A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (13 page)

It happened that Kaiser Wilhelm’s younger brother, Prince Heinrich of Prussia, was in England on this Sunday, attending the annual yacht races at Cowes and lunching as the guest of his first cousin, King George V. Afterward—heedless of the fact that the king had little voice in foreign policy—Heinrich sent a message to Berlin reporting that “Georgie” had given him the impression that London wanted to stay neutral. The prince, a naval officer by profession, had already earned a reputation as a not entirely reliable reporter, and his message contradicted warnings being sent by Ambassador Lichnowsky. The German foreign ministry, however, had never taken Lichnowsky seriously. Its leading figures saw him as a gullible Anglophile, a wealthy dilettante who owed his position to his long friendship with the kaiser. They were predisposed to find the views of Prince Heinrich more credible because they were so very much more pleasing.

And so the final week of peace had begun with Austria mobilizing while sending signals that no one was available to receive; with Russia in the first stages of mobilizing while pretending not to be; with Germany beginning to feel directly threatened; and with France’s ambassador urging the Russians as well as the Serbians on. Britain was sending ambiguous signals that the continental powers were free to interpret as they wished. Berlin and Paris were both, for the time being, effectively leaderless. Nothing irreversible had happened, but neither was anyone quite in control.

Monday, July 27

This was yet another day when, so far as the public knew, nothing much of importance was happening.

But in fact it was the day when the Austro-Hungarian Council of Ministers met in secret and voted to declare war on Serbia. This was a strange because utterly unnecessary decision. Even Conrad, eager as he was for action, questioned it. He couldn’t see the point of declaring war more than two weeks in advance of the completion of Austria’s mobilization. But Berchtold, determined to commit the dual monarchy to military action before Germany’s position softened or the mediation proposals coming out of Britain could have an effect, brought Conrad around.

The declaration of war was to be announced on Tuesday and required the approval of Franz Joseph. When Berchtold and Conrad went to see him, he proved to be reluctant. They told him lies about Serbian attacks. Actually there had been nothing more than a brief and meaningless exchange of gunfire at an insignificant border town. Persuaded by this tale that war had begun and that Serbia was responsible, the emperor signed. In preparing to do so, he trembled so badly that he had difficulty putting on his glasses.

In London, Grey read the text of Serbia’s response to the ultimatum and found it promising. He met with Lichnowsky and repeated his suggestion of a conference of the powers. Lichnowsky again relayed the suggestion to Berlin, urging that it be pursued. Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, who disliked the proposal but didn’t want to offend the British, indicated by return wire that he was forwarding it to Vienna. But he explained to Austria’s ambassador in Berlin “in the most decided way” that the German government wanted nothing to do with Grey’s ideas, “that on the contrary it advises to disregard them, but that it must pass them on to satisfy the English.” The Germans and Austrians had reason to be skeptical about the proposed conference. At least two of the four countries that would participate, France and Italy, would have little reason to look sympathetically on Austria’s grievances. A third, Britain, seemed unlikely to do anything to damage its relations with France and Russia. At best, the Germans and Austrians believed, a conference would substitute talk for action, degenerating into a sterile debate over the wording of the Austrian note and Serbia’s response. In the end, they feared, Serbia would dance away scot-free, with Austria-Hungary looking on as helplessly as in 1912 and 1913. Serb activists both within and outside the Hapsburg empire would be encouraged to continue making trouble, and Austria-Hungary’s other minorities would be encouraged to do the same.

The Austrians had financial reasons too for resisting mediation. Theirs was a financially starved administration—Conrad had never been given enough money to keep the armies of Vienna competitive with the other great powers in size, equipment, or technology—and the mobilizations during the two Balkan wars had been as costly as they had been fruitless. By 1914 all the great powers, but Austria-Hungary especially, were creaking under the weight of an arms race that was becoming constantly more onerous as the machinery of war grew more massive and complex. Vienna could not afford to be mobilizing year after year. It wanted to be sure that this time it got something for its money.

In the afternoon Kaiser Wilhelm arrived home from his vacation cruise. Chancellor Bethmann and Gottlieb von Jagow, the head of the German foreign ministry, were not delighted by his return. They had urged him to stay away, telling him that a premature end to his vacation might alarm the other powers. What they really feared, probably, was that the unpredictable kaiser would interfere in their handling of the crisis.

German Foreign Minister Gottlieb von Jagow
“Nothing has helped. I am appointed.”

With or without the kaiser’s presence, Bethmann and Jagow were not an ideal pair to be steering the most powerful state in Europe through such difficult straits. Bethmann was a tall, dour career civil servant who five years earlier had been raised to the chancellorship despite having no experience in foreign affairs and despite being disliked by the kaiser. (“He was always lecturing me,” Wilhelm complained, “and pretends to know everything.”) Like many Germans in high places, he was terrified by the presence of unfriendly powers to the east and west and convinced that Germany could only grow more vulnerable with the passage of time. Jagow was a frail hypochondriac who had used an elder brother’s connections to get into the foreign service and had then successfully leveraged those same connections to get a series of plush and undemanding assignments in Rome and elsewhere. When summoned home to head the foreign ministry, he had pulled every string he could reach in a futile effort to escape. “Nothing has helped,” he had said despairingly at last. “I am appointed.”

Late in the night Vienna sent word to Berlin of its decision to declare war. When the message reached Bethmann and Jagow, they were not astonished. The Austrians were doing at last what Berlin had been urging from the start: they were taking action. No effort was made to inform the kaiser. This was, after all, exactly what he too had demanded at the start.

Tuesday, July 28

Wilhelm II was back in his office, seated in his saddle chair. (Wanting no doubt to be the perfect Hohenzollern warrior-king, and proud no doubt of the agonies he had endured in boyhood to become a skillful horseman in spite of his crippled arm, he claimed to be more comfortable in a saddle than in a conventional chair.) He had much work to catch up on. First he read the most recent wire from Lichnowsky in London: it quoted Sir Edward Grey as saying that an Austrian attack on Serbia would have disastrous consequences, but that the Serbian response to Austria appeared to provide a basis for negotiations. Then he read the Serbian response itself. Perhaps in part because he had just seen Grey’s thoughts on the subject—Wilhelm was one of those men who tend to agree with whoever talked with them last—his reaction was much the same as Grey’s. “This was more than one could have expected,” he declared. “A great moral victory for Vienna; but with it every reason for war drops away, and Giesl might have remained quietly in Belgrade. On the strength of this
I
”—he underlined the pronoun, implicitly rebuking the Austrians—“should never have ordered mobilization!”

Seeing an opportunity and eager to seize it, Wilhelm sent a handwritten note to Jagow declaring the Serbian response “a capitulation of the most humiliating kind,” so that
“every cause for war
falls to the ground!” He instructed the foreign ministry to prepare a message to go out over his name informing Vienna that a basis now existed for resolving the crisis through mediation, and that he was prepared to help. He added an idea that a member of his military staff had suggested to him at the start of the day. Because the Serbs could not be trusted (“Orientals,” Wilhelm called them, “therefore liars, tricksters and masters of evasion”), Austria should send its army across the border and occupy Belgrade but then go no farther. In possession of Serbia’s capital, the Austrians would be in a position of strength as mediation proceeded. This would come to be called the Stop-in-Belgrade proposal, and soon Grey too would be suggesting it. It offered a solution much like the one that ended the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. The German armies had remained in France until Berlin’s terms were met—the payment of immense reparations plus the surrender of Alsace and Lorraine—then paraded through the streets of Paris and gone home.

Bethmann and Jagow, incredibly, had still not told Wilhelm that an Austrian declaration of war was only hours away. The kaiser assumed that such a declaration would not come for another two weeks if at all. Just as incredibly, Bethmann and Jagow prepared the kaiser’s message to Vienna as instructed but surreptitiously delayed its transmission for twelve hours, making certain that it wouldn’t be received until after the Austrians issued their declaration.

Though Bethmann and Jagow had deceived the kaiser, depriving him of any chance of intervening before Austria declared war, their motives may well have been good. As clumsy as their behavior had been at a crucial juncture where nothing less than brilliance was required, they knew Wilhelm all too well—his childish arrogance, his unpredictability, his history of reversing himself and even breaking down in the midst of a crisis. (He had done so in 1908, 1911, and again early in 1914, sinking so low that he had to be talked out of abdicating.) No doubt they thought they had a better grasp of the situation than he. Having been in Berlin while he was still away, they definitely were better informed, if only because they had gone to such lengths to keep him uninformed. And they had reason to think that, in their support of the Austrians, they had been carrying out the kaiser’s wishes. They must have felt that involving him more directly at this late hour could only complicate an already confusing situation.

The Austrian declaration, issued in the middle of the afternoon, changed everything. It was one of the two or three most important blunders committed by any of the great powers during the days leading up to war. And, as with the delivery of the Austrian note to Serbia five days earlier, there was a farcical aspect to how it happened. Berchtold, knowing that the Serbian government had withdrawn from Belgrade to the interior and not knowing how to make contact with that government wherever it now was, sent a telegram, uncoded and in French, informing Prime Minister Pasic that a state of war now existed between their two countries. He addressed this message to Pasic via Serbian army headquarters. Shortly thereafter, in an abundance of caution, he sent a second, identical telegram via the Serbian foreign ministry. The two messages reached Pasic separately after being routed through Romania. The first was handed to him as he was having lunch at a provincial hotel. After reading it he got to his feet and addressed the room. “Austria has declared war on us,” he said gravely. “Our cause is just. God will help us.” When the second telegram arrived a short time later, Pasic became suspicious. Never having heard of one nation declaring war on another in such a manner, he began to think that the whole thing might be a hoax. The German ambassador, when asked, replied that he knew nothing about a declaration of war. (He was being truthful; not even the kaiser, as we have seen, was informed in advance of Austria’s declaration.) The authenticity of the telegrams was confirmed soon enough. News of the declaration sparked anti-Serbian demonstrations in Vienna and even in Berlin, but there was no movement of Austrian troops. Conrad merely began shelling Belgrade from the Bosnian side of the border.

The kaiser met with Bethmann after learning the truth. The chancellor, a visibly unhappy man afterward, immediately began steering a new course. He composed a long telegram to Tschirschky in Vienna, complaining that the Austro-Hungarian government “has left us in the dark concerning its intentions, despite repeated interrogations” and that its declaration of war had put Germany in “an extraordinarily difficult position” that could cause it to “incur the odium of having been responsible for a world war.” He instructed Tschirschky to urge the Austrians to respond positively to what was now Grey’s, not just the kaiser’s, Stop-in-Belgrade proposal. No doubt Tschirschky, who shortly after the assassination had been rebuked for urging caution on the Austrians, was taken aback. Berchtold was more than taken aback. For three weeks the Germans had been prodding him to act. Now at last he was taking action—and suddenly the Germans wanted him to stop.

The day brought one additional misfortune, and a serious one. Russia’s ambassador to Austria, having been kept waiting since Monday, finally was allowed to meet with Berchtold. He wanted to discuss a number of ideas that were being passed around among the various capitals: a suggestion by Sazonov that he and Vienna’s ambassador to St. Petersburg should review the original Austrian note to see if it might be modified enough for Serbia to accept it, for example, and Sir Edward Grey’s proposal that the Serbian reply be used as a starting point for negotiations rather than a reason for war. Everyone was distracted by the rush of events, however, and Berchtold and his visitor apparently lost track of exactly which idea they were discussing at various points in the conversation. The result was misunderstanding. Berchtold, when the meeting was over, believed that he had made it clear that while he would not negotiate with Serbia, he was prepared to do so with Russia. But the ambassador came away with a distinctly different impression. He reported to Sazonov that Berchtold was not willing to negotiate even with Russia. Probably for no other reason than that both parties had too much on their minds and were approaching exhaustion, an important door had been inadvertently closed.