July 1914: Countdown to War (12 page)

Winston Churchill, Britain’s first lord of the Admiralty in 1914, at 39 years old, in his explosive, high-energy prime.
Source: Getty Images.

It is curious that neither Churchill nor Grey recalled anything of these momentous discussions in their memoirs. In Grey’s case, the omission—and his general ignorance of what was going on around him in 1914—may have been owing to faulty memory, in part caused by his failing health. All year he had suffered from deteriorating eyesight. In May, he was told that his condition was “probably irreversible.” Having had no luck with English doctors, Grey was planning a trip to Germany to see an ocular specialist sometime that summer, if he could ever find the time. His failing eyes, along with the burgeoning
Home Rule crisis, preoccupied him to such an extent that Grey seems barely to have understood what Benckendorff was talking about when he issued his protests about the Turkish dreadnoughts in May and early June. Neither then, nor later, did Grey perceive the nature of Russia’s strategic concerns over the Ottoman naval buildup. He was not unduly bothered by the Sarajevo incident, either—not enough for him to cancel a fishing trip that week. An avid outdoorsman and “master of the complex art of fly-fishing”—he had written a book on the subject—Grey was keen to enjoy his favorite hobby while his failing eyes still allowed him to pursue it.
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In Churchill’s case, it is not likely that poor memory accounts for his failure to recall the dreadnought discussions with Russia. Just thirty-nine years old, Churchill was entering his explosive, high-energy prime in the spring of 1914. Grey, having failed to inform Churchill of what was going on all through May, had brought the first lord of the Admiralty in on the discussions with Benckendorff only at the last minute in early June, and even then he had done nothing to explain what the whole thing was about. Churchill’s priority in June was not the Russian naval talks at all, but rather preparations for Fleet Week at Kiel, where the German and British fleets were staging joint maneuvers as part of an ongoing détente between the rival navies. Churchill had helped kick off the opening ceremonies at Kiel on Wednesday, 24 June, before returning to England that weekend. On Monday, 29 June, he learned about the assassinations, like most Britons, from the morning papers, which he picked up at the ferry terminal in Portsmouth en route to London and the Admiralty. More imaginative than Grey, Churchill, in his book
The World Crisis
, recalled being overcome by “a sudden and vivid feeling that something sinister and measureless had occurred. . . . I reflected that it would be nice to get our great vessels back from the Baltic soon.”
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Intriguing as this suggestion of geopolitical prescience is, the remark has the unmistakable
sound of literary license. In fact, there is no evidence that Churchill, after hearing the news from Sarajevo, ordered any precautionary naval measures or changed his daily routine any more than Grey did.

If Russia’s clearly stated desire to prevent Britain from destroying her strategic position in the Black Sea by selling dreadnoughts to the Ottoman navy did not register in the minds of Churchill or Grey in June 1914, it is hardly surprising that neither man took much interest in the news from the Balkans. Prime Minister Asquith, preoccupied with Ireland, had little time for foreign policy at all. The failure of Britain’s key policymakers to pay mind to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand was understandable. It did not bode well, however, for their ability to master events in case the Sarajevo outrage snowballed into a real crisis.

 
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It is not hard to see why. In one of Caillaux’s letters to his mistress, intercepted by his wife, he signed off with “a thousand kisses all over your adorable little body.”

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“In all my years at school,” Poincaré once wrote, “I saw no other reason to live than the possibility of recovering our lost provinces.”

K
AISER
W
ILHELM
II
WAS RACING HIS YACHT
in a regatta at Kiel on Sunday afternoon, 28 June 1914, when he saw a small motorized launch steaming toward him at full speed. Anxious to complete the race, he gestured for the boat to change its course. The man captaining the motorboat, Admiral Georg von Müller, responded with a still more emphatic gesture, urging the yacht to slow down as he had an important message for the kaiser. When the launch came in range, the admiral folded his message into a cigarette case and tossed it on board the yacht. Seeing his messenger, Wilhelm could not have been pleased. Müller, chief of the German naval cabinet and one of Wilhelm’s least favorite advisers, seemed to always bring him bad tidings. This time was no different. The kaiser opened Müller’s case, unfolded the message, and turned pale as he read the news from Sarajevo. He then ordered his crew to come about and abandoned the regatta.

Wilhelm was deeply saddened to learn of the loss of his friend, whom he had just visited two weekends previously at his estate at Konopischt, and no less so by the loss of the archduke’s wife. The kaiser, something of a social misfit himself despite his august lineage, had always had a soft spot in his heart
for this earnest, loving couple cast out by the Habsburgs. To get around the problem of court rank during official banquets at Potsdam, the kaiser had come up with the clever solution of seating everyone at smaller tables of four, so that he and his wife, Auguste, could sit alone with Ferdinand and Sophie, without any archduchesses complaining that they should have been placed ahead of her. The kaiser had always made a point of calling on Sophie when visiting Vienna and of addressing her by her proper rank. The Duchess of Hohenburg could have asked for no greater respect from a sovereign, nor her husband for a better friend and supporter.

It was not mere sentiment that led the kaiser to indulge the archduke’s morganatic marriage. With Franz Josef’s health failing, Wilhelm had been expecting Franz Ferdinand to inherit the Habsburg throne in the near future, a prospect he welcomed, not least because the kaiser’s relations with the aging emperor were far less cordial. The two friends had discussed far-reaching questions of European politics and diplomacy at Konopischt, reaching agreement on nearly all of them. The only real point of contention between them was over the Hungarian minister-president Tisza, whom Franz Ferdinand hated for Hungary’s persecution of its minorities. The kaiser thought Tisza intelligent and worth humoring, not least because the Hungarian was, publicly at least, advocating closer relations with Romania, notwithstanding his persecution of Romanians inside Hungary. Even here, the two friends had reached a rough accord, after the kaiser proposed that the archduke popularize a slogan for hoisting Tisza on his own petard: “But sir! Remember the Romanians!” The archduke, in turn, had tried to calm the kaiser’s fears about Russian saber-rattling, which he did not take seriously on account of Russia’s internal problems.
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It was painful for the kaiser now to recall this amiable discussion. He and Franz Ferdinand would never again discuss
affairs of state together nor, indeed, be able to enact those policies they hoped, perhaps optimistically, might help to defuse the Balkan powder keg. In a hostile international climate, Franz Ferdinand had been Wilhelm’s diplomatic anchor, the one man he could always count on. Now his anchor was gone. Like Berchtold and Conrad in Vienna, but unlike President Poincaré in Paris and Grey and Churchill in London, Germany’s sovereign was stopped cold by the news from Sarajevo. He called off all further engagements at Kiel and returned to Berlin.

He found the city nearly empty of imperial officials. The chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, was at his country estate at Hohenfinow. Helmuth von Moltke, Conrad’s counterpart as army chief of staff, was taking his annual cure at Carlsbad. The naval secretary, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, was summering at his estate in the Black Forest. Gottlieb von Jagow, state secretary for foreign affairs, was on his honeymoon in Italy.

The kaiser was therefore initially left alone to react to the news from the Balkans, without his usual coterie of advisers. Constitutionally speaking, this was not inappropriate. Under the German Imperial Constitution of 1871, the power to declare war, or to make peace, rested solely with Germany’s emperor as “supreme warlord,” not with the Reichstag. Only the upper house of Parliament, the Bundesrat, had the power to veto a declaration of war. In foreign policy more generally, there was no countervailing power to the emperor whatever, beyond the ability of the Reichstag to influence it by vetoing spending bills. As sovereign of the country with the most powerful army—and second most powerful navy—in Europe, the kaiser therefore bore an awesome responsibility. Whether the Austrian-Serbian dispute over the Sarajevo incident would spark a major European war would depend largely, although not exclusively, on him.

Wilhelm II was one of the most fascinating, if often misunderstood, statesmen of his era. Born in the breech position after a grueling ten-hour labor his mother barely survived, he
had suffered nerve damage that crippled his arm. By the time he reached adulthood, Wilhelm’s left arm was six inches shorter than his right and all but useless. It was his peculiar misfortune to become supreme warlord of a country with a proud martial tradition, while being unable to cut his own meat at table, let alone handle weapons properly. Understandably, this led to an insecurity complex, a need for constant attention and acclaim. As one of his many critics put it, the kaiser needed to be “the stag at every hunt, the bride at every wedding, and the corpse at every funeral.”
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Kaiser Wilhelm II, striking an implausible warrior’s pose. It was his strange misfortune to be supreme warlord of a country with a proud martial tradition, while being unable to use his left arm properly.
Source: Bain News Service, Library of Congress.

Eager for praise, taking offense at the merest slight, the kaiser was a difficult man to work for. Bismarck had disdained
to gratify Wilhelm II’s fragile ego after he became emperor in 1888, which led to his sacking two years later. The only other chancellor serving under Wilhelm II to approach Bismarck in terms of accomplishment, Bernhard von Bülow, had likewise been fired in June 1909, in part because he had failed to defend his sovereign forcefully enough after an embarrassing interview with the kaiser was published in the English
Daily Telegraph
in October 1908. In this disastrous interview, Wilhelm II had managed to insult the English, frighten the French, anger the Russians, and threaten the Japanese. The affair had so damaged Wilhelm II’s reputation that many German papers had called for his abdication. Chastened, the kaiser had gone into hibernation for much of the winter, reemerging only the following spring, when he pressed for Bülow’s resignation.

The
Daily Telegraph
affair was emblematic of Wilhelm II’s erratic statesmanship, but it was also misleading about his real character. In England, the kaiser had long been suspected of warlike tendencies due to his promotion of Germany’s High Seas Fleet, which seemed so clearly aimed at upending British naval supremacy (it had not escaped the Admiralty’s notice that Germany’s own dreadnoughts had storage room for only enough coal to reach the North Sea, allowing more space for guns).
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When the kaiser personally visited Tangier in March 1905, precipitating a diplomatic crisis over Morocco for what appeared to be no good reason, it seemed to French and English policymakers that his real aim was to start a European war before their nascent entente of 1904 had produced real military cooperation. The belligerent tone of his remarks during the
Daily Telegraph
interview crystallized Wilhelm II’s reputation as a warmonger.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. As those who knew him best understood, the kaiser’s bluster was a classic case of loud bark and little bite. The last thing he wanted was a war with England. As the grandson of Queen Victoria,
Wilhelm II longed for the approval of his English cousins and the English more generally. His enthusiasm for the High Seas Fleet, like his foolish outburst with the
Daily Telegraph
, was rooted in his craving for English respect, even if his provocative actions and reckless words tended to produce precisely the opposite effect on their intended audience. The kaiser was simply not subtle enough to realize that naval blackmail and thumping talk would annoy and frighten British policymakers, not impress them.