That left Moltke.27 As early as 1911, he had informed the General Staff, “All are preparing themselves for the great war, which all sooner or later expect.” One year later, he had pressed Wilhelm II for war with Russia, “and the sooner the better.” During his meeting with Conrad von Hötzendorf at Karlsbad on 12 May 1914, Moltke had lectured his counterpart that “to wait any longer meant a diminishing of our chances.” The “atmosphere was charged with a monstrous electrical tension,” Moltke averred, and that “demanded to be discharged.”28 Two months before the Sarajevo tragedy, he had confided to Foreign Secretary von Jagow that “there was no alternative but to fight a preventive war so as to beat the enemy while we could still emerge fairly well from the struggle.” To be sure, Moltke feared what he called a “horrible war,” a “world war,” one in which the “European cultural states” would “mutually tear themselves to pieces,” and one “that will destroy civilization in almost all of Europe for decades to come.”29 But he saw no alternative. On 29 July, he counseled Wilhelm II that the Reich would “never hit it again so well as we do now with France’s and Russia’s expansion of their armies incomplete.”
How was the decision for war reached? The gravity of the moment hit Berlin with full force after Vienna handed Belgrade its ultimatum on 23 July—and Prime Minister Nikola Pašić rejected it two days later. This greatly alarmed leaders in St. Petersburg, who felt that Austria-Hungary with this move was threatening Russia’s standing as a great power and who believed that they needed to show solidarity with the “little Slavic brother,” Serbia, to show resolve. On 29–30 July, Berlin learned first of Russia’s partial mobilization and then of its general mobilization. War Minister von Falkenhayn truncated his holidays on 24 July and rushed back to the capital. Austria-Hungary, he quickly deduced, “simply wants the final reckoning” with Serbia. Moltke returned from Karlsbad two days later. Wilhelm II left the fjords of Norway and was back in Berlin by 27 July. He hastily convened an ad hoc war council. Falkenhayn tersely summed up its result: “It has now been decided to fight the matter through, regardless of the cost.”30
What historian Stig Förster has described as the bureaucratic chaos of the imperial system of government31 was fully in evidence in Berlin as the July Crisis entered its most critical stage. Bethmann Hollweg was in a panic to pass responsibility for the coming “European conflagration” on to Russia, and he drafted several telegrams for “Willy” to fire off to his cousin “Nicky,” calling on Tsar Nicholas II to halt Russian mobilization—to no avail. Moltke and Falkenhayn raced in staff cars between Berlin and Potsdam. At times, they demanded that Wilhelm II and Bethmann Hollweg declare a state of “pre-mobilization;” at other times, they counseled against it. The chancellor conferred with the generals throughout 29 July. Moltke first lined up with the hawk Falkenhayn and pushed for the immediate declaration of a “threatening state of danger of war;” then he sided with Bethmann Hollweg and urged restraint. The chancellor sat on the fence, now supporting Falkenhayn, now Moltke, prevaricating on the issue of mobilization. At one point, he even dashed off a missive to Vienna asking its armies to “halt in Belgrade.”
In fact, Bethmann Hollweg was waiting for the right moment to play his trump card. Shortly before midnight on 29 July, he called Ambassador Sir Edward Goschen to his residence and made him an offer: If Britain remained neutral in the coming war, Germany would offer London a neutrality pact, guarantee the independence of the Netherlands, and promise not to undertake “territorial gains at the expense of France.”32 Goschen was flabbergasted by what he called the chancellor’s “astounding proposals;” a livid Sir Edward Grey, secretary of state for foreign affairs, called them “shameful.” With that, Bethmann Hollweg ruefully informed the Prussian Ministry of State the next day that “the hope for England [was now] zero.”33
Bethmann Hollweg withdrew behind a veil of fatalism. “All governments,” he moaned, had “lost control” over the July Crisis. Europe was rushing headlong down the steep slope to war. “The stone has begun to roll.”34 The night of 30 July, at Moltke’s insistence, the chancellor agreed to institute a state of emergency, the precondition for mobilization.
Around 2 PM on 31 July, Wilhelm II ordered the government to issue a decree stating that a “threatening state of danger of war” existed. Falkenhayn rushed to the palace through cheering crowds to sign the decree and to record the high drama. “Thereupon the Kaiser shook my hand for a long time; tears stood in both of our eyes.”35 The decision brought relief and joy to official Berlin.36 The strain and stress of the past few days lay behind. At the Chancellery, Bethmann Hollweg, ever the pessimist, worried about what he termed a “leap into the dark,” but concluded that it was his “solemn duty” to undertake it. At the Navy Cabinet, Admiral Georg Alexander von Müller crowed: “The mood is brilliant. The government has managed brilliantly to make us appear the attacked.” At the General Staff, Moltke detected “an atmosphere of happiness.” At the Prussian War Office, Bavarian military plenipotentiary Karl von Wenninger noted “beaming faces, shaking of hands in the corridors; one congratulates one’s self for having taken the hurdle.” Berlin was about “to begin the most serious, bloody business that the world has ever seen.” Wenninger took “malicious delight” while riding in the Grunewald to note that “the army would soon expropriate the superb steeds of the city’s wealthy Jews.”37
Wilhelm II signed the order for general mobilization at 5 PM on 1 August—in the Star Chamber of the Neues Palais at Potsdam, on the desk made from the planking of Horatio Nelson’s flagship HMS Victory, a present from his grandmother Queen-Empress Victoria. Cousins “Nicholas and Georgie,” he informed his inner circle, “have played me false! If my grandmother had been alive, she would never have allowed it.”38 Champagne was served to celebrate the momentous moment.
But all had not gone as smoothly as the mere recitation of events would indicate. Late on the afternoon of 1 August, Moltke headed back to Berlin after the kaiser had signed the mobilization order. He was ordered to return to the Neues Palais at once. An important dispatch had arrived from Karl Prince von Lichnowsky in London: Grey had assured the ambassador that London would “assume the obligation” of keeping Paris out of the war if Germany did not attack France. “Jubilant mood,” the chief of the General Staff noted.39 An ecstatic Wilhelm II redirected Moltke, “Thus we simply assemble our entire army in the east!” Moltke was thunderstruck. The deployment of an army of millions could not simply be “improvised,” he reminded the kaiser. The Aufmarschplan represented the labor of many years; radically overturning it at the last minute would result in the “ragged assembly” of a “wild heap of disorderly armed men” along the Russian frontier. In a highly agitated state, Wilhelm II shot back: “Your uncle [Moltke the Elder] would have given me a different answer.”
The evening ended with a desultory debate as to whether 16th Infantry Division (ID), the first-day vanguard of the Schlieffen-Moltke assault in the west, should immediately cross into Luxembourg. Moltke insisted that it should to prevent the French from seizing Luxembourg’s vital rail marshaling points. Bethmann Hollweg demanded that they be held back to give Lichnowsky time to seal the deal with Britain. Wilhelm II ordered the 16th to stand down. “Completely broken” by this open humiliation, Moltke feared that the kaiser was still clinging to hopes for peace. “I console Moltke,” Falkenhayn devilishly wrote in his diary.40 In fact, Moltke arrived home that night a “broken” man. His wife, Eliza, was shocked at his appearance, “blue and red in the face” and “unable to speak.” “I want to conduct war against the French and the Russians,” Moltke muttered, “but not against such a Kaiser.” She believed that he suffered a “light stroke” that night. The tension of the day finally broke forth in a torrent of “tears of despair.”41 When Gerhard Tappen, chief of operations, presented him with the order to keep 16th ID on German soil, Moltke refused to sign the document.
Then another bolt out of the blue: At 11 PM, Moltke was ordered to return to Potsdam. The kais
er, already in a nightgown, informed him that King-Emperor George V had just cabled that he was unaware of the Lichnowsky-Grey discussion and that the matter rested on a misunderstanding. Wilhelm II dismissed Moltke. “Now you can do what you wish.” Moltke ordered 16th ID to cross into Luxembourg.
It was an inauspicious start. The Younger Moltke had never wanted to measure himself against his great-uncle, the architect of Otto von Bismarck’s wars of unification. The kaiser’s acid comment concerning the Elder Moltke’s possible “different answer” had unnerved him. One can only wonder if, on that 1 August 1914, his mind did not wander back to Königgrätz, where on 3 July 1866, during a critical part of the battle, Bismarck had held out a box of cigars to the Elder Moltke to test his nerves: Helmuth Karl Bernhard von Moltke had passed the test by picking the Iron Chancellor’s best Cuban.
FRENCH DECISIONS MADE DURING the July Crisis, in the words of historian Eugenia C. Kiesling, “mattered rather little.” For whatever course Paris took, “France would be dragged into an unwanted war.”42 In the face of the frenetic diplomatic actions at Vienna, Berlin, and St. Petersburg, French policy makers in July 1914 were content to make no decision at all. Most were interested merely in making sure that Paris was not seen as pursuing an aggressive policy, one that could possibly encourage war. In President Poincaré’s well-chosen words, “It is better to have war declared on us.”43
But this does not mean that France was without a policy in 1914. France had sketched out a secret military alliance with Russia in 1892. Formally signed by Nicholas II two years later, it called on each side to assist the other “immediately and simultaneously” if attacked by Germany—France with 1.3 million and Russia with 800,000 men.44 Thus, even to discuss the matter of support for Russia during the July Crisis risked arousing suspicions concerning French reliability. If Paris as much as hinted that it had a “free hand” in shaping its course of action, then this would imply the same for St. Petersburg. Neither side, of course, was willing to jeopardize Europe’s only firm military alliance.
The main issue concerns the French diplomatic mission to Russia. At 5 AM on 16 July, President Poincaré, Premier Viviani, and Pierre de Margerie, political director of the French Foreign Ministry, boarded the battleship France at Dunkirk. They shaped a course for the Baltic Sea to conduct state visits to Russia and to the Scandinavian countries. Was it “design” or “accident”?45 Was it sheer lack of responsibility, given the escalating crisis over the murders at Sarajevo and the certain but still undetermined Austro-Hungarian response? Was it a gross miscalculation, given that radio transmission was still in its infancy? And just what did French leaders hope to accomplish in St. Petersburg? Whatever the case, they had intentionally isolated themselves from the decision-making process.
It was an uneasy voyage. Poincaré, shocked at the degree of naïveté exhibited by his premier concerning foreign policy, spent the days at sea lecturing Viviani on European statecraft. Viviani, for his part, was preoccupied by what bombshells might be revealed at the Caillaux trial—and by the whereabouts of his mistress from the Comédie française. On 20 July, the French delegation boarded the imperial yacht Alexandria in Kronstadt Harbor and set off for discussions at the Peterhof. The talks continued at the Winter Palace, in the capital, where massive strikes reminded the French visitors of the fragility of the tsar’s empire. No formal record of the discussions has ever been found.
Through interception and decryption of Austro-Hungarian diplomatic telegrams by the Russian Foreign Ministry’s code breakers, French and Russian leaders became aware that Vienna was planning a major action against Serbia. But they hardly needed such clandestine information: On 21 July, the Habsburg ambassador to Russia, Friedrich Count Szápáry, informed the French president that Austria-Hungary was planning “action” against Belgrade. Poincaré’s blunt warning that Serbia “has some very warm friends in the Russian people,” that Russia “has an ally France,” and that “plenty of complications” were to be “feared” from any unilateral Austrian action against Serbia46 apparently fell on deaf ears. For on 23 July, after having made sure that the French had departed Kronstadt, Vienna delivered its ultimatum to Belgrade.
Poincaré received word of the ultimatum on board the France the next day. From Stockholm, he set course for Copenhagen, where on 27 July he received several cables urging him to return to Paris at once. He complied—after sending off a telegram to Russian foreign minister Sergei Sazonov assuring him that France was “ready in the interests of the general peace wholeheartedly to second the action of the Imperial Government.”47 French ambassador Maurice Paléologue unofficially assured Sazonov of “the complete readiness of France to fulfill her obligations as an ally in case of necessity.”48
Poincaré, Viviani, and Margerie landed at Dunkirk on Wednesday, 29 July. The president, fearing what he termed Viviani’s “hesitant and pusillanimous” character, at once assumed control of foreign affairs. But by then, events had already spun out of his control. On 28 July, Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia, and the next day its river monitors shelled Belgrade. Two days later, Russia posted red mobilization notices (ukases) in St. Petersburg. Poincaré called a meeting of the Council of Ministers for the morning of 30 July to assess the situation. While no minutes of the meeting were kept, Abel Ferry, undersecretary of state for foreign affairs, committed the main points of the “impressive cabinet” to his diary. “For the sake of public opinion, let the Germans put themselves in the wrong.” There was no panic among the group of “solemn” ministers. “Cabinet calm, serious, ordered.” For the time being, there was little to be done. “Do not stop Russian mobilization,” Ferry summed up. “Mobilize, but do not concentrate.”49 At the army’s insistence, War Minister Adolphe Messimy agreed to establish the couverture, or frontier-covering force, but demanded that it be kept ten kilometers from the frontier to avoid any unintentional contact with the Germans.
On 31 July, Germany declared a state of “imminent danger of war” to exist, and at 6 PM the next day declared war on Russia. On 2 August, as previously noted, Lieutenant Albert Mayer’s Jäger regiment violated French territory at Joncherey. Under the pretext that French airplanes had bombed railways at Karlsruhe and Nürnberg—a claim that the Prussian ambassador at Munich, Georg von Treutler, immediately informed Berlin could not be substantiated—Germany declared war on France at 6:45 PM on 3 August. To Poincaré’s great relief, Rome had announced on 31 July that it considered Vienna’s attack on Serbia to be an act of aggression and hence did not bind it to act on behalf of the Triple Alliance.
Poincaré, who as a child had witnessed the German occupation of Bar-le-Duc, in Lorraine, carried France through the July Crisis with “firmness, resolve and confidence.”50 France appeared to the world as the victim of German aggression. Domestic unity had been maintained. The Russian alliance had been honored. Despite the eternal cry of la patrie en danger and the sporadic looting of German shops in Paris, the president demanded calm and maintained control. On 2 August, he signed the proclamation that a state of emergency existed. The next evening, he again spelled out to his cabinet his “satisfaction” that Germany, and not France, had made the move toward war. “It had been indispensable,” he stated, “that Germany should be led into publicly confessing her intentions.” He allowed himself only one misstep—“at last we could release the cry, until now smothered in our breasts: Vive l’Alsace Lorraine”*—but at the urging of several ministers omitted that xenophobic phrase from his message to Parliament two days later.51
The German declaration of war against France on 3 August spared the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies from having to debate—and much less to approve—a formal declaration of war. That left War Minister Messimy free to compile a “wish list” of war aims: Germany was to lose Alsace-Lorraine, the Saar, and the west bank of the Rhine, thereby greatly reducing its territory. France thus defined its war-aims program a month before Bethmann Hollweg did likewise for Germany.
Poincaré next procla
imed a union sacrée (“No, there are no more parties”); it met with near-universal acceptance. The famous declaration of a newfound “sacred union” was in fact read by Minister of Justice Jean-Baptiste Bienvenu-Martin in the Senate and by Prime Minister Viviani in the Chamber of Deputies, since the president did not have the right to address those bodies directly. Then Poincaré silenced critics who feared that Britain would remain aloof from the continental madness about to take place. London, he assured his colleagues, would join the war. “The English are slow to decide, methodical, reflective, but they know where they are going.”52
BRITAIN’S LEADERS WERE CONCERNED first and foremost with the security of the empire. Continental Europe was far removed from their innermost concerns. In early July 1914, Whitehall was busily redrafting terms of the entente with Russia. Britain’s security lay in the power of the Royal Navy and in its geographical separation from the Continent. Its army was small and trained to deploy “east of Suez.” London was beset by what historian Paul Kennedy has famously called “imperial overstretch,”53 that is, with mustering the power required to maintain the greatest empire since the days of Rome—and concurrently to meet the industrial and naval challenges of up-and-comers such as Germany, Japan, and the United States. As well, the Liberal government of Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith had come to power to undertake a sweeping program of social reforms, and it faced daunting challenges at home with regard to Irish Home Rule, labor unrest, and women’s suffrage. Not surprisingly, then, the double murders at Sarajevo initially hardly registered at Whitehall. Surely, Europe could survive a possible third Balkan war.
State Secretary Grey was slow to appreciate the potential danger of the Balkan situation. His mind was on his upcoming vacation, to fly-fish for stippled trout in the river Itchen. His critics later charged him with failing to avoid a European war owing to his timidity, his studied aloofness, and his failure to inform Berlin that London would not allow it to invade France unpunished.54 David Lloyd George after the war spoke of Grey in the July Crisis as “a pilot whose hand trembled in the palsy of apprehension, unable to grip the levers and manipulate them with a firm and clear purpose.”55 At the Foreign Office, Sir Eyre Crowe simply called Grey “a futile useless weak fool.”56
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