by Hew Strachan
By early 1914, therefore, the sole remaining plank in Bethmann Hollweg’s foreign policy was the hope that Britain might yet be neutralized. In playing the Turkish card, Bethmann Hollweg had at least exploited the underlying and traditional weakness in Anglo-Russian relations. If Russia was unhappy about Germany’s involvement with the Turkish army, it could hardly be ecstatic about the Royal Navy’s comparable role with the Turkish navy—especially as the imminent arrival of two British-built Dreadnoughts would give the Turks supremacy in the Black Sea. Furthermore, other British Asian interests, particularly in Persia but also in Afghanistan, Tibet, and China, helped foster tension between the two powers. Bethmann Hollweg could console himself with the thought that, given time, the Anglo-Russian alliance showed every likelihood of collapsing from within.
Bethmann Hollweg’s hopes were the stuff of Entente nightmares. Although Grey remained determined that Britain should retain a free hand, France could only endorse Sazonov’s appeal in February 1914 that the Entente become a formal defensive alliance designed to deter Germany and Austria-Hungary. In April 1914 Grey agreed to the French suggestion that Russo-British naval conversations should take place, a proposal to which the cabinet gave remarkably ready approval. The naval talks were of course secret, but a German agent in the Russian embassy in London passed on their details to Berlin. On 22 May the Berliner Tageblatt published the details, and on 11 June questions were asked in the House of Commons. Grey denied that Britain was under any obligations and denied that any negotiations were in progress—a technical truth in terms of treaty commitments, but a strategic fiction.103
Grey had feared that, if known, the naval conversations would confirm German fears of Russia and strengthen the hand of what he saw as the war party in Germany against that of Bethmann Hollweg. His worries were realized. Grey saw the German ambassador on 6 and 9 July, and insisted that, although staff talks had taken place, the governments of the Entente were not politically committed to one another. But such artfulness, ‘seeking a compromise between isolationism and a policy of alliance in order to gain the advantage of both at the same time’,104 smacked of deceit. Grey hoped to appeal to liberalism in Germany and yet betrayed his own sense of democratic accountability by misleading parliament—or at least so it seemed to Bethmann Hollweg. For Bethmann the possibility of a German-British rapprochement as a basis for German overseas expansion was now gone; threatened too was the idea that each could manage its own alliance in the event of a crisis, as it had in November-December 1912.
Far more important, however, than these diplomatic setbacks was Germany’s conviction that its encirclement was now complete. The fear which had accompanied German assertiveness gained the upper hand: the bull in the china-shop of European diplomacy began to see itself as a resigned sacrificial victim. For the Anglo-Russian naval talks gave the cue to the latent but pervasive Russophobia that gripped not only Bethmann Hollweg but also Moltke. The press and popular feeling played on the inevitability of a clash between Teuton and Slav. This emotive vocabulary did not seem inappropriate given the reality of the position. The Russian army’s budget—independently of extraordinary capital grants—had grown from 406 million roubles in 1907/8 to 581 million in 1913/14. Spending on the navy nearly tripled over the same period, and in 1914 exceeded that of Germany. In 1913 the Russians introduced the ‘grand programme’, enacted in 1914, which aimed to increase the annual contingent of recruits for the army from 455,000 to 585,000, and to expand the total number of divisions from 114.5 to 122.5.105 The Russian war minister accompanied these enlargements with statements calculated to stoke German anxieties. The German and Austro-Hungarian armies were already inferior to those of France and Russia by over a million men in the summer of 1914;106 by 1917 the Russian army alone would be three times the size of Germany’s. The argument that, objectively, there was no chance of a Russian challenge in economic terms did not figure in the calculations on the military balance. By 1914 French loans had enabled the construction of strategic railways so that Russia’s mobilization could be accelerated, and the first troops be into battle within fifteen days. German plans drawn up in 1905 rested on the then-valid assumption that Germany would have six weeks in which to deal with France before turning east: the very existence of that planning assumption, which by 1913 was demonstrably wrong, added to Germany’s sense of panic. In May 1914, therefore, Moltke’s advocacy of preventive war took on greater urgency, if no more precision: ‘we must wage a preventive war’, he told Gottlieb von Jagow, the foreign minister, ‘to conquer our opponents as long as we still have a reasonable chance in this struggle.’107
Both Jagow and Bethmann Hollweg resisted Moltke’s suggestion.108 But the case for doing so seemed, in the self-absorbed atmosphere of Wilhelmine politics, to be growing weaker. As early as December 1912 Bethmann—who had visited Russia in that year—confessed: ‘One must have a good deal of trust in God and count on the Russian revolution as an ally in order to be able to sleep at all.’109 The increases in the army necessary to meet the Russian threat exposed the delicacy of his own ability to manage the Reichstag. In 1913 90 per cent of central government spending was devoted to the armed forces, and the national debt had increased 125 per cent in 1898.110 The conservatives still opposed property taxes, and the introduction of direct Reich taxation threatened the balance between Prussia and Germany as well as increasing Bethmann’s reliance on liberal support. In addition, it was not clear that spending at such levels could be maintained. By the end of 1913, the German economy was in recession, 5 per cent of the labour force was out of work, and fears of depression followed.111 Bethmann’s ability to manage the domestic situation seemed as doubtful as his competence to overcome Germany’s succession of diplomatic setbacks. Bethmann himself increasingly gave way to fatalism: the death of his wife on 11 May 1914 can only have confirmed his sense of resignation.
Optimists in 1914 took comfort from the fact that the great powers had successfully surmounted a succession of crises since 1905. On the surface, it seemed that the international system could regulate itself. But none of those crises had resolved the underlying problems which had given them birth. Above all, nobody saw the Treaty of Bucharest and the end of the Second Balkan War as more than an armistice. Austro-Serb relations remained locked in rivalry. Germany’s own ability to manage another confrontation was diminished by its need to support its ally, a dependence made more pressing by Russia’s military and economic growth. The fact of direct Russo-German antagonism would change the dimensions of the next Balkan crisis. And the remoteness of Balkan politics, the fratricidal nature of their warfare, did not diminish their importance for Europe as a whole. In the Balkans imperial rivalries intersected and overlapped with the cold war of the alliances. The Balkans were also the point where three empires—the Russian, the Ottoman, and the Austro-Hungarian—came face to face with the imminent prospect of their own decline as great powers.
THE JULY CRISIS
In 1914 the annual summer manoeuvres of the Austro-Hungarian army were centred on XV and XVI corps in Bosnia.112 In March it was announced that the Archduke Franz Ferdinand would attend the manoeuvres and would visit Sarajevo. Franz Ferdinand himself was somewhat apprehensive about the trip. On one level the Austrian occupation of Bosnia-Herzogovina had been enlightened: the road mileage of the province had increased over seven times since 1878, the railways had arrived, and new coal- and iron mines had been opened. But the administration of the crown-lands smacked of colonialism. Divide and rule was the Austrian path, retaining Moslem feudal landlords and so setting them against the Christian population. The army, increasingly frustrated by what it saw as lax government in Austria and Hungary, determined that its administration of Bosnia-Herzogovina should be a model of effectiveness. Franz Ferdinand himself advocated repression and active Germanization. He was also a staunch Catholic: in Bosnia Catholics were the minority (18 per cent) and 42 per cent of the population were Orthodox. Many Bosnians looked wistfully to Serbia. They were impre
ssed not only by Serbia’s growth in 1912 and 1913 but also by its schooling: young Bosnians crossed the border to Belgrade for further education. Franz Ferdinand’s apprehension had good grounds. Five assassination attempts had been made against representatives of the Habsburg administration in the previous four years. In the circumstances, and even without the benefit of hindsight, the early announcement of the visit of the heir-apparent, and the extraordinarily lax security associated with it, were inexcusable.
On Sunday, 28 June, the archduke and his wife were driven from the station at Sarajevo to the town hall, along the Appel quay. No soldiers lined the route. Nedeljko Cabrinovic, a Bosnian youth, threw a bomb, which bounced off the archduke’s car, and then exploded, wounding two officers in the following car and a number of bystanders. The archduke went on to the town hall. He then decided to visit the wounded officers. At the junction of Franzjosefstrasse and the Appel quay confusion arose as to the route to be followed. The driver began to back the car. An associate of Cabrinovic, Gavrilo Princip, was at the corner, having failed earlier in the day to take his opportunity on the Appel quay. He stepped forward and shot both the archduke and his consort. Franz Ferdinand, whose unattractive character was at least redeemed by his affection for his family, called on his wife to live for the sake of their children. But by the time the car had conveyed their bodies to the governor’s residence both husband and consort were dead. It was their wedding anniversary. It was also the day of the battle of Kosovo: in 1389 a single Serb, after defeat at the hands of the Turks, had penetrated the Ottoman ranks and killed the Sultan. For the Serbs and the Bosnians tyrannicide had retained a pedigree which no longer seemed so appropriate to the revolutionaries of industrialized societies.
The assassination led directly to the outbreak of the First World War. And yet, for all the subsequent efforts to trace its authorship to one of the great powers, it remains true that the prime responsibility rested with none of the major belligerents but with an amateurish student revolutionary body, Young Bosnia, whose success owed far more to luck than to a sophisticated conspiracy.
Princip—’a character from a Chekhov play except that when he fired he did not miss’113—was born in 1894, the son of a Bosnian Christian peasant family, had received his early education in Sarajevo but had completed it in Serbia, and had aspirations to being a poet. His brief life therefore embraced not only the Bosnian tradition of resistance to foreign, and specifically Ottoman, rule, which had been so easily transferred into opposition to Austria-Hungary, but also the fusion of romanticism and revolution characteristic of his hero Mazzini. Young Bosnia did not reflect a broad current of opinion but was one of a number of small student groups. The aims of these groups were diverse, but certainly Princip and his colleagues embraced the idea of a Yugoslavia, of a South Slav independent state, and rejected gradualism and reformism as means to achieve that end. Violence, they reckoned, would provoke Austro-Hungarian repression and so increase South Slav hatred of Habsburg government. Terrorism, tyrannicide, direct action, the decisive role of the individual in history—all these themes appealed to the Young Bosnians.
It is therefore hard to see how an assassination attempt would not have taken place even without support from outside. But the assassins did not operate alone. Two members of Ujedinjenje ili Smrt, acting under the cover of Narodna Odbrana and so eluding the detection of Austrian intelligence, played key roles. Major Vojin Tankosic of the Serb army provided the four revolvers and six bombs with which the conspirators were equipped; Captain Rade Popovic commanded the Serb guards on the Bosnian frontier and had seen Princip and his associates safely into Bosnia from Serbia some four weeks before. The key figure behind both officers, and the driving force in Ujedinjenje ili Smrt, was Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijovic, known as Apis. Apis was chief of intelligence in the Serb general staff: he had used his position to help Ujedinjenje ili Smrt penetrate the army, and also to create the frontier organization which Popovic represented and which allowed Ujedinjenje ili Smrt to carry its activities into Austria-Hungary. His objective, and that of his organization, was not the federal Yugoslavia favoured by the Young Bosnians but a Greater Serbia, with the implication that the Serbs would dominate the Croats and Slovenes in the new state. Apis was in contact with Artamanov, the Russian military attaché in Belgrade, but it does not follow that Russia was privy to the assassination. Apis’s stock in trade, regicide, was not congenial to the Romanovs. Apis, for his part, wanted the achievement of a Greater Serbia to be that of Serbia itself, not that of Russia.114
Serb subjects were therefore implicated in Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. Austria-Hungary’s assumption, and indeed determination, that this was so was shared by most of the other great powers. But the involvement of the Serb government specifically remains a moot point. Although the tariff war of 1906 with Austria-Hungary (the so called ‘Pig War’, because the border was closed to Serbian livestock) had given Serbia a sharp push towards independent industrialization, this was a recent development and Serbia was predominantly a society of self-sufficient peasants.115 In such circumstances the army, with its provision of professional education and its possession of sophisticated equipment and weaponry, enjoyed considerable political influence. In 1903 a group of officers, Apis among them, had effected a particularly brutal coup in which King Alexander and his wife had been murdered and the pro-Russian, albeit westernizing and liberal, Petar Karageorgevich, installed in his stead. Petar translated J. S. Mill into Serbo-Croat, and the constitution of 1903 contained all the trappings of democracy, including equality before the law, a free press, and an independent judiciary. But the cabinets which followed the coup were short-lived, and the conspirators themselves continued in the army, their authority and influence increased by their king’s indebtedness to them. The army was frustrated by the realistic stand taken by Serbia’s ministers during the Bosnian crisis, but it was the aftermath of that affair which gave status and reality to the army’s pretensions for Serbia as the Piedmont of the South Slavs. The gains of the Balkan wars hallowed the Serb army with the aura of victory. Re-equipped with French artillery (the cause and the fruit of the ‘Pig War’), its peacetime strength standing at 200,000 men, it saw Serbia as an independent political actor.
Pasic, the prime minister, was more cautious, using the backing of Russia to hold the army in check, and seeking a modus vivendi with Austria-Hungary. Although he too was supportive of Serbia’s expansion and of its inclusion of Serbs currently within the dual monarchy, he accepted that the achievement of that aim would be more gradual and piecemeal than did Ujedinjenje ili Smrt. The administration of the newly acquired areas of Macedonia brought the clash between Pasic and Apis, between the civilian government and the army, into the open. In December 1913 civilians were given priority over soldiers at public functions in Macedonia. Pasic’s response to the outrage of Serb officers was to oust the minister of war. Apis and the opposition parties then rallied to oppose Pasic, and through Putnik, the chief of the general staff, put pressure on the king to dismiss Pasic’s government. On 2 June 1914 Pasic resigned, and on 24 June elections were announced for 1 August. However, Apis’s position was weak. King Petar abdicated, and his son Alexander backed Pasic against Apis. Both Alexander and Pasic looked to Russia for support; Apis turned to the army, but when he ordered a coup on 7 June it would not follow him. It has been suggested that so desperate had Apis’s position become within Serbia that his motivation in backing Princip and his accomplices was to try to force a confrontation between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, in which the latter would be humiliated and the overthrow of the government thus become possible.116
In the circumstances of June 1914, therefore, Pasic could gain little from the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. But his responses were inevitably dilatory. It seems that he was informed that students armed with bombs and revolvers had crossed into Bosnia: it required little imagination to guess their likely target. Pasic therefore ordered an inquiry into the arrangements at the border, into th
e illegal traffic of weapons, and into Apis himself. But he did not dispatch a specific warning to the government of Austria-Hungary. An attempt does appear to have been made to halt the conspirators, but its author was probably Apis himself after the central committee of Ujedinjenje ili Smrt had belatedly been informed and had opposed his and Tankosic’s actions. Although Pasic may not have approved of the assassination, domestically he was not in a sufficiently strong position to check it. He could not overtly antagonize the army any further, and anti-Austrian feeling and Greater Serb sentiment were genuinely popular in Belgrade. When the news of the assassination broke, his policy was to treat the matter as an incident internal to Austria-Hungary: it had occurred within the empire and had been carried out by its own subjects. But neither Serbia’s ambassadors nor Serbia’s press reacted with the same restraint; the enthusiasm of their responses to Franz Ferdinand’s death did much to confirm Vienna’s presumption of Serbia’s guilt. Whatever Pasic’s more sensible reflections suggested, the Serbian government after the assassination was not in a position forcefully to condemn it.
Whether an unequivocal and early response by Serbia to the assassination would have made any difference to Austria-Hungary’s behaviour must be doubtful. Franz Ferdinand was not the sort of personality who commanded popularity, and his demise in itself did not cast the empire into deepest mourning: indeed, in Vienna the Prater continued its jollifications without interruption. But as the Serb press crowed, so the Austrian and even Hungarian newspapers retaliated, and indignation that the heir-apparent should have been eliminated—apparently—by a foreign power took on a totally justifiable note of grievance.