by Max Hastings
Admiral Tirpitz had told a diplomat earlier in 1914, with doubtful accuracy, that the British had their newspapers under much better control than did Germany. ‘In spite of your “liberty of the press”, at a hint from your government your whole national press becomes unanimous on questions outside your domestic politics.’ By contrast, German newspapers, said the admiral contemptuously, were ‘ocean tramps’, each representing the view of its own little party. There were 3,000 titles, fifty of them in Berlin. Now, the Berlin Post urged that Austria should be left alone to pursue whatever course she chose. The Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung said on 24 July: ‘we are not required to support Hapsburg wars of aggression’. Vorwärts, a Social Democratic publication, declared contemptuously on 27 July that ‘only immature adolescents could be attracted to a warrior adventure that must turn Europe into a slaughterhouse stinking of blood and decay’.
Contrarily, in Freiburg the town’s semi-official bulletin, Freiburger Tagblatt, asserted that Austria’s looming war with Serbia ‘holds sway completely over our city. Our whole life [has] played out as if we ourselves had to draw the sword – among families, in shops and public places, on the streets, in tram cars. These are genuine lofty sentiments, rooted in real German patriotism.’ Freiburger Zeitung wrote of ‘a wave of the highest patriotic enthusiasm [which] cascaded like a spring flood through the entire city’. Even the most pacifistic socialist papers said that if war came to Germany the working class would fight, rallying to the defence of the Fatherland. A German defeat would be ‘unthinkable, horrible … we do not desire that our women and children should be victims of the Cossack’s bestialities’.
A liberal journalist wrote on 26 July in Weser-Zeitung: ‘We cannot allow Austria to go under, for then we should ourselves be threatened with becoming subject to the greater Russian colossus, with its barbarism. We must fight now in order to secure for ourselves freedom and peace. The storm from east and west will be terrible but the skill, courage, and sacrifices of our army will prevail. Every German will feel the glorious duty of showing himself worthy of our forefathers [who fought] at Leipzig and Sedan.’ But even the most strident editorialists hoped that France and Britain would remain neutral, leaving Germany to direct its undivided military attentions to Russia. The Berlin government, in one of its spasms of moderation, urged the Austrians initially to mobilise only sufficient forces to address Serbia.
But on 26 July, Jules Cambon warned German foreign minister Jagow that the British would not this time remain neutral, as they had in 1870. Jagow shrugged: ‘you have your information and we have ours, which is completely different. We are confident of British neutrality.’ Cambon was among those who always thereafter believed this a critical misapprehension – that if the Germans had known Britain would fight, they would not have risked war. His view seems mistaken, however. The key German decision-makers, Moltke foremost among them, had long before weighed the possibility and indeed likelihood of British intervention – and discounted it as irrelevant. The outcome of a continental struggle would be determined by the clash of vast armies, to which a British troop contribution would perforce be tiny, and the Royal Navy irrelevant.
At this stage, too, most of Britain’s governing class remained indifferent to the fate of Serbia and strongly hostile to intervention. The British ambassador in Paris, Sir Francis Bertie, wrote on 27 July: ‘It seems incredible that the Russian Government should plunge Europe into war in order to make themselves the protectors of the Serbians.’ Many influential people questioned the wisdom of shattering European peace to save squalid little Serbia.
Meanwhile Berchtold, in Vienna, decided that it had become urgent to initiate military action: he wrote apprehensively that it was ‘not impossible that the Triple Entente might yet try to achieve a peaceful solution of the conflict unless a clear situation is created by a declaration of war’. From Berlin, without Bethmann’s knowledge, Moltke sent a message to Vienna urging general mobilisation and rejection of mediation; but this was decrypted and read by the Austrians only after they had already made their commitment to march. At 11 a.m. on Tuesday, 28 July, sitting at a little writing table in his study at Bad Ischl, the Emperor Franz Joseph signed a declaration of war, the document which would prove the death warrant of his own empire.
Early that afternoon, via telegraph, a copy of this missive reached the Serbian Foreign Ministry’s temporary quarters in Niš. Officials at first suspected a hoax. One of them, Milan Stojadinović, later wrote: ‘its form was so very unusual, in those days when the very etiquette of such things was still deemed important’. The language was undiplomatically crude and terse, but the Serbs eventually decided the telegram must be genuine. One of them bore it down the street to the Europa coffee house, where the prime minister was lunching with Strandman, Russia’s acting envoy.
The Serb leader read the brief words with every eye in the place upon him. Then he crossed himself, passed the fatal document to his Russian companion, rose and addressed the company: ‘Austria has declared war on us. Our cause is a just one. God will help us.’ Another Foreign Ministry official hurried in, to report that a similarly worded communication had just reached the army high command in Kragujevac. Shortly afterwards, a message from St Petersburg reached Strandman, which he was ordered to deliver personally to Pašić. Signed by the Tsar, it declared that while Russia desired peace, it would not remain indifferent to the fate of Serbia. After reading this, Pašić once again crossed himself and said reverently and theatrically, ‘Lord, great merciful Russian Tsar.’
In Paris, the sensation of 28 July was not, however, Austria’s declaration of war, but instead that day’s acquittal of Madame Caillaux for her admitted killing of Gaston Calmette. Amid worldwide amazement, a jury decided that Le Figaro’s coverage of her husband and of their relationship in the days when she was merely his mistress made it not unreasonable for her to have shot its editor. And all the while, France’s leaders remained almost incommunicado on their Baltic cruise. The trip had become a nightmare: Poincaré and Viviani were obliged to continue with exchanges of courtesies in Stockholm and an apparently interminable sea passage while war clouds swept towards western Europe. Many of the wireless messages that reached them on the 26th proved indecipherable. President and prime minister conducted tense conversations, turning over the crisis. Poincaré wrote: ‘M. Viviani and I come back always to the same question: what does Austria want? What does Germany want?’
Even if the contribution of the French president to the crisis was more proactive than he later admitted, he cannot have relished meandering across the Baltic while Europe’s flames kindled and flared. In Paris, Joffre and France’s soldiers were becoming acutely frustrated by the political paralysis. The general wrote crossly: ‘The main preoccupation [of ministers] … was to make no move which could be construed as anything except a response to German initiatives. This timid attitude was largely the result of the absence of the heads of the government.’ He was appalled on the 28th, when a 21 July dispatch reached Messimy from Cambon in Berlin, which had been ‘incomprehensibly’ delayed for a week, claiming that Germany had begun pre-mobilisation measures. The ambassador overstated the case, but the French now believed Moltke’s forces to be a week ahead of themselves in preparedness, and still Messimy would not act in Viviani’s absence.
The war minister’s caution was prudent; but Joffre’s fuming anger emphasises the urgency with which soldiers were now shouldering a path to the centre of the stage in France, Russia, Germany. As war loomed, every commander-in-chief was terrified of the consequences if the enemy was ready to fight first. Thus, each began to press his respective political leaders. The Russian chiefs of staff lamented to the president of the Duma the Tsar’s indecision. Europe’s armaments race and military contingency plans were not responsible for war, because they were symptoms rather than causes. But by the last days of July 1914 generals were pushing governments towards the abyss: they knew they would take the blame if their nation lost on the battlefield th
e deadly game of grandmother’s footsteps that was now being played.
On the 27th, Poincaré and Viviani learned that the French press had become savagely critical of their absence from Paris. The two men decided to hasten home after refuelling at Copenhagen, and duly arrived at Dunkirk early on the morning of 29 July. The Germans had been insistently jamming communications between Paris, St Petersburg and Berlin, but it is hard to suggest that such mischief altered outcomes. The Russians were determined to react to Austria’s assault on Serbia. The French government was committed to support them, strongly influenced by knowledge that if war came, the Germans would strike at France first. The powerful Eiffel Tower radio station enabled the Russian military attaché to maintain contact with St Petersburg through the crisis, overcoming German interference. The Baltic yachting trip of Poincaré and Viviani probably had little or no influence upon the course of history. The president favoured a policy of ‘firmness’ towards Germany; he is likely to have led his country to support Russia in the July crisis whether or not he had met Sazonov at St Petersburg.
Many French people recognised a growing likelihood that they would have to fight. On Sunday the 26th there were scenes of intense excitement on the streets of Paris: appearances by the usual weekend military bands were cheered; a Hapsburg flag was burnt by protesters outside the Austrian embassy. Most citizens faced the prospect of war without enthusiasm but with an overwhelming sense of resignation, placing blame squarely upon Germany. As printer Louis Derenne left his works in Orléans he heard a crowd shouting ‘Mort aux Boches!’, heedless of the fact that thus far the Austrians had been prime movers in the crisis. ‘We are getting ready to enter a long tunnel full of blood and darkness,’ wrote André Gide. The government gave no clear public signals of its intentions until Poincaré and Viviani reached the capital on the 29th, but it was generally assumed that if Russia fought, so too would France.
Joffre, on his own initiative, had told the Russians on the 27th that they could expect his country’s full support. Both the chief of staff and Messimy, the war minister, urged Russia to hasten its mobilisation and deploy as rapidly as possible against Germany. They knew that its war plan required an immediate attack in the West. It was vital to French security that the Russians should realise as swiftly as possible a ‘threat in being’, to oblige Moltke to divide his forces. In Paris, a rush to hoard gold caused panic on the Bourse. In France, as across Europe, a collapse of credit was creating a huge financial crisis which was alleviated only by the intervention of governments. People milled on the boulevards and thronged cafés and restaurants, less in search of refreshment than of news and companionship.
In Berlin on Tuesday evening, the 28th, some thousands of people from working-class areas marched into the city centre singing socialist songs and crying out ‘Down with the war!’ and ‘Long live social democracy!’ They were prevented from entering the main thoroughfares by mounted police with drawn swords, though at about 10 p.m. a thousand broke through to the Unter den Linden. On the pavements, bystanders showed their disapproval by singing the rousing patriotic songs ‘Wacht am Rhein’ and ‘Heil dir im Siegerkranz’. Half an hour later the police charged and cleared the street, to loud applause from patrons nursing their mugs of hot chocolate on the balconies of Café Bauer and Café Kranzler.
Twenty-eight people were arrested for chanting anti-war slogans, and thus causing ‘public disturbance’. The right-wing press had a field day next morning, denouncing the demonstrators as ‘a mob’, and anti-war protesters as traitors. Some historians suggest that more Germans demonstrated against war than in its favour, which may well be true. But the conduct of the Kaiser, Moltke and Bethmann was wholly uninfluenced by exhibitions of dissent which they judged – correctly – would cease when the nation found itself committed. Far fewer Germans protested against war than had taken to the streets four years earlier, to demand Prussian voting reform.
The first significant strategic move by Britain came on Sunday, 26 July, when the Royal Navy’s Home Fleet was due to disperse after a trial mobilisation. The staff of Northcliffe’s Daily Mail believed that they played some role in the First Lord of the Admiralty’s initiative that day. Amid looming crisis, they telegraphed him at his holiday rendezvous in Norfolk: ‘Winston Churchill Pear Tree Cottage Overstrand: WAR DECLARED AUSTRIA SERBIA GERMAN FLEET CONCENTRATING MAY WE ASK IS IT TRUE BRITISH FLEET DEMOBILISING: DAILY MAIL’. This missive was delivered to Churchill on the nearby beach. He never responded, but spoke by telephone within the hour to the First Sea Lord, Prince Louis of Battenberg, and took the afternoon train back to London. Late that night, an order was issued to cancel the dispersal of the fleet, which two days later was dispatched to its war station at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands. Paul Cambon said later that Churchill rendered a great service to France by his impassioned support for intervention and his order not to demobilise the fleet ‘which we [the French] have never sufficiently recognised’.
Yet there was still among the British at large no sense of imminent peril. Asquith wrote to Venetia Stanley on the 28th: ‘We had a cabinet yesterday … mainly to talk about war & peace. I am afraid that Grey’s experiment of a Conference à quatre won’t come off, as the Germans refuse to take a hand. The only real hope is that Austria & Russia may come to a deal among themselves. But at this moment things don’t look well, & Winston’s spirits are probably rising.’ Churchill adopted a shamelessly cynical view, mirroring that which was driving policy in Berlin: ‘if war was inevitable this was by far the most favourable opportunity and the only one that would bring France, Russia and ourselves together’. He wrote that day to his wife Clementine: ‘My darling One & beautiful – Everything tends towards catastrophe, & collapse. I am interested, geared-up & happy.’ Asquith ended his 28 July letter to Venetia Stanley on a bathetic note: ‘It is a slack evening of Supply at the House, so I am getting Violet to beat up one or two people to dine at home & play Bridge.’ The prime minister showed no greater agitation the following evening, the 29th: ‘I have just finished an Army Council … Rather interesting because it enables one to realise what are the first steps in an actual war.’
Some people seized upon looming conflict as a profit-making opportunity. The Cotton Powder Company, whose impressive engraved copperplate letterhead announced its Kent works as ‘manufacturers of Cordite, Guncotton, Blasting Explosives, Distress Signals, Detonators etc’, wrote on 29 July to the Serbian war minister. Its board offered to provide 10,000 rifle grenades, ‘part of a contract for 80,000 which we are executing for another foreign government … This present order followed a previously executed order for 25,000 which have been used up in actual hostilities with the most satisfactory results … 10,000 are packed ready for dispatch and could be shipped within twenty-four hours. If desired the same Grenade may be thrown by hand for close-quarter fighting.’ There is no record of whether such an order was placed by Belgrade, but the Cotton Powder Company could not be accused of lacking zeal on behalf of British enterprise.
On the evening of 28 July, Russian military intelligence reported that three-quarters of the Austrian army was being mobilised, twelve out of sixteen corps – many more troops than Vienna needed to tackle Serbia. Though the Tsar had yet to sign the order, that night Russia’s chief of staff wired the senior officers of all military districts, warning that ‘30 July will be proclaimed the first day of our general mobilisation.’ The Tsar yielded to Sazonov’s urgings, and agreed that general mobilisation should start next day. From 24 July the Russians had made military preparations ahead of any other nations save Austria and Serbia, yet every Russian decision was made against the background of the former’s commitment to crush the Serbs by force. Hopes for peace crumbled in St Petersburg on the 29th, when word came that the Austrians had begun to bombard Belgrade.
Russia’s politicians and diplomats united in a belief that they must fight. That day the head of mission in Sofia, A.A. Savinsky, an accustomed moderate, said that if the country gave way, ‘our prest
ige in the Slav world and in the Balkans would perish never to return’. Aleksandr Giers in Constantinople said that if Russia bowed, Turkey and the Balkans would unfailingly swing into the Central Powers’ camp. Another diplomat, Nikolai de Basily, replied with dignity to a friend – the Austrian military attaché – who warned of domestic catastrophe if the Tsar went to war: ‘You commit a serious error of calculation in supposing the fear of revolution will prevent Russia from fulfilling its national duty.’
Bethmann Hollweg now warned St Petersburg that unless Russia halted its preparations, Germany would mobilise. This message reinforced Sazonov’s conviction that a clash was unavoidable – but caused the Tsar to waver again. He had received a personal message from the Kaiser; in response, he insisted that Russia should draw back a step – albeit a fruitless step – and revert to partial mobilisation. But Sazonov remained insistent. At 5 o’clock on the following afternoon of 30 July, while still lamenting ‘sending thousands and thousands of men to their deaths’, Nicholas signed a general mobilisation order, to take effect next morning.
That evening, many Russian army units were alerted by telephone to expect a courier carrying secret instructions. The Sumskoi Hussars were ordered to readiness to entrain in thirty-six hours for Poland’s frontier with East Prussia, while the grenadier regiment that shared their barracks outside Moscow headed for the Austrian border. Soldiers were issued with tinned emergency rations. Cornet Sokolov pointed out that these were dated 1904, but this did nothing to stem soldiers’ curiosity. To the embarrassment of the Hussars’ officers, within an hour the barracks was littered with empty tins. ‘They were just like children!’ wrote Vladimir Littauer in exasperation. He contrasted their behaviour with that of German stragglers whom they later captured, some of them starving. So disciplined were the Kaiser’s soldiers that, in the absence of orders, not a man had touched his emergency rations.