Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (12 page)

Meanwhile, at 1914 Anglo-Russian naval staff talks the British discussed providing support for a Russian landing in Pomerania. This was the sort of war-gaming all armed forces indulge in, but when news of it was leaked to Berlin by a Russian diplomat, German paranoia about the Entente was intensified. Unfortunately, the Pomeranian scheme lacked plausibility. The Royal Navy’s preparation for Armageddon focused chiefly upon a blockade of which the diplomatic complications had been inadequately considered. Like all British war planning, it was limited in scale and incoherent in substance, lacking the political impetus to make it anything more. The continental nations expected to clash in arms sooner or later, which helped to ensure that they did so. The offshore islanders, however, thought it more plausible that they would soon be fighting each other.

2

The Descent to War

1 THE AUSTRIANS THREATEN

If the Hapsburg Empire witnessed little sincere mourning for Franz Ferdinand following his assassination, Austrian rage towards its perpetrators was manifest. Joven Avakumović, a well-known Serbian lawyer and liberal opposition politician, was being shown his room at the Tyrolean hotel where he and his family were starting a holiday when the porter handed him a newspaper announcing the murders in Sarajevo. Gravely, Avakumović told his wife and daughter that these tidings were bound to have important implications for their own country. That evening after dinner, in the lounge he listened to the speculations of fellow guests, who insisted Serbia was involved in the killings, and must be called to account: ‘I noticed especially one well-dressed, well-mannered man who spoke very harshly, and sat with three others at the next table to our own. He declared loudly: “Serbia is guilty; she must be punished,” and the other three affirmed: “That is right!” I … later learnt from the porter that the man was a foreign ministry official.’

In Vienna, the Sarajevo assassins were first branded ‘Bosniacs’, then simply ‘Serbs’. Violent anti-Serbian demonstrations took place across the empire. In Sarajevo the Serb-owned Hotel Europa was wrecked, together with a Serb school; the German consul wrote that the city was living through ‘its own St Bartholomew’s Eve’. In Vienna on 30 June, a crowd of some two hundred students demonstrated in front of the Serbian embassy. They yelled: ‘Down with Serbia! Long live Austria! Hail the Hapsburgs!’ and burnt the hated flag. Such scenes were repeated through the days that followed.

The Austrian
chargé
in Belgrade, Wilhelm von Stork, reported angrily to Vienna on 30 June: ‘There is exultation in the streets and cafés on account of our tragedy, and it is described as the finger of God and a
justified punishment for everything bad Austria-Hungary has ever done to Serbia.’ The Serbian opposition press, with stunning indifference to its country’s interests and reputation, applauded the Archduke’s killing. When student Jovan Dinić hurried to Belgrade’s main square to discuss the news with friends, he was surprised to find them holding forth not in shocked whispers, but in strident exultation. A famously bright young aspiring lawyer proclaimed that Austrian military manoeuvres in Bosnia had been an intolerable provocation and a direct threat to all Serbs; that the Serbs of Bosnia would now ‘leap through fire’ alongside the Serbian nation. Misunderstandings intensified rancour: on that same 30 June, the Montenegrin border town of Metalka was bedecked with flags, causing the outraged Austrians to suppose that their neighbours were celebrating Franz Ferdinand’s murder. Only a week later did they learn that Metalka had been marking the birthday of Montenegro’s Crown Prince. Austria embraced such petty fantasy provocations alongside the large and real one of the archducal murder.

Participants in all conflicts with more than two belligerents have different motivations for deciding to fight, and this was emphatically true in 1914. The decision-making of seven governments was influenced by widely diverse ambitions and fears. Though struggles ensued in many parts of the world, and especially in Europe, and warring nations professed common allegiances, they were certainly not impelled by a common logic. Austria made an almost immediate decision to respond to Franz Ferdinand’s assassination by invading Serbia, not because its leaders cared a fig for the persons of the slain Archduke and his embarrassing wife, but because the murders represented the best justification they would ever have for settling accounts with a mortally troublesome neighbour.

The rulers of the Hapsburg Empire convinced themselves that military action was the only way out of their difficulties, not merely with Serbia, but with their own restless peoples. Finance minister Ritter von Bilinski said later: ‘We decided on war quite early.’ Vienna’s military attaché in Belgrade reported that the killings had been planned and organised by the head of Serbian intelligence. Austria’s rulers agreed that they thus represented a declaration of war, though Vienna had no more evidence to link them to the Serbs’ monarchy or elected government than do modern historians. The war minister, Alexander von Krobatin, and Gen. Oskar Potiorek, commander-in-chief in Bosnia-Herzegovina, alike urged military action. Berchtold, often scorned by his peers as a ditherer, displayed
an untimely resolution. On 30 June he spoke privately of the need for a ‘final and fundamental reckoning’ with Serbia.

Berchtold was surrounded by a group of young diplomats – Janós, Count Forgách; Alexander, Baron von Musulin; Alexander, Count Hoyos – who were convinced that an assertive and expansionist foreign policy was the best cure for the Empire’s domestic ills. Forgách was a prime mover in the commitment to crush Serbia. Hoyos became responsible for ensuring Germany’s support; he emphasised the recklessness prevailing in Vienna when he said: ‘it is immaterial to us whether world war comes out of all this’. Musulin drafted the critical communications: an ‘impetuous chatterbox’, he later took pride in calling himself ‘the man who caused the war’.

The Emperor Franz Joseph wrote personally to Kaiser Wilhelm saying: ‘You too will be convinced after the latest terrible events in Bosnia that a [peaceful] reconciliation of the conflict between ourselves and Serbia is unthinkable.’ On 4 July Berchtold dispatched Hoyos to Berlin, where the diplomat thereafter held a series of meetings with Wilhelm and his advisers, at which he was promised Germany’s unconditional support for any course of action Austria chose to adopt – what later became notorious as ‘the blank cheque’, central plank of the case for German responsibility for the First World War. On the evening of 5 July, the Austrian envoy reported the Kaiser saying that ‘if we really saw the necessity for military action against Serbia, he would think it regrettable if we did not take advantage of the present moment, which is favourable from our point of view’.

The Germans urged the Austrians to force the pace, denying the Serbians time to marshal diplomatic or military support; they wanted Vienna to confront St Petersburg with a swift
fait accompli
– Hapsburg troops occupying the Serb capital. When Hoyos went home, Arthur Zimmerman, the German under-secretary of state, estimated a 90 per cent probability of hostilities between Austria and Serbia. During the weeks that followed before Vienna’s ultimatum was finally delivered, the Germans fumed at Austrian dilatoriness. Bethmann, the chancellor, showed himself vulnerable to moments of panic. Kurt Riezler, his confidential secretary and principal counsellor, wrote in his diary on 6 July, expressing dismay about a scenario somewhat troubling his master: ‘an action against Serbia can lead to a world war. From a war, regardless of the outcome, the chancellor expects a revolution of everything that exists … Generally delusion all round, a thick fog over the people. The same in all
of Europe. The future belongs to Russia, which … thrusts itself on us as a heavier and heavier nightmare.’

Riezler sought to reassure Bethmann by suggesting that it might be possible to achieve a triumph over Serbia by diplomacy alone, then added encouragingly: ‘if war should come and the veil [of amity which masks the fundamental enmity between peoples] should fall, then the entire
Volk
will follow, driven by a sense of emergency and danger. Victory is liberation.’ Amid such Wagnerian reflections and fantasies did Germany’s political leaders enter the July crisis. At that stage, Bethmann and the Kaiser were doing almost all the talking for their country. Though Moltke assured Wilhelm that the army was ready to fight at any time, some historians claim that he was not directly consulted before the critical assurances were given to Austria.

After Hoyos returned to Vienna, Germany’s leaders behaved with a nonchalance that conspiracists believe to have been theatrical. Bethmann spent most of the rest of the month on his estate at Hohenfinow on the Oder, though he paid several discreet visits to Berlin during which he consulted with the military. Moltke departed for a cure at Karlsbad – his second of the year – from which he returned only on 25 July, just in time for the showdown between Vienna and Belgrade. The Kaiser sailed on 6 July for his annual summer yachting trip in the North Sea, which continued until the 27th. Senior officers including Prussian war minister Erich von Falkenhayn went on leave; newspapers were urged to avoid wilful provocation of the French.

While some scholars regard all this as evidence of orchestrated deception, it is more plausible that the Germans at this stage sincerely believed that the Austro-Serbian war they had mandated could be localised, though they were fatalistic about the huge risk that this might not be so. Rear-Admiral Albert Hopman, a shrewd and informed observer, wrote in his diary on 6 July: ‘In my opinion the situation is quite favourable for us, so favourable that a big and resolute statesman would exploit it to the uttermost.’ Throughout the weeks that followed, Hopman persisted in his opinion, widely shared in Berlin, that Germany could gain important diplomatic capital from the Balkan crisis, at small cost. He wrote on 16 July: ‘personally, I do not believe in war entanglement’, and again on the 21st: ‘Europe will not brawl because of Serbia.’

In Vienna, on the 7th Berchtold told the Austrian Council of Ministers that Germany was providing unqualified backing for drastic measures, ‘even though our operations against Serbia should bring about the great
war’. That day Baron Wladimir Giesl, the Austrian envoy to Belgrade, returned to his post after consultations in Vienna with clear instructions from the foreign minister: ‘However the Serbs react to the ultimatum [then being drafted], you must break off relations and it must come to war.’ Only Hungary’s minister-president, Count István Tisza, deplored the threat of ‘the dreadful calamity of a European war’, and counselled caution. He told Count Julius Andrássy that blame for the actions of the unprincipled little group which killed the Archduke should not be pinned on an entire nation, and maintained this view until mid-July.

By contrast the Austrian army’s chief of staff, Conrad, urged aggressive action. After the conflict ended Count Hoyos wrote: ‘No one today can imagine just how much the belief in German power, in the invincibility of the German army, determined our thinking and how certain we all were that Germany
would easily win the war against France
[deleted in original] would provide us with the greatest guarantee of our safety should a European war result from our action against Serbia.’

Many Austrian soldiers were not merely untroubled by the possibility of provoking war with the Russian bear, but regarded such a showdown as an indispensable contribution to the elimination of the pan-Slav threat. Wolfgang Heller, a General Staff officer, noted in his diary on 24 July that he felt confident Serbia would reject Vienna’s ultimatum, and was only worried that the Russians might not rise to the bait: ‘real success cannot be achieved unless we can implement
Kriegsfall R
[the plan to fight Russia]. Only if Serbia and Montenegro cease to exist as independent states can a solution of the [Slav] question be achieved. It would be useless to go to war with Serbia without being resolved to erase it from the map; a so-called punitive campaign – “
eine Strafexpedition
” – would be worthless, a waste of every bullet; the southern Slav question must be solved radically, so that all southern Slavs are united under the Hapsburg flag.’ Such views were widely held among Austria’s nobles, generals, politicians and diplomats.

An Austro-Serb war was thus ordained. But was a regional Balkan conflict doomed to become a general European catastrophe? Did Serbia deserve to be saved from the fate Austria and Germany decreed for it? The irresponsibility of Serbian behaviour is almost indisputable, but it seems extravagant, on the evidence, to brand the country a rogue state, deserving of destruction. It is much less surprising that the Hapsburg Empire, in the febrile mood generated by its weakness and vulnerability, chose to start a war to punish Apis and his compatriots, than that its neighbour, great and
rising Germany, should have risked a general conflagration for so marginal a purpose.

There seem several explanations. First, Germany’s rulers, like many men of their generation, accepted the role of war as a natural means of fulfilling national ambitions and exercising power: Prussia had exploited this cost-effectively three times in the later nineteenth century. Georg Müller, head of Wilhelm’s naval cabinet, told his master in 1911, ‘war is not the worst of all evils’, and this belief pervaded Berlin’s thinking. The Kaiser and his key advisers underestimated the magnitude of the dominance their country was achieving through its economic and industrial prowess, without fighting anybody. They were profoundly mistaken to suppose that European hegemony could be secured only by the deployment of armies on battlefields.

But paranoia was a prominent feature of the German psyche at this period – a belief that the country’s strategic position, far from progressively strengthening, was being weakened by the rise of socialism at home and the Entente’s military capabilities abroad. Many German bankers and industrialists were morbidly convinced that the Western democracies were bent upon strangling German trade. Berlin’s ambassador in Vienna made initial attempts to cool the Austrian government’s bellicosity, but the Kaiser scribbled on his reports: ‘Who has authorised him to do that? It is extremely stupid!’ The Germans knew it was overwhelmingly likely that the Tsar would throw his protective mantle over Serbia – Nicholas had earlier committed himself to doing so. But Moltke and Bethmann Hollweg viewed Russia, to the point of obsession, as an existential threat; and if they had to fight Nicholas’s army, they preferred to do so sooner rather than later. On 20 May 1914, sharing a railway compartment between Potsdam and Berlin, the chief of staff told foreign minister Jagow that within a few years Russia would be winning the arms race. If the price of anticipating such superiority was also to be a clash with France, Russia’s ally – which Moltke assumed – the General Staff had planned meticulously for such a prospect, and professed to be confident of victory.