The Sleepwalkers (87 page)

This sudden reversal produced almost comical levels of confusion at the French embassy. General Laguiche, the military attaché, was advised of the impending mobilization just after 10 p.m., but told by the Russians not to inform Ambassador Paléologue, lest the latter's indiscretion compromise the secrecy of the decision. But Paléologue learned of it an hour later from a different source (i.e. an indiscreet Russian) and immediately sent his first secretary, Chambrun, to the Russian foreign ministry to alert Paris by urgent telegram to the fact that a secret general mobilization was underway (the ministerial telegram link was chosen because it was feared that the French ciphers might not be secure; at the same time, Paléologue dispatched a telegram to the Quai d'Orsay in French cipher bearing the text: ‘Please collect from the Russian Embassy, as a matter of extreme urgency, my telegram no. 304'). On reaching the ministry, Chambrun bumped into Laguiche, who had just learned that the Tsar had rescinded the mobilization order. Laguiche ordered Chambrun to delete the section of his telegram referring to the decision ‘secretly to begin mobilization'. The telegram dispatched to the Russian embassy in Paris now merely announced the Russian mobilization against Austria, so that Viviani and his colleagues remained unaware of how close St Petersburg had come to a general mobilization. On the following morning, Paléologue was incandescent at the efforts of the military attaché and his own first secretary to obstruct his communications with Paris.

In any case, the partial mobilization announced on 29 July was not a sustainable arrangement. Partial mobilization posed insuperable difficulties to the Russian staff planners, because it threatened to disrupt the arrangements for a subsequent full mobilization. Unless the order were rescinded or replaced by an order for general mobilization within twenty-four hours, irreparable damage would be done to Russian preparedness for a westward attack. Early on the morning of 30 July Sazonov and Krivoshein conferred by telephone – both were ‘greatly disturbed at the stoppage of the general mobilization'.
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Sazonov proposed that Krivoshein request an audience of the Tsar in order to persuade him of the urgency of general mobilization. At 11 a.m., Sazonov and Yanushkevich met in the latter's office, and the staff chief set out once again the reasons for proceeding at once to general mobilization. Standing in the office of the chief of staff, Sazonov had a telephone call put through to the Peterhof palace. After some pained minutes of waiting, Sazonov heard the voice, unrecognizable at first, of a man ‘little accustomed to speaking on the telephone, who desired to know with whom he was speaking'.
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The Tsar agreed to receive Sazonov at three o'clock that afternoon (he refused to receive Krivoshein at the same time, because he hated it when ministers joined forces to form a lobby).

At the Peterhof, Sazonov was admitted immediately to the Emperor's study, where he found the sovereign ‘tired and preoccupied'. At the Tsar's request, the audience took place in the presence of General Tatishchev, who was about to return to his posting as Russian military attaché to the German Emperor. Sazonov spoke for fifty minutes, setting out the technical difficulties, reminding Nicholas that the Germans had rejected ‘all our conciliatory offers, which went far beyond the spirit of concession one would expect of a Great Power whose forces are intact' and concluding that ‘no hope remained of saving peace'. The Tsar ended the meeting with a final decision: ‘You are right, there is nothing else left than to prepare ourselves for an attack. Transmit to the chief of the general staff my orders of mobilization.'
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At last, with profound relief, Yanushkevich received the call he had been waiting for. ‘Issue your orders, General,' Sazonov told him, ‘and then – disappear for the rest of the day.' But Sazonov's fear that there would be another countermanding order proved groundless. Once again, it fell to General Dobrorolsky to make his way to the central telegraph office and transmit the telegram ordering a general mobilization. This time, everyone knew what was at stake. When Dobrorolsky entered the main hall of the telegraph office at around six p.m., ‘solemn silence reigned among the telegraphers, men and women'. Each was seated before his or her machine, waiting for the copy of the telegram. There was no messenger from the Tsar. Several minutes after 6 p.m., though the human operators remained silent, the machines began clicking and tapping, filling the hall with dense, purposeful rustling.
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The Russian general mobilization was one of the most momentous decisions of the July Crisis. This was the first of the general mobilizations. It came at a moment when the German government had not yet even declared the State of Impending War, the German counterpart to the Russian Period Preparatory to War which had been in force since 26 July. Austria-Hungary, for its part, was still locked into a partial mobilization focused on defeating Serbia. There would later be some discomfort among French and Russian politicians about this sequence of events. In the Orange Book produced after the outbreak of war by the Russian government to justify its actions during the crisis, the editors backdated by three days the Austrian order of general mobilization so as to make the Russian measure appear a mere reaction to developments elsewhere. A telegram dated 29 July from Ambassador Shebeko in Vienna stating that an order of general mobilization was ‘anticipated' for the following day, was backdated to 28 July and reworded to say ‘The Order for General Mobilization has been signed' – in fact, the order for Austrian general mobilization would not be issued until 31 July, to go into effect on the following day. The French Yellow Book played even more adventurously with the documentary record, by inserting a fictional communiqué from Paléologue dated 31 July stating that the Russian order had been issued ‘as a result of the general mobilization of Austria' and of the ‘measures for mobilization taken secretly, but continuously, by Germany for the past six days . . .' In reality, the Germans had remained, in military terms, an island of relative calm throughout the crisis.
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Why did the Russians take this step? For Sazonov, the decisive factor was undoubtedly the Austrian declaration of war on Serbia on 28 July, to which he responded almost immediately with a telegram to the embassies in London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin and Rome to the effect that Russia would announce on the following day the (partial) mobilization of the military districts adjoining Austria.
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(This is the telegram that was discussed by the French Council of Ministers on 29 July.) At this point, it was still important to Sazonov that the Germans be assured of the ‘absence on the part of Russia of any aggressive intentions regarding Germany' – opting for partial, as opposed to general, mobilization was part of that policy.
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Why, then, did he so rapidly shift from partial to general mobilization? Four reasons spring to mind. We have already considered the first, namely the technical impossibility of combining partial mobilization (for which no proper plan existed) with the option of a general mobilization thereafter.

A further factor was Sazonov's conviction – entertained from the beginning of the crisis, but increasingly indignant and dominant – that Austria's intransigence was in fact Germany's policy. This was an idea deeply rooted in Russian Balkan policy, which had for some time ceased to take Austria-Hungary seriously as an autonomous factor in European affairs – witness Sazonov's injunction to Bethmann at Baltic Port in the summer of 1912 not to encourage Austrian adventures. And it was reinforced by reports suggesting (correctly) that Germany was continuing to support the Austrian position, rather than pressuring its ally to back down. In his memoirs, Sazonov recalled receiving on 28 July, the day of the Austrian declaration of war on Serbia, a telegram from Ambassador Benckendorff in London reporting that a conversation with Count Lichnowsky (the German ambassador there) had ‘confirmed his conviction' that Germany was ‘supporting the obstinacy of Austria'. This was an idea of great importance, because it allowed the Russians to establish Berlin as the moral fulcrum of the crisis and the agent upon which all hope of peace rested. As Benckendorff pithily put it: ‘The key to the situation is clearly to be found in Berlin.'
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Sazonov himself articulated this view in a brief telegram dispatched to the Paris and London embassies on 28 July, in which he declared that he inferred from a conversation with the German ambassador to St Petersburg, Count Pourtalès, that ‘Germany favours the unappeasable attitude of Austria'.
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The Russian foreign minister's position hardened considerably on the following day, when Pourtales called in on him during the afternoon to read out a message from the German chancellor in which it was stated that if Russia continued with her military preparations, Germany too would find herself compelled to mobilize. To this, Sazonov, who viewed the chancellor's warning as an ultimatum, curtly replied: ‘Now I am in no doubt as to the true cause of Austrian intransigence,' prompting Pourtalès to rise from his chair and exclaim: ‘I protest with all my force,
M. le Ministre
, against this wounding assertion.'
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The meeting ended on a cold note. The point, as the Russian saw it, was that if Germany, despite its outward quiescence, was in fact the driving force behind Austrian policy, then partial mobilization made no sense, given the solidity of the Austro-German bloc – why not recognize the true nature of the threat and mobilize all-out against both powers? Finally, Sazonov's support for general mobilization was reinforced by the assurance given by Maurice Paléologue on 28 July, ‘on the instructions of his government', that the Russians could count ‘in case of necessity' on ‘the complete readiness of France to fulfil her obligations as an ally'.
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The Russians may even have felt confident at this early hour of British help. ‘Today they are firmly persuaded in St Petersburg, indeed they have even been assured of it,' wrote the Belgian military attaché Bernard de l'Escaille on 30 July, ‘that England will support France. This support carries enormous weight and has made no small contribution to giving the advantage to the war party.'
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Which ‘assurance' (if any) de l'Escaille was referring to and when exactly it became known is unclear, but he was almost certainly right that Russian leaders remained confident of British intervention, at least in the longer term.

Yet no sooner had the decision for general mobilization been reached and then accepted by the Tsar, but it was rescinded in favour of the officially agreed but unfeasible option of a partial mobilization against Austria. The reason for this lay fundamentally in the Tsar's fear and abhorrence of war, now that he faced the task of making it a reality. Virtually all of those who knew the Tsar and left behind written observations of the sovereign's personality agree that he combined two characteristics that were in tension with each other. One was a very understandable dread at the prospect of war and the disruption it would cause to his country; the other was a susceptibility to the elevated tone of nationalist politicians and rhetoric, a preference for men and measures that stirred patriotic emotion. What tilted the Tsar towards caution on 29 July was the arrival at 9.20 p.m., just as the order for general mobilization was about to be dispatched from the central telegraph office, of a telegram from Kaiser Wilhelm II, in which the Tsar's German cousin pleaded that his government was still hoping to promote a ‘direct understanding' between Vienna and St Petersburg and closed with the words:

Of course, military measures on the part of Russia which could be looked upon by Austria as threatening would precipitate a calamity we both wish to avoid, and jeopardise my position as mediator which I readily accepted on your appeal to my friendship and my help.
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Saying ‘I will not be responsible for a monstrous slaughter', the Tsar insisted that the order be cancelled. Yanushkevich reached for the phone to stay Dobrorolsky's hand, and the messenger was sent running to the telegraph office to explain that an order for partial mobilization was to be promulgated instead.

It is worth pausing for a moment to ponder on the fact that the impact of a telegram from the Emperor's third cousin in Berlin was sufficient to stay an order of general mobilization for nearly twenty-four hours. After the revolution of February 1917, the Russian revolutionary publicist and scourge of Tsarism Vladimir Burtsev was placed in charge of the Tsar's private papers, in which he discovered a cache of personal telegrams exchanged between the German and Russian emperors. Signing as ‘Willy' and ‘Nicky', the two men communicated with each other in English, adopting an informal, at times even intimate tone. The discovery of these documents was a sensation. In September 1917, the journalist Hermann Bernstein, who was reporting on the revolutionary events, published them in the
New York Herald
and they were reissued in book form (with a foreword by Theodore Roosevelt) four months later.
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The ‘Willy–Nicky telegrams', as they came to be known, have exerted an enduring fascination, partly because, reading them, one seems to be eavesdropping on a private conversation between two emperors from a now vanished Europe, and partly because they convey the sense of a world in which the destinies of nations still rested in the hands of extremely powerful individuals. In fact, both impressions are misleading, at least as far as the famous telegrams of 1914 are concerned. Those exchanged during the July Crisis were neither secret – since their existence was widely known and discussed
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– nor private. They were in effect diplomatic cables couched in the form of personal correspondence. At both ends of the conversation, the content was carefully vetted by foreign office personnel. They were an example of that curious monarch-to-monarch signalling that remained a feature of the European system until the outbreak of war, though in this case the monarchs were the transmitters, rather than the generators, of the signals exchanged. Their existence reflects the monarchical structure of the European executives, not the power of the monarchs to shape policy. The telegram of 29 July was exceptional: it arrived at a very special moment, when, for once, everything hung on the decision of the Tsar, not because he was the dominant player in the policy-making process, but because his permission (and signature) was required for an order of general mobilization. And this was a matter not of political influence as such, but of the residual military absolutism of the autocratic system. At a moment when the Tsar found it agonizingly difficult to give his assent – understandably, given the stakes involved – the telegram from ‘Willy' was enough to tip the balance away from general mobilization. But the effect lasted for less than a day, because both monarchs were merely articulating the fundamentally opposed positions of their respective executives. On the morning of 30 July, when the Tsar received a telegram from Wilhelm II reiterating the warning issued by Ambassador Pourtalès on the previous day, Nicholas II abandoned any hope that a deal between the cousins could save peace and returned to the option of general mobilization.
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