Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (13 page)

Bethmann was a natural government official rather than a leader. Lloyd George later recalled conversations with him during a 1908 visit to Germany to study its health-insurance law: ‘an attractive but not an arresting personality … an intelligent, industrious and eminently sensible bureaucrat, but he did not leave on my mind an impression of having met a man of power who might one day shake destiny’. Bethmann was also a vacillator, especially about the rival merits of peace and war. In 1912 he
returned from a visit to Russia alarmed by the evidence of its rising might; and during the following year was heard to advocate a pre-emptive conflict. In April 1913 he lectured the Reichstag on the looming ‘inevitable struggle’ between Slavs and Teutons, and warned Vienna that Russia was bound to join any conflict between Austria and Serbia. In his better moments, however, the chancellor recognised the perils posed by a clash of arms. On 4 June 1914 he told the Bavarian ambassador that conservatives who imagined that a conflict would enable them to reassert their own domestic power, crushing the hated socialists, were mistaken: ‘a world war with its incalculable ramifications will strengthen social democracy, which sermonises the virtues of peace’. War, he added, could easily cost some rulers their thrones.

Bethmann’s judgement was not improved by personal isolation. His wife died in May 1914 after a long illness, and he was left to while away his leisure hours reading Plato in Greek. He had become almost politically friendless, especially in the Reichstag. Moltke had no time for Bethmann, whose career now rested solely in the hands of the Kaiser, his patron. The chancellor initially identified in the July crisis an opportunity to restore his personal authority and reputation by achieving a diplomatic coup for the Central Powers. He was a prime mover in encouraging the Kaiser to support Austria, and was highly selective about what cable traffic he showed his master, to preserve his steadiness of purpose. He believed that Germany should pursue its chosen course without fears of any response St Petersburg might see fit to make.

In tangled harness Bethmann, the Kaiser and Moltke made the critical decisions. Germany actively encouraged the Austrians to attack Serbia, and Berlin’s three principal actors made no attempt to manage events in such a way as to avert a wider calamity. Therein lies the case for their culpability for what followed. It seems mistaken to argue that they entered the July crisis bent upon precipitating a general European conflict; but a pervasive German fatalism about such an outcome contributed largely to bringing it about. The Social Democrat leader August Bebel, a hero to millions of workers, delivered an impassioned warning following the 1911 Agadir crisis. ‘Every nation will continue to arm for war until a day comes at which one or the other says: “Better a terrible end than a terror without end.” [A nation may also say]: “If we delay any longer, we shall be the weaker instead of the stronger.” Then the catastrophe will happen. Then in Europe the great mobilisation plans will be unleashed, by which sixteen to eighteen million men, the finest of many nations, armed with the best
instruments of murder, will take the field against each other. The
Götterdämmerung
of the bourgeois world is approaching.’

Thomas Mann wrote that German intellectuals sang the praises of war ‘as if in competition with each other, with deep passion, as if they and the people, whose voice they are, saw nothing better, nothing more beautiful than to fight many enemies’. Some conservatives were impressed by a 1912 bestseller written by Gen. Friedrich von Bernhardi,
Germany and the Next War
, which proclaimed a German ‘duty to make war … War is a biological necessity of the first importance … Without war, inferior or decaying races would easily choke the growth of healthy, budding elements, and a universal decadence would follow … Might gives the right to conquer or occupy.’ Bernhardi was dismissed by Moltke, who called him ‘a perfect dreamer’, but the book was widely noticed in Britain, where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells were among those expressing repugnance. British opinion may have been coloured by the fact that their own nation had already done all the conquering and occupying it needed.

Fatalism about the desirability or inevitability of conflict was even more evident in the Hapsburg Empire. In March 1914 the influential military publication
Danzer’s Armee-Zeitung
declared that the international situation had seldom looked graver. Incessant Balkan wars, to which had been added Italy’s 1911 invasion and colonisation of Libya, were plainly mere overtures ‘to the great conflagration which is inevitably awaiting us. We see that the arms race is no longer a means of sustaining a balance of power, as it has been for decades, but instead a frenzied and undisguised preparation for a conflict that may begin today or tomorrow.’
Danzer’s
noted that Russia was still several years short of completing the strategic railway network indispensable to swift mobilisation, and thus an earlier war would be ‘inconvenient for our enemies’. This led the writer to argue that it was in the strongest interests of Austria and its allies to strike before losing the initiative: ‘Today, the balance is quite favourable, but heaven knows if this will remain so tomorrow! Sooner or later, hecatombs of blood must be sacrificed, so let us seize the moment. We have the strength – only the decision is wanting!’

On 14 July Count Berchtold presided over an important meeting at which the Empire’s next steps were decided. Conrad raised the issue of timing: given the economic difficulties threatened by mobilising reservists in the midst of the harvest season, he wanted war delayed until 12 August. The foreign minister rejected such a postponement. ‘The diplomatic situation will not hold so long,’ he told the army chief, meaning that Entente
pressure on Vienna to maintain the peace might become irresistible. The German ambassador was informed that Berchtold’s staff was working on the wording of an ultimatum to Belgrade which was designed to be rejected.

Western Europe paid scant heed to the latest round of Balkan bickering. A note on
The Times
’s court and social page for 3 July declared: ‘The Domestic Servant Problem is one of the most serious problems of the present day. With the idea of helping to its solution,
The Times
some months ago instituted a scheme whereby Lady Experts assist Ladies to obtain able and reliable Servants …’ On the 16th, the newspaper addressed the European situation in a second leader, urging that Serbia should volunteer to conduct an inquiry into Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. It concluded dismissively that neither force nor the threat of force could play any useful part in Austria-Hungary’s diplomacy towards Serbia: ‘Any attempt to meet it in that fashion would constitute a fresh peril to European peace and that, we are confident, the EMPEROR and his most sagacious advisers clearly perceive.’ Two days later
The Times
’s foreign page was led by a report on Mexico; the only European news was headed ‘the Serbian scare’. On 17 July, Lloyd George told an audience of London businessmen that ‘although you never get a perfectly blue sky in foreign affairs’, some clouds seemed to be clearing. He asserted his confidence that the European problems would soon be solved. From the outset, Britain’s politicians and press – anyway preoccupied with the Ulster crisis – found it hard to conceive that Austrian grievances against Serbia merited a resort to arms.

France, chronically politically unstable after experiencing seven changes of government between 1911 and 1914, was engaged with its own lurid domestic affairs, prominent among them the trial of Joseph Caillaux’s wife Henriette for shooting dead
Le Figaro
’s editor Gaston Calmette. President Raymond Poincaré and René Viviani, his temporary prime minister, departed from Dunkirk early on the morning of 16 July aboard the battleship
France
, to pay a state visit to Russia. Both professed to welcome the trip as a holiday: Poincaré wrote later of ‘sailing under the illusion of peace’. The ship’s wireless facilities were primitive, and throughout their time at sea they found themselves almost incommunicado: ‘a heavy mist falls on the billow, as if to hide Europe’s shores’.

On the 20th the French party arrived at the landing stage of the Peterhof Palace, to be received by the imperial family and several of Nicholas II’s ministers. Maurice Paléologue, the French ambassador, reported hearing
the Tsar say as he waited to greet his French guests: ‘I can’t believe the [Kaiser] wants war … If you knew him as I do … how much theatricality [there is] in his posing! It is all the more important for us to be able to count on England in an emergency. Unless Germany has gone out of her mind altogether she will never attack Russia, France and England combined.’ After the initial courtesies, Poincaré invited the views of Sergei Sazonov about the Sarajevo murders. According to the president’s memoirs, the foreign minister was dismissive, and messages from the French embassy in Vienna, warning that the Austrians seemed likely to take drastic action, were not forwarded to St Petersburg for days. At the banquet which followed, Paléologue, who grew ever more euphoric and emotional as the visit proceeded, wrote: ‘I shall long remember the dazzling display of jewels on the women’s shoulders … a fantastic shower of diamonds, pearls, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, topaz, beryls.’ Here was a last flourish of the serene complacency of old Europe’s ruling class.

René Viviani was an Englishman’s idea of a stage Frenchman: fluent, erratic, emotional, impulsive and subject to fits of extreme rudeness. On the Russian trip, it was plain that his mind was fixed more on domestic issues than on foreign affairs: he was fearful that evidence embarrassing to himself would emerge from the Caillaux courtroom circus, and anxious about his mistress, an actress at the Comédie Française. When messages arrived from Paris, Poincaré became increasingly impatient to see anything that bore upon the European crisis, but Viviani seemed to care only for the Paris gossip. He said the Serbian issue would obviously be resolved, so there was no purpose in hastening home.

Poincaré, passionately committed to the Entente, led the discussions with the Russians, writing in his diary in theatrical self-justification: ‘I have taken upon myself Viviani’s responsibilities. I fear that he is hesitant and pusillanimous.’ Paléologue noted: ‘It was Poincaré who had the initiative. Before long he was doing all the talking; the Tsar simply nodded acquiescence, but his whole appearance showed his sincere approval. It radiated confidence and sympathy.’ The ambassador was an unreliable witness, but right about the congenial mood of the talks.

There is a massive difficulty about assessing this Franco-Russian summit, as we should now call it, because no minutes were kept, and few relevant state papers survive. Memoirs written by some of the principals are evasive and perhaps actively deceitful about what took place. Poincaré and Sazonov alike claimed that they discussed generalities, because they knew nothing of the looming Austrian ultimatum to Serbia. This may well
be untrue, because Russian codebreakers had cracked Vienna’s diplomatic traffic. The Tsarist General Staff had a good grasp of Hapsburg plans and manoeuvres: Col. Alfred Redl, the homosexual Austrian intelligence chief who killed himself in 1913, was only the most notable of a network of agents in St Petersburg’s pay. The Russians were much less well informed about Germany, though they had few doubts about its war plan for a grand envelopment in the West, after buying from a spy for 10,000 roubles the report of the German army’s 1905 war games.

It is likely that the French and Russian delegations had intensive discussions about the Balkan crisis, and agreed a tough line. Poincaré believed that the Germans were bluffers: ‘whenever we have taken a conciliatory approach to Germany she abused it; on the other hand, on each occasion when we have shown firmness, she has yielded’. Firmness was a perceived virtue which powerfully influenced the behaviour of all the Powers in July 1914. Some historians believe that in St Petersburg Poincaré stiffened the resolve for war of Sazonov – ‘a sad wobbler’, in the view of the British Foreign Office’s Robert Vansittart. During a state banquet at the French embassy, the foreign minister spoke to the president in terms that echoed Conrad on the other side: he said that, if the crisis worsened, Russia would face great difficulties in conducting a mobilisation during the harvest. The fact that the Frenchman acknowledged in his memoirs a conversation about such a contingency suggests that he and Sazonov already viewed the Balkan situation more gravely than either afterwards admitted.

But it is easy to accept that France and Russia agreed on coordinating a tough response to the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, even including a precautionary Russian mobilisation such as had taken place in the last Balkan crisis, without convicting them of precipitating a European war. The Tsar certainly had no enthusiasm for such a clash, and his generals knew that their military position vis-à-vis Germany would be much stronger in 1916. Russia’s ambassadors to Paris, Vienna and Berlin, together with Gen. Yuri Danilov, the army’s quartermaster-general and strongest personality, were absent from their posts until the Austrian ultimatum was delivered on 24 July, a further indication that St Petersburg did not anticipate hostilities. All that is known for sure of these meetings is that the Tsar proposed for himself a visit to France in 1915. On a scenic trip up the Neva, the Franco-Russian party passed shipyards where new battleships were under construction, but the workmen were on strike. Nicholas suggested that this represented an attempt by German agitators to blight the state visit, though Poincaré shrugged: ‘pure speculation’.

On the 21st the president’s party received all the ambassadors accredited to St Petersburg in their superb gold-embroidered uniforms and knee-breeches, and exchanged banalities with most. The German envoy said that he looked forward to visiting France with his French family later in the summer. Britain’s Sir George Buchanan – ‘cold, ponderous and extremely courteous’, in the president’s words, displayed alarm about the European situation and suggested that Vienna and St Petersburg should open a direct dialogue. Poincaré responded that such a course would be most dangerous, and wrote in his diary: ‘This conversation leaves me pessimistic.’ Count Friedrich Szapáry, the Hapsburg ambassador, disturbed the French president much more: ‘He gives the impression that Austria-Hungary wishes to extend to all of Serbia responsibility for the crime committed [in Sarajevo] and possibly desires to humiliate her little neighbour. If I say nothing, that will make him suppose a violent initiative has the approval of France. I reply that Serbia has friends in Russia who would be astonished at this information, and such surprise would be shared elsewhere.’