A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (19 page)

All the same he was a competent, conscientious, experienced soldier. And now he could scarcely believe what the kaiser was telling him. Stop this enormous army? Smash all the clockwork plans for transporting it and feeding it and making certain that at every point it would have what it needed to fight? Turn it around? March it
east?
Call off the great wheeling movement to the west that was the whole and only point of German mobilization and almost certainly Germany’s sole hope of victory?

Moltke collected his wits and began to speak. “I assured his Majesty,” he would write later, “that this wasn’t possible. The deployment of an army of a million men was not a matter of improvisation. It was the product of a whole year’s work—of timetables that once worked out could not be changed. If his Majesty insisted on leading the whole army eastwards, he would not have an army ready to strike, he would have a confused mass of disorderly armed men without commissariat.” Not only would his army be a confused and disorderly mass of troops, he added, but once facing eastward it would have at its back sixty-two French army divisions ready for action and equipped with their own carefully developed plans for the conquest of Germany. How could Britain, how could anyone, guarantee that France would not seize such an opportunity?

The kaiser, his withered left arm tight against his side as usual, the waxed points of his great hornlike mustache reaching upward almost to his eyes, answered Moltke in the most wounding way possible.

“Your uncle,” he said, “would have given me a different answer.”

“This pained me a good deal,” Moltke would recall, “for I have never pretended to be the equal of the great Field Marshal.” He tried to explain that once the mobilization plan had been executed, it would become possible to start moving troops to the east, adding that he could not accept responsibility for the military consequences of halting its execution. Bethmann interrupted in a way that Moltke could not have welcomed, saying that he could not accept political responsibility for a failure to respond positively to Britain’s remarkable offer. Finally and with difficulty, a compromise was worked out. Falkenhayn took Moltke into a side room and quietly argued that some slowing of the mobilization process had to be possible. The invasion force could be stopped at least briefly at the Luxembourg border, surely. Moltke gave in. This could work for a while—for hours, though not for days.

Before the slowdown could create serious problems, causing troops and trains that were supposed to be advancing to back up on one another and wreck all the timetables, Berlin learned that what is usually true of things that seem too good to be true applied in this case: the message from London was the result of a tangle of misunderstandings. The origins of these misunderstandings remain hard to unravel even today. It seems certain that Grey, in raising the question of possible French and British neutrality, had not regarded himself as offering anything like a formal proposal. But he like everyone else had been willing to clutch at straws by this point, and apparently he had tossed out an idle thought to see what kind of response it might draw. Perhaps, enmeshed as he was in the struggle going on within the British government and exhausted by long days and nights of searching for a resolution to the continental crisis, he had been less than clear in what he said. Certainly it could never have occurred to him that his idea would be seized by the Germans as an opportunity to delay fighting with France in order to crush Russia first; what he probably had in mind, rather, was an arrangement in which Germany would stand on the defensive on both fronts while the Austro-Russian dispute was worked out.

Perhaps Lichnowsky, who throughout the crisis had displayed exceptional understanding of its dangers and exceptional courage in telling his government truths that it did not want to hear, had been too eager to believe that Grey was telling him what he most wanted to hear. As early as 1912, even before taking up his post in London, he had told the kaiser that “it is understandable that each increase in Serbian power and her expansion towards the sea is regarded with alarm by the Austrian statesmen; but it would be incomprehensible if we should run even the faintest risk of becoming involved in a war for such a cause.” His feelings on the matter were even stronger in 1914, and he never hesitated to say so.

For a few blissful hours an exultant Kaiser Wilhelm was able to occupy himself with grandiose new schemes. The German foreign ministry cabled Lichnowsky that Britain would be required to
guarantee
French neutrality, that it had until seven
P.M.
on Monday to make the necessary arrangements, and that until then Germany would refrain from attacking. Finally, all such fantasies were brought crashing down by another message from London. Lichnowsky reported that Grey, after meeting with the cabinet, had told him that a German violation of Belgian neutrality “would make it difficult for the Government here to adopt an attitude of friendly neutrality.” Germany’s failure to promise that it would not enter Belgium, Grey had added, “has caused an unfavorable impression.” He had again raised the question of whether it might be possible for France and Germany “to remain facing each other under arms, without attacking each other, in the event of a Russian war,” but there was no further suggestion that Britain was promising neutrality in return.

German Ambassador Lichnowsky making his last call on the British Foreign Office

Grey was offering, in a word, nothing. Obliquely but clearly enough, he was indicating that Britain would likely join with France in case of war—especially a war that took German troops into Belgium. The kaiser, after venting his rage about the deceitful English (his feelings about Britain had always been a mess of admiration, envy, and resentment), put everything back on track. Moltke was told that the mobilization could go forward as originally intended. Later, in making his marginal comments on Lichnowsky’s last message, the kaiser gave particular attention to Grey’s mention of an “unfavorable impression” having been created in London. “My impression,” he wrote, “is that Mr. Grey is a false dog who is afraid of his own meanness and false policy, but who will not come out in the open against us, preferring to let himself be forced by us to do it.” His childish language aside, the kaiser did have a point.

Shortly after seven
P.M.
in St. Petersburg, Germany’s Ambassador Pourtalès was admitted to the office of Foreign Minister Sazonov. The two men were friends, though throughout July their meetings had sometimes been volcanic. Pourtalès had been in St. Petersburg for seven years and had developed an affection for Russia. Like diplomats and politicians in all the capital cities, he had had almost no sleep in days. He was an old man, already preparing for retirement when the crisis began, and by Saturday he was approaching collapse. Quietly, he asked Sazonov if Russia was prepared to answer the double ultimatum.

Sazonov, exhausted himself, overwrought, and a volatile personality under the best of circumstances, had just come from a meeting at which he had been trying to assure the British ambassador that Russia’s mobilization did not necessarily mean war. He answered Pourtalès by echoing what the tsar had earlier told the kaiser: although it was not possible to stop mobilization, Russia wanted to continue negotiations. Russia remained hopeful of avoiding war.

Pourtalès took from his pocket a copy of Germany’s ultimatum, read it aloud, and added that the consequences of a negative reply would be grave.

Sazonov repeated his first answer.

Pourtalès too repeated himself: the consequences would be grave.

“I have no other reply to give you,” said Sazonov.

Pourtalès took out more papers. “In that case, sir, I am instructed by my government to hand you this note.” In his hands he held two messages, both of them declarations of war. One was for use if Russia gave no answer to the ultimatum, the other a reply to a negative answer. In his distress and confusion he pressed both on Sazonov and burst into tears.

Or so Sazonov wrote years later in his memoirs. Pourtalès’s recollection was that Sazonov wept first. Whatever the sequence, apparently both men cried. They embraced, then pulled apart and began to exchange accusations.

“This was a criminal act of yours,” Sazonov said. “The curses of the nations will be upon you.”

“We were defending our honor.”

“Your honor was not involved.”

Finally they parted forever, Sazonov helping the distraught Pourtalès to the door.

Bound for glory: the troops of imperial Germany, adorned with the
pickelhaube
headgear that will soon be replaced with more practical steel helmets, marching off to start the war.

Chapter 7

The Iron Dice Roll

“If the iron dice roll, may God help us.”

C
HANCELLOR
T
HEOBOLD VON
B
ETHMANN
H
OLLWEG

B
efore every commander of the armies that went to war in August 1914 there lay the possibility of becoming a hero, a giant, a deliverer of his people. Likewise there lay before every one of them the very real possibility of everlasting disgrace.

This was nowhere more true than in the case of Helmuth von Moltke, who as the war began was sixty-six years old, in questionable health, and approaching the ninth anniversary of his appointment as head of the German high command. His long service as chief meant that he was responsible not only for winning the war but for the plans—the inconceivably intricate plans, including among much else the timetables of the eleven thousand trains that would have to be moved to complete German mobilization—according to which the war was to be prosecuted. All of it was on his shoulders. And Moltke went to war without a trace of Napoleonic zest. Throughout most of the July crisis he had been a voice for restraint. Though Russia’s mobilization turned him into a strident advocate of military action, even then he was motivated not by any hunger for conquest or expectation of victory but by fear of a kind that was far from uncommon in the upper reaches of the German civil and military administration. This fear rose out of the belief, the conviction, that Germany was encircled by enemies who were growing stronger at an alarming rate, and that if the showdown were delayed just a few years more there might be no possibility of victory, even of survival. Far from looking forward to a quick and easy victory, Moltke said that if war came it would be “a long weary struggle with a country that will not acknowledge defeat until the whole strength of its people is broken, a war that even if we should be the victors will push our own people, too, to the limits of exhaustion.”