A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (7 page)

Never Again

“In 1908–1909 we would have been playing cards up, in 1912–1913 we still had a clear chance, now we have to go for all or nothing.”

—A
USTRIAN
F
IELD
M
ARSHAL
F
RANZ
C
ONRAD

L
eopold von Berchtold and Franz Conrad were polar opposites as men, and over the years they had often been at odds over how Austria-Hungary should deal with its Serbian problem. But in the days following the assassination, their differences disappeared and they became partners. To understand how this happened is to understand much about the origins of the war.

Conrad (Conrad von Hötzendorf was his full family name, but the
von
part was an addition, an honorific that had come with his grandfather’s elevation to the nobility) was a soldier to the marrow of his bones, sometimes even a rather fanatical one. His father had been an officer; he himself began his military training at age eleven, and he became chief of the Austro-Hungarian general staff in 1906 at the age of fifty-four. He looked the part: a compact, tidy figure with a fierce mustache that turned up at the corners and pale hair cut in a brush. He was an almost neurotically hard worker, intent upon trying to turn the hodgepodge Austro-Hungarian armies into a modern and effective fighting force, constantly drawing up and issuing new orders and war plans, painfully conscious that the empire was militarily weak and its status among Europe’s great powers no longer assured. He was certain that the empire could save itself only by asserting itself in the Balkans—above all by eliminating Serbia’s endless subversion and, if possible, by eliminating Serbia. Time after time, until Emperor Franz Joseph grew sick of hearing it, he had urged attacks on the Serb kingdom. At times he even wanted to attack the recently created Kingdom of Italy, which officially was Austria’s ally but had taken over a great expanse of what had previously been Hapsburg territory and was obviously hungry for more. In 1911 Conrad had been dismissed from his position as chief of staff because of his obsessive aggressiveness. But a year later war in the Balkans made his talents and his energy seem indispensable. And so he was recalled to duty and showed himself to be no less bellicose than before. In the course of 1913 he made no fewer than twenty-five proposals for war on Serbia.

Conrad von Hötzendorf Chief of Staff of Austro-Hungarian Army
Frustrated by Austria’s passivity during the two Balkan Wars.

Count Berchtold, by contrast, was an enormously wealthy, deeply cultivated, pleasure-loving aristocrat of ancient family. And he too looked the part: polished, serenely self-assured, a vision of elegance in spotless collars and cuffs and diamond stickpins. He spoke German, French, Hungarian, Czech, and Slovak, and he had married a Hungarian heiress. (Unusually, he held both Austrian and Hungarian citizenships, and when asked his nationality, he said he was “Viennese.”) He owned a racing stable and was famous for his charm and his success with women. He was also widely regarded as weak, lazy, frivolous, and unreliable. He had spent much of his early career as a diplomat in Paris and London, splendid places for a wealthy young nobleman eager to indulge his many appetites. He became the Austro-Hungarian ambassador to Russia in 1907 and was appointed foreign minister in 1912, when he was fifty years old. His conduct in the Balkan crises of that year and 1913, when Serbia enlarged itself at the expense of the Turks and the Bulgarians while Vienna stood by watching, had cemented his reputation for passivity and vacillation. Conrad among others came to be convinced that Berchtold lacked the backbone to protect Hapsburg interests in the slippery world of great power diplomacy. Berchtold himself was well aware by then that important people regarded him as unworthy to be foreign minister and that he needed to repair his reputation. He was ready to believe what Conrad had always believed: that the monarchy had squandered too many opportunities in its area of greatest vulnerability, the Balkans. He expected good opportunities to be far less plentiful in the years ahead, now that Serbia had grown bigger and Russia was recovering its strength, and he was as determined as Conrad not to let the next one slip away. He had become, in short, dangerous: a weak man determined to appear strong. Within forty-eight hours of the assassination he was calling for “a final and fundamental reckoning with Serbia.”

Austria-Hungary in 1914 was a second-rate and declining empire trying desperately to hang on to its traditional place among the nations that recognized one another as Europe’s leading powers. In the half-century leading up to the Sarajevo assassinations, it had been displaced as leader of the German states—had been, in effect, evicted from Germany—by Otto von Bismarck, Prussia’s great chancellor and the creator of the new German Empire. Then it had lost great hunks of territory—Tuscany, Lombardy—to a new Kingdom of Italy that, although also militarily weak, was supported in its expansion by France. Austria-Hungary had become a paradox, simultaneously obsolete and ahead of its time. In an era of nationalism run rampant, it was not a nation at all but a cobbled-together assortment of thirteen nationalities that spoke sixteen languages, belonged to five major religions, and were organized into seventeen “lands” served by twenty parliaments. But it had the potential to provide a model for a Europe in which diverse peoples could live together in peace and might even, one day, think of uniting. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, as much as Franz Joseph disliked him, had appeared to understand that potential. His murder left the empire without the one man who might possibly have been strong and canny enough to lead it through the crisis of 1914. The archduke had always disliked Conrad’s lust for military adventures and almost certainly would have restrained him. He was “a man,” as Berchtold would observe sadly amid the ruins of postwar Europe, whom “the monarchy needed.”

Just across Hungary’s southernmost border was the nightmare Kingdom of Serbia, stirring unrest whenever it could. For many Austrians, and not only for such hawks as Field Marshal Conrad, the empire faced a simple choice: it could maintain a strong position in the Balkans, or it could allow itself to be gradually undone by implacably hostile, Russian-sponsored Balkan troublemakers. The threat was not only external—every new Serbian success seemed an incitement for the many ethnic minorities inside Austria-Hungary to seek either independence or union with whatever Balkan nation they felt themselves to be linked to by culture, religion, blood, and geography. The situation was a recipe for trouble, and throughout the decade leading up to 1914, one development after another added new poisons to the mix.

The first of these developments, when it came in 1906, was a Gilbert and Sullivan–style affair that came to be known, in suitably comic fashion, as the Pig War. Serbia was still a tiny country at that time, but its position on Bosnia’s border gave it opportunities for mischief that the expansionists were delighted to exploit. Exasperated officials in Vienna, almost desperate to find some way to strike back, decided that they could punish and perhaps even subdue Serbia economically by refusing to import its livestock, pigs included. They enacted an embargo that went on for five years and accomplished nothing except to make Vienna look ridiculous. The Serbs were able to find so many new markets for their animals that their exports increased. They learned—or thought they learned, which came down to the same thing—that they could defy the mighty Hapsburgs and pay no price for doing so.

Things turned in a more serious direction in 1908. Austria, having had no success in stopping Serbia from making trouble in Bosnia and Herzegovina, became increasingly concerned about the fact that, in strict legal terms, these two southernmost pieces of its empire didn’t belong to it at all. According to international law, they were still provinces of the Ottoman Empire, though Austria had occupied and administered them since 1878, when the Turks had been forced to withdraw after suffering another in their seemingly endless series of defeats. Vienna saw that it had good reason to fear the consequences if somehow this territory ever became part of Serbia. And the aggressiveness of the Serbs, coupled with the increasingly decrepit state of the Ottoman Empire, made such a development far from unimaginable. So Vienna announced that it was annexing Bosnia and Herzegovina into the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Serbia, predictably, howled in protest and appealed to Russia. But Russia was still recovering from its disastrous war with Japan and the revolution that followed and therefore was powerless to intervene.

Conrad, who was by then entering his third year as the Austrian army’s chief of staff, wanted to send his troops into Serbia and regarded victory as assured. He had at his disposal a standing army of more than three hundred and sixty thousand men, while Serbia at this point had fewer than twenty thousand. Even more important, he had the full support of the Germans, who understood the extent of Russia’s impotence and were increasingly worried about Austria’s slow decline. The time seemed right for eviscerating Serbia, perhaps for partitioning her out of existence. Characteristically, Conrad started saying that scores might be settled with other neighbors too: with tiny Montenegro, for example, another Balkan nuisance and an ally of Serbia’s. And perhaps even with Italy, which had its own territorial ambitions in the Balkans but would have been hopelessly outmatched in a war with Austria.

Not everyone in Austria and Berlin wanted war. Emperor Franz Joseph, in his sixtieth year on the throne by then, had experienced far more military humiliations than triumphs in the course of his long life and had little appetite for a new adventure. The Hungarians were always opposed to any move that might disturb the status quo. They feared that a military victory that brought still more Serbs into the empire would dilute their influence by turning the dual monarchy into a three-cornered system with the Slavs as equal partners. This was not an idle idea: it had powerful advocates in Vienna. People who knew Franz Ferdinand well were convinced that he planned to bring the Slavs into a triple monarchy upon succeeding to the throne.

Germany ended the crisis by issuing an ultimatum: unless the Russians approved the annexation, Germany would regard Vienna as justified in moving against Serbia. Resentfully, Russia yielded. It had no choice.

Supposedly this was a great diplomatic victory. Conrad, however, regarded it as a disaster. Others agreed, among them some of Germany’s leading generals. And they had persuasive arguments on their side. Austria had come out of the crisis without acquiring one inch of territory and without having done anything to weaken Serbia. The annexation had, on the other hand, infuriated both the Kingdom of Serbia and those Serb nationalists living in Bosnia. It had subjected Russia to a fresh humiliation—this was the first time in its history that Russia had had to yield to the demands of another European nation. It showed Russia the importance of building up its army as quickly as possible, clinging to its alliance with France, and becoming capable of demonstrating that it was not a useless ally.

Three years after the annexation crisis, the Balkans began to convulse. It is a measure of just how far the decay of the Ottoman Empire had advanced that in 1912 the minuscule nation of Montenegro launched an attack on the once-invincible Turks. Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece all joined in, and in a single stunning month the Turks were driven from a region they had dominated for more than five hundred years. The map of the Balkans was redrawn. Immediately the victors doubled in size. Serbia was now big enough to be, not a major power certainly, but a real military problem for Austria.

This First Balkan War began and ended before Austria was able to mobilize its army and become involved. Thereafter the balance of power shifted significantly not only in the Balkans but in Europe as a whole, and in ways that were not at all to Vienna’s advantage. No longer was there an Ottoman presence in the Balkans to balance Russia’s, and Russia’s Balkan allies had grown more powerful than ever. Again there had been demands in Vienna for military action, and of course Conrad had been in favor. Berchtold, now the foreign minister, had opposed him. So had Franz Ferdinand, who was shrewd enough to understand that making war on Slav neighbors was no way to win the loyalty of Vienna’s tens of million of restive Slavic subjects. Once again nothing was done. One reason for Vienna’s failure to act was the mobilization, by a Russia that was nonetheless extremely fearful of war, of many thousands of troops. Another was a conspicuous absence of support from Berlin. The kaiser’s government told the Austrians that there was no popular support in Germany for a war in the Balkans, so that hostilities were politically impossible.

One of the winners of the 1912 war, Bulgaria, was a rival of Serbia’s and therefore a potential ally for Austria: this was a world in which the enemy of your enemy was sometimes your only friend. Bulgaria was not satisfied with its gains in the war, and in 1913, less than a month after the finalization of the peace agreement, it launched a surprise attack on Serbia. Greece and Montenegro both came to Serbia’s aid. So did Romania, which had not been involved in 1912. Even Turkey, hoping to recoup some of its losses, came in against Bulgaria, which quickly went down to defeat. It was all over before Austria could even ready its army for action. Serbia’s gains this time included part of the Adriatic coast—like Bosnia and Herzegovina, one of the prime objectives of the Serb expansionists. When peace was restored, Vienna insisted that Serbia withdraw from the coast. Serbia refused. Austria, almost petulantly determined to stop Serbia from getting
everything
it wanted, issued an ultimatum: If Serbia didn’t get out of Albania, it would be attacked. Again Serbia turned to Russia for help, and again the Russians showed themselves to be reluctant. Finding that even Britain and France opposed their occupation of the coast, and infuriated despite their other gains, the Serbs pulled back. The area they gave up became the new nation of Albania.