When Haldane got back to London the British cabinet looked at the navy bill and discovered it made Bethmann-Hollweg’s slowdown instantly irrelevant.12 Quite apart from asking for new battleships, the bill announced a 20 percent increase in the number of fighting men on every ship and a huge increase in submarines and smaller warships. Picking his moment during the failing negotiations with France the summer before, when the kaiser had been stung by accusations of cowardice, Tirpitz had persuaded him that a new naval bill might win back the support of the German Right, that keeping up the pressure on the Royal Navy would frighten the British into judicious neutrality in the event of a European war—a demonstrably false argument—and that any cutbacks would mean an international loss of face. As it turned out, in the January 1912 elections, the German Social Democrat Party—the Socialists—who opposed higher defence spending, received their biggest ever vote and became the largest party in the Reichstag, with one-third of the seats.
The talks finally died on 19 March when Grey stated categorically that Britain could not promise to remain neutral in a European war. Their failure catapulted Wilhelm into depression. Dona told Tirpitz that he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. “At heart,”13 she said, “he is enthusiastic about England and everything which is England, it is in his blood.” It was as if the two opposite pulls in his character had directly caused the collapse. He denounced the British cabinet as “scoundrels,” and said Grey was a “Shylock.”14 He sacked Metternich, whose unvarnished explanations of why the British were hostile he could no longer bear to hear. When Grey praised Bethmann-Hollweg, whom the British had come to see as a sober and positive force in the German government, Wilhelm growled, “I have never15 in my life heard of an agreement being concluded with reference to one definite statesman and independently of the reigning sovereign. It is clear that Grey has no idea who is master here, namely myself. He dictates to me in advance who is to be my minister if I am to conclude an agreement with England.” Tirpitz’s full naval bill was put before the Reichstag days later.
Despite left-wing opposition, it was passed in April 1912, though in a slightly slimmer form. Paradoxically, in the long term it would prove a big setback for the German navy and Tirpitz. It prompted the British to withdraw ships from the Mediterranean and concentrate their fleet in the North Sea and the Channel, making it immediately apparent that Tirpitz’s fleet was no match for the British navy, and wouldn’t be for decades. And it irritated the German army, who felt that the navy had taken too much of the military budget for too long with little to show for it. It now demanded that it must get the lion’s share of future defence spending; Moltke, observing that the Russian army was dramatically increasing, had plans to enlarge the army by 25 percent, 136,000 men. More worryingly, the British also agreed to defend the Channel coast of France in return for the French navy policing the Mediterranean—an arrangement that made British involvement in a European war that bit more likely.
…
The Russians were just as imprisoned by their own sense of priorities. Since 1905 it had been government orthodoxy that Russia must be on good terms with all the Great Powers, and that foreign wars inevitably led to revolution and must be avoided at all costs. By 1911 Nicholas’s chief minister, Peter Stolypin, and the new Russian foreign minister, Sergei Sazonov—who was uncoincidentally Stolypin’s brother-in-law—and even Nicholas, wanted Britain to commit to a defensive alliance. With Britain behind them they believed Germany and Austria would be reluctant to bully or threaten them. Not that Russia could afford to be on bad terms with Germany either. When Sazonov had become foreign minister in the autumn of 1910, he had taken an initially reluctant Nicholas to Potsdam (“I cannot understand16 how he is so blind to the consequences of what he is doing,” the British ambassador had complained gloomily) and returned with an agreement.17 “I was extremely18 pleased with my visit to William, who was in excellent spirits, calm and comfortable,” Nicholas wrote to George. The deal allowed the Germans and their railway into northern Persia, in return for an undertaking not to support Austrian ambitions in the Balkans. A week or so later Wilhelm, in a gust of enthusiasm, passed through Hesse, where Alix was staying with the children, bringing “heaps of presents.” “To them he is ‘the German Uncle,’” Nicholas wrote, “and he loves playing with them. He looks well, but has grown older and is more sedate.”19 Alix could hardly bear Wilhelm to touch her children but she knew that getting on with Germany was necessary. Communications between Berlin and St. Petersburg were as cordial as they’d been in years and Russia was noticeably silent during the international condemnation of Agadir.
It was also still orthodoxy in Russia, however, that the country’s wounded Great Power status must be restored, and the only way to do that was by extending the empire and by asserting Russia’s claims to imperial influence in the Balkans. Not surprisingly, the latter imperative constantly threatened to derail the need for peace. In 1912 the Russian minister to Serbia, a militant Pan-Slavist called Nicholas Hartwig, brokered a secret pact between the Balkan states of Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria and Montenegro. Hartwig was a rogue operator whose aim was to bring the Slav nations together so they could start a war to wrest back the Ottoman empire’s last European territories, and in so doing allow Russia to take control of the Bosphorus and open the Turkish Straits. His efforts to bring together the Balkan states—no small feat as they were all extremely quarrelsome and competitive with each other—were half-hidden from the Russian government, and what they could see, Nicholas and his ministers treated with a kind of wilful blindness because they couldn’t help feeling pleased that Russian influence had been re-established in the Balkans. Everyone knew that a war in the region would be exceptionally dangerous because Austria and Russia, both acutely aware of the vulnerability of their Great Power status, would feel compelled to intervene, and that Germany would almost certainly come in with Austria if it came to military conflict.
In June 1912 the Russian and German emperors and their chief ministers met on their yachts at Swinemünde in the Baltic on a blazing hot day. Wilhelm lavished gifts on Nicky’s children and claimed to be vastly amused when the Russian officers got through sixty bottles of his champagne. “Everything went off20 very well and quite informally,” Nicholas told his mother. “He was very gay and affable and would have his joke with Anastasia.” But perhaps the most significant conversation that day took place between Nicholas’s new chief minister, Vladimir Kokovtsov, and Bethmann-Hollweg, which Kokovtsov later recounted in his memoirs. Both men expressed a feeling of being trapped by an arms race they had no power to halt. Kokovtsov complained that Germany seemed to be “arming herself at a feverish pace.” He explained it would be impossible for him to oppose demands for equivalent increases in the Russian army. Bethmann-Hollweg answered equally frankly that “his own position was far from being as influential and independent as it might seem … He, too, had to consider the personal views of the Emperor … and especially the peculiar organization of the War Ministry, whose attitude was a very troublesome one.” The Duma would indeed vote vast sums for the Russian army in 1913, raising the number of troops from 1.3 million to 1.75 million. And this in turn would prompt the Reichstag to vote even more money to the German army in 1913.
After Wilhelm left, Nicholas told his chief minister, “Thank heaven! Now one does not have to watch one’s every word lest it be construed in a way one had not even dreamed.” Like Edward he had learned to avoid talking politics too directly with Wilhelm, but he also told Kokovtsov several times, betraying considerable anxiety about the Balkans, “that the Emperor William had assured him positively that he would not permit the Balkan complications to become a world conflagration.”21
Three months later, in September, Sergei Sazonov came to Balmoral to try to persuade Sir Edward Grey to agree to military and naval “discussions”—as the euphemism went—just like the ones Britain had with France. Stolypin thought Britain’s backing would persuade Germany and Austria to stay out of the wa
r that was now brewing in the Balkans. He neglected to mention that it was the Russians who had secretly helped to set up the conditions for war. “He [Sazonov] is a straightforward22 and honest man and I appreciate him highly,” Nicholas wrote to George, adding, “I always read the ‘Daily Graphic’ and therefore follow closely all your movements and all you have to do. It astonishes me often how enduring … you and May are both!” This was a courtesy to George because he took no role in the negotiations.
Sazonov evidently felt optimistic. British attitudes to Russia had shifted. By 1912 the country had become fascinated by its would-be ally. In January 1912 The Times published a “Russian number,” and a group of Liberal MPs visited Russia, a trip which Sir Charles Hardinge described as “the pilgrimage of23 love.” Russian literature was everywhere—not just Tolstoy but Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Turgenev had all been recently translated into English. Beef Stroganov had insinuated itself onto fashionable British menus. The Ballets Russes had brought a fantasy of Russian exoticism, wildness and modernity to London; George went to see them on the eve of his coronation in 1911. But cultural fascination was not matched by political sympathy. British journalists reported the same old ugly Russian repressions and, most provocatively, Russian troops had moved into Persia’s neutral sphere, where the shah, an old Russian client, was fighting a civil war against the British-sponsored democratic parliament, the Majlis. This was bad enough, but the British Foreign Office, which despite this would have liked to pull closer to Russia, suspected that an annexation attempt wouldn’t be far off. British public opinion simply wouldn’t countenance a closer relationship, and the Persian business made it worse. But no matter what the new British ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, said, both Nicholas and Sazonov refused to acknowledge that their policy in Persia might have an effect in Britain.
Buchanan was Britain’s new secret weapon in Russia. An old-school diplomat who had previously been minister to Alix’s brother Ernst in Hesse-Darmstadt, he had a reputation for charm and old-world courtesy, and calmly smoothed over the conflicts and misunderstandings which regularly punctuated British dealings with Russia. In many respects St. Petersburg was the last place he wanted to be—he hated the climate and found the Russian court a strain—but he had entirely fallen under Nicholas’s quiet, smiling spell. “I personally became24 wonderfully devoted to him. His Majesty had such a wonderful charm of manner that when he received me in audience he almost made me feel that it was as a friend, and not the Emperor, with whom I was talking. There was, if I may say so without presumption, what amounted to a feeling of mutual sympathy between us.” Buchanan was particularly amused by the tsar’s keenness to talk about anything but politics.
Not surprisingly, Grey refused the military discussions Sazonov asked for. He wanted to talk about Persia. Public opinion on the subject was so strong, and there was so much concern that the Foreign Office might act unilaterally and contract a secret agreement without consulting Parliament, that the Russian foreign minister’s arrival had sparked demonstrations in London and such an angry response from Liberal backbenchers that Grey had to promise he wouldn’t even use the phrase “triple entente” to indicate the loose combination of Britain, Russia and France. Sazonov made vague promises about troops leaving, but Grey didn’t really believe them.
The war in the Balkans broke out only a few weeks later. In Russia, the press demanded that the country come to the aid of its “little brothers”—the Balkan states. But the “little brothers” didn’t need their big brother’s help because within a month they had captured all Turkey’s European territories. Serbia in particular had been extremely successful; it had virtually doubled in size and was threatening to annex part of the Adriatic coastline, all of which alarmed Austria. By mid-November Austria began to mass an army near the Russian border. Once again a local conflict suddenly took on much wider and frightening connotations. Kokovtsov and Sazonov were summoned to an audience at Tsarskoe Selo one morning to discover that the tsar was cheerfully on the point of mobilizing the army against Austria. With him was the war minister, Vladimir Sukhomlinov, whom they loathed because he pandered to the tsar by keeping his reports short and simple and full of jokes. The two men managed to dissuade Nicholas by pointing out that this would bring on the European war he so feared, and that France would be unable to help as it would be quite unprepared.
Sir Edward Grey, meanwhile, tried to get the Great Powers to force the Balkan states to the negotiating table, and prevent Austria and Russia from trying to gain advantage—which would only prolong the conflict. Nicholas—seeing the prospect of a Russian-controlled Turkish Straits recede—grumbled at the British “interference,” which was “hampering us more than anybody else.”25 He wrote to Wilhelm, “I am sure you are26 also taking a keen interest in the Balkan war. I admire the splendid fighting qualities of the Bulgarians, Servians, etc but the Turks have sunk completely in my opinion. God grant we all may not have difficulties at the end!”
Rather to Europe’s surprise Grey found an ally in Bethmann-Hollweg. The two worked together to bring everyone to the table. An armistice was signed on 3 December 1912 and a conference convened in London two weeks later to resolve the competing claims. Its eventual success—despite a second brief conflict breaking out in the Balkans in July 1913 and months of subsequent wrangling—appeared to demonstrate that together Britain and Germany could work to keep the peace of Europe after all.
It seemed as if the forces of peace had won out in the German government. But behind the scenes that was by no means evident. The day the armistice was arranged, Bethmann-Hollweg announced in the Reichstag that, if Austria was unexpectedly attacked by Russia, Germany would fight on its side. It was an odd gesture since peace terms were on the table, and the next day Sir Edward Grey and Sir Richard Haldane felt obliged to counter Bethmann-Hollweg’s words with a statement to the German ambassador that, if Germany and Austria-Hungary should end up in a war against France and Russia, Britain would fight with France. For the British the matter ended there.
Wilhelm’s brother Heinrich was in England and went to visit George at York Cottage. Heinrich had long hoped for a resolution between his homeland and Britain. He couldn’t help feeling that if only Britain would shift its position just a little, their problems might be resolved. He asked George whether, if Germany and Austria went to war with Russia and France, England would help Russia and France. “I answered,”27 George told Sir Edward Grey later, “undoubtedly, yes—under certain circumstances. He [Heinrich] professed surprise and regret, but did not ask what the certain circumstances were. He said he would tell the Emperor what I had told him. Of course, Germany must know that we would not allow either of our friends to be crippled. I think it is only right that you should know what passed between me and the Emperor’s brother on this point.”
Like many people who knew Wilhelm, Heinrich found it hard to tell his brother what he didn’t want to hear. What he told Wilhelm was almost the opposite of what George had said. He reported that the British didn’t want to go to war, and that if there was a war, Germany would have to reckon “perhaps on English neutrality, certainly not on her taking the part of Germany, and probably on her throwing her weight on the weaker side.” The kaiser decided George had given an assurance that Britain would stay neutral—which the king certainly didn’t have the authority to do. He scribbled on the letter, “that settles it … we can now go ahead with France.”28 This was probably posturing as by now everyone including the Germans had agreed to send their ambassadors to the peace conference in London.
A couple of days later Wilhelm received word of Haldane’s statement that Britain would fight. He was horribly disappointed. The British regarded their warning as a way of dampening appetite for war in Europe. He saw it differently—as aggressive grandstanding which would egg both Russia and France on to involve themselves in a private argument between Austria and Serbia. He said it was a “moral declaration29 of war.” He was so angry that he immediately summoned his senior
army and naval staff. The meeting that resulted—the “war council” of 8 December 1912, to which the chancellor was not invited—has sometimes been described as the moment when the German leadership began the countdown to war. In fact, it seems to have been mainly a chance for Wilhelm to let off steam, but it also allowed the military to reiterate their desire for a preventive war, though they couldn’t agree with whom. Moltke told the meeting, “I believe war30 is unavoidable and the sooner the better.” For him, it was obvious it should be a land war against Russia, not Britain. He had become convinced that Russia’s military and economy were developing so fast that, by 1917, Russia would be too strong for Germany to beat. Tirpitz, on the other hand, wanted to delay; the navy wouldn’t be ready to challenge Britain at least until 1917. Nothing specific was planned, but the meeting agreed that the German people should be “prepared” for the possibility of war in the future. Guilty about his less than useful intervention, Heinrich wrote to George explaining that he had carried out “your instructions to the letter,” but might have omitted “the one sore point … to the effect that I thought, if Germany were drawn into war with Russia and maybe, as a result of this, with France, England might be neutral, but that I feared she might also, under circumstances, side with our foes … We always were,” he continued, “—and I am still—in hopes that England and Germany might go together, for the sake of the world’s peace!” He pleaded with George to “Please consider the situation once more, before it is too late! If England and Germany were united, even mutually, who on earth would dare stir?”31 It sounded like a request from the 1890s. Once such a plea would have at least prompted a serious conversation between Queen Victoria and Lord Salisbury. But not anymore.
The Three Emperors Page 47