July 1914: Countdown to War

by Sean McMeekin

  At ten AM, the top-secret war council began in the House of Strudel. Berchtold, chairing, opened the session by laying out the basic timeline. The forty-eight-hour ultimatum—technically termed a “note with a time limit” (befristete Démarche)—would be dispatched by five PM on Thursday, 23 July, the night Poincaré would leave Petersburg. The other powers would then be told of it on Friday morning. While it was theoretically possible that the French delegation would learn of the note before departing Petersburg on Thursday night, Berchtold thought this unlikely (the military chiefs were insisting on five PM). Assuming Serbia’s rejection, the ultimatum would expire the same time that Saturday, allowing mobilization to begin by midnight Saturday–Sunday, 25–26 July. To preempt possible objections to this timetable (that is, from Tisza), Berchtold informed the ministers that “the Germans were getting nervous,” which militated against any further postponement.2

  The military chiefs, predictably, were wholly in favor of Berchtold’s plan, wishing only that things could move faster still. Conrad repeated, for what must have seemed like the thousandth time, his view that “from the military standpoint, the speediest possible commencement of mobilization was desirable.” His only concession to caution was to allow that martial law would not be proclaimed anywhere in Austria-Hungary until mobilization was formally underway, even in Bosnia-Herzegovina, from which operations against Serbia would be launched. War Minister Krobatin promised to begin writing up mobilization orders on Wednesday, 22 July, so that everything would be ready by the weekend. Judging by these matter-of-fact disquisitions, the war with Serbia was basically a done deal, which would begin as soon as the ultimatum expired on Saturday.

  Tisza, of course, did not see things quite that way. Although he had come over—more or less—to the war party on Tuesday, he was still a reluctant convert, beset with doubts. From the Hungarian perspective, the greatest danger in any Balkan war would come from Romania, over the Transylvanian Alps. Bucharest was scarcely a hundred miles from Kronstadt (today’s Braşov), the first and greatest of the Hungarian-Transylvanian Siebenbürgen, or “Seven Cities,” settled by Saxons in medieval times. Sinaia, Romania’s summer capital in the Transylvanian Alps, was only thirty miles from Kronstadt and closer still to the Hungarian border. A Romanian incursion across that border would immediately threaten the prosperous Siebenbürgen, and thereby Hungarian control over Transylvania. Tisza had already taken what measures he could, as minister-president, to strengthen the local gendarmerie in the Seven Cities, but this was hardly enough to deter a Romanian invasion. Before consenting to the final ultimatum plan, Tisza wanted Conrad to explain what was being done to defend Transylvania.

  Conrad, anticipating this very question, had a ready answer. Martial law, he promised Tisza, would be proclaimed in Transylvania as soon as mobilization commenced. While the demands of the Serbian invasion plan, and the need to defend Galicia against a possible Russian intervention, prevented the army from concentrating its forces against Romania, Conrad had created special Landsturm battalions for the Siebenbürgen: a kind of expanded militia, under the command of actual military officers. It was true, he confessed to Tisza, that these irregular formations would not suffice if it came to war with Bucharest, but their conspicuous staging should be enough to deter Romanian aggression. As an added precaution, Conrad had made certain that the Transylvanian formations contained “only a small percentage of Romanian nationals.”

  Tisza declared himself satisfied with Conrad’s assurances, but he was still not done. Because no one else was playing devil’s advocate, the Hungarian minister-president, as usual, raised every objection himself, whether or not they affected Hungary directly. What about Italy? he asked next, reminding his fellow ministers that Austria’s nominal ally coveted Trieste and the South Tyrol, and that if she took advantage of a war against Serbia to invade, Austria would face a two-front war even if Russia and Romania stayed out. Berchtold promised him straightaway that Italian intervention was “not likely” and that he would undertake every diplomatic measure to work against it.

  Here, at last, Tisza saw his opening. With Berchtold conceding that diplomatic finesse would be required to assure even the neutrality of Austria’s nominal Italian ally, the Hungarian minister-president laid down the nonnegotiable terms under which he would consent to the dispatch of an ultimatum to Serbia. In order to ensure the support, or at least the indifference, of powers such as Italy, Romania, and Russia, Tisza insisted that the ministers agree “unanimously, that no plans of conquest by the [dual] monarchy were connected with the action against Serbia, and that, with the exception of rectifications of the frontier necessary for strategic reasons, Austria did not wish to annex a single piece of Serbia.” Failing this, Tisza would withdraw his support for the dispatch of the forty-eight-hour ultimatum.

  Berchtold could accept Tisza’s condition, he told the Hungarian, “only with a certain reserve.” While he agreed that Austria-Hungary should not herself annex territory, he was still adamant that she “should seek to reduce [Serbia’s] size so that she would no longer be dangerous, by ceding as large parts of Serbian territory as possible to Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, and possibly to Romania also.” Whether or not Berchtold really wished for Austria to conquer Serbia and then turn over her gains to greedy Balkan powers, Tisza had forced him to say that he would do this—which was something. Count Stürgkh, Austria’s minister-president, insisted that even if Serbia’s territorial integrity were respected, she might still be placed in a relation of dependence on Vienna by means of “the deposition of the dynasty, a military convention, and other appropriate measures.” Krobatin was more explicit still, declaring that “frontier rectifications” must include control of the bridgeheads of the river Sava in Serbia’s Sabaç district—across which district, he did not need to add, Gavrilo Princip and the Sarajevo assassins had crossed into Bosnia-Herzegovina.

  Still, Tisza stood tall. His opposition to dismembering Serbia, he explained, “was not simply on grounds of domestic politics, but rather because he was personally convinced that Russia would be forced to offer resistance à outrance if we were to insist on the complete annihilation of Serbia.” Not trusting the ministers at their word, Tisza insisted not only on their unanimous acceptance of a no-annexation pledge but also that it be made public. The final resolution of the Ministerial Council stipulated, “on the proposal of the Hungarian minister-president,” that “immediately on the outbreak of war a declaration shall be made to the foreign powers that the monarchy is not waging a war of conquest, and does not intend to incorporate the Kingdom [of Serbia].” Still, the other ministers insisted (although this part would not be made public) that “this vote naturally does not preclude rectifications of the frontier strategically necessary, nor the diminution of Serbia for the benefit of other states, nor the temporary occupation of parts of Serbia which may eventually be necessary.”

  Just as in the earlier war council on 7 July, the policy differences between Tisza and the others had been patched over in a “unanimous” resolution that resolved nothing. The first clause, mandating a public vow not to dismember Serbia, was flatly contradicted by the second, which implied that Serbia would be dismembered after all (although not, supposedly, by Austria-Hungary herself). The cynicism with which the other ministers viewed their promises to Tisza was nicely captured in a remark Conrad made to Krobatin as they left the Strudelhof: “Well, we shall see. Before the Balkan War the powers also talked about [preserving] the status quo—after the war nobody bothered himself about it.”3

  Reading the transcript today, the most striking thing about the 19 July Ministerial Council—which, at Tisza’s insistence, had been called to iron out the final terms of the Serbian ultimatum—is that there was no discussion of the terms of the ultimatum. Berchtold had written it himself, without consulting Tisza, although the Hungarian was apparently shown the text on Sunday. Nor, despite Berchtold having explicitly promised on Tuesday, 14 July, to run it by Tschirschky before sending it off
, was the German ambassador allowed to see it on Sunday, 19 July, nor on Monday, nor on Tuesday. Nor was Emperor Franz Josef I allowed to vet the ultimatum. Astonishingly, given the historic importance of the document, not a single minister of Austria-Hungary’s imperial government, nor her sovereign, nor the ambassador of her only real ally, signed off on Berchtold’s text before he sent it off, under seal, to Minister Giesl in Belgrade on Monday, 20 July.

  The reason for Berchtold’s secrecy is not hard to fathom. The ultimatum was so draconian that the Germans were unlikely to have approved it. Some of the clauses, to be sure, were reasonable and unsurprising, dealing with such matters as suppressing the smuggling of weapons and explosives into Austrian territory. Others, however, were almost deliberately insulting. Serbia’s government was to “dissolve immediately the society styled ‘Narodna Odbrana,’” despite the fact, well-known to Berchtold and the Austrians, that much of that government consisted of dues-paying members of that society. Serbia’s prime minister, Pašić, would also be required to fire all Serbian military officers and government officials “guilty of propaganda against the Austro-Hungarian monarchy,” with Vienna herself making up the list of offending individuals. Most onerous of all were clauses 5 and 6, which would force Belgrade to “accept the collaboration in Serbia of representatives of the Austro-Hungarian government for the suppression of the subversive movement directed against the territorial integrity of the dual monarchy” and require that Austrian officials “take part in the investigations relating thereto.”4 No sovereign state could reasonably be expected to turn over the operation of her police and justice systems to representatives of an outside (and hostile) power—certainly not when many of her own officials might be found guilty of aiding and abetting the crime. These draconian clauses gave the game away: Berchtold wanted the ultimatum to be rejected.

  Given that the Germans had learned, from Ambassador Tschirschky as early as 10 July, that the Ballplatz intended that Belgrade refuse her terms, no one in Berlin should have been surprised by the uncompromising terms of the ultimatum. Nevertheless, the extremely harsh tone of Berchtold’s “note with a time limit” was far from what the Germans had wanted. Berchtold himself implicitly admitted this when, after finally showing the text to the emperor at Bad Ischl on Tuesday, 21 July, he wired the Ballplatz with instructions to tell Ambassador Tschirschky that “he cannot be given the Note until early tomorrow morning [Wednesday, 22 July] since some corrections are still to be made to it.”5 Given that the final text of the ultimatum had already been sent off under seal on Monday, it is clear that Berchtold was lying outright about “corrections . . . still to be made.” Suspecting that Tschirschky would not approve the text, Berchtold was trying to delay showing it to him until shortly before it would be submitted to Serbia on Thursday—by which time it would be too late for the Germans to do anything about it.

  Germany’s foreign minister had just as much cause for grievance as her ambassador in Vienna. In the days before the Ministerial Council, Jagow had expressly advised Berchtold to come to terms with Italy before submitting the ultimatum—even, if necessary, offering Rome territorial compensation in exchange for neutrality. He had further stipulated that a dossier outlining Serbian complicity in the Sarajevo outrage should be published before the ultimatum was sent to Belgrade, so as to neutralize diplomatic opposition in Rome and the Entente capitals.6 All this was sensible advice. Berchtold had not followed a word of it. No agreement of any kind with Italy had been reached, and the long-awaited dossier on Sarajevo remained unfinished. Instead, Berchtold had instructed his diplomats to inform the powers on Friday, 24 July, when they presented the note to them, that such a dossier would be made available at a later date.7

  Of course, Berchtold could easily have justified his highhanded methods in view of the Germans’ repeated insistence on a “bold and decisive” course of action. And yet Berlin had pressed for speed back at the beginning of July, when the hope was that Austria would invade Serbia in retaliation for the Sarajevo murders—a military fait accompli ideally so speedy that the powers would not have time to react. Unable to offer this to the Germans because of Tisza’s opposition (and the harvest leave program), Berchtold had instead waited three weeks and then given Berlin a take-it-or-leave-it diplomatic fait accompli. The resulting policy was a diplomatic disaster in the making that combined the worst aspects of German bludgeoning (the sharp tone and strict time limit) with Austrian prevarication (the note dispatched nearly four weeks after Sarajevo, with the dossier outlining Serbian complicity still not complete). Foolishly, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Bethmann had written a blank check for an Austrian war against Serbia, while having no control over the war’s timetable or the terms in which the war would be justified to Europe. The Austrian noose, rigged up by the Germans themselves, was slowly tightening around Germany’s neck.

  10

  Poincaré Meets the Tsar

  MONDAY, 20 JULY

  AT TWO PM ON MONDAY, 20 JULY, the battleship France, accompanied by an escorting dreadnought, the Jean Bart, laid anchor at Kronstadt, the Russian naval base in the Gulf of Finland that guards the approaches to St. Petersburg. Aboard were France’s president, Raymond Poincaré, and her premier and foreign minister, René Viviani, who had set sail from Dunkirk at dawn the previous Thursday.

  It had not been a happy passage. While the seas had remained relatively calm for the four-and-a-half-day voyage, the political atmosphere was more stormy. Jean Jaurès, the great Socialist orator, had made a show of voting against funding the trip in Parliament. The antiwar crowd in Paris saw Poincaré’s effort to shore up the Franco-Russian alliance as dangerously provocative, especially now that a new Balkan crisis threatened the European equilibrium. Reluctantly, Viviani had agreed to accompany Poincaré as part of the duties of his new office, but he made it clear that he would have preferred not to go. All through the voyage, Poincaré had badgered the quasi-pacifist former education minister about the importance of France’s three-year military service law, the need to be “very firm” with the Germans, and the vital strategic importance of the Russian alliance. Viviani, to the president’s consternation, seemed scarcely to be listening. Poincaré found him “extraordinarily ignorant of foreign affairs, which do not interest him at all and which he does not even seem to understand.” To his dismay, Viviani was wholly preoccupied by the upcoming trial of Mme Caillaux, scheduled to open on Monday, 20 July—the very day they would arrive in Russia to meet the tsar. As the French delegation docked at Kronstadt that afternoon, Viviani was surprised to feel a “murderous heat” beating down upon them. He had thought he was traveling to the north country but instead found the climate worse than that of “tropical Africa.” Clearly ill at ease, France’s premier was overheard asking an aide, “What are we doing here?”1

  Poincaré, by contrast, was a man on a mission. He had set up the summit in January, at the height of the Liman von Sanders crisis, the last serious European war scare before the Sarajevo outrage. That month, Poincaré had also dispatched a new ambassador to Petersburg, Maurice Paléologue, who shared his own views on the importance of the Russian alliance. Only if French officials convinced Petersburg of their own firmness of purpose in serious international crises could they trust that the tsar’s armies had France’s back against Germany. Or, as then-premier Gaston Doumergue had instructed Paléologue prior to his departure for Russia, “War can break out from one day to the next. . . . Our [Russian] allies must rush to our aid. The safety of France will depend on the energy and promptness with which we shall know how to push them into the fight.”2

  Poincaré, like Doumergue, had long believed that a bit of “pushing” would be needed to get the Russians to stand firm against the Central Powers. His doubts about Viviani were of a piece with those he harbored about Sazonov. Not unlike Hartwig and other Russian nationalists, France’s president had pointedly criticized the Russian foreign minister’s submissive attitude during the Balkan Wars. Steeling up Sazonov was one of Poincaré’s
key goals at the summit.

  The tsar, too, remained something of an enigma to the French. Nicholas II had never—publicly, at least—expressed any distaste for Russia’s alliance with an “atheistic” republic like France, nor complained when forced, at summits, to listen to her national anthem, “The Marseillaise,” a blood-curdling masterpiece of revolutionary lèse-majesté. Then again, he had never displayed any particular passion for the alliance, either. The tsar did have good French, although, because his German wife, Alix, spoke little Russian, he spoke English more often (and wrote it, as in his famous letters to “his dear friend Willy,” Kaiser Wilhelm II). More important than all this was the issue of the tsar’s will, or lack thereof. In theory an autocrat in the long Romanov tradition who had sidelined the Duma from policymaking shortly after it was first elected in 1906, Nicholas II was, many in Paris feared, a weak-willed man easily manipulated by his subordinates.

  The truth was that no one outside Russia really knew for sure who ran things in the imperial government. Krivoshein, the agriculture minister, and not Council of Ministers chairman Goremykin, was believed by the French to be the most influential policymaker in St. Petersburg, but this was a guess—an optimistic one, as Krivoshein was the government’s most passionate Germanophobe. Going to Petersburg in person was the only sure way of figuring out where the Russians stood.

  TSAR NICHOLAS II WAS LUNCHING with Sazonov and Paléologue aboard his imperial yacht, the Alexandria, when the French delegation arrived at Kronstadt. Also present at the luncheon were Alexander Izvolsky, Russia’s ambassador to France, and General Pierre de Laguiche, the French military attaché to Russia. The subject of conversation was the upcoming summit, particularly the thorniest problem on the agenda: how to douse growing tensions between London and Petersburg over the zones of influence accorded Britain and Russia in the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907. While it was too soon to discuss details, the tsar agreed on the importance of winning over London. “Unless she has gone out of her mind altogether,” he told Paléologue, “Germany will never attack Russia, France, and England combined.” Coffee had just been served when the signal was heard announcing the arrival of France’s president. “For a few minutes there was a prodigious din in the harbor,” Paléologue wrote of the dramatic scene: “the guns of the ships and the shore batteries firing, the crews cheering, the Marseillaise answering the Russian national anthem, the cheers of thousands of spectators who had come from St. Petersburg on pleasure boats.”