Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (15 page)

The Tsar remained deeply unhappy about the prospect of a conflict which, he well knew, could destroy his dynasty. He remarked thoughtfully on 24 July: ‘Once [war] had broken out it would be difficult to stop.’ But he nonetheless consented to the measures preparatory to mobilisation. In an effort to play the part of the ruler of a great power, a status to which Russia’s claims were precarious, Nicholas acted not ignobly or wickedly, but rashly. He emulated Franz Joseph in setting a course for regime destruction – his own.

That evening, Sazonov told the Serbian ambassador that Russia would protect his country’s independence. He offered Belgrade no ‘blank cheque’, instead urging acceptance of most of the terms of the Austrian ultimatum. But his commitment was decisive in persuading the Serbian government to reject a portion of Vienna’s demands: without the Russians, absolute surrender was its only option. Sazonov felt confident that his country could count on France, while having no great expectation of support from Britain; he remarked gloomily that every British newspaper save
The Times
was backing Austria in the crisis. Many people in Britain, some of them holding office, were wholly unsympathetic to Russian intervention. They sympathised with the Austrians in viewing Serbia as a pestilential Balkan nuisance.

That day, while Europe held its breath, awaiting Serbia’s response to Vienna’s ultimatum, a violent thunderstorm struck central Europe. Outside the parliament building in Budapest a statue of Gyula Andrássy, one of the architects of the Dual Monarchy, was allegedly seen to totter. Troubled citizens told each other that their ancestors deemed such occurrences portents. But, as Finance Ministry official Lajos Thalloczy demanded in his diary: ‘for whom?’ That afternoon, expectant crowds gathered in the streets of Berlin, but by nightfall no further news was forthcoming.

Next day, Saturday the 25th, German teacher Gertrud Schädla described in her diary how her family lunged for their morning paper, desperate for the latest tidings. She wrote: ‘Despite the danger that we shall be dragged into a war, people applaud Austria’s muscular stance. The murder of the ducal couple demands harsh punishment.’ As a gesture to the gravity of the international situation, the local sharpshooters’ fair was cancelled, though booths and roundabouts had already been erected. Meanwhile Belgrade was thronged with worried people chattering in the streets, at their garden gates and in such cafés as The Russian Tsar. Each new edition of the papers was seized upon as eagerly as in Gertrud Schädla’s house.
There were rumours – accurate enough – of Austrian troops gathering on the border, but still no panic: Serbs, with their boundless capacity for self-delusion, clung to a belief that somehow fate would pass them by.

On the evening of the 25th, Germany’s Social Democrats staged protests against war. Bethmann rejected conservative demands for a blanket ban on assemblies, but decreed that they must be confined to halls, staying off the streets. Over 100,000 people attended rallies around the country, at which SPD leaders proclaimed that Austria was picking a fight Germany should not join.

All politicians find it hard to address with conviction more than one emergency at a time. This goes far to explain why the British government was slow to engage with events in Europe. Until the last week of July, the minds of senior ministers were fixed upon the Ulster crisis, to the near-exclusion of all else. Prime minister Herbert Asquith mentioned the assassinations just once, almost immediately after the event, in his intimate letters to Venetia Stanley, then not again until 24 July. In the intervening period, a Hungarian woman acquaintance called on David Lloyd George and harangued him about the rash insouciance with which the British were treating the reverberations of Sarajevo; she argued that unless Austrian anger could be assuaged, a war was inevitable. The chancellor was unimpressed, for which he later expressed regret. A
Times
leader on 3 July headed ‘Efforts for Peace’ related to Ulster, not Europe. It seemed entirely plausible that the United Kingdom was about to be plunged into a civil war, in which Protestant Ulstermen would be pitted against the Liberal government. Not only the Conservative Party, but also much of the British aristocracy and many of the army’s officers, passionately supported the rebels.

In an age when every European nation measured power by breadth of empire, imperialists saw Britain’s greatness imperilled if its other island was permitted to secede. The Ulster crisis fell upon a society already stricken by industrial strife: there was a protracted lock-out in the building trades, together with conflicts in the mines, on railways and in the engineering industry. In a July speech Lloyd George warned that the industrial and Irish confrontations were alike ‘the gravest with which any government has had to deal for centuries’. He did not exaggerate. A historic constitutional clash beckoned, as King George V recognised when he summoned a conference of the warring parties at Buckingham Palace to seek a path to reconciliation.

Yet another
Times
leader, headed ‘The King and the Crisis’, on 20 July, referred to Ulster. Catholic passions were rising in step with those of Protestants: on Tuesday the 21st the
Manchester Guardian
reported that men of the Dublin Fusiliers, returning from camp training, were heard shouting: ‘We will have Home Rule at any cost!’ ‘A nation once again!’ A letter-writer to
The Economist
asked what would happen to Lord Roberts’ rash public assertion – made in support of the army’s Orange sympathisers – that soldiers must be allowed to exercise their consciences, if Irish nationalists wearing British khaki claimed such a right. There were extraordinary scenes as the foremost Home Rulers, Redmond and Dillon, walked towards Buckingham Palace to attend the King’s conference: Irish Guardsmen in uniform cheered them on their way.

On 22 July Ulster still dominated the columns of
The Times
, but the paper admitted that the growing tension between Austria-Hungary and Serbia had become ‘too serious to be ignored’, though ‘we have no wish to exaggerate the dangers … a cool perception of their greatness may enable the Powers to conjure them before it is too late’.
The Times
found it so evident that war would threaten the very existence of Austria-Hungary that it cherished every hope the Emperor would act ‘reasonably’. On the afternoon of the 24th, Asquith was obliged to tell the House of Commons that the King’s Irish conference had broken down without a resolution. The cabinet plunged into vexed debate about the prospective boundaries of the six Ulster counties now scheduled for exclusion from immediate implementation of Home Rule – this was a concession extracted by the Protestant rebels at gunpoint. But then the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, reported to his colleagues upon the draconian terms of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia. Winston Churchill has described in immortal phrases how ‘the parishes of Fermanagh and Tyrone faded back into the mists and squalls of Ireland, and a strange light began immediately, and by perceptible gradations, to fall and grow upon the map of Europe’.

Yet that night, few British people retired to their beds anticipating any consequences for themselves from the Balkan drama. It is only because European war caused the Irish crisis to be swept aside, the government to postpone implementation of Home Rule for the duration and then forever – because it was supplanted in 1921 by Irish partition and independence – that the savage hatreds, the magnitude of the threat to Britain’s political fabric, are often today underrated. The Ulster imbroglio also significantly influenced Berlin’s attitude: German leaders saw the British impaled upon
their domestic troubles, and found it hard to imagine that a nation thus preoccupied and divided could menace their own purposes.

On the 25th, for the first time
The Times
acknowledged the gravity of the situation, saying – though still only in a second leader – that unless Austria-Hungary moderated its attitude towards Serbia, ‘we stand upon the edge of war, and of a war fraught with dangers that are incalculable to all the Great Powers … Austria-Hungary leaves a small and excitable Balkan kingdom to decide at a few hours’ notice whether there is, or is not, to be a third Balkan war, and a Balkan war this time in which one of the Great Powers will be involved as a principal from the first.’ It was widely remarked that, if Austria had been seriously interested in averting conflict, its ultimatum would have allowed a pause of more than forty-eight hours for the Serbian response, to give time for diplomacy to work.

But the British public still took more notice of such domestic trivia as ‘the motor-horn nuisance’ much discussed in
The Times
’s correspondence column. On 24 July Asquith mentioned the Balkans to Venetia Stanley in tones that still displayed Olympian detachment, though also sluggishly rising concern: ‘Russia is trying to drag us in … The curious thing is that on many, if not most, of the points Austria has a good and Serbia a very bad case, but the Austrians are quite the stupidest people in Europe … and there is a brutality about their mode of procedure which will make most people think that it is a case of a big Power wantonly bullying a little one. Anyhow it is the most dangerous situation of the last 40 years, and may have incidentally the good effect of throwing into the background the lurid pictures of “civil war” in Ulster.’ Asquith told the Archbishop of Canterbury that the Serbs deserved ‘a thorough thrashing’. On the afternoon of the 25th he presided at a diplomatic garden party at 10 Downing Street, where a string orchestra played while the German ambassador rubbed shoulders with the Serbian minister, and the Lloyd Georges mingled with assorted peers.

That same Saturday night the attorney-general, Sir John Simon, addressed a gathering of Birmingham Liberals at Altrincham. He told them: ‘We have been so filled with our own political developments that some of us may not have noticed how serious a situation is threatening on the continent of Europe … Let us resolve that the part which this country plays … shall from beginning to end be the part of a mediator simply desirous of promoting better and more peaceful relations.’ It is understandable that many Europeans, both allies and enemies, recoiled from such self-righteousness.

In the press announcement of house parties for the forthcoming Cowes yachting week, it was stated that ‘Prince Henry of Prussia was to have been among the guests, but is unable to leave Germany at present owing to the crisis, though he may do so later should the situation improve.’ Walter Cunliffe, governor of the Bank of England, asserted confidently to his guests at Inverewe in the Scottish Highlands that a great war was impossible, because ‘the Germans haven’t got the credits’. The financier Sir Ernest Cassell gave the same assurance to Mrs George Keppel’s glittering summer house party across the Channel at Clingendaal House, near The Hague: a general European conflict could not be funded. However, a young guest declared that she must go home anyway – Violet Asquith wanted to be with her father in Downing Street. Some of the young men took a cue from her. Lord Lascelles, a Grenadier Guardsman, said to his friend Lord Castlerosse, ‘We had better get back.’ They motored to the coast, and caught a boat to England among other uneasy folk with the same idea.

Just before the 6 p.m. expiry of Austria’s deadline on the 25th, Serbia’s response was delivered by the prime minister personally to Austria’s Baron Giesl. Pašić, conscious of the solemnity of the moment, wore an expression of mournful gravity. He said to Giesl in imperfect German: ‘Part of your demands we have accepted, for the rest we place our hopes on your loyalty and chivalry as an Austrian general. With you we have always been very satisfied.’ The Serbs accepted all Vienna’s harsh terms save its requirement for Austrians to be granted authority on their soil. When this response became known in western Europe, there were some brief delusions that war was averted. ‘People are relieved and at the same time disappointed to hear that Serbia is giving in,’ wrote André Gide. But Vienna made no pretence of desiring a peaceful outcome: whatever the Serbian response, Baron Giesl had been instructed to remove himself to the border at Zemun by the 6.30 train.

News that the ultimatum had not been accepted in totality prompted an explosion of frivolous glee in Vienna, where crowds surged through the streets until the small hours. It has recently been suggested that Serbia’s Nikola Pašić was also secretly enthused about a war that would commit Russia in support of Serbia’s pan-Slav ambitions; while this is remotely possible, it is again wholly unproven and unprovable. But the Serbs knew their response would not satisfy Vienna, and their own mobilisation orders had been dispatched four hours earlier, at 2 p.m. That
night government official Jovan Žujović, now in uniform, boarded a train carrying the General Staff eastward to the army’s concentration area, while his brother, a doctor, reported to a divisional field hospital. After two recent conflicts and a mobilisation, the Serbs were more familiar with the routines than any other nation in Europe. But their army had not yet re-equipped after the Second Balkan War, and the government knew how ill-stocked were its arsenals – a further reason for doubting that Pašić welcomed hostilities.

Next morning Berchtold informed his Emperor – mendaciously – that the Serbs had fired on Austria’s Danube steamers. Old Franz Joseph promptly signed the Empire’s mobilisation order, saying enigmatically, ‘
Also doch!
’ – ‘So, after all!’ Since the crisis began, his ministers had seriously debated only two matters: diplomatic measures to ensure German support, and the mechanics of Serbia’s dismemberment after its conquest. Belgrade, the country’s sole city of any stature, was to be annexed to the Hapsburg Empire, together with some additional territory. Other portions would be offered to Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro, to reconcile them to the new dispensation. Serbia would thus cease to trouble the world; the pan-Slav movement would be deprived of its prime mover. Both Austria and Germany repeatedly lied about these intentions, assuring the Russians and the world that the Hapsburg government had no plans for imposing territorial changes.