The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (79 page)

Grey insisted as he always did that Britain had a free hand in deciding what to do in any crisis but in fact he offered Russia considerable support. While he offered to help bring about a peace settlement, he also reassured the Russians that Britain was sympathetic to its need to keep the Straits in friendly hands.
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As the threat of a general war appeared to increase, Grey pointed out to the French yet again that Britain was under no obligation to support France if Germany then chose to support Austria-Hungary by attacking Russia’s ally in the west. Nevertheless, as the First Balkan War raged on, there were discussions in London about how to get a British expeditionary force to France and Grey told the German ambassador that it was a ‘vital necessity’ for Britain to prevent France being crushed by Germany and that Britain would have no choice but to come to France’s assistance.
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If Britain and France felt that their options were increasingly limited, that was much truer of the two neighbouring powers which took the closest interest in the Balkans – Russia and Austria-Hungary.

Although Russia had little directly at stake in the Balkans in economic terms – Russian trade with and investment in the Balkans was tiny compared with other powers such as France – Russian attitudes to troubles there were shaped both by powerful ambitions and by fears.
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If the Ottoman Empire collapsed, as looked increasingly likely, the issue of control of the Straits would at once become critical. Russia’s economic prosperity and its future development were both tied up with its foreign trade. Most of its key export of grain went out through the Straits and the modern machinery Russia needed for its factories and mines came in the same way. Russians were reminded of how vulnerable geography made that trade when the Straits were temporarily closed in 1911 and again in 1912 because of the Italian war on the Ottomans. As grain piled up in Russia’s Black Sea ports, its price fell, panicky merchants called on the government to do something, and, as the value of Russia’s exports fell dramatically, interest rates went up.
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The speed of the Bulgarian advance in the war that broke out in the autumn of 1912 caused real alarm in St Petersburg. At one point the government seriously considered sending a force to protect Constantinople, perhaps
even to seize a strip of land along the shores of the Bosphorus, until it realised that Russia did not have the necessary shipping or proper amphibious forces.
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Russia had other reasons for fearing trouble in the Ottoman Empire. Up to this point the very backwardness of its southern neighbour had been convenient. The Anatolian plateau, which was undeveloped with only the beginnings of a railway system, had provided a convenient land barrier between the other continental powers and the Russian Empire in Central Asia and left Russia a relatively free hand to extend its rule still further, in particular into Persia. (Although this repeatedly produced friction with the British, Grey and his colleagues were prepared to put up with a lot to maintain the Russian friendship.) Since 1900, however, growing German penetration of the Ottoman lands and the much-publicised German project for a railway network stretching from Berlin to Baghdad had presented a new and unwelcome challenge to Russia’s imperial ambitions.
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Finally, when it came to the Balkans themselves, Russia’s leaders were affected by a determination not to be outmanoeuvred or humiliated again by Austria-Hungary as Russia had been over Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908. From St Petersburg every move made by Austria-Hungary, its wooing of Montenegro and Bulgaria by offering loans, for example, or the activities of Catholic priests from the Austrian church throughout the Balkans, raised suspicions. Russian views on the Balkans were also shaped by Panslavism and the desire to protect fellow South Slavs, many of whom like the Russians themselves were Orthodox Christians. A set of emotions and attitudes rather than a coherent political movement or ideology, Panslavism generated much heated rhetoric in Russia and elsewhere in central Europe before the Great War. For Russian Panslavists it was about their ‘historic mission’, ‘our Slavic brothers’, or turning the great mosque of Hagia Sophia back into the church of Santa Sophia. There was much talk too of winning back ‘the keys and gates to the Russian house’ – the Straits between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea – so that Russian commerce and naval power could flow out into the world. (The Russians did not always seem to take into account that the Mediterranean was a bigger version of the Black Sea with its key exits at Suez and Gibraltar controlled by another power, in this case Britain.) If such rhetoric did not directly guide Russian
policies in the Balkans, it served to limit Russia’s options. Sazonov found himself under pressure to support the Balkan nations and not to work with Austria-Hungary even though Russia might have been wise to try to rebuild the old understanding to keep the status quo in the Balkans.
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To be sure, Panslavism found in him a willing victim.

It was unfortunate for Russia, for the stability of the Balkans, and in the longer run for the peace of Europe that the man now in charge of its foreign policy was so easily swayed by emotion and prejudice. Russia’s historic mission, Sazonov believed, was to liberate the South Slavs from Ottoman oppression. Although this great duty had almost been completed by the start of the twentieth century, Russia still needed to be on guard against threats to the Balkan nations, whether from a resurgent Ottoman Empire or Austria-Hungary and its German ally. He was deeply suspicious of Ferdinand of Bulgaria, whom he saw as a German cuckoo in the Balkan nest, and feared the Young Turks who, he believed, were under the leadership of Jewish Freemasons.
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It was unfortunate too that Sazonov had little of the intelligence, experience, or strength of character of his predecessor. His main qualifications for the post seem to have been that he was not Izvolsky, who was widely discredited after the Bosnian crisis, and that he was the brother-in-law of Prime Minister Stolypin.

Like so many of the top officials in Russia, the new Foreign Minister came from an old noble family. Unlike some of his colleagues, he was upright and honest and even his enemies agreed that he was a thorough gentleman and a loyal servant of both the tsar and Russia. Sazonov was also profoundly religious and, in the opinion of Baron Taube, who worked with him in the Foreign Ministry, would have done well in the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church. He was not, in Taube’s view, cut out to be Foreign Minister: ‘Sickly by nature, overly sensitive and a little sentimental, nervous and even neurotic, Sazonov was the type of womanly Slav par excellence, easy and generous but soft and vague, constantly changing because of his impressions and intuitions, resisting all sustained efforts at thinking, incapable of following through his reasoning to the logical end.’
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In 1911 and 1912, as the Balkan states circled around the carcass of the Ottoman Empire, Sazonov encouraged them. ‘To have done nothing’, he wrote in his memoirs, ‘to further the attainment of their
aim by Serbia and Bulgaria, would have meant, for Russia, not only a renunciation of her historic mission, but also a surrender, without resistance, to the enemies of the Slav nationalities, of a political position secured by age-long efforts.’
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He promoted the formation of the Balkan League and appears, like the sorcerer’s hapless apprentice, to have entertained the illusion that he could control it. When he told the Serbian and Bulgarian leaders that Russia did not want a war in the Balkans, they assumed that he did not really mean it. As the British chargé d’affaires in Sofia wrote on the eve of the First Balkan War:

The danger of the situation really lies in the fact that neither Bulgaria nor Serbia can believe that Russia could abandon her policy of centuries in the Balkans without even an attempt at resistance. The Balkan States have been brought together by Russia – true for a defensive purpose – but defensive and offensive are terms much akin under certain conditions. They are now working together and, once they are quite ready and think the moment opportune, it is not the withholding of loans by France, nor the admonitions of Russia nor of the whole of Europe that will hold them back. They care little whether they bring about a European war or not.
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When Hartwig warmly supported the Serbians’ ambitions for a Greater Serbia, Sazonov complained but did little to stop him. Nor was Sazonov prepared to stand up to his own strongly pro-Serbian public opinion even though he felt, as he admitted in his memoirs, ‘a certain fear lest the Government should find itself unable to control the course of events’.
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He also found Serbia difficult to deal with: ‘I did not always find that self-control and sober estimate of the dangers of the moment which alone could avert a catastrophe.’
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Russia was to find, as so often happens to great powers, that its much smaller and weaker client state was exigent, often with success, in demanding support from its patron. In November 1912, for example, during the First Balkan War, the Serbian leader Pašić, without consulting Russia, published a dramatic letter about Serbia’s aims in the London
Times
. His country, Pašić declared, must have a coastline of some fifty kilometres along the Adriatic. ‘For this minimum Serbia is prepared to make every sacrifice, since not to do so would be false to her national duty.’ Even the smallest
Serbian presence on the Adriatic was, as Pašić knew well, anathema to Austria-Hungary. His letter was an attempt to put Russia into a position where it had no choice but to support Serbia.
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On this occasion the Russians eventually refused to be drawn in but Sazonov and his colleagues were going to face a similar dilemma with Serbia two years later. If they abandoned it in the face of Austria-Hungary’s aggression, Russia would appear weak; if Russia assured Serbia of its unwavering support, it might well encourage recklessness in Belgrade.

Austria-Hungary, the other great power most concerned about developments in the Balkans, shared Russia’s fear of appearing weak, but where Russia wanted stronger Balkan states, Austria-Hungary regarded the prospect with horror, especially when it came to Serbia. The mere existence of Serbia was a danger to the existence of the old multinational monarchy, acting as it did as a magnet, a model, and an inspiration for the empire’s own South Slavs. The ruling elites in Austria-Hungary, remembering all too well how the kingdom of Piedmont had taken the lead in uniting Italy and how Prussia had done the same with Germany, and at the expense in each case of Austria-Hungary, saw Serbia in the same dangerous role. (It did not help that Serbian nationalists felt much the same and that they called one of their more extreme newspapers
Piejmont
.) The activities of Serbia’s nationalist leaders after the 1903 coup in encouraging nationalist sentiments throughout the peninsula and within the empire itself had done much to exacerbate Austrian-Hungarian fears.

In one of those inopportune coincidences which play their part in human affairs, Austria-Hungary also had a new Foreign Minister in 1912 and, as in Russia, one who was weaker and less decisive than his predecessor. Leopold von Berchtold was one of the Dual Monarchy’s richest men and had married a Hungarian heiress. His family was old and distinguished and he was related to virtually everyone who counted in society. Although at least one of his ancestors had broken with convention to marry Mozart’s sister, who came from the middle classes, Berchtold himself was a terrific snob and something of a prude who found Edward VII barely acceptable in society. ‘
Une royauté en décadence
’, wrote Berchtold in his diary when the British king brought a former mistress to the elegant spa at Marienbad. ‘Return to the loathsome and unworthy Georgian tradition after the Victorian epoch of
moral greatness.’
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Elegant and charming, with impeccable manners, Berchtold moved easily through society. ‘The beautiful poodle’, or so claimed one of his many critics, was more interested in his amusements and collecting exquisite objects than in high politics. Bad taste upset him; when he visited a new wing that Franz Ferdinand had constructed at one of his castles he found the marble ‘looked like head cheese and reminds one of a butcher’s’.
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Next to his family, to whom he was devoted, Berchtold’s great enthusiasm was for horse-racing. He had always wanted, he said, to be a government minister and win a great horse race. He achieved the former by catching Aehrenthal’s attention, first as a promising young diplomat and then as his likely successor, and the latter by lavish spending. Berchtold built his own race track, imported the best English trainers, and bought the best horses.

When Aehrenthal died, Franz Joseph’s choice for a successor was a limited one. It had to be someone of high social rank who was also acceptable to the heir to the throne and Franz Ferdinand’s opposition had already eliminated two likely candidates. Berchtold, who was in favour with both the uncle and nephew, and who had enjoyed a good record as Austria-Hungary’s ambassador in Russia, appeared the most suitable candidate and the dying Aehrenthal had begged him to take on his office.
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Berchtold himself had doubts about his ability to fill it. (So did his colleagues, one of whom said he would have been excellent as a high court official responsible for its elaborate ceremonies but was a disaster as a Foreign Minister.
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) In his interview with the emperor Berchtold listed his own deficiencies. He was not familiar with the inner workings of the Foreign Ministry and he had never dealt with the Austrian parliament. Furthermore, as someone who saw himself as both Austrian and Hungarian, he was likely to be despised by both nationalities. Finally, he was probably not up to the physical demands of the office. He nevertheless took the position out of a sense of duty to his emperor.
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