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appalling, and Churchill pays lip service to that notion in a note to his wife, Clementine, but, still, he cannot help himself. ‘I am interested, geared up and happy,’ he writes to her in a letter from the Admiralty. ‘Is it not horrible to be built like that? The preparations have a hideous fascination for me. I pray to God to forgive me for such fearful moods of levity …
    â€˜Kiss those kittens & be loved for ever only by me
    â€˜Your own
    â€˜W.’ 6
    A war! A real war ! And he, as First Lord of the Admiralty, able to move the fleet around nearly at will!
    The next day, the Kaiser of Germany, Wilhelm II, appears on the balcony of his Berlin palace. ‘A momentous hour has struck for Germany,’ he tells the great crowd. ‘Envious rivals everywhere force us to legitimate defence … Go to church. Kneel down before God, and ask him for help for our brave army!’ 7
    Der Kaiser! Der Kaiser!
    30 JULY 1914, SYDNEY, BLACK CLOUDS ON A SUNNY DAY
    On this Thursday morning, a young delivery boy cycles his way up the long carriageway, through minutely manicured gardens, rose arbours and orchards, right to the front door of Yaralla, the stunning Victorian-Italianate mansion that lies on the banks of Sydney’s Parramatta River.
    The honour of his task quite takes his breath away.
    For it is here that His Majesty’s representative in Australia, His Excellency Sir Ronald Craufurd Munro Ferguson, 1st Viscount Novar, the Scottish laird who is now Governor-General of Australia, has been staying with his wife, Lady Helen, since earlier in the month. The cable the delivery boy is carefully carrying is addressed to him.
    The lad’s tentative, respectful knock – for it does not demand an answer so much as ever so gently signalling that he is at the door if someone would be so kind as to answer it – is all but instantly answered, and he hands his coded cable-gram over.
    The preliminary steps laid down in 1907 by the Committee of Imperial Defence are to be effected immediately … 8
    It is the first of three such cables that the Governor-General receives over the next two days. The tall, grey-haired and distinguished representative of the King, later described by his private secretary Bede Clifford as ‘essentially kind’ but ‘choleric’, 9 finds that the cables are all from the same source and bear the same theme, once decoded from diplomatic niceties. In London, His Majesty’s Government is concerned that it appears as if Europe is sliding towards war, and it is viewed as wise if Australia could begin to mobilise its armed forces, prepare to close its ports to all but authorised shipping and make ready for war. It is the Governor-General’s task to communicate this to the Australian Government and gauge just what level of support it might be able to give to the Mother Country.
    But therein lies another problem. For the matter is slightly complicated by the fact that, this very day, there has been a double dissolution of Federal Parliament, and Prime Minister Cook has just begun a bitterly fought election campaign, where the wily Labor Opposition Leader Andrew Fisher – twice a former Prime Minister himself – is making more than a little headway against him. This means Cabinet ministers are scattered to their own electorates and so cannot quickly gather. And yet neither the Prime Minister nor the Opposition Leader leave any doubt as to whom their loyalties are owed.
    In Adelaide, Andrew Fisher stands before a large and outspoken delegation organised by the Freedom League, who are opposed to the compulsory sections in the Defence Act 1909 that include the training of young boys and fining those, such as Quakers, who do not participate in the scheme on religious grounds. In what is to be the first cast of his history-making statement over the course of the election campaign, Fisher makes his feelings crystal clear: ‘I am in favour of