Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (16 page)

Count István Burián wrote that ‘across the whole of Europe our steps are rumbling like a storm which truly will decide our destiny’. Theodor Wolff, editor of the
Berliner Tageblatt
, asserted that the increasingly frenzied response to the appearance of each special edition on the streets of the capital reflected not merely a hunger for news, but each man’s unwillingness to be alone, his yearning to share his own fears with others: ‘Suddenly the crowds move. A couple of delivery vans appear, stormed by throngs of people. Some hold a white paper, others stare over their shoulders … People stand in their autos and carriages, hanging out over the street, staring, waiting for certainty … Never before has there been so much reading in the streets … Everyone does it, the flower-sellers in front of Café Kranzler as eagerly as the elegant lady inside the café itself.’

An extra edition at 9.30 p.m. on the 25th reported that the Serbs had rejected Vienna’s ultimatum. Few people cheered; most simply went home. But crowds gathered in front of the Austrian and Italian embassies screaming patriotic slogans: ‘Down with Serbia!’ Nationalists sang outside the chancellor’s office. Café orchestras played ‘
Deutschland über alles
’. In
Wolff’s words, ‘the music rose sublimely to the heavens’, followed by Austria’s anthem ‘
Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser
’. Kurt Riezler wrote: ‘in the evening and on Sunday people were singing. The chancellor is much moved, deeply stirred and strengthened, especially since news [of such displays of popular emotion] is coming in from across the Empire. Among the people [there is] an enormous, if confused, urge for action, a yearning for a great movement … to rise up for a great cause, to show one’s powers.’

Joffre, France’s chief of staff and commander-in-chief, found civilian politicians nervous, as well they might be, facing a huge crisis with the president and premier still abroad. The general told Messimy, the war minister, that he was quite prepared to handle a mobilisation in their absence: ‘
Monsieur le Ministre
, if we have to make war we shall do so.’ Messimy responded emotionally: ‘
Bravo!
’ On 25 July, without reference to Joffre, the minister telegraphed an order for all senior officers on leave to return to their units, which caused the general testily to remind him that there was a proper sequence for such measures, which Messimy had pre-empted. That night, French intelligence learned that German officers in Switzerland had been recalled from leave; guards were being placed on key bridges across the Kaiser’s empire. It was nonetheless decided not to recall vacationing French soldiers, many of whom were still needed at home for the harvest.

In London Sir Edward Grey still harboured a huge though scarcely ignoble delusion: that Germany would exercise its influence upon Vienna to prevent a Balkan quarrel from escalating into a general European conflict. But that night of the 25th, the head of the Foreign Office’s East and West Department, Sir Eyre Crowe, warned of the gravity of the situation. He wrote that everything now hinged upon the vital question of ‘whether Germany is or is not determined to have this war now’, and urged that the most likely way of preventing disaster was for Britain to make plain that it would not remain neutral in a conflict that engaged France and Russia. But at that moment there was no possibility that the cabinet or the House of Commons would have endorsed any such commitment, even had Grey asked for it – as he did not.

Europe now had a war: only its scale remained to be determined. Everything turned upon Russia. Jules Cambon, the French ambassador in Berlin, told his Belgian counterpart: ‘Today the fate of France and the conservation of the peace of Europe depend upon a foreign will, that of the Tsar. What will he decide? And upon what advice? If he decides for war
France, the victim of her alliance, will follow the destiny of her ally on the battlefields.’ It was taken for granted that Serbia would not have dared to reject even a part of Austria’s ultimatum without being confident of Russia’s support. At 1 a.m. on 26 July St Petersburg placed Russian Poland under martial law. Later that day, critical pre-mobilisation orders were issued. The army required a fortnight to be ready to fight, a month to be fully deployed, and thus every hour counted. Sazonov wanted only partial mobilisation; Russia had taken this same step in 1912 without precipitating a war. It seemed prudent to avoid directly provoking the Germans, and thus to hold back from activating the troops of Warsaw district, closest to their frontier. But when Danilov the quartermaster-general returned from the Caucasus that day, he explained to the foreign minister that a limited mobilisation would critically impede the full process.

On the 26th also, the minister of internal affairs published an order prohibiting publication or public mention of information about the armed forces, under the terms of Russia’s treason laws. Notice was given that lighthouses and navigation lights were being doused in all Russian waters save the inland Caspian and Azov seas. The naval base at Sebastopol was closed to shipping, and Russian vessels at sea were instructed to halt radio transmissions. A series of domestic restrictions was introduced, starting with a 10 p.m. closure order for all St Petersburg restaurants. Next day all Germans and Austrians on Russian soil were ordered to settle their affairs and leave the country forthwith. From the 27th also, shipping in the Black Sea was warned that any craft steaming inshore during the hours of darkness was liable to be fired upon.

Soldiers began to move. Outside Moscow, the Sumskoi Hussars were recalled from exercises to barracks, where horses were reshod, campaign uniforms issued, harness and equipment checked. Men locked their personal possessions into chests which were labelled with the names and addresses of their next of kin. The officers’ mess silver was sent to the State Bank for safekeeping, and cherished regimental banners were presented to a museum. The Serbian military attaché to Berlin noted that he travelled across Germany on 26–27 July without observing any warlike activity, but on crossing into Russian territory ‘we noticed mobilisation steps being taken on a grand scale’. When Sir George Buchanan questioned Sazonov about Russia’s scurrying soldiery, the foreign minister responded soothingly that they were merely responding to the ongoing industrial turbulence. The ambassador, however, was in no doubt that the army was preparing for war. That day, the 26th, Grey put to Prince Lichnowsky, the
German ambassador in London, Britain’s proposed solution to the crisis: a four-power conference. Berlin promptly dismissed this, believing that such a gathering would be bound to condemn Austria. Here again was evidence of the German indifference to securing a diplomatic outcome.

In the last days of July, the weight of traffic flying between governments swamped the relatively primitive international communications system, so that vital cables became subject to chronic delay. Only a fraction of government messages were transmitted by diplomatic wireless: most relied upon the commercial telegraph network. Details of Russia’s mobilisation were slow to reach the French government, for instance, because every message from its St Petersburg embassy had to be carried more than two miles to the public telegraph office. The British Foreign Office cipher clerks, only four in number, were overwhelmed: they worked in pairs, one reading out the groups, the other transcribing them onto a Post Office form – everything was done in longhand. Since five-number groups cost more to send, they made efforts to achieve terseness in the interests of economy. Once completed, a message was sealed in an envelope and taken by a messenger half a mile to London’s central post office in The Strand for transmission.

German civilians were becoming increasingly conscious that they might have to fight. The prospect roused dismay among socialists, enthusiasm among conservatives. Wilhelm Kaisen was a twenty-seven-year-old Bremen plasterer, and a dedicated Social Democrat. On 26 July he wrote to his girlfriend Helene expressing revulsion at the prospect before Europe: ‘War – those letters embrace such a dreadful ocean of blood and horror that they make us shudder to contemplate them.’ Kaisen was full of hopes that the Socialist International would intervene to prevent conflict. If it failed to do so, he foresaw mutiny among soldiers, especially ‘once murderous aircraft unleash perdition from the sky’. Across Europe in the last weekend of July, fears of the breaking storm prompted tens of thousands of hasty weddings. In the small town of Linden near Hanover, the register office married forty-six couples before finally closing at 11 o’clock on Sunday night. In Hanover itself, two hundred couples tied the knot.

Admiral Tirpitz had told a diplomat earlier in 1914, with doubtful accuracy, that the British had their newspapers under much better control than did Germany. ‘In spite of your “liberty of the press”, at a hint from your government your whole national press becomes unanimous on questions outside your domestic politics.’ By contrast, German newspapers, said the admiral contemptuously, were ‘ocean tramps’, each representing the view of its own little party. There were 3,000 titles, fifty of them in
Berlin. Now, the
Berlin Post
urged that Austria should be left alone to pursue whatever course she chose. The
Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung
said on 24 July: ‘we are not required to support Hapsburg wars of aggression’.
Vorwärts
, a Social Democratic publication, declared contemptuously on 27 July that ‘only immature adolescents could be attracted to a warrior adventure that must turn Europe into a slaughterhouse stinking of blood and decay’.

Contrarily, in Freiburg the town’s semi-official bulletin,
Freiburger Tagblatt
, asserted that Austria’s looming war with Serbia ‘holds sway completely over our city. Our whole life [has] played out as if we ourselves had to draw the sword – among families, in shops and public places, on the streets, in tram cars. These are genuine lofty sentiments, rooted in real German patriotism.’
Freiburger Zeitung
wrote of ‘a wave of the highest patriotic enthusiasm [which] cascaded like a spring flood through the entire city’. Even the most pacifistic socialist papers said that if war came to Germany the working class would fight, rallying to the defence of the Fatherland. A German defeat would be ‘unthinkable, horrible … we do not desire that our women and children should be victims of the Cossack’s bestialities’.

A liberal journalist wrote on 26 July in
Weser-Zeitung
: ‘We cannot allow Austria to go under, for then we should ourselves be threatened with becoming subject to the greater Russian colossus, with its barbarism. We must fight now in order to secure for ourselves freedom and peace. The storm from east and west will be terrible but the skill, courage, and sacrifices of our army will prevail. Every German will feel the glorious duty of showing himself worthy of our forefathers [who fought] at Leipzig and Sedan.’ But even the most strident editorialists hoped that France and Britain would remain neutral, leaving Germany to direct its undivided military attentions to Russia. The Berlin government, in one of its spasms of moderation, urged the Austrians initially to mobilise only sufficient forces to address Serbia.

But on 26 July, Jules Cambon warned German foreign minister Jagow that the British would not this time remain neutral, as they had in 1870. Jagow shrugged: ‘you have your information and we have ours, which is completely different. We are confident of British neutrality.’ Cambon was among those who always thereafter believed this a critical misapprehension – that if the Germans had known Britain would fight, they would not have risked war. His view seems mistaken, however. The key German decision-makers, Moltke foremost among them, had long before weighed
the possibility and indeed likelihood of British intervention – and discounted it as irrelevant. The outcome of a continental struggle would be determined by the clash of vast armies, to which a British troop contribution would perforce be tiny, and the Royal Navy irrelevant.

At this stage, too, most of Britain’s governing class remained indifferent to the fate of Serbia and strongly hostile to intervention. The British ambassador in Paris, Sir Francis Bertie, wrote on 27 July: ‘It seems incredible that the Russian Government should plunge Europe into war in order to make themselves the protectors of the Serbians.’ Many influential people questioned the wisdom of shattering European peace to save squalid little Serbia.

Meanwhile Berchtold, in Vienna, decided that it had become urgent to initiate military action: he wrote apprehensively that it was ‘not impossible that the Triple Entente might yet try to achieve a peaceful solution of the conflict unless a clear situation is created by a declaration of war’. From Berlin, without Bethmann’s knowledge, Moltke sent a message to Vienna urging general mobilisation and rejection of mediation; but this was decrypted and read by the Austrians only after they had already made their commitment to march. At 11 a.m. on Tuesday, 28 July, sitting at a little writing table in his study at Bad Ischl, the Emperor Franz Joseph signed a declaration of war, the document which would prove the death warrant of his own empire.

Early that afternoon, via telegraph, a copy of this missive reached the Serbian Foreign Ministry’s temporary quarters in Niš. Officials at first suspected a hoax. One of them, Milan Stojadinović, later wrote: ‘its form was so very unusual, in those days when the very etiquette of such things was still deemed important’. The language was undiplomatically crude and terse, but the Serbs eventually decided the telegram must be genuine. One of them bore it down the street to the Europa coffee house, where the prime minister was lunching with Strandman, Russia’s acting envoy.

The Serb leader read the brief words with every eye in the place upon him. Then he crossed himself, passed the fatal document to his Russian companion, rose and addressed the company: ‘Austria has declared war on us. Our cause is a just one. God will help us.’ Another Foreign Ministry official hurried in, to report that a similarly worded communication had just reached the army high command in Kragujevac. Shortly afterwards, a message from St Petersburg reached Strandman, which he was ordered to deliver personally to Pašić. Signed by the Tsar, it declared that while Russia desired peace, it would not remain indifferent to the fate of Serbia. After
reading this, Pašić once again crossed himself and said reverently and theatrically, ‘Lord, great merciful Russian Tsar.’