Hell-Bent: Australia's leap into the Great War

Hell-Bent: Australia's leap into the Great War

by Douglas Newton
Hell-Bent: Australia's leap into the Great War

Hell-Bent: Australia's leap into the Great War

by Douglas Newton

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Overview

Most histories of Australia’s Great War rush their readers into the trenches. This history is very different. For the first time, it examines events closely, even hour-by-hour, in both Britain and Australia during the last days of peace in July–August 1914.

London’s choice for war was a very close-run thing. At the height of the diplomatic crisis leading to war, it looked very much like Britain would choose neutrality. Only very late in the evening of Tuesday 4 August did a small clique in the British cabinet finally engineer a declaration of war against Germany.

Meanwhile, Australia’s political leaders, deep in the throes of a federal election campaign, competed with each other in a love-of-empire auction. They leapt ahead of events in London. At the height of the diplomatic crisis, they offered to transfer the brand-new Royal Australian Navy to the British Admiralty. Most importantly, on Monday 3 August, an inner group of the Australian cabinet, egged on by the governor-general, offered an expeditionary force of 20,000 men, to serve anywhere, for any objective, under British command, and with the whole cost to be borne by Australia — some forty hours before the British cabinet made up its mind.

Australia’s leaders thereby lost the chance to set limits, to weigh objectives, or to insist upon consultation. They needlessly exposed Australian soldiers and their families to the full horror of the mechanised slaughter that was to come. They were hell-bent — and they got there.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781925113365
Publisher: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Publication date: 07/28/2014
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 352
File size: 551 KB

About the Author

Douglas Newton was born in Sydney in 1952 and is a retired academic, having taught European history at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, in 1986–90, and at the University of Western Sydney for the following eighteen years. His special interests are peace and war in the period 1890–1919. He has published academic studies of the peace movement before 1914, the peacemaking of 1918–1919, and Germany in the period of Weimar and Nazism, and is currently preparing a history of the struggle for a negotiated peace during the Great War. He lives in Sydney.

Read an Excerpt

Hell-Bent

Australia's Leap into the Great War


By Douglas Newton

Scribe Publications Pty Ltd

Copyright © 2014 Douglas Newton
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-925113-36-5



CHAPTER 1

Cabinet crisis

Melbourne and London, Monday 3 August 1914


Further prepared to despatch expeditionary force [of] 20,000 men of any suggested composition to any destination desired by the Home Government. Force to be at complete disposal of the Home Government. Cost of despatch and maintenance would be borne by this Government.

– Munro Ferguson to Colonial Office, Monday 3 August 1914


in the crowded last days of peace leading up to the outbreak of the First World War in early August 1914, two now half-forgotten events occurred almost simultaneously at opposite ends of the earth.

The first event took place in Melbourne, at that time the home of the Australian parliament and the nerve-centre of the federal administration. At about 6.00 p.m. Melbourne time in the evening of Monday 3 August 1914, a cablegram was despatched to London via the imperial 'All-Red Route'. It was an official cablegram. In common with all such Australian communications on high diplomatic matters, it was signed by the governor-general, Sir Ronald Munro Ferguson, and was sent to the Colonial Office in Whitehall, the heart of decision-making for all Britain's colonies and dominions. The contents of this cable were historic. The Australian cablegram offered to Britain, in the event of war breaking out, an expeditionary force of 20,000 Australian troops 'to any destination desired'. The cablegram specified that the force would be 'at [the] complete disposal of the Home Government,' and that Australia would meet all costs associated with it. In addition, the cablegram promised the immediate transfer to the British Admiralty of the entire fleet of the Royal Australian Navy — Australia's pride, and a relatively new creation, having gained that title only three years before.

This was the most open-ended of offers. No conditions were set. The cablegram had been authorised by Australian prime minister Joseph Cook, the leader of the Commonwealth Liberal Party (not to be confused with the modern Liberal Party of Australia, founded in 1944). He was an anxious man at that moment. The crisis in Europe had blown up just as he was leading his party in a federal election campaign for both houses of parliament. Moreover, it was an unprecedented election, prompted by Cook's request for a double dissolution to end a year of political instability. Polling day was only a little over a month away. A mere rump of Cook's hastily assembled cabinet endorsed the offer of an expeditionary force to London — in fact, only four of Cook's ten ministers made it to Melbourne in time to attend an emergency meeting of the cabinet on the Monday afternoon.

The timing of the Australian offer is important, and the time in London matters most. Because London was the source of almost all news, and London's view of the unfolding European crisis was the only view that really mattered across the Empire, it is vital to place the Australian offer of Monday evening in the order of events taking place in London. As eastern Australia was ten hours ahead of London, from London's perspective this Australian cablegram was sent at about 8.00 a.m. London time on the morning of that same Monday.

The second event took place just two hours afterwards, in London, on that same Monday morning of 3 August. A serious internal crisis imperilling the life of the British government reached its climax in the historic cabinet room at 10 Downing Street. There, a cabinet meeting began at 10.00 a.m. This climactic cabinet meeting took place before the outbreak of war — for Britain would not declare war upon Germany until very late on the evening of Tuesday 4 August.

Presiding over the meeting at the cabinet table was Herbert Henry Asquith, the leader of Britain's last great reforming Liberal government. Around the table was arrayed a famous cabinet. It included such giants in British political life as the Welsh Radical David Lloyd George, the bumptious hero of the 'People's Budget' of 1909 and the scourge of the House of Lords; Sir Edward Grey, the sad-eyed and sensitive foreign secretary, a passionate believer in Britain's close diplomatic alignments with Russia and France; Richard Haldane, founder of the Territorial Army and the most senior of the 'Liberal Imperialists', as those ministers in Asquith's faction proudly called themselves; and Winston Churchill, the youthful party-hopper, former Tory, and former Radical who had become a Liberal Imperialist when promoted to the post of First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911.

Prime minister Asquith was much distracted as he took counsel from this assembly. The European crisis had erupted at the very moment when his attempts to pass a Home Rule Bill for Ireland were being derailed by the threat of civil war in that troubled island. At a personal level, too, he was under tremendous stress. Asquith, aged sixty-one, had fallen deeply in love with the beautiful twenty-six-year-old Venetia Stanley, his daughter Violet's best friend. The relationship was at its most intense in the summer of 1914. Over critical days, when the prime minister's fixed focus on the international crisis was required, Asquith's private life was fantastical. He was pouring out his heart to a young woman in a great stream of letters crammed with endearments, expressing dependency and a desire for counsel, and sometimes penned on the front bench of the House of Commons or even in cabinet meetings.

At this Monday morning cabinet meeting, Asquith reviewed the latest diplomatic information on the danger of a general war erupting in Europe. Then he turned gravely to the state of the cabinet itself. He reported that, overnight, two cabinet ministers had sent in their resignation letters to Downing Street, as they had threatened to do on Sunday, and that this very morning a third minister had sent in his. Then, when the prime minister paused, a fourth minister passed his resignation letter across the cabinet table to him. Now four had confirmed their intention to walk away — from a cabinet of nineteen men. By any measure, the government was tottering.

One minister recalled that, at this moment, Asquith's eyes 'filled with tears'. He explained that such serious dissent was unprecedented in the life of his prime ministership. Moreover, he told his careworn colleagues, it was not just the cabinet but also the wider Liberal Party that was 'still hesitating' with regard to the impending war. Another minister recalled Asquith staring down the cabinet table over his glasses and saying, in a tone close to gallows humour, 'Seems as if I shall have to go on alone'.

Lewis Harcourt, the colonial secretary, and leader of the faction of Radical ministers desperate to preserve Britain's neutrality, sat at the cabinet table by the prime minister's side. He recorded more of Asquith's words in his private journal. According to Harcourt, Asquith observed that, beyond the four resigning ministers, he was aware of 'many others' who were 'uneasy'. The prime minister signalled that more resignations were possible — and no doubt he was alluding here to the resignation of Harcourt himself. If the cabinet decided to press on, Asquith observed sombrely, it would face the 'great stress' of the current European crisis with 'much shattered authority'. The prime minister remarked that he might well choose to resign in such circumstances — but he could not face it. Harcourt jotted down Asquith's explanation for sticking to his post: 'Dislikes and abhors a Coalition'. Asquith told his colleagues that his clinging to power at this moment was 'in the best interests of the country,' even though it might prove to be a 'most thankless task to go on'. It was all 'very moving,' wrote Herbert Samuel, another prominent cabinet minister, to his wife Beatrice afterwards. 'Most of us could hardly speak at all for emotion'.

There had been cabinet revolts before, but nothing on this scale. This time, the four resignation letters had come from both the humble half and the mighty half of the cabinet pecking order. But the resigning ministers were all significant figures in their own right. Beginning with the most junior, John Burns, the famous hero of the London dock strike of 1889, was a charismatic agitator who had evolved into an independent-minded moderate Liberal who was steadfastly opposed to 'entangling alliances'. Sir John Simon, the immensely talented and ambitious attorney-general, was an ornament of the cabinet, regarded by many as a future leader of the Liberal Party. Earl Beauchamp was a dogmatic free trader, a long-standing critic of the arms race, and a high-ranking Liberal in the House of Lords. (He had a connection with Australia; in 1899–1900, while still single and in his twenties, he had been a governor of New South Wales, sometimes controversial for being by turns insensitive, superior, or progressive.) John Morley, Viscount Morley, was the venerable lord president of the Privy Council, and the most senior man in the government. He was a vigilant guardian of the Liberal Party's anti-war traditions, a role easily claimed by the man who had written weighty biographies of the nineteenth-century Liberal Party's heroes, Richard Cobden and William Gladstone. A fifth resignation, from the wider ministry, would come in the afternoon of Monday 3 August, from the young Charles Trevelyan, a well-connected man from a famous Liberal family, but only a junior minister at the Board of Education. The loss of the four ministers from the cabinet on the Monday morning was far more serious for Asquith.

These cabinet ministers' resignation letters were frank and final in tone. John Burns' resignation letter, the first to be sent, on Sunday 2 August, had complained simply that 'The decision of the Cabinet to intervene in a European war is an act with which I profoundly disagree'. John Simon explained in his letter that foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey's promise of naval support to the French ambassador that afternoon was 'tantamount to a declaration that we take part in this quarrel with France and against Germany. I think we should not take part, and so I must resign my post'.

For John Morley, the chief consideration, as he explained in his letter of Monday 3 August, was his fundamental disagreement with the entire direction of the government's foreign policy. Britain had been cringingly loyal to France and Russia for too long. Britain had not acted in this crisis as the neutral power that she still was, in formal terms, and Morley wished her to be. Morley knew that the Liberal Imperialist faction of the cabinet would never agree with him on Britain's neutrality. He explained that he could not be in a cabinet where he inclined one way and 'three or four of my leading colleagues incline the other way' — a reference, of course, to the strong desire to intervene in any European war that appeared to animate Asquith, Grey, Churchill, and Haldane, the four leading Liberal Imperialists in the cabinet. 'This being so, I could contribute nothing to your deliberations, and my presence could only hamper the concentrated energy, the zealous and convinced accord, that are indispensable,' Morley explained. Earl Beauchamp's letter of Monday argued that Sunday's decision to promise assistance to France was too much. 'By successive acts the cabinet has passed to a position at wh[ich] war seems to me inevitable. That is not a responsibility wh[ich] in present circumstances I c[oul]d share,' he wrote. In a private memorandum, Beauchamp was even more blunt. 'The decision which was taken at yesterday's Cabinet — in the morning — to promise France [the] defence of her coast and shipping against Germany was so momentous that I wish to fix it'.

In this way, each minister's resignation letter protested vehemently against the foreign-policy decisions of the government over the long term, and especially during the latest Balkan crisis — the crisis that threatened imminently to explode into a continental war. Each dissident minister complained that the Asquith government had been supine in its relations with Russia and France during this crisis, as it had been for years past. Each objected, in particular, to the British promise of naval support given to France on the previous day, Sunday 2 August. It was a reckless promise, the rebels complained; it was tantamount to a declaration of war on Britain's part, and might even provoke Germany into a declaration of war upon Britain. After all, by the time the promise of naval support had been given to France on Sunday afternoon, Germany had declared war upon one power only, Russia, in the evening of Saturday 1 August.

It is important to recall also that when these resignations were lined up on Asquith's table on that Monday morning, there was as yet no news in London of any German ultimatum to Belgium. War in the west had not yet exploded, and yet Britain was threatening to close off the Channel to the German navy. In this way, Britain was acting as if she had a formal defence alliance with France — which, as the dissenting Radicals correctly insisted, she did not.

This cabinet revolt was an event laden with dramatic power. Moreover, it had no parallel among the other nations that plunged into war during those first days of August 1914. Nowhere else in Europe did ministers resign with the hot breath of war on their faces. Nowhere else did ministers with troubled consciences denounce the decisions of their own government, renounce their salaries, and abandon their careers in the course of the crisis. Nowhere else did they protest at the eleventh hour by walking out of cabinets, councils, or ministries — not in Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, St Petersburg, Paris, Brussels, Belgrade, or indeed in any of the dominions of the British Empire. Only in London did this happen.


Australia leaps ahead of Britain's choice

At the very moment that the British cabinet was weighing the choice for the Empire between strict neutrality and rapid intervention in a continental war on the side of Russia and France, Australia despatched her sweeping offer of military assistance. Australia's cablegram had proposed an expeditionary force that would be 'at [the] complete disposal of the Home Government'. The men would fight anywhere, for any objective, under British command, and Australia's treasury would pick up the tab. The question suggests itself: what was the significance of this offer in the larger story?

Australian historians have rarely linked these two events in London and Melbourne on Monday 3 August, when the declaration of war was still a day-and-a-half away. They generally tell the story of the prompt Australian offer of an expeditionary force with pride, or it appears in the historical narrative as an unremarkable development. They seldom take account of its timing or its deep, pathetic significance — that it came before the British themselves had decided finally upon war, and indeed at a moment when the British cabinet was sharply divided on the issue. In popular memory, Australia simply answered Britain's call for assistance. Behind the received narrative is acceptance of the realpolitik that neutrality was impossible for Australia, and that she had a clear economic interest in the victory of the British Empire. Moreover, large numbers of Australians did quickly volunteer for the fight. Therefore, the consensus has developed that it matters little whether Australia's politicians may have fallen over themselves in a rush to throw Australian manhood into the looming conflagration.

So, too, the crisis in the British cabinet is often neglected in narratives of the coming of the war. The German aggression in Belgium from Tuesday 4 August has made it easy to pass off the resignations of four British ministers as a mere gesture on the part of the faint-hearted. It is often overlooked that these resignations preceded the German attack on Belgium. In some histories, if the cabinet resignations are mentioned at all, they are treated as forgettable embarrassments of little significance. After all, the great majority of Asquith's ministers did swiftly rally behind the government's decision to go to war late on Tuesday 4 August, and only two of the four resigning cabinet ministers in the end actually stuck to their decision. Therefore, it has been easy also for British historians to ignore the British cabinet crisis on the eve of the war.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from Hell-Bent by Douglas Newton. Copyright © 2014 Douglas Newton. Excerpted by permission of Scribe Publications Pty Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction,
1 Cabinet crisis Melbourne and London, Monday 3 August 1914,
2 Premonitions Australia and Britain, 1900–1911,
3 Nightmares Australia and Britain, 1911–1914,
4 Double Dissolution Australia, July 1914,
5 Slip-sliding to warLondon, Friday 24 July to Wednesday 29 July,
6 The 'Warning Telegram' Melbourne and Sydney, Tuesday 28 July to Saturday 1 August,
7 Champing at the bit Wellington, Ottawa, Melbourne, Friday 31 July to Sunday 2 August,
8 A looming love-of-Empire auction Colac and Horsham, Friday 31 July,
9 The view from 'Yaralla' Sydney, Friday 31 July,
10 The view from the Customs House Sydney, Friday 31 July to Sunday 2 August,
11 'A good war-cry' Sydney, Friday 31 July to Saturday 1 August,
12 'There'll be no war' London, Saturday 1 August,
13 The whiff of a khaki election Melbourne, Saturday 1 August to Monday 3 August,
14 Radical angst London, Sunday 2 August,
15 Australia jumps the gun Melbourne, Monday 3 August,
16 The Sir Edward Grey show London, Monday 3 August,
17 'Their manhood at our side' London, Friday 31 July to Tuesday 4 August,
18 'No immediate necessity' London, Monday 3 August and Tuesday 4 August,
19 Choosing war London, Tuesday 4 August,
20 Fait Accompli Melbourne, Tuesday 4 August and Wednesday 5 August,
21 'A great and urgent Imperial service' London and Melbourne, Wednesday 5 August and Thursday 6 August,
22 Diversion to Gallipoli 1914–1915,
Conclusion Australia's leap into the Great War,
Notes,
Archival Material,
Acknowledgements,

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