THREE
SECRET PLANS DETERMINED THAT any crisis not settled by sensible diplomacy would, in the circumstances prevailing in Europe in 1914, lead to general war. Sensible diplomacy had settled crises before, notably during the powers’ quarrels over position in Africa and in the disquiet raised by the Balkan Wars of 1912–13. Such crises, however, had touched matters of national interest only, not matters of national honour or prestige. In June 1914 the honour of Austria-Hungary, most sensitive because weakest of European powers, was touched to the quick by the murder of the heir to the throne at the hands of an assassin who identified himself with the monarchy’s most subversive foreign neighbour. The Austro-Hungarian empire, a polity of five major religions and a dozen languages, survived in dread of ethnic subversion. The chief source of subversion was Serbia, an aggressive, backward and domestically violent Christian kingdom which had won its independence from the rule of the Muslim Ottoman empire after centuries of rebellion. Independent Serbia did not include all Serbs. Large minorities remained, by historical accident, Austrian subjects. Those who were nationalists resented rule by the Habsburgs almost as much as their free brothers had rule by the Ottomans. The most extreme among them were prepared to kill. It was the killing by one of them of the Habsburg heir that fomented the fatal crisis of the summer of 1914.
The Habsburg army’s summer manoeuvres of 1914 were held in Bosnia, the former Ottoman Turkish province occupied by Austria in 1878 and annexed to the empire in 1908. Franz Ferdinand, nephew to the Emperor Franz Josef and Inspector General of the army, arrived in Bosnia on 25 June to supervise. After the manoeuvres concluded, on 27 June, he drove next morning with his wife to the provincial capital, Sarajevo, to carry out official engagements. It was an ill-chosen day: 28 June is the anniversary of the defeat of Serbia by the Turks in 1389, Vidov Dan, the event from which they date their long history of suffering at the hands of foreign oppressors.1 The role of oppressor, after the retreat of the Ottoman Turks, had been assumed, in the eyes of nationalist Serbs, by the Habsburgs, and the provincial administration had been warned that his visit was unwelcome and might be dangerous. The warnings he ignored; threats to the great were commonplace in an era which had brought the killing by fanatics or lunatics of a Tsar, an Austrian Empress and a President of the United States. In this case a murder team was in place, a group of five young Serbs and a Bosnian Muslim, he recruited by the conspirators for cosmetic purposes, all equipped with bombs and pistols.2 On the Archduke’s way to the residence of the provincial governor, one of the terrorists threw a bomb at the car carrying Franz Ferdinand and his wife but it bounced off, exploding under the car following and wounding an officer occupant. The imperial party proceeded on its way. Three-quarters of an hour later, however, en route to visit the casualty in hospital, the archducal couple’s chauffeur took a wrong turning and, while reversing, came to a momentary halt. The stop brought the car opposite one of the undetected conspirators, Gavrilo Princip, who was armed with a revolver. He stepped forward and fired. The Archduke’s wife died instantly, he ten minutes later. Princip was arrested on the spot.3
Investigation swiftly revealed that, though the terrorists were all Austrian subjects, they had been armed in Serbia and smuggled back across the Austrian border by a Serbian nationalist organisation. The Austrian investigators identified it as the Narodna Odbrana (National Defence), set up in 1908 to work against the incorporation of Bosnia into the Austrian empire; it was a tenet of the nationalist creed that Bosnia was historically Serb. In fact the responsible organisation was the clandestine ‘Union or Death’, commonly known as the Black Hand. The misapprehension was scarcely substantial, since the two shared members and the Narodna Odbrana in Bosnia lent help to the Black Hand.4 The latter, more sinister, body had as its aim the ‘unification of Serbdom’ and administered a death oath to its initiates. More important, it lay under the control of ‘Apis’, as he was codenamed, the colonel commanding the intelligence section of the Serbian army’s General Staff.5
The exact degree of foreknowledge of the plot attributable to the Serbian government has never been established; intelligence is a murky world, then as now, but then more commonly one peopled by uniformed officers, as the Dreyfus affair had sensationally revealed. Apis, properly Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic, was a revolutionary as well as a soldier – he had taken part in the brutal overthrow of the Obrenovic dynasty in 1903 – and may well have been living two lives. Whatever the truth, by 2 July three of the murder team had made a full confession; it disclosed that they had been supplied with weapons from a Serbian military arsenal and helped to cross the border by Serbian frontier guards. The information was sufficient to confirm Austria’s rooted belief in Serbian malevolence and to arouse its equally ready desire to punish the small kingdom for its disturbance of order within the empire.
The Slav problem was the weightiest of the empire’s many difficulties with its minorities but, within those difficulties, the Serb problem constituted an active and growing threat. While the problem of the Poles was diffused by the partition of their ancient kingdom with Germany and Russia, the problem of the Czechs by the heavy Germanisation of their cities and the problem of the Croats by their Catholicism, nothing, it seemed, could diffuse that of the Serbs but the use of force. Their Orthodox Christianity made them a religious as well as national minority and one which Russia’s guardianship of the Orthodox Church made cocksure; their long years of guerrilla resistance to Turkish rule had rendered them headstrong and self-reliant but also, in Austrian eyes, devious and untrustworthy; their poverty kept them warlike. The small kingdom of Serbia was intensely warlike. It had won independence from the Ottomans by its own effort in 1813 and glory and territory in the Balkan Wars of 1912–13. National rebirth had raised the idea of a Greater Serbia, strong within the kingdom and a beacon to Austria’s Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia. It had to be resisted, for not only were Serbs but one minority among others in those territories but neither could be surrendered. Strategy forbade it but so also did the imperial system itself, which was creakily sustained by the denial of the worth of nationality as a political idea. Concession to one nationality would soon entail concession to others and that way lay the dissolution of the empire itself.
The evidence of Serb complicity, official or not, in the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, exposed by the conspirators’ confessions of 2 July, was therefore enough to persuade many in the imperial government that a war against Serbia was now a necessity. As it happened, Count Berchtold, the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister, had spent much of the week before the assassination preparing aggressive diplomatic measures against Serbia. His scheme was to persuade Germany to support Austria in seeking an alliance with Bulgaria and Turkey, Serbia’s enemies in the Second Balkan War of 1913, which would confront the Belgrade government with a hostile encirclement: Bulgaria and Turkey to the east, Austria-Hungary to the west and north. The assassination lent urgency to Berchtold’s diplomacy. An Austrian emissary was ordered to Berlin with the document in early July. On 4 July, the eve of his departure, Berchtold made radical amendments to it. The memorandum now requested the German government to recognise that the empire’s differences with Serbia were ‘irreconcilable’ and stated the ‘imperious . . . necessity for the Monarchy [Austria-Hungary] to destroy with a determined hand the net which its enemies are attempting to draw over its head’. A covering letter alleged that ‘the Sarajevo affair . . . was the result of a well-organised conspiracy, the threads of which can be traced to Belgrade’ and insisted that ‘the pivot of the Panslavic policy’ (Serbia as the protagonist of a ‘Greater Serbia’) ‘must be eliminated as a power factor in the Balkans’.6 Berchtold gave the emissary, Count Hoyos, verbal authority to warn the Germans that Vienna would ask Belgrade for guarantees as to its future conduct, to be followed by military action if refused. Within six days of the assassination, therefore, Austria had staked out her position. It remained to see whether the German Emperor and his government, without whose backing the Austrians dare not act, would support them.
Dare not Austria might; in retrospect it is tempting to surmise that, had she struck at once in anger, trumpeting dynastic wrath and righteous belief in Serbia’s guilt, Europe might have allowed her to mount positive measures without outside interference. Russia, a great Slav brother, had tender feelings towards the Serbs but feelings are different from vital interests and certainly no motive for war. The Bulgarians were Slavs also, and they had suffered defeat and humiliation in 1913 without Russia intervening to rescue them. The Serbs, moreover, were odd-man-out even in the wild Balkans, worse than that in the eyes of civilised Europe. The ‘Asiatic’ behaviour of their army’s officers in 1903, when they had not only killed their king and queen but then thrown the bodies from a window of the royal palace and hacked them limb from limb with their swords, had shocked sensibilities everywhere. Italy, which coveted the same Adriatic coastline towards which ‘Greater Serbia’ aspired, would certainly not have impeded her Triple Alliance partner if she had punished Belgrade. France, though she had supplied Serbia with weapons, had no means of lending her further support, even had she wished to do so. Britain had no involvement in the Balkans whatsoever. Had Austria moved at once, therefore, without seeking Germany’s endorsement, it is possible, perhaps probable, that the Serbs would have found themselves as isolated strategically as, initially, they were morally, and so forced to capitulate to the Austrian ultimatum. It was Austria’s unwillingness to act unilaterally that transformed a local into a general European crisis and her unwillingness so to act must be explained in large part by the precautionary mood of thought which decades of contingent war planning had implanted in the mind of European governments.
The net of interlocking and opposed understandings and mutual assistance treaties – France to go to war on Russia’s side and vice versa if either were attacked by Germany, Britain to lend assistance to France if the vital interests of both were judged threatened, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy (the Triple Alliance) to go to war together if any one were attacked by two other states – is commonly held to have been the mechanism which brought the ‘Allies’ (France, Russia and Britain) into conflict in 1914 with the ‘Central Powers’ (Germany and Austria-Hungary). Legalistically that cannot be denied. It was no treaty, however, that caused Austria to go running to Berlin for guidance and support in the aftermath of the Sarajevo assassination – no treaty in any case applied – but anticipation of the military consequences that might ensue should she act alone. At their worst, those consequences would bring Russia to threaten Austria on their common border as a warning to desist from action against Serbia; Austria would then look to Germany for support; that support, if given, risked drawing France into the crisis as a counterweight against German pressure on Russia; the combination of France and Russia would supply the circumstances to activate the Triple Alliance (with or without Italy); the ingredients of a general European war would then be in place. In short, it was the calculation of presumed military response, of how it was guessed one military precaution would follow from another, that drove Austria to seek comfort in the Triple Alliance from the outset, not the Triple Alliance that set military events in train.
Those Austrians who calculated the potential consequences were not Berchtold, a suave procrastinator suddenly emboldened by the Serbian affront, so emboldened that he chose not to discriminate between Serbia itself and Serb nationalism, nor the Chief of Staff, Conrad von Hötzendorf, who had so long been adamant for a Serbian war that he scorned to make the distinction. The cautious men were the old emperor, Franz Josef, in the sixty-sixth year of his reign in 1914, and Count Tisza, Prime Minister of Hungary. The Emperor opposed war for many reasons but ultimately because war brought change and he rightly identified change as the enemy of his empire’s frail stability. Tisza also feared the changes war might bring because Hungary’s equal partition with Austria of power within the empire, a share not justified by Hungarian numbers, required that the imperial system be preserved exactly as it was. The consequence of an unsuccessful war might be concessions to the Slavs, perhaps the ‘trialism’ which would undo Austro-Hungarian ‘dualism’. The consequence of a successful war, in which the empire’s Slavs made a contribution to victory, might be trialism all the same. It was those two men’s prudence, dispassionate in the Emperor’s case, partisan in Tisza’s, on which the urge for instant action against Serbia broke. On 2 July the Emperor insisted to Berchtold that he must not move before he consulted Tisza. Tisza told Berchtold the same day that the Emperor must have time to consider Hungarian objections. Berchtold, frustrated in his desire to act alone and soon, therefore decided on the fateful step of averting the first of the two other men’s fears – that Austria might find itself isolated in a crisis on which hostile, in particular Russian, war plans might impinge – by seeking assurance that Germany would stand by her.
With the arrival of Berchtold’s emissary, Count Hoyos, in Berlin, on 5 July, calculations of the import of war planning switched to the German side. Berchtold’s memorandum was delivered to the Kaiser by the Austrian ambassador the same day. Over lunch Wilhelm II authorised him to tell Emperor Franz Josef that Austria could ‘rely on Germany’s full support’.7 The offer seemed to apply as much to the proposal for an alliance with Bulgaria as to action against Serbia; the possibility of Russian intervention was discussed but discounted. So it was also in the discussions with the Kaiser’s ministers and military advisers whom the ambassador saw next. General von Falkenhayn, the Minister of War, asked if preparatory measures should be taken and was told not. Bethmann Hollweg, the Chancellor, had been independently advised by his Foreign Office that Britain would not involve herself in a Balkan crisis nor would Russia if it came to the point. The following day, Monday 6 July, after repeating his own judgement to a number of military officers that Russia, and France also, would not involve themselves and that precautionary measures were consequently not necessary, the Kaiser departed on the imperial yacht, Hohenzollern, for his annual cruise in the Norwegian fjords. He was to be absent for three weeks. The Chief of the Great General Staff and the Secretary of the Navy were already on leave and he left no orders for their recall.
The Kaiser had, however, insisted both to the Austrian ambassador and to his officials on one point. That was that it was for Austria to come to a firm resolution about what it wanted to do. Austrian Schlamperei – a mixture of prevarication and procrastination – was a constant irritant to the emphatic Germans. The young empire, the creation of an urgent nationalism and urgent in all it did, found little patience for the old empire, which thought time a solution to all problems. The first week of July 1914 therefore brought a strange reversal of attitudes. Austria was for once in a hurry. Germany went on holiday. Fundamentally, however, things remained as usual. The Kaiser’s party aboard Hohenzollern exercised vigorously, held boat races, listened to lectures on military history. The Austrians, under pressure to make up their minds, dithered.8
The Imperial Council of Ministers did not meet until Tuesday 7 July, already ten days after the assassination and five after the murderers had made their confessions. Berchtold, who sensed justification and time slipping away equally rapidly, proposed military action. Austria had mobilised against Serbia twice already in recent years, in 1909 and in 1912, on both occasions without Russia responding, and the German guarantee now put her in a stronger position. Tisza held out. He insisted that the taking of military measures be preceded by the issue of a note of demands, none of them too humiliating for Serbia to accept. Only if they were rejected would he agree to an ultimatum leading to war. His opponents – three German-Austrians, a Pole and a Croat – argued but he, as Prime Minister of the Hungarian and co-equal half of the empire, could not be talked down. He won the concession that Berchtold should not present proposals to the Emperor until he had prepared his own objections in writing. That would require another day. Thus no decision could be taken until Thursday 9 July.
Franz Josef then agreed that any ultimatum be preceded by the transmission of a note, as Tisza wanted. That was not what Berchtold desired to hear. His position was steadily hardening, towards that of Field Marshal Conrad, who had wanted war from the outset. He sustained his pressure, so that by Sunday 12 July, Tisza was prepared to agree to the presentation of a note, to be followed if necessary by an ultimatum, instead of a note with a time limit for a response attached. The importance of the distinction was greater than the choice of words might seem to imply: a note did not commit a sovereign power, an ultimatum did. By Tuesday 14 July, when Tisza and Berchtold met again, the Hungarian Prime Minister won his case against an ultimatum but was forced to concede the shortest possible time limit attaching to a note. It was to be only forty-eight hours after the document was delivered. The terms of the note were drafted and so was the date of the ministerial meeting at which it would be finally approved.
That date, however, was Sunday 19 July, the twenty-first day since the assassination. Worse, Berchtold told Tisza that the note would not formally be presented for another week after that. He had a justification. The French President, Raymond Poincaré, who would leave to make a state visit to Russia on 16 July, would not, it was believed, begin his return until Saturday 25 July. The delivery of an Austrian note to Serbia in the days when the Russian and French heads of state – respectively the Serbs’ protector and his chief ally – would be in intimate contact was likely to throw them into diplomatic and strategic conclave. Hopes of localising the dispute and of isolating Serbia – objectively already so much diminished by delay, as Berchtold must subjectively have recognised – would be dangerously reduced thereby. That was the explanation given to Berlin for the further postponement of the démarche; the Germans, Berchtold expostulated, could feel absolutely ‘assured . . . that there was not a thought of hesitation or uncertainty [in Vienna]’.
The Austrian note, conclusively agreed on Sunday 19 July, met some of Tisza’s objections. He had from the beginning opposed the presentation of any demands that might increase the number of Slavs within the empire and so it contained no threat of annexation nor, despite Conrad’s desires, of dismemberment. Serbia, if it capitulated to the full list of Austrian demands, was to be left intact. On the other hand, the note also fulfilled Berchtold’s wish that Serbia be asked for guarantees as to its future conduct. To that end, the note required first of all that the Serbian government newspaper publish on its front page a condemnation of all propaganda for the separation of any portion of imperial territory, a condemnation to be repeated by the Serbian King in an order of the day to the Serbian army. It then listed ten numbered demands, of which five were elaborations of the prohibition of propaganda or subversion and the last a demand for information that the others were being enacted. None of these points entailed any infringement of Serbian sovereignty. Points 5, 6, 7 and 8 did, since, besides stipulating the arrest, interrogation and punishment of Serbian officials implicated in the assassination, they also demanded that Austro-Hungarian officials should take part in the necessary processes on Serbian soil. Serbia, in short, was not to be trusted to police the crime itself; Austria should supervise. The time limit for an answer attached to the note was forty-eight hours from delivery. That would take place on the day Berchtold had now learnt the French President would leave Russia, Thursday 23 July. The document would reach Belgrade at six o’clock (local time) in the afternoon of that day and expire on Saturday 25 July.
It was then the twenty-fifth day since the assassination and the Serbian government had been warned that the note was on its way. Nicholas Pasic, the Serbian Prime Minister, had nevertheless decided to leave the capital for the country and, even after word reached him that the Austrian ambassador had brought the document to the foreign ministry, proceeded with his journey. Only during the night did he decide to return and it was not until ten o’clock in the morning of Friday 24 July that he met his ministers to consider what answer should be made. The Russian, German, and British governments had already received their copies of the text, and so had the French though, with the President and Foreign Minister still at sea, in Paris it was in the hands of a deputy. In Belgrade, however, the British minister was ill, the Russian minister had just died and not been replaced, while a replacement for the French minister, who had had a nervous breakdown, had only just arrived. The Serbian ministry were thus deprived of experienced diplomatic advice at a moment when the need was critical. Belgrade was a small and remote city, and the government, though experienced in the rough-and-ready diplomacy of Balkan warfare, was ill-equipped to deal with a crisis likely to involve all the great powers. The Serbian ministers, moreover, had taken fright as they pored over the Austrian note in the absence of Pasic. On his return, though there was some bold, initial talk of war, the mood quickly moved towards acquiescence. Messages were received from Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Minister, and from Paris, both counselling acceptance of as much of the Austrian note as possible. By the following morning, Saturday 25 July, both the British and French delegations in Belgrade reported home that Belgrade would agree to the Austrian demands, excepting the condition that imperial officials be admitted on to Serbian territory to supervise the investigations.
Even on that sticking point, however, the Serbians had as yet not made up their minds. As late as the twenty-seventh day after the assassination, it therefore seemed possible that Austria would arrive at the result it might very well have achieved had it exercised its right as a sovereign power to move against Serbia from the outset. The vital interest of no other power was threatened, except by consideration of prestige, even if Serbia permitted Austrian officials to participate in judicial proceedings conducted on its territory. That would be a humiliation to the Serbs, and a violation of the idea of sovereignty by which the states of Europe conducted relations between themselves. Yet, given Serbia’s semi-rogue status in the international community, it was unlikely to constitute an issue of principle for others, unless others made that choice. Even at noon on Saturday 25 July, therefore, five hours before the time limit attached to the Austrian note would expire, the crime of Sarajevo remained a matter between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, diplomatically no more than that.
Such was strictly true in the arena of diplomatic protocol. In the real world, however, the elapse of three weeks and six days since the murders had given time for fears to fester, premonitions to take form, positions to be taken in outline. Grey, on the Friday afternoon when the Serbian ministers were preparing to capitulate, had already asked the German and Austrian ambassadors in London, Prince Lichnowsky and Count Mensdorff, to consider proposing an extension of the time limit, so anticipating the possibility that the Serbs might after all jib. He also raised the question of mediation. Accepting, as the Austrians had made clear, that they would refuse any interference in their dealings with Serbia, he proposed nevertheless the idea that Germany, with France and Italy, might offer to mediate between Austria and Russia, if Russia were to mobilise, which the diplomatic community recognised to be a potential development. A Russian mobilisation would harden attitudes everywhere, even though it was not thought to entail that of other armies, and certainly not the consequence of war. Nevertheless, Mensdorff returned to the Foreign Office in the evening to reassure the officials – Grey had left for a weekend’s fishing – that the note was not an ultimatum and that Austria would not necessarily declare war if a satisfactory answer had not been received when the time limit lapsed.
The night and most of Saturday remained for it to be seen what the Serbians would do. On the morning of 25 July they were still reconciled to capitulation, though reluctantly and with occasional bursts of belligerence. Then, during the afternoon, word was received from their ambassador at the Tsar’s country palace that the mood there was fiercely pro-Serbian. The Tsar, though not yet ready to proclaim mobilisation, had announced the preliminary ‘Period Preparatory to War’ at eleven o’clock. The news reversed everything the Serbian ministers had decided. In the morning they had agreed to accept all ten Austrian demands, with the slightest reservations. Now they were emboldened to attach conditions to six and to reject absolutely the most important, that Austrian officials be allowed to take part in the investigation of the assassinations on Serbian territory. In the hurried hours that followed, the reply to the note was drafted and redrafted, lines crossed out, phrases corrected in ink. As would happen in the Japanese embassy in Washington on the night before Pearl Harbor, the typist gave way to nerves. The finished document was an undiplomatic palimpsest of revisions and afterthoughts. With a quarter of an hour in hand, however, it was finished, sealed in an envelope and taken by the Prime Minister himself, Nicholas Pasic, for delivery to the Austrian ambassador. Within an hour of its receipt, the personnel of the legation had boarded the train for the Austrian frontier and left Belgrade.
There followed a curious two-day intermission, Sunday and Monday, 26–27 July. Serbia mobilised its little army, Russia recalled the youngest reservists to the units in its western military districts, there were scenes of popular enthusiasm in Vienna over the government’s rejection of the Serbian reply and similar scenes in German cities, including Berlin. On Sunday, however, the Kaiser was still at sea, while Poincaré and Viviani, the French Foreign Minister, aboard La France, did not receive a signal urging their immediate return until that night. Meanwhile there was much talk, reflective and anticipatory, rather than decisive or belligerent. Bethmann Hollweg instructed the German ambassadors in London and Paris to warn that the military measures Russia was taking could be judged threatening. The German ambassador in St Petersburg was told to say that the measures, unless discontinued, would force Germany to mobilise which ‘would mean war’. Bethmann Hollweg learnt from him in reply that the British and French were working to restrain Russia while Sazonov, the Russian Foreign Minister, was moderating his position. The Kaiser and the Austrian government were informed. The British Foreign Office, working from information of its own, perceived a hope that the Russians were ready to acquiesce in a mediation by the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy. There was, briefly, the circulation of a feeling that the crisis, like those of 1909 and 1913, might be talked out.
The weakness of that hope was the ignorance and misunderstanding among politicians and diplomats of how the mechanism of abstract war plans, once instigated, would operate. Only Sir George Buchanan, the British ambassador in St Petersburg, and Jules Cambon, the French ambassador in Berlin, fully comprehended the trigger effect exerted by one mobilisation proclamation on another and the inexorability of deployment once begun.9 Buchanan had already warned the Russians, as he reported to the Foreign Office, that a Russian mobilisation would push the Germans not into a responsive mobilisation but to a declaration of war. Cambon had come to the same conclusion. Mere ambassadors as they were, however, and far from home in an age of formal and indirect communication, their voices lacked weight and, worse, failed to convey urgency. It was those at the point of decision – in the entourages of the Tsar and Kaiser, in Paris, in Vienna, in London – who were heard. They, moreover, though few in number – a handful of ministers, officials and soldiers in each capital – did not equally share the information available, nor understand what they did share in the same way, nor agree within each capital about what was understood. Information arrived fitfully, sometimes much, sometimes little, but was always incomplete. There was no way of correlating and displaying it, as there is in modern crisis management centres. Even had there been, it is not certain that the crisis of 1914 would have been managed any better than it was. Modern communication systems may overload those who seek to be informed through them, so consuming time necessary for thought; underload, in 1914, consumed time as men puzzled to fill in the gaps between the facts they had. Time, in all crises, is usually the ingredient missing to make a solution. It is best supplied by an agreement on a pause.
Today there are mechanisms to hand designed to negotiate pause: regional security councils, the United Nations. In 1914 there were none. Any pause would have to be arranged by men of goodwill. Grey, British Foreign Secretary, was such a man. He had raised the proposal for a four-power conference on Sunday 26 July and spent Monday trying to convene one. Had it been the only proposal in circulation he might have succeeded but others were set in motion and that deflected attention. The Russians proposed, on Monday, direct talks with the Austrians for a moderation of their demands on the Serbs; they also suggested that the great power ambassadors in Belgrade exert pressure in the opposite direction to weaken Serb resistance. To distraction was added deliberate confusion. The senior official in the German Foreign Office, Gottlieb von Jagow, verbally assured the British and French ambassadors that Germany was anxious to preserve the peace but preferred direct talks between Russia and Austria to a wider mediation; meanwhile, Germany did nothing to encourage Austria to speak to Russia. Her aim was to delay a Russian mobilisation while sustaining a process of diplomacy that would keep Britain and France – the latter agreed on Monday afternoon to join Grey’s proposed four-power conference – inert. Finally, there was sabotage. When Berchtold, in Vienna, learnt of Grey’s conference proposal that same Monday he informed the German ambassador that he intended ‘to send official declaration of war tomorrow, at the latest the day after, in order to cut away the ground from any attempt at mediation’.10
In the event, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on Tuesday 28 July. It was Berchtold rather than Conrad who was now in a hurry. There had already been an exchange of fire between Serbian and Austrian troops – it was one-sided, an Austrian volley at Serbs who had strayed too near the Austrian border – but Berchtold chose to regard it as an act of war. War was now what he wanted on the terms he might have had during the days immediately following the murders, a straightforward offensive against Serbia uncomplicated by a wider conflict. The month’s delay had threatened that simplicity, but he retained hopes that diplomacy would delay the taking of irretrievable decisions by others while he settled the Serbian score.
His urge to act was heightened by the discovery that his own country’s war plans impeded what prospect remained of a speedy resolution.11 Conrad’s tripartite division of forces – the ‘minimal’ concentration on the Balkan frontier, the major concentration against Russia in Poland, the ‘swing’ grouping to reinforce one or the other – precluded, the Field Marshal warned him, an immediate offensive against Serbia unless it could be guaranteed that Russia would not mobilise. Small though Serbia’s army was, only sixteen weak divisions, it outnumbered Austria’s ‘minimal’ group; operational prudence therefore required the commitment of the ‘swing’ grouping if a quick Serbian war were to be brought off. If the ‘swing’ grouping went south, however, the northern frontier with Poland would be left dangerously exposed. All therefore depended on what Russia would do next.
Russia had already done much. On the previous Saturday, when news of her emphatic support for Serbia had encouraged the Belgrade government to change its mind and reject the Austrian note, she had instigated the military measures known as the ‘Period Preparatory to War’. Entailing in this case only the bringing to operational readiness of the peacetime army in European Russia, the procedure was precautionary and intended not to provoke an escalation to mobilisation by another power. The equivalent in Germany was the ‘State of Danger of War’ (Kriegsgefahrzustand) and in France la couverture, covering operations behind the frontier. The Russian measure could be justified by the fact that Serbia had mobilised and Austria mobilised against her only, a partial mobilisation, on the same day. France was informed of the measure – the Franco-Russian Convention required that Russia consult her ally before mobilisation – and the German military representative at the Russian court informed Berlin that he had ‘the impression that all preparations are being made for a mobilisation against Austria’.12 In practice, much more had been done. Under cover of the ‘Period Preparatory to War’, orders had been sent for the mobilisation of the military districts of Kiev, Odessa, Moscow and Kazan – half of European Russia – and were extended on Monday 27 July to the Caucasus, Turkestan, Omsk and Irkutsk.
By the beginning of what was to prove the last week of peace, therefore, half the Russian army – though the half not stationed in the military districts adjoining Germany, those in Poland, White Russia and the Baltic provinces – was coming to a war footing. France had been informed and approved; indeed, Messimy, the Minister of War, and Joffre, the Chief of Staff, were pressing the Russians to achieve the highest possible state of readiness.13 The Russian generals at least needed little urging. Their responsibility as they saw it – all generals in all countries in July 1914 saw their responsibility in such terms – was to prepare for the worst if the worst came. The worst for them would be that, in seeking to deter Austria from making war in Serbia, their preparations provoked Germany into full-scale mobilisation. That would come about if their partial mobilisation, already in progress, prompted a full Austrian mobilisation which, they had good reason to believe, required a full German mobilisation also. On Tuesday 28 July, therefore, the Russian Chief of Staff, Janushkevich, with his quartermaster-general, chief of mobilisation and chief of transportation, agreed that the ‘Period Preparatory to War’ must now be superseded by formal mobilisation announcements.14 Privately they accepted that general war could probably not be avoided: the sequence Russian partial mobilisation against Austria = Austrian general mobilisation = German general mobilisation = war stood stark before them. They decided, however, that publicly they would announce only partial mobilisation, while preparing with the order for it another for general mobilisation, both to be set simultaneously before the Tsar for signature.
Sazonov, who had received word of Austria’s declaration of war on Serbia that Tuesday morning and conferred with Paléologue, the French ambassador, in the afternoon – Albertini, the great historian of the origins of the war, concluded that Paléologue ‘must now have approved of [the decision for partial mobilisation] and promised full French solidarity’ – attempted to palliate the fears the proclamation would certainly arouse by telegraphing Vienna, Paris, London and Rome (though not Berlin) with the news and requesting that the German government be informed, with ‘stress on the absence of any intention on the part of Russia to attack Germany’.15 Nevertheless, that evening Janushkevich informed all military districts that ‘30 July will be proclaimed the first day of our general mobilisation’ and on the following morning, having seen Sazonov, called on the Tsar and secured his signature to the orders for full as well as partial mobilisation.16 In the afternoon the chief of the mobilisation section got the relevant ministers’ signatures – the minister of the interior, a deeply devout Orthodox believer, signed only after making the sign of the cross – and in the evening the quartermaster-general had the orders typed up at the St Petersburg central telegraph office and prepared for despatch.
This decision to order general mobilisation ‘was perhaps the most important . . . taken in the history of Imperial Russia and it effectively shattered any prospect of averting a great European war’.17 It was also unnecessary. Sazonov’s support for the soldiers seems to have been supplied by his learning of a bombardment of Belgrade by Austrian gunboats on the Danube on the night of 29 July. The attack was a pinprick; Kalimegdan, the Turkish fortress crowning the Belgrade heights at the junction of the Danube and the Save, is impervious to anything but the heaviest artillery and remains unscarred to this day. On the wider front, Russia’s security was not threatened by the Austrian mobilisation. Indeed, Austria’s war with Serbia precluded its fighting a larger war elsewhere. Small as Serbia’s army was, its size, to say nothing of its proven fighting ability, required, even by Vienna’s calculation, the commitment against it of over half the Austrian force available. The ‘minimal’ and ‘swing’ groupings totalled twenty-eight of Austria’s divisions, and the twenty remaining were too few to launch an offensive into Russian Poland. The Serbian interior, moreover, was difficult campaigning country, mountainous, largely roadless and heavily forested, and therefore likely to impose serious delay on an invader seeking speedy decision: such was to prove exactly the case in 1915 when Germany, Austria and Bulgaria fell on the Serbs from several directions but took two months to conclude the campaign.18
Russia might, therefore, without risk to its security, threat to the general peace or abandonment of the Serbs, have confined itself to partial mobilisation deep within its own frontiers on 29 July. General mobilisation, including that of the military districts bordering Germany, would mean general war. That awful prospect was now taking shape in all the European capitals. Those who most feared the military preparations of others – Janushkevich, Moltke, Conrad, Joffre – were looking to their own lest they be taken at a disadvantage. Those who more feared war itself were scrabbling for stopgaps. Bethmann Hollweg, the German Chancellor, was one of them; he had already instructed the German ambassador in St Petersburg to warn Sazonov that ‘Russian mobilisation measures would compel us to mobilise and that then European war could scarcely be prevented’.19 The Kaiser was another. On the afternoon of 29 July, he telegraphed his cousin the Tsar, in English, urging him ‘to smooth over difficulties that may still arise’. In reply the Tsar pathetically suggested, ‘It would be right to give over the Austro-Servian problem to the Hague conference’, that weakling brainchild of his not scheduled to meet again until 1915.20 Later that evening a second telegram from the Kaiser reached the Tsar. ‘It would be quite possible’, he suggested, ‘for Russia to remain a spectator of the Austro-Servian conflict without involving Europe in the most horrible war she has ever witnessed’ and ended by again representing himself as a mediator. Immediately on receipt of this telegram, the Tsar telephoned the War Minister and ordered the cancellation of general mobilisation; the order was to be for partial mobilisation only after all. He intervened only just in time, for at 9.30 in the evening of 29 July the Russian quartermaster-general was actually standing over the typists at the Central Telegraph Office in St Petersburg as they tapped out the orders on to telegraph forms.21
The cancellation should have brought the pause which the search for peace required. At the opening of the day following, Thursday 30 July, the British – though refusing to reveal whether they would or would not intervene in a general European war – were still seeking to arrange a mediation, France had not taken any substantial precautionary measures, the Austrian troops mobilised were marching against Serbia only and Germany had mobilised no troops at all. The leaders of the German army were nevertheless in a state of acute anxiety. To General von Falkenhayn, the Minister of War, Russia’s partial mobilisation had consequences as threatening as full; it gave the Russians a start that would upset the feather-balance timing of the Schlieffen Plan. He wanted to mobilise at once, Bethmann Hollweg did not. He was still hoping that Berchtold would deal directly with the Russians and succeed in persuading them to accept the offensive against Serbia as a local war. Moltke, the Chief of the Great General Staff, was less bellicose but wanted at least the proclamation of the Kriegsgefahrzustand, which would match Russian preparations. In order to get his way, he wished himself on a meeting Bethmann held at one o’clock with Falkenhayn and Admiral Tirpitz, the naval minister. He failed to get what he wanted; but what he learnt shortly afterwards so alarmed him that he decided he must get general mobilisation at once and by any means. The Austrian liaison officer to the Great General Staff outlined to him his army’s current dispositions which, Moltke instantly grasped, would leave Germany’s eastern frontier desperately exposed if war came. ‘He needed forty Austro-Hungarian divisions in (Austrian Poland) ready to attack; what he was getting were twenty-five divisions standing on the defensive.’22 He at once expressed his extreme alarm to the Austrian military attaché; later that evening he telegraphed Conrad in Vienna, as one Chief of Staff to another, ‘Stand firm against Russian mobilisation. Austria-Hungary must be preserved, mobilise at once against Russia. Germany will mobilise.’
Even in militaristic Germany, Moltke thereby vastly exceeded his powers. What made his meddling even more reprehensible was that the Chancellor and the Kaiser were still seeking to persuade Austria to localise the war against Serbia and limit its objectives: ‘Halt in Belgrade’ was the phrase in circulation. Berchtold, when he saw the telegram next morning, Friday 31 July, expressed an understandable surprise. ‘How odd! Who runs the government: Moltke or Bethmann?’ Nevertheless, he took his cue. Telling Conrad, ‘I had the impression that Germany was beating a retreat; but now I have the most reassuring pronouncement from responsible military quarters’, he arranged for the general mobilisation order to be laid before Emperor Franz Josef later that morning.23 It was returned signed shortly after noon and published immediately.
That announcement in itself would have ensured a reconsideration of the Tsar’s decision to cancel general mobilisation in the evening of 29 July. In fact, it had already been reconsidered. Throughout Thursday 30 July, Sazonov, Sukhomlinov and Janushkevich – Foreign Minister, War Minister, Chief of Staff – had badgered the Tsar with their fears. He was at his summer residence on the Baltic, swimming, playing tennis, worrying about a bleeding attack suffered by his haemophiliac son, clinging to hopes of peace and trusting in the best intentions of his cousin the Kaiser. A good but infuriatingly evasive man, he deflected their arguments during the morning; in the afternoon, Sazonov set out by train to Peterhof to confront him. Sazonov was in a state of high agitation. It was no help that Paléologue, the French ambassador, whom he had seen earlier, did nothing to deter him from heightening the crisis. Paléologue, a strident patriot, appears to have given way already to belief in the inevitability of war and to have wanted only the certainty of Russian involvement when it came.24 Sazonov had never wanted war but his was an excitable and impressionable nature and he was keyed up by the warnings of the generals over losing advantage; moreover, he possessed in an acute form the Russian neurosis over control of the Balkans, with which went fears of a hostile power dominating the Bosphorus, Russia’s Black Sea exit to the Mediterranean and wider world. Between three and four o’clock on the afternoon of Thursday 30 July he rehearsed his anxieties to the Tsar who listened, pale and tense, occasionally showing an uncharacteristic irritation. General Tatistchev, his personal representative to the Kaiser, who was present, at one point observed, ‘Yes, it is hard to decide.’ The Tsar replied in a rough, displeased tone, ‘I will decide.’25 Shortly he did. Sazonov left the audience chamber and telephoned Janushkevich with the order to proclaim general mobilisation. ‘Now you can smash your telephone,’ he concluded. Janushkevich had earlier threatened that if he got the order for general mobilisation a second time he would smash his telephone and make himself unobtainable until mobilisation was too far advanced for another cancellation to take effect.
The hour had come. That evening the posters announcing mobilisation went up in the streets of St Petersburg and of all cities in Russia. The reservists would begin reporting to their depots next day, Friday 31 July. For reasons never properly elucidated, what was necessary knowledge for every Russian failed officially to reach London and Paris until late that evening; the British ambassador was dilatory in telegraphing, Paléologue’s telegram was inexplicably delayed. The Germans were not so ill-informed. They knew on Friday morning. At 10.20 a telegram arrived from Pourtalès, their ambassador in St Petersburg, ‘First day of mobilisation, 31 July’.26 It was what Moltke wanted to hear. He would now get the permission he needed to take the military precautions he believed essential. It was not what Bethmann Hollweg wanted to hear. He had retained the hopes up to the moment of the telegram’s arrival that Austria could be brought directly to negotiate with Russia and that Russia could be brought to accept the war against Serbia as local and limited. Now he had to accept what seemed inevitable. News of Austria’s general mobilisation arrived half an hour after noon. Germany proclaimed the ‘State of Danger of War’ half an hour after that.
The ‘State of Danger of War’ was an internal measure not entailing mobilisation. Nevertheless, with Austria and Russia mobilising, the Germans concluded that they must mobilise also unless Russian general mobilisation was reversed. An ultimatum to that effect was sent soon after three o’clock on the afternoon of 31 July to St Petersburg and another to Paris. The relevant sentence in each read: ‘[German] mobilisation will follow unless Russia suspends all war measures against ourselves and Austria-Hungary.’ That to Russia demanded, within twelve hours, ‘a definite assurance to that effect’, that to France included the warning ‘Mobilisation inevitably means war’ and required a declaration of neutrality ‘in a Russo-German war . . . within eighteen (18) hours’.27
The afternoon of 31 July thus brought to a crux the crisis which had begun thirty-four days earlier with the murders at Sarajevo. Its real duration had been much shorter than that. From the murders on 28 June to the conclusion of the Austrian judicial investigation and the confessions of the conspirators on 2 July was five days. It was in the period immediately following that the Austrians might have decided for unilateral action, and taken it without strong likelihood of provoking an intervention by the Serbs’ protectors, the Russians. Instead, Austria had sought a German assurance of support, given on 5 July; elapsed time from the murders, eight days. There had then followed an intermission of nineteen days, while the Austrians waited for the French President to conclude his state visit on 23 July. The real inception of the crisis may thus be dated to the delivery of the Austrian ‘note with a time limit’ (of forty-eight hours) on 24 July. It was on its expiry on Saturday 25 July, twenty-eight days from the murders, that the diplomatic confrontation was abruptly transformed into a war crisis. It was not a crisis which the participants had expected. Austria had simply wanted to punish Serbia (though it had lacked the courage to act alone). Germany had wanted a diplomatic success that would leave its Austrian ally stronger in European eyes; it had not wanted war. The Russians had certainly not wanted war but had equally not calculated that support for Serbia would edge the danger of war forward. By 30 July, thirty-three days from the murders, the Austrians were at war with Serbia, yet were doing nothing about it, had declared general mobilisation, but were not concentrating against Russia. Russia had declared partial mobilisation but was concentrating against nobody. The German Kaiser and Chancellor still believed that Austria and Russia could be brought to negotiate their mobilisations away, even if the Chief of the Great General Staff by then wanted a mobilisation of his own. France had not mobilised but was in growing fear that Germany would mobilise against her. Britain, which had awoken to the real danger of the crisis only on Saturday 25 July, still hoped on Thursday 30 July that the Russians would tolerate an Austrian punishment of Serbia but were determined not to leave France in the lurch.
It was the events of 31 July, therefore, the dissemination of the news of Russian general mobilisation, and the German ultimata to Russia and France, which made the issue one of peace or war. The day following, 1 August, the thirty-fifth since the murders, would bring Germany’s mobilisation against Russia – thus making, in the words of the German ultimatum to France, ‘war inevitable’ – unless Germany withdrew its ultimatum to Russia, which was incompatible with its status as a great power, or Russia accepted it, which was incompatible with such status also. German mobilisation would, under the terms of the Franco-Russian Convention of 1892, require both to mobilise and, if either were attacked by Germany, to go jointly to war against her. As the hours drew out on 31 July – the twelve demanded for a response from Russia, the eighteen demanded from France – only a hair’s breadth kept the potential combatants apart. There was still a hope. The Russo-French Convention of 1892, strictly interpreted, required that Germany actually attack one country or the other before the two went to war against her. German mobilisation entailed only their mobilisation. Even a German declaration of war, unless followed by German military action, would not bring the treaty into force. Nevertheless, the Germans had warned France that their mobilisation meant war with Russia and the outbreak of war between great powers not followed by fighting was a state of affairs without credibility in early twentieth-century Europe. The twelve hours given by Germany to Russia for acceptance of the ultimatum was, by any rational calculation, the last twelve hours of available peace. It was, in France, an inexact twelve hours. Wilhelm Freiherr Schoen, the German ambassador to Paris, who came to communicate news of the ultimatum to Russia at the French foreign ministry at six p.m. on Friday 31 July was unclear when the period began and ended – it was midnight to noon next day – but the exact delimitation was by then beside the point. War hovered half a day away.28
That, by 31 July, was certainly the view of the French army. News, true or exaggerated, of German military preparations, had thrown even Joffre, ‘a byword for imperturbability’, into a state of anxiety. The loss of advantage was a fear that now afflicted him as acutely as it had Janushkevich on 29 July and Moltke on 30 July. He foresaw the secret approach of German troops to their deployment positions while his own soldiers were still in barracks, German reservists kitting out at their depots while his were still at home. On the afternoon of Friday 31 July, he handed to Messimy, the Minister of War, a short note which epitomises, better than any other document of the crisis of July 1914, the state of mind which possessed the military professionals of the age.
It is absolutely necessary for the government to understand that, starting with this evening, any delay of twenty-four hours in calling up our reservists and issuing orders prescribing covering operations, will have as its result the withdrawal of our concentration points by from fifteen to twenty-five kilometres for each day of delay; in other words, the abandonment of just that much of our territory. The Commander-in-Chief must decline to accept this responsibility.29
That evening he formally requested the President to order general mobilisation at once. His representation was debated by the cabinet next morning and the first day of mobilisation, to be 2 August, proclaimed at four o’clock that afternoon.
The French had hoped to delay the proclamation until after the announcement of German mobilisation, in order to avoid any appearance of provocation. In practice, though the French order preceded the German, no such appearance was given, for the interval was only one of an hour. Moreover, two hours after that, the German ambassador in St Petersburg delivered to Sazonov the declaration of war on Russia. The hour was soon after seven in the evening, local time, Saturday 1 August. The exchange took place in a mood of high emotion. There were mutual recriminations, accusations against others, regrets, embraces, tears. The ambassador left Sazonov’s room ‘with tottering steps’.30
Yet the irrevocable did not yet seem done. The Tsar still hoped, on the strength of a telegram from the Kaiser begging him not to violate the German frontier, that war could be averted. The Kaiser, meanwhile, had fixed on the belief that the British would remain neutral if France were not attacked and was ordering Moltke to cancel the Schlieffen Plan and direct the army eastward. Moltke was aghast, explained that the paperwork would take a year, but was ordered to cancel the invasion of Luxembourg, which was the Schlieffen Plan’s necessary preliminary.31 In London this Sunday 1 August, the French ambassador, Paul Cambon, was thrown into despair by the British refusal to declare their position. Britain had, throughout the crisis, pursued the idea that, as so often before, direct talks between the involved parties would dissolve the difficulties. As a power apart, bound by treaties with none, it had concealed its intentions from all, including the French. Now the French demanded that the understanding between them and the British be given force. Would Britain declare outright its support for France and, if so, on what issue and when? The British themselves did not know. Throughout Saturday and Sunday 2 August, the cabinet debated its course of action. The treaty of 1839, guaranteeing Belgian neutrality, would force it to act, but that neutrality was still intact. It could give no firm answer to France, any more than it could to Germany, which had requested a clarification on 29 July. Precautionary measures had been taken; the fleet had been sent to war stations, France was even secretly assured that the Royal Navy would protect its Channel coast; but further than that the cabinet would not go. Then, on 2 August, Germany delivered the last of its ultimata, this time to Belgium, demanding the use of its territory in operations against France and threatening to treat the country as an enemy if she resisted. The ultimatum was to expire in twenty-four hours, on Monday 3 August. It was the day Germany also decided, claiming violation of its own territory by French aircraft, to present France with a declaration of war. The expiry of the ultimatum to Belgium, which the British cabinet had finally resolved would constitute a cause for war, proved the irrevocable event. On Tuesday 4 August, Britain sent an ultimatum of its own, demanding the termination of German military operations against Belgium, which had already begun, to expire at midnight. No offer of termination in reply was received. At midnight, therefore, Britain, together with France and Russia, was at war with Germany.
The First World War had still not quite begun. The Austrians succeeded in delaying their declaration of war on Russia until 5 August and were still not at war with Britain and France a week later. Those two countries were driven to make up the Austrians’ mind for them by announcing hostilities on 12 August. The Italians, Triple Alliance partners to Austria-Hungary and Germany, had stood on the strict terms of the treaty and declared their neutrality. The Serbians, cause of the crisis in the first place, had been forgotten. War was not to come to their little kingdom for another fourteen months.