Dividing Ireland: World War I and Partition

116 THE GREAT WAR AND NATIONAL IDENTITY
office. Bonar Law thought that if Carson had the health and desire
to take up the leadership of an opposition he could drive the
Government from office in a very short time.
Carson continued to denounce the Government’s procrastination
on conscription, asking ‘Is not the sword unsheathed of which we
have so often heard?…. The Government ought not to have asked
themselves, “Whom can we get with convenience? Whom can we
draw along with us? Whom can we please?” They ought to have
asked themselves the one sole question, “What is necessary to
fulfil and complete the policy which we have announced to the
world, to our Colonies, to our Empire and to our Allies”’. 140 Carson
despaired of Britain’s performance in every theatre of war. He
recounted, in January 1916, how the Russian military experience in
the Galian campaign, which, in the summer of 1915, it had been
hoped, would see millions of men invading Germany and Austria,
had instead seen the Russians driven back. The sight of millions of
men on the defensive, which Britain had relied on to relieve
pressure on the Western and Eastern theatres, led him to conclude
that whatever was sufficient before, in the nature of armies, could
not be sufficient in these circumstances. Carson, having watched,
throughout the autumn of 1915, the number of recruits
decreasing, week by week, asked why Britain had left the
Dardenelles where ‘so much blood and so much treasure had been
spent?’ The reason, he supposed, was because Britain had not the
men to go through with the undertaking. When he looked at the
march through Serbia, Carson saw that that nation had got little
assistance until it was too late, and he again reasoned that this
was because the Government had not the men. On the question
that industrial disruption would be caused by conscription, Carson
asked ‘What does it matter so long as we win the War; and what
would anything matter if we lost the War?’ 141
Carson cared little for the dynamics of the conscription
question; what he did care about was whether it was possible to
keep a sufficient military force in the field and, if so, how. If it
could not be done by voluntary means, it had to be done by
conscription. The necessity of this had been conveyed to him by
military men who told him that many British field battalions and
divisions were depleted, conveying the false impression that a
much larger force was in the field. Furthermore, he was informed
that the army was unable to keep up the reserves for these
battalions. Carson had been given an instance of three divisions of
thirty-six battalions in the Near East reduced to 11,000 men,
meaning that instead of 900–1,000 strong battalions these were
reduced to 350 men each. As he looked on the various stages of