THE MISCALCULATED RISK
The German leadership played a secondary yet crucial role in preparing war in July 1914. Habsburg rulers would not have dared provoke a Balkan conflict without the promises of unconditional support given to Szögyényi and Hoyos by the Kaiser and his Chancellor on 5 and 6 July.72 The German leaders recognized, even if they underestimated its likelihood, that Russia might intervene if Austria-Hungary moved against Serbia, and that this could result in a European cataclysm. Why take that chance? In the meeting on the afternoon of 5 July at which the German response to Austria-Hungary’s appeal for support was discussed, the three most important figures – Kaiser Wilhelm, War Minister Falkenhayn and Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg – together exemplified the indecision, fatalism, aggression and fearful calculation that shaped the Reich’s foreign policy. The Kaiser, an inveterate but erratic sabre-rattler, was angry about the death of his friend the Archduke, and wanted to be a good ally. He possessed sufficient insight to appreciate the considerable risk of backing strong Habsburg action against Serbia but let his advisers convince him of the improbability of European war and departed as planned for his annual North Sea cruise on 6 July. In the longer term, however, he believed in the inevitability of what he had referred to a year and a half earlier as a ‘final struggle between the Slavs and the Teutons’.73 War Minister Erich von Falkenhayn was a very different personality, a cold and self-confident professional soldier. Cynical towards humanitarian considerations, a Social Darwinist who believed in the national necessity of war, he was eager to see how the painstakingly drilled and prepared German army would meet the supreme test, but doubted that the Austro-Hungarians possessed the stomach for firm action against Serbia.74 The most complex personality, and the man who guided German policy up to the last days of July, was Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg. He had been in his post since July 1909. A moderate conservative, convinced monarchist and accomplished political tactician, he was deeply concerned about what he perceived, with much justice, to be the Reich’s encirclement by hostile powers. In offering unconditional support to Austria-Hungary, Bethmann implemented what he later conceded was ‘a policy of utmost risk’ intended through diplomatic victory or continental war to overturn the existing constellation of power in Europe.75
Germany was a strong power in 1914. It was a state that had been forged in war, the fruit of the three spectacular victories of the Prussian army and its allies over Denmark, Austria and France in 1864, 1866 and 1870–71 respectively. Since its creation was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles on 18 January 1871, this new superpower at the heart of Europe had only become more intimidating. In terms of population, one index of military might in an age of conscript armies, France’s 36.2 million people had lagged only a little way behind the 40 million in the new German state in 1871. On the eve of the First World War, however, the Republic’s citizens had increased only slightly to 39.7 million whereas the Reich’s subjects had multiplied to 67.8 million. Further, late nineteenth-century Germans were not only rather good at making both love and war; they also demonstrated a talent for making money. The Reich industrialized with startling speed at the end of the nineteenth century, competing with Britain to be Europe’s workshop. Between 1880 and 1913, Germany’s share of world manufacturing moved from being little more than a third of Britain’s share to overtaking it.76 The Reich’s pig-iron production came to exceed Britain’s by a third (15.6 million as against 10 million in 1911) and its steel production on the eve of war was more than double that of the United Kingdom (13.7 million against 6.6 million). In new industries such as chemicals, optics and electrics it led the world. This achievement was in part built on unparalleled research universities and pioneering technical high schools specializing in applied science and engineering. The banker Max Warburg was right when he told the Kaiser in June 1914 that Germany would be wiser simply to wait rather than consider war: ‘We are growing stronger every year.’77
Nonetheless, Bethmann Hollweg and the rest of the German ruling elite had good reason to be anxious in 1914, for Germany was surrounded by unfriendly powers in an increasingly unstable world. It did have allies, but hardly the sort for which one would wish. Austria-Hungary, to which it had been tied since 1879, was militarily weak and becoming a basket case. Italy, an ally since 1882, was barely a great power and certainly not to be trusted. It hankered after Habsburg Italian-speaking lands and Albania, and had signed secret agreements with France in 1900 and 1902 nullifying most of its commitments to the other Central Powers. When war came in 1914, it would indeed declare neutrality on the grounds that as its allies had not been attacked, its treaty obligations remained inactive.78 The fourth, secret member of the Triple Alliance, Romania, was tacking towards Russia. By contrast, the Triple Entente was hardening, strengthening, and relations with it had become increasingly antagonistic over the past decade. Germany itself, as historians since Fritz Fischer have rightly stressed, bore a large part of the blame. The ascent of twenty-nine-year-old Wilhelm II to the throne in 1888 and the forced resignation in the spring of 1890 of the long-serving Chancellor who had engineered German unification, Otto von Bismarck, were important caesuras. The Germans shortly after dropped their defensive ‘Reinsurance Treaty’ with Russia, leaving her free to ally with France in the Double Entente in 1894.79 However, a more significant change came in 1897, when Bethmann’s predecessor as Chancellor, Bernhard von Bülow, had inaugurated a new ‘World Policy’. This was not the start of the Reich’s efforts to win what Bülow called ‘a place in the sun’, as Germany had already acquired in the 1880s a couple of African territories. It was certainly no well-thought-out imperialist doctrine. Rather, it signalled a new, more assertive stance primarily intended to unite behind the government the fractious right-wing constituency in Germany’s parliament, the Reichstag, who wished to see their country’s new economic power translated into global influence. Expectations, once having been raised, had to be satisfied, but this proved difficult in the face of solid opposition from established colonial powers. German imperial ambitions were unexceptional in the context of the time, but the government’s need to demonstrate to a frustrated middle-class audience at home that it was being proactive stamped its actions with unusually aggressive rhetoric and some bizarre showmanship. Wilhelm II’s exploits, landing on the Moroccan coast in 1905 to announce his personal support for its Sultan or, still worse, in 1898 unilaterally declaring himself protector of 300 million Muslims, made him look faintly ridiculous. Yet in the context of Germany’s real economic competitiveness, its expanding population, military prowess and determined naval expansion, other powers could not help feeling menaced and affronted.80
Still, Germany was not, as Fischer and his disciples have claimed, on an aggressive drive for world power before 1914. Had Reich leaders wished to advance expansionist aims through war, the military weakness of the Entente in the years immediately after the 1905 Russian revolution offered ideal yet unused opportunities.81 Nor did they create the major international crises that stamped the decade before 1914, although their cack-handed and greedy diplomacy certainly exacerbated them. French aggression, much more than German, destabilized Europe in these years. The French, in their bid to take control of Morocco in 1905, not only contravened an 1881 agreement making alterations in the country’s status subject to multilateral consent, but also at first provocatively tried to exclude and override German interests. While the Germans succeeded through diplomatic pressure in forcing the resignation of the French Foreign Minister, they subsequently overreached themselves in rejecting a reasonable offer of bilateral negotiations and demanding a multinational conference. Their purpose was to undermine the new Entente Cordiale formed the previous year between Britain and France, but when representatives of the great powers gathered at Algeçiras in January 1906 no country except for Austria-Hungary backed the German efforts to rein in French ambitions.82
British support for France at Algeçiras and the tightening bonds within the Triple
Entente during the following years were primarily motivated by London’s wish to reduce imperial overstretch after the Boer War of 1899–1902. The Entente with France ended decades of tension over the British occupation of Egypt, and Britain’s understanding with Russia in 1907 was intended to limit conflict in Persia, thus bringing a considerable degree of imperial security. The Central Powers simply had nothing to offer the British that could compete with these attractions; this was a problem, for as Algeçiras showed, it meant that any great-power conventions called to solve international disputes would almost inevitably decide against the Central Powers.83 However, the Germans’ own actions pushed Britain further into Franco-Russian arms. Their naval building programme, the brainchild of the Chief of the Reich Navy Office, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, greatly increased antagonism from 1898 both because the British government rightly understood it as a direct challenge and because popular passions were inflamed. In each country pressure groups formed and propaganda campaigns were run in order to encourage public emotional investment in the fleets and push parliaments to fund these expensive warships and symbols of national power, prestige and unity. More emotionally involved than anybody was the Kaiser, who told the permanent secretary at the British Foreign Office in August 1908 that he would rather ‘go to war’ than discuss naval limitations. Bethmann Hollweg, by contrast, regarded an understanding between Germany and Great Britain as his primary foreign policy goal, but he was consistently hindered by the Kaiser and navalists; and when he was permitted to make an offer in 1912 his demand for a treaty promising ‘benevolent neutrality’ in the event of a war with other powers was unsurprisingly far too much for the British.84 Tirpitz’s strategy aimed not to match the Royal Navy’s strength but to have a fleet so large that the British would not dare cross the Reich for fear that a maritime battle would leave their force too weak to secure their Empire. Sixty capital ships by 1920 were thought likely to suffice. The balance of dreadnoughts and battlecruisers, the super-battleships introduced by the British in 1905, was 18:30 in Britain’s favour in 1914.85 Yet far from deterring a confrontation, Germany’s naval building ironically increased its likelihood. In order to ensure that enough battleships remained in home waters to counter the Kriegsmarine, the Royal Navy arranged with the French in 1912 that it would concentrate in northern waters while their fleet covered the Mediterranean. When on 1 August 1914 it appeared that the United Kingdom might not enter the war, the French ambassador to London could appeal to this agreement as imposing a moral obligation on Britain to provide support, as through it his country had denuded its northern coast of protection.86
The Germans eventually abandoned the naval race themselves in 1912, as their attention and finances were diverted towards the army. Two new army bills raised the annual intake of conscripts. Some 287,770 men had been called up for military training in 1911. A bill passed in 1912 added 38,890 recruits and a 1913 bill swelled the annual contingent by a further 63,000 soldiers.87 The increases were a defensive response to an ever more unstable international environment. After the tension caused by Austria-Hungary’s Bosnian annexation in 1908–9, another crisis centring on Morocco began, again precipitated by French expansionism. In the summer of 1911, having undermined economic agreements that had formed the basis of a minor détente with Germany in 1909–10, the French set 15,000 troops marching on Fez. The Germans reacted crudely by sending a gunboat, SMS Panther, and belligerently demanding the whole French Congo in compensation. British leaders, through a speech by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, forcefully warned off the Germans, threatening intervention in the event of war.88 Not even the Austro-Hungarian government was prepared to support their claims. This experience reinforced for German rulers the lesson of Algeçiras five years earlier, that the international system was now irrevocably biased against their interests. Concerned at their obvious isolation, they resolved to expand their army.
Unfortunately, far from providing security, Germany’s army increases sparked a land arms race against France and Russia much more dangerous than the naval race against Britain. Worse still, it was a race that Germany was doomed to lose. The Reich faced two insurmountable disadvantages. The first was that its only trustworthy ally, Austria-Hungary, had neglected its army for far too long to be able to repair its deficiencies quickly. Austria-Hungary’s annual recruit contingent had not kept pace with the rise in its population and was, by international standards, small. It trained 0.29 per cent of its people annually, less than Russia with 0.35 per cent and Italy with 0.37 per cent, and much less than Germany with 0.47 per cent and France with 0.75 per cent. The Habsburg force’s soldiers in 1912 numbered 391,297, not even a quarter of the Tsar’s 1,332,000-strong standing army. Habsburg military spending also lagged behind that of all other great powers except Italy. The belated passing of an army bill in 1912 raising peacetime manpower to 450,000 and providing extra funds for equipment helped, but the main burden of the Central Powers’ collective security still fell on Germany.89
Second, while the Germans had the men and potentially the finances to match French and Russian military expansion, there were political constraints on the army’s size. Even within the officer corps, there were reservations: while the General Staff was keen fully to exploit national manpower and put forward a proposal in December 1912 for an increase in strength by 300,000 soldiers, the War Ministry worried about the impact of so great and sudden an enlargement on military quality and political reliability and instead proposed a lesser, but still very large, rise of 117,000 men.90 A more serious check on expansion, however, were parliamentary constraints on military spending. The Kaiser was a constitutional monarch, and although he appointed his own Chancellor and formally had the right to determine the strength and structure of the army, military expenditure had to be agreed by Germany’s parliament, the Reichstag. This was elected on the basis of universal male suffrage, giving it one of the most democratic franchises in Europe.91 In 1912, after elections which had made the Social Democrats the largest party, their deputies and those of the second largest group, the Catholic Centre Party, dominated the assembly and were critical of using the socially regressive indirect taxation at the assembly’s disposal to fund military expenditure. Direct taxation such as income and property tax was the preserve of the twenty-five states within the Reich’s federal system. The largest state, Prussia, covered two-thirds of Germany and had a regional diet elected with a restrictive and, among the working classes, much hated three-class franchise which weighted voters by the tax that they paid. Highly conservative Prussia controlled the Bundesrat, the federal council in which the states were represented, and for a decade this fought off central government’s attempts to gain a share of direct tax revenue. In 1913 Bethmann Hollweg managed to push the Army Law through the Reichstag only by proposing a tax on property and dividing this law from its funding bill. The left and centre parties voted through the funding to establish the precedent for Reichstag power over direct taxation, while a national coalition of centre and right combined to pass the increase in numbers of recruits.92 Even after the two major army bills, however, the Reich spent 3.5 per cent of its GNP on defence, a higher proportion than Austria-Hungary (2.8 per cent) but lower than France (3.9 per cent) and much less than Russia (4.6 per cent).93
The Chief of the German General Staff, Helmuth von Moltke, became increasingly pessimistic and anxious at this time. The manpower gap between the Central Powers and Entente widened in consequence of Russian rearmament and France’s replacement of two- with three-year conscript service. In 1912 the Germans calculated that their adversaries’ standing armies already outnumbered German and Austro-Hungarian forces by 827,000 men. By 1914 the difference was reckoned to exceed one million soldiers.94 Railway building by the Entente, a highly sensitive subject as German security against these superior numbers rested to a great extent on their army’s speed advantage in mobilization, also proceeded apace. In the winter of 1911–12, German intelligence believed that over the past five
years new railways financed by French loans had halved the time needed by the Russian army to concentrate its units on the Tsarist Empire’s western border. In 1913 another French loan for railway-building caused panic in the German General Staff, who calculated that it would permit the Russians to speed their deployment so that instead of half, two-thirds of the army would be at the Reich’s frontier by day thirteen of mobilization.95 In the context of the upheaval brought by the First Balkan War, the tightness of the Entente alliance exacerbated German leaders’ anxiety and sense of encirclement. A turning point came in December 1912 when, with Russian troops menacingly concentrated on the Austro-Hungarian border, a discreet warning was given to the German ambassador in London, Prince Karl von Lichnowsky, that Britain valued the continental balance and could not stay out of a European conflict sparked by a Habsburg attack on Serbia. The Kaiser, in a rage at what he condemned as a ‘moral declaration of war’, called his three chief naval advisers and Moltke together in the infamous ‘War Council’ of 8 December.96 Insisting that Austria-Hungary ‘must deal energetically’ with the Serbs, and foreseeing that this would lead Russia to attack Galicia, drawing in Germany, Wilhelm II ordered – in light of the recent warning from London – that the fleet must be prepared to fight the British. Tirpitz wanted a postponement of war for a year and a half, but Moltke argued that even then the navy would not be ready and delay would be unfavourable to the army because shortage of funds meant Germany could not keep up with the armament programmes of its prospective adversaries. His message was ‘war, the sooner the better’.97 Little definitive emerged from the meeting. The participants’ single decision, that a press campaign to prepare the German people for war against Russia should be organized, was never implemented. Nonetheless, the episode had significance. The Kaiser, as he made clear in a letter written to his Foreign Secretary on the same day, felt existentially threatened by a circle of hostile powers: ‘The question at stake,’ he wrote, ‘is whether Germany is to be or not to be.’98 The conviction he expressed at the meeting in the necessity for aggressive Habsburg action against Serbia, and his readiness to support it even at the cost of drawing the Reich into war with the Triple Entente, proved fateful. Moltke’s call for preventative war, although not his first and at that point not acted upon, only underlined the peril that was understood to confront Germany.99
Ring of Steel Page 5