Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  The German populace reading these reports naturally panicked. People saw threats where there were none. A wave of denunciations flooded local authorities. Police were ordered to conduct searches. There was an atmosphere of emergency which demanded they show results, and the pressure was further heightened by another warning, sent from the Interior Ministry on 20 July, that the Serbs might carry out terrorist attacks beyond Bosnia-Herzegovina. Lacking firm leads, the police substituted action for thought and arrested anyone whom they or their informers considered suspicious. As early as 29 June, a female ‘spy’ was stopped on the railways, and, as war came closer and tensions escalated, increasing numbers of the Crownland’s loyal Habsburg Slovene subjects were taken into custody. Foreigners were also targets of distrust; one Reich German, arrested at the end of July, was held for seven weeks until he was proven to be totally harmless. A vicious circle began, in which arrests prompted by rumours and suspicions appeared to confirm an anxious public’s fears, leading to more denunciations and yet more arrests.27

  Ethnic groups with no sympathy for Serbia but who were suspected of harbouring their own irredentist ambitions also fell victim to the spiralling fear and paranoia. In the western corner of the Monarchy, Habsburg Italians in Trient were falsely rumoured to be engaged in treasonous conspiracy.28 At its eastern extreme, in Hungary, the Romanian minority could, one of its members later complained, ‘hardly move for gendarmes and police spies’ in the month after Franz Ferdinand’s murder. ‘All kinds of rumours flourished,’ he remembered. ‘Every man spied on his neighbour, no matter how placid and peace-loving.’29 Nor did the north of the Empire, a region not short of long-standing ethnic enmities, go untouched by the fear and heightened racial antagonisms of July 1914. In Vienna, the schools of Czech immigrants had their windows broken by Germans wishing to avenge the archduke’s murder by a Slav.30 The same thing took place in Troppau, the German-dominated capital of Austrian Silesia, where, at least according to the Polish press, German professors led their students in the vandalism. Other brutal clashes between Czech and German crowds, and between demonstrators and police, were reported too from Moravia.31 The first weeks of the month also witnessed a wave of riots and demonstrations in Galicia, although there, unlike elsewhere, Germans were the victims. These were not directly related to events in Sarajevo; a clash between German and Polish youths, in which the latter had come off worst, had taken place in the town of Biała on the day before Franz Ferdinand’s assassination and was the cause of widespread Polish indignation. Nonetheless, the backdrop of acute tension in the rest of the Monarchy helps to account for the unusually tumultuous response. In the Crownland’s major cities, as well as in smaller communities, violent protests took place. Students in Lwów smashed the windows of the clubhouse of the ‘German Association in Galicia’ and then destroyed German shop signs and displays in the city’s main streets on the evening of 29 June. At the start of the following month, there were further anti-German riots in Przemyśl and, just over a week later, in nearby Tarnów. The violence in turn outraged Germans beyond Galicia. In the middle of July, the German population of Czernowitz, the capital of the neighbouring Crownland Bukovina, gathered in order to protest.32

  As the Habsburg Common Ministerial Council gathered on 19 July to discuss for a final time its ultimatum to Serbia, the Empire’s peoples were already in a state of acute anxiety, in some areas even upheaval. While opprobrium towards the Serbs had grown in some quarters and there was even growing support in the capital for harsh measures, the fact that most of the tension and aggression was directed inwards should have acted as a warning to the leaders plotting war. The protests and anti-Serb pogroms in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Dalmatia and Croatia laid bare the illusory nature of the government’s fears that the South Slav lands were seriously tempted by a greater Serbia. The ethnic tensions and suspicions inflamed by the assassination across the Habsburg Empire should have cast doubt on the unreasoned faith that armed conflict would somehow bring greater unity to a divided realm. The Ministerial Council, set on its course, ignored such considerations. Instead, the ultimatum was approved, and four days later placed before the Serb government. With it, a drastic step had been taken towards war.

  THE JULY CRISIS

  The Austro-Hungarian ultimatum issued to Serbia on the evening of 23 July made newspaper headlines across Europe. In Germany, the assassination of the Habsburg heir and his wife had dominated front pages at the end of June, but interest had soon waned. It was far from the only news that summer; there was war in Albania, a French state visit to Russia and, at home, by-elections and the condemnation of the well-known Alsatian artist ‘Hansi’ for inciting class hatred. The sensational murder trial of Madame Caillaux, the French cabinet minister’s wife who had shot and killed the editor of Paris’s foremost conservative newspaper Le Figaro, also made absorbing reading for the holiday season. The Habsburg note, however, wrenched German attention back to the Balkans dispute. Its harshness startled the public, for there had been widespread predictions of a relatively moderate response. For all that the bourgeois press, in accordance with the wishes of the Reich government, insisted that Austria-Hungary’s terms were justified, the danger of the move quickly became apparent. Russia’s warning on the following day that it could not remain indifferent in any Austro-Serbian conflict raised the possibility of a major international crisis.33

  In Austria-Hungary, the ultimatum turned the attention of the Empire’s already agitated peoples back outwards. The press had received official instructions on how to portray the note. The demands were, it was acknowledged, ‘severe’ but also ‘completely justifiable and necessary, left no room for discussion and did not exclude the hope of maintaining peace’.34 Newspapers presented the population as entirely behind the initiative: the Viennese were characterized as ‘calm and serious’ yet relieved that decisive action was being taken against Belgrade. In Hungary, representatives at a parliamentary sitting on Friday, 24 July, were said to be at one with their people when they agreed that Serbia’s provocations could not go on: ‘Clarification,’ it was insisted, ‘with all means and at any price is an unavoidable necessity.’ Entente intervention was dismissed in the parliament as ‘inconceivable’. If it did happen, not the Empire but ‘Europe’ would ‘bear the responsibility’ for a world war.35

  On the evening of Saturday, 25 July, after forty-eight hours of waiting and mistaken reports that Serbia would accept the Habsburg demands, news of the ‘unsatisfactory’ response arrived at 7.45 p.m. in Vienna and at around 9.30 p.m. in Berlin. The capitals were packed full of people, on the main squares, around newspaper buildings, and in cafes and beer halls; if one wanted news in an age before radio, one went out and looked for it. A particularly large crowd of over ten thousand had gathered outside the Habsburg War Ministry, anticipating that an announcement would be made here. When the ultimatum’s rejection and the break in diplomatic relations became known, first through newspaper extras but then spread quickly by word of mouth, most people went home. Those who stayed, however, created one of the most enduring and powerful memories of the First World War’s outbreak. Outside the War Ministry in Vienna, a mood of infectious patriotism prevailed. The crowd cheered the Habsburgs, Austria, the army and the now inevitable war. Stirring patriotic refrains lifted to the sky: ‘The Watch on the Rhine’, ‘Hail to Thee in Victor’s Garland’ and, most fittingly, the old Austrian song about the siege of Belgrade in 1717, ‘Prince Eugen, the Noble Knight’, adapted to the crowd’s expectations of the coming campaign:

  Archduke Eugen the noble knight,

  Will battle the Serbs brave and well

  He will a bridge erect

  We’ll go across direct

  And we’ll occupy Belgrade!

  From the mass of people, a student – we do not know his name – climbed onto the plinth of the Radetzky Monument and gave a speech calling on those gathered to sacrifice ‘possessions and blood for Kaiser and Fatherland!’ Somebody unfurled an imperial black-gold flag and
, under this standard, around a thousand cheering people marched together down the middle of the Ringstrasse. Similar scenes played out that evening across the centre of Vienna, at monuments, outside friendly embassies and in front of the imperial residence. The whole city was, wrote one resident, ‘seething with excitement’.36

  In Berlin, the press wrote more frankly of the tension felt among the waiting people. Horror was the most obvious first reaction to news of the Habsburg ultimatum’s rejection. Nonetheless, here too, in the city centre, spontaneous patriotic demonstrations quickly formed. These began already at 8 p.m., when the first rumours of Serbia’s refusal started to circulate. Groups of people, some carrying German or Austro-Hungarian flags, gathered, cheered the German and Austrian Kaisers, and sang patriotic songs. Witnesses tell of demonstrations of 2,000, some of even 10,000, people. They paraded arm in arm up and down Berlin’s main street, Unter den Linden, being applauded by spectators in the cafes on either side. Patriotic landmarks, as in Vienna, formed the focal points of the demonstrations: there were impromptu speeches and there was singing outside the Kaiser’s palace (unoccupied, as he was on his annual North Sea cruise) and, on the other side of the Brandenburg Gate, at Bismarck’s statue. The crowd marched to the Habsburg embassy, where they were thanked by the ambassador. Some gathered outside the offices of the Reich’s Chancellor, and were greeted by him. A noisy protest, later criticized in the press, was also held at around midnight in front of the Russian embassy. Only at 3.45 a.m. were the streets quiet.37

  These first patriotic demonstrations were repeated in the following days, as Austria-Hungary and then Germany went to war. In Berlin, a few thousand people marched on the 26 July. Although thereafter the demonstrations waned and then disappeared in the midweek, the proclamation of the ‘State of Siege’ on 31 July and mobilization on 1 August brought out crowds of unprecedented size. On the latter date, between 40,000 and 50,000 people gathered around the Kaiser’s palace. Moreover, the patriotic manifestations were replicated, albeit on a smaller scale, across the Reich. Already on 25 July there were processions in major cities such as Hamburg, Munich and Stuttgart, and in university towns like Freiburg and Jena, and others followed on subsequent days.38 The Habsburg Empire’s capital, where partial mobilization against Serbia had been ordered as early as 25 July, was the scene of huge but organized patriotic demonstrations in the following week. On 26 July the city’s tram workers, along with veterans’ and apprentices’ associations, together around 15,000 people, marched to join a crowd of 25,000 outside the City Hall. Three days later, after war with Serbia had begun on 28 July, a parade by Vienna’s veterans’ associations was watched, it was estimated, by over 100,000 people, many probably relatives of those marching.39 The city’s newspapers reported excitedly that similar demonstrations were taking place across the Empire. All divisions appeared miraculously to have been overcome. ‘Everywhere,’ wrote the Reichspost, ‘in Tyrol and Silesia, in the Carpathians, the Hungarian Puszta, on the shores of the Adriatic, no less than in the imperial city Vienna, the population is rising in passionate approval of the decision to fight.’40

  Was it true, as both countries’ bourgeois press insisted, that these demonstrations expressed a united enthusiasm for war among Germans and Austro-Hungarians? There are good reasons to think not. For a start, the genuinely spontaneous early patriotic actions attracted only modest numbers of participants. The groups parading in Vienna on 25 July were each mostly between 600 and 1,000 strong; altogether, probably between 5,000 and 15,000 people took part.41 Together with the at most 30,000 who marched in Berlin that evening, they were a tiny minority among the more than two million inhabitants of each capital. The marchers also represented a very select demographic. Wandering through the centre of Vienna late on the evening of 28 July, the day war was declared on Serbia, the Austrian politician Joseph Maria Baernreither was struck that ‘the enthusiastic crowd was very young’. Commentators said the same in Germany: those singing and shouting patriotic slogans were youthful, upper middle class and mostly, although not exclusively, male. From the start students, later joined by youth organizations, played a leading role.42

  These young demonstrators should not be lightly dismissed as aggressive chauvinists. They were moved by multifarious motives to take to the streets. Certainly, many were ardent patriots, some belligerent, but plenty supported the war with reason. Especially among Vienna’s upper classes, there was a strand of opinion which considered that Serb provocations had gone far enough and that decisive action was necessary. Many young men parading on 25 July were thus, as in the violent protests earlier in the month and as one upper-middle-class woman remembered of her sons, ‘filled with thoughts of revenge against Serbia’.43 In Berlin on the same night, however, the intention of demonstrators was to express support for Austria-Hungary, not to demand violent intervention by Germany. For all the positive associations of adventure and heroism which war had for many in that generation of bourgeois youth, the rowdiness accompanying some of the parades betrays young people taking advantage of a once in a lifetime chance briefly to overturn social norms; opportunities to stomp, shout and cheer through main streets, while knocking off the hats of passers-by who failed to show respect for the patriotic anthems being sung, were naturally rare in imperial cities.44 For those who felt anxious, and privately very many did, the demonstrations provided a welcome chance to release tension, and a comforting act of solidarity. Students’ motivations have been particularly misunderstood. For the fraternities, infamous for their duelling and drinking (although while the latter was universal, the former was not), the mark of a man was his readiness to sacrifice himself for the greater national good. Students identified themselves as stalwart patriots; most were neither naive nor stupid. Their demonstrations expressed a readiness to face, not a desire for, the horrors of armed conflict.45

  The larger crowds which gathered in German and Austro-Hungarian cities during that last week of July 1914 were certainly not demanding war. Most were awaiting news, some excitedly, many with great anxiety. ‘Strange, feverish gestures, excited faces, whispers’ all betrayed the nervousness that these people felt as conflagration threatened.46 So awful was the thought that many refused to accept it could come to a European conflict. After Austria-Hungary rejected Serbia’s answer to its ultimatum as insufficient, one shop owner in the city of Freiburg, not far from the Franco-German border, observed ruefully that ‘no one yet wanted to believe in a general war, no one wanted to presume that Russia, on whom alone war or peace depended, would really take its role as protector of Serbia so far as to unleash a world war’.47 At the start of the week there were still grounds for optimism. Although Austro-Hungarians recognized that a Balkan conflict was inevitable, both they and the German public were led by the press, which reported on British proposals for mediation, to hope for its ‘localization’.48 Many nonetheless took precautions. When city banks opened on Monday morning, 27 July, queues of people, mostly small savers, among whom women were especially prominent, were waiting to close their accounts. Small change ran short as people hung on to silver and gold coinage, and tradesmen had to be warned that they faced a legal obligation to accept paper money. As the crisis worsened, people also began to buy up and hoard food, which in consequence suddenly became very expensive. This began earlier in Austria than in Germany: already by 30 July, the day that the cost of food started to become a serious problem in the Reich, maximum prices had been introduced and officials were ordered to combat war profiteering in Bohemia.49

  In both Austria-Hungary and Germany it could be expected that, far from being enthused by such a conflict, a significant part of the populations would actively resist going to war. The Habsburg government particularly feared the Czechs’ reaction; Foreign Minister Berchtold, as we have seen, thought on 29 June that revolution could break out in Bohemia if the Monarchy attempted to mobilize against Serbia.50 Special precautions were taken in Prague on 25 July, the day that the ultimatum expired, to prevent pro-Russian
demonstrations. In the event, however, the Crownland’s governor was able to report to his superiors in Vienna that ‘everywhere calm’ had prevailed.51 There was also no open resistance from Austrian Social Democrats, although on 25 July they published in the party newspaper a manifesto against war. The explanation for the lack of resistance is straightforward: on the same day, the government issued in conjunction with the order for partial mobilization a set of ‘Emergency Laws’ suspending Habsburg subjects’ constitutional rights, including their rights of free speech and assembly. Civilians in the Austrian half of the Monarchy became subject to military courts for a range of ‘political’ offences, such as, but not limited to, disturbances of the public peace, rioting and insurrection, lese-majesty, high treason and interference with the railways or army. Anyone trying to hinder mobilization would also be put before a court martial.52 Victor Adler, the Social Democrats’ leader, was cowed by this new regime. ‘The party is helpless,’ he told fellow Socialists on 29 July. ‘We cannot stave off the danger. Demonstrations have become impossible . . . Our entire organization and our press are at stake.’53

  The German Social Democrats (SPD) were far more formidable than their Austrian counterparts. With 1.1 million members, they were ten times the size of the Austrian party and the largest organization in the Reich, excepting the war veterans’ umbrella association, the Kyffhäuserbund. The so-called ‘Free Unions’, with which the SPD possessed a close relationship, together numbered more than 2.5 million workers; there was an obvious potential here for massive disruption.54 Moreover, at the International Socialist Congress of 1907 the SPD had committed itself to hinder the outbreak of any war or, if unsuccessful, strive to hasten its end while exploiting the inevitable accompanying economic and political crisis to accelerate the capitalist class system’s demise. The fiery rhetoric, influenced by French and Russian Socialists, in fact belied the party’s reformist instincts. By 1914, its leadership was dominated by men who wished not for a violent break, but rather a legal transition to real democracy. They were also, despite being tarred by their enemies as ‘comrades with no Fatherland’, patriots who had frequently stated their readiness to defend the Reich. Still, there could be no doubt that an aggressive action in the sphere of foreign policy would meet with firm resistance. Already at the time of the second Morocco crisis in 1911 and during the Balkan Wars in 1912–13, the SPD had demonstrated its ability to call out mass peace demonstrations.55