A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (12 page)

July 25 to 28:
Secrets and Lies

“This was more than one could have expected.
A great moral victory for Vienna!”

—K
AISER
W
ILHELM
II

A
s the details of Austria’s demands became known, three and a half weeks of drift came abruptly to an end. Actions and reactions began to follow one another at an accelerating pace. The possibility of war became increasingly real. Not only in Vienna, Berlin, and St. Petersburg but also in London, Rome, and Paris, awareness dawned that this was a genuinely dangerous crisis.

Men with the power to decide the fate of Europe did the things that brought the war on and failed to do the things that might have kept the war from happening. They told lies, made mistakes, and missed opportunities. With few if any exceptions they were decent, well-intended men, and almost always they acted for what they thought were the best of reasons. But little of what they did produced the results they intended.

Saturday, July 25

Measured by the headlines that it generated, this was an extraordinary day. The Kingdom of Serbia, forty-eight hours almost to the minute after receiving Austria-Hungary’s demands, presented its response. It agreed outright to only half of the ten demands. The Austro-Hungarian ambassador to Serbia, Baron Giesl, followed his instructions to find this unacceptable and broke off diplomatic relations immediately. His bags had been packed in advance, and in less than half an hour he was on a train. Less than ten minutes later the train crossed the border into Hungary.

Both countries announced that they were mobilizing. (Serbia had started mobilizing hours before delivering its response.) Russia then declared what its military planners called a Period Preparatory to War—not yet mobilizing but moving ominously in that direction. Army units on summer maneuvers were returned to their barracks, officers on leave were recalled, and the military districts of Kazan, Kiev, Moscow, and Odessa were ordered to make ready. More secretly, preparations also began in the Warsaw, Vilna, and St. Petersburg districts. The last development was particularly dangerous, as those three districts threatened Germany directly.

But there was even more to July 25 than that.

The Serbian response to Austria’s demands, far from being defiant, was actually conciliatory, respectful, and at times almost submissive in tone. But it was also long, and its language was artfully oblique. (“The most brilliant example of diplomatic skill I have ever known,” an annoyed Berchtold called it.) It explained that while Serbia could agree unconditionally to a number of the demands, it had questions about several others—not objections, just questions—and was unable to accept only one: predictably, the one that would have involved Austria directly in Belgrade’s search for and prosecution of the assassination plotters. But even here the wording was far from bellicose. “The Royal Government cannot accept such an arrangement, as it would be a violation of the Constitution and the law of criminal procedure,” it stated. “Nevertheless, in concrete cases communications as to the results of the investigation in question might be given to the Austro-Hungarian agents.”

As positive as it was in many ways, and as clever as it may have been as an attempt to hold off the Austrians while impressing the rest of the world with Serbia’s willingness to cooperate, the response can fairly be regarded as one of the mistakes that led to war. By declining to yield, the Serbs gave Berchtold, Conrad, and their cohorts the one thing they wanted: an excuse for military action. Worse, they did this unnecessarily. They might have responded differently—not more shrewdly, their document being nothing if not shrewd, but more effectively—had they not been receiving reports about how Russia wanted them to stand firm. These reports were wishful thinking on the part of Serbia’s combative ambassador to Russia, who was being manipulated by France’s ambassador in St. Petersburg, Maurice Paléologue. They certainly were not in accord with the thinking of Russian officialdom. Tsar Nicholas was leery of a major war because he was fearful of its likely consequences—social and economic strains so severe that they could spark revolution. So was Foreign Minister Sazonov. Both men believed that Russia was years from being ready to fight the Germans. Though Russia was greatly expanding its already huge army and was also, with the help of France, building a new network of railroads designed to improve its ability to wage war, such projects would not be completed until 1917 at the earliest. But Sazonov especially believed that Austria-Hungary was acting not independently but as the tool of Berlin, that the Germans were determined to precipitate a preventive war, and that Russia could protect itself only by reacting forcefully and quickly.

The Serbian response also might have been different if someone other than Nikola Pasic had been responsible for preparing it. Because of his prior knowledge of the Black Hand’s plot, and also because of the efforts he had made to stop the assassination, Serbia’s prime minister had abundant reasons for not wanting Austria-Hungary to become involved in any investigation. It would be bad for him, and probably bad for Serbia, if Austria discovered how much he had known and started asking why he had not done more. It might be even worse for him if the Black Hand learned that, in attempting to stop the assassination, he had actually tried to alert the Austrians. To all this was added Pasic’s need to show himself willing to stand up to the Austrians in the run-up to the Serbian election.

The Austrian mobilization that followed put into motion a plan for assembling twenty divisions—some three hundred thousand troops—just a few miles from Belgrade. In deploying his forces in this way, Conrad left himself with only twenty-eight divisions for Galicia to the north, where Austria-Hungary would have to face much larger numbers if Russia went to war. This alarmed the German general staff when it became known in Berlin. It meant—contrary to what Conrad had indicated in earlier consultations with the German high command—that the German army in the east would have painfully limited Austrian support in case of a Russian attack. It showed Conrad’s blind determination to believe that Russia was going to stay out, and that he was therefore free to give the Serbs the thrashing that he had been wanting to give them for years.

Russia, in declaring its Period Preparatory to War, took the steps that would enable it to get its troops into action more quickly if it too mobilized. And if its actions were “preparatory,” they were far from trivial. They involved the mustering of 1.1 million troops in the four districts nearest to Austria-Hungary. Serbia’s mobilization, necessarily much smaller, was based on the mistaken but eminently rational assumption that Austria was preparing to attack within a few days. The same assumption prompted the Serbs to begin moving their government out of Belgrade and away from the border.

Mobilization,
a momentous word in those days, meant something short of—but not always a great deal short of—declaring and going to war. The degree of difference varied from nation to nation, and in this fact lay a world of trouble. For Russia, geographically vast and systemically inefficient, mobilization was an almost glacial affair. It was a matter of calling up reserves (no simple matter where railways were few and men reporting for duty might have to travel hundreds of miles), assembling divisions and armies in their assigned positions, and getting them ready to advance against the enemy or face an enemy advance. Crucially, an invasion of enemy territory was not integral to Russia’s mobilization arrangements; that was to be decided according to circumstances. Even after mobilization, the Russian leadership would continue to have options. Its mobilized armies could be kept in place on Russian soil without disruption of their ability to act.

The sprawling Austro-Hungarian Empire faced transport problems similar to, though not quite so serious as, those of Russia. And again like St. Petersburg’s, Vienna’s mobilization plans gave it a measure of flexibility. Conrad had divided his forces into three groups: one for use against Serbia, one for Galicia and engagement of the Russians, and a third to be deployed to either front depending on need. It was by deciding to send his third group to the south that Conrad was able to assemble twenty divisions for an attack on Serbia.

Germany, in 1914 the most modern and efficient of Europe’s industrial giants, could mobilize with a speed that was dazzling by comparison with either Russia or Austria-Hungary. Its planners were convinced that in case of war the country’s survival would depend on that speed. Ever since 1894, when France and Russia had first become allies, the Germans had been faced with the likelihood that war with either would entail war with both. They also assumed—this was arguable but not unreasonable—that they could not expect to win a protracted war against both. For this reason their mobilization plan was focused on a single overriding objective: to knock France out of action in the west in no more than six weeks, before Russia could launch a major attack from the east. Germany’s plans, therefore, included the start of a drive on Paris. Once started, such a drive would be nearly impossible to stop or even significantly modify without reducing all the arrangements to chaos. For Germany alone, mobilization equaled war.

But mobilization was bound to be dangerous, regardless of which power undertook it. It was inherently threatening. Even if undertaken by Austria-Hungary, the least of the great powers, and even if directed at a mere Balkan kingdom, it was certain to draw some kind of response.

The start of Austria-Hungary’s mobilization caught the chief of the Serbian army, the aged Field Marshal Radomir Putnik, on his way home from a summer vacation in the Austrian province of Bohemia. The authorities in Budapest detained him. But Emperor Franz Joseph demanded not only that Putnik be allowed to proceed but that a special train be made available to return him to Belgrade. It was a charming gesture of Old World courtliness, one that the new world of industrialized warfare would soon render obsolete. As Putnik took charge of the Serbian defenses, Conrad and his troops would have reason to regret their emperor’s chivalry.

Sunday, July 26

This was a day when no headlines were made, a day when little, supposedly, was happening. Again, however, things were less simple than they appeared, particularly in Austria and Russia, whose leaders were now putting their military machines in motion and hoping that the other powers would understand their actions as they wanted them to be understood.

Austria mobilized in part to start the clock ticking on a process that would require sixteen days to bring the army to readiness. But it also wanted to demonstrate that the situation was serious, that if France and Britain wanted to avoid something worse than a localized Balkan problem, they had better restrain Russia. France mattered even at this early stage because it was Russia’s one powerful ally, and because everyone understood that without French support the Russians would be reluctant, probably even unwilling, to risk war with an Austria-Hungary acting with German support. Britain mattered because it was powerful despite having only a small army, because it had allied itself with France and Russia in a loose and informal way, and because it was certain to want to avoid a general war.

The second of Vienna’s purposes could not possibly be achieved. France’s President Poincaré was still at sea. With wireless communications still primitive (and with Germany attempting to jam radio transmissions), he was nearly incommunicado. Britain’s foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, was both cautious by nature and paralyzed by divisions within the government of which he was a member. In the near term, no one in Paris or London was going to be pressuring St. Petersburg—or Berlin or Vienna for that matter—to do anything. Grey’s own position, which he expressed within the cabinet only, was that the greatest threat to British security was German dominance in Europe. He believed that if war were to break out between Austria and Russia and lead to war between Germany and France, Britain would have to side with France. This did not mean, however, that he wanted war.

On July 26 Grey felt that the most he could do was communicate his concerns to the German ambassador in London, Prince Karl Lichnowsky, and suggest a conference of Britain, France, Germany, and Italy as a means of resolving the crisis. Lichnowsky, whose position in London permitted him to see almost from the start that Grey and other British leaders were likely to oppose Germany in a showdown, seized on this suggestion. “I would like to call your attention to the significance of Grey’s proposal of a mediation
à quatre
between Austria and Russia,” he said in a telegram to Berlin. “I see in it the only possibility of avoiding a world war, in which for us there would be everything to lose and nothing to gain.”

Russia’s declaration of a Period Preparatory to War had a less subtle purpose than the Austrian mobilization. Its goal was, simply, to make the Austrians reconsider. St. Petersburg was also eager to make Berlin believe that it was not being threatened, but German intelligence soon learned that the Russian military was doing much more than it would admit to. Its secret preparations in the military districts closest to Germany reflected the Russian government’s fear that, as Foreign Minister Sazonov told Tsar Nicholas, it faced not just a dispute over Serbia but “a question of the balance of power in Europe, which is seriously threatened.” But they also bore an uncomfortably close resemblance to an undeclared mobilization. When the German military attaché in St. Petersburg made inquiries, however, he was given lies in response. As more was learned about how much the Russians were doing, and as the Russians continued to pretend that they were doing very little, Berlin grew increasingly nervous. It became progressively less willing to accept the assurances of goodwill coming from St. Petersburg.

Maurice Paléologue, France’s ambassador in St. Petersburg, was able to keep himself informed of the extent of Russia’s preparations. The Russians had a responsibility under their Entente with France to tell Paris in advance of any mobilization plans, but Paléologue did not remind them of this fact. He appears to have been unwilling to do anything that might discourage them from proceeding. He did not even tell his own government what he knew; he didn’t want anyone in Paris to restrain the Russians either. A similar game was being played in Vienna by Germany’s Ambassador Tschirschky, a onetime foreign minister who had decided that it was his duty to encourage Austrian aggressiveness without doing so openly.