Colonel Roosevelt (83 page)

A DELEGATION OF
New York Progressives tried to crash the reception, but were told that the Colonel could not see them. They had hoped to persuade him, over sandwiches, to run on their ticket for governor. Answering them obliquely on 22 July, Roosevelt announced that he would support a moderate, fusion-minded Republican, Harvey D. Hinman, for the gubernatorial nomination, in opposition to an organization man put forward by William Barnes, Jr. Readers of his statement thought that it showed more animus against Barnes than any particular regard for Hinman:

Barnes immediately sued him for libel and $50,000 in damages.

ON THE SAME NIGHT
that Roosevelt was served with his legal papers in Oyster Bay, the foreign minister of Serbia was handed a note from Austria-Hungary. It was far harsher than the one he had received the previous October. His government was given forty-eight hours to guarantee a purge of all terrorist organizations operating on Serbian soil, ban anti-imperial propaganda,
condemn its own army for Black Hand connections, and accept Austrian participation in an internal investigation of the murder of Franz Ferdinand.

The terms of this ultimatum (which had been issued at the impatient urging of Wilhelm II) were so provocative that it amounted to a declaration of war.
In mid-Atlantic, Commodore Theo Kier of the
Imperator
heard the news by radio and directed his liner home to Hamburg under full steam.

Serbia rejected the ultimatum cannily, by accepting all its demands except the one for a participatory investigation. This committed Austria-Hungary to a declaration of war on the reprehensible, not to say illegal ground that it had been denied permission to infringe the rights of a sovereign nation. Germany was challenged to court the same obloquy, if it made good on its promise to support Austrian aggression.

On Saturday, 25 July, Tsar Nicholas II waited for Serbia to mobilize in its own defense. Then, reacting much more quickly than the Kaiser had expected, he ordered a partial mobilization of the Russian army. He knew that if he made it total, he would doom his own dynasty. A force consisting largely of discontented peasants was not likely to return, brutalized, from a foreign conflict and remain subservient to Romanoff rule. Nicholas had been threatened with a domestic revolution in 1905, before
he allowed Theodore Roosevelt to mediate an end to the Russo-Japanese War. But no conciliatory figure was in sight now. Slav honor was Slav honor, and the Teutons had abused it enough.

When Wilhelm II heard the news from St. Petersburg, he said, more in surprise than dismay, “
Then I must mobilize too.”

One by one, like electrical systems activated from a central switchboard, the powers compelled to respond to a crisis in the Balkans began to generate heat. Serbia mobilized even before Austria-Hungary did. In London, Sir Edward Grey warned of a “European war
à quatre
”—a four-way conflict with Russia, Germany, and France being drawn into Austria’s provincial problem. He begged his counterpart on the Wilhelmstrasse, Count Gottlieb von Jagow, to push for a mediatory conference between the first three nations and his own. Although it was plain from his tone that Britain would not stand idly by if France was menaced, Jagow’s reply was evasive.

At 11:10
A.M
. on 28 July, Austria declared war on Serbia. The British ambassador in Vienna reported that its citizens were “wild with joy” at the announcement. Some even got an erotic charge out of it. “All my libido is given to Austria-Hungary,” Sigmund Freud wrote. Even the aged Franz Joseph approved the notion of a
Blitzkrieg
in the Balkans. He had no delicacy about shedding blood, having managed in the course of a long hunting career to kill more than fifty thousand animals.

Wilhelm II, however, felt a sudden qualm. He belatedly read the text of Serbia’s reply to the ultimatum of four days before, and thought it satisfactory.
“It contains the announcement
orbi et urbi
^*
of a capitulation of the most humiliating kind, and with it every reason for war is removed.” Surely, he suggested to Jagow, Vienna’s few remaining grievances could be settled by negotiation. But Franz Joseph had already signed an instrument of war, and Germany had promised to support it “through thick and thin.” The Kaiser’s inner circle of Prussian ministers were willing to temporize only so long as it took Russia to mobilize fully, so that St. Petersburg, not Berlin, would be seen as responsible for the spread of hostilities.

France was already in a state of high alarm. Everything that Clemenceau and other Germanophobes had warned about the threat of another Franco-Prussian war seemed to be coming true.
To Edith Wharton in Paris, “everything seemed strange, ominous and unreal, like the yellow glare which precedes a storm.” She felt as if she had died, and woken up in a world she no longer knew.

The European republic had more than three million men under arms or on reserve, and had recently extended its period of national service from two years to three. French military commanders were confident of the impregnability of its defenses along the Rhine, but less so of Belgium’s ability to withstand a German sweep westward across Flanders. That might come quickly, as a rearguard reinforcement by General Falkenhayn, before the slow Russian juggernaut began to crowd the eastern fringe of Prussia.

On 29 July the general’s soul mate in Vienna, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, ordered Austrian cannons to start bombarding Belgrade. The first shell across the Danube landed before dawn, and the ones that followed soon became too numerous to count. Nobody knew how many million more would be fired before the last fell, and in what soil of what nation.
The idea of a world war, hitherto untenable by military theorists, no longer seemed like fantasy. Conrad exulted, having called for the destruction of Serbia dozens of times in his career. At the same time, he was fatalistic about the long-term consequences. “It will be a hopeless war.… Nevertheless, it must be waged, since an old monarchy and a glorious army must not perish without glory.”

Next morning,
The Washington Post
encapsulated the situation for Americans:

“
It’s the Slav and the German,” Walter Hines Page wrote President Wilson. “Each wants his day, and neither has got beyond the stage of tooth and claw.”

Both the emperors involved—they communicated in English, calling each other “Nicky” and “Willy”—were now aghast at the drift of events. “
An ignoble war has been declared to [
sic
] a weak country,” the Tsar wired his cousin. “I beg you in the name of our old friendship to do what you can to stop your allies from going too far.”

Allies
, in this case, meant only Austria-Hungary. Willy was fearfully aware that Nicky had
more than one ally, and formidable ones too: both Britain and France would be obliged to come to Russia’s aid, should Germany enter the war. “I cannot consider Austria’s action against Serbia an ‘ignoble’ war,” he protested, pointing out that the government in Vienna had declared that its interests were honorable, not territorial. “I therefore suggest that it would be quite possible for Russia to remain a spectator of the Austro-Serbian conflict without involving Europe in the most horrible war she has ever witnessed.”

Nicky could only counter-propose that the Austro-Serbian problem be referred to the Hague International Court for arbitration. In the meantime he informed Willy, at 1:20
A.M
. on 30 July, that his country had moved to a state of full mobilization.

Belgium began to mobilize too. King Albert suspected that Germany was about to demand permission to march across his borders en route to Paris. Such permission could not be given without a sacrifice of Belgian sovereignty. That almost certainly meant the destruction of his country and his culture. Several great powers, including Great Britain and France, had declared Belgium “an independent and perpetually neutral state” as long ago as 1839, in the Treaty of London. But after seventy-five years of changing interests, the signatories could not necessarily be relied on, if General Falkenhayn decided to invade.

In a midnight meeting with Sir Edward Goschen, the British ambassador in Berlin, Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg tried to send peaceable signals to London. He said that Germany regarded, or professed to regard, its military policy toward France as purely defensive. It could not allow that grudge-bearing nation to compromise the Kaiser’s efforts to come to a settlement with Russia. As long as Belgium “did not take sides” in the matter, “her integrity would be respected.” And if Britain, too, “remained neutral … in the event of a victorious war,” Germany would guarantee never to change the boundaries of France.

When Goschen, remembering the Agadir crisis of 1911, asked if that extended to France’s overseas possessions, Bethmann-Hollweg’s tone changed. He would give no such assurance. What was more, he “could not tell to what operations Germany might be forced by the action of France.”

The combined vagueness and truculence of these remarks, counterpointing the Kaiser’s ambiguous diplomacy, appalled the British Foreign Office. Sir Edward Grey noted that a promise to respect territory was not a promise to respect sovereignty. The boundaries of Alsace-Lorraine had not altered since 1870, yet the flag that flew over Zabern was German. Bethmann’s admission that Germany might be “forced” to negate its own guarantees amounted, in British eyes, to a check as blank as the one Wilhelm II had handed the Austrian ambassador at the beginning of July.

The last forty-eight hours of July accelerated with a momentum that Bethmann-Hollweg likened to that of a landslide. All the key figures in the crisis became terrified, with the exception of Falkenhayn and his nominal superior, General Helmuth J. L. von Moltke, the German chief of staff. Their Prussian blood pulsed to the potential of mobilizing the world’s mightiest army, and deploying it east and west. The enormous dynamo was there, oiled and superbly tuned, the end product of decades of tinkering and testing. In the manner of a mechanism developed for one overriding purpose, it wanted to whir into action. Falkenhayn dreaded that the Kaiser or Bethmann-Hollweg might yet effect a negotiated settlement with Nicholas II. He raged against “
those peace people at the palace” holding up German mobilization while hordes of Slavs were standing to arms. Moltke warned the Chancellor that France and Russia together would bring about “the mutual destruction of the civilized states of Europe.” Since the adjective
mutual
implied only a pair of states, it was clear that Germans and Austrians felt menaced on all sides by barbarians.

“
Germany does not want to be the cause of this egregious war,” he wrote, “but … it would violate the deepest bonds of national loyalty—one of the noblest features of the German psyche … if it did not come to its ally’s aid just when this ally’s destiny is hanging in the balance.”