Unionist Council's story. In this they were assisted in an unexpected
way. Just when the pressure was at its highest, relief came by the
diversion of attention and interest caused by another startling event in
Ulster, which will be described in the following chapters.

This Curragh Incident, which caused intense and prolonged excitement in
March 1914, and nearly upset the Asquith Government, had more than
momentary importance in connection with the Ulster Movement. It proved
to demonstration the intense sympathy with the loyalist cause that
pervaded the Army. That sympathy was not, as Radical politicians like
Mr. John Ward believed, an aristocratic sentiment only to be found in
the mess-rooms of smart cavalry regiments. It existed in all branches of
the Service, and among the rank and file as well as the commissioned
ranks. Sir Arthur Paget's telegram reporting to the War Office the
feeling in the 5th and 16th Lancers, said, "Fear men will refuse to
move."[81] The men had not the same facility as the officers in making
their sentiments known at headquarters, but their sympathies were the
same.

The Government had no excuse for being ignorant of this feeling in the
Army. It had been a matter of notoriety for a long time. Its existence
and its danger had been reported by Lord Wolseley to the Duke of
Cambridge, back in the old days of Gladstonian Home Rule, in a letter
that had been since published. In July 1913 _The Times_ gave the
warning in a leading article that "the crisis, the approach of which
Ministers affect to treat with unconcern, is already causing uneasiness
and apprehension in the public Services, and especially in the Army....
It is notorious that some officers have already begun to speak of
sending in their papers." Lord Roberts had uttered a significant warning
in the House of Lords not long before the incident at the Curragh.