July 1914: Countdown to War

by Sean McMeekin

  This is not to say, however, that any crisis between Russia and Turkey would have led to general European conflagration. The Eastern Question had produced wars and crises before, but they had all followed their own logic, depending on circumstances. The Russo-Ottoman war of 1877–1878 might have—but did not—produce a larger war, owing to Russia’s diplomatic isolation and the exhaustion of her troops when they neared Constantinople; this gave both sides cause to start negotiating. The First Bosnian crisis of 1908–1909 had very nearly produced an Austrian-Russian clash, only for this to be averted when Russia backed down owing to her weakness following her 1905 revolution.

  The two Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 had threatened the European equilibrium still more seriously. If then–chairman of the Council of Ministers Kokovtsov had not blocked the war party, Russian mobilization in November 1912 might have led Germany to counter. Still, without the provocation of an Austrian attack on Serbia, as happened following Sarajevo (but not during the Balkan Wars), Petersburg would have been hard-pressed to win French, much less British, support for a war with the Central Powers.

  A crisis over the arrival of Turkey’s first dreadnought in July 1914 might have spiraled into war. Still, prior to Sarajevo, most of the diplomatic chatter in Europe concerned the possibility of another war between Turkey and Greece, not Russia. The Greeks, pursuing their own naval buildup, might have launched a preemptive strike before the Ottoman Empire floated the Sultan Osman I. A Greco-Turkish clash might have led to a Third Balkan War, as Bulgaria would have taken advantage of the crisis to make good her losses in the Second. Still, it need not have spread to Europe. What made July 1914 different was the direct involvement of a Great Power—Austria-Hungary—in the initial clash, which brought in Russia.

  Had Russia herself launched an amphibious strike on Constantinople in summer 1914, a Great Power war might have resulted. Still, advanced as operational planning for such a strike was, it is hard to see what pretext Sazonov would have used to justify it. A Greco-Turkish war might have provided the spark, but if it seemed as if Petersburg was piggybacking on Turkey’s distress to seize the Straits, then Russia would not have been able to count on support from France, let alone Great Britain. As Sazonov wrote in his memoirs, the general understanding at the February 1914 planning conference was that Russia’s leaders “considered an offensive against Constantinople inevitable, should European war break out.” The European war, that is, had to come first. Such a war might provide Russia with the pretext to conquer Constantinople, but she could not be seen to start it, or she would find herself just as isolated as in 1878—or, worse still, 1853, when Britain and France had gone against her in the Crimean War. Only the unique sequence of events following Sarajevo—which led Austria to move against Serbia, backed by Germany—produced a European war in which both France and Britain would back Russia. Although there were bilateral agreements between London and the other two capitals, this unlikely tripartite battlefield coalition had never existed before and will never be seen again.*

  Still, contingent and clearly preventable as the Sarajevo outrage was, it happened; the July crisis ensued; world war broke out in August, with all of the fearful and long-lasting consequences mentioned above. All of these world-shaking events were man-made. They are therefore quite properly subject to human judgment.

  WHEN WE EXAMINE the key moral question of 1914—responsibility for the outbreak of European, then world war—it is important to keep degrees of responsibility in mind. Sins of omission are lesser ones than sins of commission; likewise, actions are not equivalent to the reactions they occasion. Above all, intentions are important, but the hardest to divine, because we cannot peer into men’s hearts.To begin at the beginning: Gavrilo Princip and his fellow assassination plotters bear ultimate responsibility for provoking the July crisis by murdering Archduke Franz Ferdinand. True, there was no intention on Princip’s part, or that of Black Hand organizers in Belgrade, to cause a world war;** nevertheless some of them clearly sought to provoke a confrontation with Austria. Historians continue to argue about the different motivations of Serbian leaders. Apis may have wanted to provoke a crisis with Vienna so as to furnish an opportunity for a coup d’état, or merely to embarrass Prime Minister Pašić enough for his party to be defeated in July elections. Pašić almost certainly did not approve of the plot when he learned of it, but he made only an ineffectual, halfhearted effort to foil the assassination, whether because he feared a coup or the reaction from Vienna if he revealed what the Black Hand was up to. The only things we know for certain are that high Serbian officials were complicit in the crime and that Pašić neither prevented it nor gave the Austrians any genuine help in investigating it.4

  The Austrians must stand next in the dock of judgment. It was clearly the intention of Conrad, Berchtold, and every other imperial minister except Tisza to use the Sarajevo outrage as a pretext for a punitive war against Serbia. Emperor Franz Josef I, as ultimate arbiter and signator of all key decisions, also bears a grave responsibility, although he did not design the policies—he merely confirmed them. One could easily argue, of course, that the crime committed in Sarajevo was sufficient legal casus belli for war with Serbia: the war launched by the United States and her allies against Afghanistan in 2001 (if not also the Iraq war of 2003) was justified in very similar terms (the “harboring of terrorists”). There are significant differences between the two cases, however. The Serbian government, unlike Osama bin Laden, did not confess to (much less publicly boast about) committing the crime, and she did agree to arrest at least some of the conspirators, such as Major Tankositch, whereas the Taliban refused outright to hand over bin Laden (although Serbia did similarly shelter Apis).

  More significantly, the United States received broad (if not quite universal) international support for her action in Afghanistan. No Great Power made clear her stout opposition to a United States punitive strike in 2001, as at least Russia clearly did to an Austrian one in 1914. True, Berchtold and Conrad did not know, at the beginning of July, what Russia’s reaction would be. By the end of the month, they did, and they proceeded against Serbia anyway. The Austrian sin was therefore one of both intention and commission, although with the caveat that the goal in Vienna was a local war with Serbia, not a European war involving Russia, much less France, Britain, and all the other ultimate belligerents. This was made dramatically clear when Austria, despite having catalyzed the July crisis in the first place, refused to declare war on Russia until August 6—two days after even Britain went in. While this anticlimactic declaration of war has sometimes been seen as implicating Germany in “war guilt”—as it was clearly the Germans who pressured the Austrians into it—what it really reveals is just how little desire there was in Vienna to fight Russia. Considering the Austrians’ poor performance against Russian troops in Galicia at the start of the war, one can easily see why.

  Tisza, for his part, bears significant responsibility for the final shape of the July crisis: its back-ended timing. Owing to the harvest leave issue, the two weeks Austria “lost” after the Ministerial Council of 7 July may not have been as important as historians have claimed. Conrad probably would have had to wait before mobilizing, anyway. It was, rather, at the very beginning that Tisza’s opposition mattered. Had Austria-Hungary mobilized on 1 July (as Conrad wanted to), or after only a few more days of diplomatic spadework (as Berchtold and the emperor would have preferred), it is possible that the Austrians would have caught Europe by surprise with a fait accompli—an occupation of Belgrade, at least, conveniently located as the capital was right on the Austrian border.

  True—in light of Austria’s indecisiveness during the Balkan Wars and her notoriously incompetent military performance in 1914—one should regard this counterfactual with skepticism. And yet part of the reason why Conrad fared so badly in Galicia is that his real goal—shared by everyone in Vienna—was to crush Serbia, not to fight Russia. Had Austria begun her mobilization against Serbia in the first week, instead of th
e last week, of July, and implemented Plan B without interruption, there is no telling how the crisis would have played out. It might still have led to European war, or it might have led to some kind of face-saving compromise along the lines of a “Halt in Belgrade.” It was largely Tisza’s doing that Austria did not present her ultimatum until four weeks after Sarajevo. Of course, his motivation in blocking Conrad was honorable: he wanted, at least until 14 July, to prevent war, not to cause it. If there is any sin in Tisza’s behavior, it is a negative one of omission leading to unintended consequences.

  The German sin, at the time of the Hoyos mission of 5–6 July, was more serious. By giving Austria-Hungary a blank check against Serbia, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Bethmann Hollweg made a broader escalation of the Balkan crisis possible. Given Tisza’s opposition, there is reason to believe that Conrad would not have gotten his Serbian war at all without German intervention. It was not German support alone that changed Tisza’s mind—his own revulsion against Serbia grew organically the first two weeks in July, as he learned more about Sarajevo—but without it Berchtold would have had a very hard time convincing the emperor to move forward, whatever Tisza’s views. Austria’s diplomatic isolation and military weakness meant that German backing was indispensable. The Germans gave it unambiguously. Still, although it is true that Arthur Zimmermann, the undersecretary of state, and many military chiefs in Berlin, were keen on the idea of “preventive war,” it is equally clear that Kaiser Wilhelm II and Bethmann did not expect Russia to fight. While they recognized the risks and were willing to run them, they did not intend to provoke European war. Their real sin, at this stage of the crisis, lay in failing to mandate any particular Austrian course of action, or to establish firmer guidelines as to how Vienna would coordinate its strategy with Berlin. The blank check was foolish and self-defeating. It encouraged Berchtold to behave as recklessly as possible, under the mistaken impression that this was what the Germans wanted him to do.

  Berchtold himself must shoulder the greatest blame for bringing the crisis to the danger point on 23 July. Having lost the chance for a military fait accompli, Austria’s foreign minister settled for a diplomatic one, detonating his ultimatum bombshell without even clearing the text first with his German allies. True, this was partly Bethmann’s fault for leaving Berchtold alone to do his worst and for failing to press Vienna for more information until it was too late. And yet Jagow did request to see the text; he also asked that Berchtold do his “homework” and finalize a dossier of Serbian guilt before dispatching the ultimatum, and make sure of Italy’s support. Berchtold did nothing of the kind. After sending the ultimatum under seal to Belgrade, he even lied to Germany’s ambassador that it was not yet finished. Here was conscious intention to deceive not only a hostile power such as Russia, but even Austria’s closest ally. Of all the what-ifs of the July crisis, this is one of the greatest. If Berchtold had done what the Germans asked and convinced Europe of Serbia’s perfidy, he would have put the diplomatic onus back on Russia to advocate for her guilty client. With what we know today of Serbian complicity in the Sarajevo crime, it is astonishing that Austrian officials were unable to marshal a convincing case even a month after the crime in Sarajevo.

  Still, serious as Berchtold’s errors were, it was not he who began the countdown to European war. His blundering helped isolate Austria-Hungary and embarrass Germany for supporting her, but his actions did not force Russia to mobilize, much less France or Germany. Here the timeline becomes all-important. Because of Schilling’s running diary at the Russian Foreign Ministry, we know that Sazonov decided on a military response before Serbia had replied to the ultimatum on Saturday, 25 July—before, indeed, he had actually read the ultimatum itself on Friday. True, his decision still had to be ratified in the Council of Ministers Friday afternoon and by Tsar Nicholas II the next day. In a sense, it had to be ratified by France, too. But even before running his decision by anyone else, by eleven AM on Thursday, 24 July, Sazonov had already instructed Russia’s finance minister to repatriate funds from Germany and her army chief of staff to prepare for mobilization. Sazonov had known about the impending Austrian ultimatum (if not its exact form) since the preceding Saturday. After he, the tsar, and France’s president, and premier/foreign minister held four days of meetings from Sunday to Wednesday, Sazonov had good reason to believe he had their support for his course of action. The most recent research strongly suggests (although it does not prove) that Poincaré and Paléologue gave Sazonov verbal support for a strong line against Vienna during the summit in Petersburg. The written evidence proves that Paléologue gave this support afterwards, with or without explicit authorization from Poincaré. So, too, did General Laguiche (France’s liaison officer at Russian command) and Joffre and Messimy in Paris.

  Tsar Nicholas II signed into law the Period Preparatory to War at midday on Saturday, 25 July—before learning of Serbia’s reply to the ultimatum and before either Serbia or Austria had mobilized. The Period Preparatory to War began at midnight, 25–26 July. Because it, unlike Germany’s version (the Kriegsgefahrzustand), was enacted and carried out in secret, historians have been able to deny warlike intent on Russia’s part, the idea being that, as Sazonov himself told Ambassador Pourtalès, preliminary mobilization measures “did not mean war.” Some have gone even further, saying that even Russia’s general mobilization, ordered at four PM on 30 July, did not “mean war.”5 In both cases, the claim is dubious, although it has slightly more surface plausibility with the Period Preparatory to War.

  The measures inaugurated on Sunday, 26 July, viewed on their own terms, clearly fell well short of war. Just as clearly, they constituted preparations for war. This was, indeed, the entire reason why the secret Period Preparatory to War had been developed in 1912–1913: to allow Russia a head start in mobilizing against the Austro-Germans. The statute of 2 March 1913 clearly states that the Period Preparatory to War “means the period of diplomatic complications preceding the opening of hostilities.” Or, as laid down in the tsar’s November 1912 directive, “it will be advantageous to complete concentration without beginning hostilities, in order not to deprive the enemy irrevocably of the hope that war can still be avoided. Our measures for this must be masked by clever diplomatic negotiations, in order to lull to sleep as much as possible the enemy’s fears.” Dobrorolskii, chief of the Russian army’s Mobilization Section, understood this to mean war. So did War Minister Sukhomlinov and Chief of Army Staff Yanushkevitch. Sazonov made a great show of believing otherwise, but then, that was his job: to handle the “diplomatic complications.” In this sense, and this sense alone, was the Period Preparatory to War not war. However insincere, diplomacy could continue.

  In a curious mirror imaging of Sazonov’s approach, Austria’s foreign minister, tiring of insincere “diplomatic complications,” declared war on Serbia—by telegram—on Tuesday, 28 July. Considering that Conrad did not believe the army would be ready to fight until 12 August, Berchtold’s maneuver was counterproductive, as it gave diplomatic ammunition to Russia and France in their goal of winning over Britain and other neutrals. Berchtold’s motivation, however, is instructive: he wanted to cut off further outside mediation efforts. War cancelled diplomacy. Here was another sin of commission. Still, aside from its adverse strategic consequences, especially for Germany, Berchtold’s move proves little more than that Austrian leaders wanted a war with Serbia, a fact we knew already.

  Austria’s declaration of war on Serbia has usually been seen as the point of no return in the outbreak of the First World War, the moment when the July crisis escalated into actual conflict. This, too, has a surface plausibility. And yet again, we need to be careful with chronology. While it is true that Berchtold’s rash action gave Russia a pretext to escalate her war preparations, these had been underway for nearly three days when Austria declared war on Serbia. By keeping quiet about the Period Preparatory to War and then delaying the announcements of both partial and general mobilization, Sazonov was able to convin
ce Sir Edward Grey, along with generations of historians, that Russia had begun mobilizing only after Austria’s declaration of war on Serbia. This is untrue: Austrian, German, French, and most of all Russian sources confirm that Russia’s mobilization measures against both Austria and Germany were well advanced by 28 July, and even more so by 29 July. All Berchtold’s telegram did was give Russia a public casus belli for war preparations she was undertaking anyway. The long-running argument about Russia’s partial versus general mobilization rests, ultimately, on a fiction. As Kokovtsov had pointed out in November 1912, and Dobrorolskii pointed out in July 1914, a partial mobilization targeting Austria alone, without using the Warsaw railway hub and blanketing Poland, was technically impossible. Nor was it ever fully implemented. “Partial mobilization” was a diplomatic conjuring act designed to show France—and more so, Britain—that Russia was not giving Germany a pretext for war.

  The decision for European war was made by Russia on the night of 29 July 1914, when Tsar Nicholas II, advised unanimously by his advisers, signed the order for general mobilization. General mobilization—as he knew, as Sazonov knew, as Schilling knew; as Krivoshein, Rodzianko, and Duma leaders knew; as Sukhomlinov, Yanushkevitch, and Dobrorolskii knew—meant war. So clearly did the tsar know this that, on being moved by a telegram from Kaiser Wilhelm II, he changed his mind. “I will not be responsible for a monstrous slaughter” is the key line of the entire July crisis, for it shows that the tsar, for all his simplicity—or expressly because of his guileless, unaffected simplicity—knew exactly what he was doing when he did it. He knew exactly what he was doing when he did it again, sixteen hours later, after agonizing all day about it. Sazonov knew it, which is why he told Yanushkevitch to “smash his telephone” so that the tsar could not change his mind again.