A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (10 page)

Hungarian Prime Minister István Tisza
“Our exactions may be hard, but not such that they cannot be complied with.”

On July 7 Austria-Hungary’s council of ministers was assembled by Berchtold to discuss measures to “put an end to Serbia’s intrigues once and for all” and, he hoped, to approve a course of action. Tisza surprised no one when he showed himself willing to do little. He tried to divert attention to Berchtold’s plans for Bulgaria and Romania. (Such diplomatic intrigues, typical of eastern Europe in the years before the war, are almost impossible to explain briefly.) When he saw that everyone had lost interest in such long-term speculative ventures, that nothing short of a showdown with Serbia would satisfy the Austrians, Tisza groped for ways to slow things down. He insisted that nothing be done until he had an opportunity to prepare a memo explaining his objections to Franz Joseph, who was away at his summer retreat. Berchtold and the council had no choice but to agree. Tisza was, after all, the head of the Hungarian government and not to be ignored.

Much of the discussion focused on the idea, with which none of the council members disagreed, that Serbia should be presented with a set of demands. At issue was whether these demands should be framed in such a way that Serbia could reasonably be expected to accept and act on them. Again Tisza was alone: “Our exactions may be hard,” he said, “but not such that they cannot be complied with. If Serbia accepted them, we should have a splendid diplomatic success.” Such a success, he added, “would decidedly improve our situation and give a chance of initiating an advantageous policy in the Balkans.” A failure to limit the conflict to diplomatic measures, he warned, could lead to “the terrible calamity of a European war.”

No one had any interest in going along with what Tisza proposed. The Austro-Hungarian war minister responded that “a diplomatic success would be of no use at all” and would be “interpreted as weakness.” According to a summary of the proceedings, everyone except Tisza agreed that “a purely diplomatic success, even if it ended with a glaring humiliation of Serbia, would be worthless.” It was finally decided, therefore, that “such stringent demands must be addressed to Serbia” that refusal would be “almost certain.”

Implicit in all this was the assumption that an Austro-Hungarian invasion would lead without complications to the defeat of Serbia. This led to the question of Serbia’s fate after it was defeated. Tisza’s position was that “by a war we could reduce the size of Serbia, but we could not completely annihilate it.” Here he carried the council with him, probably because of the reason he offered: “Russia would fight to the death before allowing this.” But all agreed that Serbia was to be made smaller. Parts of it were to be given to Bulgaria, Greece, and Albania. What remained, though formally an autonomous state, was to be an Austro-Hungarian satellite. In this way Berchtold—always too clever by half—thought that he could proceed with the destruction of Serbia while promising Russia and the world that Vienna did not want an inch of Serbian territory.

The summary of the council’s proceedings makes plain the near-desperation of the men participating. They were genuinely afraid of Serbia—convinced that, if Serbia were not crushed, it would be impossible to keep their South Slav subjects from fighting to break free of Hapsburg control. Another striking aspect of the discussion is the attention
not
given to how the other great powers—even Germany—might react to what was being planned. At the opening of the meeting, Berchtold had acknowledged that a “decisive stroke” of the kind he and Conrad wanted “cannot be dealt without previous diplomatic preparation.” But by this he meant only that Vienna could not proceed without an assurance of German support, and he had already been given that assurance. The council did not recognize the advisability of keeping Germany informed. Nor, beyond assuming that Russia would not intervene unless Vienna tried to absorb Serbia, did the ministers pay the slightest attention to the need to try to prepare Russia for what lay ahead. The emphasis, instead, was on secrecy. On secrecy, and on surprise, and on deceit: in the weeks to follow not even the Germans would be told of the council’s decision to dismember Serbia after taking it by force. To the contrary, all the great powers would be assured—falsely but repeatedly—that Austria had no territorial aspirations where Serbia was concerned. Even Tisza appears to have decided in the end to go along with this approach. Late in the meeting he told the council that he “was anxious to meet the others halfway and was prepared to concede that the demands addressed to Serbia should be hard indeed, but not such as to make our intention of raising unacceptable terms clear to everybody else.” The shift in his tone is striking. Tisza was no longer insisting that the demands be acceptable, only that Vienna’s real intent be concealed from
everybody else.
In the case of Germany, the results of this secrecy would be unfortunate. They would keep the Berlin government from understanding what Vienna was doing until it was very nearly too late. In the case of Russia, the results would be disastrous. The Austrians’ duplicity assured that, when their intentions became clear at last, the Russians would be shocked, panicked, and—not without reason—convinced that they had been betrayed.

This meeting was followed by a period of quiet waiting. For the sake of secrecy, and to Conrad’s consternation, little could be done to ready the Austro-Hungarian army for action. Tisza remained nettlesome. On the day after the council meeting he wrote to Franz Joseph, warning that an attack on Serbia “would, as far as can humanly be foreseen, lead to an intervention by Russia and hence to a world war.” He reverted to his original position that the demands to be made of Serbia should be “stiff but not impossible to meet, and that further action should be taken only if Serbia refuses.” Berchtold, occupied with drafting the demands, paid him no attention.

By July 13 Vienna’s ambassador in Berlin was reporting that the Germans were growing nervous about Vienna’s failure to act. Berchtold ignored this report too. A day later, when Tisza pointedly objected to the use of the term
ultimatum
in connection with the demands, Berchtold cheerfully offered a compromise. The document he was drafting would be a “note with time limit,” not an ultimatum. It was a distinction without a difference, and it cost Berchtold nothing. Serbia would be given forty-eight hours to respond and would be told nothing about what Vienna intended to do if the response proved unsatisfactory. Austria’s ambassadors were under instructions to assure Russia and even Germany that Vienna was planning nothing that would cause concern. Again Berchtold was being too clever, deceiving friends and prospective enemies alike.

On July 19 the council of ministers met again in Vienna. Members reviewed Berchtold’s draft note and gave their approval. It included ten demands. At least half were entirely reasonable. A few, however, were susceptible to being interpreted as requiring Serbia to compromise its sovereignty. The most objectionable called for direct Austrian involvement in Serbia’s handling of the assassination investigation and related internal matters. Its rejection was, in practical terms, nearly inevitable. The council agreed that Berchtold should have the note delivered to the Prime Minister of Serbia in Belgrade on July 23, immediately after the departure of France’s President Poincaré from St. Petersburg. Tisza was no longer objecting. Germany’s promise of support had neutralized his warnings, and on top of that (the complexities of the Balkans being almost infinite) he was beginning to see Serbia—specifically, Serbia’s friendly relations with Romania—as a threat to Hungary’s control of Transylvania, which had a large Romanian population increasingly restless for union with what it saw as its true homeland.

The delivery of the note to Serbia, when the evening of Thursday, July 23, finally arrived, was a sad little comedy of errors. Prime Minister Pasic had—not necessarily by coincidence, as he had been alerted that a communication from Vienna was coming—left Belgrade on an electioneering trip into Serbia’s newest provinces. His foreign minister, when told to expect an important visit by the Austrian ambassador at six
P.M.,
tried to contact Pasic by telegram but got no answer.

Vienna’s ambassador to Belgrade, another of the many Austrian officials who had long regarded war with Serbia as not only inevitable but desirable, was a baron with the interesting name Giesl von Gieslingen. Upon arriving, he was taken to see the foreign minister. An interpreter was on hand because the minister spoke neither German nor French. Giesl began to read his government’s note, a lengthy document that opened with a preamble complaining that the behavior of Serbia had been intolerable and would in fact no longer be tolerated. He read slowly, with frequent pauses for the benefit of the interpreter. The foreign minister, more and more alarmed by what he was hearing, began to interrupt. Again and again he complained through the interpreter that he could not accept a communication this important, that only Pasic could do so. Giesl, out of patience, said that in that case he could only leave the note and go. In departing he said that no response other than unconditional acceptance would satisfy Austria, and that Serbia’s response was required by six
P.M.
on Saturday.

News of the Austrian demands had little impact except in Russia. The government of faraway Britain, ensnared in a violent crisis having to do with Irish Home Rule, had scant attention to spare for the Balkans. The London newspapers, never friendly toward Serbia, dealt generously with Austria’s demands, in most cases describing them as appropriate and responsible. The British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, suggested only that Austria’s deadline ought to be extended.

There was even less interest in France. President Poincaré, having completed his visit with Tsar Nicholas and his ministers, was at sea, somewhere between St. Petersburg and home. In Paris the public and even the government were fixated on a scandal that had erupted when the wife of a former prime minister shot and killed a newspaper editor.

Berlin too was quiet. Kaiser Wilhelm, back to his customary weeks of summertime sailing, didn’t learn about the Austrian note until news of it reached him through the Norwegian newspapers. He was, understandably, angry at not having been informed by his own foreign office. For the first time he showed signs of serious concern. He proposed canceling a planned visit of the German High Seas Fleet to Scandinavia but was dissuaded. Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg urged him not to interrupt his vacation a second time. Wilhelm refused and started for home.

At this point Wilhelm still knew nearly nothing about what the Austrian note said. Requests for a copy had gone out from Berlin, but when a copy reached Foreign Minister Gottlieb von Jagow on the evening of July 22—less than twenty-four hours before the delivery to Serbia—it proved to be incomplete and unaccompanied by any indication that the Austrians were determined to reject the Serbian response. Bethmann didn’t bother to read it. Vienna had not consulted Berlin, now virtually no time remained for questions or objections, and the man whose questions would have mattered most—Kaiser Wilhelm—knew less than anyone. Berchtold, almost certainly, had planned things this way. Having succeeded in getting his government to commit to action despite Tisza’s initial resistance and the deadly inertia of the dual monarchy’s dual bureaucracy, he was determined to make further complications impossible. Thus he compounded his earlier mistakes. Not only had he left the Russian government completely unprepared for the harshness of his note, he had actively encouraged the Russians to expect something very different. He had done nothing to help newspapers across Europe, and thereby the European public, understand why Austria was taking action at last. Little had been disclosed, and less had been publicized, about Vienna’s success in tracing the assassination plot back to Belgrade and establishing the likelihood that officials of the Kingdom of Serbia had been involved. Vienna had made no public complaints about Belgrade’s failure to investigate the assassination. Thus the news of Vienna’s note, when it flashed across the continent, came as more of a surprise than an invasion of Serbia might have done in the immediate aftermath of the Sarajevo shootings. By July 23 the assassination was three and a half weeks in the past. Tempers had cooled, and people in cities far from Sarajevo had moved on to other things. They were no longer disposed to regard the murder of the archduke and his wife as such an outrage as to require a military response.

In St. Petersburg, Russia’s foreign minister, the mercurial Sergei Sazonov, went into a rage when he learned of the Austrian note. He complained that he had been deceived, that Russia couldn’t possibly stand by while Serbia was humiliated or worse, that Austria couldn’t possibly have sent such a note without the knowledge and approval of Germany, and that both countries must be plotting to drive Russia out of the Balkans. “You are setting fire to Europe!” Sazonov told the Austrian ambassador. The Prince Regent of Serbia, meanwhile, was sending wires to Tsar Nicholas asking for help.