Tannenberg: Clash of Empires, 1914 (Cornerstones of Military History)

by Dennis Showalter

  Militarily, moreover, the Russo-Japanese War had been only the most recent demonstration of the fact that as long as control of the Bosporus remained outside Russia’s hands, a large part of her fleet was useless except for coastal defense; while in the hands of an unfriendly state with a strong navy the straits were a gateway to Russia’s back door. Complicating the picture was the growing conviction of Russian strategists that possession of Constantinople and the Dardanelles depended on dominating their hinterlands in Europe and Asia. A simple land grab would no longer suffice. Nor was subversion of the Ottoman Empire a desirable policy for a Russia not only plagued with its own revolutionaries, but uncertain of its ability to take quick advantage of a Turkish collapse. German-trained and German-led troops might well prove a significant barrier to any Russian attempts to seize the straits, then confront Europe with a fait accompli.9

  In such a context it was hardly surprising that Kokovtsov expressed “deep sorrow” at the regrettable worsening of Russo-German relations generated by the Liman von Sanders appointment, or that Sazonov grew “extremely nervous” and was not to be reassured. The Russian foreign minister accused Germany of seeking simultaneously to undo the results of the Balkan wars of national liberation and to strangle south Russia’s economy by gaining control of the straits herself. He recommended that the entente change Germany’s mind by occupying selected Turkish ports as hostages!10

  The proposal was met with raised eyebrows by French and British officials on the spot in Constantinople. They argued the effect of Liman’s appointment would be far less—even suspiciously less—than Sazonov seemed to expect. By this time, however, Russia’s Turkish policy is best understood in terms of a running man who, feeling himself stumble, seeks to restore his balance by accelerating his pace. Sazonov insisted that concessions to either of the central powers would destroy Russia’s credibility with foes and friends alike. When he proclaimed the Liman appointment a test of Russia’s alliances, the French ambassador indicated that his government’s support would be unequivocal and unstinting. Britain was less encouraging, but not discouraging.11

  On January 13, 1914, an imperial council discussed the pros and cons of direct military action against Turkey. When asked if Russia could fight a war with Germany, the war minister and the chief of staff cheerfully agreed that Russia was perfectly prepared for such a conflict—with Austria thrown in. Kokovtsov’s insistence that such a war would be the worst thing that could happen to Russia swayed just enough of the council just enough to the side of moderation that they accepted, at least provisionally, Bethmann’s assurances that the entire affair was a misunderstanding.12

  Did the chancellor’s words mask darker intentions? Liman’s appointment has been described as a major initiative in Germany’s return to an aggressive continental strategy as a prelude to Weltpolitik. In this interpretation, Germany’s leaders by 1914 were thinking in terms not of concert diplomacy, but of a Central European power bloc, with the Ottoman Empire as its major sphere of direct influence. This meant the straits, the bridge to Asia Minor, must remain secure at all costs.13

  Realities were a good deal more modest. German military missions had been “reforming” the Ottoman army at intervals for over twenty years with at best modest success. Given the results of Turkey’s recent conflicts with Italy and the Balkan states, any improvements in her armed forces would amount to little more than restoring a regional balance. Turkish generals seemed for once willing to take advice—a welcome prospect after the frustrations of German soldiers and diplomats at the Porte in recent years. But Liman von Sanders, suspicious, petty both in public and private matters, was hardly the man single-handedly to bring Turkey into Germany’s camp. He not only saw his task as narrowly professional; he was directly warned by the Kaiser to avoid involvement in local politics.

  This admonition reflected the basic inconsistency of German policies towards Turkey. Specific issues of profit and loss, either economic or diplomatic, were less important than glowing visions of the future. Opinion was sharply divided on the importance and the possibility of establishing close links with a state needing at least a decade to recover from the effects of defeat and revolution. What success Germany did have was largely negative, a product of Britain’s growing tendency to take Turkish good will for granted. As late as May, 1914, the grand vizier was insisting to the German ambassador that it was in Turkey’s best interests to have no alliances with any of the powers. The only threat she faced was when one of the alliance networks was ready to start a world war.14

  William’s order to Liman to resign command of I Corps ended the crisis. It settled nothing more. From Berlin’s point of view, Russia had significantly overreacted to a limited initiative, if indeed it could be called an initiative at all. Concert diplomacy was never meant to exclude self-interest—only to limit the parameters of its pursuit. Germany never denied direct and growing economic, political, and military interests in the Ottoman Empire. She was correspondingly unwilling to abandon that field to a Russia whose claims seemed increasingly designed to exclude everyone else.

  In January, 1914, the Turkish military attaché in St. Petersburg expressed alarm at Russian troop movements in the Caucasus. His German colleague initially belittled the situation, saying that if Russia had designs on Turkey she would have implemented them during the Balkan Wars. But in April the Tiflis consulate confirmed extensive Russian military activity, including reports that a new army corps was to be raised on the Turkish border. In June the Russian government proposed that the Ottoman Empire’s Armenian subjects be given virtual autonomy under what amounted to Russian protection. Farther to the east, Russia’s continued pressure on Persia and in Central Asia was generating increasing concern about her ultimate intentions in a Britain for years at pains to appease her imperialist rival. In such a context Russia’s vehement objections to the limited matter of a command appointment invited interpretation as part of a general campaign to renew the Great Game in Asia and complete the Balkan Wars by dismembering the Turkish Empire.15

  Had Russia in fact decided to do herself what her purported clients had been unable to do after their recent falling-out? The evidence was ambiguous. Near East rivalries had been endemic among the powers for two centuries. Russian policy makers had accepted German economic interests in the Ottoman Empire. They understood the risks of war should Germany not be considered in any future reorganization of that troubled area. As late as 1912 the military attaché in Berlin warned that a Germany uncompensated for a Turkish collapse might well take “sword in hand.”16 Since the Bosnian Crisis, moreover, Russian diplomats had been at periodic pains to insist to their German colleagues that Austria was the real obstacle to peace in the Balkans and in Europe. Let Germany encourage her ally to be a bit more reasonable, to modify her aggressive responses to the development of south Slav autonomy under Russian auspices, and there was no reason why peace should be endangered. According to Sazonov the Russian government had no complaints about German behavior in the recent Balkan crises. Germany needed only to ignore the agitation of press and parliament, which meant nothing in an autocracy. As for Turkey, she was finished in any case. Why should Germany damage her relations with Russia by denying facts?17

  Sazonov was not making these overtures in a vacuum. Since 1912 Austria had been under steadily increasing economic and diplomatic pressure in the Near East from her ostensible ally. Throughout the Balkans and Asia Minor the business interests of the two empires clashed noisily. For all the kaiser’s rhetoric of fidelity and brotherhood, Bethmann-Hollweg’s consistent advocacy of restraint and compromise seemed in Vienna only to bind Austria’s hands in dealing with adversaries bent on her destruction. In Berlin, more and more policy makers were becoming more and more open in describing their Austrian connection as an alliance with a corpse. Bethmann-Hollweg’s speculations on the Dual Monarchy’s declining viability were paralleled by Foreign Secretary Gottlieb von Jagow’s description of the Habsburg dynasty as a House of Atreus, stum
bling from catastrophe to catastrophe.18

  Austria’s emerging role as the new Sick Man of Europe involved perceptions as well as realities. In an age still influenced by positivism, among men intellectually formed when scientific objectivity was gaining the status of a shibboleth, it was easy to accept diplomatic situations as given, unsusceptible to alteration by human efforts. In Britain, publicists like R. W. Seton-Watson and Henry Wickham Steed predicted glorious futures for the young and vigorous Slavic peoples of southeastern Europe, once the Habsburg Empire should disappear. French graduates of the École Libre des Sciences Politiques, considering Austria’s demise imminent, were constructing alternate systems based on the soon-to-be-autonomous Czechs and Yugoslavs.

  Arguments constantly repeated tend to acquire both a life of their own and a certain ascriptive credibility. Russia, France, and Britain individually were increasingly unwilling to run any significant risks to sustain Austria’s existence as a participant in the great-power political system. None of the three states trusted the other two deeply enough to risk alienating them by advocating policies of restraint and support towards Austria. France, over the protests of her ambassador to Vienna, bowed to Russian pressure in refusing the Austro-Hungarian government access to the Paris Bourse in 1909–10. France was also increasingly ready to develop Greece as a bridgehead for the penetration of the Balkan Peninsula and the Ottoman Empire. British policies in principle recognized Austria’s role as a counterweight to Russian ambitions in the Near East. In practice the foreign office followed a modification of the Fifth Commandment: Thou shalt not kill/ But need not strive/ Excessively to keep alive. Sir Edward Grey regarded British support for Austria as risking misinterpretation in Germany, as an attempt to detach her only ally. Proposed concessions to Austria were also carefully scrutinized for their possible impact in Paris and St. Petersburg—sometimes with a dose of cant gratuitously added. When in 1910 the foreign office thwarted the Hungarian government’s negotiations for a loan in London, it justified its decision by explaining that the money might be spent on armaments.19

  None of the entente governments gave serious consideration on a policy-making level to what might happen should Austria not choose to disappear quietly. Perhaps this was another manifestation of the Age of Science. If Austria’s fate were objectively certain, she would disappear as the mastodon and the saber-tooth tiger had disappeared: without significantly disturbing the march of history.

  But if other great powers might have little sympathy with Austria’s increasingly strident claims that her vital interests were being neglected, Germany could not ignore them. Apart from the possible consequences of the Dual Monarchy’s total collapse, Vienna’s growing concentration on the Balkans was a serious danger sign. Should Austria in effect relinquish her great-power role, resigning herself to regional status and pursuing regional interests, Germany would be thrown on her own resources, no longer one of three, as in Bismarck’s ideal, no longer even one of two, but one alone, too weak to stand for long, much less conduct a European concert.

  Bethmann’s increasing doubts of Austria’s viability only encouraged his support for a policy of caution and circumspection in the Balkans, as opposed to forceful unilateral action the fragile empire might be unable to sustain. Germany’s insistence that the will of the powers in that region was best exercised collectively, through the Concert of Europe, was correspondingly designed to serve two interlocking ends. The Concert would solidify Anglo-German detente, but also underwrite Austria’s status and position. The Habsburg monarchy and the peace of Europe would be preserved; Germany’s prospects for becoming Europe’s new coachman would be correspondingly enhanced.

  It can legitimately be argued that no system can long function if some of its great powers are in fact regional powers seeking to make the system resist change because their own weaknesses preclude flexibillity. But among the most serious gaps in entente diplomacy prior to 1914 was its failure to prepare consequently for Germany’s reaction to the disappearance of her only reliable major ally—perhaps even by engaging her in the process. To states already concerned with the steady accretion of German power, to statesmen unwilling to see themselves as cold-blooded heirs of Machiavelli, such an approach seemed a potentially explosive reversion to an earlier and more savage era of international relations. In 1772, a Russian tsarina had recognized the necessity of involving a Prussian king in the destruction of a weak neighbor. The lessons of the Polish partition were, however, lost on Nicholas II and his advisors.

  At the turn of the century, the French military attaché submitted several memoranda on the Russian army’s planning for the contingency of a Habsburg collapse in the aftermath of Franz Josef’s death. Apparently the general staff planners expected the empire’s German provinces to seek admission to the Second Reich spontaneously—a development Russia would not oppose if suitably compensated with Galicia, a blank check in the Ottoman Empire, and possibly an independent Bohemia as well.20 But these and similar projections remained the stuff of operational planning rather than state policy. In April, 1913, Tsar Nicholas, in an interview with the British ambassador, described Austria as “a source of weakness for Germany and a danger to peace” whose breakup was only a question of time. He went on to sketch a future situation in which Bohemia and Hungary would become independent kingdoms and the south Slavs absorbed by Serbia and Rumania, with Germany acquiring the “German provinces.” Sir George Buchanan was one of the leading lights of the foreign office, with wide experience in both German and Slavic Europe. He had held his current post since 1910. He was highly regarded in London for his tact and skill. Yet he confessed himself “unable to follow the Emperor’s train of thought, or to understand how he arrived at this conclusion.” Buchanan was, however, perceptive enough to comment that such changes were not likely to be effected without a general war.21

  In January, 1914, Sazonov echoed Buchanan, saying that the Austrian situation would end in either a federal solution along national lines, or a war for which Russia was in no way prepared. But on March 18, the nationalist and conservative St. Petersburg Novoye Vremya published the alleged comments of “a highly authoritative state official,” probably Sukhomlinov. The article repeated Nicholas’s line of argument almost verbatim, with the added provisions that Germany would sacrifice Alsace and Russia would annex Galicia. Sazonov was quick to deny that the war minister had anything at all to do with the story. The denial, however, becomes suspect in the context of Sukhomlinov’s statement to the French ambassador in May that Russia intended to have Galicia after Franz Josef’s death, and the tsar hoped Germany would accept this peacefully.22

  These exchanges hardly count as prima facie evidence that Russia was ready to risk a general war to redraw Europe’s map to her advantage. Russia was not the only state where politicians said one thing in public while generals said something else in private. Nor does every speculation on possible future contingencies necessarily represent a sinister hidden agenda. The scenario outlined by the tsar and his war minister was more than familiar; it could have been developed by anyone with a schoolboy’s knowledge of central European ethnography. Dreams of natural future accretions to Russian power might well have been enhanced by the all-too-concrete failures of current Russian diplomacy. Nevertheless the evolution of the concept is not without interest: from Nicholas’s omission of any direct gains for Russia, through the Novoye Vremya’s discussion of a general settlement with something for all the continental survivors including France, to Sukhomlinov’s blunt statement of ultimate goals which Germany could like or lump as it pleased. The incidents illustrate the nature of the ideas unofficially discussed in St. Petersburg. They also demonstrate all too clearly Paul Schroeder’s argument that while by 1914 every great power expected the European system to work for its benefit, none were willing to work for the system.23

  II

  A loosely-structured group of top officials and ex-officials did suggest that Russia was wrong to sacrifice Berlin for London. Th
ese men respected the German Empire as a more reasonable model for their own than the Western parliamentary systems. In particular, Sergei Witte and former interior minister Peter Durnovo insisted that Germany and Russia had no differences that could not be negotiated. A Russo-German war, Durnovo argued, would bring revolution if it were lost, and a victory would be almost as disastrous. Russia would become financially and economically dependent on her allies, while having to cope with the anarchy sure to break out in the defeated states and likely to spread across their borders.24

  Hindsight indicates the wisdom of the Witte-Durnovo forecasts. In the event Russia got the predicted negative effects of both winning and losing its German war—a fact arguably not lost on Stalin during the 1930s. At the time, however, this was a minority position. By 1913 Germany had captured almost 40 percent of Russia’s foreign trade. Russian critics of existing commercial relations presented their country as a virtual colony of her economically dominant neighbor, a source of cheap raw materials and a dumping ground for even cheaper finished products. Russia, in the words of one group of merchants, must emancipate herself from this humiliating dependence, preferably by cultivating improved relations with countries willing to establish more equitable trade relationships. Industrialists too regarded Germany as the principal foreign obstacle to Russia’s economic development, and decried their country’s dependance on German techniques and German machines. While the manufacturers were not enthusiastic at the prospect of a war, they more than any other group saw clear benefits arising from a German defeat. As it was more and more German firms were losing Russian contracts to French and British suppliers submitting higher bids, despite years of cooperative relationships with local authorities. The navy minister went so far as to urge the German director of the Putilov armament works to consider becoming a Russian citizen. Something of the relationship between business and patriotism at this period is suggested by the latter’s prompt willingness to make the change and his justification of it as making him better able to serve German industrial interests.25