July 1914: Countdown to War (59 page)

5
. Lloyd George, vol. 1, 60.

6
. Tuchman, 137–139. Trevelyan: cited in Jannen Jr., 344.

7
. Grey, vol. 2, 14.

8
. This recollection (and the Derby quote) is cited in Tuchman, 140–141. For the full text of Grey’s speech (including interjections from the benches): Grey,
Speeches on Foreign Affairs
, 297–315.

9
. Trevelyan and Liberal/Labour dissent: cited in Jannen Jr., 348.

10
. Lichnowsky to Jagow, 3 August 1914 (10
PM
), no. 801 in DD, vol. 4.

11
. Schoen, “In Paris überreichter Text der Kriegserklärung,” 3 August 1914, no. 734b in DD, vol. 3; compare to Bethmann’s originals, no. 734 and 734a.

12
. Turner, “Schlieffen Plan,” 213.

13
. Churchill, vol. 1, 235.

14
. Grey to Goschen, 4 August 1914 (9:30
AM
), no. 573 in BD, vol. 11 (emphasis added).

15
. Widely cited, as in Jannen Jr., 348.

Notes to Chapter 25
      
World War: No Going Back

1
. Cited in Tuchman, 148. On the timing of the session: Schmitt, vol. 2, 391.

2
. Zuber, 158.

3
. Asquith, 4 August 1914, 150.

4
. Grey to Goschen, 4 August 1914 (2
PM
), no. 594 in BD, vol. 11.

5
. Jouhaux, cited in Albertini, vol. 3, 225.

6
. Poincaré and Viviani to French parliament, 4 August 1914, cited in Albertini, vol. 3, 225–228.

7
. Cited in Jannen Jr., 355.

8
. Bethmann Hollweg to Reichstag, 4 August 1914 (3:30
PM
), no. 1146 in Geiss, vol. 2. Tirpitz on “greatest blunder”: cited in Tuchman, 152. “Frantic applause and highest enthusiasm”: cited in Albertini, vol. 3, 224.

9
. German Foreign Office to German ambassador, London, 4 August 1914 (4:38
PM
), no. 612 in BD, vol. 11.

10
. Cited in Albertini, vol. 3, 225.

11
. Goschen to Grey, 6 August 1914, no. 671 in BD, vol. 11. For Bethmann’s recollection of Goschen bursting into tears: Bethmann, vol. 1, 180.

12
. Tuchman, 176.

Notes to Epilogue
      
The Question of Responsibility

1
. Churchill, foreword to Edward Spears,
Liaison 1914.

2
. This Austrian counterfactual, along with those on France and Britain, builds on those spun out in Beatty, chapters 3, 5, and 6.

3
. Zuber, 177.

4
. For a summary of the state of the art in research on Serbian complicity and policy, see Williamson and May, “Identity of Opinion,” 351–353. Princip quote footnoted: in Stone,
World War One
, 19.

5
. On this question, see the discussion in McMeekin,
Russian Origins
, chapter 2 (and notes).

6
. Cited in Schmitt, vol. 2, 250–251.

7
. Zuber, 159.

8
. See Zuber generally, along with the discussion of his work in, among many other places, Strachan,
First World War
, and Williamson and May, “Identity of Opinion.”

9
. Again, the best summary of arguments regarding Grey is in Williamson and May, “Identity of Opinion.”

10
. Cited in Fuller,
Strategy and Power
, 450. Sukhomlinov’s optimism was not unfounded. Initial Russian reconnaissance, completed by 10 August, revealed that the Germans had only four infantry corps in East Prussia, plus a few reserve divisions. Against this, the Russians deployed nine army corps. Because each Russian division contained 16 battalions, to 12 for German ones, the Russian battalion advantage was 480 to 130. In artillery, the breakdown was particularly lopsided: 5,800 Russian guns against 774 German. For a fuller discussion, see McMeekin,
Russian Origins
, chapter 3.

T
HE PLACE TO BEGIN
any study of the July crisis remains Luigi Albertini’s superb three-volume history of
The Origins of the War of 1914
, available in English translation by Isabella M. Massey (Oxford University Press, 1952). Albertini’s curiosity and energy were boundless; he not only tracked down thousands of documents but also conducted interviews with many of the principals. His history, owing in part to the collaborative effort of Professor Luciano Magrini (who finished assembling the volumes after Albertini’s death), is thorough and meticulous, covering, annotating, and excerpting virtually all relevant diplomatic correspondence from the Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich of 1867 to August 1914. Today’s historians are also indebted to Professor Samuel R. Williamson Jr., who brought out a new edition from Enigma Books in 2005 (this is the one I have used). As Williamson writes in the foreword, “whenever I need to check a date, verify a name, or simply to be reminded of the qualities and attributes of a great historical work, I reach for Albertini.” I do the same.

The only thing one needs to be a bit wary about with Albertini is the translations. This is no fault of Albertini, Magrini, or Massey; rather it reflects the inevitable difficulty of rendering documents from a multitude of languages (English, French, German, Russian, Serbo-Croatian) into Albertini’s Italian and then English. For the most part, Massey did a superb job. When I cite Albertini in the notes, I am using Massey’s translation.

The volumes of Sidney Fay and Bernadotte Schmitt, which came out before Albertini’s and thus missed some of the material that became available in the 1930s, nevertheless remain essential reading. Fay, in
The Origins of the World War
, 2 vols. (Macmillan, 1935), is particularly good on the Black Hand and the milieu in Sarajevo, and also on the Russian mobilization. Schmitt’s
The Coming of the War, 1914
, 2 vols. (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930) is strong on the last days of July and the first days of August, and particularly on Belgium, where Fay’s own volume tends to tail off.

Of course, many fine studies have appeared since those of Fay, Schmitt, and Albertini. Following Albertini’s lead, Imanuel Geiss produced a kind of annotated documentary history in two volumes (
Julikrise und Kriegsausbruch 1914
, 1963–1964), which adds a number of documents, including those published by the Bolsheviks, to the ones originally reproduced in the “Kautsky” volumes of German documents published after the war. An abridged English-language translation was also published as
July 1914
. Still, in his interpretation and selection of documents to include (or ignore), Geiss, along with Fritz Fischer (
Griff nach der Weltmacht
, 1961;
Krieg der Illusionen
, 1969) and Holger Herwig (recently, with Richard Hamilton,
The Origins of World War I
, 2003) has come to stand for a kind of Germanocentric orthodoxy that I find ultimately unsatisfying. The fashion in recent years, among many First World War historians, has been to say that the “revelations” of Fischer-Geiss-Herwig relating to Germany’s long-term ambitions and her short-term premeditation during July 1914 (the “preventive war”) have superseded the more balanced interpretations of Fay, Albertini, and Schmitt. In this vein, see especially David Fromkin,
Europe’s Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914?
(Knopf, 2004).

As I have already made clear in my own
The Russian Origins of the First World War
(Harvard, 2011), I do not agree with the German “preventive war” thesis. Even in what we might call
the “high Fritz Fischer era” (i.e., the 1960s–1970s), thoughtful historians, refusing to buckle to the emerging orthodoxy, continued producing more nuanced interpretations of the July crisis. Among them I think L. C. F. Turner’s work has best stood the test of time. Turner produced excellent studies on both Germany’s role in the outbreak of the war (as in his critical study of the Schlieffen Plan in the 1979 Paul Kennedy volume on the
War Plans of the Great Powers
) and the importance of Russia’s early mobilization (“The Russian Mobilization in 1914,” published in 1968). Turner’s elegant, concise study,
Origins of the First World War
(1970), is one of the most balanced and useful narrative accounts since Albertini’s.

As Samuel R. Williamson Jr. and Ernest R. May point out in their recent, illogically titled review essay, “An Identity of Opinion: Historians and July 1914” (2007), there remains a multitude of interpretations of the origins of the war, even if consensus now exists on certain subjects—e.g., Apis and the Black Hand; that Austria took many actions independently of (or directly contrary to) German advice; the importance of the Franco-British naval agreement in buttressing and possibly outweighing Belgium in Britain’s path to belligerence. Far from confirming an “identity of opinion,” Williamson and May assert that, contrary to the Fischer-Geiss-Herwig school, “no convincing evidence has surfaced to support a contention that the German generals actually launched a preventive war in 1914.” It seems that not even the Fischer debate—which so thoroughly dominated the field for decades that many historians nearly forgot about the other powers in their zeal to unearth evidence of plotting in Berlin—has resolved the issues of responsibility debated by Fay, Schmitt, and Albertini. While we know a fantastic amount today about the thinking of policymakers in Vienna and Berlin, it is not altogether clear to me that we know much more than Albertini did.

We do know far more about the social, economic, and military-technological sides of the war and its outbreak today than
Albertini did. In these areas, the recent general histories by Hew Strachan (The
First World War, Volume 1: To Arms
, 2001) and David Stevenson (
Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy
, 2004) are essential. Stevenson is particularly good on economics. Strachan has mastered the literature on war planning, gaming, and execution of all the main belligerents, up to 2001 at least. If one wants to know about the latest research on British naval and expeditionary planning, French and Russian mobilization scenarios, the debates surrounding Terence Zuber’s critique of received wisdom on the Germans’ Schlieffen Plan, or the best available information on the initial battles of the war (including extra-European theaters), Strachan is the place to start.

The areas where our knowledge of the war’s outbreak is incomplete remain the same now as ever: the role of French officials in sanctioning or encouraging Russia’s early mobilization; the exact nature of that mobilization and whether it “constituted war”; whether Paléologue was acting as a free agent in St. Petersburg, taking orders from the French General Staff, or working on prior authorization from the president; and, finally, the enigmatic role of Poincaré at the summit and at sea—what he knew and when he knew it.

For this reason, one of the most important revisionist works published in recent years is Stefan Schmidt’s
Frankreichs Aussenpolitik in der Julikrise 1914
(Oldenbourg, 2009). Because it has not been translated into English, the impact of Schmidt’s book has not yet been fully felt among First World War historians. But it will be. Schmidt’s close reading of Poincaré’s thinking and intentions—especially through his diaries and diplomatic correspondence, including published Russian sources—has greatly undermined the less critical interpretation of John Keiger (most recently
Raymond Poincaré
, 1997). Complementing my own
Russian Origins
, which draws on Russian archival sources to explore the assumptions, interests, and intentions behind policymaking
in Petersburg from 1914 to 1917, Schmidt’s book rounds out the long-neglected Franco-Russian side of the July crisis.

Among recent histories, I have also found stimulating William Jannen Jr.’s
The Lions of July
(Presidio, 1996), Michael Neiberg’s
Dance of the Furies
(Harvard, 2011), and Jack Beatty’s
The Lost History of 1914
(Bloomsbury, 2012). Of these, Jannen Jr. is best on high politics; Neiberg and Beatty are better on the social backdrop of the war’s outbreak. Although Beatty’s work, unlike Jannen Jr.’s and Neiberg’s, is based almost entirely on secondary sources, Beatty has devoured these with gusto. Beatty and Neiberg both display deep sympathy with the ordinary men and women swept up into a cataclysmic war they had nothing to do with and did not want. Beatty has written a fascinating alternative history, spinning out plausible scenarios in which Europe would
not
have plunged into war in 1914. He is particularly good on the Irish Home Rule crisis, the Caillaux affair and its possible echoes, and the contingencies relating to the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. While I did not find Beatty’s take on the German and Russian sides of 1914 as convincing, I admire the spirit of his and Neiberg’s studies, reimagining history as it might have been. Like Niall Ferguson, who has written at length on the issue, I see counterfactual reasoning as central to the historical enterprise—and far more constructive than “consensus” interpretations designed to close off further argument. Albertini’s classic volumes are replete with lively “what if” scenarios, which are essential to his judgments on statesmen and their responsibility for the catastrophe; rather than close off further argument, they invite them.

In the end, historians must make up their own minds about controversial matters such as responsibility for the outbreak of the First World War. An issue as explosive as this, as central to our understanding of modern history, can never be fully resolved by consensus. I invite readers wishing to know more to consult the sources themselves and to draw their own conclusions.