The Sleepwalkers (94 page)

The German civilian leaders, on the other hand, could see no alternative to an ultimatum, for this seemed the only possible way to strike a deal of some kind with Brussels and thereby keep Britain out of the war. The ultimatum, drawn up by Moltke on 26 July and subsequently revised by the Foreign Office in Berlin, was formulated to appeal to a reasoned Belgian appraisal of the national interest in the light of the huge imbalance in the forces engaged. The text opened by stating that the Germans believed a French attack through Belgian territory to be imminent and that the German government would view it as a matter of the ‘deepest regret if Belgium regarded as an act of hostility against herself the fact that the measures of Germany's opponents force Germany, for her own protection, to enter Belgian territory'. Then followed a series of points: Germany would (point 1) guarantee all Belgian territory and possessions, (point 2) evacuate Belgian territory as soon as hostilities were completed, and (point 3) cover all Belgian costs and damages with a cash indemnity. Should Belgium oppose the German troops, however (point 4), ‘Germany would, to her regret, be compelled to consider Belgium as an enemy'. But if this outcome were avoided, the ‘friendly ties that bind the two neighbouring states' would ‘grow stronger and more enduring'.
¹⁸⁸

Two telling last-minute changes were made to the note. The deadline offered for the Belgian reply was reduced from twenty-four to twelve hours at the request of Moltke, who was keen to get moving as quickly as possible. Second, a clause suggesting that the Belgians could, if they maintained a ‘friendly attitude', expect territorial compensation ‘at the cost of France' was deleted from the text because it had suddenly occurred to the Foreign Office that it might well enrage Britain even more than the intended violation of Belgian territory. That Bethmann had at first failed to see this does not cast a flattering light on his political judgement at the height of the crisis.
¹⁸⁹

From the moment when the German minister Below Saleske delivered the note to Davignon, the Belgian minister of foreign affairs, everything started to go horribly wrong for the Germans. Had Moltke simply barged through the south of Belgium, it might have been possible to frame the breach in terms of military expediency. But the note forced the Belgian government to articulate a principled view in advance of the anticipated action. The task of doing that fell to the Belgian king and to the head of the Belgian government Count Charles de Broqueville. De Broqueville brought a French translation of the text with him when he went to see the king at the palace at 8 p.m. There could be no doubt about how these two would respond. The Belgian king was famed for his uprightness and resolve and de Broqueville was a genteel, old-fashioned Belgian patriot. They viewed the note as an affront to Belgian honour – how could they have done otherwise? One hour later, at 9 p.m., the German ultimatum was discussed by the Council of Ministers and then by a Crown Council at which the portfolio ministers were joined by a number of distinguished statesmen with titular ministerial titles. There was no debate – it was clear from the outset that Belgium would resist. During the hours of darkness the ministry of foreign affairs composed a reply of profoundly impressive dignity and clarity, culminating in a high-minded rejection of the German offer: ‘The Belgian government, were they to accept the proposal submitted to them, would sacrifice the honour of the nation and betray at the same time their duties towards Europe.'
¹⁹⁰

On the morning of 3 August, the texts of the ultimatum and of the Belgian reply were shown to the French minister in Brussels, M. Klobukowski, who immediately passed the news to the Havas agency. A media storm swept through Belgium and the Entente countries, stirring outrage everywhere. In Belgium, there was an explosion of patriotic emotion. Across Brussels and other major towns, the streets filled with national flags; all the parties, from the anticlerical liberals and socialists across to the clerical Catholics, pledged their determination to defend their homeland and their national honour against the invader.
¹⁹¹
At the Chamber of Deputies, where the king spoke on 5 August of the need for national unity in defence of the fatherland and asked the assembled deputies, ‘Are you determined at any cost to maintain the sacred heritage of our ancestors?', there was delirious cheering from all sides.
¹⁹²
The German ultimatum thus turned out to be a ‘terrible psychological blunder'.
¹⁹³
It resonated in wartime propaganda, overshadowing the complexities of the war's causation and endowing the Entente war effort with an unshakeable sense of moral superiority.

Many Germans were shocked by the Belgian decision to resist
à l'outrance
. ‘Oh, the poor fools,' one diplomat at the German legation in Brussels exclaimed. ‘Oh, the poor fools! Why don't they get out of the way of the steamroller. We don't want to hurt them, but if they stand in our way they will be ground into the dirt. Oh, the poor fools!'.
¹⁹⁴
It was perhaps because they recognized this that the Germans renewed their appeal to Belgian reason only six days later, on 8 August. The fortress of Liège, so important to Moltke, had in the meanwhile been taken after a determined defence, at considerable cost in life. In a note passed to Brand Whitlock, the American minister in Brussels, the Berlin government expressed its regret at the ‘bloody encounters before Liège', and added:

Now that the Belgian army has upheld the honour of its arms by its heroic resistance to a very superior force, the German Government beg the King of the Belgians and the Belgian Government to spare Belgium the further horrors of war. [. . .] Germany once more gives her solemn assurance that it is not her intention to appropriate Belgium to herself and that such an intention is far from her thoughts. Germany is still ready to evacuate Belgium as soon as the state of war will allow her to do so.
¹⁹⁵

This offer, too, was rejected.

With the sequence of general mobilizations, ultimatums and declarations of war, the story this book set out to tell comes to an end. During his last meeting with Sazonov in St Petersburg on Saturday 1 August, Ambassador Pourtalès muttered ‘incomprehensible words', burst into tears, stammered ‘So this is the result of my mission!' and ran from the room.
¹⁹⁶
When Count Lichnowsky called on Asquith on the 2nd, he found the prime minister ‘quite broken', with tears ‘coursing down his cheeks'.
¹⁹⁷
In Brussels, the departing counsellors of the German legation sat on the edge of their chairs in a shuttered room among their packed boxes and files, mopping their brows and chain-smoking to master their agitation.
¹⁹⁸

The time of diplomacy was drawing to a close, the time of the soldiers and sailors had begun. When the Bavarian military plenipotentiary to Berlin visited the German ministry of war after the order for mobilization had gone out, he found ‘everywhere beaming faces, shaking of hands in the corridors; one congratulates oneself for having taken the hurdle'.
¹⁹⁹
In Paris on 30 July Colonel Ignatiev reported the ‘unconcealed joy' of his French colleages ‘at having the chance to use, as the French think, beneficial strategic circumstances'.
²⁰⁰
The First Sea Lord Winston Churchill was cheered by the thought of the impending struggle. ‘Everything tends towards catastrophe, & collapse,' he wrote to his wife on 28 July. ‘I am interested, geared-up and happy.'
²⁰¹
In St Petersburg, a jovial Alexander Krivoshein assured a delegation of Duma deputies that Germany would soon be crushed and that the war was a ‘boon' for Russia: ‘Depend upon us, gentlemen, everything will be superb.'
²⁰²

Mansell Merry, vicar of St Michael's, Oxford, had travelled to St Petersburg in mid-July in order to officiate over the summer months as chaplain at the city's English Church. When the order to mobilize was announced, he tried to make his escape by steamer to Stockholm. But his ship, the
Døbeln
, was confined to harbour – the lighthouses had been extinguished along the whole length of the Finnish Bight and the forts at Kronstadt had been ordered to fire at once on any boat that attempted to pass the minefield. On 31 July, an ugly, grey, blustery day in St Petersburg, Merry found himself confined on board with all the other would-be travellers, watching throngs of soldiers and naval reservists tramp along the Nicolaevskaya Quay. A few marched to the ‘lilting strains' of a brass band, but most ‘trudged along, bundle on back or in hand, in sullen silence, the womenfolk, many of them weeping as if their hearts would break, breathlessly struggling to keep pace with their husbands, sons or lovers on either side, as company after company [swung] past'.
²⁰³

In the small hours of the night of 1–2 August, the Boulevard du Palais in central Paris was filled with the same sound of marching men making their way in long columns northwards to the Gares de l'Est and du Nord. There was no music, singing or cheering, just the scraping of boots, the clip-clopping of hundreds of horses, the growl of motor lorries and the crunching of iron wheels on cobbles as artillery pieces rolled under the unlit windows of apartments, many of whose occupants must have lain awake or sleepily watched the sombre spectacle from their windows.
²⁰⁴

Public reactions to the news of war gave the lie to the claim, so often voiced by statesmen, that the hands of the decision-makers were forced by popular opinion. There was, to be sure, no resistance against the call to arms. Almost everywhere men went more or less willingly to their assembly points.
²⁰⁵
Underlying this readiness to serve was not enthusiasm for war as such, but a defensive patriotism, for the aetiology of this conflict was so complex and strange that it allowed soldiers and civilians in all the belligerent states to be confident that theirs was a war of defence, that their countries had been attacked or provoked by a determined enemy, that their respective governments had made every effort to preserve the peace.
²⁰⁶
As the great alliance blocs prepared for war, the intricate chain of events that had sparked the conflagration was swiftly lost from view. ‘Nobody seems to remember,' an American diplomat in Brussels noted in his diary on 2 August, ‘that a few days ago Serbia was playing a star rôle in this affair. She seems to have faded away behind the scenes.'
²⁰⁷

There were isolated expressions of chauvinist enthusiasm for the coming fight, but these were the exception. The myth that European men leapt at the opportunity to defeat a hated enemy has been comprehensively dispelled.
²⁰⁸
In most places and for most people, the news of mobilization came as a profound shock, a ‘peal of thunder out of a cloudless sky'. And the further one moved away from the urban centres, the less sense the news of mobilization seemed to make to the people who were going to fight, die or be maimed or bereaved in the coming war. In the villages of the Russian countryside a ‘stunned silence' reigned, broken only by the sound of ‘men, women and children weeping'.
²⁰⁹
In Vatilieu, a small commune in the Rhône-Alpes region of south-eastern France, the ringing of the tocsin brought workers and peasants into the village square. Some, who had run straight from the fields, were still carrying their pitchforks.

‘What can it mean? What is going to happen to us?' asked the women. Wives, children, husbands, all were overcome by emotion. The wives clung to the arms of their husbands. The children, seeing their mothers weeping, started to cry too. All around us was alarm and consternation. What a disturbing scene.
²¹⁰

An English traveller recalled the reaction in an Altai (Semipalatinsk) Cossack settlement when the ‘blue flag' borne aloft by a rider and the noise of bugles playing the alarm brought news of mobilization. The Tsar had spoken, and the Cossacks, with their unique military calling and tradition, ‘burned to fight the enemy'. But who
was
that enemy? Nobody knew. The mobilization telegram provided no details. Rumours abounded. At first everyone imagined that the war must be with China – ‘Russia had pushed too far into Mongolia and China had declared war.' Then another rumour did the rounds: ‘It is with England, with England.' This view prevailed for some time.

Only after four days did something like the truth come to us, and then nobody believed it.
²¹¹

‘I shall never be able to understand how it happened,' the novelist Rebecca West remarked to her husband as they stood on the balcony of Sarajevo Town Hall in 1936. It was not, she reflected, that there were too few facts available, but that there were too many.
¹
That the crisis of 1914 was complex has been one of the central contentions of this book. Some of that intricacy derived from behaviours that are still part of our political scene. The last section of the book was written at the height of the Eurozone financial crisis of 2011–12 – a present-day event of baffling complexity. It was notable that the actors in the Eurozone crisis, like those of 1914, were aware that there was a possible outcome that would be generally catastrophic (the failure of the euro). All the key protagonists hoped that this would not happen, but in addition to this shared interest, they also had special – and conflicting – interests of their own. Given the inter-relationships across the system, the consequences of any one action depended on the responsive actions of others, which were hard to calculate in advance, because of the opacity of decision-making processes. And all the while, political actors in the Eurozone crisis exploited the
possibility
of the general catastrophe as leverage in securing their own specific advantages.