The War that Ended Peace

by Margaret MacMillan

  Its geography meant that Austria-Hungary had to think of more possible scenarios for war than did Germany – against any of Russia, Serbia, Montenegro, Italy, or, after 1913, Rumania. And there was always the possibility that the enemies could combine: Serbia and Montenegro, with or without Russian support, or Serbia and Italy. Conrad himself was initially fixated on Italy but increasingly Serbia obsessed him as well.64 He talked frequently of destroying ‘the nest of vipers’ in war and incorporating its territory into Austria-Hungary. To cope with the challenges facing Austria-Hungary, Conrad drew up several different war plans to cover the possible combinations of enemies and fronts, and to give himself maximum flexibility, he placed a force in each of the Balkans (Minimalgruppe Balkan) and Galicia (A-Staffel) up by the border with Russia, and set up a third force (B-Staffel) which could swing to support either of the others as needed. This was optimistic, given the state of Austria-Hungary’s railways. Its railway lines down to its borders with Serbia were inadequate at best. In the north Russian railway building was outstripping Austria-Hungary’s so that by 1912 it could run 250 trains a day to the border with Austrian Galicia where Austria-Hungary could manage only 152.65 In addition, the Hungarians had insisted for nationalistic reasons on building a self-contained railway system within their state so that very few lines connected the Hungarian and Austrian railway networks. Although Conrad begged for an accelerated programme of railway building, objections from both the Hungarian and Austrian parliaments to spending the necessary money, especially if it would benefit the other half of the empire, meant that little had been done by 1914.66

  Although Conrad and his general staff continued to work on their plans for a war against Italy and, in 1913, drew up plans for a war on Rumania, by 1914 they assumed that the most likely prospect was a war against Serbia which might well then bring in Russia. Like the other European military, the Austrian-Hungarian military also placed their faith in the power of the offensive and did not think in terms of a war of defence.67 Yet Austria-Hungary’s army when mobilised was under a third of Russia’s; its spending was the lowest of all the powers, less even than that of Britain which had a much smaller army.68 Conrad’s plans were optimistic, indeed blindly so, given the state of the armed forces and the worsening international situation for Austria-Hungary as Italy and then Rumania drifted away from the Dual Alliance in the last years of the peace.

  The military in Germany and Austria-Hungary continued to talk, perhaps to reassure themselves as much as anything, about their expected successful offensives in the east. Moltke quoted Schlieffen to Conrad to say that the German attack on France would really settle everything and that Austria’s fate would be decided there and not in the east. Nevertheless, Moltke went on, the war in the east mattered greatly, representing as it did a showdown between the Teutonic races and the Slavs: ‘To prepare for this is the duty of all states which carry the banners of Germanic Kultur.’ Conrad in his reply noted that a crusade of this sort would not go down well in Austria-Hungary: ‘We can hardly rely upon our Slavs, who form 47% of the population, to be enthusiastic about a struggle against their allies.’69 Very little was done, however, by way of co-ordination or sharing information. On 4 August 1914, the day the Germans invaded Belgium, the German military attaché in Vienna said: ‘It is high time that the two general staffs consult now with absolute frankness with respect to mobilization, jump-off time, areas of assembly and precise troop strength …’70 It was much too late for that, but the understanding between Austria-Hungary and Germany had served to turn a war in the Balkans into a general European one.

  Russia, the object of Austria-Hungary’s and Germany’s attentions in the east, had a pretty good idea of what the war plans of the Dual Alliance were. By 1910 the Russians had seen enough of German army manoeuvres, railway building and military dispositions to come to the conclusion that the main German attack would go against France. While the Russians continued to overestimate, by about 100 per cent, how many troops Germany would leave in the east, they still felt confident that they would outnumber the Germans and that German strategy would favour Russia. If the Germans attacked, as expected, from East Prussia, they were likely to do so only as a quick thrust to keep the Russians off guard. Germany was then likely to withdraw its forces westwards behind the fortifications of the Masurian Lakes and wait to see what the outcome of the fighting in France was. That would give the Russians time to complete their slower mobilisation.71

  The Russians had an even more accurate picture of the war plans of the other partner in the Dual Alliance. All the powers had spies as well as military attachés in each other’s countries but Russia probably had the most successful one of all in Colonel Alfred Redl, an officer with the general staff of Austria-Hungary. He was recruited around 1901 by the Russians, who offered him the money he badly wanted and threatened to expose his homosexuality which in those days would have led to his disgrace. Redl spent the next years passing on to his Russian paymaster such top-secret information as Austria-Hungary’s mobilisation plans and crucial details about its fortresses along the shared border between the Dual Monarchy and Russia in Galicia. He also betrayed Austria-Hungary’s agents in Russia, who were sent to jail or executed.72 Like other spies, the flamboyant Guy Burgess in Britain in the 1950s, for example, the surprising thing is that Redl was not caught sooner. Although he came from a modest middle-class background and ostensibly had to live on his army salary, he always had lots of money to throw around, on expensive cars, flats, clothes (after his unmasking he was discovered to own 195 dress shirts) or his young male lovers. In 1913 German intelligence tipped off their colleagues in Austria-Hungary to the existence of a traitor and provided the information that two envelopes full of banknotes were waiting for collection by someone called Nikon Nizetas at the main post office in Vienna. Redl duly turned up in disguise to claim them but even then he almost escaped discovery because the detectives who were staking out the post office lost his trail. They only picked it up again by accident but by the evening Conrad, the chief of staff, had enough evidence to send a party of officers to confront Redl and force his confession and subsequent suicide.73 Although the high command in Austria-Hungary scrambled to change its secret codes and its railway timetables, it could not change its overall strategy before 1914. As a result of Redl’s treachery, the Russians had an accurate picture of how and where Austria-Hungary would attack and of its plans against Serbia as well.

  In making their own plans the Russians nevertheless faced a number of problems. To begin with Russia’s size meant that its mobilisation took much longer than that of its neighbours to the west. When the call came, the average Russian soldier had to travel over twice as far as his German or Austrian counterpart. The Russian railway system was developing fast, thanks in part to French loans, and much of it was concentrated in the west, in the Polish territories and the European part of Russia, but it was still underdeveloped in comparison to those of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Most of the Russian lines, for example, were still single-tracked, which meant that running trains along them was slower. Only 27 per cent of its lines were double-tracked compared to 38 per cent for Germany. Nevertheless the German military estimated that by 1912 new railway building had helped to halve the Russian concentration time on the German border.74 (If the Russians chose to attack into Germany they would face a problem, however, which also affected Germany coming east: Russian railway lines were of a wider gauge than in the rest of Europe so that everything, men and their equipment included, would have to be trans-shipped.) In 1914, even after the improvement in the railways, it still took twenty-six days fully to mobilise the armies in the European part of Russia while it took Austria-Hungary sixteen days and Germany twelve.75 That discrepancy was going to put additional pressure on the tsar to order Russian mobilisation early in the crisis that summer.

  Geography also gave Russia a rich choice of potential enemies. In the east, Russian territories remained under threat from Japan while in Europe Russia had a
particular vulnerability in its Polish lands. While the dismemberment of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century had brought Russia a rich prize with good natural resources including coal and, by the twentieth century, with strong industries and a population of some 16 million Poles, it also created an exposed salient 200 miles from north to south which stretched 230 miles westward with German territory in the north and west and Austrian-Hungarian territory to the south. ‘Our sore spot’, a Russian military report called it.76 Moreover, Russia had more potential enemies than even Austria-Hungary and its vast size created particular challenges when it came to situating its forces or moving them about. In Europe Sweden had been a threat on and off since the seventeenth century and the Russian general staff continued to count it as an enemy right up to 1914. Rumania, with its German king and its continuing resentment that Russia had taken part of Bessarabia in 1878, was potentially hostile. Russia had fought two wars with the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century and the two powers remained rivals in the Caucasus and the Black Sea.

  Lecturers at the Russian War Academy had been stressing since 1891 that it was impossible to avoid a conflict with the Dual Alliance of Austria-Hungary and Germany and the Russian military increasingly focussed on this as their main challenge in the west. As a consequence they tended to interpret developments in those other countries in the most pessimistic fashion. When the military in Austria-Hungary failed to get the budget increases it wanted from parliament in 1912, the Russians immediately assumed this was mere window-dressing designed to conceal a real increase in spending. The Russian military also believed, quite wrongly, that Franz Ferdinand was the leader of the war party in Austria-Hungary. The views of Russian diplomats who understood other countries better frequently did not reach the military and the tsar made little attempt to co-ordinate the different branches of his government.77 What was generally accepted among the Russian leadership, however, was that any conflict in the Balkans could turn into general war.78

  The Russian general staff, which tended to take the gloomiest possible view, saw as its worst case the Dual Alliance along with Sweden and Rumania attacking in the west while Japan and, improbably, China attacked in the east.79 Then, so the military feared, the Ottoman Empire would probably join in as well and the Poles would take the opportunity to rise up. Even if the worst did not happen, its geography presented Russia, as it had done for centuries, with a strategic choice of whether to focus on Europe or the south and east. Although both Izvolsky, the Foreign Minister after the Russo-Japanese War, and Stolypin, Prime Minister until 1911, looked westwards, there were still influential voices among the Russian leadership arguing that Russia had a mission in the east and that Japan remained its chief enemy. In 1909 one of their number, Vladimir Sukhomlinov, became Minister of War.

  Sukhomlinov remains, not without reason, a highly controversial figure but he did undertake a series of much-needed reforms in Russia’s armed forces and thanks to him, Russia entered the Great War relatively well prepared. He improved training and equipment, updating armaments and creating dedicated units for such things as field artillery. In the five years before the Great War Russia also increased the number of men it was recruiting and training by 10 per cent so that in time of war it would be able to mobilise over 3 million men. Sukhomlinov reorganised the army’s structure and command system and set up a new and more efficient system for mobilisation. In addition he pulled troops back from the western part of Poland to the interior of Russia, where they would be both safer from attack and more readily available to be sent eastwards if Russia’s relations with Japan deteriorated again.80 He tried as well to get rid of Russia’s line of forts in the western part of Poland, which, as he pointed out, sucked up money and resources which could be better used elsewhere. This last caused a huge outcry. The tsar’s cousin, the Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolayevich, who had conceived a passionate hatred for Sukhomlinov, opposed any destruction of the forts and he had many supporters in the military. The War Minister was obliged to back down.81

  He had many enemies by this point and was going to accumulate more, partly because he was upsetting established traditions and vested interests, partly because of his own personality. He was devious, ruthless, and charming. Although he was short and bald, many women found him irresistible. His many detractors at the time and since accused him of everything from senility to corruption to high treason and a Russian diplomat described him as the evil genius of Russia. His own colleagues complained that he was lazy and incapable of sustained application to the many challenges facing him. General Aleksei Brusilov, one of Russia’s most competent generals, said: ‘Undoubtedly a man of intelligence, a man who could grasp a situation and decide upon his course very rapidly, but of a superficial and flippant mentality. His chief fault was that he would not probe things to the bottom and was content if his orders and arrangements made a show of success.’82 Sukhomlinov was, however, as even his enemies recognised, a master of Russia’s bureaucratic politics. He built networks of supporters throughout the army and the Ministry of War through the clever use of patronage and, as important, flattered the tsar on whom his continuation in office depended.83

  Sukhomlinov, who was born in 1848 to a minor gentry family, had enjoyed an outstanding career as a soldier. He graduated near the top of his class from the Staff College and gained a reputation for bravery in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–8. By 1904 he was a lieutenant general and in command of the important Kiev military district. When disturbances broke out in Kiev in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War Sukhomlinov was made governor-general of a larger area which includes much of today’s Ukraine. He restored law and order and put an end to the disgraceful and brutal treatment of the local Jews, something for which many conservatives never forgave him. He also fell in love with a much younger and beautiful married woman who was going to become his third wife. Their affair and her subsequent divorce caused a considerable scandal, and her insatiable demands for luxuries were going to lead to the whiff of corruption that always surrounded Sukhomlinov. ‘There is something about General Sukhomlinov that makes one uneasy,’ said Maurice Paléologue, the French ambassador in St Petersburg. ‘Sixty-two years of age, the slave of a rather pretty wife thirty-two years younger than himself, intelligent, clever and cunning, obsequious towards the tsar and a friend of Rasputin, surrounded by a rabble who serve as intermediaries in his intrigues and duplicities, he is a man who has lost the habit of work and keeps all his strength for conjugal joys. With his sly look, his eyes always gleaming watchfully under the heavy folds of his eyelids, I know few men who inspire more distrust at first sight.’84

  Sukhomlinov survived in his position until 1915 because he had the tsar’s support, but that was a mixed blessing. Nicholas was not an easy master and in his anxiety to guard his own power he played his ministers off against each other. Although he was an amateur in military affairs, he felt obliged as the supreme authority to intervene. In 1912 he ended a debate over tactics and strategy by saying, ‘Military doctrine consists of doing everything which I order.’85 Although Sukhomlinov tried to co-ordinate the advice the tsar received even he failed to reform the chaotic and incoherent nature of Russian decision-making and the military continued to keep crucial information from the civilian leaders. In 1912, for example, the Russian and French military agreed they would not pass on the details of their military understandings to the Russian Prime Minister.86

  In the years immediately before the Great War Sukhomlinov was rethinking his earlier assumption that Russia needed to count Japan as its main enemy. Moreover, turbulence in the Balkans was turning Russian attention westwards and the French, not surprisingly, were encouraging this. What France needed if a general war broke out was an early Russian attack on Germany in the east to take the pressure off French forces in the west. Over the years the French used their financial hold over Russia, which badly needed foreign loans, to persuade their ally to make a commitment to such an attack. The French also did their best to ensure th
at their loans to Russia for railways produced lines that would take Russian forces swiftly to the German frontier. While the Russian leadership frequently resented French demands, by 1911 the Russian chief of staff had given way and promised France that Russia would attack Germany in East Prussia fifteen days after the start of a war. The promise was reiterated right up to the outbreak of war even though there were those in the Russian leadership who felt that it was a mistake and that Russia’s interests lay in avoiding a war with Germany if at all possible and, in any case, concentrating on its chief enemy, Austria-Hungary.87

  Russia had several strategic options on its western frontiers: to fight a defensive war until such time as it was ready to counter-attack, to focus its main attack on one of Austria-Hungary or Germany, or to take them both on at once. In retrospect a strong defence and retreat into Russia’s vast spaces as a first stage, with a counter-attack in strength against one enemy at a time, made the most sense for Russia. By 1912 the military, though, had ruled out an entirely defensive war and had accepted the general European enthusiasm for offensive war. Russia’s own most recent war, against Japan, seemed to show that the Russian forces had lost because they had sat waiting for the Japanese to attack. Russian military instruction, regulations and orders now stressed the power of the offence and paid little attention to the defence.88 In the Black Sea too Russia was planning amphibious attacks on the upper part of the Bosphorus to gain control of the all-important Straits out of the Black Sea, this in spite of the fact that Russia’s Black Sea Fleet was weak and it did not possess adequate troop transports.89