July 1914: Countdown to War (18 page)

Despite the latest delay occasioned by Tisza, the new plan had much to recommend it. The twenty-fifth of July was a bit later than Conrad wanted, but by that date even the last two furloughed army corps, the VI and VII, would be back on duty.
Moreover, “radio silence,” as Berchtold realized once he had thought it over, would work better on the return than on the outward voyage. By waiting until Poincaré left before showing its hand, Austria could deny France and Russia any chance to coordinate during the summit. Poincaré, by well-deserved reputation the most belligerent statesman in either Paris or Petersburg, would miss his chance to put steel into Sazonov and the tsar when they learned of the Serbian ultimatum. Austria would then lay down her fait accompli when Poincaré was at sea, unable to react. It was a cynical plan—but also brilliant.

Brilliant but not foolproof. If the French or the Russians got wind of the Austrian ultimatum early, they could coordinate a response to it over champagne toasts—with the added, enraging motivation that Berchtold had tried to snooker them. The ultimatum would therefore have to be handled in the strictest possible secrecy (aside from keeping the German ambassador more or less in the loop): any leak picked up by a hostile power could be fatal. With London engulfed in the Irish crisis and Paris consumed by the Caillaux affair, it would not be that difficult to keep the English and the French off the scent. The Russians, of course, might be more suspicious. Still, the Austrian embassy in Petersburg was able to inform the Ballplatz on Tuesday, 14 July, that Sazonov had left the capital for his country estate near Grodno. Russia’s foreign minister would not return to his office until Sunday—the very day the Ministerial Council would approve the final text of the ultimatum. If Berchtold could keep things under wraps until then, the “radio silence” plan might succeed. It was a big if.

SATURDAY, 18 JULY

A
USTRIAN EFFORTS TO KEEP THE ULTIMATUM
secret were thorough. Sending Chief of Staff Conrad and War Minister Krobatin out of town on “vacation leave” was a clever smokescreen, which seems to have taken in even the Russian ambassador, Nikolai Shebeko, who reported this without evident suspicion in a 16 July dispatch to Foreign Minister Sazonov.
¹
But for a twenty-four-hour visit to Vienna for the Ministerial Council on Sunday, 19 July, the über-belligerent Conrad remained at Innichen, a south Tyrolean resort town near the Italian border, from Tuesday, 14 July, until Wednesday, 22 July, which had the important side benefit of preventing him from talking to anyone. Harvest leave continued for enlisted men, and vacationing officers, too, remained undisturbed.

Meanwhile, Berchtold instructed his diplomats to take a conciliatory tone in their discussions with representatives of foreign powers, while avoiding all mention of the Sarajevo outrage in his own utterances. Perhaps not entirely trusting himself, Berchtold called off his usual weekly reception for foreign ambassadors, meeting with them only privately and on request. Luckily, the Austrian Reichsrat was out of session in July, which meant that the foreign minister would not have to answer any
awkward questions there. The Hungarian Diet was meeting in Budapest, but in that house it was Tisza who had to run the gauntlet. “The government,” Hungary’s minister-president replied in the Diet to a barrage of questions on the Balkan crisis, “is fully conscious of all the weighty interests in favor of the maintenance of peace . . . [and] is not of the opinion that the clearing up of the [Serbian] question will necessarily involve warlike complications.” Tisza conceded that “every state . . . must be in a position to carry on war as an
ultima ratio
,” but then declared cryptically that he would not “indulge in any prophecies” as to whether war with Serbia was imminent.
²
Berchtold could not have said it better himself—in fact, he probably could not have said this at all. Tisza, simply by being his usual cautious, war-wary self, was able to dispel a good deal of suspicion about Vienna’s intentions regarding Serbia.

Still, the general air of frenzied activity at the Ballplatz was hard for Berchtold to hide, no matter how hard he tried. Diplomatic professionals across Europe had been expecting some kind of response from the dual monarchy ever since the Sarajevo outrage. Spies and informants were crawling over Vienna, hoping to tease out the truth about what Berchtold was up to. Ordinary journalists, too, were chasing down every source they could find to pick up the slightest hint about Austrian intentions. A single leak, from any source, that reached the ears of a hostile ambassador might ruin Berchtold’s plans by allowing France and Russia to coordinate a response to the forthcoming ultimatum during the Petersburg summit.

In the end, it was Berchtold himself who slipped. As early as Monday, 13 July, the foreign minister had invited an old friend, Count Heinrich von Lützow, to sit in on his discussions with German ambassador Tschirschky and Count Johann Forgách, chief of section in the Ballplatz. Lützow, now sixty-two years old, had served as Austro-Hungarian ambassador to Italy
from 1904 to 1910, but had thereafter been sent into early retirement. Because he was senior to Berchtold, the foreign minister treated the retired Lützow as a kind of “wise man” elder, outside the chain of command in the Foreign Ministry, who could offer him blunt advice without worrying about upsetting the chief. During the Monday audience, Lützow had warned Berchtold that the idea of “localizing” a conflict with Serbia was a “fantasy.”
³

So concerned was Lützow by what he had heard of Berchtold’s plans that he resolved to tell someone about it. The old diplomat left Vienna on Tuesday for his country estate, where, it happened, one of his closest neighbors was Britain’s ambassador to Vienna, Sir Maurice de Bunsen, with whom Lützow often dined. Over luncheon on Wednesday, 15 July, Lützow recounted for his British friend the conversation he had just had with Berchtold regarding the Balkan crisis. Lützow, de Bunsen recalled, “put on a serious face and wondered if I knew how grave the situation was.” The dual monarchy, Lützow warned de Bunsen, “was not going to stand Serbian insolence any longer. . . . A note was being drawn up and would be completed when the Sarajevo enquiry was finished. . . . No futile discussion would be tolerated. If Serbia did not at once cave in, force would be used to compel her.”
⁴

Britain’s ambassador wasted no time returning to Vienna to share this stunning coup with London. On Thursday, 16 July, de Bunsen reported to Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey that “a kind of indictment is being prepared against the Serbian Government for alleged complicity in the conspiracy which led to the assassination of the Archduke.” De Bunsen’s source, he informed Grey, was “language held by the Austrian Minister for Foreign Affairs to a friend of mine.” This “friend,” Grey learned, had further informed de Bunsen that “the Serbian Government will be required to adopt certain definite measures in restraint
of nationalist and anarchist propaganda, and that Austro-Hungarian Government are in no mood to parley with Serbia, but will insist on immediate compliance, failing which force will be used. Germany is said to be in complete agreement with this procedure.”
⁵
De Bunsen’s “friend,” he confessed the next day, was Lützow.

Astonishingly, Berchtold does not seem to have told his adviser to keep his mouth shut when speaking with de Bunsen. As far as we can glean from Lützow’s memoirs, his own intention was to frustrate Berchtold’s designs by warning the British about what was brewing, in the hope that they might act to restrain Serbia, France, and Russia. If so, then he had committed an act of gross insubordination—except for the fact that, as a retired diplomat, he was not bound by the foreign minister’s instructions. As Berchtold’s senior, moreover, Lützow may not have felt the need to hew to a policy he clearly disagreed with. Whatever the truth about Lützow’s motivations, it does not speak well of Berchtold’s discipline that he spoke so freely with a retired diplomat, however senior, without expressly forbidding him from betraying his confidence to foreigners.

De Bunsen sought out Berchtold on Friday to enquire further. Seemingly unaware that his colleague had just spilled the beans, the foreign minister put on an impressive display of insouciance. Berchtold had been utterly “charming,” de Bunsen reported happily to London. He promised to visit de Bunsen’s estate in the country shortly and invited the Briton to visit his own estate at Buchlau. Berchtold “never mentioned general politics or the Serbians.” Mostly, the Austrian seemed exercised by an upcoming horse race he had thoroughbreds running in. Showing characteristic British reserve, de Bunsen did not interrupt this amiable discussion to demand clarification on Lützow’s revelations about Austrian plans to send an ultimatum to Serbia. Nor did Grey, after receiving de Bunsen’s explosive
dispatch from Vienna, press his ambassador for more information on the matter. In a follow-up dispatch sent on Saturday, 18 July, de Bunsen all but endorsed Berchtold’s protestations of innocence, reporting that the Italian ambassador had told him that he “does not believe that unreasonable demands will be made on Serbia” because neither the timid Berchtold nor the cautious Emperor Franz Josef “would sanction such an unwise proceeding.” De Bunsen then dropped the matter, at least in his correspondence with London.
*
British incuriosity, it appeared, had saved Austria’s foreign minister from the consequences of Lützow’s undisciplined tongue.
⁶

W
ITH THE
R
USSIANS
, Berchtold would not be so lucky. Foreign Minister Sazonov was in the Russian countryside, incommunicado, until Saturday, but during his absence his ambassador to Vienna, Nikolai Shebeko, would display much greater curiosity—and suspicion—than did his British counterpart. While Shebeko, as a “hostile” ambassador, was not favored with the confidence of Lützow, much less Berchtold’s, he was favored with that of the British ambassador, who passed on the gist of Lützow’s story to the Russian. As Shebeko later recalled, on Thursday afternoon, 16 July, he learned from de Bunsen that “there had been a discussion” earlier that week at the Ballplatz, between Berchtold and Forgách, “on the terms of a note which, when the inquiry would have terminated, the Austrian Government had decided to present to the Serbian Government.
This note was drafted in extremely stiff terms and contained demands unacceptable to any independent State.”
⁷
Although he was not able to confirm this independently, Shebeko was confident enough of his source to inform the Russian Foreign Ministry that “information reaches me that the Austro-Hungarian government at the conclusion of its inquiry intends to make certain demands on Belgrade, claiming that there is a connection between the question of the Sarajevo outrage and the pan-Serb agitation within the confines of the monarchy.” Unlike his British counterpart, Shebeko was in no doubt as to the gravity of the moment. He asked Sazonov urgently to inform “the Vienna cabinet” as to “how Russia would react to the fact of Austria’s presenting demands to Serbia such as would be unacceptable to the dignity of that state.” The Habsburg ambassador to Russia, the Hungarian Count Friedrich Szapáry, Shebeko further informed Sazonov, had left Vienna the previous evening (Wednesday, 15 July), and would arrive in Petersburg shortly.
⁸

Britain’s ambassador had first picked up the hint of Austrian intentions from Lützow, but it was the Russians who would make use of the information. Russian cryptographers had, over the past several years, broken many of Austria’s diplomatic codes. While Berchtold had been careful to forbid the sending of cables to Petersburg mentioning the ultimatum itself, he had been less careful regarding its timing. On Tuesday, 14 July, Berchtold had wired directly to the Austro-Hungarian embassy in Petersburg, demanding to know when the French delegation would leave town following Poincaré’s summit with the tsar. This suspicious telegram had been decoded by Russian cryptographers by Tuesday evening. Knowing now what to look for, the Russians then intercepted two more reply telegrams on Thursday and Friday, 16–17 July, which informed Berchtold that Poincaré would embark at sea on his return voyage to France on the evening of Thursday, 23 July.
⁹
From Shebeko (via de Bunsen
and Lützow) the Russian Foreign Ministry was able to learn—roughly at least—what Berchtold intended to do. From their own cryptographers, the Russians learned exactly when he planned to do it. When Sazonov returned from the country, he would have a great deal to catch up on.

The man working the wires in Sazonov’s absence was his chief of staff, Baron Moritz Schilling. Equivalent in rank and function to Zimmermann in Berlin and Hoyos in Vienna, Schilling would play a role no less important than they in the unfolding diplomatic drama. Even before reading Shebeko’s ominous Thursday dispatch from Vienna, Schilling had begun to have his own suspicions about Austrian intentions based on a conversation he had that very night with the Italian ambassador to Russia, Marquis Carl Carlotti di Riparbella. Carlotti had told Schilling that “it was his impression that Austria was capable of taking an irrevocable step with regard to Serbia based on the belief that, although Russia would make a verbal protest, she would not adopt forcible measures for the protection of Serbia.” Schilling himself felt that Russia was “firmly determined not to permit any weakening or humiliation of Serbia,” but he thought it best if Italy, as an ally (nominally, at least) of Austria-Hungary, or better still Germany, put this warning to Vienna on Russia’s behalf. If the Russians themselves “made such a declaration in Vienna,” Schilling explained to Carlotti, “it would perhaps be regarded as an ultimatum, and so render the situation more acute.” Then, too, Schilling, as a mere chief of staff, was not authorized to stipulate as to Russian policy. He would, however, immediately upon his return to town, inform Russia’s foreign minister of Carlotti’s warning.
¹⁰