Europe's Last Summer (38 page)

If one underlines the distinction between the two wars, it helps to answer many of the questions that always have been asked about the July crisis. One of them, posed in various guises from the very outset, is why peoples all around the planet were fighting and dying because of something that happened to two people, Franz Ferdinand and Sophie, of whom most knew nothing.

The answer is: that was
not
why people on the far side of the world were fighting and dying. The local war between Austria and Serbia was connected with Franz Ferdinand and Sophie, but the Great War was not; the world war, which was not really the same conflict, was caused by the
struggle for supremacy among the great European powers. The desire to be number one may have been a deplorable reason for starting a war, but it was neither surprising nor puzzling that it was what motivated the powers. Germany deliberately started a European war to keep from being overtaken by Russia.

There was a certain parallel between the origins of the two wars. The Austro-Serbian war supposedly was triggered by the murders in Sarajevo, even though the Austrian plot against Serbia was hatched two weeks earlier. Similarly, the German government made use of a pretext to start a world war, and that pretext was the possibility that Russia might interfere in the Austro-Serbian war. Thus pretext was piled upon pretext, and dust was thrown in the eyes of posterity. The two wars were intertwined, but—to repeat—they were different and distinct; and in the end, Germany made Austria discard its own war in favor of Germany's.

The German generals in July 1914 had taken advantage of their weeks of vacation to ponder their plans. They were not entirely isolated from events; they had made arrangements to be kept informed. They returned to Berlin calling for war. It was not for a war against Serbia. It was for the war against Russia for which the Serbian crisis gave them an excuse.

It should be noted that the Russians had done nothing yet when the German generals came back to Berlin July 23–27. The Russians had not intervened or interfered. They had undertaken only a minimal pre-mobilization (on July 26).

So what was driving up the temperature to fever pitch in Berlin was the prospect that the government could attack the Franco-Russian alliance in 1914 rather than later. The German generals had decided on war
before
Russia mobilized (July 31), so—as pointed out earlier—it was not (as is claimed so often) Russian mobilization that started the war. So far as one can tell, the question Moltke agonized over, seemingly changing his mind, was whether to seize Liege instantly, as he absolutely needed to do, or whether to wait for Russia to order mobilization and thus provide his government with its excuse for declaring war.

Once Russia obliged by ordering mobilization, the local and comparatively little Serbian war could be ignored and the world war of the Great Powers could start. Historians would write that the local Serbian war somehow had gotten out of control and had escalated into a global war.
But the one did not grow into the other. On the contrary, one had to be put aside in order to start the other.

Two wars, not one; that is the key.

Sir Michael Howard, with his usual clarity, has explained what it is that has puzzled scholars of the First World War ever since: there was no logic to the German decision. Agreeing with
Clausewitz that military plans have no inherent logic, Sir Michael writes: "There was certainly no logic in the decision by the German General Staff that
in order to support the Austrians in a conflict with Russia over Serbia,
Germany should attack France, who was not party to the quarrel, and do so by invading Belgium."

If you delete the italicized words—for we now see that Germany instigated the war against Russia on its own account,
not
Austria's—the puzzle is solved. And it shows that there
was
logic in the decisions of the German general staff. It was not to support the Austrians that the German leaders had maneuvered in July. It was just the reverse; it was to secure Austria's support for themselves in their own war. Germany's generals had to perform the trick of first getting Austria involved in a war and then getting it to change its enemy.

The wars were to some extent incompatible. One can see that, however, only if one first sees that there
were
two wars, not one.

CHAPTER 47: WHAT WAS IT ABOUT?

When we claim that something or another was what a war was "about," we can mean a number of different things, among them: why decision-makers said they were going to war; why they actually believed they were doing so; and what in the end proved to be the results of the conflict.

In the case of the Austro-Serbian war, Vienna claimed that it was going to war to seek justice for the Sarajevo slayings and to prevent similar crimes from occurring in the future. What the Austrian leaders really believed was somewhat different. They thought they were fighting to preserve the multinational character of their empire—in other words, to keep Austria-Hungary from disintegrating. As they saw it, Serbia, if given a respite of a few years from the Balkan wars, would threaten to take over the leadership of the southern Slavs within the Hapsburg Empire as it was constituted in 1914, as well as those without. So they were fighting for their empire's existence.

The case of Serbia was even simpler. The Serbs fought because they were attacked. If they lost, Austria planned to cut them up into pieces; Serbia would lose its existence as well as its independence.

The Austrians may well have been right in believing that, given a few years to rebuild, Serbia would have mounted a potent challenge to the Hapsburg Empire. Like its
German ally, Austria in 1914 there-fore was launching what it conceived of as a preventive war.

In the earlier years of his reign, the Kaiser had championed the claims of the navy. He had supported the program, advocated by Tirpitz, that pictured the rival empire Germany should challenge as Great Britain. If that program had succeeded, Germany—if Tirpitz was correct—would have been transformed from a dominant European power to a dominant world power.

But that was not the goal—or at least not the short-run goal—of the German government in 1914. Russia, not Britain, had become the enemy. The navy had been supplanted by the army; Tirpitz had in large part been eclipsed by Moltke and Falkenhayn. Those who now were dictating Germany's policy—the army generals—aimed at holding on to what Germany had got. They wanted to maintain their country's dominance on the European continent. They wanted to prevent a future challenge to that position by Russia, backed by France, by provoking a war immediately, while their chances of winning would be greater than in the future.

The army officers in Berlin who forced their war policy on the reluctant Kaiser were motivated by a fear of Russia's growing might. Their notion that a showdown between Teutons and Slavs was inevitable is not one that we would credit today. But their fear was real.

The men who led Germany in 1914 pursued what in their eyes was a defensive policy. It was conservative in the sense that they aimed at maintaining Germany's existing military mastery in Europe. The enemy—the challenger they would have to meet one day or another—was Russia. Like Austria, choosing to fight Serbia today rather than tomorrow, Germany—which is to say, Germany's military leaders—decided to fight Russia today rather than tomorrow.

What the war was about, in the view of Berlin's decision-makers at the end of July 1914, was which country would be master of Europe in the years to come: Germany or Russia?

• • •

During the war
V I. Lenin, the communist theorist and future Russian dictator, while still in Zurich, wrote that the war was about imperialism. Inspired by a British theorist,
J. A. Hobson, Lenin claimed that capitalism had entered its final phase, in which the leading industrial countries could expand their economies only by acquiring colonial empires to use as captive markets. The 1914 war, as he saw it, was a war for empire.

Lenin was wrong. It was a war for control of continental Europe, not for empire in Asia or Africa. But what he wrote was plausible, and was widely believed, especially in the 1920s and 1930s. The evidence seemed to be persuasive.

When the world war was over, it could be seen that one of its results, in 1919, had been the dramatic expansion of the British Empire. England had taken German colonies in Africa. A British army of a million men was in occupation of the Middle East. Some who observed these results drew the conclusion that it had been an imperialist war, a war for imperial expansion all along. That was an illusion. In August 1914, Grey and Asquith, in bringing Britain into the war, harbored no desire to expand and pursued no strategy designed to further imperial expansion; and they did not preside over their country's entrance into the war in hope or expectation of acquiring more territory.

The same was true of Germany, although it expanded its ambitions as early as September 1914, as did other countries on both sides. They began by fighting to keep what they had. But once at war, which opened up all possibilities, they drew up wish lists, and then grew so attached to their desires that they were determined not to make peace without achieving them. The longer they fought, the more extravagant grew their war goals. So it was with Germany, and with France and England too.

As I have written elsewhere, it was not imperialism that caused the war; it was the war that produced a new wave of imperialism. What the belligerents asked at the peace conference bore little resemblance to what drove them to go to war in the first place.

We have seen why Austria and Germany went to war. What drove France and Russia to join in the fray can be covered in a sentence: Germany declared war on them, and they defended themselves. Of the Great Powers that stood together against Germany and Austria in August 1914, only Britain had been allowed the freedom to decide for itself whether to go in or to stay out.

One of the most extraordinary stories of the war's origins is that of how Britons, who were mostly against participating in the war as late as August 1 or 2, changed their minds and came close to becoming unanimous in favor of joining in by August 3. They were persuaded to change their minds by Sir Edward Grey. The issue on which he carried his case was Belgium.

Belgian neutrality had been guaranteed twice by the powers during the nineteenth century. There was no question that, as a guarantor, Britain was entitled to defend Belgium's neutrality if it chose to do so. What was less clear was whether Britain was
obligated
to intervene if its fellow signatories decided not to do so. There was a real question as to whether the guarantee by the European powers was joint or several.

Yet, for whatever reason, the cause of Belgium excited an emotional response among Britons of all sorts, politics, and persuasions. Some said that Britain's honor required it to keep its promise to protect Belgium. Some said that Germany, by violating a treaty obligation, had to be punished for not keeping
its
word. Others venerated neutrality and Belgium's dedication to defending it. Still others believed that England should keep big countries from trampling on the rights of small ones. Then there were those who viewed the neutrality of Belgium as a British vital interest, picturing the Channel ports in the hands of a potential enemy as a strategic threat to the British islands.

For large numbers of the British cabinet, Parliament, and the public, one or another of these aspects of the Belgian question—skillfully combined by Grey in his masterly speech to the Commons on August 3—brought about a change of mind. For Grey's audience, the martyrdom of Belgium was not the pretext; it was, in all honesty, the real reason for throwing England and its people into a life-or-death struggle. It was why
Britain
said
it was going to war; and it was also why Britain
believed
it was going to war.

But Asquith and Grey, who led the country into war, did so not for the sake of a British ideal but for the sake of a British vital interest. There is reason to believe that had Belgian neutrality been violated by France rather than by Germany, Asquith and Grey would have looked the other way. But what Germany was doing threatened Britain. By destroying France as a Power, Germany would destroy the balance of power in Europe, and would threaten to bring Britain's global supremacy to an end. By controlling the length of the French and Belgian Atlantic coast, including the Channel ports, Germany would render the British islands permanently vulnerable to attack, bombardment, or invasion. For Asquith and Grey, the war was about the balance of power and national security.

At one time it was common for historians to say (as Elie Halévy did, quoted earlier) that the Anglo-German duel in the First World War was about Germany's challenge to Britain's supremacy in the existing European system. England was depicted as fighting a
defensive war to preserve the status quo; Germany, as a dynamic aggressor seeking to change the world.

Now that theory requires qualification. Both Germany and Britain were seeking in at least some respects to preserve the existing balance of power, as they perceived it to be. Germany could not afford to lose Austria either as an ally or as a Great Power; Britain could not afford to lose France either as an ally or as a Great Power. Germany fought to save Austria; Britain fought to save France. In the first instance, both sides went to war to retain what they had: their closest ally. In that sense it was—at the outset, though only at the outset—a defensive conflict on both sides.