July 1914: Countdown to War (52 page)

The idea that Berlin’s strategic position was uniquely favorable for war in 1914 is absurd. By 1912, Germany had decisively lost the naval race with Britain. As recently as 1911, her position vis-à-vis France and Russia had been reasonably strong, but France’s Three-Year Law, and Russia’s recent acceleration of her mobilization schedule under French pressure, had already wiped out any advantage Germany might accrue from her speedier deployment even before the Great Program would take effect. In 1914, the Austro-German strategic position was, in the words of military historian Terence Zuber, “nearing a ‘worst possible case’ scenario.” Indeed German planners, recognizing that they were decisively outnumbered on both fronts, were hoping to add six corps to the peacetime army by 1915 (if the Reichstag would pay for this), which might have restored parity, as France was already scraping the bottom of the recruitment barrel, conscripting nearly 90 percent of her available manpower. Expansion of the army could have given the Germans decisive superiority on the western front, with enough covering troops in the east to hold off any Russian attack.
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This would have soured even Poincaré on the strategic point of a Russian alliance. Or real détente with a Caillaux-Jaurès ministry in Paris might have ended the Franco-German arms race altogether. If any, all, or none of these scenarios transpired, Moltke—or the belligerent Prussian minister of war, Falkenhayn—might still have bent the kaiser’s ear with pleas for preventive war. They would not have been listened to. Talk of
Präventivkrieg
among German generals was qualitatively no different than French whispers of
revanche
in Alsace-Lorraine, Conrad’s entreaties that Austria must crush Serbia, or Russian
conferences plotting the conquest of Constantinople. Talk was talk. It was not war.

With St. Petersburg, it is easier to imagine alternative scenarios leading her into war in 1914. With the
Sultan Osman I
scheduled to arrive in the Bosphorus in July, the clock was ticking—as soon as Turkey floated a single dreadnought, Russia’s “Straits window” would close for the foreseeable future. This fear, even more than the Liman von Sanders crisis, is what prompted the strategic planning conference of February 1914 focused on the Ottoman Empire, and Sazonov’s demand, following the Sarajevo outrage, for up-to-date information on the timetable for an amphibious strike on Constantinople. Even absent the assassination of the Habsburg heir, some kind of crisis over Turkey’s dreadnoughts would have come to a head for Russia in summer 1914.

This is not to say, however, that any crisis between Russia and Turkey would have led to general European conflagration. The Eastern Question had produced wars and crises before, but they had all followed their own logic, depending on circumstances. The Russo-Ottoman war of 1877–1878 might have—but did not—produce a larger war, owing to Russia’s diplomatic isolation and the exhaustion of her troops when they neared Constantinople; this gave both sides cause to start negotiating. The First Bosnian crisis of 1908–1909 had very nearly produced an Austrian-Russian clash, only for this to be averted when Russia backed down owing to her weakness following her 1905 revolution.

The two Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 had threatened the European equilibrium still more seriously. If then–chairman of the Council of Ministers Kokovtsov had not blocked the war party, Russian mobilization in November 1912 might have led Germany to counter. Still, without the provocation of an Austrian attack on Serbia, as happened following Sarajevo (but not during
the Balkan Wars), Petersburg would have been hard-pressed to win French, much less British, support for a war with the Central Powers.

A crisis over the arrival of Turkey’s first dreadnought in July 1914 might have spiraled into war. Still, prior to Sarajevo, most of the diplomatic chatter in Europe concerned the possibility of another war between Turkey and Greece, not Russia. The Greeks, pursuing their own naval buildup, might have launched a preemptive strike before the Ottoman Empire floated the
Sultan Osman I
. A Greco-Turkish clash might have led to a Third Balkan War, as Bulgaria would have taken advantage of the crisis to make good her losses in the Second. Still, it need not have spread to Europe. What made July 1914 different was the direct involvement of a Great Power—Austria-Hungary—in the initial clash, which brought in Russia.

Had Russia herself launched an amphibious strike on Constantinople in summer 1914, a Great Power war might have resulted. Still, advanced as operational planning for such a strike was, it is hard to see what pretext Sazonov would have used to justify it. A Greco-Turkish war might have provided the spark, but if it seemed as if Petersburg was piggybacking on Turkey’s distress to seize the Straits, then Russia would not have been able to count on support from France, let alone Great Britain. As Sazonov wrote in his memoirs, the general understanding at the February 1914 planning conference was that Russia’s leaders “considered an offensive against Constantinople inevitable, should European war break out.” The European war, that is, had to come
first
. Such a war might provide Russia with the pretext to conquer Constantinople, but she could not be seen to start it, or she would find herself just as isolated as in 1878—or, worse still, 1853, when Britain and France had gone against her in the Crimean War. Only the unique sequence of events following Sarajevo—which led Austria to move against Serbia,
backed by Germany—produced a European war in which both France and Britain would back Russia. Although there were bilateral agreements between London and the other two capitals, this unlikely tripartite battlefield coalition had never existed before and will never be seen again.
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Still, contingent and clearly preventable as the Sarajevo outrage was, it happened; the July crisis ensued; world war broke out in August, with all of the fearful and long-lasting consequences mentioned above. All of these world-shaking events were man-made. They are therefore quite properly subject to human judgment.

W
HEN WE EXAMINE
the key moral question of 1914—responsibility for the outbreak of European, then world war—it is important to keep
degrees
of responsibility in mind. Sins of omission are lesser ones than sins of commission; likewise, actions are not equivalent to the reactions they occasion. Above all, intentions are important, but the hardest to divine, because we cannot peer into men’s hearts.To begin at the beginning: Gavrilo Princip and his fellow assassination plotters bear ultimate responsibility for provoking the July crisis by murdering Archduke Franz Ferdinand. True, there was no intention on Princip’s part, or that of Black Hand organizers in Belgrade, to cause a world war;
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nevertheless some of them clearly sought to provoke a confrontation with Austria. Historians continue to
argue about the different motivations of Serbian leaders. Apis may have wanted to provoke a crisis with Vienna so as to furnish an opportunity for a coup d’état, or merely to embarrass Prime Minister Pašić enough for his party to be defeated in July elections. Pašić almost certainly did not approve of the plot when he learned of it, but he made only an ineffectual, halfhearted effort to foil the assassination, whether because he feared a coup or the reaction from Vienna if he revealed what the Black Hand was up to. The only things we know for certain are that high Serbian officials were complicit in the crime and that Pašić neither prevented it nor gave the Austrians any genuine help in investigating it.
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The Austrians must stand next in the dock of judgment. It was clearly the intention of Conrad, Berchtold, and every other imperial minister except Tisza to use the Sarajevo outrage as a pretext for a punitive war against Serbia. Emperor Franz Josef I, as ultimate arbiter and signator of all key decisions, also bears a grave responsibility, although he did not design the policies—he merely confirmed them. One could easily argue, of course, that the crime committed in Sarajevo was sufficient legal casus belli for war with Serbia: the war launched by the United States and her allies against Afghanistan in 2001 (if not also the Iraq war of 2003) was justified in very similar terms (the “harboring of terrorists”). There are significant differences between the two cases, however. The Serbian government, unlike Osama bin Laden, did not confess to (much less publicly boast about) committing the crime, and she did agree to arrest at least some of the conspirators, such as Major Tankositch, whereas the Taliban refused outright to hand over bin Laden (although Serbia did similarly shelter Apis).

More significantly, the United States received broad (if not quite universal) international support for her action in Afghanistan. No Great Power made clear her stout opposition to
a United States punitive strike in 2001, as at least Russia clearly did to an Austrian one in 1914. True, Berchtold and Conrad did not know, at the beginning of July, what Russia’s reaction would be. By the end of the month, they did, and they proceeded against Serbia anyway. The Austrian sin was therefore one of both intention and commission, although with the caveat that the goal in Vienna was a local war with Serbia, not a European war involving Russia, much less France, Britain, and all the other ultimate belligerents. This was made dramatically clear when Austria, despite having catalyzed the July crisis in the first place, refused to declare war on Russia until August 6—two days after even Britain went in. While this anticlimactic declaration of war has sometimes been seen as implicating Germany in “war guilt”—as it was clearly the Germans who pressured the Austrians into it—what it really reveals is just how little desire there was in Vienna to fight Russia. Considering the Austrians’ poor performance against Russian troops in Galicia at the start of the war, one can easily see why.

Tisza, for his part, bears significant responsibility for the final shape of the July crisis: its back-ended timing. Owing to the harvest leave issue, the two weeks Austria “lost” after the Ministerial Council of 7 July may not have been as important as historians have claimed. Conrad probably would have had to wait before mobilizing, anyway. It was, rather, at the very beginning that Tisza’s opposition mattered. Had Austria-Hungary mobilized on 1 July (as Conrad wanted to), or after only a few more days of diplomatic spadework (as Berchtold and the emperor would have preferred), it is possible that the Austrians would have caught Europe by surprise with a fait accompli—an occupation of Belgrade, at least, conveniently located as the capital was right on the Austrian border.

True—in light of Austria’s indecisiveness during the Balkan Wars and her notoriously incompetent military performance in
1914—one should regard this counterfactual with skepticism. And yet part of the reason why Conrad fared so badly in Galicia is that his real goal—shared by everyone in Vienna—was to crush Serbia, not to fight Russia. Had Austria begun her mobilization against Serbia in the first week, instead of the last week, of July, and implemented Plan B without interruption, there is no telling how the crisis would have played out. It might still have led to European war, or it might have led to some kind of face-saving compromise along the lines of a “Halt in Belgrade.” It was largely Tisza’s doing that Austria did not present her ultimatum until four weeks after Sarajevo. Of course, his motivation in blocking Conrad was honorable: he wanted, at least until 14 July, to
prevent
war, not to cause it. If there is any sin in Tisza’s behavior, it is a negative one of omission leading to unintended consequences.

The German sin, at the time of the Hoyos mission of 5–6 July, was more serious. By giving Austria-Hungary a blank check against Serbia, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Bethmann Hollweg made a broader escalation of the Balkan crisis possible. Given Tisza’s opposition, there is reason to believe that Conrad would not have gotten his Serbian war at all without German intervention. It was not German support alone that changed Tisza’s mind—his own revulsion against Serbia grew organically the first two weeks in July, as he learned more about Sarajevo—but without it Berchtold would have had a very hard time convincing the emperor to move forward, whatever Tisza’s views. Austria’s diplomatic isolation and military weakness meant that German backing was indispensable. The Germans gave it unambiguously. Still, although it is true that Arthur Zimmermann, the undersecretary of state, and many military chiefs in Berlin, were keen on the idea of “preventive war,” it is equally clear that Kaiser Wilhelm II and Bethmann did not expect Russia to fight. While they recognized the risks and were willing to run
them, they did not
intend
to provoke European war. Their real sin, at this stage of the crisis, lay in failing to mandate any particular Austrian course of action, or to establish firmer guidelines as to how Vienna would coordinate its strategy with Berlin. The blank check was foolish and self-defeating. It encouraged Berchtold to behave as recklessly as possible, under the mistaken impression that this was what the Germans wanted him to do.

Berchtold himself must shoulder the greatest blame for bringing the crisis to the danger point on 23 July. Having lost the chance for a military fait accompli, Austria’s foreign minister settled for a diplomatic one, detonating his ultimatum bombshell without even clearing the text first with his German allies. True, this was partly Bethmann’s fault for leaving Berchtold alone to do his worst and for failing to press Vienna for more information until it was too late. And yet Jagow did request to see the text; he also asked that Berchtold do his “homework” and finalize a dossier of Serbian guilt before dispatching the ultimatum, and make sure of Italy’s support. Berchtold did nothing of the kind. After sending the ultimatum under seal to Belgrade, he even lied to Germany’s ambassador that it was not yet finished. Here was conscious intention to deceive not only a hostile power such as Russia, but even Austria’s closest ally. Of all the what-ifs of the July crisis, this is one of the greatest. If Berchtold had done what the Germans asked and convinced Europe of Serbia’s perfidy, he would have put the diplomatic onus back on Russia to advocate for her guilty client. With what we know today of Serbian complicity in the Sarajevo crime, it is astonishing that Austrian officials were unable to marshal a convincing case even a month after the crime in Sarajevo.