Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914

That day, while Europe held its breath, awaiting Serbia’s response to Vienna’s ultimatum, a violent thunderstorm struck central Europe. Outside the parliament building in Budapest a statue of Gyula Andrássy, one of the architects of the Dual Monarchy, was allegedly seen to totter. Troubled citizens told each other that their ancestors deemed such occurrences portents. But, as Finance Ministry official Lajos Thalloczy demanded in his diary: ‘for whom?’ That afternoon, expectant crowds gathered in the streets of Berlin, but by nightfall no further news was forthcoming.

Next day, Saturday the 25th, German teacher Gertrud Schädla described in her diary how her family lunged for their morning paper, desperate for the latest tidings. She wrote: ‘Despite the danger that we shall be dragged into a war, people applaud Austria’s muscular stance. The murder of the ducal couple demands harsh punishment.’ As a gesture to the gravity of the international situation, the local sharpshooters’ fair was cancelled, though booths and roundabouts had already been erected. Meanwhile Belgrade was thronged with worried people chattering in the streets, at their garden gates and in such cafés as The Russian Tsar. Each new edition of the papers was seized upon as eagerly as in Gertrud Schädla’s house. There were rumours – accurate enough – of Austrian troops gathering on the border, but still no panic: Serbs, with their boundless capacity for self-delusion, clung to a belief that somehow fate would pass them by.

On the evening of the 25th, Germany’s Social Democrats staged protests against war. Bethmann rejected conservative demands for a blanket ban on assemblies, but decreed that they must be confined to halls, staying off the streets. Over 100,000 people attended rallies around the country, at which SPD leaders proclaimed that Austria was picking a fight Germany should not join.

All politicians find it hard to address with conviction more than one emergency at a time. This goes far to explain why the British government was slow to engage with events in Europe. Until the last week of July, the minds of senior ministers were fixed upon the Ulster crisis, to the near-exclusion of all else. Prime minister Herbert Asquith mentioned the assassinations just once, almost immediately after the event, in his intimate letters to Venetia Stanley, then not again until 24 July. In the intervening period, a Hungarian woman acquaintance called on David Lloyd George and harangued him about the rash insouciance with which the British were treating the reverberations of Sarajevo; she argued that unless Austrian anger could be assuaged, a war was inevitable. The chancellor was unimpressed, for which he later expressed regret. A Times leader on 3 July headed ‘Efforts for Peace’ related to Ulster, not Europe. It seemed entirely plausible that the United Kingdom was about to be plunged into a civil war, in which Protestant Ulstermen would be pitted against the Liberal government. Not only the Conservative Party, but also much of the British aristocracy and many of the army’s officers, passionately supported the rebels.

In an age when every European nation measured power by breadth of empire, imperialists saw Britain’s greatness imperilled if its other island was permitted to secede. The Ulster crisis fell upon a society already stricken by industrial strife: there was a protracted lock-out in the building trades, together with conflicts in the mines, on railways and in the engineering industry. In a July speech Lloyd George warned that the industrial and Irish confrontations were alike ‘the gravest with which any government has had to deal for centuries’. He did not exaggerate. A historic constitutional clash beckoned, as King George V recognised when he summoned a conference of the warring parties at Buckingham Palace to seek a path to reconciliation.

Yet another Times leader, headed ‘The King and the Crisis’, on 20 July, referred to Ulster. Catholic passions were rising in step with those of Protestants: on Tuesday the 21st the Manchester Guardian reported that men of the Dublin Fusiliers, returning from camp training, were heard shouting: ‘We will have Home Rule at any cost!’ ‘A nation once again!’ A letter-writer to The Economist asked what would happen to Lord Roberts’ rash public assertion – made in support of the army’s Orange sympathisers – that soldiers must be allowed to exercise their consciences, if Irish nationalists wearing British khaki claimed such a right. There were extraordinary scenes as the foremost Home Rulers, Redmond and Dillon, walked towards Buckingham Palace to attend the King’s conference: Irish Guardsmen in uniform cheered them on their way.

On 22 July Ulster still dominated the columns of The Times, but the paper admitted that the growing tension between Austria-Hungary and Serbia had become ‘too serious to be ignored’, though ‘we have no wish to exaggerate the dangers … a cool perception of their greatness may enable the Powers to conjure them before it is too late’. The Times found it so evident that war would threaten the very existence of Austria-Hungary that it cherished every hope the Emperor would act ‘reasonably’. On the afternoon of the 24th, Asquith was obliged to tell the House of Commons that the King’s Irish conference had broken down without a resolution. The cabinet plunged into vexed debate about the prospective boundaries of the six Ulster counties now scheduled for exclusion from immediate implementation of Home Rule – this was a concession extracted by the Protestant rebels at gunpoint. But then the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, reported to his colleagues upon the draconian terms of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia. Winston Churchill has described in immortal phrases how ‘the parishes of Fermanagh and Tyrone faded back into the mists and squalls of Ireland, and a strange light began immediately, and by perceptible gradations, to fall and grow upon the map of Europe’.

Yet that night, few British people retired to their beds anticipating any consequences for themselves from the Balkan drama. It is only because European war caused the Irish crisis to be swept aside, the government to postpone implementation of Home Rule for the duration and then forever – because it was supplanted in 1921 by Irish partition and independence – that the savage hatreds, the magnitude of the threat to Britain’s political fabric, are often today underrated. The Ulster imbroglio also significantly influenced Berlin’s attitude: German leaders saw the British impaled upon their domestic troubles, and found it hard to imagine that a nation thus preoccupied and divided could menace their own purposes.

On the 25th, for the first time The Times acknowledged the gravity of the situation, saying – though still only in a second leader – that unless Austria-Hungary moderated its attitude towards Serbia, ‘we stand upon the edge of war, and of a war fraught with dangers that are incalculable to all the Great Powers … Austria-Hungary leaves a small and excitable Balkan kingdom to decide at a few hours’ notice whether there is, or is not, to be a third Balkan war, and a Balkan war this time in which one of the Great Powers will be involved as a principal from the first.’ It was widely remarked that, if Austria had been seriously interested in averting conflict, its ultimatum would have allowed a pause of more than forty-eight hours for the Serbian response, to give time for diplomacy to work.

But the British public still took more notice of such domestic trivia as ‘the motor-horn nuisance’ much discussed in The Times’s correspondence column. On 24 July Asquith mentioned the Balkans to Venetia Stanley in tones that still displayed Olympian detachment, though also sluggishly rising concern: ‘Russia is trying to drag us in … The curious thing is that on many, if not most, of the points Austria has a good and Serbia a very bad case, but the Austrians are quite the stupidest people in Europe … and there is a brutality about their mode of procedure which will make most people think that it is a case of a big Power wantonly bullying a little one. Anyhow it is the most dangerous situation of the last 40 years, and may have incidentally the good effect of throwing into the background the lurid pictures of “civil war” in Ulster.’ Asquith told the Archbishop of Canterbury that the Serbs deserved ‘a thorough thrashing’. On the afternoon of the 25th he presided at a diplomatic garden party at 10 Downing Street, where a string orchestra played while the German ambassador rubbed shoulders with the Serbian minister, and the Lloyd Georges mingled with assorted peers.

That same Saturday night the attorney-general, Sir John Simon, addressed a gathering of Manchester Liberals at Altrincham. He told them: ‘We have been so filled with our own political developments that some of us may not have noticed how serious a situation is threatening on the continent of Europe … Let us resolve that the part which this country plays … shall from beginning to end be the part of a mediator simply desirous of promoting better and more peaceful relations.’ It is understandable that many Europeans, both allies and enemies, recoiled from such self-righteousness.

In the press announcement of house parties for the forthcoming Cowes yachting week, it was stated that ‘Prince Henry of Prussia was to have been among the guests, but is unable to leave Germany at present owing to the crisis, though he may do so later should the situation improve.’ Walter Cunliffe, governor of the Bank of England, asserted confidently to his guests at Inverewe in the Scottish Highlands that a great war was impossible, because ‘the Germans haven’t got the credits’. The financier Sir Ernest Cassell gave the same assurance to Mrs George Keppel’s glittering summer house party across the Channel at Clingendaal House, near The Hague: a general European conflict could not be funded. However, a young guest declared that she must go home anyway – Violet Asquith wanted to be with her father in Downing Street. Some of the young men took a cue from her. Lord Lascelles, a Grenadier Guardsman, said to his friend Lord Castlerosse, ‘We had better get back.’ They motored to the coast, and caught a boat to England among other uneasy folk with the same idea.

Just before the 6 p.m. expiry of Austria’s deadline on the 25th, Serbia’s response was delivered by the prime minister personally to Austria’s Baron Giesl. Pašić, conscious of the solemnity of the moment, wore an expression of mournful gravity. He said to Giesl in imperfect German: ‘Part of your demands we have accepted, for the rest we place our hopes on your loyalty and chivalry as an Austrian general. With you we have always been very satisfied.’ The Serbs accepted all Vienna’s harsh terms save its requirement for Austrians to be granted authority on their soil. When this response became known in western Europe, there were some brief delusions that war was averted. ‘People are relieved and at the same time disappointed to hear that Serbia is giving in,’ wrote André Gide. But Vienna made no pretence of desiring a peaceful outcome: whatever the Serbian response, Baron Giesl had been instructed to remove himself to the border at Zemun by the 6.30 train.

News that the ultimatum had not been accepted in totality prompted an explosion of frivolous glee in Vienna, where crowds surged through the streets until the small hours. It has recently been suggested that Serbia’s Nikola Pašić was also secretly enthused about a war that would commit Russia in support of Serbia’s pan-Slav ambitions; while this is remotely possible, it is again wholly unproven and unprovable. But the Serbs knew their response would not satisfy Vienna, and their own mobilisation orders had been dispatched four hours earlier, at 2 p.m. That night government official Jovan Žujović, now in uniform, boarded a train carrying the General Staff eastward to the army’s concentration area, while his brother, a doctor, reported to a divisional field hospital. After two recent conflicts and a mobilisation, the Serbs were more familiar with the routines than any other nation in Europe. But their army had not yet re-equipped after the Second Balkan War, and the government knew how ill-stocked were its arsenals – a further reason for doubting that Pašić welcomed hostilities.

Next morning Berchtold informed his Emperor – mendaciously – that the Serbs had fired on Austria’s Danube steamers. Old Franz Joseph promptly signed the Empire’s mobilisation order, saying enigmatically, ‘Also doch!’ – ‘So, after all!’ Since the crisis began, his ministers had seriously debated only two matters: diplomatic measures to ensure German support, and the mechanics of Serbia’s dismemberment after its conquest. Belgrade, the country’s sole city of any stature, was to be annexed to the Hapsburg Empire, together with some additional territory. Other portions would be offered to Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro, to reconcile them to the new dispensation. Serbia would thus cease to trouble the world; the pan-Slav movement would be deprived of its prime mover. Both Austria and Germany repeatedly lied about these intentions, assuring the Russians and the world that the Hapsburg government had no plans for imposing territorial changes.

Count István Burián wrote that ‘across the whole of Europe our steps are rumbling like a storm which truly will decide our destiny’. Theodor Wolff, editor of the Berliner Tageblatt, asserted that the increasingly frenzied response to the appearance of each special edition on the streets of the capital reflected not merely a hunger for news, but each man’s unwillingness to be alone, his yearning to share his own fears with others: ‘Suddenly the crowds move. A couple of delivery vans appear, stormed by throngs of people. Some hold a white paper, others stare over their shoulders … People stand in their autos and carriages, hanging out over the street, staring, waiting for certainty … Never before has there been so much reading in the streets … Everyone does it, the flower-sellers in front of Café Kranzler as eagerly as the elegant lady inside the café itself.’

An extra edition at 9.30 p.m. on the 25th reported that the Serbs had rejected Vienna’s ultimatum. Few people cheered; most simply went home. But crowds gathered in front of the Austrian and Italian embassies screaming patriotic slogans: ‘Down with Serbia!’ Nationalists sang outside the chancellor’s office. Café orchestras played ‘Deutschland über alles’. In Wolff’s words, ‘the music rose sublimely to the heavens’, followed by Austria’s anthem ‘Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser’. Kurt Riezler wrote: ‘in the evening and on Sunday people were singing. The chancellor is much moved, deeply stirred and strengthened, especially since news [of such displays of popular emotion] is coming in from across the Empire. Among the people [there is] an enormous, if confused, urge for action, a yearning for a great movement … to rise up for a great cause, to show one’s powers.’

Joffre, France’s chief of staff and commander-in-chief, found civilian politicians nervous, as well they might be, facing a huge crisis with the president and premier still abroad. The general told Messimy, the war minister, that he was quite prepared to handle a mobilisation in their absence: ‘Monsieur le Ministre, if we have to make war we shall do so.’ Messimy responded emotionally: ‘Bravo!’ On 25 July, without reference to Joffre, the minister telegraphed an order for all senior officers on leave to return to their units, which caused the general testily to remind him that there was a proper sequence for such measures, which Messimy had pre-empted. That night, French intelligence learned that German officers in Switzerland had been recalled from leave; guards were being placed on key bridges across the Kaiser’s empire. It was nonetheless decided not to recall vacationing French soldiers, many of whom were still needed at home for the harvest.

In London Sir Edward Grey still harboured a huge though scarcely ignoble delusion: that Germany would exercise its influence upon Vienna to prevent a Balkan quarrel from escalating into a general European conflict. But that night of the 25th, the head of the Foreign Office’s East and West Department, Sir Eyre Crowe, warned of the gravity of the situation. He wrote that everything now hinged upon the vital question of ‘whether Germany is or is not determined to have this war now’, and urged that the most likely way of preventing disaster was for Britain to make plain that it would not remain neutral in a conflict that engaged France and Russia. But at that moment there was no possibility that the cabinet or the House of Commons would have endorsed any such commitment, even had Grey asked for it – as he did not.

Europe now had a war: only its scale remained to be determined. Everything turned upon Russia. Jules Cambon, the French ambassador in Berlin, told his Belgian counterpart: ‘Today the fate of France and the conservation of the peace of Europe depend upon a foreign will, that of the Tsar. What will he decide? And upon what advice? If he decides for war France, the victim of her alliance, will follow the destiny of her ally on the battlefields.’ It was taken for granted that Serbia would not have dared to reject even a part of Austria’s ultimatum without being confident of Russia’s support. At 1 a.m. on 26 July St Petersburg placed Russian Poland under martial law. Later that day, critical pre-mobilisation orders were issued. The army required a fortnight to be ready to fight, a month to be fully deployed, and thus every hour counted. Sazonov wanted only partial mobilisation; Russia had taken this same step in 1912 without precipitating a war. It seemed prudent to avoid directly provoking the Germans, and thus to hold back from activating the troops of Warsaw district, closest to their frontier. But when Danilov the quartermaster-general returned from the Caucasus that day, he explained to the foreign minister that a limited mobilisation would critically impede the full process.

On the 26th also, the minister of internal affairs published an order prohibiting publication or public mention of information about the armed forces, under the terms of Russia’s treason laws. Notice was given that lighthouses and navigation lights were being doused in all Russian waters save the inland Caspian and Azov seas. The naval base at Sebastopol was closed to shipping, and Russian vessels at sea were instructed to halt radio transmissions. A series of domestic restrictions was introduced, starting with a 10 p.m. closure order for all St Petersburg restaurants. Next day all Germans and Austrians on Russian soil were ordered to settle their affairs and leave the country forthwith. From the 27th also, shipping in the Black Sea was warned that any craft steaming inshore during the hours of darkness was liable to be fired upon.

Soldiers began to move. Outside Moscow, the Sumskoi Hussars were recalled from exercises to barracks, where horses were reshod, campaign uniforms issued, harness and equipment checked. Men locked their personal possessions into chests which were labelled with the names and addresses of their next of kin. The officers’ mess silver was sent to the State Bank for safekeeping, and cherished regimental banners were presented to a museum. The Serbian military attaché to Berlin noted that he travelled across Germany on 26–27 July without observing any warlike activity, but on crossing into Russian territory ‘we noticed mobilisation steps being taken on a grand scale’. When Sir George Buchanan questioned Sazonov about Russia’s scurrying soldiery, the foreign minister responded soothingly that they were merely responding to the ongoing industrial turbulence. The ambassador, however, was in no doubt that the army was preparing for war. That day, the 26th, Grey put to Prince Lichnowsky, the German ambassador in London, Britain’s proposed solution to the crisis: a four-power conference. Berlin promptly dismissed this, believing that such a gathering would be bound to condemn Austria. Here again was evidence of the German indifference to securing a diplomatic outcome.

In the last days of July, the weight of traffic flying between governments swamped the relatively primitive international communications system, so that vital cables became subject to chronic delay. Only a fraction of government messages were transmitted by diplomatic wireless: most relied upon the commercial telegraph network. Details of Russia’s mobilisation were slow to reach the French government, for instance, because every message from its St Petersburg embassy had to be carried more than two miles to the public telegraph office. The British Foreign Office cipher clerks, only four in number, were overwhelmed: they worked in pairs, one reading out the groups, the other transcribing them onto a Post Office form – everything was done in longhand. Since five-number groups cost more to send, they made efforts to achieve terseness in the interests of economy. Once completed, a message was sealed in an envelope and taken by a messenger half a mile to London’s central post office in The Strand for transmission.

German civilians were becoming increasingly conscious that they might have to fight. The prospect roused dismay among socialists, enthusiasm among conservatives. Wilhelm Kaisen was a twenty-seven-year-old Bremen plasterer, and a dedicated Social Democrat. On 26 July he wrote to his girlfriend Helene expressing revulsion at the prospect before Europe: ‘War – those letters embrace such a dreadful ocean of blood and horror that they make us shudder to contemplate them.’ Kaisen was full of hopes that the Socialist International would intervene to prevent conflict. If it failed to do so, he foresaw mutiny among soldiers, especially ‘once murderous aircraft unleash perdition from the sky’. Across Europe in the last weekend of July, fears of the breaking storm prompted tens of thousands of hasty weddings. In the small town of Linden near Hanover, the register office married forty-six couples before finally closing at 11 o’clock on Sunday night. In Hanover itself, two hundred couples tied the knot.

Admiral Tirpitz had told a diplomat earlier in 1914, with doubtful accuracy, that the British had their newspapers under much better control than did Germany. ‘In spite of your “liberty of the press”, at a hint from your government your whole national press becomes unanimous on questions outside your domestic politics.’ By contrast, German newspapers, said the admiral contemptuously, were ‘ocean tramps’, each representing the view of its own little party. There were 3,000 titles, fifty of them in Berlin. Now, the Berlin Post urged that Austria should be left alone to pursue whatever course she chose. The Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung said on 24 July: ‘we are not required to support Hapsburg wars of aggression’. Vorwärts, a Social Democratic publication, declared contemptuously on 27 July that ‘only immature adolescents could be attracted to a warrior adventure that must turn Europe into a slaughterhouse stinking of blood and decay’.

Contrarily, in Freiburg the town’s semi-official bulletin, Freiburger Tagblatt, asserted that Austria’s looming war with Serbia ‘holds sway completely over our city. Our whole life [has] played out as if we ourselves had to draw the sword – among families, in shops and public places, on the streets, in tram cars. These are genuine lofty sentiments, rooted in real German patriotism.’ Freiburger Zeitung wrote of ‘a wave of the highest patriotic enthusiasm [which] cascaded like a spring flood through the entire city’. Even the most pacifistic socialist papers said that if war came to Germany the working class would fight, rallying to the defence of the Fatherland. A German defeat would be ‘unthinkable, horrible … we do not desire that our women and children should be victims of the Cossack’s bestialities’.

A liberal journalist wrote on 26 July in Weser-Zeitung: ‘We cannot allow Austria to go under, for then we should ourselves be threatened with becoming subject to the greater Russian colossus, with its barbarism. We must fight now in order to secure for ourselves freedom and peace. The storm from east and west will be terrible but the skill, courage, and sacrifices of our army will prevail. Every German will feel the glorious duty of showing himself worthy of our forefathers [who fought] at Leipzig and Sedan.’ But even the most strident editorialists hoped that France and Britain would remain neutral, leaving Germany to direct its undivided military attentions to Russia. The Berlin government, in one of its spasms of moderation, urged the Austrians initially to mobilise only sufficient forces to address Serbia.

But on 26 July, Jules Cambon warned German foreign minister Jagow that the British would not this time remain neutral, as they had in 1870. Jagow shrugged: ‘you have your information and we have ours, which is completely different. We are confident of British neutrality.’ Cambon was among those who always thereafter believed this a critical misapprehension – that if the Germans had known Britain would fight, they would not have risked war. His view seems mistaken, however. The key German decision-makers, Moltke foremost among them, had long before weighed the possibility and indeed likelihood of British intervention – and discounted it as irrelevant. The outcome of a brief continental struggle would be determined by the clash of vast armies, to which a British troop contribution would perforce be tiny, and the Royal Navy irrelevant.

At this stage, too, most of Britain’s governing class remained indifferent to the fate of Serbia and strongly hostile to intervention. The British ambassador in Paris, Sir Francis Bertie, wrote on 27 July: ‘It seems incredible that the Russian Government should plunge Europe into war in order to make themselves the protectors of the Serbians.’ Many influential people questioned the wisdom of shattering European peace to save squalid little Serbia.

Meanwhile Berchtold, in Vienna, decided that it had become urgent to initiate military action: he wrote apprehensively that it was ‘not impossible that the Triple Entente might yet try to achieve a peaceful solution of the conflict unless a clear situation is created by a declaration of war’. From Berlin, without Bethmann’s knowledge, Moltke sent a message to Vienna urging general mobilisation and rejection of mediation; but this was decrypted and read by the Austrians only after they had already made their commitment to march. At 11 a.m. on Tuesday, 28 July, sitting at a little writing table in his study at Bad Ischl, the Emperor Franz Joseph signed a declaration of war, the document which would prove the death warrant of his own empire.

Early that afternoon, via telegraph, a copy of this missive reached the Serbian Foreign Ministry’s temporary quarters in Niš. Officials at first suspected a hoax. One of them, Milan Stojadinović, later wrote: ‘its form was so very unusual, in those days when the very etiquette of such things was still deemed important’. The language was undiplomatically crude and terse, but the Serbs eventually decided the telegram must be genuine. One of them bore it down the street to the Europa coffee house, where the prime minister was lunching with Strandman, Russia’s acting envoy.

The Serb leader read the brief words with every eye in the place upon him. Then he crossed himself, passed the fatal document to his Russian companion, rose and addressed the company: ‘Austria has declared war on us. Our cause is a just one. God will help us.’ Another Foreign Ministry official hurried in, to report that a similarly worded communication had just reached the army high command in Kragujevac. Shortly afterwards, a message from St Petersburg reached Strandman, which he was ordered to deliver personally to Pašić. Signed by the Tsar, it declared that while Russia desired peace, it would not remain indifferent to the fate of Serbia. After reading this, Pašić once again crossed himself and said reverently and theatrically, ‘Lord, great merciful Russian Tsar.’

In Paris, the sensation of 28 July was not, however, Austria’s declaration of war, but instead that day’s acquittal of Madame Caillaux for her admitted killing of Gaston Calmette. Amid worldwide amazement, a jury decided that Le Figaro’s coverage of her husband and of their relationship in the days when she was merely his mistress made it not unreasonable for her to have shot its editor. And all the while, France’s leaders remained almost incommunicado on their Baltic cruise. The trip had become a nightmare: Poincaré and Viviani were obliged to continue with exchanges of courtesies in Stockholm and an apparently interminable sea passage while war clouds swept towards western Europe. Many of the wireless messages that reached them on the 26th proved indecipherable. President and prime minister conducted tense conversations, turning over the crisis. Poincaré wrote: ‘M. Viviani and I come back always to the same question: what does Austria want? What does Germany want?’

Even if the contribution of the French president to the crisis was more proactive than he later admitted, he cannot have relished meandering across the Baltic while Europe’s flames kindled and flared. In Paris, Joffre and France’s soldiers were becoming acutely frustrated by the political paralysis. The general wrote crossly: ‘The main preoccupation [of ministers] … was to make no move which could be construed as anything except a response to German initiatives. This timid attitude was largely the result of the absence of the heads of the government.’ He was appalled on the 28th, when a 21 July dispatch reached Messimy from Cambon in Berlin, which had been ‘incomprehensibly’ delayed for a week, claiming that Germany had begun pre-mobilisation measures. The ambassador overstated the case, but the French now believed Moltke’s forces to be a week ahead of themselves in preparedness, and still Messimy would not act in Viviani’s absence.

The war minister’s caution was prudent; but Joffre’s fuming anger emphasises the urgency with which soldiers were now shouldering a path to the centre of the stage in France, Russia, Germany. As war loomed, every commander-in-chief was terrified of the consequences if the enemy was ready to fight first. Thus, each began to press his respective political leaders. The Russian chiefs of staff lamented to the president of the Duma the Tsar’s indecision. Europe’s armaments race and military contingency plans were not responsible for war, because they were symptoms rather than causes. But by the last days of July 1914 generals were pushing governments towards the abyss: they knew they would take the blame if their nation lost on the battlefield the deadly game of grandmother’s footsteps that was now being played.

On the 27th, Poincaré and Viviani learned that the French press had become savagely critical of their absence from Paris. The two men decided to hasten home after refuelling at Copenhagen, and duly arrived at Dunkirk early on the morning of 29 July. The Germans had been insistently jamming communications between Paris, St Petersburg and Berlin, but it is hard to suggest that such mischief altered outcomes. The Russians were determined to react to Austria’s assault on Serbia. The French government was committed to support them, strongly influenced by knowledge that if war came, the Germans would strike at France first. The powerful Eiffel Tower radio station enabled the Russian military attaché to maintain contact with St Petersburg through the crisis, overcoming German interference. The Baltic yachting trip of Poincaré and Viviani probably had little or no influence upon the course of history. The president favoured a policy of ‘firmness’ towards Germany; he is likely to have led his country to support Russia in the July crisis whether or not he had met Sazonov at St Petersburg.

Many French people recognised a growing likelihood that they would have to fight. On Sunday the 26th there were scenes of intense excitement on the streets of Paris: appearances by the usual weekend military bands were cheered; a Hapsburg flag was burnt by protesters outside the Austrian embassy. Most citizens faced the prospect of war without enthusiasm but with an overwhelming sense of resignation, placing blame squarely upon Germany. As printer Louis Derenne left his works in Orléans he heard a crowd shouting ‘Mort aux Boches!’, heedless of the fact that thus far the Austrians had been prime movers in the crisis. ‘We are getting ready to enter a long tunnel full of blood and darkness,’ wrote André Gide. The government gave no clear public signals of its intentions until Poincaré and Viviani reached the capital on the 29th, but it was generally assumed that if Russia fought, so too would France.

Joffre, on his own initiative, had told the Russians on the 27th that they could expect his country’s full support. Both the chief of staff and Messimy, the war minister, urged Russia to hasten its mobilisation and deploy as rapidly as possible against Germany. They knew that its war plan required an immediate attack in the West. It was vital to French security that the Russians should realise as swiftly as possible a ‘threat in being’, to oblige Moltke to divide his forces. In Paris, a rush to hoard gold caused panic on the Bourse. In France, as across Europe, a collapse of credit was creating a huge financial crisis which was alleviated only by the intervention of governments. People milled on the boulevards and thronged cafés and restaurants, less in search of refreshment than of news and companionship.

In Berlin on Tuesday evening, the 28th, some thousands of people from working-class areas marched into the city centre singing socialist songs and crying out ‘Down with the war!’ and ‘Long live social democracy!’ They were prevented from entering the main thoroughfares by mounted police with drawn swords, though at about 10 p.m. a thousand broke through to the Unter den Linden. On the pavements, bystanders showed their disapproval by singing the rousing patriotic songs ‘Wacht am Rhein’ and ‘Heil dir im Siegerkranz’. Half an hour later the police charged and cleared the street, to loud applause from patrons nursing their mugs of hot chocolate on the balconies of Café Bauer and Café Kranzler.

Twenty-eight people were arrested for chanting anti-war slogans, and thus causing ‘public disturbance’. The right-wing press had a field day next morning, denouncing the demonstrators as ‘a mob’, and anti-war protesters as traitors. Some historians suggest that more Germans demonstrated against war than in its favour, which may well be true. But the conduct of the Kaiser, Moltke and Bethmann was wholly uninfluenced by exhibitions of dissent which they judged – correctly – would cease when the nation found itself committed. Far fewer Germans protested against war than had taken to the streets four years earlier, to demand Prussian voting reform.

The first significant strategic move by Britain came on Sunday, 26 July, when the Royal Navy’s Home Fleet was due to disperse after a trial mobilisation. The staff of Northcliffe’s Daily Mail believed that they played some role in the First Lord of the Admiralty’s initiative that day. Amid looming crisis, they telegraphed him at his holiday rendezvous in Norfolk: ‘Winston Churchill Pear Tree Cottage Overstrand: WAR DECLARED AUSTRIA SERBIA GERMAN FLEET CONCENTRATING MAY WE ASK IS IT TRUE BRITISH FLEET DEMOBILISING: DAILY MAIL’. This missive was delivered to Churchill on the nearby beach. He never responded, but spoke by telephone within the hour to the First Sea Lord, Prince Louis of Battenberg, and took the afternoon train back to London. Late that night, an order was issued to cancel the dispersal of the fleet, which two days later was dispatched to its war station at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands. Paul Cambon said later that Churchill rendered a great service to France by his impassioned support for intervention and his order not to demobilise the fleet ‘which we [the French] have never sufficiently recognised’.

Yet there was still among the British at large no sense of imminent peril. Asquith wrote to Venetia Stanley on the 28th: ‘We had a cabinet yesterday … mainly to talk about war & peace. I am afraid that Grey’s experiment of a Conference à quatre won’t come off, as the Germans refuse to take a hand. The only real hope is that Austria & Russia may come to a deal among themselves. But at this moment things don’t look well, & Winston’s spirits are probably rising.’ Churchill adopted a shamelessly cynical view, mirroring that which was driving policy in Berlin: ‘if war was inevitable this was by far the most favourable opportunity and the only one that would bring France, Russia and ourselves together’. He wrote that day to his wife Clementine: ‘My darling One & beautiful – Everything tends towards catastrophe, & collapse. I am interested, geared-up & happy.’ Asquith ended his 28 July letter to Venetia Stanley on a bathetic note: ‘It is a slack evening of Supply at the House, so I am getting Violet to beat up one or two people to dine at home & play Bridge.’ The prime minister showed no greater agitation the following evening, the 29th: ‘I have just finished an Army Council … Rather interesting because it enables one to realise what are the first steps in an actual war.’

Some people seized upon looming conflict as a profit-making opportunity. The Cotton Powder Company, whose impressive engraved copperplate letterhead announced its Kent works as ‘manufacturers of Cordite, Guncotton, Blasting Explosives, Distress Signals, Detonators etc’, wrote on 29 July to the Serbian war minister. Its board offered to provide 10,000 rifle grenades, ‘part of a contract for 80,000 which we are executing for another foreign government … This present order followed a previously executed order for 25,000 which have been used up in actual hostilities with the most satisfactory results … 10,000 are packed ready for dispatch and could be shipped within twenty-four hours. If desired the same Grenade may be thrown by hand for close-quarter fighting.’ There is no record of whether such an order was placed by Belgrade, but the Cotton Powder Company could not be accused of lacking zeal on behalf of British enterprise.

On the evening of 28 July, Russian military intelligence reported that three-quarters of the Austrian army was being mobilised, twelve out of sixteen corps – many more troops than Vienna needed to tackle Serbia. Though the Tsar had yet to sign the order, that night Russia’s chief of staff wired the senior officers of all military districts, warning that ‘30 July will be proclaimed the first day of our general mobilisation.’ The Tsar yielded to Sazonov’s urgings, and agreed that general mobilisation should start next day. From 24 July the Russians had made military preparations ahead of any other nations save Austria and Serbia, yet every Russian decision was made against the background of the former’s commitment to crush the Serbs by force. Hopes for peace crumbled in St Petersburg on the 29th, when word came that the Austrians had begun to bombard Belgrade.

Russia’s politicians and diplomats united in a belief that they must fight. That day the head of mission in Sofia, A.A. Savinsky, an accustomed moderate, said that if the country gave way, ‘our prestige in the Slav world and in the Balkans would perish never to return’. Aleksandr Giers in Constantinople said that if Russia bowed, Turkey and the Balkans would unfailingly swing into the Central Powers’ camp. Another diplomat, Nikolai de Basily, replied with dignity to a friend – the Austrian military attaché – who warned of domestic catastrophe if the Tsar went to war: ‘You commit a serious error of calculation in supposing the fear of revolution will prevent Russia from fulfilling its national duty.’

Bethmann Hollweg now warned St Petersburg that unless Russia halted its preparations, Germany would mobilise. This message reinforced Sazonov’s conviction that a clash was unavoidable – but caused the Tsar to waver again. He had received a personal message from the Kaiser; in response, he insisted that Russia should draw back a step – albeit a fruitless step – and revert to partial mobilisation. But Sazonov remained insistent. At 5 o’clock on the following afternoon of 30 July, while still lamenting ‘sending thousands and thousands of men to their deaths’, Nicholas signed a general mobilisation order, to take effect next morning.

That evening, many Russian army units were alerted by telephone to expect a courier carrying secret instructions. The Sumskoi Hussars were ordered to readiness to entrain in thirty-six hours for Poland’s frontier with East Prussia, while the grenadier regiment that shared their barracks outside Moscow headed for the Austrian border. Soldiers were issued with tinned emergency rations. Cornet Sokolov pointed out that these were dated 1904, but this did nothing to stem soldiers’ curiosity. To the embarrassment of the Hussars’ officers, within an hour the barracks was littered with empty tins. ‘They were just like children!’ wrote Vladimir Littauer in exasperation. He contrasted their behaviour with that of German stragglers whom they later captured, some of them starving. So disciplined were the Kaiser’s soldiers that, in the absence of orders, not a man had touched his emergency rations.

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 (#ulink_3f947a6b-17a1-5ed9-8517-02454add6017)