Europe's Last Summer (41 page)

Conrad had wanted Russia deterred. He much preferred not to go to war with the Russians—or the French, or, later, the British, or, later still, the Americans. Germany's role, as Conrad saw it, was to keep Russia out of the fight—not to bring it into the conflict. The only country Conrad wanted to fight in the summer of 1914 was Serbia.*

*Conrad was bellicose, and in other circumstances would happily have waged war against such neighbors as Italy.

But as pre-Sarajevo history demonstrated, Germany did not see Serbia as a danger. It felt no need to eliminate the Balkan kingdom. It was Conrad and his government that feared Serbia. Moltke feared Russia and its ally France. From Germany's point of view, the only use for the Serbian conflict was that it bound Austria to remain faithful to Germany in Germany's war against Russia and France. By August 1, 1914, that goal had been accomplished. From Moltke's point of view, the Serbian affair had served its purpose. But from Conrad's perspective it had not.

Hence Conrad played truant in the opening weeks of the two intertwined wars: he ordered his soldiers to ride the trains south instead of north. In doing so he stole for his country a fleeting chance to engage in its private duel with Serbia, one against one. His armies invaded Serbia. They brought the Serbians to battle. And—crushingly, overwhelmingly—the Austrians lost!

The Hapsburg armies never seemed to have recovered from their initial mislocations and dislocations. After attacking Serbia and being defeated, their private war was concluded, and they joined the wider conflict. They moved to the Russian front and were crushed there too.

By the beginning of December 1914 the Hapsburg Empire, according to John Keegan, no longer was a military great power; he tells us that it had lost 1,268,000 men out of 3,350,000 mobilized. Austria fought on, under German high commanders, in a struggle not so much to conquer as to survive.

Conrad was in despair. At the start of the war, awarded a medal, he had remarked: "If only I knew for what." As the failures mounted he confided to colleagues that if he lost the war it would "cost him the comfort of his beloved Gina." He was overcome by self-pity. All the blame, he reflected, would be "unloaded on to me. I will probably have to disappear from the scene like an outlaw. I have no home, no woman who will stand by my side in my final years."

He remembered his sometime mentor, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who cared so much for his beloved Austrian army, and who, year after year, had opposed the plans to fight Serbia and to estrange Russia: the Archduke, whose murder had been exploited cynically by Vienna in order to bring about the very war he so ardently opposed. Franz Ferdinand's shadow loomed large over the world that summer. What would he have thought? What would he have said? What would he have done? Had the Archduke still been alive, Conrad had to admit, he "would have had me shot."

CHAPTER 53: GERMANY'S WAR

Berchtold (especially in July) and Conrad (especially in August) were the active agents who led Austria into a war with Serbia. They did so with full support from the cabinet and the foreign office of the Dual Monarchy, and with at least the approval of the elderly emperor. There is no question that the two of them did it—and meant to do it. The only question in that regard is the extent to which Berchtold was influenced by his foreign office staff.

Berchtold frequently is named as the single person who also was most responsible for the wider war. That, as we can see now, is not true. The accusation confuses the two wars. What he wanted was the Serbian war, not the other one. He was willing to risk a wider conflict if he had to, but he did not desire it.

It was Moltke who wanted a war against Russia and France. He always had held back—or had been held back—from initiating such a war in past crises because the circumstances never had been quite right. Everything had to be in place: the Kaiser's authority had to be on the wane, Austrian participation had to be assured, and Russia had to look like the aggressor. Suddenly, toward the end of July 1914, all
did
fall into place. Moltke leaped at the chance; he saw that his hour had come, and he seized it. His artful substitution of his war for Berchtold's on Berlin's July agenda was a sort of confidence trick that kept generations afterwards in the dark as to who caused what. He had exchanged early July's policy for a late July policy, and one war for another.

He could not have done it had he not represented a force bigger than himself. He represented the Prussian Junker officer caste whose militarization of German life led to the war. Germany's militarist culture had been identified in 1914 as the cause of the coming war by, among others, Colonel House.

Germany declared war on Russia August 1. Its proposed timetable was the Moltke plan. The plan called for the German army to meet its rendezvous with destiny on French soil in six weeks. There and then it would bring France, Russia's ally, to battle. The battle would be decisive. It was intended to knock France out of the war, out of the Russian alliance, and out of the political history of Europe.

Six weeks after August 1 the German army did indeed meet its rendezvous with destiny on French soil. For friends of France and Britain, it was a heart-stoppingly close-run thing; the Germans almost won it. Instead France and Britain did. And the battle—the
first battle of the Marne—was decisive. What it decided was that neither side could gain a quick victory or a real victory. Instead, the conflict was to become an endurance contest lasting four years, and ruining victor and vanquished alike. Nor were its results in 1918 conclusive, for the parties did not accept them as such.

The war between Germany, on one side, and Russia, France, Britain, and the United States, on the other, resumed in 1939–41; and it too failed to resolve the question of which power would be supreme on the Continent—and whether the United States and Britain would accept that supremacy. The conflict that Germany's military leaders initiated by declaring war on Russia August 1, 1914, did not come to an end until the last Russian soldier left German soil on August 31, 1994.

For nearly a century, debate has raged among participants and then among scholars about the decisive battle with which the Moltke plan concluded: the battle of the Marne in September 1914. On the German side, the question was whether it was Moltke or his young envoy
Richard Hentsch who ordered the retreat and regroupment behind the Marne; and whether ordering the withdrawal was the correct decision or whether it snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. At the time thirty-three German generals were fired by the Kaiser. Shortly afterwards, Moltke, too, lost his job. Wilhelm was unforgiving.

Moltke obviously could not have foreseen the full hideousness of the long war of the twentieth century (the 1914 war that led to the 1939 war that led to the Cold War), nor the tens of millions who would die in it nor the multitude of consequences to which the war directly or indirectly would give rise. But he knew well enough who had started the war.

In June 1915, Moltke, who had been shifted to a job he regarded as of little importance, complained of this to his friend
General (Baron) Colmar von der Goltz. "It is dreadful to be condemned to inactivity in this war," he wrote to his friend:
"this war which I prepared and initiated"
(emphasis added). It is an arresting thought that, to the extent that any individual did so, this modest, unexceptional, and indeed rather ordinary career army officer started the Great War, and thereby ushered in the twentieth century, with all of its horrors and wonders.

APPENDIX 1: THE AUSTRIAN NOTE

Count Berchtold, Austrian minister for foreign affairs, to Count Mensdorff Austrian ambassador in London. (Communicated by Count Mensdorff, July 24
,
1914.)
(Translation.) (From British documents in Public Record Office.)

The Austro-Hungarian Government felt compelled to address the following note to the Serbian Government on the 23
^rd
July, through the medium of the Austro-Hungarian Minister at Belgrade:—

"On the 31
^st
March, 1909, the Serbian Minister in Vienna, on the instructions of the Serbian Government, made the following declaration to the Imperial and Royal Government:—

"Serbia recognises that the
fait accompli
regarding Bosnia has not affected her rights, and consequently she will conform to the decisions that the Powers may take in conformity with article 25 of the Treaty of Berlin. In deference to the advice of the Great Powers, Serbia undertakes to renounce from now onwards the attitude of protest and opposition which she has adopted with regard to the annexation since last autumn. She undertakes, moreover, to modify the direction of her policy with regard to Austria-Hungary and to live in future on good neighbourly terms with the latter.

"The events of recent years, and in particular the painful events of the 28
^th
June last, have shown the existence of a subversive movement wit the object of detaching a part of the territories of Austria-Hungary from the Monarchy. The movement, which had its birth under the eye of the Serbian Government, has gone so far as to make itself manifest on both sides of the Serbian frontier in the shape of acts of terrorism and a series of outrages and murders.

"Far from carrying out the formal undertakings contained in the declaration of the 31
^st
March, 1909, the Royal Serbian Government has done nothing to repress these movements. It has permitted the criminal machinations of various societies and associations directed against the Monarchy, and has tolerated unrestrained language on the part of the press, the glorification of the perpetrators of outrages, and the participation of officers and functionaries in subversive agitation. It has permitted an unwholesome propaganda in public instruction, in short, it has permitted all manifestations of a nature to incite the Serbian population to hatred of the Monarchy and contempt of its institutions.

"This culpable tolerance of the Royal Serbian Government had not ceased at the moment when the events of the 28
^th
June last proved its fatal consequences to the whole world.

"It results from the depositions and confessions of the criminal perpetrators of the outrage of the 28
^th
June that the Serajevo assassinations were planned in Belgrade; that the arms and explosives with which the murderers were provided had been given to them by Serbian officers and functionaries belonging to the Narodna Odbrana; and finally, that the passage into Bosnia of the criminals and their arms was organised and effected by the chiefs of the Serbian frontier service.

"The above-mentioned results of the magisterial investigation do not permit the Austro-Hungarian Government to pursue any longer the attitude of expectant forbearance which they have maintained for years in the face of the machinations hatched in Belgrade, and thence propagated in the territories of the Monarchy. The results, on the contrary, impose on them the duty of putting an end to the intrigues which form a perpetual menace to the tranquillity of the Monarchy.

"To achieve this end the Imperial and Royal Government see themselves compelled to demand from the Royal Serbian Government a formal assurance that they condemn this dangerous propaganda against the Monarchy; in other words, the whole series of tendencies, the ultimate aim of which is to detach from the Monarchy territories belonging to it, and that they undertake to suppress by every means this criminal and terrorist propaganda.

"In order to give a formal character to this undertaking the Royal Serbian Government shall publish in the front page of their 'Official Journal' of the 26 July the following declaration:—

" 'The Royal Government of Serbia condemn the propaganda directed against Austria-Hungary—i.e., the general tendency of which the final aim is to detach from the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy territories belonging to it, and they sincerely deplore the fatal consequences of these criminal proceedings.

" 'The Royal Government regret that Serbian officers and functionaries participated in the above-mentioned propaganda and thus compromised the good neighbourly relations to which the Royal Government were solemnly pledged by their declaration of the 31
^st
March 1909.

" 'The Royal Government, who disapprove and repudiate all idea of interfering or attempting to interfere with the destinies of the inhabitants of any part whatsoever of Austria-Hungary, consider it their duty formally to warn officers and functionaries, and the whole population of the kingdom, that henceforward they will proceed with the utmost rigour against persons who may be guilty of such machinations, which they will use all their efforts to anticipate and suppress.'

"This declaration shall simultaneously be communicated to the Royal army as an order of the day by his Majesty the King and shall be published in the 'Official Bulletin' of the Army.

"The Royal Serbian Government further undertake:

"1. To suppress any publication which incites to hatred and contempt to the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and the general tendency of which is directed against its territorial integrity;

"2. To dissolve immediately the society styled Narodna Odbrana, to confiscate all its means of propaganda, and to proceed in the same manner against other societies and their branches in Serbia which engage in propaganda against the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. The Royal Government shall take the necessary measures to prevent the societies dissolved from continuing their activity under another name and form;