The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (60 page)

It was not clear in any case that Italy would remain in the Triple Alliance. By 1902 its relations with France had improved markedly and Italy had secretly promised not to join any German attack on France. As a naval power itself in the Mediterranean, Italy had always preferred to be on good terms with the world’s leading naval power Britain. At the same time Italy’s relationship with Austria-Hungary, never good, was worsening. The two countries were rivals in the western part of the Balkans and in both there was talk and planning for war against the other. While Conrad in Austria-Hungary thought in terms of attack, the Italian general staff, aware of its own weakness, planned for a defensive war. Italy’s promises of military support to Germany sat awkwardly with its growing concern about Austria-Hungary. In 1888, shortly after the Triple Alliance was formed, Italy had promised to send troops through Austria to support Germany along the Rhine against any French attack. Although Alberto Pollio, the chief of the Italian general staff between 1908 and 1914, was initially reluctant to keep the commitment, in February 1914 the Italian government confirmed that, should a war break out, it would send three army corps and two cavalry divisions to the upper Rhine to join the left wing of the German army. In the crisis that July the German military leadership continued to hope for the Italian troops, although with considerable reservations about Italy’s reliability or usefulness.
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Germany could manage without Italy, and in the event did, but in the last decade before the Great War it badly needed to hang on to Austria-Hungary. In spite of periodic attempts to reach out to Russia or to Britain, it had few other possibilities for allies. The Ottoman Empire was too weak, and the smaller powers such as Rumania or Greece rightly tried to stay out of conflicts if they could. As the years went by and Germany faced a strengthening Triple Entente, its Dual Alliance with Austria-Hungary assumed greater and greater importance. That meant in turn that Germany had to back Austria-Hungary up when it got into confrontations in the Balkans or, more seriously still, with Russia.

Bismarck had always intended the alliance to be a defensive one and had resisted any attempts, such as binding military agreements, to make it something more. He had, though, allowed staff talks which gave Austria-Hungary to understand that Germany would send a substantial number of troops to the east for combined operations against Russia in the event of a Russian attack on Austria-Hungary. When Wilhelm II assumed the throne, he repeatedly signalled, at least rhetorically, enthusiasm for a closer relationship. After Schlieffen became the German chief of staff in 1891, however, the allies’ strategic goals diverged as the Germans increasingly saw France as their main enemy while the Austrians continued to focus on Russia. At their first meeting, General Friedrich von Beck, the Austrian chief of staff, found Schlieffen ‘taciturn and not very obliging’. Schlieffen for his part did not put much trust in the Austrians: ‘Those characters will only desert or run over to the enemy.’ In 1895 he cut back sharply on Germany’s commitments in the eastern theatre of war and made it clear that Germany would only carry out a small attack on to Russian soil. Beck was furious, not least because the German decision nullified years of Austrian staff work.
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From that point on, relations between the two general staffs were correct but cool and there was no detailed joint military planning.

It was in not until 1908–9, at a moment when it looked as though Austria-Hungary might go to war with Serbia over Bosnia, that the Dual Alliance shifted away from Bismarck’s limited and defensive conception and became something closer, more offensive, and more dangerous for the stability of Europe. Wilhelm II again took a hand, telling Austria-Hungary: ‘Emperor Francis Joseph is a Prussian field
marshal and hence he has only to command and the entire Prussian Army will follow his command.’
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More importantly, the militaries from Austria-Hungary and Germany started to talk again and from that point on until the summer of 1914 they exchanged letters and visits which served to build up an expectation that they would consult and act together to support each other in moments of crisis.
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Schlieffen and Beck had by this time passed from the scene and their successors, Moltke and Conrad, established a warmer relationship. Conrad revered the elder Moltke and was to wear a medallion with the great German general’s image around his neck during the Great War.
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On New Year’s Day in 1909 Conrad initiated an exchange of letters with Moltke to clarify what Germany would do if Austria-Hungary went to war with Serbia and Russia came in to support the little Balkan country. Austria-Hungary expected and Germany accepted that such a Russian move would bring the Dual Alliance between them into play and that Germany would be bound to come to Austria-Hungary’s defence. (And of course if Russia attacked Germany the same would hold true.) Both sides wanted a commitment from the other to go on the offensive against Russia at the start of a war without undertaking to do the same itself. As a result the letters are full of expressions of respect and friendship and short on concrete promises. Since Conrad intended to destroy Serbia first even if Russia came into the war, he needed Germany to promise significant support in the north against Russia, in particular to undertake to attack southwards from East Prussia into Russian Poland while Austria-Hungary attacked northwards from Galicia. Moltke, of course, wanted to keep German forces in the east small so that he could concentrate on defeating France. In the end the two allies made promises they probably knew they could not keep: when war broke out, Austria-Hungary promised to attack Russia as soon as possible and Germany for its part promised to join in from the north even before the war against France was finished.
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Its geography meant that Austria-Hungary had to think of more possible scenarios for war than did Germany – against any of Russia, Serbia, Montenegro, Italy, or, after 1913, Rumania. And there was always the possibility that the enemies could combine: Serbia and Montenegro, with or without Russian support, or Serbia and Italy. Conrad himself was initially fixated on Italy but increasingly Serbia obsessed
him as well.
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He talked frequently of destroying ‘the nest of vipers’ in war and incorporating its territory into Austria-Hungary. To cope with the challenges facing Austria-Hungary, Conrad drew up several different war plans to cover the possible combinations of enemies and fronts, and to give himself maximum flexibility, he placed a force in each of the Balkans (Minimalgruppe Balkan) and Galicia (A-Staffel) up by the border with Russia, and set up a third force (B-Staffel) which could swing to support either of the others as needed. This was optimistic, given the state of Austria-Hungary’s railways. Its railway lines down to its borders with Serbia were inadequate at best. In the north Russian railway building was outstripping Austria-Hungary’s so that by 1912 it could run 250 trains a day to the border with Austrian Galicia where Austria-Hungary could manage only 152.
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In addition, the Hungarians had insisted for nationalistic reasons on building a self-contained railway system within their state so that very few lines connected the Hungarian and Austrian railway networks. Although Conrad begged for an accelerated programme of railway building, objections from both the Hungarian and Austrian parliaments to spending the necessary money, especially if it would benefit the other half of the empire, meant that little had been done by 1914.
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Although Conrad and his general staff continued to work on their plans for a war against Italy and, in 1913, drew up plans for a war on Rumania, by 1914 they assumed that the most likely prospect was a war against Serbia which might well then bring in Russia. Like the other European military, the Austrian-Hungarian military also placed their faith in the power of the offensive and did not think in terms of a war of defence.
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Yet Austria-Hungary’s army when mobilised was under a third of Russia’s; its spending was the lowest of all the powers, less even than that of Britain which had a much smaller army.
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Conrad’s plans were optimistic, indeed blindly so, given the state of the armed forces and the worsening international situation for Austria-Hungary as Italy and then Rumania drifted away from the Dual Alliance in the last years of the peace.

The military in Germany and Austria-Hungary continued to talk, perhaps to reassure themselves as much as anything, about their expected successful offensives in the east. Moltke quoted Schlieffen to Conrad to say that the German attack on France would really settle
everything and that Austria’s fate would be decided there and not in the east. Nevertheless, Moltke went on, the war in the east mattered greatly, representing as it did a showdown between the Teutonic races and the Slavs: ‘To prepare for this is the duty of all states which carry the banners of Germanic
Kultur
.’ Conrad in his reply noted that a crusade of this sort would not go down well in Austria-Hungary: ‘We can hardly rely upon our Slavs, who form 47% of the population, to be enthusiastic about a struggle against their allies.’
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Very little was done, however, by way of co-ordination or sharing information. On 4 August 1914, the day the Germans invaded Belgium, the German military attaché in Vienna said: ‘It is high time that the two general staffs consult now with absolute frankness with respect to mobilization, jump-off time, areas of assembly and precise troop strength …’
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It was much too late for that, but the understanding between Austria-Hungary and Germany had served to turn a war in the Balkans into a general European one.

Russia, the object of Austria-Hungary’s and Germany’s attentions in the east, had a pretty good idea of what the war plans of the Dual Alliance were. By 1910 the Russians had seen enough of German army manoeuvres, railway building and military dispositions to come to the conclusion that the main German attack would go against France. While the Russians continued to overestimate, by about 100 per cent, how many troops Germany would leave in the east, they still felt confident that they would outnumber the Germans and that German strategy would favour Russia. If the Germans attacked, as expected, from East Prussia, they were likely to do so only as a quick thrust to keep the Russians off guard. Germany was then likely to withdraw its forces westwards behind the fortifications of the Masurian Lakes and wait to see what the outcome of the fighting in France was. That would give the Russians time to complete their slower mobilisation.
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The Russians had an even more accurate picture of the war plans of the other partner in the Dual Alliance. All the powers had spies as well as military attachés in each other’s countries but Russia probably had the most successful one of all in Colonel Alfred Redl, an officer with the general staff of Austria-Hungary. He was recruited around 1901 by the Russians, who offered him the money he badly wanted and threatened to expose his homosexuality which in those days would have led
to his disgrace. Redl spent the next years passing on to his Russian paymaster such top-secret information as Austria-Hungary’s mobilisation plans and crucial details about its fortresses along the shared border between the Dual Monarchy and Russia in Galicia. He also betrayed Austria-Hungary’s agents in Russia, who were sent to jail or executed.
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Like other spies, the flamboyant Guy Burgess in Britain in the 1950s, for example, the surprising thing is that Redl was not caught sooner. Although he came from a modest middle-class background and ostensibly had to live on his army salary, he always had lots of money to throw around, on expensive cars, flats, clothes (after his unmasking he was discovered to own 195 dress shirts) or his young male lovers. In 1913 German intelligence tipped off their colleagues in Austria-Hungary to the existence of a traitor and provided the information that two envelopes full of banknotes were waiting for collection by someone called Nikon Nizetas at the main post office in Vienna. Redl duly turned up in disguise to claim them but even then he almost escaped discovery because the detectives who were staking out the post office lost his trail. They only picked it up again by accident but by the evening Conrad, the chief of staff, had enough evidence to send a party of officers to confront Redl and force his confession and subsequent suicide.
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Although the high command in Austria-Hungary scrambled to change its secret codes and its railway timetables, it could not change its overall strategy before 1914. As a result of Redl’s treachery, the Russians had an accurate picture of how and where Austria-Hungary would attack and of its plans against Serbia as well.

In making their own plans the Russians nevertheless faced a number of problems. To begin with Russia’s size meant that its mobilisation took much longer than that of its neighbours to the west. When the call came, the average Russian soldier had to travel over twice as far as his German or Austrian counterpart. The Russian railway system was developing fast, thanks in part to French loans, and much of it was concentrated in the west, in the Polish territories and the European part of Russia, but it was still underdeveloped in comparison to those of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Most of the Russian lines, for example, were still single-tracked, which meant that running trains along them was slower. Only 27 per cent of its lines were double-tracked compared to 38 per cent for Germany. Nevertheless the German military
estimated that by 1912 new railway building had helped to halve the Russian concentration time on the German border.
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(If the Russians chose to attack into Germany they would face a problem, however, which also affected Germany coming east: Russian railway lines were of a wider gauge than in the rest of Europe so that everything, men and their equipment included, would have to be trans-shipped.) In 1914, even after the improvement in the railways, it still took twenty-six days fully to mobilise the armies in the European part of Russia while it took Austria-Hungary sixteen days and Germany twelve.
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That discrepancy was going to put additional pressure on the tsar to order Russian mobilisation early in the crisis that summer.