as crewmen heaved the deadly crates from one hold to the other. On April 25 the Clydevalley groaned its way into Larne, the very harbor through which the Churchills had passed. Orangemen in the town had cut telephone wires and organized a convoy of trucks. Between 11:00 P.M. and 2:30 A.M. volunteers sweating under rigged lights lugged the guns and ammunition from the collier to waiting trucks. By dawn they had fanned out all over northern Ireland. Now, if Home Rule were forced upon them, they could field an army.

By the end of the month fifty thousand Orangemen, aged seventeen to sixty-five, had joined the Ulster Volunteer Force. Their morale was excellent, and they were superbly led. England’s best generals were backing them. Kitchener belonged to the Protestant Ascendancy; so did Lord Roberts. Kitchener’s duties in the Middle East ruled him out, but Roberts declined the UVF command only because, at eighty-five, he was too old. More and more one heard the name of General Henry Wilson, who had been appointed Britain’s chief of military operations despite the fact that as an Ulsterman he had signed the covenant. Tall, lanky, with a look of despondent fidelity which was entirely misleading, Wilson was one of many establishmentarians whose names gave the incipient revolt an aura of respectability. Others included Lord Rothschild, Edward Elgar of “Land of Hope and Glory,” and Rudyard Kipling. Kipling had contributed £30,000 to the UVF and published a poem honoring it—not in The Times, which supported Home Rule, but in the archconservative Morning Post:

The blood our fathers spilt,
Our love, our toils, our pains,
Are counted us for guilt,
And only bind our chains.
Before an Empire’s eyes,
The traitor claims his price.
What need of further lies?
We are the sacrifice.

Even the King had doubts about using force against the Orangemen. He asked Bonar Law: “Will it be wise, will it be fair to the Sovereign as head of the Army, to subject the discipline and indeed the loyalty of his troops to such a strain?” Law, a Canadian who had become an adopted Orangeman, exploited the King’s discomfort. At stake, he told the monarch, was not merely Ulster, but the entire British Empire. Home Rule would be the thin end of the wedge for His Majesty’s fractious subjects all over the world. He should refuse to recognize it, whatever Parliament did. Law said: “You will save the Empire by your example.”¹⁹²

Meanwhile, the tale of the twenty-five thousand smuggled Mausers had leaked out. The possibility of a Belfast-Berlin collaboration seemed very real, and was discussed in the House. Liberal back-benchers demanded prosecution of Orangemen negotiating with the Germans. Asquith refused; he was vacillating. Churchill spoke out: “We have,” he said, “been confronted with an avowed conspiracy to defy Parliament and the law, leaving a great army practising preparations for rebellion and for the setting up of a provisional Government, which would be an outrage against the realm and the Empire.” England, he said, would not be intimidated by plots to raise a revolt “greater than the police could cope with.”¹⁹³ He was not speaking only to Belfast; Redmond and his fellow Irish Nationalists had been desperately worried about the response to all this among their own people in the south, and their nightmares were being realized. Riots were reported in Dublin. Catholic youths were flocking to join the Irish Nationalist Volunteers. Irish MPs who were counselors of moderation were losing their followers. In 1913 a militant working-class movement had forged a tight alliance with the Sinn Féin, who regarded themselves as Irishmen first and last and gentlemen never, and wearers of the green were turning to these champions of violence.

By March 1914, with final passage of the Home Rule bill less than two months away, the strain was becoming insupportable. Asquith, with Redmond’s reluctant consent, promised that Ulster would be permitted to vote itself out of Home Rule for six years, or until two successive general elections had been held. Carson angrily rejected this as “a sentence of death with a stay of execution for six years.” Churchill decided to take his gloves off. He had been conciliatory at Dundee. Now he would swing over to the attack. At Bradford on March 14 he called Bonar Law “a public danger seeking to terrorize the Government and to force his way into the Councils of his Sovereign” by exploiting the issue for partisan purposes. “Behind every strident sentence which he rasps out,” he said, “you can always hear the whisper… ‘Ulster is our best card; it is our only card.’ ” That was fair. The Tories had asked for it. But then, carried away by his own rhetoric, he blundered, salting the Unionists’ wounds with sarcasm. Having raised troops, he said, Ulster seemed anxious for battle “so that her volunteers could assert themselves.” But the proposed moratorium would deprive them of that test. He put words in their mouths: “ ‘Now the Government have had the incredible meanness to postpone all possible provocation for six long years.’ ” Bitterly he commented: “Coercion for four-fifths of Ireland is a healthful, exhilarating, salutary exercise, but lay a finger on the Tory fifth—sacrilege, tyranny, murder!” The Liberals were not cowed, he said: “There are worse things than bloodshed…. We are not going to have the realm of Britain sunk to the condition of the Republic of Mexico.” The issue, for him, was “whether civil and Parliamentary government in these realms is to be beaten down by the menace of armed force.” If Orangemen would extend the hand of friendship, it would be eagerly clasped by Liberals and Irish Nationalists, but “if every effort to meet their views is only to be used as a means of breaking down Home Rule… if the civil and Parliamentary systems are to be brought to the crude challenge of force… then I can only say to you: Let us go forward and put these grave matters to the proof.” Lord Fisher wrote him: “I should say it’s probably the best speech you ever made.” But The Times commented the next day that, having carried his naval estimates over the protests of rank-and-file Liberals, he “seemed to think it necessary to show that on occasion he could shout defiance with the rest,” and another critic called his remarks redolent of “cheap champagne made of gooseberry juice and vitriol, exhilarating at the moment but nauseating sooner or later.”¹⁹⁴

It was quickly forgotten, for within a week Churchill found himself in deep trouble. He and Seely were worried about the loyalty of British soldiers in Ireland. A high proportion of them were natives of Ulster. Moreover, they were badly deployed for the approaching climax; of the twenty-three thousand regulars on the island, only nine thousand were stationed in the north. Mutinous mutters had met proposals for a redistribution which would transfer troops billeted on the Curragh plain, outside Dublin, to Belfast. Even if the men remained subordinate, it was reported, Ulster officials of the Great Northern Railway might refuse to carry them northward. However, it was feasible to send them up by sea. Encouraged by Lloyd George, the two service ministers, with the approval of Asquith and the King, decided to take precautionary steps. Guards at the Ulster arms depots of Armagh, Omagh, Enniskillen, and Carrickfergus were doubled. Winston signaled the vice admiral commanding his Third Battle Squadron: “Admiralty, 19 March 1914. Secret. Proceed at once at ordinary speed to Lamlash…. Acknowledge and report dates of arrival. WSC.” This would put eight battleships, a cruiser, and three destroyers in Irish waters.¹⁹⁵

The warships never reached the North Channel. General Henry Wilson sent word of their destination to Brigadier General Hubert Gough, commander of the Curragh garrison. Gough resigned his commission, whereupon fifty-seven of his seventy officers resigned, whereupon Sir John French, the chief of the Imperial General Staff, also resigned. The prime minister faced an army revolt. He countermanded Churchill’s orders and canceled Seely’s plans to reinforce Ulster. That wasn’t enough for Gough. He sent Asquith a message through Wilson: “In the event of the present Home Rule Bill becoming law, can we be called upon to enforce it under the expression of maintaining law and order?” To make certain that his position was understood, he came to London and demanded assurances in writing. He got them. The prime minister wrote that it had all been “a misunderstanding”; that, though His Majesty’s government had the right to employ crown forces anywhere, it had “no intention of taking advantage of this right to crush political opposition to the policy or principles of the Home Rule Bill.” Gough and his officers then withdrew their resignations. Timothy M. Healy, an Irish Nationalist MP, concluded: “Asquith threw over Churchill, Seely and Lloyd George and refused to back up their actions.”¹⁹⁶

Wilson leaked all this to Bonar Law, and there was a storm in the House. The Tory press was jubilant over Asquith’s “complete surrender”; the Liberals and Irish Nationalists were furious. Scapegoats were needed, so Seely and his two chief advisers resigned. The prime minister—who had initialed all the military arrangements—claimed ignorance of them. That left the first lord of the Admiralty to face the music. It would seem that twenty-five thousand rifles in the hands of Orangemen justified precautions of some sort, but the Tories believed that he had been trying to goad the Ulster Volunteers into open rebellion. One Conservative MP accused him of hatching a “plot” designed to create an excuse for an “Ulster pogrom.” Balfour added scathingly: “There is one character disgusting to every policeman and which even the meanest criminal thinks inferior to himself in point of morals, and that character is the agent provocateur.”¹⁹⁷

On April 28 Churchill blazed back: “What we are now witnessing in the House is uncommonly like a vote of censure by the criminal classes upon the police.” A Tory interjected: “You have not arrested them.” He replied: “Is that the complaint—that we have been too lenient?” He declared that the Conservatives, “the party of the comfortable, the wealthy… who have most to gain by the continuance of the existing social order,” were now “committed to a policy of armed violence and utter defiance of lawfully constituted authority… to tampering with the discipline of the Army and the Navy… to overpowering police, coastguards and Customs officials… to smuggling in arms by moonlight.” If this was an example of “how much they care for law, how much they value order when it stands in the way of anything they like,” what would be the impact on England’s impoverished millions, on “the great audiences that watch in India,” on the Germans who believed that Britain was paralyzed by factions “and need not be taken into account as a factor in the European situation?” He said: “I wish to make it perfectly clear that if rebellion comes we shall put it down, and if it comes to civil war, we shall do our best to conquer in the civil war. But there will be neither rebellion nor civil war unless it is of your making.”¹⁹⁸

At this point he altered his tone dramatically and ended on a propitiatory note. He appealed directly to Carson: “The right honourable Gentleman… is running great risks in strife. Why will he not run some risk for peace? The key is in his hands now. Why cannot the right honourable and learned Gentleman say boldly: ‘Give me the Amendments to this Home Rule Bill which I ask for, to safeguard the dignity and the interests of Protestant Ulster, and I in return will use all my influence and good will to make Ireland an integral unit in a federal system’?” The House was stirred. Balfour, while describing Churchill’s earlier remarks as “an outburst of demagogic rhetoric,” declared that he was “heartily in sympathy with the First Lord’s proposal,” and Carson went so far as to say that he was “not very far from the First Lord.” Negotiations were reopened. Liberals and Irish Nationalists, who insisted that northern Ireland must yield, protested angrily. Winston’s position in the party was still shaky; he wrote Clementine that his plea for a truce was “the biggest risk I have taken.” His cabinet colleagues, generous with their “hear, hears” when he had taken the offensive, had sat on their hands when he offered Carson an olive branch.¹⁹⁹

But the negotiations stalled and were again discontinued. The general feeling was that it was too late for one man to halt the drift toward fratricide. Churchill himself said wearily, “A little red blood had got to flow,” though he quickly added: “We shall give no provocation. The Ulstermen will have no excuse, and we think that public opinion will not support them if they wantonly attack.” On May 26 the Home Rule bill passed for the third and last time. Officially it was now law. The possibility of enforcing it, however, was as remote as ever. Each side was still waiting for the other to shoot first. On July 20 the King intervened, summoning an all-party conference to Buckingham Palace. The Speaker of the House presided as the delegates wrangled for four days. Winston wrote Clementine: “We are to go ahead with the Amending Bill, abolishing the time limit and letting any Ulster county vote itself out if it chooses. The [southern] Irish acquiesced in this reluctantly. We must judge further events in Ulster when they occur.”²⁰⁰

Asquith’s cabinet met on the afternoon of Friday, July 24, 1914, to discuss the final conclusions of the King’s conference. The report was sterile; absolutely nothing had been accomplished. It was at this point that the Irish issue, foremost in everyone’s mind, so certain to burst into flames at any moment, was unexpectedly deferred, destined not to re-emerge for years, by which time the whole cast of characters would have changed. The ministers were about to break up when Grey began reading in quiet, grave tones a document which had just been sent in to him from the Foreign Office. It was an Austrian note to Serbia. Churchill was very tired; several minutes passed before he could disengage his mind from the tedium which had just ended. Gradually the phrases and sentences began to take shape and meaning. The foreign secretary was reading an ultimatum. Winston had never heard anything like it. He did not see how any country could accept it, or how any acceptance, however abject, could satisfy the government which had sent it. He later recalled: “The parishes of Fermanagh and Tyrone faded back into the mists and squalls of Ireland, and a strange light began immediately, but by perceptible gradations, to fall and grow upon the map of Europe.”²⁰¹

Churchill later blamed three men for the outbreak of the Great War: the Serb assassin, the Austrian foreign minister who had written that first ultimatum, and the kaiser, who could have stopped the chain reaction of governments bound by military alliances. But the initial culprit was an incompetent chauffeur whose name has not survived. On June 28, 1914, four weeks before the delivery of the fateful note to Serbia, Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his morganatic wife, Sophie, had been riding through the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo when the driver took a wrong turn. Realizing his mistake, he came to a dead halt—right in front of a Serbian fanatic armed with a revolver. Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were shot dead on the spot. In Vienna the toils of vengeance, like everything else in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, moved very slowly. But they were moving. Meanwhile, Britain stood aside. There was every reason to believe Britain would remain there. It had nothing at stake. Grey’s “moral obligation,” assumed eight years earlier, had been given privately and was not binding. Britain’s only commitment on the Continent was to defend Belgian independence, which hardly seemed threatened then, and even that was vague. Winston didn’t care for the Belgians; he thought their behavior in the Congo disgraceful. At the Admiralty he lunched with Kitchener, on leave from Egypt and soon to be Seely’s successor at the War Office. Both suspected the existence of a secret agreement between Brussels and Berlin which would permit German troops to cross Belgium on their way to France. For England, they agreed, such an “invasion” would be an inadequate casus belli. But it was all very speculative, very remote, quite nebulous.

The Admiralty’s trial mobilization had begun, as scheduled, in the middle of July, over two weeks after the Sarajevo murders. The grand review was held on July 18. Churchill called it “incomparably the greatest assemblage of naval power ever witnessed in the world”—223 battleships, armored cruisers, light cruisers, destroyers, minesweepers, and submarines parading past the royal yacht and the Enchantress at Spithead, with the King and his first lord taking the salute. Normally, the next step would have been demobilization of all three fleets, accompanied by liberty for the regular tars and tickets home for the reservists. It wasn’t taken. Churchill, concerned about rumors from central Europe, published an Admiralty notice in the newspapers of July 20: “Orders have been given to the First Fleet, which is concentrated at Portland, not to disperse for naval leave at the present. All vessels of the Second Fleet are remaining at their home ports in proximity to their balance crews.” Yet he was confident that negotiations would settle the differences between Vienna and Belgrade. In a letter to Grey two days later, drawing an analogy between that problem and the more urgent situation in Ulster, he wrote that if the question were how to uphold British interests on the Continent, “you wd proceed by two stages. First you wd labour to stop Austria & Russia going to war: second, if that failed, you wd try to prevent England, France, Germany & Italy being drawn in.” In either instance, mediation was the solution. The following day Lloyd George, who concurred, assured the House that “civilization” would have no difficulty in regulating disputes which arose between nations, by means of “some sane and well-ordered arbitrament.”²⁰²

After studying the note Grey had read to the cabinet, however, Churchill wrote Clementine: “Europe is trembling on the verge of a general war, the Austrian ultimatum to Servia [sic] being the most insolent document of its kind ever devised.” It was in fact remarkable. Serbia was required to suppress all criticism of Austria-Hungary in newspapers, magazines, societies, and schools; Serbain officials and teachers who had spoken unfavorably of Austrians were to be dismissed; certain Serbs known to be unfriendly to Austria were to be arrested at once; and Austrian officers were to enter Serbia to enforce all these demands and investigate the Sarajevo assassinations. Belgrade must reply to this ultimatum within forty-eight hours. A request for an extension was denied. In Vienna the foreign minister acknowledged that the tone of the note was “such that we must reckon on the probability of war.”²⁰³

“Happily,” Asquith wrote the King, “there seems to be no reason why we should be anything more than spectators.” Churchill shared his view. At Overstrand, on the Norfolk coast, he had rented a little holiday house called Pear Tree Cottage for Clementine and the children—Goonie Churchill and her two young sons had taken nearby Beehive Cottage—and Friday evening he postponed an Admiralty meeting which had been scheduled for Saturday morning, preferring to spend the weekend at the shore. He wrote: “My darling one, I have managed to put off my naval conference and am coming to you & the kittens tomorrow by the 1 o’clock train.” Before he left London, good news arrived: Serbia had accepted all demands upon it except the supervision of compliance by Austrian officers, and Belgrade offered to submit that question to the Hague Court. Even the kaiser believed this reply had removed “every reason for war.” Winston told Prince Louis to run the Admiralty in his absence; he would stay in touch by phone. On the beach he organized the children, distributed buckets and spades, and directed them while they built a sand castle against the rising tide. The surf leveled it. As he remembered later: “We dammed the little rivulets which trickled down to the sea as the tide went out. It was a very beautiful day. The North Sea sparkled to a far horizon.”²⁰⁴