The assassination of the heir to the Hapsburgs took place on the anniversary of the defeat of the Serbs by the Turks at the battle of Kosovo in 1389, a humiliating collective memory for all Serbs. There was something particularly tactless in holding a State visit in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, that day of solemn memories, which was also Serbia’s national day. Among those who gathered to watch the Archduke and his wife drive through the city to the Governor’s residence was a nineteen-year-old Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip, who had a pistol. He was one of six young conspirators present in the streets that day who dreamed of the moment when Bosnia would be free of the Austrian yoke, and an integral part of Serbia.
That morning one of Princip’s accomplices had thrown a bomb at the archducal car. The bomb bounced off the side and exploded against the next car, injuring two officers on the Archduke’s staff. Having ensured that the injured men were taken to hospital, and that the would-be assassin had been caught, the Archduke insisted on continuing with his visit to the City Hall. Once there, he remarked with some anger: ‘So you welcome your guests here with bombs?’ He was then formally welcomed to the city by the Mayor. After the ceremony he asked to be driven to the hospital to visit the two injured officers. During this unscheduled part of the journey the driver, Franz Urban, took a wrong turn into a narrow street in which he could not turn the car round. He therefore slowed down in order to reverse.
Gavrilo Princip, disappointed that his colleagues had ruined their chance of assassinating the Archduke (or even more disappointed that the chance had not fallen to him) was standing, by chance, on the pavement only ten yards from where the car slowed down. Suddenly he saw his ‘lost’ target coming towards him. Stepping forward, he fired two shots. At first it seemed that no one was hurt, and Urban drove swiftly towards the correct road. But both his passengers had been shot. The Archduke, who had escaped death that morning and been angry at the lack of security provided for him, bled to death during the drive. His wife died with him.
Princip and two of his accomplices had been trained in Serbia by members of the Black Hand terrorist organisation, a fiercely nationalist organisation which the Serb Government itself was even then trying to suppress. The conspirators had been encouraged in their task by the leader of the Black Hand, Colonel Dimitrievic (also known as Apis), a sworn enemy of Austria. Having been given their weapons in Belgrade, the conspirators had been smuggled back across the Austrian border into Bosnia in May. Their aim was to strike a physical blow at Austrian rule. In 1878 the Turks had been driven from Bosnia after ruling there for many centuries, but the subsequent annexation of the province by Austria was a blow to Serb national aspirations. That Franz Ferdinand had come to Bosnia to direct the manoeuvres of two Austrian army corps stationed in the province, troops who could one day be the spearhead of an Austrian attack on Serbia, was a particular incitement to them. The manoeuvres had taken place on the two days preceding the visit to Sarajevo.
Unknown to the conspirators, the victim of their bullets was not unsympathetic to the national aspirations of the nationalities of the Empire, including the Serbs. In court and political circles he had the reputation of wishing to change the Dualism of Austria-Hungary into the Trialism of Austria, Hungary and the South Slavs, giving the Slavs of the Empire the same separate powers and autonomies as had been enjoyed by the Hungarians since 1867. This sympathy to Slav national aspirations, and the Archduke’s marriage outside the circle of royalty and high aristocracy, had already alienated him from his uncle, the Emperor, whose first comment on his nephew’s assassination was said to have been: ‘A higher power has re-established the order which I, alas, could not preserve.’ For him, apparently, it was not the assassin, but God, who had averted the possible repercussions of his nephew’s marriage outside the royal circle.
Franz Josef’s remark about the ‘higher power’ was told by the man who heard it, Count Parr, to his deputy, Colonel Margutti, who wrote up the account ten years later. Franz Josef’s most recent biographer writes: ‘The harsh comment, with its echo of old worries over the intrusion of a morganatic marriage in what the Emperor regarded as a divinely ordained line of dynastic descent, seems so artificially stilted as to be apocryphal. On the other hand, the news broke on a Sunday, at a time when the unfathomable workings of Providence may have been close to the surface of his shocked mind.’5
Fourteen years earlier, to the day, Franz Ferdinand had been forced by his uncle to take an oath barring any children he might have from the throne. The Emperor had always feared that this oath would be abandoned once Franz Ferdinand succeeded him. That danger was now averted. The new heir to the throne, the fifth of his reign, was his great-nephew the Archduke Charles. ‘For me it is a great relief from worry,’ he commented.
In the aftermath of the assassination, the Emperor’s personal sense of relief was unknown to the public and could have no effect on the repercussions. Indignation at the deed, and fear of a wider Serb conspiracy, led to anti-Serb riots in Vienna and Brünn. From Budapest the British Consul-General reported: ‘A wave of blind hatred for Serbia and everything Serbian is sweeping over the country.’ The Austrian Foreign Minister, Count Berchtold, and the Chief of the Austrian General Staff, Baron Conrad von Hötzendorf, both saw the assassination as an opportunity to reduce the power of Serbia. They were unclear in their own minds as to whether they should annex some part or all of Serbia, or defeat her in war in order to demand not territory, but a large financial indemnity. Franz Josef was not enamoured of action, fearing that an Austrian attack on Serbia might draw in other powers, in particular Russia, which would be forced by pan-Slav sentiment to come to Serbia’s assistance. Equally hesitant was the Hungarian Prime Minister, Count Tisza. On July 1 Conrad noted: ‘Tisza was against war with Serbia; he was anxious, fearing that Russia might strike at us and Germany leave us in the lurch.’
Having returned from Kiel to Berlin, the Kaiser was in a bellicose mood. ‘The Serbs must be disposed of, and that right soon!’ he noted in the margin of a telegram from his Ambassador in Vienna on June 30. Against his Ambassador’s remark that ‘only a mild punishment’ might be imposed on Serbia, the Kaiser wrote: ‘I hope not.’ Yet these comments envisaged nothing more than a swift Austrian victory over Serbia, with no wider repercussions. That day, as the British naval squadron sailed from Kiel, the British admiral signalled to the German Fleet: ‘Friends in past, and friends for ever.’ Also on June 30, Sir Arthur Nicolson, the senior civil servant at the British Foreign Office, wrote to the British Ambassador in St Petersburg: ‘The tragedy which has just taken place in Sarajevo will not, I trust, lead to further complications.’
On July 3 it was announced from Berlin that the Berlin-Baghdad railway would be continued southward to Basra, giving Germany an outlet on the Persian Gulf, and overland access to the Indian Ocean. That summer, however, Britain was within a few months of concluding an agreement with Germany, so that the railway would not be a cause of conflict between them.
***
The German attitude towards Austria was crucial. On July 4 the German Ambassador to London, Prince Lichnowsky, having just returned from Berlin, told the former British Secretary of State for War, Lord Haldane, that he was ‘very worried’ about the state of opinion in Germany. ‘The general feeling in Berlin’, Lichnowsky reported, was ‘that Serbia could not be allowed to go on intriguing and agitating against Austria and that Germany must support Austria in any action she proposed to take.’ That same day the German Ambassador in Vienna, Count Tschirschky, told a senior Austrian official that Germany would support Austria-Hungary ‘through thick and thin’, and he added: ‘The earlier Austria attacks the better. It would have been better to attack yesterday than today; and better to attack today than tomorrow.’
To this advice the Kaiser added, on July 5, an essential dimension of active German support, telling the Austrian Ambassador to Germany, Count Szogyeny, that Russia was ‘in no way prepared for war’ and that the Austrians would regret it if, having recognised the necessity of war against Serbia, ‘we did not make use of the present moment, which is all in our favour’. The Kaiser added: ‘Should war between Austria-Hungary and Russia prove unavoidable’, Germany would be at Austria’s side.
Later that day, while still at Potsdam, the Kaiser told the German Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, and the Prussian War Minister, General Falkenhayn, that he ‘did not believe that there was any prospect of great warlike developments. The Tsar would not side with the Archduke’s murderers, and Russia and France were not ready for war.’ For this reason, the Kaiser explained, ‘there was no need to make special dispositions’. He then returned to Kiel and on the morning of July 6 departed in the imperial yacht Hohenzollern for his annual three-week summer cruise in Norwegian waters.
***
More than a week had passed since the murder of the Archduke. Anger in Vienna, apprehension in Belgrade, and relaxation in Berlin, were the order of the day. With the Kaiser’s departure on his cruise, the shock of Europe’s latest episode began to subside. In Vienna, however, the secret debates on how to deal with Serbia continued. On July 7 the eight members of the Austro-Hungarian Cabinet met to discuss the Kaiser’s offer of German help. Berchtold, who presided, proposed an immediate attack on Serbia, without even a declaration of war.
The overriding mood of the meeting was for war, and for the reduction of Serbia in size, making her dependent on Austria. Only Count Tisza protested to the Emperor, writing to him on the following day that an Austrian attack on Serbia ‘would, in human possibility, provoke the world war’: a war that Tisza believed would bring not only Russia but also Roumania against Austria-Hungary, exposing the Empire to a ‘very unfavourable’ prospect.
The Germans ignored Tisza’s worries. When the German Ambassador in Vienna, Count Tschirschky, went to see Berchtold, he emphasised the German desire for action against Serbia. ‘He told me’, Berchtold informed Tisza, ‘that he had received a telegram from Berlin according to which his Imperial Master instructed him to declare here with all emphasis that in Berlin an action against Serbia is expected, and that it would not be understood in Germany if we allowed the opportunity to pass without striking a blow.’ Fears of Russia continued to influence the Germans. On July 7 Bethmann-Hollweg had commented: ‘The future lies with Russia, she grows and grows, and lies on us like a nightmare.’ On the following day he informed Prince Lichnowsky that ‘not only the extremists’ in Berlin ‘but even level-headed politicians are worried at the increases in Russian strength, and the imminence of Russian attack.’
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On July 8, ten days after the Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, a senior British general, Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, told his old school association dinner that they should all fit themselves ‘for the coming struggle’. He was, he later recalled, ‘good-naturedly chaffed by my particular friends and asked what had made me so gloomy that evening’. At the Uppingham School speech day three days later, one of those present as a guest, Vera Brittain, whose brother Edward and friend Roland Leighton were both at the school, later recalled ‘the breathless silence which followed the Headmaster’s slow, religious emphasis on the words: “If a man cannot be useful to his country, he is better dead”.’
On July 9, eleven days after the assassination, Edward Grey asked the German Ambassador in London, Prince Lichnowsky, to call on him at the Foreign Office. He then told the Ambassador that Britain had been ‘endeavouring to persuade the Russian Government even at the present juncture to adopt a calm view and a conciliatory attitude towards Austria, should the Vienna Cabinet feel obliged in consequence of the Sarajevo murder to take up a stern attitude towards Serbia.’ However, there were measures, Grey warned, on which Austria might embark, ‘such as to arouse Slav feeling’, which might make it impossible for the Russians to ‘remain passive’. What these measures might be, Grey did not indicate. That very day his principal diplomatic adviser, Sir Arthur Nicolson, wrote with a certain confidence to the British Ambassador in Vienna: ‘I have my doubts as to whether Austria will take any action of a serious character and I expect the storm will blow over.’
This optimistic view might have been confirmed on July 13, had Nicolson known of a secret Austrian report which reached Vienna that day from Sarajevo, stating that there was no evidence to implicate the Serbian Government in the assassination. The Austrian desire to punish Serbia was still strong, however, sustained by the feeling that Germany would support punitive action. When Berchtold finally convinced Franz Josef that Austria could chastise Serbia without any other powers taking Serbia’s side, the old man reluctantly agreed to an Austrian ultimatum. Berchtold’s successful persuasion was the first step towards war. Nicolson’s confidence had been misplaced.
In Vienna, the secret and public debate continued: should action be taken against Serbia? Nicolson’s optimistic comment had been written in answer to the warning by one of his subordinates that ‘the unwisdom of a blindly anti-Serbian policy is not at all appreciated in Austria, and that is the real point in a rather threatening situation’. The young official was right. His name was Robert Vansittart. Twenty years later he was himself to be the head of the Foreign Office and a strenuous opponent of the appeasement of Germany.
No Austrian ultimatum had been sent to Serbia, and a sense of crisis had begun to wane. On July 16, in a talk in London on the international situation, and the dangers of a ‘grand military bonfire’, Norman Angell told a largely socialist audience: ‘The younger generation are, I believe, increasingly determined not to be the victims of that supreme futility.’
Even as Norman Angell was putting his faith in the ‘younger generation’, the hesitations in Vienna among the older generation were ending. On July 14 the Austrian Council of Ministers had decided to deliver an ultimatum in a week’s time. In London two days later, the German Ambassador, Prince Lichnowsky, commented with some acerbity in a letter to the German Chancellor that the Austrian authorities had only themselves to blame for the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, for having sent him into an ‘alley of bomb throwers’ at Sarajevo. Even the Serbian Foreign Minister had sent a message to the Austrian Finance Minister in Vienna, who had responsibilities for Bosnia-Herzegovina, that the visit was unwise. But all this was now in the past: under seal of secrecy, the senior authorities in Berlin were informed of the date on which the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia would be delivered, and made no protest. The German army hierarchy was ready for war. On July 17 the Deputy Chief of the General Staff, General Waldersee, wrote to the Foreign Secretary, von Jagow, from Berlin: ‘I shall remain here ready to jump; we are all prepared at the General Staff.’
Jagow, like the Kaiser, was confident that Russia would not intervene. On July 18 he informed Lichnowsky in London: ‘The more resolute Austria shows herself and the more energetically we support her, the sooner will Russia stop her outcry. To be sure, they will make a great to-do in St Petersburg, but when all is said and done, Russia is at present not ready for war.’
The terms of the Austrian ultimatum were finalised in Vienna on July 19. Linking the Belgrade Government with the assassination, they consisted of a total of fifteen demands, among them Serbian Government condemnation of anti-Austrian propaganda; a joint Austro-Serbian commission to investigate the murder; a Serbian army order condemning the Serbian military involvement with the murders; and a firm promise of no further Serbian intrigue in Bosnia. Serbia would also have to give an undertaking to punish anyone who circulated anti-Austrian propaganda, either in schools or in the various nationalist societies. In addition, Austrian officials would participate in the judicial process, and in the process of punishment, of those connected with the plot.
It was clear to all those at the meeting of the Austrian Council of Ministers on July 19, including General Conrad von Hotzendorf, that Serbia would reject these terms, and that some form of punitive Austrian military action would follow. Conrad was the keenest for war, and determined that Austria would make territorial gains on the Bosnian border as a result of it.
On July 21 Franz Josef agreed to the terms of the ultimatum, influenced by the fact that some groups inside Serbia had been involved in the plot, and by fears of the threat of Serbian expansion. On the following day the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergius Sazonoff, warned Austria against taking drastic action. This Russian warning came too late, and lacked any threat of Russian military action.
The Austrian ultimatum had not yet been delivered. On July 23 the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, told the House of Commons that ‘civilisation’ would have no difficulty in regulating disputes that arose between nations by means ‘of some sane and well-ordered arbitrament’. Relations with Germany were better than they had been for some years, he said. The next budget ought to show an economy on armaments. That evening of July 23 the Austrian ultimatum was delivered in Belgrade. An answer was demanded within forty-eight hours.
Reading the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, Grey called it, on July 24, ‘the most formidable document that was ever addressed from one state to another’. That day the Russian Council of Ministers agreed, in strictest secrecy, to mobilise thirteen Army Corps ‘eventually’ destined to be in action against Austria, while publicly announcing that Russia ‘cannot remain indifferent’. On the following day, in a development overshadowed by the Austro-Serbian crisis, but dangerous for Britain, the first German warship sailed through the newly-widened Kiel Canal, marking the first day of Germany’s capability to send her ships safely and swiftly from the Baltic Sea to the North Sea.
***
It was clear that the repercussions for continental Europe of the Austrian ultimatum could be severe. There were those in Britain, however, who saw themselves detached from Europe. The Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith, told King George V that Europe was ‘within measurable distance of a real Armaggedon’, but that as far as Britain was concerned, ‘Happily there seems to be no reason why we should be anything more than spectators.’ Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, wrote to his wife that Europe was ‘trembling on the verge of a general war’ and that the Austrian ultimatum was ‘the most insolent document of its kind ever devised’. From Berlin, the British Chargé d’Affaires, Sir Horace Rumbold, wrote to his wife: ‘In two hours from now the time limit expires and the Austrians will probably be in Belgrade by Monday. The Lord knows what will happen then and I tell you—between ourselves—that we shall be lucky if we get out of this without the long-dreaded European war, a general bust-up in fact.’
Serbia was reluctant to agree to Austria’s wide-ranging demands, but even more reluctant also to provoke an attack from her powerful neighbour. The demands of defence and survival were hard to reconcile. The Emperor Franz Josef had ordered partial Austrian mobilisation that day, yet the process was not to start for three days, and was so cumbersome that it would take sixteen days to complete.
At three o’clock on the afternoon of July 25 Serbia mobilised. Three hours later she replied to the ultimatum, agreeing, as demanded by Austria, that anti-Austrian propagandists would be punished, and that subversive movements would be suppressed. All those connected with the Archduke’s assassination would, as also demanded, be brought to justice. As to Austria’s insistence on participation in the judicial process inside Serbia, the most drastic point of the ten, Serbia asked only that this demand be submitted to the International Tribunal at The Hague.
Half an hour after the Serbian reply to Austria, which was judged by all outside observers to be conciliatory, even humiliating, the Austrian Ambassador, Baron Giesl, left Belgrade. In an immediate act of self-preservation, the Serbian Government, fearing an immediate attack on the capital, which lay across the Danube from Austria, withdrew southward, to the provincial town of Nis. One unexpected problem for Serbia, which attracted international attention and some amusement, was that the Serbian Army Chief-of-Staff, General Putnik, returning by train from a Bohemian spa where he was taking the waters, was detained in Budapest by the police. Franz Josef, indignant that the General should have been arrested by the Hungarians, ordered him to be given a special train for the journey back to Serbia, with an apology.
Austria and Serbia were not yet at war. Lack of preparedness was a problem: on July 26 Conrad had explained to Berchtold that a full-scale Austrian invasion of Serbia would be impossible for a number of weeks. In Russia, whose preparedness was if anything even more backward than that of Austria, the Tsar, while stressing that Russia could not be indifferent to the fate of Serbia, proposed on July 27 the opening of negotiations with Vienna, on the basis of Serbia’s reply to the ultimatum. The Austrians rejected this. A British attempt that same day to convene a four-power conference of Britain, Germany, France and Italy ‘for the purpose of discovering an issue which would prevent complications’ was rejected by Germany on the grounds that such a conference ‘was not practicable’. That day the British War Office instructed General Smith-Dorrien to guard ‘all vulnerable points’ in southern Britain.
***
The prospect of a general European war forced those who had a hitherto unchallenged, or untested ideological point of view to work out where they stood in the actual evolution of the crisis. On July 27 the one working-class member of Britain’s Liberal Government, John Burns, wrote in his diary: ‘Why four great powers should fight over Serbia no fellow can understand.’ War must be averted ‘by all the means in our power’. He held it to be ‘my especial duty to dissociate myself and the principles I hold, and the trusteeship for the working classes which I carry, from such a universal crime as the contemplated war will be’.
Burns expressed his feelings at a Cabinet meeting that day. When the meeting was over, Lloyd George informed a leading Liberal journalist that ‘there could be no question of our taking part in any war in the first instance. He knew of no Minister who would be in favour of it.’ The meeting did agree, however, that the First and Second Fleets, which by chance were concentrated at Portland in the English Channel, at the end of a practice mobilisation that had been agreed upon six months earlier, should not be dispersed to their home ports. Realising that Britain might be drawn into a war by the alliance systems, Churchill obtained Asquith’s approval that afternoon to set up special armed guards on ammunition and oil depots, and informed all naval commanders: ‘European political situation makes war between Triple Alliance and Triple Entente powers by no means impossible. This is not the warning telegram, but be prepared to shadow possible hostile men-of-war.’
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The German High Command was pressing Austria to take military action against Serbia, but to do so quickly, in order to eliminate the danger of pressure to the contrary: the danger of the crisis being resolved before Austrian forces could occupy Belgrade. In Berlin, there was still a feeling that a wider conflict could be averted. ‘We are not at war yet,’ the Kaiser told a friend on July 27, ‘and if I can, I shall prevent it.’ In a telegram from Berlin on the following day, the Austrian Ambassador informed Count Berchtold: ‘We are urgently advised to act at once and present the world a fait accompli.’ Serbia would be chastised before war could spread. So keen was the German High Command to see Austria attack before the world could react that they urged Austria not to wait even until the completion of her mobilisation, which still needed almost two weeks.
In the five days following the Austrian ultimatum, Britain took a lead among the European states in pressing Austria not to attack Serbia. She also evolved a formula designed to bring Austria and Russia together. But the Austrian Ambassador in Berlin, in passing on the British proposals for mediation to Vienna, stressed that the German Government ‘in no way identifies itself with them, but on the contrary is decidedly opposed to their consideration, and only communicates them in order to satisfy the English.’ On July 28 the British Ambassador in Vienna warned London that ‘postponement or prevention of war with Serbia would undoubtedly be a great disappointment in this country, which has gone wild with joy at the prospect of war’.
Then came a bizarre episode, which remained secret until after the war. The Kaiser, reading that morning for the first time the full text of the Austrian ultimatum and the Serbian reply, could see no reason at all for Austria to declare war, writing in the margin of the Serbian reply: ‘A great moral victory for Vienna; but with it every reason for war is removed and Giesl ought to remain quietly in Belgrade. On the strength of this I should never have ordered mobilisation.’ He went on to suggest that ‘as a visible satisfaction d’honneur for Austria, the Austrian Army should temporarily occupy Belgrade as a pledge.’ Then negotiations to end the brief military conflict could begin. ‘I am convinced’, the Kaiser wrote to Jagow, ‘that on the whole the wishes of the Danube monarchy have been acceded to. The few reservations that Serbia makes in regard to individual points can in my opinion be well cleared up by negotiations. But it contains the announcement orbi et urbi of a capitulation of the most humiliating kind, and with it every reason for war is removed.’
It was too late for such conciliatory counsel: at noon that day, scarcely an hour after the Kaiser penned these unbellicose words, Austria declared war on Serbia, confident of German support if the war widened. The first military conflict of the First World War had begun. Only two nations were as yet combatants: Austria and Serbia. Russia and Germany, for all their preparations, were not inexorably bound to come to blows. Would the war widen? Winston Churchill, on whom the responsibility for Britain’s naval war would rest, wrote to his wife on learning of the Austrian declaration of war: ‘I wondered whether those stupid Kings and Emperors could not assemble together and revivify kingship by saving the nations from hell but we all drift on in a kind of dull cataleptic trance. As if it was somebody else’s operation.’
These were not mere late-night musings without a practical aspect: on the morning of July 29 Churchill proposed to the British Cabinet that the European sovereigns should ‘be brought together for the sake of peace’. But despite the Kaiser’s belated satisfaction with the Serbian reply, the European sovereigns lacked the will to try to halt the march to war, as each War Office and Admiralty worked to ensure that its preparations should be as advanced as possible. That day, as the German Fleet began to mobilise, the British Fleet was sent to its war stations in the North Sea, putting in place the means whereby Britain could prevent a German naval assault on Britain, or, if war came, could protect British troops should they be sent across the Channel to France.
In Berlin there was a glimmer of hope for British neutrality on July 29, when the Kaiser’s brother, Prince Henry, who had been yachting in Britain at the Cowes Regatta and had called on his cousin King George V at Buckingham Palace a few days earlier, reported King George as saying to him: ‘We shall try all we can to keep out of this and shall remain neutral.’ One of the Kaiser’s biographers has commented: ‘Although Henry had already shown he was an inaccurate reporter of his English relatives’ remarks—probably through a failure to understand linguistic subtleties—the Kaiser gave more attention to this message than to any other reports from London or the assessments of his naval intelligence department.’6 When Admiral Tirpitz expressed his doubts that Britain would remain neutral the Kaiser replied: ‘I have the word of a King, and that is good enough for me.’
With Serbia’s border forts under the shadow and imminent bombardment of Austrian guns, on the morning of July 29 Russia publicly called a proportion of its vast population to arms. There was no Russian declaration of war on Austria that day, but partial mobilisation of a total force of almost six million men. Russian soldiers and artillery were on the move, setting off towards army camps and fortifications along the border with Austria. The Russian War Minister, General Sukhomlinov, had wanted full mobilisation, but this had been rejected by the Tsar. At least one sovereign still hoped war might be averted. But as the focus intensified upon armies and fleets, authority everywhere was shifted towards War Ministers and General Staffs.
In Berlin, Horace Rumbold found himself on July 29 outside the Crown Prince’s Palace at the very moment when the Crown Prince arrived in his car. ‘The crowd cheered wildly. There was an indescribable feeling of excitement in the air. It was evident that some great event was about to happen. The olive grey motor cars of the Great General Staff were dashing about in all directions.’
Both Russia and France were pressing Britain to commit herself to the Franco-Russian alliance, to state publicly that a German attack on France would bring Britain in as France’s ally and defender. But Grey refused any such commitment, even though the argument put forward by Sazonoff, his Russian opposite number, related not to military action but to deterrence. Sazonoff argued that if Britain took her stand firmly with France and Russia, there would be no war. If she failed to take such a stand, rivers of blood would flow and Britain too would be dragged into the conflict. The Italian Government added its voice in this same sense. But the British Government had no intention of committing itself: on July 29 Grey told the French ambassador in London: ‘If Germany became involved and France became involved, we had not made up our minds what we should do; it was a case that we should have to consider.’
Germany now tried to isolate Britain from the conflict, suggesting, in a secret message on July 29, that if Britain were to remain neutral, Germany would take no territory from France except her colonies. This offer was rejected by Grey: when he revealed it later, there was indignation in Britain at what was seen as German cynicism.
In the Russian capital, St Petersburg, rumours were circulating that Austria’s designs might extend ‘considerably beyond’ a punitive occupation of Serbian territory. Serbia’s very independence might be in danger. The Russian partial mobilisation of July 29 coincided with the first bombardment of Belgrade by Austrian river monitors. Russian opinion was incensed against Austria. In panic at the prospect of war with Germany, the Tsar appealed directly to the Kaiser, with whom he had been in friendly correspondence for more than twenty years. ‘To try and avoid such a calamity as a European war,’ the Tsar telegraphed (in English), ‘I beg you in the name of our old friendship to do what you can to stop your allies from going too far.’ This telegram, signed Nicky, crossed with one (also in English) from the Kaiser to the Tsar, signed Willie: ‘I am exerting my utmost influence to induce the Austrians to deal straightly to arrive at a satisfactory understanding with you.’
On the late afternoon of July 29, encouraged by the Kaiser’s telegram, the Tsar sent his military chiefs a telegram cancelling general mobilisation and authorising only partial mobilisation. He now proposed to the Kaiser that the ‘Austro-Serbian problem’ be handed over to the International Court at The Hague. Late that evening the Kaiser proposed to the Tsar that Russia ‘remain a spectator of the Austro-Serbian conflict, without involving Europe in the most horrible war she ever witnessed’. The Kaiser went on to offer to help promote an understanding between Russia and Austria. Excited by this, the Tsar tried to countermand the partial mobilisation he had just ordered, but his Foreign Minister, Sazonoff, and the Chief of the Russian General Staff, Yanushkevich, persuaded him that this could not be done: the wheels were already in motion all over the Empire. After midnight the Tsar telegraphed again to the Kaiser: ‘We need your strong pressure on Austria to come to an understanding with us.’
Austria had no intention of submitting her dispute with Serbia to The Hague. Nor was the Kaiser able to dissuade his own General Staff from responding to the Russian partial mobilisation by similar German measures. When news of the German partial mobilisation reached St Petersburg, Sazonoff and Yanushkevich prevailed upon the Tsar to sign the order for full mobilisation. Without it, Russia’s exposed Polish provinces could be at risk.
It was at four in the afternoon of July 30 that the Tsar signed the order for full Russian mobilisation. Russian popular sentiment applauded the fullest possible solidarity with the beleaguered fellow Slavs of Serbia. Any Russian hope of using the mobilisation not to make war on Austria, but to deter war by the threat of mobilisation, was in vain. Were Austria to mobilise on her Russian front she could confront Russia’s six million conscripts with three million of her own. From Berlin, the German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg telegraphed to Berchtold in Vienna, on the morning of July 31, urging the Austrians not to mobilise against Russia. But also from Berlin, that same morning, the Chief of the German General Staff, General Moltke, advised his opposite number in Vienna, General Conrad, to mobilise at once. Commented Berchtold: ‘Who rules in Berlin: Moltke or Bethmann?’ Confident that German support would be forthcoming if Russia declared war, Austria mobilised. That afternoon Germany sent Russia an ultimatum to ‘cease every war measure against us and Austria-Hungary’ within twelve hours. Russia rejected this demand.
Confident of a swift victory against the lumbering, clumsy Russian war machine, Germany prepared to declare war on Russia. First, however, she asked France to state categorically that she would remain neutral in the event of war between Germany and Russia. France refused. Since 1894 France had been allied to Russia. She immediately called her own men to the colours: nearly three million French soldiers were on their way to the railway stations and crowding into their barracks: a precise total of 4,278 trains had been allocated for this massive preparatory manoeuvre. Yet, despite the order to mobilise, France hesitated to declare war on Germany. ‘There is still hope, although the clouds are blacker and blacker,’ Churchill wrote to his wife on July 31, and he then gave her a survey of the most recent developments known to the British Cabinet. ‘Germany is realising I think how great are the forces against her and is trying tardily to restrain her idiot ally. We are working to soothe Russia.’
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Diplomacy, and the hesitations of individuals, were proving powerless to avert the drift to catastrophe. During July 31 the French Ambassador in Berlin, Jules Cambon, and the Belgian Minister, Baron Beyens, appealed to their United States colleague, James W. Gerard, to do something to avert war. Gerard had no instructions from Washington, but he wrote at once to Bethmann-Hollweg: ‘Your Excellency, Is there nothing that my country can do? Nothing that I can do towards stopping this dreadful war? I am sure that the President would approve any act of mine looking towards peace.’ He received no reply.
In France, the response to the call for mobilisation was overwhelming in its enthusiasm. For ten years the French Socialist Party had preached workers’ solidarity across national borders. Its newspaper, L’Humanité, and its leader, Jean Jaurès, had striven to create a joint Franco-German socialist policy against war. In vain did Jaurès now appeal for the unity of European working-class interests, for a concerted working-class demand that all war measures and mobilisations stop. On July 31, as patriotic fervour mounted among all classes, he was assassinated by a fanatical nationalist.
Jaurès had not been alone in seeing the dangers of war fever. In Berlin on July 31 a leading German industrialist, Walther Rathenau, published an article in the Berliner Tageblatt protesting at German’s blind loyalty towards Austria. ‘Without the protection of this loyalty,’ he wrote, ‘Austria could not have ventured on the step she has taken.’ A question such as the participation of Austrian officials in investigating the Serbian plot ‘is no reason for an international war’. Rathenau was not to be assassinated for another seven years, but his article that day sowed the seeds of the accusation of treason that was to be hurled at him when the war was over: a war to which, once started, he gave all his industrial expertise and personal energies.
Those Germans who saw opportunities opening out as a result of a victorious war over Russia, were in a dilemma. If France were to gather her full military strength and declare war on her while the German armies were advancing against Russia in the east, then Germany could be terribly mauled in the west, perhaps even overrun. To avert this, a plan had been devised long before, which every German general knew in detail, to defeat France first, and to do so swiftly, before turning the full German military force against Russia. This plan was the brainchild of Alfred von Schlieffen, Chief of the German General Staff from 1891 to 1905, who had spent twelve years perfecting it, so that it could not fail.
Completed in 1905, the Schlieffen Plan envisaged a German attack through Belgium and Holland into northern France, by-passing the long French fortified frontier, and descending upon Paris in a great sweep from the north. Even after his retirement Schlieffen had continued to improve his plan, the last revision being in December 1912, shortly before his death. His successor as Chief of the General Staff, General Moltke, shortened the line of the sweep by eliminating Holland (which Hitler reinstated in 1940), but as the possibility of war with Russia became imminent, the modified Schlieffen Plan emerged as the essential means of avoiding a two-front war and winning a double victory.
Paris would be occupied, and victory over France achieved, within six weeks. Then Germany could march against Russia. It was a careful, precise and comforting calculation. On July 31 Britain asked both France and Germany if they would respect Belgian neutrality, to the maintenance of which Britain was committed by Treaty. France gave a pledge to do so. Germany made no reply.
No European capital was free from anxiety and activity. ‘All the Austrian personnel who were available for mobilisation left at once,’ Betty Cunliffe-Owen recalled of August 1 in Constantinople, where her husband was British Military Attaché. ‘I was intensely sorry for the Marquise Pallavacini (the Ambassadress); being an Englishwoman, her heart must have been torn in two. Both her sons were in the Austrian Army. She started immediately for Vienna, naturally anxious to see them before they left for the Front.’ That day the First Secretary at the German Embassy, Count Kanitz, remarked to Betty Cunliffe-Owen’s husband: ‘Mon cher, England’s whole interest for years has been the Irish question and women’s suffrage—of what use then troubling about other people’s quarrels? You have got to set your own house in order first.’
In Munich, at a public meeting in the Odeonsplatz on August 1, an exuberant crowd greeted the news of the coming of war. Among those photographed at that moment of public enthusiasm was the Austrian-born Adolf Hitler, then earning a precarious living selling his own watercolours. A French painter, Paul Maze, in Paris on August 1, heard everywhere that day the shouts of ‘À Berlin’. At the Place de la Concorde he watched a French cavalry regiment march ‘very smartly’ across the square, the officers wearing white gloves, ‘the tramp of the horses mingled with the shouts of the crowd throwing flowers to the men’. Throughout the day soldiers passed through Paris on their way to the railway stations. ‘When artillery passed, the guns were festooned with flowers and women jumped on the limbers to kiss the men.’ That day the head of the Russian military mission in Paris, Count Ignatiev, telegraphed to St Petersburg that the French Ministry of War was ‘seriously suggesting that Russia invade Germany and advance on Berlin’. Such a request, commented General Golovin, ‘was equivalent to asking Russia to commit suicide, in the full sense of the word’.
That day the Tsar sent yet another appeal to the Kaiser to try to prevent a Russo-German war. ‘Our long proved friendship must succeed, with God’s help, in avoiding bloodshed,’ he telegraphed. The Kaiser, however, whose earlier encouragement to Austria had been a factor advancing the crisis, now determined to honour his promise to help Austria, should she be attacked by Russia. At five o’clock in the afternoon he ordered the mobilisation of all German forces. Then, within minutes, he grasped at a straw in the wind that suggested a wider war could be avoided: a telegram from Lichnowsky in London, suggesting that Britain might be willing to remain neutral, and to guarantee French neutrality in a Russo-German war, provided Germany did not attack France in the west. ‘So now we need only wage war against Russia, we simply advance with the whole army in the east,’ was the Kaiser’s enthusiastic, wishful comment to Helmut von Moltke, the Chief of Staff of the German Armies.
Moltke quickly pointed out that no change could be made in the plan to attack France. All was already on the move. A German division, moving westward from Trier, was about to seize the Luxembourg railways, as part of the Schlieffen Plan and an essential preliminary to war in the east, to prevent a two-front war. The Kaiser, unconvinced, ordered a telegram sent to Trier, halting all military operations. Then, at eleven o’clock that night, reversing his stand, he told Moltke that the hoped-for guarantees of British and French neutrality were illusory, and that the war in the west would go ahead. The troops at Trier were ordered to march.
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‘Three hundred million people today lie under the spell of fear and fate,’ a London evening newspaper declared on August 1, and went on to ask: ‘Is there no one to break the spell, no gleam of light on this cold dark scene?’ Unknown to the newspaper, Britain’s King George V, a cousin of both the Tsar and the Kaiser, had telegraphed to the Tsar that day: ‘I cannot help thinking that some misunderstanding has produced this deadlock. I am most anxious not to miss any possibility of avoiding the terrible calamity which at present threatens the whole world.’
George V wanted the Tsar ‘to leave still open grounds for negotiation and peace’. Sir Edward Grey was hopeful that this royal initiative might have some effect. ‘If only a little respite in time can be gained before any Great Power begins war,’ he telegraphed to the British Ambassador in Berlin, ‘it might be possible to secure peace.’ Grey’s telegram to Berlin and George V’s to St Petersburg reached their recipients on the evening of August 1. They came, as did the Tsar’s telegram to the Kaiser, too late. That evening the German Ambassador to Russia, Count Pourtalès, went to the Russian Foreign Ministry in St Petersburg, where he handed Sazonoff the German declaration of war.
‘This is a criminal act of yours,’ Sazonoff told the Ambassador. ‘The curses of the nations will be upon you.’ ‘We are defending our honour,’ the Ambassador replied. ‘Your honour was not involved,’ Sazonoff declared. ‘You could have prevented the war by one word; you didn’t want to.’ The Ambassador burst into tears and had to be helped from the room by the Foreign Minister.
Germany had declared war on Russia. ‘Wives and mothers with children accompanied the reservists from point to point, deferring the hour of parting, and one saw cruel scenes,’ the British Military Attaché in St Petersburg, Colonel Knox, later recalled, ‘but the women cried silently and there were no hysterics. The men generally were grave and quiet, but parties cheered one another as they met in the streets.’ In defiance of Germany, and of all things German, the name St Petersburg, honouring Peter the Great’s founding of the city in 1702, was changed to the Russian ‘Petrograd’ (Peter’s Town).7
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On the night of August 1, the Russian Foreign Minister dined with the British Ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, whose daughter Meriel later recalled: ‘Four times that evening Monsieur Sazonoff was called away; the bell of the telephone pealed incessantly, the square outside was a dense crowd of people singing the National Anthem. Till late on in the night crowds besieged the doors of the Embassy cheering for the British Fleet, and always asking the same question: Would England help, would England join them?’
That night, as the first step in the long-prepared strategic moves against France, German troops entered Luxembourg. It was a small-scale operation, scarcely a skirmish. Its objective was to occupy a rail and telegraph junction.
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A scramble for war supplies began. In France, fifty monoplanes that were being built for the Turkish Government were seized by the French authorities. In Britain, two battleships being built for Turkey were likewise seized: one of them was under Turkish orders to join the German High Seas Fleet as soon as it was ready to sail. In Danzig, the German authorities prepared to requisition two light cruisers being built for Russia. ‘It has been, and still is exciting to the uttermost degree,’ Horace Rumbold wrote from the British Embassy in Berlin on the morning of August 2, ‘but it is too awful to think what the next few months have in store.’
On August 2 German military patrols crossed the French frontier for the first time since 1871, and there were several skirmishes. At Joncherey, near the German-Swiss border, a French soldier, Corporal André Peugeot, was killed, the first French victim of a war that was to claim more than a million French lives. That day, full British naval mobilisation was put into effect, and orders given to shadow two German warships on their way through the Mediterranean to Turkey. A secret assurance was also given by Britain to France, that if the German Fleet went into the North Sea or English Channel to attack French shipping, the British Fleet would give the French vessels ‘all the assistance in its power’.
It was not on a naval victory over France in the North Sea or the Channel, however, but on a rapid overland march through Belgium, that the German war plans depended. It was in order to achieve this goal that, at seven o’clock on the evening of August 2, Germany delivered a twelve-hour ultimatum to Belgium: German troops must be given free passage through Belgium. The Belgians refused. By the Treaty of London in 1839, Britain, Austria, Prussia, France and Russia had agreed that Belgium should form an independent and perpetually neutral State. That Treaty was still in force. ‘Were the Belgian government to accept the propositions conveyed to it,’ Brussels informed Berlin, ‘it would be sacrificing the nation’s honour and betraying its engagements to Europe.’
On August 3 Germany declared war on France. As a first step to victory, her troops crossed into Belgium. That day Bethmann-Hollweg told the Reichstag: ‘The wrong—I speak openly—that we are committing we will endeavour to make good as soon as our military goal is reached.’ When France was conquered, Belgium would be set free. In France, an outpouring of patriotic fervour affected all classes: Alsace and Lorraine would be restored: the humiliations of 1870 and 1871 would be reversed. That day, in Munich, the Austrian citizen Adolf Hitler petitioned the King of Bavaria for permission to enlist in a Bavarian Regiment. On the following day his petition was approved.
Hitherto Britain had stood aside. Among its Cabinet Ministers there was no clear majority for war against Germany, even if Germany attacked France. Britain had no treaty of alliance with France, only the Entente Cordiale signed in 1904 to settle long standing quarrels in Egypt and Morocco. The question of Belgium raised a complication. Belgian neutrality was guaranteed by Britain under a treaty signed in 1839. An ultimatum was sent from London to Berlin: there must be no attack on Belgium.
Germany was unlikely to oblige: her whole two-front war plan was already in action. At a meeting of the Prussian Cabinet in Berlin on August 3, Bethmann-Hollweg told his colleagues that the participation of Britain was now inevitable. To the alarm of those present, Admiral Tirpitz cried out: ‘All is then lost!’
In Britain too, there were those who had premonitions of the terrors that were to come. In the village of Rudston a 16-year-old schoolgirl, Winifred Holtby, never forgot an episode that took place as the prospect of war drew nearer. ‘Above the counter of the small crowded newspaper shop, large moths flopped clumsily round the swinging paraffin lamp. An old drunken woman wearing a man’s cap planted herself in a chair beneath it. “War’s bloody hell,” she remarked in mild conversational tones. “Ah’m tellin’ you God’s truth. Two o’ my lads went i’ South Africa. Bloody hell. That’s wha’ ’tis”.’
The German High Command’s confidence in Germany’s military prowess was such, that on August 3, even before the march through Belgium began, German troops in the east crossed the Russian border and occupied three towns in Russian Poland: Bendzin, Kalish and Chenstokhov.8
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The British Government had demanded that the German army did not cross into Belgium. This was not a bluff. The ultimatum sent from London to Berlin was due to expire at eleven o’clock on the night of August 4. Mines were being laid in the English Channel to prevent the sudden incursion of German warships: among the steamships held up as a result of this minelaying was one coming from South Africa. Its passengers included a 44-year-old Indian lawyer, M.K. Gandhi, who, despite the view of many Indian nationalists that Indians should have nothing to do with their masters’ conflict, was to advocate that Indians living in Britain should take ‘their share in the war’.
Seven hours before the British ultimatum to Germany expired, German troops entered Belgium. At eleven o’clock that night, Britain declared war on Germany. In Berlin, a crowd quickly gathered outside the British Embassy, smashing windows and hurling both stones and abuse. On the following morning, in apologising for the attack, an emissary of the Kaiser remarked that it would nevertheless show the British Ambassador ‘how deeply the people felt the action of England in ranging herself against Germany and forgetting how we had fought shoulder to shoulder at Waterloo’. The emissary added that the Kaiser had been proud of being a British Field Marshal and Admiral of the Fleet, but now he would ‘divest himself of these honours’. The Ambassador and his staff prepared to leave Berlin: Horace Rumbold later recalled how, in a final gesture of contempt, the Embassy’s three German servants, having been given a month’s wages in advance, ‘took off their liveries, spat and trampled on them, and refused to help carry the trunks down to the taxi cabs’. A century of diplomatic courtesy, deference and propriety was at an end.
Britain and Germany were to devote to war even greater energies than they had hitherto devoted to trade and industry, imperial expansion, culture and the evolution of a fairer society. Sir Edward Grey, who had laboured to prevent Austria from attacking Serbia, and whose government had refused to make any formal commitment to France, now defended war with Germany on a much wider plane than the violation of Belgian neutrality, telling the American Ambassador in London: ‘The issue for us is that, if Germany wins, she will dominate France; the independence of Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and perhaps of Norway and Sweden, will be a mere shadow; their separate existence as nations will be a fiction; all their harbours will be at Germany’s disposal; she will dominate the whole of Western Europe, and this will make our position quite impossible. We could not exist as a first class State under such circumstances.’
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That August, Italy, Portugal, Greece, Bulgaria, Roumania and Turkey remained neutral, watching from the sidelines, but with an eye to future participation if advantage could be gained. Elsewhere in Europe, other nations remained firmly and permanently outside the circle of conflict. Holland, Switzerland, Spain, Denmark, Norway and Sweden took no part in the coming of war, or in its prosecution; nor were they drawn into it as belligerents, though for some it was to prove a lucrative source of revenue and trade. The opening shots of rifle, machine gun and artillery marked a new era for the arms trade, as well as for comradeship, bravery, suffering and torment.
Five Empires were at war by midnight on 4 August 1914: the Austro-Hungarian Empire against Serbia; the German Empire against France, Britain and Russia; the Russian Empire against Germany and Austria-Hungary; and the British and French Empires against Germany. If the war was to be over by Christmas, as many believed, or at the latest by Easter 1915, tens of thousands of soldiers might be killed or wounded before the guns fell silent. Every army believed that it could crush its opponents within a few months. German troops were as confident that they would soon be marching in triumph along the Champs-Élysées in Paris as French troops were that they would parade along the Unter den Linden in Berlin. Of the morning of August 5 in Constantinople, Betty Cunliffe-Owen recalled: ‘The Germans left with the light of victory already in their eyes, one of the most truculent being Count Kanitz himself, who promised to send a post card from Paris in a few weeks!—but those few weeks found him a prisoner in Malta!’
As German diplomats left Constantinople, expecting victory, German pacifists were meeting with their European counterparts in the serenity of the south German town of Konstanz, for the founding meeting of the World Alliance for Promoting Friendship Through the Churches. On August 4 the delegates, among them British, French and German churchmen for whom war was an abomination, were obliged within hours of reaching their lakeside meeting point to abandon their discussions and hurry home.