Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

by Max Hastings

  On the 21st the president’s party received all the ambassadors accredited to St Petersburg in their superb gold-embroidered uniforms and knee-breeches, and exchanged banalities with most. The German envoy said that he looked forward to visiting France with his French family later in the summer. Britain’s Sir George Buchanan – ‘cold, ponderous and extremely courteous’, in the president’s words, displayed alarm about the European situation and suggested that Vienna and St Petersburg should open a direct dialogue. Poincaré responded that such a course would be most dangerous, and wrote in his diary: ‘This conversation leaves me pessimistic.’ Count Friedrich Szapáry, the Hapsburg ambassador, disturbed the French president much more: ‘He gives the impression that Austria-Hungary wishes to extend to all of Serbia responsibility for the crime committed [in Sarajevo] and possibly desires to humiliate her little neighbour. If I say nothing, that will make him suppose a violent initiative has the approval of France. I reply that Serbia has friends in Russia who would be astonished at this information, and such surprise would be shared elsewhere.’

  Paléologue recorded Szapáry saying coldly to Poincaré: ‘Monsieur le Président, we cannot suffer a foreign government to allow plots against our polity to be hatched on its territory!’ The president allegedly urged the need for caution on the part of all the European powers, adding: ‘With a little goodwill this Serbian business is easy to settle. But it can just as easily become critical. Serbia has some very warm friends in the Russian people. And Russia has an ally, France. There are plenty of complications to be feared!’ Szapáry bowed and left without saying a further word. Poincaré said to Viviani and Paléologue, according to the latter: ‘I’m not satisfied with this conversation. The ambassador had obviously been instructed to say nothing … Austria has a coup de théâtre in store for us. Sazonov must be firm and we must back him up …’ This account is disingenuous, but probably catches the tone of what was said.

  A telegram arrived from Paris, reporting that Germany was offering Austria-Hungary its support. Viviani and Poincaré claimed to have agreed that this sounded like a bluff to increase pressure on the Serbs, but the French leaders were now becoming alarmed by the meagreness and tardiness of incoming information. The Germans shortly thereafter began jamming some French diplomatic wireless traffic. The mere fact that Berlin adopted such a measure places its role in the July crisis in an unsympathetic light, alongside its consistent mendacity in exchanges with the other Powers. If Germany seriously desired a peaceful outcome, this could scarcely be promoted by isolating France’s leaders from unfolding developments, nor by lying about its own state of knowledge.

  On the 23rd, Poincaré gave a dinner under an awning on the quarterdeck of the France, marred by a heavy rainstorm which doused the empress and her daughters. The president was irked that his naval officer showed little imagination or chic in its management of the evening. The dinner, he complained, needed a woman’s touch. But the French delegation left St Petersburg a few hours later confident that the visit had been a success, and confirmed in France’s commitment to Russia. Indeed, it is possible that Viviani’s visible unease was fuelled by fears about how far his president went in promising support, though again there is no evidence about this. Poincaré speculated later that efforts made by Germany to deny him information during those critical days were prompted by fears that Russia and France might otherwise have concocted a credible peace initiative. This is implausible; but it is a matter of fact that the Austrians delayed presenting their ultimatum to Serbia until they were sure the French presidential party was at sea, sailing ever further from Russian shores. Only next day did Poincaré and Viviani begin to receive in successive fragments the text of the Austrian document as delivered.

  Between 14 and 25 July, astonishingly, the two men received no dispatches from France’s Belgrade mission, because the minister was ill. Meanwhile Paléologue in St Petersburg was persistently pressing on Sazonov the case for ‘firmness’. In those days ambassadors were important people, as intermediaries and even sometimes as principals. Paléologue was an erratic personality, unafraid of war because he believed that the balance of military advantage now lay with Russia and France. But it remains hard to see why the St Petersburg summit should be condemned as a malign and conspiratorial affair, as some seek to do even in the absence of evidence to that effect.

  It is true that Russia was competing fiercely with Germany for control of the Dardanelles and access to the Black Sea, but the latter issue influenced 1914 events only because it had intensified animosity and suspicion between the two nations. The Tsarist Empire had stronger motives than any nation in Europe to delay a showdown. At St Petersburg in July the two Entente Powers debated not a military initiative of their own, but an appropriate reaction to an Austrian one, which was evidently likely to be backed by the Germans. It was never plausible that Russia would acquiesce in Serbia’s suppression, nor that Paris would leave St Petersburg unsupported. Both the Austrians and the Germans knew this, but declined to be deterred, because they believed they could win a war.

  The final Austrian decision to invade Serbia, heedless of Belgrade’s response to Vienna’s demands, was reached at a secret meeting in Berchtold’s house on 19 July. Count Tisza, the sole earlier dissenter, was now reconciled to the foreign minister’s course; Hungarian public opinion had become as feverishly anti-Serb as was Austrian. Baron Musulin, who drafted Austria’s ultimatum to Serbia, said proudly later that he ‘sculpted and polished it like a precious stone’, to ‘astound the world with the eloquence of its accusation’. The day before its delivery, a draft was sent to Berlin, which the German government made no attempt to amend or soften, and afterwards mendaciously claimed that it had not seen before publication.

  The document presented to Belgrade at 6 p.m. on 23 July denounced Serbia for promoting terror and murder in the Hapsburg Empire. The charges made in the ultimatum about the participation of the Black Hand in the Sarajevo plot were largely valid. But Clauses 5 and 6, demanding that the Austrians should be empowered themselves to investigate and arbitrate on Serbian soil, represented a surrender of sovereignty no nation could concede – nor was Serbia expected by Vienna to do so. Berchtold’s missile was thus launched, and in flight.

  2 THE RUSSIANS REACT

  Nikola Pašić, the Serb prime minister, was away from Belgrade electioneering on 23 July – he made a habit of removing himself from the capital at moments of crisis, perhaps not accidentally. In his absence, the Austrian ultimatum was received by Serbia’s finance minister, Dr Laza Paču. A frenzy of activity followed. Apis, one of those most responsible for the crisis, went to the house of his brother-in-law, Živan Živanović, and warned him gravely: ‘The situation is very serious. Austria has delivered the ultimatum, the news has been passed on to Russia and the mobilisation orders are out.’ Živanović, like many others, hastily escorted his family to the temporary safety of the countryside.

  The Russian ambassador, the egregious Nikolai Hartwig, had died suddenly of a heart attack on 10 July; his deputy, Vasily Strandman, found himself in charge of the mission, which was modestly staffed. Strandman conscripted his wife and Lyudmila Nikolaevna, Hartwig’s daughter, to help encipher the mounting pile of telegrams that had now to be dispatched to Sazonov in St Petersburg, creating a curious snapshot of diplomatic domesticity. Late that night, they were engaged on this task when a servant entered to report that Alexander, the twenty-six-year-old Prince Regent, was waiting below to discuss the ultimatum. The Russian told the young man, who was visibly emotional: ‘The terms are very severe and offer little hope of a peaceful outcome.’ Strandman said that unless they could be accepted in their entirety, Serbia must expect to have to fight. The Prince agreed, then asked simply, ‘What will Russia do?’ Strandman answered: ‘I cannot say anything, because St Petersburg has not yet seen the ultimatum, and I have no instructions.’ ‘Yes, but what is your personal opinion?’ Strandman said he thought it likely that Russia would offer Serbia some protection. Al
exander then asked, ‘What should we do next?’ The Russian urged him to telegraph the Tsar.

  The Prince, who had been educated in Russia, fell silent for a few moments, then said, ‘Yes, my father the King will send a telegram.’ Strandman urged: ‘You yourself must tell [the Tsar] what has happened, give him your assessment of the situation and ask for help. You should sign, rather than the King.’ Alexander demanded sharply, ‘Why?’ Strandman said: ‘Because the Tsar knows and loves you, whereas he barely knows King Peter.’ They argued the toss about signatories for several minutes. Strandman suggested copying the message to Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel, who was married to Alexander’s aunt. He also agreed to cable St Petersburg immediately, asking for 120,000 rifles and other military equipment desperately needed by the Serbs – the Russians had failed to deliver earlier promised arms consignments.

  Western Europe and its leaders were slow to address the Austrian ultimatum with the urgency it demanded. France’s president and prime minister were at sea. Raymond Recouly of Le Figaro described how, in Paris, he gained his own first intimations of the gravity of the crisis not from ministers or diplomats, but from financial journalists. Before the Austrians acted, between 12 and 15 July there was frenzied activity on the Vienna and Budapest bourses, probably driven by inside information. ‘Everybody’s selling everything for any price they can get,’ Le Figaro’s financial editor told Recouly. Stock exchanges discounted the delusion in some chancelleries that Austria-Hungary intended to act temperately: they expected war.

  Across the Hapsburg Empire and in Serbia, millions held their breath. A Graz schoolteacher wrote on the 23rd: ‘nobody could think or speak about anything else’. In Serbia it was a season of lush blooming: gardens were full of roses, carnations, wallflowers, jasmine, lilac; pervasive scents of lime and acacia. Peasants drifted into Belgrade and other cities from surrounding villages, many accompanied by their families, to sell in the streets boiled eggs, plum brandy, cheese, bread. In the evenings the young gathered to sing songs, watched and heard by silent, grizzled old men. In the Serbian capital, Dr Slavka Mihajlović wrote on hearing of the ultimatum at her hospital: ‘We are astounded. We look at each other aghast, but must go back to work … We expected Serbia’s relations with Austria to get tense, but we did not expect an ultimatum … The whole town is in shock. Streets and cafés are filling up with anxious people … It is less than a year since our little Serbia emerged from two bloody wars, with Turkey and Bulgaria. Some of the wounded still lie in hospitals – are we to see more bloodshed and more tragedy?’

  The July crisis entered its critical phase on the 24th, when the terms of the Austrian ultimatum became known in the chancelleries of Europe. Sazonov said immediately: ‘C’est la guerre européene.’ He told the Tsar that the Austrians would never have dared to act in such a fashion without German guarantors. Nicholas’s response was cautious, but he convened a Council of Ministers to meet later that day. Sazonov then received Sir George Buchanan, who urged allowing time for diplomacy. Paléologue inevitably maintained his insistence upon toughness. What took place in St Petersburg during the ensuing four days ensured that the looming conflict would not be confined to the Balkans.

  All the operational plans in 1914 were complex, that of the Russians most of all, because of the huge distances involved. Each mobilised soldier of the Tsar must travel an average of seven hundred miles to reach his regiment, against a German’s average of two hundred. The strategic rail network required twelve days’ warning of a call to arms, and troop concentrations would anyway be much slower than Germany’s. An hour after receiving news of the ultimatum, Sazonov ordered the army to prepare to move onto a war footing. Later that day of the 24th, Peter Bark the finance minister instructed Foreign Ministry officials to arrange repatriation of a hundred million roubles of state funds lodged in Berlin.

  Austria’s commitment to war, and Germany’s ‘blank cheque’ in support, predated every response by the Entente. During an earlier Balkan crisis in the winter of 1912–13, Russia adopted the same military precautions that it activated on 24 July 1914 – without provoking hostilities. Unless St Petersburg proposed to acquiesce in the Austrian invasion of Serbia, immediate warning orders to the Russian army represented not eagerness to precipitate a European catastrophe, but prudence. There was, however, a critical new factor. In 1912–13 Germany had declined to support a tough Austrian line in the Balkans: key elements of its own military preparedness were still lacking – the Rhine bridge at Remagen, the bridge at Karwendel across which Austrian heavy artillery could move northwards, the Kiel canal, a new Army Bill. Now those links were complete: Moltke’s machine was at near-perfect pitch. St Petersburg and the rest of Europe knew that if Russia moved, Germany was almost bound to respond. Sazonov claimed that mobilisation was not a declaration of war; that the Tsar’s army could remain for weeks at readiness, but passive – as it had done in the earlier crisis. But German policy was different and unequivocal: if the Kaiser’s army mustered, it marched.

  The Russian Council of Ministers’ meeting on 24 July lasted two hours. Sazonov stressed Berlin’s war preparations – which he probably exaggerated – and the unhappy past, in which Russian concessions to Austrian or German assertiveness had been treated as admissions of weakness. He argued that it was time to take a stand; that it would be an intolerable betrayal to allow Serbia to succumb. The two service ministers, Vladimir Sukhomlinov and Igor Grigorovich, said that, while the national rearmament programme was incomplete, the army and navy were ready to fight. Their contributions were important: had they spoken more cautiously – or perhaps, realistically – Russia might have drawn back.

  Implausibly to foreign eyes, it was the agriculture minister whose remarks appear to have exercised the strongest influence. Alexander Krivoshein was a skilful court politicker with an extensive network of connections. He said that ‘public opinion would not understand why, at a critical moment involving Russia’s vital interests, the Imperial Government was reluctant to act boldly’. While recognising the dangers, he thought conciliation mistaken. The Tsar held a long private conversation with his uncle Grand Duke Nicholas, who commanded St Petersburg military district. It is unknown what was said, but it is likely that the Grand Duke expressed confidence both in France’s support and in the power of its army: he had been much impressed by a 1912 visit, during which he viewed Joffre’s soldiers. Moreover, he and his brother Peter were married to sisters, daughters of the King of Montenegro, whose impassioned influence was exercised to urge the Russians to fight the Austrians to the last gasp.

  The Tsar remained deeply unhappy about the prospect of a conflict which, he well knew, could destroy his dynasty. He remarked thoughtfully on 24 July: ‘Once [war] had broken out it would be difficult to stop.’ But he nonetheless consented to the measures preparatory to mobilisation. In an effort to play the part of the ruler of a great power, a status to which Russia’s claims were precarious, Nicholas acted not ignobly or wickedly, but rashly. He emulated Franz Joseph in setting a course for regime destruction – his own.

  That evening, Sazonov told the Serbian ambassador that Russia would protect his country’s independence. He offered Belgrade no ‘blank cheque’, instead urging acceptance of most of the terms of the Austrian ultimatum. But his commitment was decisive in persuading the Serbian government to reject a portion of Vienna’s demands: without the Russians, absolute surrender was its only option. Sazonov felt confident that his country could count on France, while having no great expectation of support from Britain; he remarked gloomily that every British newspaper save The Times was backing Austria in the crisis. Many people in Britain, some of them holding office, were wholly unsympathetic to Russian intervention. They sympathised with the Austrians in viewing Serbia as a pestilential Balkan nuisance.

  That day, while Europe held its breath, awaiting Serbia’s response to Vienna’s ultimatum, a violent thunderstorm struck central Europe. Outside the parliament building in Budapest a statue of Gyula Andr
ássy, one of the architects of the Dual Monarchy, was allegedly seen to totter. Troubled citizens told each other that their ancestors deemed such occurrences portents. But, as Finance Ministry official Lajos Thalloczy demanded in his diary: ‘for whom?’ That afternoon, expectant crowds gathered in the streets of Berlin, but by nightfall no further news was forthcoming.

  Next day, Saturday the 25th, German teacher Gertrud Schädla described in her diary how her family lunged for their morning paper, desperate for the latest tidings. She wrote: ‘Despite the danger that we shall be dragged into a war, people applaud Austria’s muscular stance. The murder of the ducal couple demands harsh punishment.’ As a gesture to the gravity of the international situation, the local sharpshooters’ fair was cancelled, though booths and roundabouts had already been erected. Meanwhile Belgrade was thronged with worried people chattering in the streets, at their garden gates and in such cafés as The Russian Tsar. Each new edition of the papers was seized upon as eagerly as in Gertrud Schädla’s house. There were rumours – accurate enough – of Austrian troops gathering on the border, but still no panic: Serbs, with their boundless capacity for self-delusion, clung to a belief that somehow fate would pass them by.

  On the evening of the 25th, Germany’s Social Democrats staged protests against war. Bethmann rejected conservative demands for a blanket ban on assemblies, but decreed that they must be confined to halls, staying off the streets. Over 100,000 people attended rallies around the country, at which SPD leaders proclaimed that Austria was picking a fight Germany should not join.

  All politicians find it hard to address with conviction more than one emergency at a time. This goes far to explain why the British government was slow to engage with events in Europe. Until the last week of July, the minds of senior ministers were fixed upon the Ulster crisis, to the near-exclusion of all else. Prime minister Herbert Asquith mentioned the assassinations just once, almost immediately after the event, in his intimate letters to Venetia Stanley, then not again until 24 July. In the intervening period, a Hungarian woman acquaintance called on David Lloyd George and harangued him about the rash insouciance with which the British were treating the reverberations of Sarajevo; she argued that unless Austrian anger could be assuaged, a war was inevitable. The chancellor was unimpressed, for which he later expressed regret. A Times leader on 3 July headed ‘Efforts for Peace’ related to Ulster, not Europe. It seemed entirely plausible that the United Kingdom was about to be plunged into a civil war, in which Protestant Ulstermen would be pitted against the Liberal government. Not only the Conservative Party, but also much of the British aristocracy and many of the army’s officers, passionately supported the rebels.