ABSTRACT
The first eleven months of 1918 marked the pinnacle of wartime crises for the Netherlands and witnessed the culmination of its neutrality compromises. Between January and May of that year, the Netherlands came closer to becoming a belligerent than at any time previously or subsequently in the conflict. The requisitioning of Dutch ships by American and British authorities in March, followed by Germany's threatening stand on the transport of sand and gravel demonstrated that the danger of war was all too real. The exclamation by H.T. Colenbrander in February 1917 rang even more ominously a year later: ‘all hell has broken loose; none of the devils can protect us against the others, and there we lie’. 1 The tense international situation agitated the already strained relationship between the Commander-in-Chief and the government, and brought the majority of cabinet ministers to the point of resigning in May. In combination with existing dissension within the government over sending an armed convoy to the East Indies, civil disorder of any kind was the last thing the country desired in this veelbewogen (very stirring) time.
