The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (78 page)

In the early stages of their independence, the Balkan states had been content, or at least obliged, to pay attention to the great European powers. And the powers, especially Russia and Austria-Hungary before they fell out over the annexation of Bosnia, wanted to keep the status quo in the Balkans with the Ottoman Empire continuing to rule over its remaining European territories. Over the last decades of the nineteenth century, however, the obvious decline of the Ottomans had emboldened leaders across the Balkans to take matters into their own hands. In the name of protecting Christians still under Ottoman rule
in Macedonia and elsewhere, Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece all sent money, weapons and agents to stir up resistance. The rise of the Young Turks and their policy of winning back control of Ottoman lands (and making them more Turkish) not surprisingly set off alarms throughout the Balkan states and among the Ottomans’ own Christian subjects. By 1910, Albanians, Christian and Muslim alike, who were traditionally loyal to their Ottoman rulers, were in open revolt. The following year the Albanian revolutionaries joined forces with their Macedonian counterparts. The Ottoman authorities cracked down savagely, which only fuelled further unrest and violence. In the autumn of 1911 Italy’s war on the Ottoman Empire set off renewed uprisings by Christians. In Macedonia that December a series of explosions destroyed police stations and mosques. In retaliation Muslim crowds attacked local Bulgarians. Throughout the independent Balkan states there were protest meetings and demonstrations against the Ottomans.
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Balkan leaders complained openly that they could no longer trust the great powers to protect the Christians under Ottoman rule and hinted that they might have to take action. Why maintain the status quo in the Balkans, a leading politician in Serbia asked Trotsky. ‘Where was the status quo when Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina? Why didn’t the powers defend the status quo when Italy seized Tripoli?’ And why should the Balkan states be treated as though they were somehow not European but like Morocco?
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There was the chance, the Foreign Minister of Serbia admitted to the British ambassador in Belgrade, that Austria-Hungary would intervene if any of the Balkan nations moved to seize Ottoman territory but, as far as he, Milovan Milovanović, was concerned, it was better for Serbia to die fighting. If Austria-Hungary itself expanded further southwards into the Balkans, Serbia was finished anyway as an independent kingdom.
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Pride, nationalist ambitions, the temptations of a declining empire on their doorstep, the example of naked aggression set by Italy, and sheer recklessness, all brought the Balkan nations together – briefly, as it turned out – to drive the Ottoman Empire out of its remaining European possessions. From the autumn of 1911, emissaries were travelling secretly back and forth among the Balkan capitals or meeting as if by chance in one European city or another. Russia, and particularly the Russian ambassador in Constantinople, had long promoted the idea of
a Balkan League to include the Ottoman Empire, which, so it was hoped, would both provide stability in the region and block the spread of German and Austrian-Hungarian influence south and eastwards. The Balkan states themselves, with visions of plundering the Ottoman Empire taking ever more solid shape, would have none of it. Sazonov, who succeeded Izvolsky in 1910 as Russian Foreign Minister, then tried to bring Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, and Greece into an alliance to act as a barrier against Austria-Hungary’s trying to move south if the Ottoman Empire collapsed.
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In the autumn of 1911, that collapse appeared imminent. Serbia and Bulgaria had been talking on and off since 1904 about some form of partnership, but the Bulgarians, led by Tsar Ferdinand, had always preferred to keep a free hand. Now the talks took on a new urgency. It helped too that a new government in Bulgaria’s capital, Sofia, was pro-Russian and less inclined to worry about offending Austria-Hungary. Great Britain and France, which were warned by Russia that something was in the air, were not averse to a warmer relationship between the two Balkan powers. Its Triple Entente partners shared Russia’s hopes of finding a cheap, local solution to containing German and Austrian-Hungarian expansion into the Ottoman Empire.
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In Sofia and Belgrade, Anatol Neklyudov and Hartwig, the Russian ambassadors, worked hard to bring the Bulgarians and the Serbians together. Neklyudov at least foresaw the potential for trouble; ‘The union of Bulgaria and Serbia contains one dangerous element – the temptation to use it for offensive purposes.’
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Hartwig had no such concerns. From the moment he had arrived in Belgrade in 1909 he had become a fervent supporter of the Serbian cause. He rapidly became an indispensable part of the political scene; everyone consulted him from the king down and each morning his study was filled with prominent members of Serbian society. He and Pašić were particularly close and with many a nod and a wink, Hartwig let the Serbian leader know that he need not take the warnings from Russia to tread carefully too seriously. When Sazonov sent a message to urge the Serbian government to be moderate in its foreign policy, Hartwig solemnly read it out. ‘Have you finished,
mon cher ami
?’ asked Pašić. ‘All right!
C’est bien. Nous pouvons maintenant causer sérieusement!
’ [We can now talk seriously.]
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Sazonov worried about Hartwig but did
not have the strength to recall him, possibly because Hartwig’s wife had good connections at court and among Panslavist circles in Russia.

At the end of September 1911 the Bulgarians let the Russians know that they were prepared to negotiate treaties first with Serbia and then with Montenegro and Greece. A leading member of Bulgarian government told Neklyudov that Bulgaria and Serbia needed to stand together not just to protect the Christians in the Ottoman Empire but to remain independent of the Central Powers.
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Sazonov, who was recuperating from a serious illness in Davos, was delighted when Neklyudov brought him the news. ‘Well,’ Sazonov exclaimed, ‘but this is perfect! If only it could come off! Bulgaria closely allied to Serbia in the political and economic sphere; five hundred thousand bayonets to guard the Balkans – but this would bar the road for ever to German penetration, Austrian invasion!’
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It took another several months to hammer out the details of the agreement. In a warning of the troubles to come between the new allies, the main difficulty was the division of the Macedonian lands, right down to tiny villages, where Bulgarian and Serbian claims overlapped.
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The treaty which was finally signed in March 1912 contained secret clauses directed against the Ottoman Empire and made Russia the arbiter in any future disputes over the division of Macedonia. Bulgaria also promised to back Serbia if it got into a war with Austria-Hungary.

By this point foreign diplomats were picking up rumours about the new relationship and stories were starting to appear in the press. Sazonov blandly assured Russia’s entente partners that the treaty was purely defensive and that Russia would use its influence to ensure that it remained so. Germany and Austria-Hungary initially showed little concern.
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That spring of 1912, however, as details of the secret clauses leaked, the great powers started to suspect that more was at stake than a defensive arrangement. ‘It is evident’, wrote Nicolson, by now Permanent Undersecretary at the Foreign Office, to a British diplomat in St Petersburg, ‘that the distribution of the spoils in Macedonia has been decided upon.’ Sazonov was perhaps being a bit too adventurous, Nicolson complained, but it would not do to say so since Britain needed to keep on the best possible terms with Russia.
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International concern grew as it became clear that Bulgaria and Greece, long divided by their competing ambitions in Macedonia, were
now also drawing closer. The new Greek Prime Minister, Eleutherios Venizelos, was committed to freeing his home island of Crete from Ottoman rule, and was prepared to sacrifice Greek interests in Macedonia, at least for the time being, in order to gain allies. In May a treaty between Bulgaria and Greece – again, of course, described as defensive only – brought a league of Balkan states against the Ottoman Empire a step closer. The Bulgarians and Montenegrins found occasion to talk the following month, ironically in the great Habsburg palace, the Hofburg, while both kings, Ferdinand and Nicholas, were paying visits to Franz Joseph. The agreement reached later in the summer dispensed with the pretence of defence and simply took a war against the Ottoman Empire for granted. At the end of September Serbia and Montenegro signed an alliance. The Balkan League was now complete, with Bulgaria at its centre.

The Ottoman Empire itself appeared to be in its last throes. In Constantinople, the Young Turks were turned out of office at the start of the summer by right-wing army officers who then proved unable to reestablish order. The revolt in Albania continued to gain strength and the cycle of unrest and violence in Macedonia went on. In August a bomb exploded at a market killing several innocent bystanders. The Ottoman police panicked and fired on the crowds that gathered. Over a hundred people, most of them Bulgars, were killed. In Bulgaria, the public demanded that its government intervene to liberate Macedonia. The Ottomans mobilised their forces on the southern border of Macedonia and the members of the Balkan League did the same a few days later. Russia was by now trying, ineffectually, to restrain its protégés. The other great powers had also awakened from their complacency and after a round of hasty discussions it was agreed that Russia and Austria-Hungary should act on behalf of what remained of the Concert of Europe to caution the Balkan states and the Ottoman Empire against war. The powers would not, they stated firmly, accept any territorial changes in the Balkans as a result of war. A French diplomat at St Petersburg was more realistic: ‘For the first time in the history of the Eastern question the small states have acquired a position of such independence of the Great Powers that they feel able to act completely without them and even to take them in tow.’
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On 8 October, the day the warning from the Concert reached the
Balkan capitals, Nicholas of Montenegro, always a gambler, declared war on the Ottoman Empire. Although he had worked assiduously to stir up trouble in the Ottoman territories along his borders, he declared to the British ambassador in Cetinje that he had been left no choice: ‘Above all continued massacres of Christian brothers on the frontier had struck him to the heart.’
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(Rumours later suggested that his main motive had been to make a financial killing in Paris by using his advance knowledge of the timing of the outbreak of hostilities.)
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On 18 October, after some unconvincing attempts to portray themselves as the innocent parties, the other members of the Balkan League joined in. Trotsky was in Belgrade as the ill-equipped Serbian peasant soldiers marched off to war, cheering as they went:

Along with this shout there enters into one’s heart a peculiar spontaneous feeling of tragedy, impossible to convey at a distance: a feeling, too, of helplessness in the face of the historical fate which is so closely approaching the peoples shut up in the Balkan triangle, and of anguish for all those hordes of men who are being led to destruction …
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Across the Balkans there was intense excitement with huge crowds demonstrating and singing patriotic songs. Old rivalries were briefly forgotten as newspapers talked about ‘The Balkans for Balkan peoples’. Outside the Bulgarian embassy in Belgrade, Serbians shouted ‘Long Live King Ferdinand!’
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The combined Balkan forces outnumbered the Ottomans by more than two to one and the Ottoman armies were demoralised and unprepared. Obliged to fight on several different fronts at once, they suffered a series of rapid defeats. (The French attributed the success of the Balkan armies to their use of artillery from the French firm of Creusot while the Ottomans were using guns made by the German firm of Krupp.)
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By the end of October the Ottomans had lost almost all their remaining territory in Europe. Intoxicated by dreams of wearing the crown of old Byzantium and having a victory Mass sung in the great church of Santa Sophia, Ferdinand urged his Bulgarian troops on to attack Constantinople but they were held at a ridge north-east of the city. The Bulgarians had outrun their supply lines and the soldiers were short of ammunition,
proper clothing and food, and an increasing number were falling ill. Additionally, the tensions in the Balkan League, never far below the surface, were becoming apparent. To the dismay of Bulgaria, Greece had seized the Macedonian port of Salonika (today Thessaloniki) while the Serbians and Montenegrins rushed to occupy the Sanjak of Novi Bazar, that piece of land south of Bosnia which separated them, and as much of Albania as they could. None of its allies liked the fact that Bulgaria had come up with by far the greatest share of Ottoman territory. On 3 December, under pressure from the great powers who were both shocked and worried by the dramatic changes in the Balkans, the members of the Balkan League and the Ottoman Empire agreed to sign an armistice and to start peace talks in London later that month.

What made the Balkans so dangerous was that a highly volatile situation on the ground mingled with great power interests and ambitions. Britain and France, who had the least at stake in the Balkans, did not want to see the equilibrium in Europe, so recently threatened by the second Moroccan crisis, challenged again. On the other hand, neither power wanted to see the Ottoman Empire disappear with a resulting scramble for its territory at the eastern end of the Mediterranean or in the largely Arab lands throughout the Middle East. If the Ottoman sultan – who was also caliph, the chief religious leader for the world’s Sunni Muslims – was deposed, that might well stir up unrest among the large, mostly Sunni, Muslim population in British India who had hitherto been loyal supporters of the British Raj or among the millions of Muslims in France’s North African colonies.
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The French also worried about what would happen to the large sums of money they had lent to the Ottoman Empire (France was its biggest foreign lender). And both powers feared the consequences of a confrontation between Russia and Austria-Hungary in the Balkans. Poincaré, now President, made it clear to the Russians as early as August 1912 that France had no interest in getting dragged into a conflict between Russia and Austria-Hungary over the Balkans. The message from Paris was mixed, though: Poincaré also promised that France would fulfil its alliance obligations to Russia if Germany got involved on the side of Austria-Hungary.
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In December 1912, when relations between Russia and Austria-Hungary were deteriorating rapidly, France apparently indicated that it would support Russia if war broke out.
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And whether Poincaré actually believed it
himself or was indulging in wishful thinking, he assured the Russians that Britain had given a verbal promise to send an expeditionary force to support France if it were attacked by Germany.
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