July 1914: Countdown to War

by Sean McMeekin

  Tisza did not take the bait. He had already composed a memorandum for the emperor outlining conclusions from Tuesday’s conference, and he was not about to revise them. “If war were to result after all,” he argued, “it must be demonstrated before the eyes of all the world that we stand on a basis of legitimate self-defense.” Absent thorough diplomatic preparation—meaning a two-step ultimatum process—before a declaration of war on Serbia, he warned the Habsburg sovereign, Romania, Russia, and possibly Italy would take up arms against Austria-Hungary—a four-front war! Because of these risks, he concluded, “Serbia should be given the opportunity to avoid war by means of a severe diplomatic defeat.”5

  Since Tisza refused to budge, Berchtold would have to tell his sovereign, again, that there was no agreement yet on what to do. He arrived at Bad Ischl at seven AM on Thursday morning, 9 July, and met Franz Josef two hours later. Together they read over Tisza’s memorandum. Although it presented, on the surface, a roadblock to immediate action, they gradually began to see some room for maneuver. Tisza was obviously expecting the Ballplatz to make severe demands on Serbia, even if he wanted them to be less obviously harsh than the other ministers would have preferred. Why could Berchtold not simply go ahead and draw up an ultimatum? It would take time to win Tisza’s approval, but so long as he took Conrad’s advice and gave a “strict time limit” of forty-eight hours or less, it would increase the chances of the desired rejection by Serbia. While Berchtold and Franz Josef understood the need to keep Tisza on board, they were now agreed on the need to levy “concrete demands on Serbia,” as Berchtold told the German ambassador the next day. More fundamentally, the emperor decided that the time had come for a reckoning with Serbia, saying that “there was no going back.”6

  Based on this informal verbal mandate from the emperor, Berchtold ordered his staff to begin preparing an ultimatum to Serbia. On Friday, 10 July, Tschirschky reported to Berlin, with evident satisfaction, that the Austrians were finally getting their act together. True, Berchtold had admitted to him that Tisza wanted to water down the terms offered Serbia—to, as Tschirschky put it contemptuously, “proceed gentleman-like” (he used the English phrase for emphasis). Tisza’s opposition notwithstanding, the facts were these: Berchtold was writing up an ultimatum to Belgrade with a “strict time limit, at most 48 hours.” Austria’s foreign minister, along with Emperor Franz Josef I and everyone in the government except for Tisza, hoped that the terms would be rejected. For good measure, Tschirschky also reported to Berlin that Krobatin and Conrad were taking vacation leave so as to “guard against any impression of alarm.”7

  That evening, a terrible scene transpired in Belgrade. Baron Giesl von Gieslingen, Austria’s minister to Serbia, had returned to town on Friday after a long sojourn in Vienna. The absence of the ranking Habsburg diplomat in early July had allowed Russia’s minister to Belgrade, Nikolai Hartwig, a useful excuse not to condole with the Austrians. It was now nearly two weeks since the Sarajevo outrage, however, and even Hartwig’s stubbornness had its limits. He therefore visited the Austrian legation to clear the air. Arriving at 9 PM, Hartwig expressed to Giesl his “personal and sincere condolences for the atrocious outrage.” He then denied having held a bridge party the evening of the murders and claimed it was untrue that he had refused to fly the flag at half-mast during the archduke’s memorial service. Anxious to believe in the Russian’s good intentions, Giesl accepted these assertions. A reconciliation of sorts was thus affected between Austria and Russia, but it was not of long duration. At 9:20 PM, Hartwig collapsed of a heart attack in the Austrian legation. Within minutes he was dead.

  Hartwig’s sudden and shocking demise turned a delicate moment in high-stakes diplomacy into a crime scene. Seeking to deflect suspicion that the Russian had died of unnatural causes, Giesl sent a carriage to pick up Hartwig’s daughter Ludmilla, his nearest of kin. When she arrived in the legation to see the body, however, Ludmilla made it clear that she already suspected foul play. Her manner, Giesl reported to Vienna, “was cold and hostile.” Hartwig’s daughter inspected the room “thoroughly,” “rummaging around in some large Japanese vases,” and taking particular interest in a bottle of cologne that she suspected might have contained poison. After composing herself, Ludmilla asked if Hartwig had eaten or drunk anything from the legation kitchen. Giesl assured her that he had not—the Russian had arrived after dinner and died scarcely twenty minutes after his arrival. Hartwig had, however, smoked two cigarettes. The Austrian offered the butts to Ludmilla, who “carefully put them in her purse,” to guard as evidence. Shortly after she left, a Serbian policeman showed up to investigate, only for Giesl to turn him away on the grounds of extraterritorial diplomatic immunity. While Giesl was perfectly within his rights to do so, his denial of access to local police led most Serbs to believe the Austrians were hiding something.8

  The Serbian press had a field day with the story. All weekend, lurid stories circulated about the alleged Austrian murder of Hartwig. So widespread was belief in Giesl’s guilt that Giesl heard himself accused of the crime while visiting (incognito, luckily) a local barber. The story had, by this point, been embellished to the point where the Austrian was not simply a murderer but a kind of mass executioner. One Serb, Giesl reported, calmly told another that “Giesl has brought an electric chair from Vienna which causes the immediate death of anyone who sits down on it and leaves not the slightest trace.”9

  Hartwig, already a hero to Serbian nationalists for his support during the Balkan Wars, was now celebrated as a martyr against Austrian tyranny. He was given a “magnificent” funeral worthy of a head of state. A prominent Belgrade street was named after him, and sculptors began work on a monument in his honor to be erected in the center of town. On Sunday, 12 July, anti-Austrian demonstrations were organized all over Belgrade to capitalize on popular rage over Hartwig’s death. On top of the celebration of the murder of Franz Ferdinand that took place at Kossove Polje on Vidov Dan, and the unfounded murder accusations leveled at Giesl in the Serbian press, the weekend hullabaloo over Hartwig seemed deliberately calculated to insult Austrian pride. While Paris and London continued to slumber on, oblivious to the unfolding drama in the Balkans, Belgrade already felt like a city at war.

  Any sympathy the Austrians might have felt for Russia or Russians following Hartwig’s death dissipated quickly. Sunday afternoon, the Italian chargé d’affaires, called in by Giesl to clear up the rumors about Hartwig’s behavior, confirmed that the story about the Russian flag not being lowered during the funeral requiem was true. So, too, was the story about the bridge party. So Hartwig had lied to Giesl. The late Russian’s “sincere condolences for the atrocious outrage” were phony after all.10

  The news from Berlin was more positive. That Sunday, Ambassador Szögyény reiterated that the Germans wanted Austria to move quickly against Serbia. This time, though, he was more explicit, saying that “both H. M. Kaiser Wilhelm and all other responsible personages” wanted Austria to “make a clean sweep of the revolutionary conspirators’ nest [in Serbia] once and for all.” The Germans wanted Vienna to realize that “it is by no means certain that . . . Russia would resort to arms” in support of Serbia, and, more significantly, that “the German government further believes it has sure indications that England at the present moment would not join in a war over a Balkan country, even should this lead to a passage of arms with Russia and eventually even with France.”11 This was more than a blank check: the Germans were all but demanding that Austria attack Serbia immediately.

  Monday brought more welcome news for the war party in Vienna. On Friday, the chief counsel at the Ballplatz, Dr. Friedrich Wiesner, had been sent to Belgrade to prepare a legal dossier on the crime. On Monday, 13 July, he filed his initial report. While Wiesner all but ruled out actual Serbian government complicity in plotting the crime, he did declare it “beyond reasonable doubt” that the plot had been hatched in Belgrade with the assistance of Major Tankositch, who had provided the assassins with “bom
bs, Brownings, ammunition, and cyanide of potassium” to swallow after their deed. It was also clear that “Princip, Chabrinovitch, and Grabezh [had been] secretly smuggled across the frontier by Serbian officials.” While Wiesner’s report did not go far beyond what Potiorek had already discovered, his careful, lawyerly prose reassured Berchtold that a proper dossier outlining Serbian guilt would be ready in time to make Austria’s case for war.12

  On the basis of Szögyény’s latest telegram, the weekend outbreak of Serbian chauvinism in Belgrade, and the Wiesner report, Berchtold called a meeting with Tisza, believing he had the stubborn Hungarian cornered at last. As he told Tschirschky on Monday afternoon, 13 July, he “hoped to agree with Tisza tomorrow on the text of a note to be delivered to Serbia.” Assuming success, Berchtold would then travel to Bad Ischl on Wednesday, 15 July, to present the note to the emperor for approval. A forty-eight-hour ultimatum could then be delivered to Belgrade that evening, a week ahead of the original plan for 22 July (Berchtold, keen to impress the German ambassador, seems to have forgotten about the harvest leave issue).13 If everything came off as planned, Berchtold could at last shed his reputation for dithering indecisiveness. How pleased the Germans would be!

  There was another important reason why Berchtold would have liked for the ultimatum to go out that week (as opposed to the following one, as mandated by the harvest leave timetable). Wednesday, 15 July, was the day French president Poincaré would embark at sea aboard the France, en route for his summit with Tsar Nicholas II in St. Petersburg. While Berchtold had succeeded in keeping the French and the Russians in the dark until now about Austrian plans, the dispatch of an Austrian ultimatum to Belgrade would at once precipitate a diplomatic crisis. The last thing he wanted was for this to happen while France’s president was in Petersburg; Poincaré and the tsar could then coordinate a military response to Austria’s action in the heat of the moment, quite possibly while toasting each other’s health at an official banquet. If, by contrast, Berchtold could somehow send off the ultimatum before Poincaré’s departure, the president might call off the trip, which would make it far more difficult for him to coordinate policy with the Russians. A steamer journey from France’s Channel coast to the Russian capital usually took about five days, which would put Poincaré in Petersburg on Monday, 20 July. So Berchtold could also win a trick if he sent the ultimatum off on Thursday or Friday, which would ensure that the forty-eight-hour window for Serbia’s answer would be blanketed with the “radio silence” of a long sea voyage. France’s president could still, in this case, coordinate a response with the Russians after his arrival in Petersburg on Monday, 20 July, but if Austria (again, disregarding the harvest leave problem) began mobilizing following Serbia’s rejection of the ultimatum on Saturday or Sunday, it would be too late to make much difference to the outcome of the war. The Germans could then have their fait accompli.

  WHEN TISZA RETURNED to Vienna on Tuesday, 14 July, he knew that Berchtold was expecting a decision. His resistance worn down by the constant pressure coming at him from all sides, Tisza began at last to draw down his guard. He conceded that the anti-Austrian attacks of the Serbian press had become intolerable. Reluctantly, Tisza said that each day since the crisis had begun unfolding had “strengthened him in the conviction that [Austria-Hungary] must come to a bold resolve to demonstrate its vitality and put an end to the unendurable state of affairs in the southeast” (a euphemism for Serbia). Tisza had been particularly impressed by “the unconditional manner in which Germany has ranged herself at the side of the [dual] monarchy.” While it “had not been easy to take the decision of advising war,” he was now “convinced of its necessity.”14 Berchtold appeared to have won. Tisza had, however, exacted a heavy price for his conversion. More than two weeks had passed since the Sarajevo outrage, two weeks during which Austria had not begun mobilizing her army as Conrad wished to (although doing so would have been possible only in the first week, before harvest leave began), nor even prepared an ultimatum to serve as a casus belli against Serbia. The passage of time had helped to deflect international scrutiny away from Vienna, as most of Europe had begun to forget about the Balkan crisis. But it also helped ensure that, when this scrutiny finally came, the Austrians would appear to be acting out of cool, cynical calculation, rather than in the first flush of rage following the assassination of the Habsburg heir. Conrad’s plan to mobilize on 1 July (before the harvest furlough was underway), for all its bluntness, would have been diplomatically sound: while some statesmen would have been shocked, no one could have doubted Austrian sincerity or resolve. Now, as a result of Tisza’s delaying tactics, the Austrians were forced to operate in the shadows, camouflaging their intention to wage war on Serbia inside an insincere diplomatic note to Belgrade. Berchtold had conceded this when he told the German ambassador that he wished to send off the ultimatum while France’s president was at sea—as if he were afraid the ultimatum would not stand the light of day. This was the sort of dishonest, baldly cynical diplomacy that Tisza’s stubbornness had reduced Berchtold to.

  In one final gesture of defiance, Tisza made even this plan impossible. Staying true to his vow at the 7 July council that he would have to approve the text of any note sent to Serbia, Tisza informed Berchtold that the ultimatum must pass muster at a full Ministerial Council, which could not convene before Sunday. The ultimatum could therefore be dispatched, at the earliest, on the evening of 19 July—just hours before Poincaré arrived in Petersburg. There was no way that Berchtold was going to allow the French president and the Russian tsar to learn of Austria’s ultimatum while “swearing brotherhood under the influence of champagne.” As he put it drily to Tschirschky, “it would be good if the toasts were all over before the note is delivered.”15 The new plan was thus to wait until the night the French delegation would leave Petersburg, which Berchtold expected (incorrectly) to be Saturday, 25 July—nearly a month after Sarajevo and three days after the date that he and Conrad had agreed to, owing to the harvest leave issue.

  Despite the latest delay occasioned by Tisza, the new plan had much to recommend it. The twenty-fifth of July was a bit later than Conrad wanted, but by that date even the last two furloughed army corps, the VI and VII, would be back on duty. Moreover, “radio silence,” as Berchtold realized once he had thought it over, would work better on the return than on the outward voyage. By waiting until Poincaré left before showing its hand, Austria could deny France and Russia any chance to coordinate during the summit. Poincaré, by well-deserved reputation the most belligerent statesman in either Paris or Petersburg, would miss his chance to put steel into Sazonov and the tsar when they learned of the Serbian ultimatum. Austria would then lay down her fait accompli when Poincaré was at sea, unable to react. It was a cynical plan—but also brilliant.

  Brilliant but not foolproof. If the French or the Russians got wind of the Austrian ultimatum early, they could coordinate a response to it over champagne toasts—with the added, enraging motivation that Berchtold had tried to snooker them. The ultimatum would therefore have to be handled in the strictest possible secrecy (aside from keeping the German ambassador more or less in the loop): any leak picked up by a hostile power could be fatal. With London engulfed in the Irish crisis and Paris consumed by the Caillaux affair, it would not be that difficult to keep the English and the French off the scent. The Russians, of course, might be more suspicious. Still, the Austrian embassy in Petersburg was able to inform the Ballplatz on Tuesday, 14 July, that Sazonov had left the capital for his country estate near Grodno. Russia’s foreign minister would not return to his office until Sunday—the very day the Ministerial Council would approve the final text of the ultimatum. If Berchtold could keep things under wraps until then, the “radio silence” plan might succeed. It was a big if.

  8

  Enter Sazonov

  SATURDAY, 18 JULY

  AUSTRIAN EFFORTS TO KEEP THE ULTIMATUM secret were thorough. Sending Chief of Staff Conrad and War Minister Krobatin out of town on
“vacation leave” was a clever smokescreen, which seems to have taken in even the Russian ambassador, Nikolai Shebeko, who reported this without evident suspicion in a 16 July dispatch to Foreign Minister Sazonov.1 But for a twenty-four-hour visit to Vienna for the Ministerial Council on Sunday, 19 July, the über-belligerent Conrad remained at Innichen, a south Tyrolean resort town near the Italian border, from Tuesday, 14 July, until Wednesday, 22 July, which had the important side benefit of preventing him from talking to anyone. Harvest leave continued for enlisted men, and vacationing officers, too, remained undisturbed.

  Meanwhile, Berchtold instructed his diplomats to take a conciliatory tone in their discussions with representatives of foreign powers, while avoiding all mention of the Sarajevo outrage in his own utterances. Perhaps not entirely trusting himself, Berchtold called off his usual weekly reception for foreign ambassadors, meeting with them only privately and on request. Luckily, the Austrian Reichsrat was out of session in July, which meant that the foreign minister would not have to answer any awkward questions there. The Hungarian Diet was meeting in Budapest, but in that house it was Tisza who had to run the gauntlet. “The government,” Hungary’s minister-president replied in the Diet to a barrage of questions on the Balkan crisis, “is fully conscious of all the weighty interests in favor of the maintenance of peace . . . [and] is not of the opinion that the clearing up of the [Serbian] question will necessarily involve warlike complications.” Tisza conceded that “every state . . . must be in a position to carry on war as an ultima ratio,” but then declared cryptically that he would not “indulge in any prophecies” as to whether war with Serbia was imminent.2 Berchtold could not have said it better himself—in fact, he probably could not have said this at all. Tisza, simply by being his usual cautious, war-wary self, was able to dispel a good deal of suspicion about Vienna’s intentions regarding Serbia.