For months, the crisis consumed a British government already on edge from labor turbulence and from not knowing where militant suffragettes were going to attack next. That Ireland and England were inseparable was an article of faith for imperial-minded Britons—wasn't the country's very name the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland? Many of those at the very top of British society—Sir John French, for example—proudly boasted family roots in Ireland. Hadn't the United States fought a civil war to remain united? Some in Britain were prepared to risk the same, and among them was Alfred Milner. In early 1914, he decided drastic action was needed—action, he hinted ominously, "falling short of violence or active rebellion, or at least not beginning with it." To Violet Cecil he wrote: "For the last 3 or 4 months I have really worked hard—at public things—for the first time since South Africa." In Milner's view, the Irish were no better than Boers, and like them belonged firmly under British control; Rudyard Kipling agreed, considering Irish Catholics "the Orientals of the West."
Milner began traveling England making speeches and skillfully mobilizing other opponents of Irish home rule on the political right. Publicly, he and his allies gathered some two million signatures on a manifesto threatening civil disobedience. Secretly, he raised funds to buy arms for the Protestant militia, with Kipling contributing an astonishing £30,000, the equivalent of well over $3 million today. Violet Cecil firmly supported their campaign. After all, if the subversive idea of home rule spread, there would soon be no British Empire left for her son George—now a newly minted officer in the Grenadier Guards—to defend.
As the summer of 1914 began, the authorities worked desperately to resolve what seemed the gravest national crisis in a century. The Royal Navy recalled some ships from overseas. King George V convened an unprecedented emergency conference of all sides at Buckingham Palace, somberly declaring, "Today the cry of Civil War is on the lips of the most responsible and sober-minded of my people." The conference collapsed in discord. Widespread violence seemed to draw yet closer when British troops opened fire on protesters in Dublin, killing three and wounding many more, one of whom died. Carrie Kipling began assembling supplies of clothing for the beleaguered Irish Protest ant refugees who were certain to soon flood England.
The Kiplings, Milner, Despard, French, the Pankhursts, and almost everyone else in Britain were so focused on the looming conflagration in Ireland that they paid little attention to the news, at the end of June, that Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary and his wife, Sophie, had been killed by an assassin's bullets in the provincial city of Sarajevo.
II. 1914
7. A STRANGE LIGHT
THERE HAD BEEN plenty of pomp and circumstance on the schedule, but not much else. Archduke Franz Ferdinand's visit to Sarajevo, capital of one of the outlying provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was largely ceremonial. Fifty years old, overweight and ill-tempered, he was not on the best of terms with his elderly uncle, the Emperor, whose throne he was due to inherit. Unusually for a member of European royalty, however, he had a happy marriage, and his pregnant wife had come along from Vienna for the trip. During two days of rain, she visited schools and orphanages while, in his role as inspector general of the army, Franz Ferdinand observed military maneuvers. At the suburban spa where they were staying the couple gave a dinner dance for local officials and army officers; a military band played The Blue Danube and other waltzes. The next morning, June 28, 1914, the sun came out and Franz Ferdinand and Sophie headed into the city in a convoy of cars flying the black and yellow Hapsburg dynasty flag for a 24-gun salute, a welcoming ceremony, and a formal celebration of their 14th wedding anniversary.
The very headgear of the dignitaries who greeted them in Sarajevo reflected the crazy quilt of this ungainly empire that threatened to come apart at the seams: homburgs, yarmulkes, miters, fezzes, turbans, plus cavalry helmets and brimmed military caps in different shapes for regiments of different ethnicities. The empire was a wobbly agglomeration of nearly a dozen minorities, almost all of them restless under Vienna's autocratic domination. The region around Sarajevo included many ethnic Serbs, among them a faction of militant nationalists. Living next door to the independent nation of Serbia, they dreamed of a Greater Serbia encompassing all Serbs. Gavrilo Princip was one of them, a 20-year-old aspiring poet. Small, ascetic, and tubercular, fired up by the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Russian anarchists and aided by a shadowy group of sympathizers across the border in Serbia, he conceived the idea of assassinating the heir apparent on his visit to Sarajevo, and with several fellow conspirators planned a suicide mission. On the morning of June 28 they set off with pistols, bombs, and poison tablets they would swallow after their task was accomplished.
Relations between the empire and Serbia were already touchy. Austro- Hungarian officials considered that country's very existence a threat, and were flexing their military might with the army exercises that the Archduke had come to watch. They were looking for any possible excuse to invade, dismantle, and partition Serbia. Waiting in the crowd on a sunny Sarajevo street for the Archduke's motorcade, Gavrilo Princip was about to provide one.
Making things even more combustible was Kaiser Wilhelm II, the staunchest backer of Vienna. A world industrial colossus, Germany was like an impatient, overbearing big brother to Austria-Hungary. For 35 years the two empires had been bound together by a military alliance, each committed to support the other if attacked. The hot-blooded Kaiser, enthusiastic about flaunting Germany's power but for the moment deprived of opportunities to do so, frequently encouraged his ally to take on little Serbia.
In the background was Russia, another rickety empire and long-time rival of Austria-Hungary for control of the Balkans. The Russians' emotional ties to the Serbs, fellow Slavs and fellow Eastern Orthodox believers, went far back in time (and, indeed, would be a factor in the Balkan wars of the 1990s). Vienna always suspected, sometimes correctly, that any expression of Greater Serbian nationalism had covert Russian support. If Austria-Hungary invaded Serbia, the Russian government would face overwhelming pressure from its own people to come to the aid of their Slavic brethren. Helmuth von Moltke of the German general staff had already assured his Austrian counterpart that if this ever happened, Germany would gladly join a war against Russia.
Like so many German military men, he was eager for the inevitable war to come, in which, he felt, "the issue will be one of a struggle between Germandom and Slavdom." The Kaiser agreed, optimistically assuming that in the long run the British could not remain allied with the "Slavs and Gallics," and would come over to the side of their Teutonic cousins. Racial paranoia about Russia ran deep. "This unorganised Asiatic mass," declared the head of Germany's Royal Library, "like the desert with its sands, wants to gather up our fields of grain." Sometimes high German officials and industrialists talked privately of annexing a slice of western Russia and of turning other parts of it into vassal states.
It was into this powder keg of jostling empires, just as Franz Ferdinand's open touring car unexpectedly stopped on the street in front of him, that young Gavrilo Princip fired two point-blank pistol shots. One hit the Archduke, who was wearing a sky-blue tunic and a helmet with green peacock feathers, in the jugular vein; the other struck the Duchess, dressed in white silk. Both were dead within half an hour.
Outside the Balkans, the assassinations made the headlines for a few days, then dropped from sight. In England, the early summer of 1914 was warm and bright, perfect for tennis at Wimbledon and for the upcoming Henley Regatta; the cloud that threatened to spoil everything was the growing likelihood of civil war in Ireland. The Continent seemed far off. It was "difficult to discuss foreign affairs freely," said one member of the House of Commons, "when our home affairs were in such a particularly evil plight."
In France, President Raymond Poincaré was at the races at Long-champ, where the Baron de Rothschild's horse Sardanapale won the Grand Prix, when he received news of the killings, and did not bother to leave. The Fr
ench had something far more intriguing to distract them: the sensational murder case against Henriette Caillaux, wife of a former prime minister. She had shot and killed a newspaper editor who threatened to publish love letters she and her husband had exchanged when both were still married to others. At her trial the next month, the murder would be judged a crime of passion for which a woman, by definition not in control of her emotions, could not be held accountable. She was acquitted.
Even today it seems extraordinary how swiftly Princip's two bullets, fired in a city most people had never heard of, set in motion events that would so profoundly reshape our world. Few periods have been as intensively studied as the six weeks that followed the moment Princip squeezed off his shots, unsuccessfully swallowed his poison capsule, and was wrestled away from an angry crowd by sword-wearing policemen. (He would die of tuberculosis in prison four years later.)
If the Archduke and his wife had not been assassinated, might the war have been avoided? Possibly, but given Austria-Hungary's impatience to crush Serbia and Germany's ambitions to dominate Europe, it is hard to imagine a conflict of some sort not taking place—not when we listen, for example, to the Kaiser, at a court ball in 1913, pointing out the general designated "to lead the march on Paris," or asking, fruitlessly, two successive Belgian kings for the right to begin that march through Belgium, or when we read General von Moltke, in 1915, writing to a friend about "this war which I prepared and initiated."
Princip's bullets may have provided the spark, but—German and Austro-Hungarian aggressiveness aside—three other factors steepened Europe's plunge toward the abyss. First was the pair of rival alliances that obligated some countries to come to the aid of others in case of war. Second was the pressure felt by all the major Continental powers to mobilize their large forces of trained reservists who could triple or quadruple the size of any peacetime army. Mobilizing an army in 1914 required several weeks: reservists had to be called up, get to their bases, and collect their rifles and equipment; then millions of men, their weapons, and tens of thousands of tons of food and supplies had to be laboriously deployed by train and horse-drawn wagon to wherever the fighting was expected to be. The very time necessary for mobilization, however, was something inherently destabilizing, for if the other side looked about to mobilize, and you didn't do so, you would be at a fatal disadvantage. A third dangerous factor was the tremendous advantage gained by any country that attacked first, for this guaranteed that the fighting would at least begin on another country's territory.
In Vienna, Emperor Franz Joseph seemed remarkably unperturbed by the death of the nephew he disliked. What he and his advisers saw in the assassination of the heir apparent was something they had long sought: an excuse to attack Serbia. Anti-Serbian riots soon broke out on Vienna's streets. In Germany, when a launch raced out from shore to bring news of the murders to his yacht off Kiel, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had been a close friend of Franz Ferdinand and impatient for him to succeed his aging, side-whiskered uncle, was crushed. A few days later at his palace, he told Vienna's ambassador to Berlin that he would back any Austro-Hungarian move against Serbia—and he urged that the upstart Serbs be taught a lesson with no delay. In effect, the Kaiser, who had far more power than a constitutional monarch like Britain's, gave Austria a secret blank check to invade.
Was anyone in the Serbian cabinet aware of the plans of Princip and his tiny band? No proof of this has ever surfaced, but it hardly mattered now that Austria had the perfect pretext to wipe Serbia off the map.
July was the month when Europe's emperors, kings, and prime ministers began their summer vacations, so the steps toward the cataclysm were taken in slow motion. In Berlin and Vienna, although messengers and telegraph wires were kept busy, no break in the normal routine that might hint at an impending attack on Serbia was allowed. Even General von Moltke, more impatient for war than ever ("We are ready," he had said some weeks earlier, "and the sooner the better for us"), conspicuously went to take the waters at the famous spa in Carlsbad. The Kaiser departed for a cruise off Norway. Germany's chancellor headed for his country estate. Austro-Hungarian officials, from the Emperor on down, similarly took their holidays. The Kaiser sent birthday greetings to the King of Serbia because, the German Foreign Office advised, "the omission of the customary telegram would be too noticeable." All over Europe those of a class who could afford to take July off were doing so: young George Cecil, home on leave from the army at his mother's country house, Great Wigsell, whiled away his time playing cricket with the Kiplings.
The Kaiser had convinced himself that if Austria-Hungary promptly attacked Serbia, there would be no risk of Russian intervention: Tsar Nicholas II's own grandfather had been murdered by terrorists, so how could he come to the aid of a nation possibly implicated in the assassination of two members of another Emperor's family? Furthermore, if the attack were immediate, as the Kaiser urged, Russia would not even be able to intervene. Unlike industrialized countries with dense rail networks, Russia, with its more primitive infrastructure and vast distances, would need some six weeks to fully mobilize. By then, Austria should long have Serbia fully occupied.
Even though the Austro-Hungarian general staff had already been planning moves against Serbia several weeks before the assassinations, it was unable to follow the Kaiser's urging to strike quickly and without warning. To their dismay, Austrian officials discovered that large numbers of army troops had been granted leave to go home and help their families with the summer harvest. Recalling them would tip the government's hand. As a result, only on July 23, 1914, almost four weeks after the killings, did the Austro-Hungarian envoy present an ultimatum to the Serbian finance minister—the prime minister was out of town—who refused to accept it. The diplomat finally left the document on a table and departed. By design, the ultimatum was composed of demands that Serbia could never accept, such as the removal of government officials to be specified and a carte blanche for Austro-Hungarian police to operate on Serbian territory. It was this warlike document, not the assassinations, that rang out like a warning bell across the continent, signaling that, for the first time since the Battle of Waterloo nearly a century earlier, Europe was facing an all-engulfing war.
Winston Churchill, now First Lord of the Admiralty, was in a cabinet meeting about the Irish crisis when a messenger arrived with news that the foreign secretary shared with his colleagues: "The quiet grave tones of Sir Edward Grey's voice were heard," he later wrote, "reading a document which had just been brought to him from the Foreign Office. It was the Austrian note to Serbia.... The parishes of Fermanagh and Tyrone faded back into the mists and squalls of Ireland, and a strange light began ... to fall and grow upon the map of Europe."
Prime Minister Asquith was optimistic his own country could avoid the dangers of the strange light. He sometimes penned letters during meetings, and from that same cabinet session he wrote to his confidante, Venetia Stanley, "We are in measurable ... distance of a real Armageddon." But about Britain he added reassuringly, "Happily, there seems to be no reason why we should be anything more than spectators." Famous for enjoying his leisure, the following weekend he went to play golf.
Desperately mobilizing its small army, Serbia sent an urgent appeal asking the Russian Tsar, "in your generous Slav heart," for help. In St. Petersburg, the Russian capital, the general staff ordered the first steps toward mobilization. France, bound to Russia by treaty, recalled all generals to active duty and canceled all army leaves. Then some 40,000 French troops stationed in Morocco were ordered home.
The moves and countermoves succeeded each other ever faster. On July 28 Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia and the following day Austrian gunboats on the Danube began shelling the Serbian capital, Belgrade—the first actual shots of the First World War. Kaiser Wilhelm II returned from his seagoing holiday, boiling with exasperation that the bumbling Austrians had not done this weeks earlier. In his erratic way he was having an attack of cold feet, for now France and Russia were mobilizing a
gainst him. And Britain took an ominous step.
As a long-planned test of its reserve system, in mid-July the Royal Navy had called up reservists from all over the country to man more than 180 warships—the most powerful armada that had ever been assembled in one spot—for exercises off the great south coast naval base at Spithead. Thrilling spectators onshore and in boats, an endless line of vessels, studded with huge Dreadnought-class battleships like the Audacious and Colossus, had steamed past the royal yacht for six hours, the sailors on board returning King George V's salute with rousing cheers. The government then decided to keep the reservists on duty. On July 29 Churchill secretly ordered the core of the fleet to move north to its protected wartime base. From the English Channel, an 18-mile line of battleships and battle cruisers, running at top speed and with lights out, tore through the night up the North Sea to safe anchorage at Scapa Flow, in the Orkney Islands north of Scotland, where a tight circle of fogbound islands would protect them from enemy ships and submarines.
Meanwhile, the British ambassador in Vienna sent a telegram to London: "This country has gone wild with joy at the prospect of war with Serbia." In Berlin, General von Moltke, his eyes no longer on paltry Serbia but on France and Russia, was convinced that Germany should strike. Its army, Europe's best, was prepared. "We shall never hit it again so well as we do now," he said impatiently. The German foreign minister told the Russian ambassador that, with Russia mobilizing, Germany would be "likewise obliged to mobilize ... and the diplomatists must now leave the talking to the cannon."
Indecisive and fatalistic, Tsar Nicholas II waffled, issuing contradictory orders, now for full mobilization, now for partial mobilization. Trying to halt the momentum toward war, he exchanged telegrams with the Kaiser—in English, which they both spoke fluently. But his top generals, like the German ones, were eager to let the cannon do the talking. "I will ... smash my telephone," said one, so that he could not "be found to give any contrary orders for a new postponement of general mobilization." Having humiliatingly lost a war to Japan a decade earlier, the Russian high command felt anxious to prove its mettle. If France were attacked, the generals felt, for Russia to refuse to go to war, as its treaty commitments required, would be an intolerable loss of face. Outside the British embassy in St. Petersburg, an enormous crowd rallied late into the night, excited that Britain's all-powerful fleet might join the war on Russia's side. Nearby, as the Tsar and Tsarina appeared on the balcony of their palace, a great mass of Russians sank to their knees and fervently sang the national anthem.
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