July 1914: Countdown to War (8 page)

Here was a damning judgment on Vienna. So poorly did the Germans rate their ally’s level of administrative competence after Sarajevo that they did not think the Austrians could secure an imperial funeral in their own capital. On the bright side, the chancellor’s fingering of Bosnian-based terrorism as grounds for canceling a state visit suggested that Berlin might be sympathetic to the cause of the Austrian war party. On the other hand, Bethmann had been careful not to mention Serbs, or Serbia, as complicit in the Sarajevo outrage. After all, the Austrians had not yet linked Belgrade to the crime. Germany’s chancellor, like Tisza, Franz Josef I, and Berchtold, would need proof.

It is a reflection of the strategic impotence of Austria-Hungary in 1914 that her statesmen were unable to formulate a response to Sarajevo without running it by the Germans first. True, the impasse was also the result of internal political dynamics: namely, the presence of a towering Hungarian in the upper ranks of the government who had the unique ability to veto a policy based on his ability to represent literally half of the dual monarchy. But then it was impossible to separate foreign and domestic policy in an empire of fifteen nationalities. Tisza’s “pacifist” views on Balkan policy were intimately tied to his
goal of maintaining Magyar supremacy over Hungary’s subject nationalities, just as Conrad, and now Berchtold, wished to crush Serbia in order to weaken national irredentism in the empire, beginning with the insufferable pretensions of Magyars like Tisza. The interests of Hungary, the Austrian-dominated Imperial Foreign Office, and the Common Army appeared irreconcilable—without someone from outside knocking heads together. In this curious way Germany had, by 1914, become the arbiter of not only Austria’s foreign policy but also her constitutional dilemmas. If and when Berchtold’s and Conrad’s suspicions about Serbian involvement in the Sarajevo outrage were confirmed by investigators, the Ballplatz could then pose the question on everyone’s mind: What will the Germans say? For now, all Berchtold could do was wait.

 
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It has been estimated that in 1913 alone, Conrad proposed going to war with Serbia twenty-five times. There is a popular theory that his belligerent attitude owed much to a desire to impress his young mistress, Gina von Reininghaus, into leaving her husband, Hermann, a wealthy beer merchant. While one never knows what secret motivations lie in our heart of hearts, this seems to be taking psychoanalysis a bit far.

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Different versions have the emperor remarking that “the Almighty is not mocked,” the idea being that Franz Ferdinand’s morganatic marriage had offended God. This is perhaps too lyrical, according to those most familiar with Franz Josef’s manner of speaking. “It is God’s will” is the most likely phrasing.

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Doubtless the emperor got wind of this. The rumor in Vienna was that Franz Josef’s surprisingly rapid recovery was owed to “his keen desire to spite his nephew.”

T
HE REASON
A
USTRIAN STATESMEN
needed German support in case of a war with Serbia was plain as day: Russia might intervene. St. Petersburg had gone to war against Ottoman Turkey on behalf of Balkan Slavs (mostly the Bulgarians) in 1877 and had nearly done so again against Austria on Serbia’s behalf during the First Bosnian Crisis in 1909, only to back down in the face of an unsubtle threat from Berlin. True, Russia had not gone to war in either of the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, but this was because both times her Serbian clients were winning and Vienna was doing nothing to stop them: there had been no need for Petersburg to bail out Belgrade, as there would be in case Austria-Hungary invaded Serbia.

While the popular cliché of the “Russian steamroller” greatly exaggerated the real striking power of the tsarist armies, no one in either Vienna or Petersburg doubted that Russia could best Austria-Hungary easily alone. Only with German backing against Russia could the Austrians even entertain the idea of going to war in the Balkans; only with German backing could they win. This had been the argument of Tisza, the Hungarian minister-president, against going to war with Serbia: Russia would fight, and Germany would not back Austria. The line taken by the
Habsburg foreign minister, Berchtold, and the belligerent chief of staff, Conrad, was the reverse of Tisza’s: Germany would back Vienna, and Russia would not fight—so they hoped, at least. With the Germans, once the evidence from Belgrade was in, the Austrians could take a direct approach. With St. Petersburg, it was like taking a leap in the dark. What would the Russians do?

The early signs were not encouraging for Austria. Although few foreigners other than Kaiser Wilhelm II truly grieved the loss of Franz Ferdinand, British, French, Italian, and German consuls across Europe all responded to the news from Sarajevo with the sympathy and decorum one expected of trained diplomats. Grave official condolences were offered; flags were lowered to half-mast; heads were nodded in deep if somewhat strained sympathy for Austria’s loss. In stark contrast, Austrian diplomats throughout the Balkans complained that no condolences were offered by their Russian counterparts. In Rome, the Russian embassy was alone in refusing to lower its flag in honor of Archduke Ferdinand. Likewise, the tsarist legation in Belgrade declined to fly its flag at half-mast, even during the official funeral requiem for Franz Ferdinand, as if intentionally to insult the memory of the slain Habsburg heir.
¹

This calculated insult was almost certainly the work of Nikolai Hartwig, the pan-Slavist Russian minister whom Emperor Franz Josef had told Germany’s ambassador was the real “boss of Belgrade.” According to an Italian diplomat, upon hearing the news from Sarajevo on 28 June, Hartwig had exclaimed, “In the name of Heaven! So long as it is not a Serb” (
pourvu que ça ne soit pas un Serbe
). As the Austrian chargé d’affaires in Belgrade, Ritter von Storck, interpreted this ambiguous remark for Berchtold, “Hartwig, as someone in the know . . . evidently took it a priori that the murderer could only be a Serb.” Unperturbed in any case by the news, Hartwig held a bridge party that evening, at which he shared his real views confidentially with the Italian
diplomat (who later betrayed him to the Austrians). The murder of Franz Ferdinand, Hartwig said, “should be regarded as a boon for the [dual] monarchy,” as “the archduke was sick through and through,” illustrating how “the Austrian dynasty is an exhausted race.” The new heir to the throne, Franz Ferdinand’s nephew Karl, was, Hartwig informed the Italian by way of further explanation, “syphilitic,” which made nonsense of his earlier protestation that Franz Ferdinand’s death was good news—unless, of course, he meant good news for Russia.
²

It was hard for Austrians not to think the worst of Hartwig, the man widely viewed as the mastermind of the predatory Slavic-Orthodox coalition of Serbia-Bulgaria-Greece-Macedonia, which had launched the First Balkan War against Turkey in 1912, giving a powerful spur to Serbian irredentism. Franz Josef’s contention that Hartwig secretly ruled Serbia was tinged with a certain exaggeration, but it contained a grain of truth. Serbia’s People’s Radical Party prime minister, Nikola Pašić, was an impressive political survivor. A former mayor of Belgrade, Pašić had served as prime minister of Serbia nearly continuously since 1904, overseeing Serbia’s heroic irredentist aggrandizement during the Balkan Wars while fending off plots against him hatched by Serbian and “South Slav” activists more radical still, such as Colonel Dimitrijevitch (Apis) and his Black Hand conspirators. With his colossal white beard and stern visage, Pašić looked like an Orthodox monk from the pages of Dostoevsky, still virile at sixty-eight in 1914. Still, for all his appearance of vigor, Pašić—and Serbia—would not have amounted to much without Russia’s backing. It was with Russian subsidies, and Russian and French arms, that Serbia had fought the Balkan Wars, and it was Russia’s threats to intervene that had kept the Austrians off Belgrade’s back while Serbian armies were carving up Turkey and Bulgaria. Hartwig had stood behind Pašić’s every action during the Balkan Wars, and he remained Pašić’s closest adviser still.
³

Nikola Pašić, Serbia’s great political survivor.
Source: Getty Images.

Moreover, Hartwig was not the only influential Russian patron in town. Just as Russia’s minister to Belgrade provided public pan-Slavist support for Pašić’s populist regime, so did Russia’s military attaché, General Viktor Artamonov, help advise and arm Serbia’s more radical shadow government. Apis, after all, was not merely the secret organizer of the Black Hand and (as we know today) of the plot to murder Franz Ferdinand; he was also chief of Serbian army intelligence. Asked by an Italian journalist after the war how closely he had worked with Apis in Belgrade, Artamonov admitted readily that “of course I was in practically daily contact with Dimitri[jevitch].” Predictably, the Russian attaché denied having prior knowledge of the Sarajevo plot, producing a perfect alibi—he was on leave from 19 June to 28 July 1914—but a strange one, considering that the whole
point of Archduke Ferdinand’s ill-fated visit to Bosnia was to observe Austrian maneuvers, which would have been of great interest to Russia’s official military observer in Serbia. Still, in a revealing aside, Artamonov conceded that “in the little Belgrade of the time, where public life was confined to a very few cafés, the plot could not have been kept secret.” Russia’s military attaché was out of town on 28 June, but he was in Belgrade in late May and early June, when the plot had been set in motion.
⁴

Hartwig, meanwhile,
was
in town that fateful day, hosting his soon-to-be-notorious bridge party. From postwar confessions, we know that Prime Minister Pašić knew of the assassination plot; in fact he had tried discreetly, via an emissary, to warn Vienna in early June, not wanting to provide Austria with a pretext for war, while Serbia was still recovering its strength from the Balkan Wars. (Pašić’s warning was either ignored or later erased from memory by Habsburg officials, such as the minister for Bosnia-Herzegovina, Biliński, who were embarrassed not to have heeded it.) Serbia’s prime minister and his Russian advisers were thus not complicit in the Black Hand plot to assassinate the archduke, but they almost certainly knew that some kind of plot had been hatched prior to his visit, and Pašić had done nothing decisive to foil it.
⁵

Franz Josef was therefore not wrong to point the finger at Hartwig as an abettor of Serbian aggression and a menace to peace in the Balkans. It was still not clear, however, whether the views of the minister in Belgrade were representative of Russian policymakers in St. Petersburg. During the Balkan Wars, Hartwig had behaved as something of a free agent, frequently overstepping the bounds of the brief laid down by Russia’s more cautious foreign minister, Sergei Sazonov. Shortly before the outbreak of the First Balkan War in October 1912, Hartwig had all but questioned Sazonov’s manhood: after the foreign minister issued a preemptory declaration guaranteeing the territorial status quo in the Balkans, Hartwig told the Serbs to go ahead and attack Turkey and not worry about “foolish Sazonov.”
⁶

Sergei Sazonov, Russia’s beleaguered and much-pilloried foreign minister, trying to live down a reputation for cowardice.
Source: Nikolai Aleksandrovich Bazili Papers, Envelope A, Hoover Institution Archives.

Sazonov had never been anyone’s idea of a strongman. To begin with, he did not look the part. Slim and small in stature, with a bland face and receding hairline, Sazonov had a classic Russian bureaucrat’s mien: he could have been the inspiration for Gogol’s empty overcoat. The foreign minister had been pilloried by pan-Slavists in Petersburg for his mild-mannered timidity during the Balkan Wars, even as Hartwig emerged as their conquering hero. For a time there were serious rumors in Petersburg that Hartwig would replace Sazonov, but in the end Tsar Nicholas II had stuck by his man out of simple loyalty.