July 1914: Countdown to War

by Sean McMeekin

  With Austria having lost its strategic role as a smokescreen for Bismarckian diplomacy, Germany maintained her alliance with Austria largely out of diplomatic inertia—and the fact that the two empires now, since the collapse of Bismarck’s system, shared a Russian enemy. True, Vienna could theoretically count on Italy, third wheel of a Triple Alliance with Austria and Germany dating to 1882, but the tie with Rome was far weaker than the one with Berlin. Italy shared a common potential wartime enemy with Germany (France), but not with Austria, which did not border France. Moreover, Italy’s well-known designs on Austrian Trieste and the South Tyrol made nonsense of the notion that Rome was Vienna’s ally. Conrad had gone too far in proposing a preemptive war with Italy in 1911, but no one at the Ballplatz entertained any illusions that Italy would take Austria’s side in a Balkan or European war. In the face of the Serbian threat, the Austrians knew that Germany alone stood between them and utter isolation. Without the Germans, they could do nothing. On this, if little else, everyone in Vienna—and Budapest—was agreed.

  On 1 July, the same day Tisza presented his antiwar memorandum to the Emperor, Conrad visited the Ballplatz again to sound out the foreign minister. Berchtold informed the chief of staff of Tisza’s stout opposition to waging war on Serbia: Tisza believed that Russia would intervene and that “Germany would leave us in the lurch.” Conrad himself was forced to concede that, if Austria’s main ally did not offer support, “our hands would be tied.” Berchtold himself shared this concern, adding to it the fear that Romania, which Vienna was actively courting as a possible ally in the Balkans, would not likely support an Austrian war against Serbia unless it was clear that the war had German backing. Berchtold told the chief of staff that he had recently prepared a memorandum exhorting Berlin to help cajole Bulgaria and Romania into the Triple Alliance. Conrad was intrigued. The chief of staff concluded his audience with Berchtold by saying, “before anything else we must ask Germany whether she intends to back us up against Russia or not.”16

  It is significant that Berchtold told Conrad that he himself had prepared the Balkan policy memorandum that both men agreed must now be dispatched to Berlin. In fact the original memorandum, outlining a new Austro-German “peace initiative” centered on bringing Bulgaria, Romania, and Ottoman Turkey into the Triple Alliance in order to deter Russian aggression in the Balkans, had been prepared on Tisza’s instructions back in March. The most recent draft had been completed on 24 June, four days before the Sarajevo incident. Had the foreign minister told Conrad that the Berlin initiative represented Tisza’s pseudo-pacifist thinking, the chief of staff may not have assented with such alacrity. Berchtold had clearly thought this through, because Tisza’s Berlin peace initiative offered him a possible way out of the current impasse. Ostensibly to do with the bric-a-brac of Balkan politics, Tisza’s memorandum was, at root, about strengthening the German alliance. Austria’s goal, Tisza argued, must be to force Berlin to plunge ever deeper into Austria’s Balkan affairs, so as to take joint ownership of them. “There can be no talk of success,” Tisza had concluded his March missive, “unless we have complete assurance of being understood, respected, and supported by Germany. Germany must see that the Balkans are of decisive importance not only for us but for the German Empire.” Continuing the same line of thought in his 1 July note to the emperor, Tisza had urged Franz Josef I to approach Wilhelm II at the upcoming memorial service for the archduke, making use of the “recent monstrous events” to win him over to a “wholehearted support of [Austrian] policy in the Balkans.” Conrad wanted to use the Sarajevo outrage as a pretext for settling scores with Serbia. Tisza wished to use it as a pretext for bringing Germany into harmony with Austria on Balkan issues, to prevent another destructive war, as he assumed the Germans wanted to do. Berchtold’s idea was to approach the Germans with Tisza’s peace initiative but use it to win their support for Conrad’s war policy.17

  Franz Ferdinand’s funeral, scheduled to take place in Vienna on Friday, 3 July, would, as Tisza suggested, offer the perfect setting for an approach to the Germans. Unlike his Austrian counterpart, Germany’s Emperor Wilhelm II had been fond of Franz Ferdinand and Sophie. He had visited them for a long weekend at Konopischt in June, just days before the archduke was assassinated. The kaiser was notoriously impetuous and emotional. The murder of his close friend, a fellow royal, was bound to send him into a rage. So long as the Austrians could direct this rage in the right direction—against Serbia—Germany would be as good as won over.

  It was not to be. On the morning of Thursday, 2 July, while the embalmed remains of Ferdinand and Sophie were still en route to Vienna from the port of Trieste, it was announced that Kaiser Wilhelm II would not be attending the funeral; an attack of lumbago had left him unable to travel. Tisza would not have his chance to sell the German sovereign on his Balkan peace initiative, but then neither could Berchtold or Conrad exploit Wilhelm’s anger to win German backing for a Serbian war. In fact, not a single foreign royal or statesman came to Vienna for the funeral. Supposedly, Berchtold claimed, invitations were withheld to spare the aging Franz Josef from the fatigue sure to result from a lengthy ceremony. Separate memorial services would be arranged by Austrian ambassadors abroad instead. The emperor’s own feelings toward the deceased, as everyone knew, were not warm; despite strong protests from inside the family, he had not yielded on his decision not to bury the archducal couple in the Habsburg vault. A more intriguing explanation has been suggested by Ballplatz insiders: Berchtold did not want foreign sovereigns’ access to the emperor’s ear, for fear they would exercise a moderating influence on the war party.18

  The flat memorial service for the heir to the Habsburg throne forms an instructive comparison with the grandiose state funeral of King Edward VII of England in May 1910, so memorably chronicled by Barbara Tuchman in The Guns of August. Then, London had seen no less than nine kings, on splendid mounts, ride “through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun,” followed by “five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens,” and “a scattering of ambassadors from uncrowned countries.”19 Franz Ferdinand’s death, by contrast, went nearly unmourned in Vienna. The emperor refused even to meet the funeral train from Trieste, nor did he attend the memorial service. Those few members of the Habsburg dynasty willing to brave the emperor’s wrath were free to attend, but they were given less than fifteen minutes to view the body. Franz Ferdinand’s own children were not allowed even this dignity (although they were allowed to send flowers). Ferdinand’s coffin, at least, bore the full insignia of the second-highest ranking prince of the dual monarchy: his body was properly adorned by the archducal crown, a plumed general’s helmet, his ceremonial sword, and his principal decorations, including the Order of the Golden Fleece. Sophie’s coffin, by contrast, was not only smaller than her husband’s but stood twenty inches lower. It was bare except for a pair of white gloves and a black fan, symbolizing her former station as a mere lady-in-waiting. The bodies were buried in a modest chapel in Artstetten—a “provincial hole” well removed from imperial Vienna—which Franz Ferdinand had had specially built in case the couple were denied entry to the imperial vault. It was the Habsburg equivalent of an unmarked grave.20

  The stiff and socially awkward archduke had, it is true, never been as popular as the gregarious and charming Edward VII, nor was Austria remotely as powerful a country as England, which ruled an empire that literally bestrode the globe. Still, the sharp contrast between the two occasions suggests that something important had been lost in the intervening four years. The year 1910 had seen a kind of Indian summer of Old Europe, a year blissfully free of international tension in between the First Bosnian Crisis of 1908–1909 and the Moroccan crisis of 1911 and the Italian-Turkish and Balkan Wars that followed on its heels. Then, Austria had not yet been humiliated, nor Serbia enlarged; nor had the Ottoman Empire been dealt a series of near-death blows by Italy and the Balkan League. T
he monarchical principle was still operative in 1910: no matter how loudly the nationalist press of each country bayed for blood against its enemies, sovereigns still shared ties of marriage and blood, some level of mutual comity and trust, which helped to defuse tensions before things went too far.

  Had this still been true in 1914, there should have been a powerful international upwelling of sympathy for the slain archduke, whose brutal murder was an obvious affront to rulers everywhere (notwithstanding the frigid feelings of Austria’s own sovereign). Instead, not even Wilhelm II, Franz Ferdinand’s best and only true friend among Europe’s royal houses, came to Vienna to pay his respects. There was a good—and revealing—reason why Wilhelm stayed home, and it was not, contrary to the public report, owing to lower-back pain. “As a result of warnings I have received from Sarajevo,” German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg informed Franz Josef I in a secret telegram sent via the Ballplatz, “of which the first dates all the way back to April of this year, I have been obliged to request His Majesty the Kaiser to abandon his trip to Vienna.” Assassinations such as those of the archduke and his wife, Bethmann explained, “are well known to have a suggestive effect on criminal elements.”21

  Here was a damning judgment on Vienna. So poorly did the Germans rate their ally’s level of administrative competence after Sarajevo that they did not think the Austrians could secure an imperial funeral in their own capital. On the bright side, the chancellor’s fingering of Bosnian-based terrorism as grounds for canceling a state visit suggested that Berlin might be sympathetic to the cause of the Austrian war party. On the other hand, Bethmann had been careful not to mention Serbs, or Serbia, as complicit in the Sarajevo outrage. After all, the Austrians had not yet linked Belgrade to the crime. Germany’s chancellor, like Tisza, Franz Josef I, and Berchtold, would need proof.

  It is a reflection of the strategic impotence of Austria-Hungary in 1914 that her statesmen were unable to formulate a response to Sarajevo without running it by the Germans first. True, the impasse was also the result of internal political dynamics: namely, the presence of a towering Hungarian in the upper ranks of the government who had the unique ability to veto a policy based on his ability to represent literally half of the dual monarchy. But then it was impossible to separate foreign and domestic policy in an empire of fifteen nationalities. Tisza’s “pacifist” views on Balkan policy were intimately tied to his goal of maintaining Magyar supremacy over Hungary’s subject nationalities, just as Conrad, and now Berchtold, wished to crush Serbia in order to weaken national irredentism in the empire, beginning with the insufferable pretensions of Magyars like Tisza. The interests of Hungary, the Austrian-dominated Imperial Foreign Office, and the Common Army appeared irreconcilable—without someone from outside knocking heads together. In this curious way Germany had, by 1914, become the arbiter of not only Austria’s foreign policy but also her constitutional dilemmas. If and when Berchtold’s and Conrad’s suspicions about Serbian involvement in the Sarajevo outrage were confirmed by investigators, the Ballplatz could then pose the question on everyone’s mind: What will the Germans say? For now, all Berchtold could do was wait.

  * It has been estimated that in 1913 alone, Conrad proposed going to war with Serbia twenty-five times. There is a popular theory that his belligerent attitude owed much to a desire to impress his young mistress, Gina von Reininghaus, into leaving her husband, Hermann, a wealthy beer merchant. While one never knows what secret motivations lie in our heart of hearts, this seems to be taking psychoanalysis a bit far.

  * Different versions have the emperor remarking that “the Almighty is not mocked,” the idea being that Franz Ferdinand’s morganatic marriage had offended God. This is perhaps too lyrical, according to those most familiar with Franz Josef’s manner of speaking. “It is God’s will” is the most likely phrasing.

  * Doubtless the emperor got wind of this. The rumor in Vienna was that Franz Josef’s surprisingly rapid recovery was owed to “his keen desire to spite his nephew.”

  2

  St. Petersburg: No Quarter Given

  THE REASON AUSTRIAN STATESMEN needed German support in case of a war with Serbia was plain as day: Russia might intervene. St. Petersburg had gone to war against Ottoman Turkey on behalf of Balkan Slavs (mostly the Bulgarians) in 1877 and had nearly done so again against Austria on Serbia’s behalf during the First Bosnian Crisis in 1909, only to back down in the face of an unsubtle threat from Berlin. True, Russia had not gone to war in either of the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, but this was because both times her Serbian clients were winning and Vienna was doing nothing to stop them: there had been no need for Petersburg to bail out Belgrade, as there would be in case Austria-Hungary invaded Serbia.

  While the popular cliché of the “Russian steamroller” greatly exaggerated the real striking power of the tsarist armies, no one in either Vienna or Petersburg doubted that Russia could best Austria-Hungary easily alone. Only with German backing against Russia could the Austrians even entertain the idea of going to war in the Balkans; only with German backing could they win. This had been the argument of Tisza, the Hungarian minister-president, against going to war with Serbia: Russia would fight, and Germany would not back Austria. The line taken by the Habsburg foreign minister, Berchtold, and the belligerent chief of staff, Conrad, was the reverse of Tisza’s: Germany would back Vienna, and Russia would not fight—so they hoped, at least. With the Germans, once the evidence from Belgrade was in, the Austrians could take a direct approach. With St. Petersburg, it was like taking a leap in the dark. What would the Russians do?

  The early signs were not encouraging for Austria. Although few foreigners other than Kaiser Wilhelm II truly grieved the loss of Franz Ferdinand, British, French, Italian, and German consuls across Europe all responded to the news from Sarajevo with the sympathy and decorum one expected of trained diplomats. Grave official condolences were offered; flags were lowered to half-mast; heads were nodded in deep if somewhat strained sympathy for Austria’s loss. In stark contrast, Austrian diplomats throughout the Balkans complained that no condolences were offered by their Russian counterparts. In Rome, the Russian embassy was alone in refusing to lower its flag in honor of Archduke Ferdinand. Likewise, the tsarist legation in Belgrade declined to fly its flag at half-mast, even during the official funeral requiem for Franz Ferdinand, as if intentionally to insult the memory of the slain Habsburg heir.1

  This calculated insult was almost certainly the work of Nikolai Hartwig, the pan-Slavist Russian minister whom Emperor Franz Josef had told Germany’s ambassador was the real “boss of Belgrade.” According to an Italian diplomat, upon hearing the news from Sarajevo on 28 June, Hartwig had exclaimed, “In the name of Heaven! So long as it is not a Serb” (pourvu que ça ne soit pas un Serbe). As the Austrian chargé d’affaires in Belgrade, Ritter von Storck, interpreted this ambiguous remark for Berchtold, “Hartwig, as someone in the know . . . evidently took it a priori that the murderer could only be a Serb.” Unperturbed in any case by the news, Hartwig held a bridge party that evening, at which he shared his real views confidentially with the Italian diplomat (who later betrayed him to the Austrians). The murder of Franz Ferdinand, Hartwig said, “should be regarded as a boon for the [dual] monarchy,” as “the archduke was sick through and through,” illustrating how “the Austrian dynasty is an exhausted race.” The new heir to the throne, Franz Ferdinand’s nephew Karl, was, Hartwig informed the Italian by way of further explanation, “syphilitic,” which made nonsense of his earlier protestation that Franz Ferdinand’s death was good news—unless, of course, he meant good news for Russia.2

  It was hard for Austrians not to think the worst of Hartwig, the man widely viewed as the mastermind of the predatory Slavic-Orthodox coalition of Serbia-Bulgaria-Greece-Macedonia, which had launched the First Balkan War against Turkey in 1912, giving a powerful spur to Serbian irredentism. Franz Josef’s contention that Hartwig secretly ruled Serbia was tinged with a certain exaggeration, but it cont
ained a grain of truth. Serbia’s People’s Radical Party prime minister, Nikola Pašić, was an impressive political survivor. A former mayor of Belgrade, Pašić had served as prime minister of Serbia nearly continuously since 1904, overseeing Serbia’s heroic irredentist aggrandizement during the Balkan Wars while fending off plots against him hatched by Serbian and “South Slav” activists more radical still, such as Colonel Dimitrijevitch (Apis) and his Black Hand conspirators. With his colossal white beard and stern visage, Pašić looked like an Orthodox monk from the pages of Dostoevsky, still virile at sixty-eight in 1914. Still, for all his appearance of vigor, Pašić—and Serbia—would not have amounted to much without Russia’s backing. It was with Russian subsidies, and Russian and French arms, that Serbia had fought the Balkan Wars, and it was Russia’s threats to intervene that had kept the Austrians off Belgrade’s back while Serbian armies were carving up Turkey and Bulgaria. Hartwig had stood behind Pašić’s every action during the Balkan Wars, and he remained Pašić’s closest adviser still.3

  Nikola Pašić, Serbia’s great political survivor. Source: Getty Images.

  Moreover, Hartwig was not the only influential Russian patron in town. Just as Russia’s minister to Belgrade provided public pan-Slavist support for Pašić’s populist regime, so did Russia’s military attaché, General Viktor Artamonov, help advise and arm Serbia’s more radical shadow government. Apis, after all, was not merely the secret organizer of the Black Hand and (as we know today) of the plot to murder Franz Ferdinand; he was also chief of Serbian army intelligence. Asked by an Italian journalist after the war how closely he had worked with Apis in Belgrade, Artamonov admitted readily that “of course I was in practically daily contact with Dimitri[jevitch].” Predictably, the Russian attaché denied having prior knowledge of the Sarajevo plot, producing a perfect alibi—he was on leave from 19 June to 28 July 1914—but a strange one, considering that the whole point of Archduke Ferdinand’s ill-fated visit to Bosnia was to observe Austrian maneuvers, which would have been of great interest to Russia’s official military observer in Serbia. Still, in a revealing aside, Artamonov conceded that “in the little Belgrade of the time, where public life was confined to a very few cafés, the plot could not have been kept secret.” Russia’s military attaché was out of town on 28 June, but he was in Belgrade in late May and early June, when the plot had been set in motion.4