Europe's Last Summer (35 page)

Only a week before, Britain had been on the verge of civil war on the issue of Ireland. Now, after Grey had finished speaking,
John Redmond, the principal leader of the
Irish nationalists, rose to assure the government that it "might tomorrow withdraw every one of their troops from Ireland" because "the armed Nationalist Catholics in the South would be only too glad to join arms with the armed Protestant Ulsterman in the North" to defend the shores of the United Kingdom.

What happens next? Violet Asquith asked her father, while independently, Winston Churchill asked Grey the same question. The Prime Minister and the foreign secretary both gave the same answer: deliver an ultimatum. Indeed, at a cabinet meeting convened after the House of Commons session, that is what was decided.

CHAPTER 42: AUGUST 4

London.
At 9:30 a.m. Grey sent a telegram to Germany protesting Germany's ultimatum to Belgium and demanding that it be withdrawn.

As news arrived confirming Germany's intention of invading Belgium, Grey, at 2 p.m., sent Berlin an ultimatum demanding German compliance with Belgium's neutrality to be confirmed by midnight. The cable was sent to the British ambassador, who was able to deliver it only at 7 p.m. At some point Grey realized that the ultimatum did not specify whether it was to expire at midnight British time or continental time, and it was decided that it should be continental time, giving Germany five hours in which to reply.

Germany never replied.

Germany's invasion of Belgium, bringing Great Britain into the war, converted what had been a continental war into a world war. The British Empire extended all the way around the earth and so, now, would the warfare. Moltke's memo on August 2 to the German foreign office made it clear that the German government understood that.

In view of the paramount importance of the British decision, it is all the more remarkable how, in that pre-democratic age, the decision was reached. Parliament did not vote. The cabinet played little role. As A. J. P. Taylor tells us, King George V "held a privy council at Buckingham Palace" the night of August 4 "which was attended only by one minister and two court officials" and which "sanctioned the proclamation of a state of war." More astonishing, when viewed through modern eyes, "The governments and parliaments of the Dominions were not consulted." Instead each "governor general issued the royal proclamation on his own authority, as did the viceroy of India." Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India (which then included Pakistan and Bangladesh), and much of Africa were swept up in a war without first being asked.

Peculiar in a different way was the situation of Germany, which was fighting Russia, France, Britain, Luxemburg, and Belgium—all supposedly to prop up Austria, which, as of August 4, was still at peace with all of them. Yet Germany was
not
at war with, or fighting against, Serbia, the only country with which Austria
was
at war and which, according to Vienna, was the country that posed the threat to Austria's existence.

The following day, we are told by the historian
Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, there was "a panic in Berlin" as German troops continued to advance alone and without allies. Moltke told Tirpitz on August 5 that if Austria continued to shy away, Germany—only days after declaring war—would have to sue for peace on the best terms it could get.

On August 6, Vienna overcame its reluctance and declared war against Russia.

No wonder that, from the very outset, the belligerents felt obliged to explain to their own peoples, and to the peoples of other countries, the seemingly muddled logic that had brought them to the battlefield and, in Austria's eyes, to the wrong battlefield.

CHAPTER 43: SHREDDING THE EVIDENCE

Michael Howard, the military historian, writes of 1914: "Probably no few days in the history of the world have been subjected to such scrutiny as those between June 28, when the Archduke was assassinated, and August 4, when Britain declared war." Yet gaps remain in the record. Suspicious historians are bound to turn detective and to ask what the gaps mean. For the suppression or destruction of evidence in itself is evidence, and the challenge is to discover: evidence of
what)

A case in point is the week that began the morning of June 28. Austria-Hungary was deciding how to react to the assassination of its heir apparent. Its foreign minister, Count von Berchtold, the prime decision-maker in what ensued, is the first person whose private papers we would want to consult. It may tell us something that we learn from Holger Herwig, author of a magisterial work on Austria and Germany in the First World War: "It is interesting to note that Berchtold's official diary at the Foreign Office is conspicuously devoid of entries for the period between 27 June and 5 July 1914." There is a one-week gap. It suggests that in the week after June 27, Berchtold was doing something that he knew he might someday want to disavow. Interesting, too, is that Austrian intelligence, in Vienna's war archives, contains records that stop June 28, and do not resume for a whole year. When Germany justified itself on August 3, two days after declaring war, by publishing documents, "half of the thirty documents were blatant forgeries."

During the First World War all sides wanted to prove that they had not started it; afterwards, everyone wanted to avoid "war guilt," especially the Germans, on whom it was officially fixed in the Treaty of Versailles of 1919, after the Armistice. The German authorities instigated the suppression of relevant portions of Moltke's papers.

The result was that even in the decades after the war, evidence tended to be destroyed rather than recovered, and even if recovered, rewritten or restructured. Moreover, the authorities under successive German regimes up to and including the Nazi government carried on a massive disinformation campaign which has been described by Herwig in detail in his essay "
Clio Deceived."

The diaries of Kurt Riezler, private secretary to the German Chancellor, illustrate the difficulties that research scholars face. Riezler died after leaving instructions that his diaries should be destroyed. The personal papers of Bethmann had been removed or destroyed a decade or two earlier. After many maneuvers and arguments, the Riezler papers were rescued. But examination showed that while the diaries before and after the summer of 1914 were in small exercise books, the key months of July and August were recorded, instead, on loose paper and in another manner, strongly suggesting that these centrally relevant sections had been rewritten—and had been substituted for the original. The papers of Müller, head of the Kaiser's Naval Cabinet, though they survived, were expurgated.

Germans were not alone in destroying or falsifying their records. In the first weeks of the 1914 war the French foreign office issued a
Yellow Book
justifying all that it had done—a work of which Albertini in the 1940s was to write: "it musters 159 documents, many of them altered, mutilated, or falsified." Of a similar effort by St. Petersburg, Albertini writes that the Russian
Orange Book
"gives 79 documents, some considerably faked." And Serbia's archives were closed for half a century. No minutes were kept of Serbian cabinet meetings for 1914.

But nowhere was suppression or destruction of records, diaries, and the like carried out so widely throughout the following decades as in Germany. Thus all records of telephone conversations and notes of other verbal communications are missing for the period in question from the German foreign office. On the German side the two key turning points were the July 5 conversations with the Austrians, resulting in the "blank check," and the discussions among
German leaders the week of July 27 that led to the decision to go to war. All records of both are missing from the foreign office. Missing, too, we are told by a leading researcher in this field,
Imanuel Geiss, are all records of the Kaiser's conversations with military and political leaders during July. For that matter, there are no records of Germany's conversations in Berlin with foreign powers.

Appropriately it is German scholars, beginning with the courageous Fritz Fischer in the 1960s, who have taken the lead in discovering or restoring bits and pieces of the record, and who often have done so through enterprising and imaginative fieldwork. Thus in the early 1970s, John Röhl, a leading authority on Wilhelmine Germany, published two documents of considerable importance "discovered in a chest in the cellar of Hemmingen Castle in Württemberg, and in a washing-basket in the attic of Hertefeld manor-house, in western Germany close to the Dutch border," he writes, "while I was searching for letters." The two documents had been hidden away for half a century.

On the whole, we have to draw the obvious and commonsense conclusion that documents destroyed or hidden probably were embarrassing or incriminating, and that the effort to blot out or falsify the record was undertaken in order to deny responsibility for the war.

As will be seen, however, modern scholarship has made it possible, despite the massive destruction and falsification of evidence, to uncover much of the truth about what really happened.

PART EIGHT
THE MYSTERY SOLVED

CHAPTER 44: ASSEMBLING IN
THE LIBRARY

An inquest into the circumstances surrounding the outbreak of hostilities in 1914 results in findings that read, in some respects, like a murder mystery. There is the
simple
question of who did it: who, if anyone, was behind the boy who pulled the trigger. There also is the
complex
question of who did it: who, if anyone, deliberately manipulated the resulting situation in such a way as to destroy the existing European order.

The old-fashioned detective story that became so popular with the generation that emerged from the Great War, in Britain in particular, often ended with all the surviving characters assembling in one room. There, in the ship's lounge or in the ballroom of the hotel or in the library of a country house, Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot or some similar private detective would explain what really had happened and would answer the ultimate question: who did it?

For us, in our own inquiry, the room in which we gather to sum up must of necessity be a library. Those who played a role in the July crisis are no longer alive. They can no longer answer our questions in person. Luigi Albertini, the Italian historian who died in the opening years of the Second World War, was perhaps the last
researcher of the events of 1914 who could conduct his inquiries by sleuthing in the way that detectives do: by taking statements from the witnesses and suspects, questioning them, comparing their accounts, and pursuing contradictions and discrepancies. His volumes are the last of the police procedurals.

A new era opened, beginning in the 1960s, with the publication of the pioneering research of Fritz Fischer, who dug in the archives as archaeologists dig in the field. His example was followed and led to discoveries. Memories had been lost but files were found. Now, year after year, decade after decade, disclosures are made, fresh insights are afforded, hidden documents are recovered and displayed in the light of day. No longer, it is true, do participants speak to us, but a literature does.

Thousands of volumes have been written about the origins of the First World War, but of these, perhaps fifty or a hundred from the post-Fischer era, taken together, give at least in its main details a truthful account of what happened in that seminal summer of 1914, with the consequences of which we still live.

CHAPTER 45: WHAT DID NOT HAPPEN

In the post-Fischer era, scholars have revised many of the opinions that used to be held about the origins of the Great War. But scholarship has not percolated effectively into the consciousness of the wider public. Much of what people continue to say and think about the events of July 1914 is now questioned or disputed by scholars.

According to the most recent and convincing scholarship, it was not the case, as the man in the street seems to have believed at the time, and as Englishmen and others were to write later, that the European world of June 1914 was a sort of Eden in which the outbreak of hostilities among major powers came as a surprise. On the contrary, as its political and military elites recognized, Europe was in the grip of an unprecedented arms race; internally the powers were victims of violent social, industrial, and political strife; and general staffs chattered constantly, not about whether there would be war, but where and when.

Even the emerging trouble spots, far from coming as a surprise, could be discerned in advance. The chancelleries of Europe expected that the unsettled Balkans soon would be ready for another round of warfare in which the Ottoman Empire might disappear from Europe altogether. German leaders worried (and some of Russia's leaders hoped) that the Hapsburg Empire might collapse as well. Austria-Hungary worried that it might not be able to contain a Slavic tide. Germany was levying taxes to accelerate its military programs at rates that were unsustainable; it looked very much as though it had either to launch a war soon or stand down. What nobody knew was
when
there would be war: in which year or, for that matter, which decade. The Europe that took up arms in the summer of 1914 had not been a calm and peaceful place. It was riven by a thousand enmities, and was conspicuously bellicose.

Nor was it the case, at least in my view, that the march toward war began on June 28, 1914, and at Sarajevo. It was the Second Balkan War (1913) and its aftermath that persuaded Berchtold and his foreign office that Austria-Hungary had to destroy Serbia. It will be remembered that Vienna started drafting the memorandum-plan to crush Serbia two weeks
before
Sarajevo.