Bethmann owed his position partly to his seniority in the civil service and partly to the belief that he could hold the middle ground between the conservatives and the radicals. By German standards he was a very moderate conservative: in foreign policy he had frequently gone on record to state his commitment to peace, and to warn against the dangers of militarism. For this he was the
bete noire
of the Pan-German League, who often called for his dismissal.
His guiding principle was supposedly
Weltmacht unà kein Krieg
, ‘World power but no war’. In the previous November he had reprimanded the Crown Prince for his lack of restraint: ‘To rattle the sabre at every diplomatic entanglement… is not only blind but criminal.’
105
Pondering the prospects shortly after Sarajevo, he had confided to Riezler, ‘Any general conflict [will lead] to a revolution of all existing conditions.’
106
Two weeks later, he had personally protested to the Kaiser about the bombastic statements of the Crown Prince and certain sections of the Press.
In July 1914, at the age of 58, Bethmann’s personal life had been blighted by the death of his wife only two months earlier. He travelled back and forth between Hohenfinow and Berlin alone, or with Riezler. Bethmann’s feelings towards England were very friendly. His son Ernst, who was to be killed in the war, had been a Rhodes scholar at Oxford in 1908. Everything he said or wrote before the crisis underlined his wish and expectation for Anglo-German
rapprochement
.
Bethmann’s performance attracted little admiration, except from his immediate associates. Riezler admired his fortitude under pressure, and compared his ‘scruples’ to the ‘icy hypocrisy’ of Grey. ‘The Chancellor is a child of the first half of the nineteenth century,’ he noted, ‘and the heir to a more idealistic culture.’
107
Yet the Kaiser was brutal: when things began to go wrong in mid-July and Bethmann offered to resign, the Kaiser apparently said, ‘It’s you that have cooked this soup, and now you’re going to eat it.’
108
Albert Ballin, President of the Hamburg-Amerika Line and the informal go-between with London, was no more sympathetic. A friend of Bethmann’s predecessor as Chancellor, he called Bethmann ‘Bülow’s revenge’, and talked of his ‘torpor’, his ‘passivity’, his ‘lack of initiative’, his ‘enormous ineptitude’. ‘Bethmann’, he said, ‘was an uncommonly articulate man … who did not realise that politics is a dirty business.’
109
Von
Bülow, the former Chancellor, pointed to what he considered the fatal flaw: ‘It would have been quite enough to have told Vienna [after Sarajevo] that we definitely refused our authorisation of any breach between Serbia and Austria-Hungary.’
110
In England, the criticisms of Bethmann were merciless. Popular sources recounted not only his ‘half-heartedness’ and ‘indecision’ but also his ‘essentially Prussian conceptions of political morality’. It was generally believed that Bethmann conducted German foreign policy unaware that the wheel of state was really in the hands of the military.
111
After the war, Bethmann was to make a strong point of collective guilt. ‘All nations are guilty,’ he insisted in his
Memoirs
. ‘Germany, too, bears a large part of the blame.’
112
Bethmann’s road to war began in the first week of July. Owing to the Foreign Minister’s absence on honeymoon, Bethmann took personal charge of German diplomacy from the start. He constantly protested his determination to avoid an international conflict. On the morning of 5 July he was summoned by the Kaiser to advise on Austria’s request for assistance in its quarrel with Serbia. Two contradictory decisions were taken—one to refrain from a direct response, and the other to assure Francis-Joseph that Germany would not desert him. In the afternoon he attended a meeting of the Kaiser’s military advisers, where the opinion prevailed that Russia would not intervene and that Serbia should be punished, ‘the sooner the better’. This encouraged Bethmann to tell the Austro-Hungarian Ambassador:
Vienna has to judge what has to be done to clarify Austria’s relations with Serbia. [None the less], in this undertaking it can count safely on Germany’s support of the Monarchy as an ally and a friend—whatever the decision.
113
Here was the notorious ‘blank cheque’ for Austria’s war against Serbia.
Back at Hohenfinow on the evening of the 8th, Bethmann talked to Riezler ‘on the verandah under a starry sky’. He explained the dangers of a general conflict. He then said that inaction was the worst policy of all. He was obsessed by fears of Russia: ‘The future belongs to Russia, which grows and grows, looming above us as an increasingly terrifying nightmare.’
114
At bottom, therefore, the Chancellor agreed with those more outspoken generals who said that Germany’s position could only suffer from delay. Six days later, on the 14th, though nothing special had happened, Riezler reports the Chancellor as saying, ‘Our position is desperate … This action is a leap in the dark and as such a most serious duty.’ It would seem that Bethmann had already resigned himself to ‘the calculated risk’ of a Continental war.
115
In the third week of July Bethmann began to suspect that his gamble was ill-conceived. None of the requisite pieces of the puzzle was falling into place. He advised the Kaiser to prolong his Baltic cruise in order to maintain a show of normalcy. When his advice was refused he tendered his resignation, and his resignation was refused as well. According to Riezler, the Chancellor was in fatalist mood, and was sensing that public opinion favoured war—’an immense if undirected
drive for action in the people’.
116
With this in mind he took two practical steps. He stopped the Minister of Interior from arresting the assorted socialists, Poles, and others on its list of
Reichsfeinde or
‘unreliable elements’; and in a secret meeting with the Social Democrat leader he informed the Opposition of the gravity of the situation. Both these steps had the effect of disarming popular opposition to the war.
On the 29th, when Russia responded to Austria’s attack on Belgrade with partial mobilization, Bethmann at last paid serious attention to the possibility of a general conflict. He proposed a neutrality agreement to Great Britain, guaranteeing the integrity of France’s metropolitan territory. In the night, contrary to his previous line, he bombarded Vienna with ‘World on Fire’ telegrams advising mediation. Neither produced any effect. As a result, Germany was facing war with Russia without having secured Austrian support. Berlin was committed to help Vienna, but Vienna might not help Berlin. The Alliance was in total disarray.
The moment of decision was reached on 30 July. The Kaiser took fright from the telegrams coming out of St Petersburg. In the margin of one of them he scrawled a note about ‘the war of extermination against us’.
117
Berlin was convinced of its ‘encirclement’. At 9 p.m. Bethmann met with the military leaders, von Moltke and von Falkenhayn. They took the decision to declare ‘a state of imminent war’, thus automatically starting the countdown to the outbreak of a general Continental war in the first days of August. And they did so without any knowledge of Russia’s full mobilization or of Belgian and British intentions. From that point on, barring retractions, the die was cast.
In the two key decisions of 5 July and 30 July, there is little evidence to suggest that the generals forced through a warlike line contrary to Bethmann’s advice. It is true that in the last resort the Kaiser possessed the traditional Prussian
Kommandogewalt
or ‘power of command’ over both generals and ministers. But the Chancellor never put himself in a position where it might have been used against him. He did not stumble into war; he was party to the decisions which provoked it.
118
The one thing to say in mitigation, and often ignored by Allied historians, is that Russia had mobilized with the same rashness as Germany.
Henceforth, for the Chancellor, the main consideration was to pin the blame on the
Entente
. At 11 p.m. on the 30th he learned that Russia’s general mobilization was in train, and used the information to justify his prior decision taken in the dark. On the 1st Bethmann declared war on Russia, whilst demanding impossible assurances from Paris that France should abandon the Franco-Russian alliance. Ballin was privy to the scene in the garden-room of the Kanzlerspalais, where Bethmann was frantically driving the clerks to complete the drafting of the declaration. ‘Why such haste to declare war on Russia, Your Excellency?’ he asked. ‘If we don’t, we shan’t get the socialists to fight.’
119
On the 2nd the German Ambassador in Brussels was ordered to take a letter from a sealed envelope, prepared seven days before by von Moltke. The letter demanded that Belgium accept German protection against a (non-existent) French attack. On the 3rd, Germany declared war on France.
On the afternoon of 3 August, at the same time that Grey was addressing the Commons, Bethmann addressed the Reichstag with his speech about the Russian ‘firebrand’. ‘A war with Russia and France has been forced upon us,’ he declared. Echoing Grey’s words about determination and resolution, Bethmann said: ‘The entire German nation … is united to the last man.’
120
On the 4th, German troops invaded Belgium. In mid-afternoon Bethmann heard from the Wilhelmstrasse that the British ultimatum had arrived. In his Speech from the Throne, the Kaiser spoke calmly of ‘drawing the sword with a clear conscience and clean hands’.
121
But Bethmann was livid. When the British Ambassador called to take his leave, the walls of the Kanzlerspalais reverberated to the strains of an unprecedented tirade of recriminations. Shouting in French, the Chancellor harangued the Ambassador for a good twenty minutes:
This war is only turning into an unlimited world catastrophe through England’s participation. It was in London’s hands to curb French revanchism and pan-Slav chauvinism. Whitehall has not done so, but rather repeatedly egged them on … All my attempts [for peace] have been wrested from me. And by whom? By England. And why? For Belgian neutrality. Can this neutrality, which we violate from necessity, fighting for our very existence, really provide the reason for a world war?… Compared to the disaster of such a holocaust, does not this neutrality dwindle into a scrap of paper? Germany, the Emperor and the Government are peaceloving. The Ambassador knows that as well as I do. We enter the war with a clear conscience. But England’s responsibility is monumental.
122
The Ambassador broke into tears. Diplomacy had come to an end.
Oddly enough, Bethmann’s phrase about the ‘scrap of paper’—
un chiffon de papier
—does not appear in the Ambassador’s original summary of the tirade. Like Grey’s words about ‘the lamps going out’, there must be some doubt whether it was uttered at that fateful meeting.
123
The emotions of those summer days found their best expression in places often far removed from the haunts of diplomats.
In Paris, on 3 August Marcel Proust drove to the Gare de l’Est with his brother, a medical officer
en route
for Verdun, then returned to the Boulevard Haussmann after midnight to write to his agent. ‘Millions of men are going to be massacred in a War of the Worlds, like that of Wells.’
124
In England, Virginia Woolf was spending the Bank Holiday at Rodmell, near Lewes in Sussex. At 4 p.m. on the 3rd she wrote to Vanessa Bell. ‘Dearest, Would it be possible for you to let us have half the rent—£15—before we go away?… The postman brought rumours that two of our warships are sunk—however, we found … that peace still exists … I do adore Thee.’
125
The young poet Rupert Brooke, who had dined the previous week at 10 Downing Street with the Asquiths and Churchill, dashed off a letter to Gwen Darwin, now Mrs Raverat:
Everything’s just the wrong way round. I want Germany to smash Russia to fragments, and then France to break Germany. Instead of which I’m afraid Germany will badly smash
France, and then be wiped out by Russia. France and England are the only countries that ought to have any power. Prussia is a devil. And Russia means the end of Europe and any decency. I suppose the future is a Slav Empire, world-wide, despotic and insane.
126
D. H. Lawrence was on holiday with three friends in the Lake District:
I had been walking in Westmoreland, rather happy, with water-lilies twisted round my hat … and I pranked in the rain, [whilst] Kotilianski groaned Hebrew music—
Ranani Sadekim Badanoi
… Then we came down to Barrow-in-Furness, and saw that war was declared. And we all went mad. I can remember soldiers kissing on Barrow station, and a woman shouting defiantly to her sweetheart: ‘When you get at ‘em, Clem, let ‘em have it’… — and in all the tram-cars ‘War—Messrs Vickers Maxim call in their workmen’…
Then I went down the coast for a few miles. And I think of the amazing sunsets over flat sands and a smoky sea … and the amazing vivid, visionary beauty of everything heightened up by immense pain …
127
In Germany and Austria the excitement ran equally high. Thomas Mann was at Bad Tölz in Bavaria, wondering when the
Landsturm
would call. Declining to act as witness at his brother Heinrich’s wedding, he recorded his current feelings:
Shouldn’t we be grateful for the totally unexpected chance to experience such mighty events? My chief feeling is a tremendous curiosity—and, I admit it, the deepest sympathy for this execrated, indecipherable, fateful Germany, which, if she has not hitherto unqualifiedly held ‘civilisation’ as the greatest good, is at any rate preparing to smash the most despicable police state in the world.
128
In Vienna, rumours were rife that the Papal Nuncio had been refused access to the Emperor. Pius X was said to be heartbroken by his failure to preserve the peace. (He died on 20 August.) Vatican documents later showed the rumours to have been false: the Papal Secretary of State approved of imperial policy.