Europe's Last Summer (36 page)

As for Germany, it was Russia's military, railroad, and industrial buildup after 1905 that awakened in its generals an urgent desire to launch a preventive war against Russia and its ally France. That was why they looked back on 1905 with regret: both Russia and France had been temporarily powerless in that year, and could have been defeated easily. The roots of Germany's move can be dated, therefore, to sometime in the decade 1904–1914, when its military leaders first began to advocate preventive war. The move itself took place suddenly in the last week of July 1914, when they seized their chance and opted for provoking the preventive war of which they had long dreamed.

In the aftermath of the June 28 killings, Vienna believed them to be the product of a plot conceived in, and organized by, Serbia. That turns out not to have been entirely true. Serbia bore some responsibility, but not all.

The murder, as we have seen, was committed by one person, a Bosnian, and therefore an Austrian, not a Serbian subject. He acted probably (but not certainly) on his own initiative, though he was assisted by others. His act—we now can confirm—was made possible by support from dissident officers in the Serbian army.

There is no question that the bullet that killed Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo the late morning of Sunday, June 28, 1914, came from the weapon wielded by the schoolboy terrorist Gavrilo Princip.

Princip, though he claimed otherwise for a few days after his capture, did not act entirely alone. He may well have originated the idea of murdering Franz Ferdinand, as he maintained to the end, but he headed a team. The others were, like himself, young amateurs motivated by nationalist or fringe ideologies. Another member of his band attempted the assassination but failed. In the end Princip acted alone. There was no third bullet. There was no grassy knoll.

The assassination plot could not have succeeded without the essential support provided by the Serbian secret society, the Black Hand, which supplied weapons, marksmanship training, and the use of an "underground railroad" to smuggle Princip and a colleague past frontier and customs posts, from Serbia into Bosnia. The Black Hand, in turn, called on the support of low-level Serbian government officials and on the resources of the Serbian nationalist cultural organization Narodna Odbrana.

Apis and his chief lieutenants, the active heads of the Black Hand, were high-ranking army officers who had infiltrated the Serbian government. It was a military-political faction conspiring against the Prime Minister; so he was not responsible for what they did.

Rumors circulated at the time and for decades afterwards that Russia provided financial support to the Black Hand and to the Sarajevo plotters. These appear to be baseless. Junior attaches of the pan-Slav faith may have known of Apis's aid to Princip and may have expressed sympathy, but they were individuals who did not represent their government in the matter. Russia's pan-Slav man in the Balkans, Hartwig, minister to Serbia, supported Prime Minister Pasic against the Black Hand, and surely that would have foreclosed the possibility of any aid by the Russians to the terrorist team.

Princip, who killed Franz Ferdinand, did so for a muddle of misinformed reasons. Although the Archduke was the most pro-Slav member of the Hapsburg hierarchy, the youth believed that he was anti-Slav. Princip feared that the annual military maneuvers Franz Ferdinand was inspecting masked an invasion force that would launch a surprise attack on Serbia (untrue). Princip had heard that the heir was a moderate whose attractive policies might bring all the Slavs of the Balkans under Austrian control.

Like other terrorists, Princip must have believed that killing government leaders would demoralize the ruling classes. He had hoped to assassinate another Hapsburg official before he heard about the Archduke's planned arrival.

Apis, who facilitated Princip's deed, seems to have had not much more information about the policies for which Franz Ferdinand stood than did Princip. But the question of Apis's motivation is more complex. As A. J. P. Taylor has pointed out, Princip and his schoolboy friends, at the time they made themselves known to agents of the Black Hand, could hardly have inspired much confidence as a band of killers. They were adolescents and amateurs with no military training or experience, and with no knowledge of weaponry. How were they going to break through the bodyguard of what should have been one of the most heavily guarded political figures in Europe? Indeed, only a series of blunders and coincidences that could not possibly have been expected led to the success of Princip's plot.

Might it not have been more probable that, as Taylor suggested, Apis decided to facilitate the plans of the little band of teenage incompetents
because
he assumed they would bungle it? If so, without providing Austria with a pretext for taking action, the attempted assassination might have seriously embarrassed the Serbian Prime Minister—Apis's enemy—especially in the upcoming August 14 elections. So while the world always has thought of the murders in Sarajevo as an episode in international affairs, they may have been intended at the time more as a maneuver in Serbian domestic politics.

Austria-Hungary's actions, from the Outrage of June 28 until its declaration of war against Serbia on July 28, were widely believed to have been inspired by a desire to punish the guilty. Critics argued that Vienna was rushing to judgment too soon—that it was condemning Serbia on the basis of insufficient evidence.

In fact, as we know now, Austria-Hungary did not care whether Serbia was guilty of the murders or not. If anything, members of the imperial court came close to welcoming the assassinations. The government of Austria-Hungary, neither angered nor saddened by the death of the Archduke and his consort—in fact, relieved that the unloved couple had been removed from the scene so conveniently— used the events of June 28 as an excuse for doing what it planned to do anyway. Better yet, the assassinations provided an opportunity to secure the support of Germany, which was vital to the
success of Austria's plan to attack Serbia. As of June 28, German approval was all that was missing.

Kaiser Wilhelm ordinarily would have refused to support Austrian aggression. He had refused such support before. But he—practically alone—genuinely
was
outraged by the killing of his friend, or at least he seemed to be. Evidently he was carried away. Like his Homeric idol Achilles, he changed his mind and opted for a war to avenge his best friend.

Later, it became a commonplace among historians that the assassinations in Sarajevo served as a mere pretext for making war against Serbia. They were a pretext, but not a
mere
pretext. The murders were important in themselves, for by eliminating the Archduke, and by changing the mind of the Kaiser, they neutralized the opposition of the two people who probably would have continued to stop the Hapsburg government from moving to crush Serbia.

The next key events in the run-up toward war with Serbia occurred July 5–6, when Kaiser Wilhelm and his government extended a blank check to Austria-Hungary. Rightly, historians have condemned this: a government is responsible for its decisions, so a blank check gives one set of decision-makers power without responsibility, and the other, responsibility without power.

But Germany was given no cause to regret its folly in issuing a blank check; in practice the check never was used. Crudely put, Austria, instead of recklessly making decisions for the ally, went on taking orders from Germany. Chancellor Bethmann devised the invasion strategy that Berchtold and his government undertook to follow; and it was Berlin, not Vienna, that mounted the "localization" diplomatic campaign that followed it.

It is true that the Austrians did not call off the war when the Kaiser ordered them to do so in late July, but when the Austrians
did
declare war on Serbia on July 28, it was because the German foreign minister told them to do it.

• • •

The blank check was never presented for payment, but it would be wrong to say that its issuance proved irrelevant. It was only because of the security it provided that Franz Joseph, Berchtold, and Conrad set out on the path that led to war against Serbia.

It was the Kaiser who decided to give the blank check. His military and civilian leaders approved the decision, and shared in his
responsibility for it. For all the hatred directed his way by the Allies in the 1914–18 war—"Hang the Kaiser!" was a popular chant in Britain—it was the only respect in which he was among those principally
responsible for the outbreak of war.

The Kaiser, blustering, threatening, and unbalanced monarch though he was, did not want to lead his country and Europe into war. On the contrary, his was the major force for peace within his country's government. Wilhelm and Franz Ferdinand were the two most obnoxious public figures in Europe, but they were the ones who kept hotheads in check and, in the end, always opted for peace. Only when they were removed from the decision-making process, Franz Ferdinand permanently and Wilhelm temporarily, did the pro-war faction find its window of opportunity open. Even in the blank check matter, the Kaiser did not believe that he was initiating a war among the Great Powers. He believed he was encouraging Austria to make war on Serbia, but that none of the other powers would go to war. He appeared to be certain of that.

The very name historians have attached to the thirty-seven days from the Sarajevo events to world war—the
"July crisis"—tends to mislead. It suggests mounting tension, day by day, but, as remarked earlier, that is not how events played out.

The July 5–6 blank check conference and its decisions were secret, and the German and Austrian governments were successful thereafter in pretending that no preparations for Serbia's downfall were under way. So Europe, unaware, was not alarmed, either mountingly or otherwise.

A copy of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia was delivered to European foreign offices on July 23 or 24, and it was only then that the crisis began to detonate. For Russia and Britain it was July 24; for France it was nearly a week later, when Poincaré and Viviani returned from Russia.

• • •

The ultimatum that Austria-Hungary served on Serbia on July 23 shocked Europe. The opinion was widespread at the time that no country that accepted it could thereafter remain independent.

But after the experiences of the brutal twentieth century, historians have grown callous; they no longer find the Austrian demands outrageous. We still object to the time period; the Serbs should not have been given an ultimatum. But we find Serbia in large part culpable.

Serbia harbored, and perhaps even nourished, terrorist groups. It had been the staging and training ground for the death squad that had killed the Hapsburg heir apparent. Moreover, the Serbian people clearly had rejoiced in the assassination.

Austria's decision to deal with thus by invading Serbia, dismantling terrorist logistical supports, disbanding organizations that had supported attacks on Austria, and seeking to bring the guilty to justice, has a twenty-first-century ring to it. In 2001 the United States government, with the aid of its
NATO allies, acted similarly in
Afghanistan at the outset of our new millennium.

It is basic to international law that each government must keep armed forces from using its territory as a base to attack other countries. But if a government is powerless to enforce the law within its own domains—if it cannot keep its territory from being used to harm other countries—then it forfeits its right to sovereignty in this respect, and the injured foreign country can send in its own troops to punish the guilty and to prevent further attacks. It was in exercise of that right that
General John Pershing's American forces were ordered to pursue
Pancho Villa's band into
Mexico after Villa's 1916 raid on U.S. territory.

At the time it was believed that in its reply, Serbia had agreed to almost all of Austria's terms. Historians no longer believe that. Readers can judge for themselves by reading the notes (Appendixes 1 and 2).

Facing the voters of his turbulent nationalist country on August 14, Prime Minister Pasic needed to convince them that he was making few concessions while, in replying to Vienna, he had to appear to agree to practically all the concessions demanded. The document therefore was drafted to be ambiguous.

Russia has been blamed by some historians for encouraging Pasic to avoid a full surrender. The current view among historians is that Russia gave no such counsel, and, if anything, encouraged Serbia to make its peace with Austria.

The point to grasp is that it did not matter what Pasic wrote in reply to the ultimatum: Austria had decided in advance not to accept the Serbian reply, no matter what it was. The ultimatum, in fact, had been drafted with the aim of making it practically impossible for Serbia to accept.

Austria continued to move slowly but straight ahead, as it had since July 5–6. It served its ultimatum on Serbia July 23, rejected Serbia's reply July 25, and declared war on Serbia July 28. Thereafter it took steps to prepare to engage the enemy.

It has been widely believed for a long time that the political structure of the European world in 1914—in particular an allegedly overly rigid
alliance system—caused the conflict to enlarge and bring in the Great Powers. In retrospect, that seems not to have been true. Italy was bound to Germany and Austria in the Triple Alliance, but nonetheless remained neutral in 1914 and thereafter joined the Allies. Great Britain, on the other hand, had no treaty of alliance with France and Russia but united with them nonetheless. Treaties, therefore, did not determine which countries decided to fight on which side.