Europe's Last Summer (40 page)

Berchtold had one great asset in pursuing his goal. The foreign minister of any other Great Power would have been reined in by his allies. If Russia wanted to invade a neighbor, France—which financed Russia's military expansion—would keep St. Petersburg from doing so. When Germany meddled in Morocco in 1911, even Austria refused support and thereby helped stop Berlin. Only one country in Europe had an ally that would
not
restrain it—that would support it blindly. That was Austria, backed unconditionally by Germany, and against all odds that was the one country in Europe that was led by a man who was determined to start a war.

Why was Berchtold able to start a war? The answer is, because there was nobody to stop him. He was the only leader in Europe, we now know, whose ally gave him carte blanche. It should be noted, though, that he did not use it on his own. He declared war only when—and because—the German foreign minister, Jagow, told him to do so. So Jagow was one more person who started the Austro-Serbian war.

In the case of the preventive war against Russia and France, it had been contemplated by the leaders of the German army for a long time. It was a policy proposal that tended to surface whenever crises emerged. Moltke is the one usually quoted as advancing it, but he seems to have spoken for the officer corps as a whole. When the July crisis blew up, therefore, it looked to the German generals like the time to act rather than merely talk.

Falkenhayn and Moltke took the lead. They were the officers, supported by their military colleagues, who made the real decision for war in the summer of 1914. They thought they knew what they were doing. Moltke had predicted that the war would lead European civilization to ruin, but he felt the war to be inevitable. He believed that all he was deciding—all that he was in a position to decide—was when it would take place. And he did decide that.

Here again it confuses the issue to think in terms of one war rather than two. At the outset—at the time of the Outrage and the blank check—there was only the Serbian war initiative on the table: war was proposed by the Austrians. But it was the civilian government of Germany that crafted an actual plan of operations for Austria. And it was that civilian government—the Chancellor and his foreign office—that monitored Austria's performance.

So little progress had been made by the Dual Monarchy in initiating a war by the last week of July (according to Germany's generals)—or in arriving at a settlement (according to the Kaiser)—that neither side in Germany was willing to let the Chancellor, the foreign office, and the Austrians continue to be in charge of the operation.

Vienna had wanted to start and win a war, but as of the end of July had failed to do so. All it had created was what it—and the Kaiser and Bethmann—had wanted
not
to create: a war crisis, involving, to some extent, all the powers of Europe. But the German generals began to see that a war crisis was something they
did
want.

Such a war crisis, and such internationalization, created confusion. As spectators during July, Moltke, Falkenhayn, and Germany's other military leaders pondered the uses to which such confusion could be put. They had been willing to let Austria have its Serbian adventure, although it meant little to Germany; but now Austria had bungled it, and in doing so had involved itself perhaps inextricably, so Germany now could count on the Austro-Hungarian Empire's full support in launching a new war initiative of Germany's own—a war against the other powers of Europe.

The German government therefore was in the process of changing its policy from the weekend of July 25 onward. The Kaiser and the Chancellor, albeit with some misgivings, let Moltke and Falkenhayn have their way. In the confusion of a European war crisis, the German generals cleverly substituted one war for another. The world was deluded into believing, then and thereafter, that one grew out of the other, but it was not so; one had to be overridden in order to pursue the other.

On the part of Moltke and Falkenhayn, it was a supreme act of opportunism. They saw their opening and swiftly took advantage of it. It was as though they had seen a passenger airliner parked on a runway, fully fueled and ready to take off, boarded it and commandeered it, and at gunpoint forced the captain to divert from his scheduled destination to someplace in the opposite direction. Moltke and Falkenhayn had succeeded in an unprecedented act of political hijacking; they had taken over Berchtold's war against Serbia, and had forced it instead to take them to their own war against France and Russia.

CHAPTER 50: COULD IT
HAPPEN AGAIN?

In the aftermath of the First World War—in the 1920s and 1930s—the survivors came to look upon that disastrous conflict as a European civil war. To have ignited it was condemned either as a ghastly mistake or as a dreadful crime. The overriding lesson of the catastrophe was deemed to be that humankind never must allow such a thing to happen again.

Of course it
did
happen again when, in 1939–45, the Allies— France, Britain, Russia, and the United States—continued the fight that had not been resolved in 1914–18. But then actual hostilities among the surviving powers—Britain, Russia, and the United States— did
not
develop when they failed to reach agreement on the peace terms that ought to have ended the two parts of the 1914–45 world war. They turned instead to a war that was "cold."

In managing the
Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, U.S. President
John F. Kennedy was haunted by what he believed he had learned from reading about the origins of World War I in
Barbara Tuchman's
The Guns of August.
He felt that the war had been the result of an unintended chain reaction.

The Kennedy generation was educated in the interwar years, at a time when the leading American text,
The Origins of the World War
by Sidney B. Fay, taught that none of the Great Powers had wanted a war among themselves. They had been caught up in the Great War nonetheless, for which Austria-Hungary was more responsible than the other countries, although not even Vienna deliberately brought the war about. Similar views were popularized by Tuchman, whose book reached a mass audience.

Based on the evidence available in those pre-Fischer times, Fay's teachings seemed to be close to the truth, and even in Europe, leading scholars and politicians arrived at conclusions much like his.

In his war memoirs, former British Prime Minister David Lloyd George famously claimed that "the nations slithered over the brink into the boiling cauldron of war without a trace of apprehension or dismay."
Raymond Aron, one of the greatest political thinkers of the twentieth century, saw in the story of July 1914 "the unleashing of the First World War which none of the principal actors consciously or directly wished for."

The lesson to be learned from the Great War, the world was told, is that governments must be careful not to lose control. They must not let confrontations inadvertently spill over into hostilities. They must not let small wars escalate into big wars. They must not let brushfires blaze into forest fires.

These are good lessons to learn, but it is not July 1914 that teaches them. It was no accident that Europe went to war at that time. It was the result of premeditated decisions by two governments. Once those two countries had invaded their neighbors, there was no way for the neighbors to keep the peace. That was true in World War II; at Pearl Harbor, Japan made the war-or-peace decision not merely for itself, but for the unwilling United States as well, by launching its attack. Nor had America any more choice in Europe in 1941; Hitler's Germany declared war on the United States, to which America was obliged to respond.

To repeat, it takes two or more to keep the peace, but only one to start a war. And that means that it
could
happen again. An aggressor can start a major war even today and even if other great powers desire to stay at peace—unless other nations are powerful enough to deter it.

At least one thing has changed greatly between then and now. In 1914 the coming of war was an almost complete surprise to the public. In the open world of today we would be likely to have at least some sort of advance warning. In turn, that would give peoples and parliaments at least a chance to make their views known. How much of a difference that might make is difficult to foretell.

CHAPTER 51: SUMMING UP

The international conflict in the summer of 1914 consisted of two wars, not one. Both were started deliberately. They were intertwined. They were started by rival empires that were bound together by mutual need. One war was launched by the Haps-burg Empire and the other by the German Empire. In each case the decision to launch a war was made by a few individuals at the top, whose peoples were unaware that such decisions were being considered, let alone made.

The wars were about power. Specifically, they were about relative ranking among the great European powers that at the time ruled most of the world. Both Germany and Austria believed themselves to be on the way down. Each started a war in order to stay where it was.

Austria's war on Serbia was, like so many terrible but small Balkan wars, one of history's minor episodes. It would have been soon forgotten had it not provided the German generals with the conditions they needed in order to start a war of their own: a European conflict, which grew into a global conflict. Although soldiers in the trenches for the four long years beginning in 1914 came to believe that the war was pointless, that was not so. It was about the most important issue in politics: who should rule the world.

The question was opened up in 1914 by the German war. In the decades that followed, new powers and forces arose to contest it. Whether Germany or Russia should control Europe, and whether Europe should continue to rule Africa and much of Asia, were issues that overlapped with rival ideologies: communism, fascism, Nazism, liberal democracy, and others. By the 1990s the question seemed finally to have been answered. Almost all the peoples in the world ruled themselves, rather than being ruled by foreigners; and most aspired to democracy, however defined.

The decision for war in 1914 was purposeful; and the war itself was not, as generations of historians have taught, meaningless. On the contrary, it was fought to decide the essential questions in international politics: who would achieve mastery in Europe, and therefore in the world, and under the banners of what faith.

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER 52: AUSTRIA'S WAR

From the beginning—which is to say, from mid-June, when Berchtold put his foreign office to work on a plan—Vienna's intent had been to crush Serbia without outside interference. To be able to focus all resources on the Serbian campaign was the Austrian dream. Vienna had declared war on Serbia July 28. Conrad von Hötzendorf, Austria's chief of staff, promptly sent half his army by railroad to the Serbian frontier, with the other half in reserve to back it up.

The
Austrians learned almost at once that they and their German ally had been working at cross-purposes. Vienna had planned its invasion of Serbia in the belief that Berlin would take steps to keep Russia out of the war. Instead Germany deliberately was pulling Russia
into
the war.

Germany opted for war during the week of July 27 and made its move final on July 31. Mobilization was ordered that day, to be followed by a declaration of war on Russia the following day. Moltke and his colleagues in Berlin told Conrad to forgo a Serbian campaign for the time being and instead to send the bulk of his army to the Russian frontier, leaving only a skeleton force to defend against a possible Serbian attack. If Conrad complied—if he recalled troops to new positions before they had taken up the old ones—he risked bringing about administrative confusion.

The logistics of such a move were challenging. In any event Conrad did not want to do it. He had been scheming to bring about a Serbian war for so many years that it must have seemed unbearable to give it up at the last moment—just as he had gotten agreement for it—in order to help Germany first. He decided that his forces would remain in the Serbian campaign for a while but then some would be withdrawn on August 18 and reassigned to the Russian front.

Conrad wanted to cash Germany's blank check before Germany had a chance to withdraw it. He was trying to launch the invasion of Serbia in August that he was supposed to have initiated—and concluded—in July. In a letter to Moltke dated August 2, he explained that he was continuing to conduct his operations against Serbia in such a way as to keep Russia from entering the war.

One of the things that emerges from Conrad's various explanations is that he did not understand that Germany's policy and objectives had changed. On July 5–6 the Kaiser had hoped—and had been sure—that Europe would remain inactive on the sidelines while Austria succeeded in crushing Serbia. Germany's policy had been to persuade Russia, France, Britain, and the others to stay out. Now, animated by Moltke, Falkenhayn, and their colleagues, Berlin had reversed itself. Conrad was being told that Germany no longer was backing Austria's war and that Austria now had to back Germany's war.

Moltke and Conrad never had really coordinated their war plans fully. Since each proposed to use the other for his own purposes, the two army chiefs may have felt they could not afford to be too open with one another. In any event, they were paying the price for it in the opening months of the war, as each attempted to go his own way and to get his own way.