by Max Hastings
After a last civilian passenger train crossed the border from East Prussia into Russia on 30 July, a Russian passenger who had hitherto remained silent burst into voluble expressions of frustration that he had not had a bomb to drop on the German rail bridge at Dirschau; he expressed glee that its guards were still wearing parade rather than field dress, showing that those ‘pigs of Germans’ were not quite ready. Russia’s leaders understood that they were undertaking an adventure beyond their own national strength. It is most unlikely that they would have dared to move against the Central Powers in 1914 had they not been assured of the support of France. Diplomatically and even militarily, they might have done better to have delayed mobilisation until the Austrian army had started its invasion of Serbia. But the policy-makers in St Petersburg, especially Sazonov, were spurred by fears that delay would enable Germany literally to steal a march on them. Russia’s prevarications about the exact pattern of its mobilisation were almost certainly irrelevant to the European outcome. Once St Petersburg made the decision to take military action of any kind against Austria, Germany was sure to respond.
The Russians made little attempt to conceal their extended preparations: the Tsar told the Kaiser without embarrassment on the night of 29 July, in one of their personal ‘Nicky–Willy’ communications: ‘the military measures which have now come into force were decided five days ago for reasons of defence on account of Austria’s preparations’. Those who today attribute to Russia principal responsibility for war are obliged to rely on the same argument as did the Kaiser in July 1914: that the Tsar should have preserved wider European peace by allowing Austria to conduct a limited war to crush Serbia. Such a case can be made; but it seems essential to acknowledge its terms, rather than attempt to construct a spurious indictment that the Russians were guilty of duplicity. The most important dates in the July crisis were the 23rd, when Austria made explicit its commitment to destroy Serbia, and the 24th, when Russia began to take active measures to respond. Unless or until evidence is forthcoming that the Serbian government was complicit in the plot to kill Franz Ferdinand, or that Russia had prior knowledge of the outrage, the Tsar’s commitment to resist the attempt to extinguish Serbia seems justified. The best reason for Nicholas to have held back was not doubt about the legitimacy of Russia’s action, but caution about the menace posed by belligerence to his own polity.
3 THE GERMANS MARCH
The only untenable view of the July crisis is that war was the consequence of a series of accidents. On the contrary: the leaders of all the great powers believed themselves to be acting rationally, in pursuit of coherent and attainable objectives. A large enigma nonetheless persists about the exercise of authority in Germany: who was in charge? During the previous decade, the dysfunctionality of the nation’s governance had progressively worsened, even as its economic might increased. A new generation of elected politicians, many of them socialists, jostled for access to power outside palaces still dominated by the spurred topboots of a highly militarised autocracy. The Kaiser had become the symbol of his country’s assertive nationalism rather than an executive ruler, but he continued to make erratic interventions. Around him rival personalities, institutions and political groupings vied for mastery. The army and navy were at loggerheads. The General Staff scarcely spoke to the War Ministry. The Empire’s component states intermittently asserted themselves against Berlin.
A German author predicted in 1910 that during the period of political and military tension preceding any conflict, ‘the press and its key instruments, telegraph and telephone, will exercise immense influence, which may be for either good or ill’. Moltke agreed. However great the power of the army, the chief of staff recognised that to induce millions of conscripted civilians to engage in a twentieth-century conflict, the cause must command popular support. ‘Moltke told me,’ recorded a Prussian officer in 1908, ‘… that the time of cabinet wars was over and that a war the German people did not want or did not understand, and would therefore not greet with sympathy, would be a very dangerous affair. If … the people thought that the war had been conjured up in a frivolous fashion and was only intended to help the governing classes out of an embarrassment, then it would have to start with us having to fire on our own subjects.’ This goes far to explain why Germany had refused to go to war alongside Austria in earlier Balkan crises. It shows why, in July 1914, Moltke attached such importance to ensuring that Germany was seen, above all by its own people, as a threatened victim and not as an aggressor. The European crisis was overlaid on domestic turbulence. Labour unrest, manifested in frequent strikes, alarmed the Berlin government as much as similar troubles elsewhere prompted British, French and Russian fears about social stability.
It is difficult to assess the Kaiser’s conduct, because he changed his mind so often. Scribbled annotations on state documents emphasise his irredeemable intemperance: ‘Fool yourself Mr Sazonov!’; ‘Damnation!’; ‘No!’; ‘It’s not for him to decide’; ‘a tremendous piece of British insolence!’. The exclamation mark was his favoured instrument of policy-making. Wilhelm’s reversions to caution always came too late to undo the damage inflicted by his more usual imprudence. He allegedly told Bethmann on 5 July: ‘we should use all means to work against the growth of the Austro-Serbian controversy into an international conflict’. Yet next day he gave Vienna the ‘blank cheque’.
On 27 July his initial reaction, on returning from his Norwegian yachting trip to read the Serbs’ humble response to Vienna’s ultimatum, was that he saw ‘no more reason for a war’. But Bethmann that same day told the German ambassador to Austria: ‘We must appear as the ones being forced into the war.’ Gen. Erich von Falkenhayn, the Prussian war minister, met the Kaiser and Moltke on the 27th and recorded afterwards: ‘It has now been decided to fight the matter through, regardless of the cost.’ Three days later, on the 30th, the Bavarian Gen. Krafft von Dellmensingen wrote in his diary: ‘The Kaiser absolutely wants peace and the Kaiserin is working towards it with all her might. He even wants to influence Austria and stop her continuing further. That would be the greatest disaster! We would lose all credit as allies.’
By that time, however, the general’s court gossip was two days out of date. The Kaiser said on 28 July, ‘the ball that is rolling can no longer be stopped’, and seemed to mean it. One might liken his erratic behaviour to that of an amateur actor struggling to fill a monarch’s part in a Shakespearean history piece. Wilhelm strove to keep up with the rest of the cast, to play the warrior emperor, while being chronically uncertain what this required: he was forever snatching at the wrong cue or delivering misplaced lines.
But if German policy had vacillated earlier in July, now the march to war had attained its own momentum. In Berlin on the 29th, Falkenhayn sought to force the pace: he declared that the time for prevarication was over; Germany could no longer wait for Russia to move, but must mobilise. Bethmann and Moltke remained anxious, for domestic reasons, to be seen to follow rather than lead Russia, but they knew the hour was nigh. An ultimatum to neutral Belgium was prepared, demanding a right of passage through the country for the German army. Bethmann then made a diplomatic blunder. At a moment when British sentiment was wavering, he dispatched an offer to Sir Edward Grey: would Britain undertake to remain neutral, in return for assurances about German respect for Belgian and French territorial integrity? This essay in blackmail, which made plain that the Germans were preparing to attack in the West, provoked outrage in London. ‘There is something crude and almost childlike about German diplomacy,’ wrote Asquith disdainfully. Grey responded curtly that in no circumstances could Britain entertain so shameful a proposal.
This news from London precipitated a brief crisis of nerves on the part of Wilhelm and Bethmann during the night of 29 July. It had become apparent that they were leading their country into the greatest military clash in history, with the British unlikely to remain neutral. The Kaiser suddenly proposed that the Austrians should agree merely to occupy Belgrade until their te
rms were met. At 2.55 a.m. on the 30th, Bethmann telegraphed Vienna urging acceptance of diplomatic mediation. His message reached Berchtold, however, only after Austrian mobilisation had begun, and on the same day as the telegram from Moltke, urging the Empire to reject mediation and deploy its army against Russia rather than Serbia. Thus, before the chief of staff knew of full Russian mobilisation, he emphasised his personal commitment to a wider war, and his readiness to exercise his influence in the diplomatic sphere in a fashion well beyond the usual compass of an army chief of staff. Berchtold asked Conrad after reading the two contradictory messages: ‘Who rules in Berlin – Moltke or Bethmann?’ The Austrians figuratively and perhaps literally shrugged, then continued their mobilisation and bombardment of Belgrade.
The answer to Berchtold’s question was anyway now Moltke. Bethmann made no further attempt to dispute the chief of staff’s insistence that the march to war must take its course. Moreover, the chancellor would soon become an advocate of far-reaching war aims, explicitly directed towards securing German mastery of Europe. Though both the Kaiser and Bethmann havered during July, they could never bring themselves to adopt the only measure that would probably have averted disaster: withdrawal of German support for an Austrian invasion of Serbia. By the last days of the month, Moltke and Falkenhayn were asserting military imperatives – and the soldiers’ primacy in the decision-making process, now that war was inevitable – in a fashion that brooked no dissent. Wilhelm, like his chancellor, lacked strength to allow himself to be seen to draw back when the generals were insisting that his duty lay in acceptance of trial by combat. Falkenhayn had once argued that duelling must be maintained as a means of resolving personal disputes between officers, citing its importance ‘for the honour of the army’. Now, in the same spirit, he sternly silenced the Kaiser’s belated expressions of doubt: ‘I reminded him that he was no longer in control of these matters.’
Moltke became the critical personality in Germany’s endgame. The army was the country’s most powerful institution, and he directed its motions. Part of the historic indictment against the chief of staff is that, even if the charge that from the outset he pressed for war is disputable, he endorsed such a course while harbouring huge doubts about its implications, and about Germany’s prospects of success. If it was sufficiently wretched for a man as foolish as Conrad to have willed Armageddon, it seems even more base for one as intelligent as Moltke to have been complicit in this outcome. The most plausible explanation, supported by his subsequent conduct amidst the stress of war, is that like his royal master, the chief of staff was fundamentally a weak man seeking to masquerade as a strong one. In Vienna and Berlin alike – and in St Petersburg and Paris also, though to a lesser degree – there was now a fatal hunger for a showdown, a decision, in place of repeated inconclusive crises over a decade.
Many of Germany’s soldiers, as well as its conservative politicians, believed that war offered a prospect of reversing the social democratic tide which they deemed a threat to national greatness as well as to their own authority. The generals also saw that within two or three years, enhanced Russian capabilities would remove Germany’s last hopes of fulfilling Schlieffen’s mystic vision – smashing France before turning east. Deterrence was bound to fail, with or without a British commitment to fight, because the Germans believed that in 1914 they had a better chance of defeating any Entente combination than they would ever enjoy again. Berlin merely sought to ensure that the Tsar bore the odium for initiating mobilisation, and for the Kaiser’s mighty military response.
The Belgians suddenly recognised the peril facing their own country. Baron de Gaiffier d’Hestroy, political director of Belgium’s Foreign Ministry, holidaying with his family in the Engadine, was hastily ordered home, and departed for Brussels on 29 July. He found that many trains had already been commandeered by the Germans or Austro-Hungarians for troop movements; only a chance meeting secured him a place homewards in the private carriage of a Belgian industrialist, reaching Brussels on the morning of the 30th.
Sir Francis Bertie wrote that day, quite mistakenly but in a fashion reflecting the mood in Paris: ‘Things are hanging in the balance of peace and war. We are regarded as the deciding factor. The Italians suggested that they and we should both stand aside. A poor bargain for the French. I have written to Grey that the feeling here is that peace between the Powers depends on England and that if she declare herself solidaire with France and Russia there will be no war, for Germany will not face the danger to her of her supplies by sea being cut off by the British.’ That afternoon of 30 July, it was learned that French pedestrians attempting to cross the frontier into Germany were being turned back, while some motor cars and even railway locomotives with the same intentions were detained; telephone links were severed.
All over France, people gathered to discuss the news. Work stopped in the little factories of Beaurepaire, in Isère; solemn crowds filled the streets, discussing the crisis with gravity rather than excitement. In the words of one local man, ‘It was like a funeral. Our small town appeared to be in mourning.’ In Germany on 30 July, a thousand customers of Freiburg’s Municipal Savings Bank emptied their accounts, forcing it to restrict withdrawals, and there were matching queues outside most of the banks of Europe. Many shop-owners refused to accept payment in paper currency, while others shut their doors. In Le Havre, waiters warned restaurant customers before they ordered dinner that only gold rather than banknotes would be acceptable in payment.
There were still a few spasms of optimism: on the evening of the 30th, in the courtyard of the Palais Bourbon journalists thronged around M. Malvy of the Foreign Office, who told them of new exchanges between St Petersburg, Berlin and Vienna. ‘As soon as the diplomats start talking,’ he said, ‘we may hope for an accommodation.’ But late that night, as Raymond Recouly was writing his column at Le Figaro, a colleague burst into his office and cried: ‘Henri de Rothschild is downstairs. He has been dining with a senior official of the Foreign Ministry, who told him that war was a matter of days away, perhaps even of hours.’ Shortly afterwards a woman friend appeared, and asked the journalist whether she should cancel an intended motoring holiday in Belgium the following week. Without question, replied Recouly: ‘If you are really determined to go driving, head instead for Biarritz or Marseille.’
By the evening of the 30th, Moltke was no longer willing to wait for the Russians to announce mobilisation. He told Bethmann that Germany must act. The two agreed that whatever the Tsar did, Germany would proclaim its own mobilisation at noon next day, the 31st. A few minutes before this deadline came, to the vast relief of the Germans, St Petersburg announced its own move. Berlin could thus go to war, having achieved its critical diplomatic purpose of seeing the Russians become first after Austria to draw the sword. Following an official ‘declaration of a war threat’ – ‘Zustand der drohenden Kriegsgefahr’, a legal definition – on the 31st, the army forthwith began to patrol Germany’s borders. Some unauthorised crossings took place by troops of both sides, notably in Alsace. German pioneers blew up a railway bridge near Illfurt, following false reports that the French were at hand. Only on 3 August, however, did Berlin formally authorise its soldiers to invade French soil.
After the Kaiser signed Germany’s mobilisation order at 5 p.m. on 1 August in the Sternensaal of his Berlin palace, with his usual instinct for the wrong gesture he ordered champagne to be served to his suite. The Bavarian Gen. von Wenninger visited the Prussian War Ministry soon after news of Russian mobilisation came through: ‘Everywhere beaming faces, people shaking hands in the corridors, congratulating one another on having cleared the ditch.’ Russia had acted in accordance with the ardent and freely avowed hopes of Wenninger, Moltke, Falkenhayn and their comrades; as Germany adopted pre-mobilisation measures on 31 July, they merely expressed fears that France might decline to follow suit, fail to enter the trap. Wilhelm despised the French as ‘a feminine race, not manly like the Anglo-Saxons or Teutons’, and this undoubtedly inf
luenced his lack of apprehension about going to war with them.
There was one more internal crisis in Berlin that day: Moltke had already left the palace after the mobilisation decree ceremony when a telegram was brought to the Kaiser from Lichnowsky in London. This professed to bear an undertaking from Grey that Britain would remain neutral, and guarantee French neutrality, if Germany refrained from attacking France. Wilhelm exulted. Moltke was recalled, to be told that it was now only necessary to fight in the East. A legendary exchange followed: the chief of staff, appalled, said that the mobilisation plans could not be changed; such an upheaval would dispatch to the battlefield not an army, but a rabble. He was outraged that Wilhelm should seek to meddle when diplomacy was at an end; the issue was now that of conducting a war – the responsibility of himself.
It swiftly became plain that Lichnowsky’s dispatch reflected a foolish misunderstanding of the British position. The French were mobilising, and Germany had its two-front war. But the conversation with Wilhelm had a devastating impact on Moltke. He returned to the General Staff building incandescent, his face mottled deep red. He told his adjutant: ‘I want to wage a war against the French and the Russians, but not against such a Kaiser.’ His wife later testified that she believed him to have suffered a slight stroke. Moltke’s health was already fragile, his nerve unsteady. Now, on the brink of the collision of armies that he had done much to bring about, he showed the first signs of a moral and physical vulnerability which within six weeks would destroy him.