July 1914: Countdown to War (31 page)

Of course, Kaiser Wilhelm II himself was hardly devoid of responsibility for Germany’s disastrous diplomacy in July. It was he, not Bethmann, who had first offered the Austrian ambassador a blanket promise of support on Sunday, 5 July; he who, just like Bethmann, had all along urged speedy, decisive action against Serbia; and he who, like Bethmann, had failed to take the slightest interest in the text of the Austrian ultimatum before it was too late to revise it. In fact, so far from wishing that Austria modify its terms to make them acceptable to Belgrade, when one of Wilhelm’s ambassadors (Baron Schoen in Paris) had suggested that Austria do this to win international sympathy, the kaiser had furiously scribbled in the margins: “
Ultimata
are either accepted, or they are not! There is no discussion! That is why they have the name!” (Wilhelm may have been unaware of just how much effort the Austrians had put into denying that their “note with a time limit”
was
an ultimatum.)
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In truth the kaiser, Bethmann, and (after he returned from his honeymoon) Jagow had cooked up the broth together. They, along with Germany’s military service chiefs, would now eat it.

S
HORTLY AFTER THREE PM
on Monday afternoon, Moltke and Jagow arrived in Potsdam to meet with the kaiser and the chancellor. Although Tirpitz was not called in, Admiral Müller, chief of the naval cabinet, attended in his stead. In view of the momentous developments of recent days, this should have been a council of decisive importance. With Austrian and Serbian mobilizations underway, Germany’s civilian and military leaders needed urgently to decide what posture to take regarding a prospective war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia. Next in importance was how to respond to reports of a secret early
mobilization in Russia. There was also British foreign secretary Grey’s four-power conference proposal; whether or not Germany would play along fully, she needed at least to finesse the issue so as to prevent an open breach with Britain. While input from everyone was needed, it was up to Bethmann to get everyone on the same page and devise a sensible policy course. No one else had access to all the reports pouring into Berlin; no one else had the urgent duty, as head of government, to make sense of them.The chancellor, alas, was not up to the job. Unless it entirely escaped everyone’s recollection afterwards, neither Bethmann nor Jagow seems to have mentioned Pourtalès’s report of his dramatic Sunday evening confrontation with Russian foreign minister Sazonov, deciphered in Berlin just past ten
PM
, nor Eggeling’s report of his frustrating encounter with War Minister Sukhomlinov, which reached the Wilhelmstrasse at two thirty
AM
on Monday. Instead the basis for discussion remained Pourtalès’s earlier, more optimistic Sunday telegram in which he had surmised that Sazonov was “losing his nerve.” Bethmann seems also to have seized on a Sunday night report from Ambassador Schoen, in Paris, that Prime Minister Viviani was going to try to exercise a moderating influence in St. Petersburg (how the French premier would do this from the Baltic Sea was left unsaid).
⁹
Meanwhile Grey’s four-power proposal, however unattractive to the Germans’ localization policy, could be and was interpreted as a sign that England was keen to prevent a European war, even if her method of doing so was questionable. Then, too, the rumor that Serbia’s reply to the Austrian ultimatum had been mild—agreeing on “nearly all points,” as Bethmann had wired the kaiser Monday morning—suggested that there might be a way out of the diplomatic impasse (strangely, however, Bethmann had still not bothered to read the actual reply, although a copy had arrived at the Wilhelmstrasse late Sunday evening).
¹⁰
Put together in this selective fashion,
the documents available as of early Monday afternoon, 27 July, were reassuring enough as to lull Bethmann into a posture of complacency.

He was not alone in adopting this attitude. Before heading to Potsdam, Moltke had written to his wife that “the situation continues to be extremely obscure. . . . It will be about another fortnight before anything definite can be decided.”
¹¹
While no transcript of the Potsdam meeting survives, the evidence we do have suggests that nothing transpired there that jolted Moltke or the others awake. As General Plessen, the kaiser’s adjutant, recorded in his diary afterwards: “The Austrians are not nearly ready! It will be the beginning of August before operations can begin. It is hoped to localize the war! England declares she means to remain neutral. I have the impression that it will all blow over.”
¹²
Müller, likewise, wrote after the meeting that “the tenor of our policy is to remain calm. To allow Russia to put herself in the wrong, but then not to shrink from war if it were inevitable.”
¹³
The Potsdam council of Monday, 27 July, resolved nothing. The Germans would wait and see.

Viewed in the context of what was going on elsewhere in Europe on that very day, the passive posture of Germany’s leaders seems astonishing. Monday morning at seven
AM
, the British First and Second Fleets, fortuitously concentrated at Portland Harbor off Dorset on the southern coast of England, had been scheduled to disperse following a test mobilization. On Sunday, Churchill, first lord of the Admiralty, had ordered them to stay in Portland. This “holding together” of the fleet fell well short of actual mobilization, but it was still a serious measure that kept Britain’s main naval forces facing Germany together.
¹⁴
Russia’s secret mobilization was also gathering steam on Monday. A full Russian artillery division was observed marching westwards from Kiev. From Riga, German intelligence reported that the Düna (Dvina) River had been mined; all rolling stock had
been commandeered for the army. Closer still to Berlin, the German consul in Warsaw telegraphed at three forty-five
PM
on 27 July:

Finally, and most significantly, Ambassador Tschirschky reported Monday afternoon from Vienna that, contrary to the previous day’s report that Berchtold was going to wait before declaring war, the Austrians, “in order to cut the ground out from any attempt at intervention,” would “make an official declaration of war [on Serbia] tomorrow, or at the latest the day after tomorrow.”
¹⁶

Rarely has a statesman been so far off the mark in reading the international situation as Bethmann was on Monday afternoon, 27 July. How could he have been so wrong? One possibility is that, just as he had sugarcoated his dispatches to the kaiser on Saturday and Sunday, he wanted to keep Wilhelm in the dark on Monday, so as to prevent his nervous sovereign from intervening to restrain the Austrians from invading Serbia. Buttressing this theory is the fact that Jagow, shortly after the Potsdam meeting, called in Britain’s ambassador, Sir Edward Goschen, to reject Grey’s mediation proposal.
¹⁷
There is also Bethmann’s strange incuriosity about the text of the Serbian reply, which he neither read nor presented at the Potsdam meeting. The text would not finally be dispatched to Potsdam until nine thirty
PM
Monday, and even then not by wire but by private courier. By the time it reached the Neues
Palais, Wilhelm was in bed. Germany’s sovereign would thus not see Serbia’s reply until Tuesday, 28 July—nearly three days after it had been handed over to Giesl in Belgrade. Some of the delay can be attributed to difficulties in transcribing and decoding the text (a Wilhelmstrasse log entry says the telegram from Vienna containing it was “somewhat illegible”).
¹⁸
But it is also likely that Jagow and Bethmann deliberately delayed its delivery to the kaiser, whom they expected might be impressed by its moderate wording and then seek to call off the Austro-Serbian war.

Some or all of this may be true. Following the fait-accompli policy, neither Bethmann nor Jagow was inclined to put the brakes on Vienna. They also had good motivation to hide the worst news from the kaiser. This does not explain, however, why they would have kept Moltke, too, in the dark; he was hardly one to shrink from a challenge. Nor was there any reason to conceal bad news from the other military leaders. In the end, the simplest explanation is the most convincing. Bethmann did not lay out the full picture of the international situation in Potsdam on Monday afternoon because he did not have it. Having to play catch up after returning to Berlin on Saturday, he had not yet digested all of Sunday’s dispatches by the time he met the kaiser at Wildpark Station at 1
PM
Monday—nor, of course, any of Monday’s key dispatches, which began arriving in the late afternoon. Tschirschky’s report announcing that Austria was about to declare war on Serbia was deciphered at the Wilhelmstrasse at 4:37
PM
, about the same time the Potsdam meeting was concluding. The reports from Russia announcing Monday’s alarming mobilization news began arriving only after 7
PM
. So desperate was Lichnowsky, Germany’s Anglophilic ambassador to London, to cling to his hopes for peace, meanwhile, that he failed to mention the critical news about the holding together of the British fleet in any of his three Monday dispatches. It may
be, of course, that Lichnowsky had not yet learned of Churchill’s action; in any case he did not report it.
*
¹⁹
Bethmann therefore remained unaware of the day’s three key pieces of news while at Potsdam, in part because the kaiser himself had insisted on being briefed immediately on his return. Had everyone waited three or four hours, the meeting might have taken on a very different air.

Of course, Bethmann had given the kaiser a selective, self-serving reading of the weekend’s confusing dispatches, and he might have done the same with Monday’s more unambiguously negative ones. So wedded was the chancellor to localization, and more broadly to the English rapprochement on which he had staked his entire foreign policy, that he seemed to be regarding the whole unfolding crisis through rose-colored glasses. By Monday night, however, not even Bethmann could ignore the signs, which all pointed toward a general conflagration. True, Austria’s plan to declare war immediately on Serbia, reported by Tschirschky, was ostensibly good news—the Germans had been demanding this for weeks. But the belated timing could not have been worse. With more disturbing news coming in every hour about far-reaching Russian mobilization measures, the hoped-for localization of the Austro-Serbian conflict looked like a mirage.

On top of this, Serbia’s cleverly crafted reply to the Austrian ultimatum, initially lost in the flurry of weekend events, was now receiving serious attention in Europe’s capitals—especially
at the Foreign Office in London, where Grey had returned Monday from Itchen Abbas. Already skeptical of Austrian intentions, the foreign secretary was floored by the Serbian reply, which he thought had met the Austrian demands “to a degree which he would never have thought possible.” Lichnowsky had found Grey “in a bad temper” on Monday. The foreign secretary was clearly losing patience with the Austrians—and with the Germans, whom he thought were doing nothing to hold them back. “The key to the situation,” Grey emphasized, “is Berlin and if Berlin seriously means peace, Austria can be restrained from pursuing a foolhardy policy.”
²⁰
He therefore requested that the Germans mediate at Vienna, working toward some kind of “agreement between Vienna and St. Petersburg on the basis of the Serbian note.” If no such agreement was reached and there was “an Austrian passage of arms with Serbia,” Grey told the German ambassador, then he would hold Berlin responsible.
²¹
Taking an uncharacteristically sharp tone, Lichnowsky therefore warned Jagow and Bethmann that “if war comes in these conditions, we shall have England against us.”
²²

Bethmann’s ultimate nightmare, a breach with Britain that left Germany opposed by three major powers in a European war, now stared him in the face. Encouraging the Austrians had all along been what the chancellor called a “calculated risk,” a kind of colossal bluff. As Bethmann had told his private secretary, Kurt Riezler, at Hohenfinow shortly after giving Vienna her blank check, there were three possible scenarios. The first was localization: a punitive Austrian strike that would erode Serbian prestige and lead to a favorable Balkan realignment, with Bulgaria and Romania falling in with the Central Powers. It is not that Bethmann necessarily expected that this would come to pass. He saw the second scenario, a “continental” war pitting Germany and Austria against France and Russia, as about as likely. Such a conflict posed manifest dangers, but it
could also allow Germany to “break the iron ring of encirclement,” if it could humiliate France, weaken Russia, and strengthen Austria. The last possibility was the worst of all: Britain would join France and Russia, turning the conflict into a world war. The odds against Germany winning the latter would be almost insurmountable. Urging on the Austrians against Serbia thus constituted, the chancellor had warned Riezler in a flourish of his characteristic fatalism, a “leap in the dark.”
²³

Riezler’s diary entries following Bethmann’s return to Berlin suggest a similar fatalism, as the beleaguered chancellor was rapidly overwhelmed by bad news. Bethmann, Riezler recorded on Saturday, “sees a fate greater than human power hanging over Europe and our nation.” At other times, he saw this “fate” not as supernatural but as outside his own control. It was not Germany, he kept repeating to himself and to Riezler, but rather Russia “on which the European peace solely depends.” On Sunday, Bethmann insisted that “only compelled by dire necessity will we unleash the sword, but then
with the clear conscience that we bear no guilt
for the nameless misfortune which war must bring to Europe’s peoples.”
²⁴