The Sleepwalkers (63 page)

This was a play with only male characters – how important was that? Masculinity is and was a broad category that encompassed many forms of behaviour; the manliness of these particular men was inflected by identities of class, ethnicity and profession. Yet it is striking how often the key protagonists appealed to pointedly masculine modes of comportment and how closely these were interwoven with their understanding of policy. ‘I sincerely trust we shall keep our backs very stiff in this matter,' Arthur Nicolson wrote to his friend Charles Hardinge, recommending that London reject any appeals for rapprochement from Berlin.
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It was essential, the German ambassador in Paris, Wilhelm von Schoen wrote in March 1912, that the Berlin government maintain a posture of ‘completely cool calmness' in its relations with France and approach ‘with cold blood' the tasks of national defence imposed by the international situation.
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When Bertie spoke of the danger that the Germans would ‘push us into the water and steal our clothes', he metaphorized the international system as a rural playground thronging with male adolescents. Sazonov praised the ‘uprightness' of Poincaré's character and ‘the unshakable firmness of his will';
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Paul Cambon saw in him the ‘stiffness' of the professional jurist, while the allure of the reserved and self-reliant ‘outdoorsman' was central to Grey's identity as a public man. To have shrunk from supporting Austria-Hungary during the crisis of 1914, Bethmann commented in his memoirs, would have been an act of ‘self-castration'.
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Such invocations of
fin-de-siècle
manliness are so ubiquitous in the correspondence and memoranda of these years that it is difficult to localize their impact. Yet they surely reflect a very particular moment in the history of European masculinity. Historians of gender have suggested that around the last decades of the nineteenth and the first of the twentieth century, a relatively expansive form of patriarchal identity centred on the satisfaction of appetites (food, sex, commodities) made way for something slimmer, harder and more abstinent. At the same time, competition from subordinate and marginalized masculinities – proletarian and non-white, for example – accentuated the expression of ‘true masculinity' within the elites. Among specifically military leadership groups, stamina, toughness, duty and unstinting service gradually displaced an older emphasis on elevated social origin, now perceived as effeminate.
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‘To be masculine [. . .] as masculine as possible [. . .] is the true distinction in [men's] eyes,' wrote the Viennese feminist and freethinker Rosa Mayreder in 1905. ‘They are insensitive to the brutality of defeat or the sheer wrongness of an act if it only coincides with the traditional canon of masculinity.'
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Yet these increasingly hypertrophic forms of masculinity existed in tension with ideals of obedience, courtesy, cultural refinement and charity that were still viewed as markers of the ‘gentleman'.
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Perhaps we can ascribe the signs of role strain and exhaustion we observe in many of the key decision-makers – mood swings, obsessiveness, ‘nerve strain', vacillation, psychosomatic illness and escapism, to name just a few – to an accentuation of gender roles that had begun to impose intolerable burdens on some men. Conrad von Hötzendorf combined the brittle persona of a belligerent martinet with a deep need for the support of women, in whose company the immobile mask of command fell away revealing an insatiable ego in dire need of comfort and psychological reinforcement. His mother Barbara lived with or near Conrad until she died in 1915. He filled the vacancy by finally marrying the now divorced Gina von Reininghaus and drafting her into the Austro-Hungarian headquarters in Teschen – much to the astonishment of his colleagues and of Viennese society.
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Another interesting case is the French envoy in Belgrade, Léon Descos. A Russian colleague who knew Descos well reported that the ‘deep moral blow' of the two Balkan wars had damaged his ‘nervous system'. ‘He started to become more solitary [. . .] and from time to time he would repeat his favourite ditty on the inviolability of peace.'
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During the Balkan wars, Berchtold complained constantly to his diary of nightmares, sleepless nights and headaches.
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When the new French prime minister René Viviani, a man of fundamentally pacific temperament, travelled to St Petersburg for the summit talks of July 1914, he came close to suffering a complete nervous collapse. Hartwig, too, was under strain. Alexander Savinsky, the Russian minister in Sofia, believed that Hartwig had ‘lost his balance' during the Balkan Wars; Hartwig, Savinsky observed, ‘sees enemies everywhere that he has created himself'. By the early summer of 1914, Hartwig was constantly complaining about the poor state of his heart and longing for his summer break and cure in Bad Nauheim. He would not outlive the July Crisis.
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The nervousness that many saw as the signature of this era manifested itself in these powerful men not just in anxiety, but also in an obsessive desire to triumph over the ‘weakness' of one's own will, to be a ‘person of courage', as Walther Rathenau put it in 1904, rather than a ‘person of fear'.
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However one situates the characters in this story within the broader contours of gender history, it seems clear that a code of behaviour founded in a preference for unyielding forcefulness over the suppleness, tactical flexibility and wiliness exemplified by an earlier generation of statesmen (Bismarck, Cavour, Salisbury) was likely to accentuate the potential for conflict.

In his
System of Subjective Public Laws
, published in 1892, the Austrian public lawyer Georg Jellinek analysed what he called ‘the normative power of the factual'. By this he meant the tendency among human beings to assign normative authority to actually existing states of affairs. Human beings do this, he argued, because their perceptions of states of affairs are shaped by the forces exerted by those states of affairs. Trapped in this hermeneutic circularity, humans tend to gravitate quickly from the observation of what exists to the presumption that an existing state of affairs is normal and thus must embody a certain ethical necessity. When upheavals or disruptions occur, they quickly adapt to the new circumstances, assigning to them the same normative quality they had perceived in the prior order of things.
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Something broadly analogous happens when we contemplate historical events, especially catastrophic ones like the First World War. Once they occur, they impose on us (or seem to do so) a sense of their necessity. This is a process that unfolds at many levels. We see it in the letters, speeches and memoirs of the key protagonists, who are quick to emphasize that there was no alternative to the path taken, that the war was ‘inevitable' and thus beyond the power of anyone to prevent. These narratives of inevitability take many different forms – they may merely attribute responsibility to other states or actors, they may ascribe to the system itself a propensity to generate war, independently of the will of individual actors, or they may appeal to the impersonal forces of History or Fate.

The quest for the causes of the war, which for nearly a century has dominated the literature on this conflict, reinforces that tendency: causes trawled from the length and breadth of Europe's pre-war decades are piled like weights on the scale until it tilts from probability to inevitability. Contingency, choice and agency are squeezed out of the field of vision. This is partly a problem of perspective. When we look back from our remote vantage point in the early twenty-first century at the twists and turns of European international relations before 1914, we cannot help but view them through the lens of what followed. The events assemble themselves into something resembling Diderot's characterization of a well-composed picture: ‘a whole contained under a single point of view'.
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It would be perverse, of course, in attempting to correct for this problem, to fetishize contingency or inadvertancy. Among other things, this would merely replace the problem of over-determination with one of under-determination – of a war without causes. Important as it is to understand that this war might easily not have happened and why, this insight has to be balanced with an appreciation of how and why it did in fact happen.

A striking feature of the interactions between the European executives was the persistent uncertainty in all quarters about the intentions of friends and potential foes alike. The flux of power across factions and office-holders remained a problem, as did worries about the possible impact of popular opinion. Would Grey prevail against his opponents in cabinet and parliament? Would Poincaré stay in control of the French ministry? Military voices had recently been setting the tone in strategic debates in Vienna, but in the wake of the Redl Affair, Conrad's power appeared to be in decline, his dismissal was already on the cards. On the other hand, the hawks were in the ascendancy in St Petersburg. These domestically induced uncertainties were compounded by the difficulty of reading power relations within foreign political executives. British observers believed (wrongly, as we know in retrospect) that dovish conservatives like Kokovtsov (despite his recent dismissal) and Pyotr Durnovo had strengthened their influence over the Tsar and were about to make a comeback. There was anxious talk in Paris about the imminent victory of a pro-German faction led by the former premier Sergei Witte. Then there was the perennial nervousness about the susceptibility of key decision-makers to trends in public opinion. In a report filed from Berlin on the last day of February 1914, the Russian military plenipotentiary, Major-General Ilya Leonidovich Tatishchev, a friend of the German Kaiser, conceded that although he had noted high levels of hostility to Russia in the German press, he was unable to judge how this might influence Wilhelm II: ‘I believe in general, however, that His Majesty's love of peace is unshakable. But perhaps it is getting weaker in his entourage.' Two weeks later, however, he sounded the all-clear, noting that the latest Russo-German press feud appeared to have left no impression whatsoever on the German sovereign.
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Beneath all the paranoia and aggression was a fundamental uncertainty about how to read the mood and intentions of the other chancelleries, let alone how to anticipate their reactions to as yet unrealized eventualities.

The future was still open – just. For all the hardening of the fronts in both of Europe's armed camps, there were signs that the moment for a major confrontation might be passing. The Anglo-Russian alliance was under serious strain – it looked unlikely to survive the scheduled date for renewal in 1915. And there were even signs of a change of heart among the British policy-makers, who had recently been sampling the fruits of détente with Germany in the Balkans. It is far from obvious or certain that Poincaré could have sustained his security policy over the longer term. There were even tentative signs of an improvement in relations between Vienna and Belgrade, as agreements were sought and found on the exchange of political prisoners and the settlement of the Eastern Railway question. Above all, none of the European great powers was at this point contemplating launching a war of aggression against its neighbours. They feared such an initiative on each other's part, and as the military preparedness of the Entente soared, there was talk among the military in Vienna and Berlin of a pre-emptive strike to break the deadlock, but pre-emptive war had not become policy. Nor had Vienna resolved to invade Serbia unprovoked – an act that would have amounted to geopolitical suicide. The system still needed to be ignited from outside itself, by means of the trigger that the Russians and French had established on the Austro-Serbian frontier. Had Pašić's Serbian government pursued a policy aimed at domestic consolidation and nipped in the bud the irredentist movement that posed as great a threat to its own authority as it did to the peace of Europe, the boys might never have crossed the river Drina, a more clear-cut warning might have been given in good time to Vienna, the shots might never have been fired. The interlocking commitments that produced the catastrophic outcome of 1914 were not long-term features of the European system, but the consequence of numerous short-term adjustments that were themselves evidence of how swiftly relations among the powers were evolving.

And had the trigger not been pulled, the future that became history in 1914 would have made way for a different future, one in which, conceivably, the Triple Entente might not have survived the resolution of the Balkan crisis and the Anglo-German détente might have hardened into something more substantial. Paradoxically, the plausibility of the second future helped to heighten the probability of the first – it was precisely in order to avoid abandonment by Russia and to secure the fullest possible measure of support that France stepped up the pressure on St Petersburg. Had the fabric of the alliances seemed more dependable and enduring, the key decision-makers might have felt less under pressure to act as they did. Conversely the moments of détente that were so characteristic of the last years before the war had a paradoxical impact: by making a continental war
appear
to recede to the horizons of probability, they encouraged key decision-makers to underrate the risks attending their interventions. This is one reason why the danger of a conflict between the great alliance blocs appeared to be receding, just as the chain of events that would ultimately drag Europe into war got underway.

On the morning of Sunday 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie Chotek von Chotkowa and Wognin arrived by train in the city of Sarajevo and boarded a motorcar for the ride down the Appel Quay to the City Hall. There were six vehicles in the motorcade. In the leading car were the mayor of Sarajevo, Fehim Effendi Čurčić, dressed in a fez and a dark suit, and the Sarajevo police commissioner, Dr Edmund Gerde. Sitting behind them in the second car, a splendid Graef und Stift sports coupé with the roof rolled back so the passengers could be seen by the crowds of well-wishers lining the streets, were the archduke and his wife. Opposite them on the folding seat sat General Oskar Potiorek, governor of Bosnia. Sitting in the passenger seat at the front beside the driver was Lieutenant-Colonel Count Franz von Harrach. Behind them followed three further cars carrying local policemen and members of the archduke's and the governor's suites.