The War that Ended Peace

by Margaret MacMillan

  The French military were encouraged by the presence of Henry Wilson as Director of Military Operations after 1910. He was an imposing figure, well over six feet tall, with a face which resembled, said a fellow officer, a gargoyle.100 (Someone once addressed a postcard ‘To the Ugliest Man in the British Army’ and it reached him without difficulty.)101 Wilson was ‘selfish and cunning’, as another colleague put it, skilled at political intrigue and good at finding influential patrons. He came from a moderately well-to-do Anglo-Irish family (and the cause of the Protestants in Ireland was always important to him) but had been obliged to make his own way in the world. As his presentation to the Committee of Imperial Defence demonstrated, he was clever and persuasive. He was also energetic and strong willed and had very clear views on strategy. In a paper he wrote in 1911 which was endorsed by the general staff, he took the view: ‘we must join France’. Russia, he argued, was not going to be much help if Germany attacked France; what would save Europe from a French defeat and dominance by Germany was the rapid mobilisation and dispatch of a British expeditionary force.102 When he took up his office, Wilson was determined to make sure this happened. ‘I am very dissatisfied with the state of affairs in every respect,’ he wrote in his diary. There were no proper plans for deploying the British expeditionary force or the reserves: ‘A lot of time spent writing beautiful minutes. I’ll break all this if I can.’103

  He rapidly established very good relations with the French military, helped by the fact that he loved France and spoke fluent French. He and the commandant of the French Staff College, the deeply Catholic Colonel Ferdinand Foch (as the future Field Marshal then was), became firm friends. ‘What would you say,’ Wilson once asked Foch, ‘was the smallest British military force that would be of any practical assistance to you in the event of a contest such as the one we have been considering?’ Foch did not pause to reflect: ‘One single private soldier,’ he replied, ‘and we would take good care that he was killed.’104 The French would do whatever it took to get Britain to commit itself. In 1909 they produced a carefully faked document, said to have been discovered when a French commercial traveller picked up the wrong bag on a train, which purported to show Germany’s invasion plans for Britain.105

  Wilson made frequent visits to France to exchange information about war plans and work out arrangements for co-operation. He bicycled many miles along France’s frontiers, studying fortifications and likely battle sites. In 1910, shortly after his appointment, he visited one of the bloodier battlefields from the Franco-Prussian War in the part of Lorraine that remained to France: ‘We paid my usual visit to the statue of “France”, looking as beautiful as ever, so I laid at her feet a small bit of map I have been carrying, showing the areas of concentration of the British forces on her territory.’106 Like his French hosts, Wilson assumed that the German right wing would not be strong enough to move nearer the sea, west of the Meuse in Belgium; the British expeditionary force would take its place on the French left wing to anticipate what was expected to be the weaker part of the German attack. There was some talk that the British might go to Antwerp but Wilson and his colleagues agreed that they could afford to be flexible and decide once the British forces had landed.

  The British may have kept flexibility in their military plans but in political terms they were increasingly hemmed in. The first Morocco crisis of 1905–6 brought much greater co-operation and understanding between Britain and France but it also brought greater obligations. The crisis served as well to draw the lines more sharply between the powers in Europe. With the signing of the Anglo-Russian Convention in 1907, yet another line was drawn and another strand of obligations and expectations woven, this time between two former enemies. It was more difficult, too, to ignore public opinion. In both France and Germany, for example, important business interests as well as key figures such as the French ambassador in Germany, Jules Cambon, were in favour of better relations. In 1909 France and Germany reached an amicable agreement over Morocco. Nationalists in both countries made it impossible for their governments to move further and discuss improved economic relations.107 Europe was not doomed to divide itself into two antipathetic power blocs, each with its war plans to the ready, but as yet more crises succeeded the first Moroccan one, it became more difficult to change the pattern.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Bosnian Crisis: Confrontation between Russia and Austria-Hungary in the Balkans

  In 1898, Kaiser Wilhelm II sailed on his yacht the Hohenzollern up the Dardanelles and into the Sea of Marmara to pay his second state visit to Abdul Hamid, the Ottoman sultan. Wilhelm liked to think of himself as the friend and protector of the Ottoman Empire. (He also had every intention of getting as many concessions as possible for Germany such as the right to build railways on Ottoman territory.) He was drawn too by the glamour of Constantinople itself. One of the greatest and most ancient cities in the world, Constantinople had seen many great rulers from Alexander the Great, to Emperor Constantine, and much more recently Suleiman the Magnificent. The scraps of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine columns and ornamentation which were embedded in its walls and foundations as much as its magnificent palaces, mosques and churches were reminders of the great empires which had come and gone.

  The German royal couple were rowed ashore in a state caique and while the Kaiser rode around the great city walls on an Arab horse, the empress made an excursion to the Asian coast of the sea. That night the sultan gave his guests a lavish banquet in a new wing of his palace which had been built expressly for the occasion. It was followed by a magnificent display of fireworks. Below in the harbour electric lights picked out the silhouettes of the German warships which had accompanied the Kaiser’s yacht. To mark his visit, the Kaiser presented the city with a large gazebo containing seven fountains, all made in Germany. With columns of porphyry, marble arches, a bronze dome decorated on the inside with gold mosaics and Wilhelm’s and Abdul Hamid’s initials carved into the stone, it still stands today at one end of the ancient Hippodrome where the Romans once raced their horses and chariots. For the sultan Wilhelm II had brought the latest German rifle, but when he tried to present it Abdul Hamid at first shrank away in terror thinking he was about to be assassinated. The heir to Suleiman the Magnificent who had made Europe tremble nearly four centuries earlier was a miserable despot so fearful of plots that he kept a eunuch near him whose sole duty was to take the first puff on each of his cigarettes.

  14. Although Africa and much of the Pacific had been divided up by 1900, the declining Ottoman Empire on Europe’s doorstep offered increasing temptations. Here the weak Ottoman ruler, Abdul Hamid II, watches helplessly while Austria-Hungary in the shape of its emperor Franz Ferdinand seizes the Ottoman provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908 and Ferdinand I of Bulgaria takes the opportunity to proclaim the independence of his kingdom, which was still nominally part of the Ottoman Empire. The resulting crisis heightened the tensions in Europe.

  The Ottoman Empire was, so most observers thought, doomed. It was nearly bankrupt with foreign interests holding most of its debt; its subjects were restive; and its administration was incompetent and corrupt. It was a sad ending to an empire which had been one of the greatest the world had ever seen. The Ottoman Turks had come out of Central Asia in the thirteenth century and had advanced inexorably westward across Turkey. In 1453 their armies took Constantinople. The last Byzantine emperor had sought death in battle – and found it – and so what had been the heart of Orthodox Christianity became a Muslim city. The Ottomans had kept moving, north into the Balkans in the south-eastern corner of Europe, into the Middle East and along the southern coast of the Mediterranean into Egypt and beyond. Rulers who tried to stand in their way were swept aside and their peoples subjugated. By the end of the fifteenth century the Ottoman Empire controlled most of the Balkans and by 1529 Ottoman armies had reached Vienna, which managed, only just, to withstand their siege. A decade later Budapest fell and most of Hungary became part of the Ottoman Empire. By t
he middle of the seventeenth century, at its greatest extent the Ottoman Empire in Europe included all or parts of the present-day countries of Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, Macedonia and Greece. The Ottomans also took over a big piece of what is today Ukraine and the southern Caucasus (where later the countries of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan would emerge). In addition the empire included Turkey, the Arab Middle East as far as the border with Persia down to the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula, and much of North Africa as far west as Morocco.

  As empires went, Ottoman rule had been relatively mild. The Ottomans, who were largely Sunni Muslims, had allowed their subjects, which included many varieties of Christians and Jews, as well as Shia Muslims, to follow their own religious practices and within limits its many ethnicities, which ranged from Kurds to Serbs to Hungarians, were allowed to keep their languages and culture. Over the centuries, though, the empire had started to decline. Its fleets were defeated on the Mediterranean and on land its great rival, the Austrian Empire gradually pushed it back southwards, taking the prize of Hungary in 1699. In the course of the next century both Austria and Russia stripped yet more territory from the Ottoman Empire and in the nineteenth century France and Britain joined in the scavenging with the French taking Algeria and Tunis and the British Egypt and Cyprus. What was also destroying the Ottoman Empire was not just the passage of time and the resurgence of its enemies but the growth of nationalism throughout its territories, first in the European part. Greece won its independence in 1832 while Serbia, Rumania and Bulgaria moved from autonomy within the Ottoman Empire towards full independence.

  When the long-expected final disintegration of the Ottoman Empire occurred, its remaining territories, huge in the Middle East and still considerable in the Balkans, would be up for grabs. While the competing ambitions between Germany, France, Russia, and Britain in the Middle East and North Africa fed tensions back into Europe, it was the rivalry between Austria-Hungary and Russia that in the end posed the greatest threat to Europe’s long peace. The two powers had vital and incompatible interests at stake. While Austria-Hungary had little interest in the Ottomans’ Asian territories, it was bound to care about what happened on its southern doorstep in the Balkans. It could not calmly contemplate an enlarged Serbia or Bulgaria, both of which were likely to seize any chance to enlarge their territory, which would in turn block Austria-Hungary’s trading routes southwards to Constantinople and the Aegean ports, or, in the case of Serbia, threaten its Adriatic possessions along the Dalmatian coast. One or more large South Slav states, moreover, would act as a solvent on Austria-Hungary itself, arousing the national hopes of its own South Slavs in Croatia, Slovenia, and southern Hungary. And if the Balkan states gravitated, as they well might, towards Russia, Austria-Hungary would face a formidable coalition.

  Russia for its part could not stand by while control of the Ottoman Straits fell into the hands of another power. So much of Russia’s trade, some 40 per cent of its exports alone by 1912, went through those narrow waterways that any blockage could fatally weaken Russia’s economy. For historical and religious reasons, too, Constantinople had once been the capital of the Byzantine Empire, to which Russia claimed to be the heir. The prospect of Austria-Hungary, a Catholic power, occupying it was almost as bad, at least to the devout Orthodox, as Muslims. Nor could the Russian Panslavs, an increasingly vociferous group, tolerate their fellow Slavs in the Balkans, the majority of whom were Orthodox like the Russians themselves, falling under the sway of Austria-Hungary.

  In the nineteenth century, the great powers, led by Britain, had propped up the ‘Sick Man of Europe’ partly to prevent just such a dangerous scramble for territory. Russia’s attempt, after its victory over the Ottoman Empire in 1878, to strip away a good deal of the Ottomans’ European territory and create a big Bulgaria including the Macedonian territories, was stopped by the other powers, who handed Macedonia back to the Ottomans, leaving a smaller Bulgaria, nominally under Ottoman suzerainty. Macedonia, which had a large Christian population, was rapidly reduced to even greater misery than before through a combination of Ottoman incompetence and the activities of the different Balkan Christians outside the Ottoman Empire who did little but quarrel among themselves and fund different terrorist groups to stir up trouble among the Macedonians.

  In the settlement of 1878 Austria-Hungary was compensated in the west by being allowed to occupy and administer Bosnia-Herzegovina, again under nominal Ottoman suzerainty. It was also allowed to keep troops in a small appendix, the Sanjak of Novi Bazar, which ran southwards from Bosnia-Herzegovina. This prevented Serbia from joining up with Montenegro to the west and allowed Austria-Hungary a narrow corridor through which it could run communications down into Macedonia, still Ottoman territory, and on southwards to the Aegean. The new territories were troublesome from the start; Austria-Hungary had to send a substantial force of troops in to put down an uprising by Bosnian Muslims who did not want to come under Christian rule.

  By the end of the century, both Russia and Austria-Hungary had recognised the dangerous potential for conflict between them over the remains of the Ottoman Empire and, in 1897, came to an agreement to respect the territorial status quo in the Balkans. They also agreed that they would not interfere in the internal affairs of the existing Balkan states. Russia promised that it would respect Austria-Hungary’s rights in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Finally, the two powers would together oppose any agitation against the principles they had just agreed. In 1900, Alois von Aehrenthal, an Austrian diplomat in St Petersburg, wrote optimistically to Gołuchowski, the Foreign Minister in Vienna, that Russia and Austria-Hungary were learning to trust each other: ‘Without trust, diplomatic developments in the Balkans are impossible. The important matter will be to intensify the process of trust.’1 It might be possible, he hoped, to come eventually to an agreement on spheres of influence in the Balkans with Austria-Hungary dominating the western part and Russia the eastern as well as the waters between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, and Constantinople itself. The developments of the next few years appeared to bear out his hopes. ‘Gone are the days,’ said Lamsdorff, the Russian Foreign Minister in 1902, ‘when Russia and Austria-Hungary came to loggerheads only out of love for the Balkan peoples.’ In 1903, as the situation in Macedonia went from bad to worse, the two powers signed a further agreement to work together to put pressure on the Ottoman authorities to make much-needed reforms there. The following year, as Russia became embroiled in the war with Japan, it signed a neutrality agreement with Austria-Hungary which allowed Russia to move troops from their common border to the east.2

  In 1906, however, under pressure from his nephew and heir, Franz Ferdinand, Franz Joseph made two important appointments which inaugurated new, more active policies for Austria-Hungary. Conrad took over as chief of the general staff and Aehrenthal became Foreign Minister. Many, especially in the younger generation of officers and officials, hoped that now the Dual Monarchy would stop its slow suicide and show that it was still vital and powerful, that successes domestically and in foreign affairs would feed each other to create a stronger state as achievements at home and abroad rallied the empire’s inhabitants to their multinational state and the dynasty itself. A revitalised Austria-Hungary could also shake itself free of its growing and humiliating dependency on Germany and show that it was an independent actor in the world. While the two men agreed on the overall goals, the Foreign Minister preferred to use diplomacy rather than war. Conrad, who urged war relentlessly, later characterised Aehrenthal as ‘a vain, self-indulgent ninny, who carried out his ambitions only in petty diplomatic ambiguities and things that were superficially successful’ and claimed that he saw the army as an umbrella to be left in the cupboard until it rained.3 This, like much of what Conrad said about his colleagues, was unfair. Aehrenthal was prepared to use war, but only if absolutely necessary.

  The new Foreign Minister was tall and slightly stooped, with fine, regular features and hooded eyes fr
om which he peered out shortsightedly. Aehrenthal always looked weary, said Bülow, who found him ‘reserved, indolent, almost apathetic’.4 Aehrenthal was in fact very hardworking and had devoted his life to furthering the foreign policy of Austria-Hungary, serving, among other things, as a successful and respected ambassador to Russia. Like most of his colleagues he came from the aristocracy. ‘Our diplomatic corps’, said a staff officer, ‘is like a Chinese wall. There is no entrance for people on the outside, people who don’t belong.’5 Aehrenthal’s family were Czech nobility who had risen socially as a result of their service to the state. (His enemies liked to point out that he had bourgeois ancestors, perhaps even a Jew somewhere.) He was far from being Czech in his loyalties, however; like many of his class, Aehrenthal was cosmopolitan and gave his primary allegiance to the dynasty and Austria-Hungary. In their service, he was dedicated, devious, duplicitous and ruthless. His weakness was that he tended to over-complicate matters. Nor was he good at taking advice. Count Leopold Berchtold, his colleague and later his successor, complained of his ‘frightful characteristic of overlooking facts that do not fit into his complicated house of cards’.6

  Although Aehrenthal was deeply conservative and shared the antipathy of much of his class to liberalism and socialism, he believed that Austria-Hungary had to make reforms if it were to survive. Like his mentor, Franz Ferdinand, he hoped to create a South Slav bloc within the empire that would somehow blunt the endless tensions between the Austrian and the Hungarian halves. More, a new South Slav component of the empire would act as a magnet to the South Slavs in the Balkans, in Serbia, Montenegro or Bulgaria, and draw them into Austria-Hungary’s orbit, perhaps even bringing them inside the empire.7 In foreign affairs, he shared the firm assumption of his predecessors that the German alliance was crucial for the survival of Austria-Hungary yet he also hoped to reach across the growing dividing line in Europe and build a stronger relationship with Russia. He longed to see the Three Emperors League of Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia reborn to promote the causes, which he saw as interrelated, of conservatism and stability in Europe.8 His years in St Petersburg had gained him the reputation of being pro-Russian (aided, so Bülow claimed, by an affair he had with a beautiful leader of society9) and he preferred, wherever possible, to work with the Russians.