Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  The key figure shaping German foreign policy in July 1914 was, however, Bethmann Hollweg, who had not been invited to what he himself had sardonically christened the ‘War Council’. He regarded the Kaiser’s behaviour as hysterical. In his view, the British warning was not threatening: ‘It only affirmed what we have long known: now as before England follows a policy of balance of power and therefore will stand up for France if the latter is in danger of being annihilated by us.’ He quashed an attempt to introduce another naval funding increase and instead emphasized multilateralism and worked to restrain Austria-Hungary from violent action. Germany and Britain cooperated effectively to ensure that the Balkan Wars sparked no European conflagration.100 The difference between Bethmann’s policy in early 1913 and his actions in the summer of 1914, when he sanctioned a Habsburg attack on Serbia and sabotaged British efforts to mediate jointly, is thus striking. What changed in the interim? First, the Chancellor re-evaluated the threat posed by Russia to the Reich. In early July 1914, he described the Tsarist Empire as ‘looming above us as an increasingly terrifying nightmare’.101 Officially inspired, belligerent newspaper articles in both countries and tension about the German military mission to Constantinople, which the Tsar’s government feared could lead to German control of the Turkish Straits and the ability to choke Russian maritime trade from the Black Sea, further soured the countries’ relations.102 Above all, however, the ‘Great Programme’ of rearmament passed by Russia’s Duma in June 1914, which would add 500,000 men and more artillery to the Russian army, unnerved German decision-makers. By 1917, the Russian military was projected to be, at over two million men, three times the size of Germany’s conscript force.103 Falkenhayn and Moltke both believed war inevitable and saw the Reich’s situation deteriorating with time. The Chief of the General Staff even appealed to the Foreign Secretary, Jagow, in the early summer of 1914, before the assassinations in Sarajevo, to engineer a preventative war. Although this was refused, the German military leaders’ anxiety and pressure influenced Bethmann. A preventative war had appeared ever more attractive, he later confessed, through ‘the constant threat of attack, the greater likelihood of its inevitability in the future, and by the military’s claim: today war is still possible without defeat, but not in two years!’104

  Bethmann Hollweg was influenced not only by the German army’s fear of Russia but also by his own assessment of the Reich’s deteriorating relations with Britain and Austria-Hungary. After fruitful cooperation during the Balkan Wars, Anglo-German relations had become more distant. While an agreement over the future partition of the ailing Portuguese Empire was reached in April 1913, subsequent negotiations over the extension of Germany’s Berlin–Baghdad railway to the Persian Gulf proved dishearteningly difficult. In the end though, what destroyed Bethmann’s faith in Britain’s readiness to act multilaterally and continue restraining Russia was intelligence, lifted by a German agent in Russia’s London embassy, of secret Anglo-Russian naval discussions in May 1914. Among the subjects discussed was a joint landing in Pomerania, an invasion of Germany. This was, the Chancellor told his assistant in early July, ‘the last link in the chain’. Yet if Britain had finally committed itself unconditionally to the Franco-Russian alliance, this had implications for Germany’s relations with Austria-Hungary. These had cooled during the Balkan Wars due to German unwillingness to support aggressive Habsburg action against Serbia. Now, however, with trust in Britain’s pacific intentions and readiness to restrain Russia undermined, the Reich’s security rested more than ever on preserving and supporting its one solid ally.105

  When Hoyos and Szögyényi arrived in Potsdam on 5 and 6 July 1914 bearing Emperor Franz Joseph’s plea for support, Bethmann Hollweg and the Kaiser thus had no hesitation in assenting. The Chancellor is often characterized as being fatalistic and resigned at this time due to the death of his wife two months earlier, but this hardly fits with the purposefulness that he displayed.106 He and Wilhelm II had met after news of the Sarajevo assassination reached Berlin. His admonition to the Habsburg emissaries on 6 July that any action should be executed quickly betrays a strategy already conceived. Bethmann’s plan was to exploit the crisis to strengthen the Central Powers’ alliance and break the coalition surrounding Germany. As he explained a few days later to his assistant, what was needed was ‘a rapid fait accompli and afterwards friendliness towards the Entente’. Bethmann recognized and feared that ‘an attack on Serbia can lead to world war’. Indeed, the British had warned the Germans of this explicitly in December 1912. The Chancellor’s complete surrender of the decision on how to proceed against the Balkan state to Austria-Hungary was perhaps a subconscious attempt to avoid responsibility for so monstrous an outcome, which he rightly foresaw would be cataclysmic. By contrast, Bethmann was prepared to accept a continental conflict against Russia and France. Moltke was confident that the army could win such a struggle, and if the two powers did intervene on Serbia’s behalf, German leaders considered that this would merely prove they had always intended to attack.107 The Chancellor’s preferred outcome, however, was a diplomatic victory. If Russia failed to support Serbia, he calculated, its prestige would be shattered in the Balkans, easing the pressure on Austria-Hungary. French or British refusal to back Russia would plausibly result in a crisis of trust, bringing the break-up of the Entente and a resulting German hegemony in Europe. Central to the hope that a conflict could be localized were the assumptions that the Tsar’s army was not yet ready to fight and that the Habsburgs would eliminate Serbia quickly, while international sympathy was still on their side and before surprised governments could respond. Both assumptions were wrong. As events in the last week of July were to prove, Bethmann had made a terrible miscalculation.108

  WORLD WAR

  When, on 24 July 1914, the great powers received copies of the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum handed to Serbia one day earlier, reactions ranged from concerned to angry. Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, famously called it ‘the most formidable document I have ever seen addressed by one State to another’.109 His Russian counterpart, Sergei Sazonov, ruled the document’s demands ‘simply unacceptable’. Entreaties to monarchical solidarity had left him unmoved. ‘I see what is going on,’ he had raged. ‘You are setting fire to Europe.’110 Lest these men’s views be dismissed as coloured by their indifference or hostility towards Austria-Hungary, the experienced and trusted Viennese politician Joseph Maria Baernreither, who had previously served as the Habsburg Trade Minister, similarly thought the demands ‘totally impossible’.111 No one among the Vienna and Berlin decision-makers could be surprised that an ultimatum written deliberately to be rejected should elicit such reactions. Bethmann Hollweg was satisfied by the Entente’s responses. The Russian Foreign Minister, although angry, had avoided stating a firm commitment to intervene militarily for Serbia, and Britain’s attitude was understood as worried but disinterested. On 25 July it still seemed feasible to localize an Austro-Serbian conflict.112

  The only opportunity to avoid any sort of war was if the Serbs unconditionally capitulated to Habsburg demands. This turned out to be more likely than most of Europe’s diplomats had predicted. Prime Minister Nikola Pašić had been away from Belgrade campaigning for re-election when the ultimatum was received by his deputy Lazar Paűu, the Serbian Finance Minister, and Pašić only returned at 5 a.m. on 24 July. At first he hoped to procrastinate but he soon came around to the view that without Russian support, Serbia would have to offer ‘full satisfaction’. However, on the morning of 25 July, news arrived from Serbia’s ambassador in St Petersburg, that ‘energetic measures, even mobilization’ on Serbia’s behalf were promised. The small Balkan state was officially to be taken under Russia’s protection. This information stiffened the Serbian government’s resolve. The reply to the Habsburg ultimatum drafted that afternoon was couched in conciliatory language but was careful to accept no culpability and conceded the Austro-Hungarians very little. In particular, it agreed only with reservation to point 5
, the demand that Habsburg officials be allowed to participate in suppressing anti-Austrian movements on Serbian soil, and it rejected point 6, which had ordered the Serbs to permit the involvement of Habsburg officials in the prosecution of the conspirators. Pašić had reason to resist this last demand, for there is good evidence that he had known of the plot, tried to stop it, but was unable to control the soldiers. Serbia’s military intelligence service was heavily implicated. The Austro-Hungarians could not know that the idea to kill Franz Ferdinand had come from within its ranks or that the plot was organized by its head, Colonel Dimitrijević. However, as a note accompanying the ultimatum made clear, they had established already that the assassins had been assisted by an army major, Dimitrijević’s right-hand man Voija Tankosić, that they had received weapons training in Belgrade and bombs and guns supplied from a Serbian arsenal, and that Serb customs officers had helped to smuggle them across the border.113

  Even before the Austro-Hungarian ambassador, Baron Wladimir Giesl, read the Serbian reply and, as instructed, broke off relations and left Belgrade, moves had already begun to localize the coming conflict. On 24 July, Berchtold had called the Russian chargé d’affaires into the Habsburg Foreign Ministry to insist that nothing could be further from his mind than the humiliation of Serbia. ‘It had been my particular care to eliminate from the Note everything which could have been interpreted in this sense,’ he claimed disingenuously. He appealed to the Russians as another dynastic power, explained the danger of the irredentist agitation to the Habsburg Empire, and assured him that ‘we had no intention of increasing the size of our territory’.114 This last point was superficially true, for Tisza, Minister President of Hungary, had made it a condition of his agreement to go to war. Nonetheless, the Habsburg ministers had agreed that ‘strategically necessary corrections of the frontier lines’ might be made, a formula that during hostilities came frequently to be used as code for very extensive annexations, and they certainly intended to reduce Serbia and distribute its territory to client states, cementing the Habsburg hold over the Balkans.115

  The Germans too worked hard at localizing the conflict. As early as 21 July, Bethmann Hollweg had ordered the Reich’s ambassadors in Entente capitals to stress that Austria-Hungary and Serbia should be left to resolve their disputes alone. Once the Habsburg ultimatum had been delivered, he sabotaged all attempts at restraint. A proposal by Sir Edward Grey for mediation by Germany, Italy, France and Britain on 24 July was deliberately forwarded late by Jagow, the Reich’s Foreign Secretary, so that it reached Vienna only after the ultimatum had expired. Over the following days, Bethmann continued firmly to insist that international adjudication should be directed solely towards Austria-Hungary and Russia, not Serbia; a stance designed to enable the Balkan conflict to go ahead without triggering a continental war. When another British proposal for mediation was made to Berlin on 27 July, it was again passed on late to Austria-Hungary, and only after the Habsburg ambassador had first secretly been instructed that the German government advised that it be disregarded.116 So determined was the Chancellor to push through his strategy of risk that he even attempted to exclude the Kaiser, whom he feared might weaken as danger approached, by urging him to stay on his North Sea cruise. This proved prescient. Wilhelm II disregarded his Chancellor’s advice and returned to Potsdam on 27 July. When, on the following morning, his officials belatedly gave him the Serbian answer, he judged it a ‘capitulation of the most humiliating kind’ and pronounced (with underlining to show how strongly he felt) that ‘every cause for war has vanished’. He advocated mediation after the Habsburgs had taken Belgrade, just across their southern border, as a sop to their honour and a guarantee that the Serbs would meet their demands. The Kaiser’s new pacifism was never permitted to influence the Austro-Hungarians, however, for while Bethmann’s next instructions to the German ambassador in Vienna incorporated Wilhelm’s idea that Belgrade might be occupied as a guarantee of good Serbian behaviour, they crucially omitted any indication that war was no longer necessary. Instead, Bethmann warned that no impression should be given ‘that we wish to hold Austria back’. The Germans’ repeated urging during the past days had in fact left the Habsburgs in no doubt that their allies wanted them ‘to press forward immediately and to confront the world with a fait accompli’.117

  Bethmann Hollweg was, however, already at this point losing grip on his deadly diplomatic game of risk. From the German perspective, there were two problems. The first was the excruciating slowness of Austria-Hungary’s move to war. Although Emperor Franz Joseph ordered mobilization on 25 July, the first day was set for 28 July, and only on the following day did troops start to arrive at their units. Moreover, it was solely at Berchtold’s insistence that war was declared at noon on that day; Conrad von Hötzendorf, Chief of the General Staff, who earlier had been so full of belligerence and talk of immediate strikes on the Balkan enemy, now wanted the declaration to be delayed until 12 August, the first day on which his forces would be fully ready for operations. Even had Habsburg leaders been so inclined, no lightning strike and a halt in Belgrade as the Kaiser suggested were possible, for their army’s units were scheduled in two waves: the first deployment was opposite Serbia’s western border, and only later was a contingent scheduled to arrive against its capital in the north.118 The second problem was that, in stark contrast to the Austro-Hungarians, the Russians reached for arms extraordinarily quickly. In this, they were urged on by the French, whose President and Prime Minister had made clear during their visit in St Petersburg – and thus, even before they had seen the Habsburg ultimatum – that no demands on Serbia should be tolerated.119 Already on the weekend of 24–25 July, before the Serbs had answered the ultimatum, the Tsar and his ministers resolved to impose the ‘Period Preparatory to War’ on four western military districts, Odessa, Kiev, Kazan and Moscow. The first orders to prepare for mobilization were sent to these areas on 24 July, that is, even before the Serbs or Austro-Hungarians, the principal protagonists in the dispute, had made any military moves.120 The Tsar’s ministers and diplomats knew they were playing for high stakes. Even with Habsburg promises that no Serbian territory would be annexed by the Empire, it was obvious to Russia that an Austro-Hungarian victory over Serbia would totally undermine its position in the Balkans. A senior Russian diplomat, Prince Troubetzkoi, spelled out most clearly the Russian government’s justified scepticism to the Italian ambassador on 29 July 1914: ‘Austrian assurances regarding annexation of Serbian territory were worth little because the results of the Austrian policy would be to isolate and bring Montenegro under its dominance, to place Albania under its protection, to reward Bulgaria with Serbian Macedonia, and to make Romania an appendage of the Triple Alliance. The Austrian plan was to secure the supremacism of Germanism in the Balkans at the expense of Slavism.’121

  For Russia’s leaders, however, Germany, not Austria-Hungary, was the central problem. Foreign Minister Sazonov was convinced that the Reich lay behind the Habsburg ultimatum and argued that Russia’s past diplomatic retreats and concessions had merely encouraged aggression. Using the messianic racial language so common among Russian leaders, he warned his colleagues that the Tsarist Empire’s ‘historic mission’ of leading the Slav peoples should not be abandoned. Backing down would lead to the loss of Russia’s great-power status: ‘she would be considered a decadent state and would henceforth have to take second place among the powers’.122

  Sazonov’s belief, which was accepted by the other ministers, that German aggression was behind the crisis meant that from the very beginning the Russians considered it to be not merely a Balkan but a European issue. This, combined with their rush to military action, was fateful. The Tsar and his ministers briefly attempted to avoid provoking the Germans by keeping the Warsaw district that faced both Germany and Austria on a peacetime footing. However, in the early hours of 26 July, the Russian Chief of Staff, General Nikolai Ianushkevich, who had already instructed his officers to act energetically and permitted
them to go beyond the regulations in their preparations, extended the ‘Period Preparatory to War’ to cover all of Russian Europe. Military technical considerations justified this extension: the Russian General Staff had no plan for a partial mobilization against Austria-Hungary. Denying itself the use of the important rail hub at Warsaw would cause chaos. Moreover, as its regiments did not draw their reserves from a single military district, it was inevitable that manpower in areas beyond the four districts mobilized would be drawn in.123 Nevertheless, it meant effectively that the first stages of a mobilization directed not only at Austria-Hungary but, critically, also at Germany had begun. From the early hours of that morning, the military railway department and personnel essential for running the troop transports were brought up to a full state of readiness, magazines, supply depots and fortresses were put on alert, screening troops took up position near the border and reservists were drafted to frontier divisions. The training of officer cadets was abruptly terminated, they received commissions and were sent to fill vacant command posts. Under no circumstances can these measures be interpreted as deterrence, for they were carried out in strict secrecy. When, on the night of 26 July, the German ambassador and military attaché in St Petersburg confronted Sazonov and accused the Russians of moving troops to the western border ‘in accordance with a mobilization directive’, he denied that any ‘mobilization order’ had been issued. Nor were the Russians naive; they had long understood the likely consequence of a move to arms. At the height of the tensions caused by the First Balkan War in November 1912, the then Prime Minister Count Vladimir Kokovtsev had pointed out that Russian mobilization would be countered by the Germans with war.124