Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914

The Austrian chargé in Belgrade, Wilhelm von Stork, reported angrily to Vienna on 30 June: ‘There is exultation in the streets and cafés on account of our tragedy, and it is described as the finger of God and a justified punishment for everything bad Austria-Hungary has ever done to Serbia.’ The Serbian opposition press, with stunning indifference to its country’s interests and reputation, applauded the Archduke’s killing. When student Jovan Dinić hurried to Belgrade’s main square to discuss the news with friends, he was surprised to find them holding forth not in shocked whispers, but in strident exultation. A famously bright young aspiring lawyer proclaimed that Austrian military manoeuvres in Bosnia had been an intolerable provocation and a direct threat to all Serbs; that the Serbs of Bosnia would now ‘leap through fire’ alongside the Serbian nation. Misunderstandings intensified rancour: on that same 30 June, the Montenegrin border town of Metalka was bedecked with flags, causing the outraged Austrians to suppose that their neighbours were celebrating Franz Ferdinand’s murder. Only a week later did they learn that Metalka had been marking the birthday of Montenegro’s Crown Prince. Austria embraced such petty fantasy provocations alongside the large and real one of the archducal murder.

Participants in all conflicts with more than two belligerents have different motivations for deciding to fight, and this was emphatically true in 1914. The decision-making of seven governments was influenced by widely diverse ambitions and fears. Though struggles ensued in many parts of the world, and especially in Europe, and warring nations professed common allegiances, they were certainly not impelled by a common logic. Austria made an almost immediate decision to respond to Franz Ferdinand’s assassination by invading Serbia, not because its leaders cared a fig for the persons of the slain Archduke and his embarrassing wife, but because the murders represented the best justification they would ever have for settling accounts with a mortally troublesome neighbour.

The rulers of the Hapsburg Empire convinced themselves that military action was the only way out of their difficulties, not merely with Serbia, but with their own restless peoples. Finance minister Ritter von Bilinski said later: ‘We decided on war quite early.’ Vienna’s military attaché in Belgrade reported that the killings had been planned and organised by the head of Serbian intelligence. Austria’s rulers agreed that they thus represented a declaration of war, though Vienna had no more evidence to link them to the Serbs’ monarchy or elected government than do modern historians. The war minister, Alexander von Krobatin, and Gen. Oskar Potiorek, commander-in-chief in Bosnia-Herzegovina, alike urged military action. Berchtold, often scorned by his peers as a ditherer, displayed an untimely resolution. On 30 June he spoke privately of the need for a ‘final and fundamental reckoning’ with Serbia.

Berchtold was surrounded by a group of young diplomats – Janós, Count Forgách; Alexander, Baron von Musulin; Alexander, Count Hoyos – who were convinced that an assertive and expansionist foreign policy was the best cure for the Empire’s domestic ills. Forgách was a prime mover in the commitment to crush Serbia. Hoyos became responsible for ensuring Germany’s support; he emphasised the recklessness prevailing in Vienna when he said: ‘it is immaterial to us whether world war comes out of all this’. Musulin drafted the critical communications: an ‘impetuous chatterbox’, he later took pride in calling himself ‘the man who caused the war’.

The Emperor Franz Joseph wrote personally to Kaiser Wilhelm saying: ‘You too will be convinced after the latest terrible events in Bosnia that a [peaceful] reconciliation of the conflict between ourselves and Serbia is unthinkable.’ On 4 July Berchtold dispatched Hoyos to Berlin, where the diplomat thereafter held a series of meetings with Wilhelm and his advisers, at which he was promised Germany’s unconditional support for any course of action Austria chose to adopt – what later became notorious as ‘the blank cheque’, central plank of the case for German responsibility for the First World War. On the evening of 5 July, the Austrian envoy reported the Kaiser saying that ‘if we really saw the necessity for military action against Serbia, he would think it regrettable if we did not take advantage of the present moment, which is favourable from our point of view’.

The Germans urged the Austrians to force the pace, denying the Serbians time to marshal diplomatic or military support; they wanted Vienna to confront St Petersburg with a swift fait accompli – Hapsburg troops occupying the Serb capital. When Hoyos went home, Arthur Zimmerman, the German under-secretary of state, estimated a 90 per cent probability of hostilities between Austria and Serbia. During the weeks that followed before Vienna’s ultimatum was finally delivered, the Germans fumed at Austrian dilatoriness. Bethmann, the chancellor, showed himself vulnerable to moments of panic. Kurt Riezler, his confidential secretary and principal counsellor, wrote in his diary on 6 July, expressing dismay about a scenario somewhat troubling his master: ‘an action against Serbia can lead to a world war. From a war, regardless of the outcome, the chancellor expects a revolution of everything that exists … Generally delusion all round, a thick fog over the people. The same in all of Europe. The future belongs to Russia, which … thrusts itself on us as a heavier and heavier nightmare.’

Riezler sought to reassure Bethmann by suggesting that it might be possible to achieve a triumph over Serbia by diplomacy alone, then added encouragingly: ‘if war should come and the veil [of amity which masks the fundamental enmity between peoples] should fall, then the entire Volk will follow, driven by a sense of emergency and danger. Victory is liberation.’ Amid such Wagnerian reflections and fantasies did Germany’s political leaders enter the July crisis. At that stage, Bethmann and the Kaiser were doing almost all the talking for their country. Though Moltke assured Wilhelm that the army was ready to fight at any time, some historians claim that he was not directly consulted before the critical assurances were given to Austria.

After Hoyos returned to Vienna, Germany’s leaders behaved with a nonchalance that conspiracists believe to have been theatrical. Bethmann spent most of the rest of the month on his estate at Hohenfinow on the Oder, though he paid several discreet visits to Berlin during which he consulted with the military. Moltke departed for a cure at Karlsbad – his second of the year – from which he returned only on 25 July, just in time for the showdown between Vienna and Belgrade. The Kaiser sailed on 6 July for his annual summer yachting trip in the North Sea, which continued until the 27th. Senior officers including Prussian war minister Erich von Falkenhayn went on leave; newspapers were urged to avoid wilful provocation of the French.

While some scholars regard all this as evidence of orchestrated deception, it is more plausible that the Germans at this stage sincerely believed that the Austro-Serbian war they had mandated could be localised, though they were fatalistic about the huge risk that this might not be so. Rear-Admiral Albert Hopman, a shrewd and informed observer, wrote in his diary on 6 July: ‘In my opinion the situation is quite favourable for us, so favourable that a big and resolute statesman would exploit it to the uttermost.’ Throughout the weeks that followed, Hopman persisted in his opinion, widely shared in Berlin, that Germany could gain important diplomatic capital from the Balkan crisis, at small cost. He wrote on 16 July: ‘personally, I do not believe in war entanglement’, and again on the 21st: ‘Europe will not brawl because of Serbia.’

In Vienna, on the 7th Berchtold told the Austrian Council of Ministers that Germany was providing unqualified backing for drastic measures, ‘even though our operations against Serbia should bring about the great war’. That day Baron Wladimir Giesl, the Austrian envoy to Belgrade, returned to his post after consultations in Vienna with clear instructions from the foreign minister: ‘However the Serbs react to the ultimatum [then being drafted], you must break off relations and it must come to war.’ Only Hungary’s minister-president, Count István Tisza, deplored the threat of ‘the dreadful calamity of a European war’, and counselled caution. He told Count Julius Andrássy that blame for the actions of the unprincipled little group which killed the Archduke should not be pinned on an entire nation, and maintained this view until mid-July.

By contrast the Austrian army’s chief of staff, Conrad, urged aggressive action. After the conflict ended Count Hoyos wrote: ‘No one today can imagine just how much the belief in German power, in the invincibility of the German army, determined our thinking and how certain we all were that Germany would easily win the war against France [deleted in original] would provide us with the greatest guarantee of our safety should a European war result from our action against Serbia.’

Many Austrian soldiers were not merely untroubled by the possibility of provoking war with the Russian bear, but regarded such a showdown as an indispensable contribution to the elimination of the pan-Slav threat. Wolfgang Heller, a General Staff officer, noted in his diary on 24 July that he felt confident Serbia would reject Vienna’s ultimatum, and was only worried that the Russians might not rise to the bait: ‘real success cannot be achieved unless we can implement Kriegsfall R [the plan to fight Russia]. Only if Serbia and Montenegro cease to exist as independent states can a solution of the [Slav] question be achieved. It would be useless to go to war with Serbia without being resolved to erase it from the map; a so-called punitive campaign – “eine Strafexpedition” – would be worthless, a waste of every bullet; the southern Slav question must be solved radically, so that all southern Slavs are united under the Hapsburg flag.’ Such views were widely held among Austria’s nobles, generals, politicians and diplomats.

An Austro-Serb war was thus ordained. But was a regional Balkan conflict doomed to become a general European catastrophe? Did Serbia deserve to be saved from the fate Austria and Germany decreed for it? The irresponsibility of Serbian behaviour is almost indisputable, but it seems extravagant, on the evidence, to brand the country a rogue state, deserving of destruction. It is much less surprising that the Hapsburg Empire, in the febrile mood generated by its weakness and vulnerability, chose to start a war to punish Apis and his compatriots, than that its neighbour, great and rising Germany, should have risked a general conflagration for so marginal a purpose.

There seem several explanations. First, Germany’s rulers, like many men of their generation, accepted the role of war as a natural means of fulfilling national ambitions and exercising power: Prussia had exploited this cost-effectively three times in the later nineteenth century. Georg Müller, head of Wilhelm’s naval cabinet, told his master in 1911, ‘war is not the worst of all evils’, and this belief pervaded Berlin’s thinking. The Kaiser and his key advisers underestimated the magnitude of the dominance their country was achieving through its economic and industrial prowess, without fighting anybody. They were profoundly mistaken to suppose that European hegemony could be secured only by the deployment of armies on battlefields.

But paranoia was a prominent feature of the German psyche at this period – a belief that the country’s strategic position, far from progressively strengthening, was being weakened by the rise of socialism at home and the Entente’s military capabilities abroad. Many German bankers and industrialists were morbidly convinced that the Western democracies were bent upon strangling German trade. Berlin’s ambassador in Vienna made initial attempts to cool the Austrian government’s bellicosity, but the Kaiser scribbled on his reports: ‘Who has authorised him to do that? It is extremely stupid!’ The Germans knew it was overwhelmingly likely that the Tsar would throw his protective mantle over Serbia – Nicholas had earlier committed himself to doing so. But Moltke and Bethmann Hollweg viewed Russia, to the point of obsession, as an existential threat; and if they had to fight Nicholas’s army, they preferred to do so sooner rather than later. On 20 May 1914, sharing a railway compartment between Potsdam and Berlin, the chief of staff told foreign minister Jagow that within a few years Russia would be winning the arms race. If the price of anticipating such superiority was also to be a clash with France, Russia’s ally – which Moltke assumed – the General Staff had planned meticulously for such a prospect, and professed to be confident of victory.

Bethmann was a natural government official rather than a leader. Lloyd George later recalled conversations with him during a 1908 visit to Germany to study its health-insurance law: ‘an attractive but not an arresting personality … an intelligent, industrious and eminently sensible bureaucrat, but he did not leave on my mind an impression of having met a man of power who might one day shake destiny’. Bethmann was also a vacillator, especially about the rival merits of peace and war. In 1912 he returned from a visit to Russia alarmed by the evidence of its rising might; and during the following year was heard to advocate a pre-emptive conflict. In April 1913 he lectured the Reichstag on the looming ‘inevitable struggle’ between Slavs and Teutons, and warned Vienna that Russia was bound to join any conflict between Austria and Serbia. In his better moments, however, the chancellor recognised the perils posed by a clash of arms. On 4 June 1914 he told the Bavarian ambassador that conservatives who imagined that a conflict would enable them to reassert their own domestic power, crushing the hated socialists, were mistaken: ‘a world war with its incalculable ramifications will strengthen social democracy, which sermonises the virtues of peace’. War, he added, could easily cost some rulers their thrones.

Bethmann’s judgement was not improved by personal isolation. His wife died in May 1914 after a long illness, and he was left to while away his leisure hours reading Plato in Greek. He had become almost politically friendless, especially in the Reichstag. Moltke had no time for Bethmann, whose career now rested solely in the hands of the Kaiser, his patron. The chancellor initially identified in the July crisis an opportunity to restore his personal authority and reputation by achieving a diplomatic coup for the Central Powers. He was a prime mover in encouraging the Kaiser to support Austria, and was highly selective about what cable traffic he showed his master, to preserve his steadiness of purpose. He believed that Germany should pursue its chosen course without fears of any response St Petersburg might see fit to make.

In tangled harness Bethmann, the Kaiser and Moltke made the critical decisions. Germany actively encouraged the Austrians to attack Serbia, and Berlin’s three principal actors made no attempt to manage events in such a way as to avert a wider calamity. Therein lies the case for their culpability for what followed. It seems mistaken to argue that they entered the July crisis bent upon precipitating a general European conflict; but a pervasive German fatalism about such an outcome contributed largely to bringing it about. The Social Democrat leader August Bebel, a hero to millions of workers, delivered an impassioned warning following the 1911 Agadir crisis. ‘Every nation will continue to arm for war until a day comes at which one or the other says: “Better a terrible end than a terror without end.” [A nation may also say]: “If we delay any longer, we shall be the weaker instead of the stronger.” Then the catastrophe will happen. Then in Europe the great mobilisation plans will be unleashed, by which sixteen to eighteen million men, the finest of many nations, armed with the best instruments of murder, will take the field against each other. The Götterdämmerung of the bourgeois world is approaching.’

Thomas Mann wrote that German intellectuals sang the praises of war ‘as if in competition with each other, with deep passion, as if they and the people, whose voice they are, saw nothing better, nothing more beautiful than to fight many enemies’. Some conservatives were impressed by a 1912 bestseller written by Gen. Friedrich von Bernhardi, Germany and the Next War, which proclaimed a German ‘duty to make war … War is a biological necessity of the first importance … Without war, inferior or decaying races would easily choke the growth of healthy, budding elements, and a universal decadence would follow … Might gives the right to conquer or occupy.’ Bernhardi was dismissed by Moltke, who called him ‘a perfect dreamer’, but the book was widely noticed in Britain, where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells were among those expressing repugnance. British opinion may have been coloured by the fact that their own nation had already done all the conquering and occupying it needed.

Fatalism about the desirability or inevitability of conflict was even more evident in the Hapsburg Empire. In March 1914 the influential military publication Danzer’s Armee-Zeitung declared that the international situation had seldom looked graver. Incessant Balkan wars, to which had been added Italy’s 1911 invasion and colonisation of Libya, were plainly mere overtures ‘to the great conflagration which is inevitably awaiting us. We see that the arms race is no longer a means of sustaining a balance of power, as it has been for decades, but instead a frenzied and undisguised preparation for a conflict that may begin today or tomorrow.’ Danzer’s noted that Russia was still several years short of completing the strategic railway network indispensable to swift mobilisation, and thus an earlier war would be ‘inconvenient for our enemies’. This led the writer to argue that it was in the strongest interests of Austria and its allies to strike before losing the initiative: ‘Today, the balance is quite favourable, but heaven knows if this will remain so tomorrow! Sooner or later, hecatombs of blood must be sacrificed, so let us seize the moment. We have the strength – only the decision is wanting!’

On 14 July Count Berchtold presided over an important meeting at which the Empire’s next steps were decided. Conrad raised the issue of timing: given the economic difficulties threatened by mobilising reservists in the midst of the harvest season, he wanted war delayed until 12 August. The foreign minister rejected such a postponement. ‘The diplomatic situation will not hold so long,’ he told the army chief, meaning that Entente pressure on Vienna to maintain the peace might become irresistible. The German ambassador was informed that Berchtold’s staff was working on the wording of an ultimatum to Belgrade which was designed to be rejected.

Western Europe paid scant heed to the latest round of Balkan bickering. A note on The Times’s court and social page for 3 July declared: ‘The Domestic Servant Problem is one of the most serious problems of the present day. With the idea of helping to its solution, The Times some months ago instituted a scheme whereby Lady Experts assist Ladies to obtain able and reliable Servants …’ On the 16th, the newspaper addressed the European situation in a second leader, urging that Serbia should volunteer to conduct an inquiry into Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. It concluded dismissively that neither force nor the threat of force could play any useful part in Austria-Hungary’s diplomacy towards Serbia: ‘Any attempt to meet it in that fashion would constitute a fresh peril to European peace and that, we are confident, the EMPEROR and his most sagacious advisers clearly perceive.’ Two days later The Times’s foreign page was led by a report on Mexico; the only European news was headed ‘the Serbian scare’. On 17 July, Lloyd George told an audience of London businessmen that ‘although you never get a perfectly blue sky in foreign affairs’, some clouds seemed to be clearing. He asserted his confidence that the European problems would soon be solved. From the outset, Britain’s politicians and press – anyway preoccupied with the Ulster crisis – found it hard to conceive that Austrian grievances against Serbia merited a resort to arms.

France, chronically politically unstable after experiencing seven changes of government between 1911 and 1914, was engaged with its own lurid domestic affairs, prominent among them the trial of Joseph Caillaux’s wife Henriette for shooting dead Le Figaro’s editor Gaston Calmette. President Raymond Poincaré and René Viviani, his temporary prime minister, departed from Dunkirk early on the morning of 16 July aboard the battleship France, to pay a state visit to Russia. Both professed to welcome the trip as a holiday: Poincaré wrote later of ‘sailing under the illusion of peace’. The ship’s wireless facilities were primitive, and throughout their time at sea they found themselves almost incommunicado: ‘a heavy mist falls on the billow, as if to hide Europe’s shores’.

On the 20th the French party arrived at the landing stage of the Peterhof Palace, to be received by the imperial family and several of Nicholas II’s ministers. Maurice Paléologue, the French ambassador, reported hearing the Tsar say as he waited to greet his French guests: ‘I can’t believe the [Kaiser] wants war … If you knew him as I do … how much theatricality [there is] in his posing! It is all the more important for us to be able to count on England in an emergency. Unless Germany has gone out of her mind altogether she will never attack Russia, France and England combined.’ After the initial courtesies, Poincaré invited the views of Sergei Sazonov about the Sarajevo murders. According to the president’s memoirs, the foreign minister was dismissive, and messages from the French embassy in Vienna, warning that the Austrians seemed likely to take drastic action, were not forwarded to St Petersburg for days. At the banquet which followed, Paléologue, who grew ever more euphoric and emotional as the visit proceeded, wrote: ‘I shall long remember the dazzling display of jewels on the women’s shoulders … a fantastic shower of diamonds, pearls, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, topaz, beryls.’ Here was a last flourish of the serene complacency of old Europe’s ruling class.

René Viviani was an Englishman’s idea of a stage Frenchman: fluent, erratic, emotional, impulsive and subject to fits of extreme rudeness. On the Russian trip, it was plain that his mind was fixed more on domestic issues than on foreign affairs: he was fearful that evidence embarrassing to himself would emerge from the Caillaux courtroom circus, and anxious about his mistress, an actress at the Comédie Française. When messages arrived from Paris, Poincaré became increasingly impatient to see anything that bore upon the European crisis, but Viviani seemed to care only for the Paris gossip. He said the Serbian issue would obviously be resolved, so there was no purpose in hastening home.

Poincaré, passionately committed to the Entente, led the discussions with the Russians, writing in his diary in theatrical self-justification: ‘I have taken upon myself Viviani’s responsibilities. I fear that he is hesitant and pusillanimous.’ Paléologue noted: ‘It was Poincaré who had the initiative. Before long he was doing all the talking; the Tsar simply nodded acquiescence, but his whole appearance showed his sincere approval. It radiated confidence and sympathy.’ The ambassador was an unreliable witness, but right about the congenial mood of the talks.

There is a massive difficulty about assessing this Franco-Russian summit, as we should now call it, because no minutes were kept, and few relevant state papers survive. Memoirs written by some of the principals are evasive and perhaps actively deceitful about what took place. Poincaré and Sazonov alike claimed that they discussed generalities, because they knew nothing of the looming Austrian ultimatum to Serbia. This may well be untrue, because Russian codebreakers had cracked Vienna’s diplomatic traffic. The Tsarist General Staff had a good grasp of Hapsburg plans and manoeuvres: Col. Alfred Redl, the homosexual Austrian intelligence chief who killed himself in 1913, was only the most notable of a network of agents in St Petersburg’s pay. The Russians were much less well informed about Germany, though they had few doubts about its war plan for a grand envelopment in the West, after buying from a spy for 10,000 roubles the report of the German army’s 1905 war games.

It is likely that the French and Russian delegations had intensive discussions about the Balkan crisis, and agreed a tough line. Poincaré believed that the Germans were bluffers: ‘whenever we have taken a conciliatory approach to Germany she abused it; on the other hand, on each occasion when we have shown firmness, she has yielded’. Firmness was a perceived virtue which powerfully influenced the behaviour of all the Powers in July 1914. Some historians believe that in St Petersburg Poincaré stiffened the resolve for war of Sazonov – ‘a sad wobbler’, in the view of the British Foreign Office’s Robert Vansittart. During a state banquet at the French embassy, the foreign minister spoke to the president in terms that echoed Conrad on the other side: he said that, if the crisis worsened, Russia would face great difficulties in conducting a mobilisation during the harvest. The fact that the Frenchman acknowledged in his memoirs a conversation about such a contingency suggests that he and Sazonov already viewed the Balkan situation more gravely than either afterwards admitted.

But it is easy to accept that France and Russia agreed on coordinating a tough response to the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, even including a precautionary Russian mobilisation such as had taken place in the last Balkan crisis, without convicting them of precipitating a European war. The Tsar certainly had no enthusiasm for such a clash, and his generals knew that their military position vis-à-vis Germany would be much stronger in 1916. Russia’s ambassadors to Paris, Vienna and Berlin, together with Gen. Yuri Danilov, the army’s quartermaster-general and strongest personality, were absent from their posts until the Austrian ultimatum was delivered on 24 July, a further indication that St Petersburg did not anticipate hostilities. All that is known for sure of these meetings is that the Tsar proposed for himself a visit to France in 1915. On a scenic trip up the Neva, the Franco-Russian party passed shipyards where new battleships were under construction, but the workmen were on strike. Nicholas suggested that this represented an attempt by German agitators to blight the state visit, though Poincaré shrugged: ‘pure speculation’.

On the 21st the president’s party received all the ambassadors accredited to St Petersburg in their superb gold-embroidered uniforms and knee-breeches, and exchanged banalities with most. The German envoy said that he looked forward to visiting France with his French family later in the summer. Britain’s Sir George Buchanan – ‘cold, ponderous and extremely courteous’, in the president’s words, displayed alarm about the European situation and suggested that Vienna and St Petersburg should open a direct dialogue. Poincaré responded that such a course would be most dangerous, and wrote in his diary: ‘This conversation leaves me pessimistic.’ Count Friedrich Szapáry, the Hapsburg ambassador, disturbed the French president much more: ‘He gives the impression that Austria-Hungary wishes to extend to all of Serbia responsibility for the crime committed [in Sarajevo] and possibly desires to humiliate her little neighbour. If I say nothing, that will make him suppose a violent initiative has the approval of France. I reply that Serbia has friends in Russia who would be astonished at this information, and such surprise would be shared elsewhere.’

Paléologue recorded Szapáry saying coldly to Poincaré: ‘Monsieur le Président, we cannot suffer a foreign government to allow plots against our polity to be hatched on its territory!’ The president allegedly urged the need for caution on the part of all the European powers, adding: ‘With a little goodwill this Serbian business is easy to settle. But it can just as easily become critical. Serbia has some very warm friends in the Russian people. And Russia has an ally, France. There are plenty of complications to be feared!’ Szapáry bowed and left without saying a further word. Poincaré said to Viviani and Paléologue, according to the latter: ‘I’m not satisfied with this conversation. The ambassador had obviously been instructed to say nothing … Austria has a coup de théâtre in store for us. Sazonov must be firm and we must back him up …’ This account is disingenuous, but probably catches the tone of what was said.

A telegram arrived from Paris, reporting that Germany was offering Austria-Hungary its support. Viviani and Poincaré claimed to have agreed that this sounded like a bluff to increase pressure on the Serbs, but the French leaders were now becoming alarmed by the meagreness and tardiness of incoming information. The Germans shortly thereafter began jamming some French diplomatic wireless traffic. The mere fact that Berlin adopted such a measure places its role in the July crisis in an unsympathetic light, alongside its consistent mendacity in exchanges with the other Powers. If Germany seriously desired a peaceful outcome, this could scarcely be promoted by isolating France’s leaders from unfolding developments, nor by lying about its own state of knowledge.

On the 23rd, Poincaré gave a dinner under an awning on the quarterdeck of the France, marred by a heavy rainstorm which doused the empress and her daughters. The president was irked that his naval officer showed little imagination or chic in its management of the evening. The dinner, he complained, needed a woman’s touch. But the French delegation left St Petersburg a few hours later confident that the visit had been a success, and confirmed in France’s commitment to Russia. Indeed, it is possible that Viviani’s visible unease was fuelled by fears about how far his president went in promising support, though again there is no evidence about this. Poincaré speculated later that efforts made by Germany to deny him information during those critical days were prompted by fears that Russia and France might otherwise have concocted a credible peace initiative. This is implausible; but it is a matter of fact that the Austrians delayed presenting their ultimatum to Serbia until they were sure the French presidential party was at sea, sailing ever further from Russian shores. Only next day did Poincaré and Viviani begin to receive in successive fragments the text of the Austrian document as delivered.

Between 14 and 25 July, astonishingly, the two men received no dispatches from France’s Belgrade mission, because the minister was ill. Meanwhile Paléologue in St Petersburg was persistently pressing on Sazonov the case for ‘firmness’. In those days ambassadors were important people, as intermediaries and even sometimes as principals. Paléologue was an erratic personality, unafraid of war because he believed that the balance of military advantage now lay with Russia and France. But it remains hard to see why the St Petersburg summit should be condemned as a malign and conspiratorial affair, as some seek to do even in the absence of evidence to that effect.

It is true that Russia was competing fiercely with Germany for control of the Dardanelles and access to the Black Sea, but the latter issue influenced 1914 events only because it had intensified animosity and suspicion between the two nations. The Tsarist Empire had stronger motives than any nation in Europe to delay a showdown. At St Petersburg in July the two Entente Powers debated not a military initiative of their own, but an appropriate reaction to an Austrian one, which was evidently likely to be backed by the Germans. It was never plausible that Russia would acquiesce in Serbia’s suppression, nor that Paris would leave St Petersburg unsupported. Both the Austrians and the Germans knew this, but declined to be deterred, because they believed they could win a war.

The final Austrian decision to invade Serbia, heedless of Belgrade’s response to Vienna’s demands, was reached at a secret meeting in Berchtold’s house on 19 July. Count Tisza, the sole earlier dissenter, was now reconciled to the foreign minister’s course; Hungarian public opinion had become as feverishly anti-Serb as was Austrian. Baron Musulin, who drafted Austria’s ultimatum to Serbia, said proudly later that he ‘sculpted and polished it like a precious stone’, to ‘astound the world with the eloquence of its accusation’. The day before its delivery, a draft was sent to Berlin, which the German government made no attempt to amend or soften, and afterwards mendaciously claimed that it had not seen before publication.

The document presented to Belgrade at 6 p.m. on 23 July denounced Serbia for promoting terror and murder in the Hapsburg Empire. The charges made in the ultimatum about the participation of the Black Hand in the Sarajevo plot were largely valid. But Clauses 5 and 6, demanding that the Austrians should be empowered themselves to investigate and arbitrate on Serbian soil, represented a surrender of sovereignty no nation could concede – nor was Serbia expected by Vienna to do so. Berchtold’s missile was thus launched, and in flight.

2 THE RUSSIANS REACT (#ulink_96c419ad-b43b-5ce6-ac40-9a0dc84cd59f)

Nikola Pašić, the Serb prime minister, was away from Belgrade electioneering on 23 July – he made a habit of removing himself from the capital at moments of crisis, perhaps not accidentally. In his absence, the Austrian ultimatum was received by Serbia’s finance minister, Dr Laza Paču. A frenzy of activity followed. Apis, one of those most responsible for the crisis, went to the house of his brother-in-law, Živan Živanović, and warned him gravely: ‘The situation is very serious. Austria has delivered the ultimatum, the news has been passed on to Russia and the mobilisation orders are out.’ Živanović, like many others, hastily escorted his family to the temporary safety of the countryside.

The Russian ambassador, the egregious Nikolai Hartwig, had died suddenly of a heart attack on 10 July; his deputy, Vasily Strandman, found himself in charge of the mission, which was modestly staffed. Strandman conscripted his wife and Lyudmila Nikolaevna, Hartwig’s daughter, to help encipher the mounting pile of telegrams that had now to be dispatched to Sazonov in St Petersburg, creating a curious snapshot of diplomatic domesticity. Late that night, they were engaged on this task when a servant entered to report that Alexander, the twenty-six-year-old Prince Regent, was waiting below to discuss the ultimatum. The Russian told the young man, who was visibly emotional: ‘The terms are very severe and offer little hope of a peaceful outcome.’ Strandman said that unless they could be accepted in their entirety, Serbia must expect to have to fight. The Prince agreed, then asked simply, ‘What will Russia do?’ Strandman answered: ‘I cannot say anything, because St Petersburg has not yet seen the ultimatum, and I have no instructions.’ ‘Yes, but what is your personal opinion?’ Strandman said he thought it likely that Russia would offer Serbia some protection. Alexander then asked, ‘What should we do next?’ The Russian urged him to telegraph the Tsar.

The Prince, who had been educated in Russia, fell silent for a few moments, then said, ‘Yes, my father the King will send a telegram.’ Strandman urged: ‘You yourself must tell [the Tsar] what has happened, give him your assessment of the situation and ask for help. You should sign, rather than the King.’ Alexander demanded sharply, ‘Why?’ Strandman said: ‘Because the Tsar knows and loves you, whereas he barely knows King Peter.’ They argued the toss about signatories for several minutes. Strandman suggested copying the message to Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel, who was married to Alexander’s aunt. He also agreed to cable St Petersburg immediately, asking for 120,000 rifles and other military equipment desperately needed by the Serbs – the Russians had failed to deliver earlier promised arms consignments.

Western Europe and its leaders were slow to address the Austrian ultimatum with the urgency it demanded. France’s president and prime minister were at sea. Raymond Recouly of Le Figaro described how, in Paris, he gained his own first intimations of the gravity of the crisis not from ministers or diplomats, but from financial journalists. Before the Austrians acted, between 12 and 15 July there was frenzied activity on the Vienna and Budapest bourses, probably driven by inside information. ‘Everybody’s selling everything for any price they can get,’ Le Figaro’s financial editor told Recouly. Stock exchanges discounted the delusion in some chancelleries that Austria-Hungary intended to act temperately: they expected war.

Across the Hapsburg Empire and in Serbia, millions held their breath. A Graz schoolteacher wrote on the 23rd: ‘nobody could think or speak about anything else’. In Serbia it was a season of lush blooming: gardens were full of roses, carnations, wallflowers, jasmine, lilac; pervasive scents of lime and acacia. Peasants drifted into Belgrade and other cities from surrounding villages, many accompanied by their families, to sell in the streets boiled eggs, plum brandy, cheese, bread. In the evenings the young gathered to sing songs, watched and heard by silent, grizzled old men. In the Serbian capital, Dr Slavka Mihajlović wrote on hearing of the ultimatum at her hospital: ‘We are astounded. We look at each other aghast, but must go back to work … We expected Serbia’s relations with Austria to get tense, but we did not expect an ultimatum … The whole town is in shock. Streets and cafés are filling up with anxious people … It is less than a year since our little Serbia emerged from two bloody wars, with Turkey and Bulgaria. Some of the wounded still lie in hospitals – are we to see more bloodshed and more tragedy?’

The July crisis entered its critical phase on the 24th, when the terms of the Austrian ultimatum became known in the chancelleries of Europe. Sazonov said immediately: ‘C’est la guérre européene.’ He told the Tsar that the Austrians would never have dared to act in such a fashion without German guarantors. Nicholas’s response was cautious, but he convened a Council of Ministers to meet later that day. Sazonov then received Sir George Buchanan, who urged allowing time for diplomacy. Paléologue inevitably maintained his insistence upon toughness. What took place in St Petersburg during the ensuing four days ensured that the looming conflict would not be confined to the Balkans.

All the operational plans in 1914 were complex, that of the Russians most of all, because of the huge distances involved. Each mobilised soldier of the Tsar must travel an average of seven hundred miles to reach his regiment, against a German’s average of two hundred. The strategic rail network required twelve days’ warning of a call to arms, and troop concentrations would anyway be much slower than Germany’s. An hour after receiving news of the ultimatum, Sazonov ordered the army to prepare to move onto a war footing. Later that day of the 24th, Peter Bark the finance minister instructed Foreign Ministry officials to arrange repatriation of a hundred million roubles of state funds lodged in Berlin.

Austria’s commitment to war, and Germany’s ‘blank cheque’ in support, predated every response by the Entente. During an earlier Balkan crisis in the winter of 1912–13, Russia adopted the same military precautions that it activated on 24 July 1914 – without provoking hostilities. Unless St Petersburg proposed to acquiesce in the Austrian invasion of Serbia, immediate warning orders to the Russian army represented not eagerness to precipitate a European catastrophe, but prudence. There was, however, a critical new factor. In 1912–13 Germany had declined to support a tough Austrian line in the Balkans: key elements of its own military preparedness were still lacking – the Rhine bridge at Remagen, the bridge at Karwendel across which Austrian heavy artillery could move northwards, the Kiel canal, a new Army Bill. Now those links were complete: Moltke’s machine was at near-perfect pitch. St Petersburg and the rest of Europe knew that if Russia moved, Germany was almost bound to respond. Sazonov claimed that mobilisation was not a declaration of war; that the Tsar’s army could remain for weeks at readiness, but passive – as it had done in the earlier crisis. But German policy was different and unequivocal: if the Kaiser’s army mustered, it marched.

The Russian Council of Ministers’ meeting on 24 July lasted two hours. Sazonov stressed Berlin’s war preparations – which he probably exaggerated – and the unhappy past, in which Russian concessions to Austrian or German assertiveness had been treated as admissions of weakness. He argued that it was time to take a stand; that it would be an intolerable betrayal to allow Serbia to succumb. The two service ministers, Vladimir Sukhomlinov and Igor Grigorovich, said that, while the national rearmament programme was incomplete, the army and navy were ready to fight. Their contributions were important: had they spoken more cautiously – or perhaps, realistically – Russia might have drawn back.

Implausibly to foreign eyes, it was the agriculture minister whose remarks appear to have exercised the strongest influence. Alexander Krivoshein was a skilful court politicker with an extensive network of connections. He said that ‘public opinion would not understand why, at a critical moment involving Russia’s vital interests, the Imperial Government was reluctant to act boldly’. While recognising the dangers, he thought conciliation mistaken. The Tsar held a long private conversation with his uncle Grand Duke Nicholas, who commanded St Petersburg military district. It is unknown what was said, but it is likely that the Grand Duke expressed confidence both in France’s support and in the power of its army: he had been much impressed by a 1912 visit, during which he viewed Joffre’s soldiers. Moreover, he and his brother Peter were married to sisters, daughters of the King of Montenegro, whose impassioned influence was exercised to urge the Russians to fight the Austrians to the last gasp.

The Tsar remained deeply unhappy about the prospect of a conflict which, he well knew, could destroy his dynasty. He remarked thoughtfully on 24 July: ‘Once [war] had broken out it would be difficult to stop.’ But he nonetheless consented to the measures preparatory to mobilisation. In an effort to play the part of the ruler of a great power, a status to which Russia’s claims were precarious, Nicholas acted not ignobly or wickedly, but rashly. He emulated Franz Joseph in setting a course for regime destruction – his own.

That evening, Sazonov told the Serbian ambassador that Russia would protect his country’s independence. He offered Belgrade no ‘blank cheque’, instead urging acceptance of most of the terms of the Austrian ultimatum. But his commitment was decisive in persuading the Serbian government to reject a portion of Vienna’s demands: without the Russians, absolute surrender was its only option. Sazonov felt confident that his country could count on France, while having no great expectation of support from Britain; he remarked gloomily that every British newspaper save The Times was backing Austria in the crisis. Many people in Britain, some of them holding office, were wholly unsympathetic to Russian intervention. They sympathised with the Austrians in viewing Serbia as a pestilential Balkan nuisance.