by Hew Strachan
Well before this mood was common the minds of all but one of Franz Joseph’s ministers were firmly set. In the preceding Balkan crises the strongest voice for restraint had been that of Franz Ferdinand himself. He had appreciated that, for all his advocacy of Germanization, the majority of the empire’s population was Slav and that war against the Slavs outside the empire was not a sensible way to cement the loyalty of those within it. Furthermore, he recognized that such a war could not be restricted to Austria-Hungary and Serbia, but would draw in Russia. Not only would Austria-Hungary find a two-front war difficult to sustain, it would also automatically sacrifice his own foreign-policy objective of a renewed Dreikaiserbund. By his own death the archduke had made war possible in more ways than one.
The opinion that the archduke’s moderation had had most frequently to counter in the previous eight years was that of his own nominee as chief of the general staff, Conrad von Hötzendorff. Conrad was a social Darwinist. He believed that a recognition that the struggle for existence was ‘the basic principle behind all the events on this earth’ was ‘the only real and rational basis for policy making’.117 Conrad regarded it as self-evident that Austria-Hungary would at some stage have to fight to preserve its status as a great power. For much of the early part of his tenure of office his focus had been on a preventive war against Italy, but from 1909 he came to see Serbia as the more important issue. The irridentism of both powers threatened the southern belt of the empire, and war against one could provoke the other. Two cardinal points therefore followed. First, Serbia and Italy were both as much domestic as foreign problems, and their resolution was an essential preliminary to greater Austrian strength at home as well as abroad. Secondly, it was important to fight each power separately and independently rather than to face both simultaneously. War should therefore be undertaken logically or preventively: ‘politics’, he averred, ‘consists precisely of applying war as a method.’118 Conrad first advocated preventive war against Serbia in 1906, and he did so again in 1908–9, in 1912–13, in October 1913, and May 1914: between 1 January 1913 and 1 January 1914 he proposed a Serbian war twenty-five times.119
Ironically, by the summer of 1914, although his enthusiasm for war had not diminished, it resided less on the calculation of previous years and more on the resigned fatalism which characterized so much of German thought at the same time. The Hungarian parliament’s opposition to the army’s reforms had delayed the new service law’s introduction until 1912, and the consequent reorganization would not be complete until 1915.120 In conjunction, the Balkan states (without Russian support) could outnumber the Austro-Hungarian army, and the Serbs alone—Conrad was wont to reckon—could field 500,000 men (although only 200,000 would be available on mobilization, the balance being made up of reserves). Conrad saw the Balkan League as an Entente-sponsored organization which threatened the dual monarchy with encirclement.
Thus he added to his frustration with the Magyars the expectation of a life-and-death struggle between Teuton and Slav. But in so revealing his own Austro-Germanism, he placed himself at odds with the multinationalism of the army’s Hapsburg loyalties. During the course of 1913 he had become increasingly distant from Franz Ferdinand, and in September, stung by the latter’s acerbic (if warranted) criticisms of the army and its general staff, he had sought permission to retire. Cut off from his royal patron and distant from the key government ministers, he was becoming politically isolated once more.121 Then the assassination and its consequences put him back at the fulcrum. His pessimism caught the apocalyptic mood prevalent in Vienna, suggesting that Austria-Hungary was already the victim of Conrad’s Darwinian contest. War, he said on 29 June, would be ‘a hopeless struggle, but even so, it must be because such an ancient monarchy and such an ancient army cannot perish ingloriously’.122
He was determined, too, that this time the outcome would not just be more sabre-rattling: a repetition of the mobilizations used in earlier crises without actual fighting would, he warned, be bad for the army’s morale. Nobody in Vienna on 29 and 30 June could misinterpret his resolve, even if its basis was no longer rational calculation but, in his own words, ‘va banque’.123 And the fact that he was listened to was itself in part a result of that previous enthusiasm for preventive war. By that enthusiasm, he had won Moltke’s undertaking in 1909 that, if Russia mobilized to support Serbia against Austria, Germany too would mobilize: in other words, he was confident that he could turn against Serbia, with Germany either deterring or fighting Russia. He seems to have been remarkably slow to consider what France would do. That enthusiasm, too, had enabled him to accustom Franz Joseph’s ministers to the idea and expectation of war. The domination of the chief of the general staff over the minister of war had been accomplished by 1900. Conrad’s efforts to achieve comparable sway over the foreign minister had been thwarted by Aehrenthal, and indeed it was Aehrenthal’s pacific line which had headed Conrad off in 1909.124 But Berchtold was made of weaker stuff.
The foreign minister was not under pressure just from Conrad. His ministry was staffed by a group of younger diplomats, protégés of Aehrenthal, who were committed to the fulfilment of Aehrenthal’s programme for an Austrian domination of the Balkans. Berchtold’s conciliar style meant that he listened to their views. Each day during the July crisis he held meetings with his principal subordinates, and mapped his tactics on the basis of their advice. It was these men who shaped Berchtold’s Balkan strategy before the assassination, and kept the foreign minister to his resolve as the crisis unfolded.125
Like Conrad, Berchtold was keen to frustrate an Entente-sponsored Balkan League. Late in June his ministry was considering a diplomatic offensive designed to create an alternative Balkan structure. Ideally its pivot would be Romania. This would please the Germans and it would give Conrad sixteen extra divisions and a secure flank in Hungary. But Austrian negotiations begun in November 1913 had foundered, in part on the Hungarians’ refusal to make concessions over Transylvania. Realistically, therefore, Austria’s hopes were pinned on Bulgaria, and possibly Turkey. The aim was to isolate Serbia and to block Russia. In a memorandum of 24 June Franz von Matscheko portrayed Belgrade as manipulating Russian aggressiveness in the Balkans for its own ends. Matscheko’s tone was deliberately alarmist: he hoped thereby to rally both the Germans and the Magyars in support of Austrian diplomacy.
The Sarajevo assassination presented this long-term policy with an immediate crisis. Matscheko’s memorandum became the blueprint, not for forceful negotiation but for the negotiation of force. It seemed that Serb terrorism would lead to a Balkan League sponsored not by the Triple Alliance but by Russia. Swift military action—and it should be emphasized that Berchtold envisaged a war without the issue of an ultimatum and without the mobilization of Austrian resources—should eliminate Serbia’s power in the Balkans, and so pre-empt a new league and destroy Russian influence. Potiorek, the governor of Bosnia-Herzogovina, no doubt anxious to cover over his inadequate security arrangements, exaggerated the unrest in Bosnia and pressed on Vienna the need for decisive and early steps against Belgrade. Berchtold and his colleagues were convinced of Serbia’s culpability, and that inaction would be tantamount to diplomatic humiliation and would lead to a further decline in Austria-Hungary’s status in the Balkans. By 30 June Berchtold was already proposing a ‘final and fundamental reckoning’ with Serbia. He told the royal household that the Entente heads of state should not be invited to Franz Ferdinand’s funeral.126 Franz Joseph did not demur, and on 2 July he reworked the Matscheko memorandum in a letter to Kaiser Wilhelm seeking his support. Count Alexander Hoyos, Berchtold’s chef de cabinet, a protégé of Aehrenthal and a noted hawk, was chosen to bear the imperial letter to Berlin.127
Austria-Hungary had received no formal expression of Germany’s views before Hoyos boarded his train. Hoyos had met the German journalist Victor Naumannn on 1 July, and Naumann, an acquaintance of Bethmann Hollweg and of Jagow, had assured him that the Kaiser would support the dual monarchy, ev
en to the point of war.128 But Germany’s ambassador in Vienna, Heinrich von Tschirschky, had kept silent. Austria-Hungary’s decision to fight Serbia was its own.
Firmness had worked in 1908 and 1913; on other occasions a willingness to negotiate had led the empire into restraint and loss of face. The interaction between domestic and foreign policy was not simply a contrivance, as has to be argued in the German case, but an iron law. As Conrad had remarked to Franz Ferdinand in December 1912, South Slav unification was inevitable. It could be achieved within Austria-Hungary or at Austria-Hungary’s expense. If the former, given the power and strength Serbia had acquired, a showdown with Serbia could not be avoided. It was the Austrian general staff, not the German, for whom war was a strategic necessity.
Franz Joseph’s letter to Wilhelm was delivered by Hoyos to Count Szögeny, Austria-Hungary’s aged and somewhat ineffectual ambassador in Berlin. The Kaiser had visited Franz Ferdinand and Sophie at their home as recently as 2 June, and his sense of personal loss gave him uncharacteristic decisiveness. He invited Szögeny to Potsdam on Sunday, 5 July, and over lunch—while stressing that he had yet to consult Bethmann Hollweg—expressed his conviction that Austria-Hungary should deal rapidly and firmly with Serbia, and that such action would have Germany’s support. This typical display of apparent determination and swift resolve was effectively endorsed by the Kaiser’s advisers. That same afternoon Wilhelm held a crown council at which Bethmann Hollweg, Zimmermann (standing in for Jagow, the foreign secretary being away on his honeymoon), Erich von Falkenhayn (the minister of war), Moritz von Lyncker (the chief of the military cabinet), and Hans von Plessen (the adjutant-general) were present; significantly neither Moltke, who was taking the waters at Karlsbad, nor any naval representative was in attendance. The meeting agreed to support the Austro-Hungarian desire to reconstruct a Bulgaria-centred Balkan League favourable to the Triple Alliance; as for Serbia, the dual monarchy’s action was its own affair, but it was assured of German support in the event of Russian intervention. The following morning, 6 July, Bethmann Hollweg conveyed the council’s views to Szögeny and Hoyos. Equipped with this ‘blank cheque’, Hoyos returned to Vienna.
What is striking about the ‘blank cheque’ is not that it was issued but that it was indeed blank. The council had made little effort to discuss the implications of what it was doing. Its decisions followed from previous events rather than from a projection as to the future. Falkenhayn wrote to Moltke expressing the view that neither he nor Bethmann Hollweg believed that Austria-Hungary would follow through the forceful language which it had so far employed.129 But Bethmann Hollweg had done little to inform himself on precisely this point. When on 9 July he told the minister of the interior, Clemens von Delbrück, of the impending Austrian ultimatum he confessed that he had no idea of its contents; furthermore, so little was he disturbed by his own ignorance that he used it as a device to still Delbrück’s alarm.130 The fatalism which had increasingly gripped the chancellor had become a device to ease him of responsibility for his actions. Later in the same month he was to express the view that ‘a fate greater than human power hangs over the situation in Europe and over the German people’.131 The Kaiser too felt that the affairs of nations were beyond individual control and were subject to the inscrutable will of God.132 Thus, nobody in Germany attempted to guide and manage events in July 1914.
Such an extraordinary abdication of responsibility is all the more remarkable in view of the fact that Bethmann Hollweg’s calculations did not exclude the possibility of a major European war. The key question was the Russian response to an Austro-Hungarian invasion of Serbia. Assuming that Russia would intervene, Zimmermann told Hoyos that there was a 90 per-cent probability of a European war. But such realism—or pessimism—does not seem to have been widespread. By 11 July Zimmermann—whose reputation rested on his forthright but not necessarily consistent views—was confident that there would not be war because Austria and Serbia would come to terms. More widespread was the expectation that there would be war, but that it would be localized because Russia would stay out. That had been Plessen’s view at the meeting of 5 July, and it was the line taken by Zimmermann’s superior, Jagow.133 Germany’s ambassador in Russia, Pourtalès, continued to insist that the dangers of domestic revolution in the event of a major war would inhibit Russia. After all, Russia had backed down during the Bosnian crisis, and as recently as 1913 had endeavoured to restrain the Balkan states. Furthermore, its rearmament programme was not completed. If such calculations proved ill-founded, a second line of argument suggested that Britain and France would hold their eastern ally back from precipitate action. The Kaiser took comfort in the notion that his imperial cousin could not afford to condone the assassination of royalty. Outrage at the murders of the archduke and his wife seemed to have created a mood in Europe sympathetic to the Habsburgs. Bethmann Hollweg did not, therefore, embrace the probability of general war, but he was indubitably using its threat as an instrument in foreign policy, to isolate Russia both from its Entente partners and from its Balkan friends. His intentions were to strengthen the Triple Alliance by endorsing the Austro-German pact, and then, assuming the Austrians moved fast enough, to repeat the moderating role of 1912–13. The culmination of this process, according to Kurt Riezler, who was as close to Bethmann Hollweg as anyone in the July crisis, would be both a satisfied Austria and, eventually, a Russo-German agreement.134 However, alongside the ideas of deterrence Bethmann Hollweg, and also Jagow, placed the calculations of preventive war. Serbia would be a good test as to how justified German Russophobia was: if Bethmann’s bluff was called, and Russia did want war, then it was better for the two powers to fight it out in 1914, before Russia completed its rearmament programme in 1917. Furthermore, a war triggered by Serbia would ensure Austro-Hungarian support for Germany, and the fact that imperial Russia would have to initiate hostilities promised that within Germany the socialists would rally to the defence of the Reich. If European war was genuinely inevitable, the circumstances of July 1914 seemed as propitious for Germany as could be reasonably expected.
Bethmann Hollweg was playing fast and loose with the possibility, however remote he thought it, of a European war. He could only do so because his image of such a war—although widely held—was confused. The victories of 1866 and 1870 had achieved in short order and with minimal complications the political objectives for which they had been fought: Bethmann Hollweg’s mental image of war in July 1914—at least as it related to an Austrian attack on Serbia—was of Königgrätz and Sedan, not of Verdun and the Somme. But also present in his mind was the idea of a long war with its concomitants, economic strain and social and political disruption. He saw a Russo-German war in such terms, for the possibility of war leading to revolution was a consequence he could envisage for Germany as well as Russia, and such a picture had to be present if he imagined that Russia might be deterred from intervention. Bethmann’s policy in July was therefore made even more obscure by its ambivalence as to what war would be like—simultaneously it was a reasonable way to achieve policy objectives and the agent of total upheaval. The former implied that war could be an appropriate means to conduct policy, the latter that only its threat could so operate.
The chancellor himself made no attempt to resolve this dilemma, although his actions suggest that his hopes continued to be shaped by the prospect of a Bismarckian campaign. No preparations for a long war were made in July, and even on the 24th the Treasury rebuffed the general staff’s suggestion that Germany build up its food stocks with wheat purchases in Rotterdam. Falkenhayn had assured the crown council on 5 July that the army was ready, but the authority with which he spoke was that of the minister of war, not of the chief of the general staff. He may have been buoyed up by the comparative success with which the 1913 army law had been rushed into effect, especially compared with the disruption which the three-year law was reported as having created in France. But the argument that the army was using this window of opportunity to exploit the
idea of preventive war is hard to sustain. Falkenhayn thought that any conflict would remain localized, and promptly went on leave; he did not return until 27 July. Moltke, who was actually responsible for war plans, was not recalled until 25 July. Four days later the chief of the general staff was predicting ‘a war which will annihilate the civilisation of almost the whole of Europe for decades to come’.135 Bethmann had made no attempt to consult the service chiefs earlier in July, in the first half of the month, when Germany might still have been able to fashion the progress of events. Not the least of the ambiguities that such a discussion could have clarified was Germany’s support of Austrian operations against Serbia when Germany’s war plans required the Austrians to turn against Russia. If, as has been claimed,136 the ‘blank cheque’ was designed to get Austria-Hungary to pin down Russia, so leaving Germany free to knock out Belgium and France, then its strategic and operational assumptions were remarkably ill-thought-out.
The focus of much recent historiography with regard to the ‘blank cheque’ has been on Berlin. But although Berlin issued the cheque, it was Vienna that had requested it and it was Vienna that cashed it. After 6 July, and until 23 July, decisions were taken not by Germany but by Austria-Hungary. The Kaiser departed on a cruise. Jagow returned to the foreign office, but Nicolai, the head of espionage and counter-intelligence on the general staff, only came back to work on the same day as Moltke, 25 July, and Groener, the head of the railway department, not until the following day.137 On 11 July Berlin informed its ambassadors of the possibility of Austrian action against Serbia, and in Rome the German ambassador inadvisedly told San Giuliano, the Italian foreign minister. Habsburg distrust of Italy, and in particular fears that Italy could exercise its claim to compensation in the Balkans (embodied in article 8 of the Triple Alliance), caused Berchtold to look on his northern ally with almost as much suspicion as a result of this leak as he did on his Mediterranean ally. Communications from Vienna to Berlin were therefore kept to a minimum.138 The Germans had no direct share in drafting the ultimatum which Austria-Hungary planned to send to Serbia, although they were aware of its main points and knew that its contents were designed to be unacceptable to the Serbs. Germany’s immediate purpose remained relatively consistent: an Austrian coup against Serbia, while Germany worked to localize and limit the repercussions.