by G. J. Meyer
But Russia, too, had much to fear. For all its size, her army was ill trained, ill equipped, run by a corrupt and incompetent bureaucracy, and supported by a deplorably inadequate physical infrastructure. And like her ally France and her potential enemies, Russia was trapped in an unending, apparently unbreakable cycle of escalation. In 1912, for the first time, her military spending exceeded Germany’s. But then the First and Second Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 both ended with the little kingdom of Serbia profiting at Austria-Hungary’s expense, so alarming the Germans that they increased their military budget sharply. This frightened Russia into launching her so-called Great Program. Undertaken at France’s insistence and made possible by French loans, this program was approved in June 1914, just days before Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. It was, over the next three years, to add four hundred thousand men and modern weaponry and equipment to Russia’s standing army and extensively upgrade the railways and other infrastructure needed for fast mobilization. Its short-term effect was not to strengthen Russia but to cause the Germans and Austro-Hungarians to fear that in a few more years their situation would be hopeless. Some of them said that if war was inevitable sooner or later, it had better come soon.
The killing of Franz Ferdinand mattered not only because he was the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, one of the three empires that dominated central and eastern Europe, but because he was shot by a Serb, a hapless and tubercular teenager named Gavrilo Princip. This sparked rage in the Austrian capital of Vienna, for which Serbia had long been a headache, taking every opportunity to stir up the kind of trouble that might enable it to grab another piece of territory, always looking to Russia for support. The Austrians assumed from the start, and with reason, that the assassination had been planned in Serbia’s capital, Belgrade, and that government officials were involved. They took it as certain that if they did not meet this latest and most outrageous provocation with a punishing response, the subject peoples of Vienna’s sprawling multiethnic empire would be encouraged to make trouble as well. The empire was a disjointed hodgepodge, with Germans and Magyar Hungarians making up less than 45 percent of its population. Many of its other subjects—the 12 percent who were Czech, the Polish 10 percent, et cetera—tended to regard themselves as captives with little reason to fight, or even wish, for the empire’s survival. Austria-Hungary was also financially hard-pressed, her treasury drained by the Balkan Wars. She was capable of dealing with only a limited amount of trouble. Problems had to be snuffed out as soon as they appeared, because her ability to cope with them was questionable if they grew to be too big.
Serbia was a protégé state, a kind of Slavic little brother, of the great Russian empire. The Russians had long supported the Serbs to strengthen their own position in the Balkans, increasing Austria’s difficulties. The Austrians knew that if they threatened Serbia, she would, as in the past, look to Russia for help. They knew also that they were no match for Russia. So they, too, appealed to a stronger ally and patron—to Germany.
When Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II lunched with a delegation from Vienna and promised to support them in a move against Serbia, giving them what would become notorious as his “blank check,” he committed the first of the mistakes with which the road to Armageddon would be paved. He did so almost offhandedly, without deliberation or consultation, not imagining that a major crisis might ensue. His aim was to encourage Germany’s junior partner to assert her authority in the Balkans, thereby drawing a line under the relentless erosion of that authority and of Vienna’s credibility. He was of course aware of the Russian-Serb connection, but he believed that Russia was not prepared for a showdown. He was confident that her tsar, Nicholas II (who in childhood had seen his grandfather blown to bits by terrorists), would understand the need to hold regicides to account. They were, after all, family. Nicholas was married to Wilhelm’s first cousin, and both the tsarina and the kaiser were first cousins of George V of England.
Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany
Seen by Americans as the devil’s disciple, he complained that in wartime Germany no one cared what he thought.
There was an element of fear in the kaiser’s writing of his blank check. He and his ministers and generals were painfully aware that Austria-Hungary, though feeble, was their sole reliable support in a Europe that was growing more militarized every year. They saw that if her decline continued, she could be of little use if war came, that if they did not prove themselves willing to support her, she might be inclined to look elsewhere for protection. Officials in Berlin joked, sourly, that being allied to Vienna was like being shackled to a corpse. But they saw no alternative to propping the corpse up and applying makeup.
If the Austrians had done as the kaiser expected, delivering a fast, chastening blow to the Serbs while making it clear that their objectives were modest and their campaign was going to be short, they would have had the sympathy of a European public still shocked by the murder of Franz Ferdinand and his wife. Undoubtedly there would have been hard words from Russia, and mediation might have been required, but the danger of a crisis escalating out of control would have been considerably reduced.
But Vienna was unable to move swiftly. The mobilization of its army, once started, was going to take sixteen days if everything went smoothly, and would be made especially difficult by the fact that this was high summer and many of the troops had been sent home to help with the harvest. Under the constitution of Austria-Hungary’s dual monarchy, mobilization could not begin without the approval of Hungary’s government, which was far from eager to proceed. Even the Austrians were unwilling to begin immediately because, as it happened, President Poincaré and Prime Minister René Viviani of France were at that moment in the midst of an official visit to their Russian allies. The Austrians saw the unwisdom of revealing their intentions while the Russian and French leaders were together—something that rarely happened—and able to coordinate an immediate response.
And so the days passed quietly, with nothing apparently happening. The assassination turned into old news. But the Austrians were keeping a dangerous secret: they had no intention of simply giving the Serbs a quick thrashing and withdrawing within their own borders. If free to choose, they would have opted to eliminate Serbia, breaking her up and distributing the pieces among neighbors friendly to Vienna. They had to accept, however, that Russia would never permit such a thing. And so they settled for the lesser goal of reducing Serbia in size—assuming, mistakenly, that Russia would acquiesce in that. They told Berlin nothing, wanting no conditions placed on the blank check. Nor was Russia given even an oblique warning; the plan was to present her with a fait accompli.
The Austro-Hungarian foreign minister, Count Leopold von Berchtold, was a fabulously wealthy bon vivant who thought himself devilishly clever but in fact was only reckless and shortsighted. Not satisfied with merely keeping Russia in the dark, he instructed his ambassador to assure the tsar’s foreign minister that Vienna intended to do nothing that St. Petersburg could possibly find objectionable. This ensured that the Russians, when they learned the truth, would become unwilling to believe Vienna about anything.
Meanwhile Berchtold began drafting a list of demands to be presented to Serbia as soon as Poincaré and Viviani departed for home. Vienna’s Council of Ministers, its blood up and its confidence inflated by the blank check, agreed that these demands must be so severe as to make acceptance impossible, thereby providing justification for an invasion.
On Thursday, July 23, just hours after the French leaders steamed away from St. Petersburg, Vienna’s ten demands were presented to the Serbian authorities in Belgrade. The deadline for an answer was set at forty-eight hours. The Serb response, delivered to the Austrian ambassador late on Saturday afternoon, fully accepted half the demands and requested clarification of most of the others. Its tone was conciliatory, in places almost abject. Nevertheless the ambassador did as instructed and declared that, being unsatisfied, Vienna was severing diplomatic relations. He took the ne
xt train out of town, and both countries announced that they were mobilizing their armies. Austria began moving three hundred thousand troops to the border, within easy artillery range of Belgrade.
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Sazonov, had been so infuriated upon learning of the Austrian demands that he told the chief of the Russian general staff to be ready for mobilization. At his urging and that of the military, Tsar Nicholas declared a Period Preparatory to War. Russian military districts, both those nearest the Austro-Hungarian frontier and others more directly threatening to Germany, were ordered to muster their troops and weaponry. This was supposed to take place in secret, but concealment was impossible. When the Germans made inquiries, they were met with denials that were obviously untrue. The Germans began to wonder what Russia was actually planning. The tension ratcheted upward.
Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, chancellor of the German Empire
He struggled to avert a showdown with the United States but was defeated by his own nation’s generals.
Sazonov had become convinced, without evidence but with the encouragement of the French and Serbian ambassadors, that the Austrians were being used as German puppets, and that what the Germans intended was to force Russia out of the Balkans. There was no truth in this—Berlin would have been delighted to see Russia exit the Balkans, but had no intention of going to war in hope of making it happen—but that hardly mattered. President Poincaré, before departing, had demanded that the Russians not allow themselves to be bullied by Vienna or Berlin. And now the Serbian ambassador was telling Sazonov, on his own, that Serbia, too, expected him to take a hard line. This was yet another tragic untruth; in fact, the Belgrade government was terrified by the prospect of an Austrian invasion.
The fuse was now short and burning fast. On Tuesday, July 28, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. She did so in spite of being far from ready to attack, and for no better reason than Berchtold’s determination to take an irreversible step before Berlin awoke to the seriousness of the situation and stopped payment on its blank check. Vienna’s declaration came a day after Kaiser Wilhelm, ignorant of the latest developments, arrived home from his annual yachting holiday in the North Sea. Though the German ambassador in Vienna had provided advance notice of Vienna’s intentions, Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg had told Wilhelm nothing. Probably this was because he knew how unstable his master was, how psychologically fragile and how capable of making rash decisions and erratically changing direction. As Otto von Bismarck had declared more than two decades earlier, “The emperor is like a balloon. If one did not hold him fast on a string, he would go no one knows whither.” Keeping him ignorant was one way of keeping him from flying off into the unknown.
Shortly after Austria’s declaration of war, Russia’s ambassador paid a call on Berchtold. The result was disastrous. The ambassador departed believing that Berchtold had told him that he was unwilling to negotiate not just with Serbia but even with Russia. This meant that there could be no communication between the two powers that were best positioned to resolve the crisis peaceably. It is unlikely that even Berchtold was irresponsible enough to have said any such thing—or to have done so intentionally, anyway. But when Sazonov was informed, his fear that war was inevitable turned into certainty. The chief of the Russian general staff agreed; he was receiving reports, false but frightening, that Germany was mustering troops on a massive scale. Later that same day, Thursday, July 30, Sazonov persuaded a deeply unwilling tsar to sign a mobilization order. He accomplished this by claiming to know (as he unquestionably believed) that the Germans were already doing the same thing. The tsar’s reluctance did him credit. “Think of the thousands and thousands of men who would be sent to their deaths!” he pleaded. But Sazonov insisted that the survival of the Romanov dynasty—of Mother Russia herself—was now at stake.
This was the turning point. Just two days later a dumbfounded Europe would find itself at war. The heart of the tragedy is that there was no need for Russia’s mobilization. Nothing had happened to threaten Russia directly or even to put her position in the Balkans in clear jeopardy. The irony is that Germany, the cause of Russia’s fears, was now alone in having made no move toward mobilization. The French general staff was moving masses of troops to places within a few miles of their eastern frontier from which they could launch an invasion of Germany. In London, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill had deployed Britain’s Grand Fleet, positioning it to meet any moves by the German navy in the North Sea or the Channel. Nicholas II’s signature meant that almost one and a half million troops—some 150 divisions—would begin assembling at points chosen as best for starting attacks on Germany as well as Austria and Hungary. Additionally, Russia’s millions of reservists were being called to duty. Viewed from Berlin, these developments were terrifying.
Sazonov gave much weight, in demanding the tsar’s signature, to the fact that for Russia mobilization was going to be a slow and cumbersome process. The country was both enormous—the largest on earth—and backward by the standards of western Europe, her railways inadequate and her armies impressive in size only. Even when mobilized, her troops would be merely positioned for action, not launched upon an attack. Viewed from St. Petersburg, Russia’s mobilization did not appear nearly as dangerous as it did from Berlin. Sazonov was walking a tightrope, hoping that mobilization would make the Germans see the gravity of the situation while not stampeding them into a panicky response. To accomplish this, unfortunately, he continued to claim that his country’s preparations were less extensive than they actually were. The only result was to increase German fears that Russia was readying a preemptive attack.
Britain meanwhile stood on the sidelines. In keeping with her traditional policy of keeping clear of continental alliances, she was not a member of the French-Russian Entente or the German-Austrian partnership. So far as the world knew—so far as most members of the cabinet in London knew—she had no obligations to either side. In keeping with her equally venerable policy of opposing any continental power that threatened to dominate Europe, however, she had unofficially regarded Germany as her prime potential enemy almost from 1871, the year the Franco-Prussian War made possible the unification of the German states in a new empire. Prussia, a German kingdom so warlike that Napoleon I called it an army with a country attached, had led the confederation that defeated France. It was more or less inevitable that her king, Wilhelm I, became emperor of Germany.
France meanwhile had found herself in the unfamiliar role of underdog, without allies. That, however, was sure to change, and in due course it did. Russia had so many border disputes with Austria-Hungary that early in the 1890s she quit the Three Emperors League in which she had been allied with Berlin and Vienna. Unwilling to stand alone, she formed an Entente with France. France, for her part, reached out to Britain and met with a friendly response. In the first decade of the new century, Britain’s general staff began working with France’s, in deepest secrecy, on preparations for war with Germany. Belgium, like Britain officially neutral, became a third partner in this arrangement; more on that later.
Most of the nations on both sides were thinking defensively, hoping not for conquest but to save themselves from destruction and with luck to become permanently more secure. If there was an exception among the major powers, it was France. In 1871 the victorious Germans had stripped France of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, considerable parts of which were in fact historically and culturally German. Bismarck had cautioned that if Germany took the two provinces, she would have to fight to keep them in another fifty years. He was off by less than a decade. Time did not heal France’s wound. For many of the republic’s citizens, a war to take back what had been stolen would be a holy war. Conquest was entirely justified.
Sir Edward Grey, British foreign secretary
He managed Colonel House as skillfully as House managed Wilson.
From the start of the 1914 crisis, British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey found himself obliged
to play a devious game, feigning a neutrality that was, because of the secret arrangements with France and Belgium, a good deal less than real. On July 26 and again on July 27, he suggested to Prince Karl Lichnowsky, the German ambassador in London, that the dispute between Austria-Hungary and Russia should be mediated by a conference made up of Britain, France, Germany, and Italy. Lichnowsky liked the idea and urged his government in Berlin to take it up. It went no further, however. It was all too obvious that France would favor Russia and Italy would be hostile to Vienna, whose alpine territories she coveted. It seemed unlikely that Britain would want to do anything to antagonize France or Russia. What mattered more, Vienna was emphatically not interested, in this case with some justification. Similar conferences had settled the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, but in a way so unfavorable to the Austrians that they were unwilling to try any such thing again.
It was not until July 30, the day of Russia’s mobilization, that Grey peeked out from his shell of impartiality. Speaking without the knowledge of the other members of Britain’s divided cabinet, most of whom were only now learning to their shock of the secret military arrangement with France, he told Lichnowsky that in his personal opinion (he made no claim to be speaking for the government), if Vienna refused to negotiate, the result was likely to be a general war. A war that Britain would probably enter on the side of France and Russia.