The Sleepwalkers (57 page)

In the minds of some of the key policy-makers in London, the Russian threat still eclipsed that posed by Germany. ‘What our people fear,' a senior Foreign Office functionary admitted at the beginning of December 1912, when the first Albanian crisis was at its height, ‘is that Germany will go to St Petersburg and propose holding Austria in, if Russia will leave the Entente. This is the real danger of the situation, not a conflict of the powers. We are sincerely afraid lest out of the hurly burly of the crisis Russia should emerge on the side of the [Triple] Alliance'.
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In Nicolson's eyes, the security of Britain and its world empire still rested on the Anglo-Russian Convention, which he wished to see elaborated (along with the French entente) into a fully fledged alliance. It was ‘far more disadvantageous to have an unfriendly France and Russia than an unfriendly Germany'.
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‘It is absolutely essential to us to keep on the best terms with Russia,' he wrote in May 1914, ‘as were we to have an unfriendly or even an indifferent Russia, we should find ourselves in great difficulties in certain localities where we are unfortunately not in a position to defend ourselves.'
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Even the slightest gesture in the direction of a rapprochement with Berlin risked compromising London's reputation for reliability, and once this was gone, there was the danger that Russia would simply abandon Britain and revert to the role of imperial rival. Underlying Nicolson's view was the conviction – widely shared in London during the last pre-war years – that the awesome expansion of Russian economic power and military strength would soon place it in a position of relative independence, rendering Britain dispensable.

From this it followed that Russia's loyalty must be bought at virtually any price. Nicolson was appalled at the role played by Sazonov in sponsoring the Serbo-Bulgarian alliance against Turkey, and more generally by Russia's egging on of the Serbian government, but these were minor annoyances compared with the catastrophe of a Russian defection. British diplomats were thus in some respects more comfortable with a situation of managed tension in the Balkans than with the prospect of a return to the Austro-Russian condominium of the pre-1903 era, which would in turn have facilitated a return to the pre-1907 situation of open Anglo-Russian global rivalry, a scenario they felt even less well equipped to deal with in 1913 than they had been in the era of the Boer War.
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In the summer of 1912, Nicolson even propagated the view that Russian expansion into the Balkan region was inevitable and should therefore not be opposed by Britain. ‘The determination of Russia, now that she has got her finances in splendid order and reorganized her army,' he told the British ambassador in Vienna, ‘is to reassert and re-establish her predominant position in the Balkans.'
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Détente interacted in complex ways with the mobile architecture of the alliance blocs. It could raise risk levels by muting the awareness of risk among key political actors. The Ambassadors' Conference in London, for which Grey took much of the credit, left him confident in his ability to solve crises and ‘save peace', a confidence that would impede his ability to react in a timely fashion to the events of July 1914. Grey drew from the Anglo-German détente in the Balkans the lesson that Germany would continue restraining its Austrian ally, come what may. Jagow and Bethmann extracted the equally problematic insight that the eyes of London had at last been opened to the true character of Russian policy on the peninsula and that Britain would probably remain neutral if the Russians started a conflict in the region. Moreover, détente in one part of the European international system could also produce a hardening of commitments in another. Thus, for example, uncertainties about London – fuelled by Anglo-German collaboration in the Balkans – affected French relations with St Petersburg. ‘The French government,' wrote the Belgian minister to Paris in April 1913, ‘seeks to tighten more and more its alliance with Russia, for it is aware that the friendship of England is less and less solid and effective.'
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These reflections might seem to suggest that the pre-war European system had somehow locked itself into a position from which a war was the only way out. That would appear to be one possible deduction from the observation that even détente posed a danger to peace. But we should not forget how dynamic the system still was, or how open its future seemed to be. In the last months before the outbreak of war, it was gradually dawning on some of the most senior British policy-makers that the Convention with Russia over Persia might not survive its scheduled renewal in 1915.
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Tyrrell's view in the spring of 1913 was that Britain should tolerate the misbehaviour of the Russians until the crisis in the Balkans subsided and then – in 1914 or 1915 perhaps? – get tough with them over Persia, Mongolia and China. A gap opened between Grey and Nicolson, who by 1914 was an increasingly isolated figure. Many senior Foreign Office colleagues viewed with deepening scepticism Nicolson's unconditional attachment to the Anglo-Russian Convention. Tyrrell and Grey – and other senior Foreign Office functionaries – were deeply annoyed by St Petersburg's failure to observe the terms of the agreement struck in 1907 and began to feel that an arrangement of some kind with Germany might serve as a useful corrective to St Petersburg. By the spring of 1914, even Nicolson was getting the message: on 27 March 1914, he warned a colleague not to presume that the current constellation of powers would endure: ‘I think it is extremely probable that before long we shall witness fresh developments and new groupings in the European political situation.'
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What did all of this mean for the Germans? In answering this question, it is helpful to emphasize the ambivalence of international developments in the last two years before the war. On the one hand, the post-Agadir period saw a waning of tension, especially between Germany and Britain, and signs that the continental alliance blocs might in time lose their functionality and cohesion. There was thus reason to believe that détente was not merely a temporary respite from mutual hostility, but a genuine potentiality of the international system. Viewed from this perspective, a general war was anything but inevitable.
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On the other hand, the Agadir and Balkan crises produced a drastic stepping up of military preparedness and signs of a more aggressive Russian policy on the Balkan peninsula, backed by Paris. And the fear that the bonds of the Entente might be loosening produced in the short term a hardening of alliance commitments, a tendency reinforced by the ascendancy across Europe of relatively belligerent policy factions.

German policy reflected the incoherence and ambiguity of this larger picture. First, it is worth noting that the Germans were as impressed as everyone else by the spectacle of Russian economic growth and vitality. After his journey to Russia in the summer of 1912, Bethmann summarized his impressions for Jules Cambon in similar terms to Verneuil's account for Pichon nine months later:

The Chancellor expressed a feeling of admiration and astonishment so profound that it affects his policy. The grandeur of the country, its extent, its agricultural wealth, as much as the vigour of the population, still bereft, he remarked, of any intellectualism. He compared the youth of Russia to that of America, and it seems to him that whereas [the youth] of Russia is saturated with futurity, America appears not to be adding any new element to the common patrimony of humanity.
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From the standpoint of the most influential German military commanders, it seemed blindingly obvious that the geopolitical situation was shifting rapidly to Germany's disadvantage. Helmuth von Moltke, Schlieffen's successor (from January 1906) as chief of the General Staff adopted an unswervingly bleak and bellicose view of Germany's international situation. His outlook can be reduced to two axiomatic assumptions. The first was that a war between the two alliance blocs was inevitable over the longer term. The second was that time was not on Germany's side. With each advancing year, Germany's prospective enemies, and Russia in particular with its swiftly expanding economy and virtually infinite manpower, would grow in military prowess until they enjoyed an unchallengeable superiority that would permit them to select the moment for a conflict to be fought and decided on their own terms.

There was a fundamental difference in kind between these two axioms. The first was an unverifiable psychological projection, born of Moltke's own paranoia and pessimism.
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The second, by contrast, though it also incorporated a measure of paranoia, was at least justified by a comparative analysis of the relative military strengths of the European powers. Moltke's concern over the deepening imbalance between the two blocs and the steady deterioration in Germany's capacity to prevail in a future conflict steadily gained in plausibility after 1910, when the Russians initiated the first major cycle of rearmament in land weapons and forces.
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Helmuth von Moltke in 1914

The next escalation in European war-readiness and armaments investment came in the wake of Agadir and the crisis triggered by the Balkan Wars. In November 1912, as the Russians stepped up their measures against Austria-Hungary and the French government cheered from the sidelines, the German government showed remarkable restraint – reservists were not called up, conscript classes were not retained, there was no trial mobilization.
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But from mid-November, as the massive scale of the Russian military preparations became clear, the German command grew increasingly concerned. Especially alarming was the retention of the Russian senior conscript class, which sharply raised troop strengths along the German frontier in the Polish salient. And these concerns were nourished by intelligence from a range of sources and locations that the dominant view among the senior echelons of the Russian army was that conflict with Austria was inevitable and that ‘the best time to strike was the present moment'.
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Unnerved by these auguries and by the troop movements on both sides of the Galician border and anxious to counter the impression that Germany was no longer interested in defending Austria-Hungary against regional threats, the German chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg delivered a ten-minute speech to the Reichstag on 2 December 1912. It was a redaction – in a more concise format and a more modest register – of Lloyd George's Mansion House speech of the previous year. The chancellor began by noting that Germany had to date ‘used her influence in order to localise the war' and that ‘hitherto it had in fact been localised' – an observation that brought cheers from the house. There followed a carefully worded warning:

If – which I hope will not be the case – insoluble difficulties then appear, it will be the business of the Powers directly involved in the particular case to give effect to their claims. This applies to our allies. If in giving effect to their interests they, contrary to all expectation, are attacked from a third side, and so find their existence menaced, we, in loyalty to our duty as allies, should have to take our stand firm and determined at their side. (Cheers from the Right and from the National Liberals.) In that case we should fight for the defence of our own position in Europe and for the protection of our own future and security. (Cheers on the Right.) I am convinced that in following such a policy we shall have the whole people behind us. (Cheers.)
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The Times
, which published the text of the entire speech on the following day, found nothing ‘new or sensational' in the chancellor's words. ‘It has been perfectly clear,' the paper's Berlin correspondent wrote, ‘that Germany is both desiring peace and ensuing [i.e. pursuing] it.'
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Edward Grey saw the matter very differently. In a completely unexpected move, he summoned the German ambassador, Count Lichnowsky, to his office and informed him that in the event of a war between Germany and the Franco-Russian Alliance, Britain was likely to fight on the side of Germany's enemies. Lichnowsky's report of his conversation with Grey triggered panic in Berlin, or more precisely in the Kaiser, who, ever sensitive to signals from London, claimed to discern in Grey's warning a ‘moral declaration of war'.
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Deeply shaken, Wilhelm ordered Moltke, Tirpitz, Chief of the Admiralty Heeringen and Admiral Müller, Chief of the Naval Cabinet, to attend him at short notice for an emergency meeting in the Royal Palace at 11.00 a.m on Sunday 8 December. The meeting opened with belligerent bluster from the Kaiser: Austria must be firm in dealing with Serbia (whose troops were at this time still in Albania) and Germany must support her if Russia attacked. Should this occur, the Kaiser vociferated, Germany would throw the brunt of its army against France and use its submarines to torpedo British troop ships. Towards the end of the discussion that followed, he urged that the navy step up the pace of U-boat production, demanded that ‘more should be done through the press to prepare the popularity of a war against Russia' and endorsed Staff Chief Hellmuth von Moltke's observation that ‘war is unavoidable and the sooner the better'.
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