Although many in the German army hungered for a world war now, before the French and Russian army procurement and manpower programs were complete, Moltke remained prudent, noting the obvious: with the world united in horror at Princip’s deed, which had at least a degree of Serbian government connivance, it would be better if Austria-Hungary seized the day, promptly invaded Serbia, and crushed the kingdom in single combat. Churchill, no friend of the Austrians, agreed that the murder was obscene, akin to Ireland launching a “pan-Celtic scheme to unite Ireland, Scotland and Wales” and assassinating the Prince of Wales “with weapons supplied from the Dublin Arsenal.”36 Even the Russians would find it hard to react, the kaiser predicting that Tsar Nicholas II would not enter a war “on the side of regicides.” Decision makers in Berlin were united in believing, like Lady Macbeth, that “if it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.”
In other words, Vienna had to exploit the momentum and sympathy of the crisis, cancel its vacations, and move. Mobilization was a three-week process: a week for reservists to report to their regiments, another week for the regiments to join their corps, and then a third week for the corps to join their armies on the frontier. Everyone was sufficiently confident that the Austrians would do the right thing that few summer leaves were canceled in the other great powers; on July 5, the kaiser told the Austro-Hungarian ambassador in Berlin that he “would be saddened if advantage were not taken of such a favorable juncture as the present one.” That was a bare-faced incitement to war, reinforced the next day by German chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, who urged the Austrians to strike, even if the “action against Serbia will lead to a world war.”37
Having summoned the war clouds, the kaiser then departed on his three-week cruise to the Norwegian fjords, Moltke returned to the healing waters of Karlsbad, and Falkenhayn and the key war ministry and general staff department heads and section chiefs scattered to the lakes, spas, beaches, and mountains.38 German chancellor Bethmann Hollweg even agreed that so long as Vienna’s punitive expedition unfolded swiftly, there would be no need to notify Rome and Bucharest, as the Triple Alliance demanded. “Austria,” Moltke wrote from his rest cure at Karlsbad, “must beat the Serbs and then make peace quickly, demanding an Austro-Serbian alliance as the sole condition,” tactlessly adding, “just as Prussia did with Austria in 1866.” The kaiser had given his blank check to Ambassador Szögyeni on the assumption that the Austrians would move fast—stepping across the Danube to corral the Serbian army and seize the Serbian capital—and present the world (and the Russians in particular) with a fait accompli.39
But “fast” was a word that had never been associated with the Austro-Hungarian military. The fact that Austria’s duel with Serbia in 1914 mushroomed into a world war had much to do with the sluggish decision making of the Austro-Hungarian government and the torpid deployment of the Habsburg army. At a meeting of the Common Ministerial Council on July 7, ten days after the assassination, Hungarian prime minister Tisza still argued for purely diplomatic pressure on the Serbs and refused to support a deliberately humiliating ultimatum that the Serbs would have to reject. Hungarian public opinion weighed heavily on the prime minister, as most Magyars shrank from war for three reasons. First, the archduke had planned to reduce the size and power of Hungary; no one in Budapest wept for him. Second, Hungarians did not want to add yet more Slavs to the monarchy, so a war for Balkan or Polish annexation made no sense to them. Third, Hungarians recognized that a great-power war would likely result in one of two outcomes, Russian or German domination of central Europe and the Balkans; neither outcome would favor Budapest.40
Nor was Tisza encouraged by Conrad’s review of the Austro-Hungarian plans for war. The staff chief was overconfident, suggesting that he had the means to strong-arm Serbia and fluidly shift forces to the Russian front as needed, so long as Russia’s intentions became clear “by the fifth day of mobilization.” He made no allowance for Tisza’s chief concern, which was that the Rumanians might seize upon the opportunity of an Austro-Russian war to invade and annex Habsburg Transylvania.41 No one in the room seemed to grasp the existential danger posed by Russia. The Romanovs could be beaten only if the Germans attacked them too, but the German Schlieffen Plan called for an attack on France first, which meant that the Austro-Hungarians would bear the brunt of the Russian steamroller. This too explained Tisza’s caution.
Another full week was consumed arguing with Tisza, who insisted that a war, far from ameliorating Austria-Hungary’s nationality problems, would “explode” them instead.42 Conrad and Krobatin took the opportunity presented by this Hungarian dawdling not to finalize their war plans but to prolong their summer vacations. The Austrian legation in Belgrade fulminated at the delay, writing Berchtold that the Serbs were using the respite to “finish their war preparations and buy time for a Russian intervention that will wear us down.”43 General Auffenberg—on a vacation of his own—ran into the vacationing Austro-Hungarian finance minister on July 10 in the Salzkammergut. Bilinksi was taking his customary summer holiday in the Alps and, despite being the Austro-Hungarian money man and civilian chief of Bosnia-Herzegovina, had no idea that the monarchy was about to shift to a war footing.44
Tisza only came round to the consensus war view on July 14, when he was reminded by his fellow Magyar and foreign policy advisor Count István Burián that to do nothing about Serbia’s mischief would merely embolden the Rumanians to practice the same destabilizing tactics in Transylvania, a largely Rumanian corner of Hungary coveted by Bucharest. Tisza did insist that no Serbian territory be annexed lest the monarchy’s nationalities problem become even more vexing, to which everyone hastily agreed, Conrad confiding to Krobatin: “We’ll see. Before the Balkan Wars, the powers also talked of the status quo; after the wars no one worried about it.”45
Another week was lost as finishing touches were put to Vienna’s ultimatum. On July 21, Berchtold finally carried it to the Kaiservilla in Bad Ischl, where the emperor spent his summers—even this one. The emperor, about to turn eighty-four and never the most acute commander in chief, read and approved it. The ultimatum demanded that Serbia “cease its attitude of opposition to the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina,” and then listed ten humiliating demands. Belgrade would be required to censor its own press to “remove anti-Austrian articles,” eliminate anti-Austrian material from school instruction, fire bureaucrats and officers with anti-Austrian attitudes, arrest suspect army officers and government officials, stop shipments of illicit weapons into Bosnia-Herzegovina and Dalmatia, dissolve secret societies like Narodna Odbrana, and—most degrading of all—permit Austro-Hungarian officials to lead an inquiry (on Serbian soil) into the “subversive movement” and the “plot of June 28th.”46
Had the ultimatum been delivered a month earlier, on the heels of the assassination, it would have been greeted with international sympathy, but by now—several weeks after the murder—the slow march of this démarche was such that Austria had lost its early edge in the crisis. Moral outrage had faded. The assassination was a month old, and in the meantime the archduke’s corpse had been conveyed from Sarajevo to the coast, taken on a dreadnought to Trieste, transported by rail to a funeral in Vienna, and then transferred to the family crypt in Upper Austria, where it had been resting in peace for nearly three weeks. General Appel, commanding the Austro-Hungarian corps in Sarajevo, boiled with frustration: “We have lost two martyrs for Austria’s honor; we are the insulted empire; our mailed fist is ready to smash them, yet still not even a mobilization order! We await it feverishly.”47 Worse, German indiscretions—leaking the contents of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia to the Italians—had betrayed the whole operation. In St. Petersburg on a state visit, French president Raymond Poincaré made plain that he and the Russians knew what was going on and that Austria-Hungary would not succeed in localizing the war: Serbia, Poincaré declared, “has friends.”48
Austria-Hungary’s minister in Belgrade, Wladi
mir Giesl, delivered the ultimatum to the Serbian Foreign Ministry at 6:00 p.m. on July 23. The note was simultaneously published in the Austrian newspapers, with the clear implication that acceptance by the Serbs was neither desired nor expected. The Serbs had forty-eight hours to answer, and when they did, on July 25, they rather surprisingly granted all of the Austrian demands except those that required the intervention of Austrian investigators on Serbian territory, suggesting as an alternative that the matter be turned over to an international tribunal at the Hague.49 In a bid for international support, the Serbs were trying to appear reasonable. But, prodded by the Germans and their own wounded pride, the Austrians were impervious to reason. Giesl read the Serbian caveats, deemed them unacceptable, broke diplomatic relations, and left the kingdom, crossing the Danube on a ferry to the Hungarian town of Semlin (Zemun). This was the signal for war.
But the lack of synchronization between Austrian policy (the ultimatum) and strategy (the mobilization) was astonishing. General Auffenberg, who shortly would be given an army, was still vacationing in Upper Austria, sitting down to lunch with his sister when his brother-in-law suddenly appeared on a bicycle waving a newspaper and crying, “The fuse has been lit; it’s the ultimatum!” Auffenberg recalled his surprise: “Four weeks had passed since the shattering events in Sarajevo, so I had assumed that this crisis too would amount to nothing.”50 Woefully prepared though they were, the Habsburg generals exulted at the chance finally to fight. “Thank God, we’ve got a war!” General Viktor Dankl, commandant of the Austrian XIV Corps in Innsbruck, shouted to his headquarters staff on hearing the news. He summoned the post musicians to his office and ordered up a celebratory concert. Sir Maurice de Bunsen, Britain’s ambassador in Vienna, observed “vast crowds parading till the early morning” in the Austrian capital, and hostile demonstrations in front of the Russian embassy. Bunsen expressed his dismay at the Viennese war fever: “The public clearly thought that this would be a war with the Serbs . . . summary vengeance for the crime in Sarajevo. . . . Few seemed to reflect that the forcible intervention of a Great Power in the Balkans must inevitably call other Great Powers into the field.”51
That collision of great powers was precisely the contingency that Conrad was supposed to be hedging against. Conrad should have been using the month since the assassination to tee up a hasty attack to cripple Serbia before the other powers could engage, rather than vacationing with his mistress in the Alps. In all war planning since the 1880s, the Austrians had stressed the need to mobilize, move, and beat the Serbs quickly, for Russia would almost certainly intervene in a lengthy war, and the need to force rivers—the Danube, the Sava, the Drina, or all three—to get into Serbia would only protract the campaign.
On July 25, the Serbs evacuated Belgrade, shifting their government to Nis. With the government far from the frontier and the army grouped behind the Kolubara River around Valjevo and Arangjelovac, Serbia now presented an almost certain quagmire, not a lightning victory. While the Austrians had dithered, the Serbs had rushed their initial mobilization—300,000 troops and 542 guns—to completion.52 This explained the consternation of contemporaries at the sluggishness of the Austrian reply to the assassination: Vienna had conceded the Serbs and the Russians four entire weeks to prepare for war.
Conrad had always insisted that the Zeitfaktor, or time factor, would be crucial in any showdown with Serbia, but for all of his bluster, he proved remarkably passive in the clinch.53 He had authorized summer harvest leaves for active-duty troops, permitting tens of thousands of soldiers to return to their villages in June to assist with the harvest. Officers were also on summer leaves. So when the Serbs gave an unsatisfactory answer to the ultimatum and the emperor ordered a partial mobilization on July 25, Conrad had little real force to mobilize. When the emperor actually declared war on Serbia on July 28, nothing happened. Count Burián—who would replace Berchtold as foreign minister in 1915—would later use this passivity to defend Austria-Hungary against insinuations of war guilt: how could “the war have been contrived in a shadowy workshop,” he hazarded, when “the Austro-Hungarian army proved so utterly unprepared for it?”54
Conrad’s workshop, of course, was supposed to have been better prepared than this. The general staff chief had assured Berchtold on July 7 that so long as he knew Russia’s intentions within five days of the start of mobilization, he would be able to manage a war on two fronts.55 He now knew Russia’s intentions: the tsar had ordered a partial mobilization in the Moscow, Warsaw, Kiev, and Odessa military districts the day the Serbs rejected the ultimatum. From the Russian capital, France’s president had warned that Serbia “had friends.” Clearly it was time for Plan R, not Plan B, but Conrad wouldn’t see reason; he still wanted to fight the Serbs. That prospect, however, was looking less and less appealing. While the Austrian army struggled with its own partial mobilization—just two-fifths of the army—the Serbs were busily deploying their entire strength. By July 25, the Serbs had called up four hundred thousand men and had begun to assemble three field armies. The Russians were accelerating their mobilization, and the British were pressuring the Germans to force the Austrians to halt in Belgrade—that is, to punish but not partition Serbia—and negotiate an end to the July Crisis.56
Conrad downplayed the threat from Russia, still preferring to “sweep the iron broom” across Serbia.57 His willful blindness was remarkable. Austro-Hungarian staff planning had always taken for granted that an Austrian war with Serbia would be but the Vorstufe—the first step—to a wider war with Russia.58 Now Conrad buried his head in the sand and lashed out blindly. He wasn’t the only one. Meeting late on July 28 with General Alexander von Uxküll, a close advisor to the emperor and former military attaché in St. Petersburg, General Auffenberg was stunned to hear Uxküll describe the Russian war preparations as a “bluff.” Russia, Uxküll averred, “will not intervene.”59 Berchtold also was groping in the dark, blind to what Conrad was doing. Conrad ordered the twelve divisions of Echelon B not to Galicia but to the Serbian border, wildly assuming that the Russians would back down when faced with a real German threat.60 “I was not pleased with the division of our army into two parts,” Auffenberg recalled, with just twenty-three divisions against Russia (too few) and eighteen against the Serbs (too many), with seven divisions floating in between the two armies as a general reserve.
Conrad, in short, was setting the army up for defeat on all fronts. His superior, Archduke Friedrich, named Armeeoberkommandant (supreme commander) by the emperor after the death of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, lacked the acuity to amend Conrad’s decisions. Meeting with the fifty-eight-year-old Friedrich—“Fritzl” to his intimates—Auffenberg was underwhelmed: “We had a short, trivial chat; as was always the case, the noble gentleman left an impression of abiding mediocrity; he will not inspire confidence at the head of an army of 2 million.”61 Fortunately, there was still a way out of the unfolding disaster. The British ambassador called on Berchtold on July 28, offered his good offices, and warned the foreign minister that he must not continue to “neglect the European aspect” of Vienna’s grievance with Serbia. If he did, there would be a world war involving all of the powers. Berchtold told the British that the Russians would not intervene, “for we will assure [Russia] that we seek no added territory.”62 This was staggering naiveté for a man as prudent as Berchtold.
The Germans gave the final shove to war. Having appeared to support a “halt in Belgrade” option on July 30, when the kaiser enjoined Franz Joseph to accept the keys to “Belgrade or other fortresses” as collateral for Serbian cooperation in Vienna’s investigation of the assassination plot, Wilhelm II abruptly reversed course, issuing a double ultimatum to St. Petersburg and Paris on July 31. “Decline the renewed advances of Great Britain in the interest of peace,” Moltke instructed Conrad. “European war is the last chance of saving Austria-Hungary. Germany is ready to back Austria unreservedly.”
Moltke ought to have added that a general European war was the only chance of sa
ving Germany, Bethmann having declared that “the future belongs to Russia, it grows and grows and weighs on us like an ever-deepening nightmare.”63 Only war could nip that Russian growth in the bud, or so they thought in Berlin. These exchanges between Vienna and Berlin underpin the verdict of German and Austrian war guilt, all the more so because Moltke confessed that he knew what he was doing. There would be a “world war,” Moltke wrote Bethmann Hollweg, and the great powers would “tear each other apart,” with vicious results: “The culture of almost all of Europe will be destroyed for decades to come.”64 But no matter. Like the Austrians, the Germans felt that the military advantages they currently enjoyed would be drowned in two or three years by the big Russian and French military programs, which would add yet more troops, artillery, and infrastructure, leveling a playing field that was still tilted in favor of Germany because of its vast 1913 army spending program. “All postponement,” Moltke had told Conrad at Karlsbad in May 1914, “means a lessening of our chances.”65
And like the Austrians, the Germans also suffered from a domestic political malaise. Bethmann Hollweg had been Reich chancellor for five years yet had never secured a reliable parliamentary majority; his role had been reduced to passing huge army and navy bills through the Reichstag and fending off increasingly bold attacks from the Socialists, the Alsace-Lorrainers (“Vive la France!”), and the Poles, who carped at every German-speaking school and official in their precincts. There may have been little Bethmann could have done anyway to arrest the drive to war. The chancellor complained that he was not “receiving good information on military events” and that the “decisions for war were being taken in the closed circle around the kaiser.”66 The Austrians would later recall the “fearful, nervous, hesitant, neurotic” quality of these harried decision makers in Berlin. They lacked “Bismarck’s shrewdness” in recklessly declaring war on Russia on August 1 and then on France two days later. When Britain reluctantly added its weight to the coalition against Germany on August 5—“to prevent the union of all of Western Europe under a single power”—the German reaction was furious (and idiotic): “One more enemy, just one more reason to close ranks and fight to the last breath.”67
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