The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (92 page)

It was its great neighbour to the east that caused the most nightmares for Germany’s leaders. Reflecting the Social Darwinist assumptions of their era, many Germans saw the Slavs, and especially Russia, as the natural opponent of the Teuton races. Wilhelm was by no means alone in fearing the Slavic hordes sweeping westwards. He frequently sounded like right-wing politicians in the United Kingdom today worried about eastern Europeans storming British ports or conservative US Republicans with similar worries about Mexicans. ‘I hate the Slavs,’ he said to the military attaché from Austria-Hungary with a striking lack of tact, given the large numbers of Slavs living within the Dual Monarchy. ‘I know it’s a sin but I cannot help myself.’ Serbia, he was fond of saying, was ‘the pig monarchy’. His senior generals such as Waldersee and Moltke talked in apocalyptic terms about the impending need for Germans to fight for their very existence as a people and a culture. They also found such arguments convenient as they pushed the
government in the spring and early summer of 1914 for big increases in the army.
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It is curious in retrospect how little attention the German leadership paid to the alternatives to war as a way of breaking the encirclement. Bethmann, it is true, had hoped for a rapprochement with Britain but after the failure of the Haldane mission two years earlier that seemed increasingly unlikely. The Kaiser from time to time expressed the hope that the old alliance between the two conservative monarchies of Germany and Russia might be revived but it is doubtful that he really believed it was possible. In 1914 a prominent banker, Max Warburg, recorded a conversation with him: ‘Russia’s armaments, the great Russian railway constructions were in his opinion preparations for a war which could break out in the year 1916 … Beset by his anxieties, the Kaiser even considered whether it would not be better to attack first instead of waiting.’
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And the Kaiser, like others among the German leadership, thought that conflict with Russia was inevitable and seriously considered a preventive war. In the Foreign Office there were many including Jagow and his deputy Zimmermann who agreed and argued that the diplomatic and military situation in 1914 was particularly favourable for Germany.
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They should have remembered that famous saying of Bismarck: ‘Preventive war is like committing suicide out of fear of death.’

The top military leadership were, if anything, even more psychologically ready for war than the civilians. The Kiel Canal works were nearly complete and by 25 July German dreadnoughts would be able to go back and forth in safety between the North Sea and the Baltic. True, the army had not yet achieved its increases but Russia’s new programme had only just started. At a memorial service in Berlin for Franz Ferdinand on 3 July, the military representative of Saxony fell into conversation with Waldersee. The general, he reported to his own government, felt that war could come at any moment. The German general staff was ready: ‘I had the impression that they would regard it as quite convenient if it came to a war right now. The conditions and prospects would not get any better for us.’
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What helped to give the German military leadership confidence was that they had their strategy all mapped out. ‘Armed with the Schlieffen Plan as we were’, Groener of the general staff later wrote, ‘we believed that we could await the inevitable martial conflict with our neighbours in calmness …’
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A few weeks before Sarajevo Moltke mused to Jagow that it would make sense for Germany to take Russia on while it still had a chance of winning. Jagow, the chief of staff suggested, should conduct his foreign policy ‘with the aim of provoking a war in the near future’. Around the same time Moltke said to a German diplomat from the London embassy, ‘If only things would finally boil over – we are ready; the sooner the better.’
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And sooner was better for him as well. As he said to a niece in 1912, during the First Balkan War, ‘If war is coming, I hope it will come soon before I am too old to cope with things satisfactorily.’
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By 1914, his health appeared to be breaking down. He had to spend four weeks at the spa in Carlsbad between April and May receiving treatment for what was said to be bronchitis and he went back again for another extended stay on 28 June.
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Nor was he as confident of Germany’s success as he sounded. He was well aware of the dangers of a long-drawn-out war. When Conrad von Hötzendorf queried him in May 1914 about what he intended to do if Germany failed to win a quick victory over the French, Moltke was evasive: ‘Well, I will do what I can. We are not superior to the French.’ And while Bethmann continued to hope until the end that the British would opt for neutrality, Moltke also took for granted that Britain would enter the war on France’s side. Yet he and his colleagues exuded confidence to the civilians that Germany could handily defeat France, Russia and Britain in a short war.
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By 1914 its partnership with Austria-Hungary assumed greater importance for Germany than ever before. Jagow put it with brutal honesty to Lichnowsky on 18 July: ‘It is also arguable whether we are likely to find an alliance with that crumbling constellation of States on the Danube a good investment: but I say with the poet – I think it was Busch – “If you no longer like your company, try to find other, if other there be.”’
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That gave Austria-Hungary, as happens surprisingly often in international relations, power over its stronger partner. By 1914 Germany’s leaders felt that they had little choice but to support their ally even as it pursued dangerous policies, much as the United States continues to support Israel or Pakistan today. Crucially, Bethmann, who in earlier crises had counselled Austria-Hungary to compromise, had now come round accepting that Germany would have to back its ally whatever it chose to do. ‘We face our old dilemma over any Austrian actions in the Balkans,’ he said to Riezler, to whom the Chancellor frequently
unburdened himself. ‘If we advise them to take action, they will say we had pushed them into it; if we advise against, they will say that we have abandoned them. Then they will approach the Western powers whose arms are open and we will lose our last powerful ally.’
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In those crisis weeks of July 1914, Bethmann was particularly melancholy, for his beloved wife Martha had died on 11 May after a painful illness. ‘What was past and should have been future,’ he wrote to his predecessor Bülow, ‘all that was tied to our common life is now destroyed by death’.
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Riezler kept a diary of his conversations with Bethmann in the weeks of the crisis. On 7 July, the day after the Chancellor had added his support to the blank cheque, the two men sat up late under the summer night sky at Bethmann’s old castle at Hohenfinow east of Berlin. Riezler was shocked by the older man’s pessimism as he lamented the state of the world and of Germany. German society, Bethmann felt, was in moral and intellectual decline and the existing political and social order seemed incapable of renewing itself. ‘Everything’, he said sadly, ‘has become so very old.’ The future too looked bleak: Russia, ‘an increasingly heavy nightmare’, would grow still stronger while Austria-Hungary declined to the point where it was no longer capable of fighting with Germany as an ally. (Recall that Bethmann had earlier decided not to plant trees on his estate because he assumed the Russians would be overrunning eastern Germany within in few years.)
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Germany’s key leaders such as Bethmann may not have deliberately started the Great War, as has often been charged, by among others German historians such as Fritz Fischer. Nevertheless, by taking its coming for granted, as something desirable even, by issuing the blank cheque to Austria-Hungary, and by sticking to a war plan which made it inevitable that Germany would fight on two fronts, Germany’s leaders allowed it to happen. At times in those last increasingly tense weeks they seemed to grasp the enormity of what they were risking and took comfort in what were mostly unlikely scenarios. If Austria-Hungary moved quickly to deal with Serbia, Bethmann said to Riezler, the Entente might just accept it. Or Germany and Britain might work together – after all they had done so before in the Balkans – to keep a war involving Austria-Hungary from dragging in other powers. That last Jagow consigned to ‘the category of pious wishes’.
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Yet the Foreign Secretary himself indulged in wishful thinking, writing for example to
Lichnowsky on 18 July, ‘when all is said and done, Russia at present is not ready for war’. As for Russia’s allies, Britain and France, did they really want to go war on its side? Grey always wanted to maintain the balance of power in Europe but if Russia destroyed Austria-Hungary and defeated Germany, Europe would have a new hegemonic ruler. France too might not be ready to fight: the divisive battle over the three-year military service could well be renewed in the autumn and it was well known that the French army had serious shortfalls in its equipment and training. On 13 July, revelations in the French Senate added further details, about France’s lack of field artillery for example, which encouraged the Germans to think that France was unlikely to fight in the near future and that the Russians might conclude they could not rely on their ally. With any luck the Entente might fall apart.
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If war came, so Germany’s leaders hoped in their more optimistic moments, perhaps they could localise it in the Balkans. Or perhaps the threat alone of military force could bring victory. Bluff after all had worked against Russia in the Bosnian crisis when it had backed down in the face of stepped-up military preparations by Austria-Hungary and an ultimatum from Germany. Bluff had worked again in the Balkan wars when Austria-Hungary had forced Serbia and Montenegro out of Scutari and Russia had chosen to stand by. Serbia and its patron Russia might back down again this time in the face of a resolute Dual Alliance. ‘We hoped’, said Bethmann’s chief of press, Otto Hammann in October 1914, ‘that we would humiliate Russia without war; this would have been a nice success.’
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What made it unlikely that Germany’s leaders would be resolute in the pursuit of peace was the fear they had of appearing weak and unmanly, of not standing up for their honour and that of Germany. ‘I do not desire a preventive war’, said Jagow, ‘but
if we are called upon to fight, we must not funk it
’.
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The Kaiser, who had the final say in whether Germany went to war or not, wavered as he had done so often before between hoping that peace could be preserved and uttering the most belligerent sentiments – ‘The Serbs must be disposed of,
and
that right
soon!
’ he scribbled on 30 June for example in one of his marginal notes.
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Like the younger George Bush nearly a century later, who blamed his father for not finishing off Saddam Hussein while he had the chance, Wilhelm had always wanted to distinguish himself from a
father he held to be weak and indecisive. While Wilhelm took great pride in being Germany’s supreme warlord he knew that many of his subjects, including army officers, held him responsible for the country’s poor showing in previous crises. Although he insisted that he had worked for peace throughout his reign, the epithet ‘Emperor of Peace’ stung. In a conversation with his friend the industrialist Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach on 6 July, just after the blank cheque had been issued, the Kaiser said that he made his promise knowing that Austria-Hungary intended to take action against Serbia. ‘This time I shall not give in,’ he said three times. As Krupp noted in a letter to a colleague, ‘The repeated Imperial assurance that this time nobody could again accuse him of irresolution had had an almost comic effect.’
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Bethmann used what was perhaps the most revealing phrase of all when he said that for Germany to back down in the face of its enemies would be an act of self-castration.
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Such attitudes came in part from the German leaders’ social class and their times but Bismarck, who came out of the same world, had been strong enough to defy its code when he chose. He never allowed war to be forced upon him. It was Germany’s tragedy and that of Europe that his successors were not the man he was.

Once the German leadership had made up its mind to back Austria-Hungary, they expected their ally to move quickly while opinion in Europe was still shocked and sympathetic. It was also important for domestic reasons, as the Germans frequently reminded Vienna, to make sure that Serbia was put in the wrong. (Right up to the outbreak of hostilities the German leaders feared that the working classes and their leaders in the unions and the Social Democratic Party would be true to their often-repeated word and oppose a war.) An ultimatum from Vienna to Belgrade followed up rapidly with a short victorious war if Serbia did not capitulate would leave the other great powers unable to intervene until it was too late.

The Germans found it impossible to hurry up their counterparts in Vienna. Like a great jellyfish with indigestion, the Dual Monarchy moved at its own stately and complicated pace. The army had let many of its soldiers off on ‘harvest leave’ and they would not be back in uniform until 25 July. ‘We are above all an agrarian state’, Conrad, whose policy it was, told the German military attaché, ‘and must live on the
result of the harvest for a whole year.’ And if he tried to bring his soldiers back early it might cause chaos on the railways and, worse, alert the rest of Europe that something was up. Yet another argument for waiting was that the French President Poincaré and his Prime Minister Viviani, who was also responsible for foreign relations, were going to be on a state visit to Russia until 23 July. Once they were on board ship on their way back to France, communications would be poor and they would have difficulty for several days in co-ordinating with Russia on a response to the ultimatum. The delay was costly to Austria-Hungary: in the almost four weeks between the assassinations and the presentation of the ultimatum much of the sympathy that Europeans had felt for it had dissipated and what might have looked like a natural reaction was to appear more like cold-blooded power politics.
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