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.
Colonel Seely himself had been made aware of it in the previous December when he signed a War Office Memorandum on the subject[82]; and, indeed, no officer could fail to be aware of it who had ever been quartered in Ireland.
Nor was it surprising that this sympathy should manifest itself.