July 1914: Countdown to War (19 page)

On Friday, 17 July, Schilling learned of Shebeko’s Thursday dispatch and of the decoded messages to and from Vienna regarding the timing of Poincaré’s departure from Petersburg. As if to crystallize Schilling’s worst suspicions about Austrian
intentions, Ambassador Szapáry, fresh in from Vienna, called at Chorister’s Bridge and “expressed a desire to see Sazonov as soon as possible.” Szapáry did not say why he urgently needed to see Russia’s foreign minister, but it was not hard for Schilling to guess. Sazonov, Schilling informed the Austrian ambassador, was still at his country estate near Grodno, although he was expected back early next morning. Schilling penciled Szapáry in for an eleven
AM
meeting at Chorister’s Bridge.
¹¹

Sazonov returned to Petersburg on schedule Saturday morning. To get him up to speed on the latest developments before his audience with Szapáry, Schilling met him right at the train station. En route to the Foreign Ministry, Sazonov’s chief of staff read out for him the contents of the Thursday dispatch from his ambassador in Vienna. It was not hard to draw the connection between Shebeko’s warning that Austria was about to “present demands to Serbia such as would be unacceptable to the dignity of that state” with Szapáry’s urgent demand for an audience with him. After all, Shebeko’s telegram linked the two implicitly by asking Sazonov urgently to inform Vienna “how Russia would react,” before informing Sazonov that Szapáry was on his way to Petersburg. Schilling also recounted for his boss the gist of his conversation with Carlotti, which seemed to confirm the worst. Sazonov, Schilling wrote later that day in a diary he kept for the Foreign Ministry, “was troubled by this information, and agreed with Baron Schilling as to the necessity of forewarning Austria regarding the determination of Russia on no account to permit any attempts against the independence of Serbia.” Russia’s foreign minister, Schilling continued, “formed the resolve to express himself in the most decided manner to [Szapáry] regarding this matter.”
¹²

When Sazonov received the Austro-Hungarian ambassador at eleven
AM
, however, he seemed to backtrack on his vow to stand firm. The Russian, Szapáry reported to Vienna, “carefully
avoided raising the subject of Austria’s relations with Serbia.” Szapáry himself was under strict orders from Berchtold not to give any hint of the upcoming ultimatum, and so Sazonov’s reticence to bring it up naturally put a damper on the conversation. Seeking to draw the Russian out, Szapáry tried gamely to invoke the “monarchical principle.” While Sazonov “made no effort to contradict” him, Szapáry was not able to lure the Russian into any belated expression of sympathy for the Sarajevo outrage. Instead, Sazonov changed the subject, warning Szapáry that “the latest news from Vienna had disquieted him,” without spelling out what news he was talking about. Gingerly, Sazonov tried to draw Szapáry out by declaring that “Vienna would never be able to establish proof of Serbian tolerance for machinations,” such as those that produced the Sarajevo incident. To this, Szapáry replied carefully that, while the final results of the Austrian investigation were not yet in, “every government must be held responsible, to a certain degree, for acts emanating from its territory.” Knowing that Sazonov had opposed this very proposition in previous conversations with Czernin, the Austrian legation secretary, Szapáry tried to corner him into a firm declaration of policy, but the Russian simply changed the subject again.

Overall, Szapáry reported to Vienna, Russia’s foreign minister “gave no impression” of having settled on a firm policy. Meanwhile, Sazonov himself, shortly after the meeting, told Schilling that Szapáry had been “as docile as a lamb.”
¹³
Circling each other like wary adversaries careful not to expose their flanks, the two diplomats had somehow made it through the awkward encounter without once losing their tempers—and without, it seemed, revealing a thing.

Because Szapáry, not Schilling or Sazonov, had called for the Saturday meeting, the whole thing was clearly the Austrians’ idea. The intention is not hard to fathom: Berchtold wished to
find out whether the Russians knew what he was up to. A corollary motive was probably for Berchtold to put Sazonov off his guard, lulling the Russian to sleep so as to snuff out any possibility that he might get wind of the Serbian ultimatum before, or worse still during, the summit with French president Poincaré, which would begin on Monday. In both aims, Ambassador Szapáry had apparently succeeded. Sazonov had not confronted the ambassador with any serious allegation about Austrian intentions, nor raised his voice, nor indeed done anything to suggest that he had the faintest clue of what Berchtold was up to. Sazonov’s “docile as a lamb” remark, although unknown to the Austrians, suggested that Berchtold’s plan had worked perfectly.

All was not, however, quite what it seemed to be in this dance of diplomatic misdirection. Sazonov was being as cagey as Szapáry. Just as Berchtold wanted to be sure the Russians did not know what he was up to, so did the latter not want the Austrians to know that they were cottoning to the game. Later Saturday afternoon, Sazonov spoke more frankly to Britain’s ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, of the “great uneasiness which Austria’s attitude towards Serbia was causing him.” When the British ambassador asked him to clarify what he meant, Sazonov responded that “anything in the shape of an Austrian ultimatum to Belgrade could not leave Russia indifferent, and she might be forced to take some precautionary military measure.”
¹⁴
Within eight hours of his return to Petersburg from holiday, and little more than twenty-four hours before he would host President Poincaré and Premier Viviani at a high-level summit of the Franco-Russian alliance, Russia’s foreign minister was already contemplating a military response to the expected Austrian ultimatum to Serbia.

Sunday morning, Sazonov went to Peterhof Palace to debrief the tsar on the unfolding crisis. Significantly, he had
Nicholas II read over the text of Shebeko’s 16 July telegram, alerting Russia’s sovereign that some kind of ultimatum to Belgrade was being worked up in Vienna. Following his conversation with Sazonov, the tsar scribbled in the margins of Shebeko’s telegram: “In my opinion a State should not present any sort of demands to another, unless, of course, it is bent on war.”
¹⁵
That very morning, Berchtold was convening the Ministerial Council in Vienna to draw up the terms of Austria’s ultimatum to Serbia.

 
___________

*
Curiously, on the evening of Saturday, 18 July, shortly after the British ambassador had parroted Berchtold’s confession of innocence without objection, de Bunsen’s wife recorded in her diary: “A strong note with ultimatum Lützow told M[aurice de Bunsen] is to be sent in the next week probably not acceptable to Serbia.”

SUNDAY, 19 JULY

A
FTER
T
ISZA CONVERTED
to the war party on Tuesday, Austria’s foreign minister had been forced to wait five agonizing days before his plan could be put into motion. Keeping a secret of this magnitude was not easy for a sociable man like Berchtold, who had never been known for message discipline. He remained unaware that Lützow, an old friend, had betrayed him to the British ambassador (and via him, to the Russians). As far as Berchtold knew as he awoke on Sunday morning, Austria had kept the other powers entirely in the dark—even the Germans, who had been told nothing more since Berchtold had informed Ambassador Tschirschky of Tisza’s conversion on Tuesday, 14 July. So long as Tisza stayed true to his word, on Sunday the Ministerial Council could finally draft the text of a forty-eight-hour ultimatum to Serbia, behind which the imperial government would stand united. The note could then be dispatched to the Austrian legation in Belgrade anytime in the next four days, so long as it was under seal, with strict instructions not to be opened until Thursday, 23 July.

Despite the appearance of success so far, Berchtold was taking no chances on Sunday. To keep the gathering secret from foreign ambassadors, the foreign minister had ordered elaborate security measures. With the Hungarian Diet still in session in Budapest, Berchtold invented a cover story to explain Tisza’s presence in Vienna. The press was told that the Hungarian minister-president had been tasked by the Diet with getting more information on the latest Balkan developments—not an implausible scenario. Chief of Staff Conrad, on vacation in the South Tyrol, had returned late Saturday evening in order, he told anyone who asked, to visit a son who was ill and bedridden. The other ministers—Biliński, Krobatin, Stürgkh—were all based in Vienna, and so no explanation of their being in town was needed. To further allay suspicions, the meeting was held at Berchtold’s private residence in Vienna, the delightfully named Strudelhof, rather than at the Ballplatz. In true cloak-and-dagger style, everyone arrived in unmarked cars so as not to tip off the neighbors.
¹

At ten
AM
, the top-secret war council began in the House of Strudel. Berchtold, chairing, opened the session by laying out the basic timeline. The forty-eight-hour ultimatum—technically termed a “note with a time limit” (
befristete Démarche)
—would be dispatched by five
PM
on Thursday, 23 July, the night Poincaré would leave Petersburg. The other powers would then be told of it on Friday morning. While it was theoretically possible that the French delegation would learn of the note before departing Petersburg on Thursday night, Berchtold thought this unlikely (the military chiefs were insisting on five
PM
). Assuming Serbia’s rejection, the ultimatum would expire the same time that Saturday, allowing mobilization to begin by midnight Saturday–Sunday, 25–26 July. To preempt possible objections to this timetable (that is, from Tisza), Berchtold informed the ministers that “the Germans were getting nervous,” which militated against any further postponement.
²

The military chiefs, predictably, were wholly in favor of Berchtold’s plan, wishing only that things could move faster still. Conrad repeated, for what must have seemed like the thousandth time, his view that “from the military standpoint, the speediest possible commencement of mobilization was desirable.” His only concession to caution was to allow that martial law would not be proclaimed anywhere in Austria-Hungary until mobilization was formally underway, even in Bosnia-Herzegovina, from which operations against Serbia would be launched. War Minister Krobatin promised to begin writing up mobilization orders on Wednesday, 22 July, so that everything would be ready by the weekend. Judging by these matter-of-fact disquisitions, the war with Serbia was basically a done deal, which would begin as soon as the ultimatum expired on Saturday.

Tisza, of course, did not see things quite that way. Although he had come over—more or less—to the war party on Tuesday, he was still a reluctant convert, beset with doubts. From the Hungarian perspective, the greatest danger in any Balkan war would come from Romania, over the Transylvanian Alps. Bucharest was scarcely a hundred miles from Kronstadt (today’s Braşov), the first and greatest of the Hungarian-Transylvanian Siebenbürgen, or “Seven Cities,” settled by Saxons in medieval times. Sinaia, Romania’s summer capital in the Transylvanian Alps, was only thirty miles from Kronstadt and closer still to the Hungarian border. A Romanian incursion across that border would immediately threaten the prosperous Siebenbürgen, and thereby Hungarian control over Transylvania. Tisza had already taken what measures he could, as minister-president, to strengthen the local gendarmerie in the Seven Cities, but this was hardly enough to deter a Romanian invasion. Before consenting to the final ultimatum plan, Tisza wanted Conrad to explain what was being done to defend Transylvania.

Conrad, anticipating this very question, had a ready answer. Martial law, he promised Tisza, would be proclaimed in Transylvania as soon as mobilization commenced. While the demands of the Serbian invasion plan, and the need to defend Galicia against a possible Russian intervention, prevented the army from concentrating its forces against Romania, Conrad had created special Landsturm battalions for the Siebenbürgen: a kind of expanded militia, under the command of actual military officers. It was true, he confessed to Tisza, that these irregular formations would not suffice if it came to war with Bucharest, but their conspicuous staging should be enough to deter Romanian aggression. As an added precaution, Conrad had made certain that the Transylvanian formations contained “only a small percentage of Romanian nationals.”

Tisza declared himself satisfied with Conrad’s assurances, but he was still not done. Because no one else was playing devil’s advocate, the Hungarian minister-president, as usual, raised every objection himself, whether or not they affected Hungary directly. What about Italy? he asked next, reminding his fellow ministers that Austria’s nominal ally coveted Trieste and the South Tyrol, and that if she took advantage of a war against Serbia to invade, Austria would face a two-front war even if Russia and Romania stayed out. Berchtold promised him straightaway that Italian intervention was “not likely” and that he would undertake every diplomatic measure to work against it.

Here, at last, Tisza saw his opening. With Berchtold conceding that diplomatic finesse would be required to assure even the neutrality of Austria’s nominal Italian ally, the Hungarian minister-president laid down the nonnegotiable terms under which he would consent to the dispatch of an ultimatum to Serbia. In order to ensure the support, or at least the indifference, of powers such as Italy, Romania, and Russia, Tisza insisted that
the ministers agree “unanimously, that no plans of conquest by the [dual] monarchy were connected with the action against Serbia, and that, with the exception of rectifications of the frontier necessary for strategic reasons, Austria did not wish to annex a single piece of Serbia.” Failing this, Tisza would withdraw his support for the dispatch of the forty-eight-hour ultimatum.