In truth, during the wedding Wilhelm had been torn between delight at the turnout and jealousy of his cousins. He made it clear that George would not be welcome at the station when he went to meet Nicholas off the St. Petersburg train, because he didn’t want to be upstaged. And he was determined, George later recalled, not to allow his two cousins to be alone together, for fear that they would whisper behind his back. When the two did manage a few moments together, George was convinced that “William’s ear was53 glued to the keyhole.” A year later, as Europe lurched towards conflict, Wilhelm insisted his cousins—two men who never talked politics if they could help it—had been plotting against him at the wedding.
In fact, George had come to the wedding with a tiny flame of expectation. The previous December Heinrich had told him that he still nursed “hopes that England54 and Germany might go together, for the sake of the world’s peace!” and begged him to make a state visit to Germany. “Please think about it seriously—it might do a world of good!” The king’s ambitions, however, were quickly extinguished by the proximity of Wilhelm. George, one German courtier observed, was most at ease discussing horseflesh55 with the kaiser’s Master of the Horse. He was genuinely pleased, though, to see Nicholas, who arrived by train with a hundred policemen.56 “I had a long57 and satisfactory talk with dear Nicky, he was just the same as always,” he wrote in his diary. The same, of course, was good. George later wrote that Nicholas and he had “entirely agreed upon58 the great importance of maintaining the most friendly relations between our two countries,” in order to secure “the peace of Europe.” Given the banality of their letters, it is hard to imagine that Wilhelm had anything to feel anxious about. In any case, all three men had long since withdrawn into their own national orthodoxies. Nicholas was resentful that the British and German moves to resolve the Balkan Wars had destroyed Russia’s latest hope of taking the Straits, and at the Russian court Pan-Slavist, anti-German attitudes were very much in the ascendant. The German government was committed to supporting Austria in the Balkans, and Wilhelm liked to tell visiting Austrian envoys that they should get on and deal once and for all with the Serbs.
As if to confirm the irrelevance of the event, barely six months afterwards Russia and Germany found themselves once again trading threats as once again one small act took on frightening significance. A German lieutenant general called Otto Liman von Sanders was appointed as instructor to the Turkish army and commander of the 1st Ottoman Army Corps, the garrison that guarded Constantinople. The Russians instantly saw the appointment as a deliberate move to put the Straits under German control. Nicholas asked Kokovtsov, who was in Berlin, to demand an explanation from the German government. In a scene played out many times before, Wilhelm assured the Russian minister that the whole matter had been thoroughly discussed during Nicholas’s attendance at the wedding in May. Nicholas “had then offered59 no objections … his interference now that all details had been arranged was, to say the least, inconsistent.” Should he, the kaiser mused, consider these complaints “an ultimatum”? Kokovtsov, unused to Wilhelm’s manner, didn’t know what to say; he could hardly challenge the word of an emperor. At lunch he shuddered as Wilhelm veered between joviality and indignation—listing the good deeds he had performed for Russia and complaining about her “ingratitude”—and warnings: “In spite of all this the outbursts of your press … have become insufferable; they will lead inevitably to a catastrophe which I shall be powerless to avert.”
Nicholas, outraged, “flatly denied that any agreement had been reached.”60 The Russian government demanded that Liman von Sanders be removed, while the Russian press made angry denunciations. The Germans refused to stand down, protesting that the appointment was simply an exchange of personnel. There was a long tradition of European military staff giving training to the Turkish army; British naval officers had recently been seconded to its navy. Neither the British nor the French, indeed, could see why the Russians were so exercised.
At an emergency meeting of the tsar’s Council of Ministers it was agreed that, if the Germans refused to back down, Russia would consider military action, including the seizing of Turkish ports, and seek military aid from France and Britain, in order to force Germany to capitulate. Behind the precipitousness of the reaction was a fear that Germany meant to be a player in the Near East. The appointment of Liman von Sanders, like the Baghdad railway, seemed evidence of German intentions.* Kokovtsov reminded the meeting that war was the greatest misfortune that could befall Russia, but his words were ignored. It was a seismic, if not altogether unexpected, turnaround in the Russian government’s thinking. The fundamental axiom of policy had been that war meant disaster. Now it seemed that humiliation and the potential loss of Russia’s Great Power status were a greater priority. Thankfully, the Germans backed down in January 1914 and the Turks promoted Liman von Sanders to field marshal, which made him too senior to command a Turkish corps. “Now I have only62 friendly smiles for Germany,” Nicholas told Count Pourtalès, the German ambassador, after the Germans backed down.
Actually the Liman von Sanders affair seemed to break the last shreds of Nicholas’s belief in German goodwill. He was convinced it had proved the reality of the German threat. At the end of January 1914 he gave an audience to the former French foreign minister, Théophile Delcassé, and told him that he foresaw “a perhaps inevitable63 and imminent collision between German ambitions and Russian interest,” and said Russia would not allow itself to be trampled on. In March he told the British ambassador, Buchanan, that “he had reason to64 believe that Germany was aiming at acquiring such a position at Constantinople as would enable her to shut in Russia altogether in the Black Sea. Should she attempt to carry out this policy He would have to resist with all His power, even should war be the only alternative.” He was not alone. As one of his courtiers observed, the belief “that war is inevitable65 has grown and grown in all classes.” The extent of anti-German feeling among Russians prompted a former minister, Durnovo, to write a memo to the tsar outlining in horribly prescient detail the disasters a war with Germany would bring, arguing that ties with Britain—ties which had brought Russia no real benefits—were simply accelerating the likelihood of that clash. But for Nicholas Germany had finally and indubitably taken Britain’s place as Russia’s main enemy. With the British, however, the conflicts had been fought out at a distance in Asia. Germany was on the doorstep.
Russian attempts to lure Britain into alliance, however, continued to fail. In May 1914 Nicholas summoned Buchanan and said he wanted to see France, Britain and Russia working much more closely together. But Russia was behaving so badly in Persia that the Convention was on the point of collapse. The British Foreign Office, moreover, suspected Russia now had its eye on Turkish Armenia. When Buchanan put the British position to Nicholas—as carefully as he could—the tsar refused to accept it: “I can only tell66 you, as I have so often told you before, that my one desire is to remain firm friends with England and, if I can prevent it, nothing shall stand in the way of the closest possible understanding between our two countries.” Finally, in June, George was conscripted by Grey to bring the subject to the tsar’s attention—or rather the Foreign Office drafted a letter and George copied it. He said he was now “so anxious upon67 this subject, that I write this private letter to explain what is causing me this anxiety. It is the present unsatisfactory state of affairs in Persia. It is my great desire to see a friendly feeling towards Russia preserved in British public opinion and in both political parties … that makes me most anxious that our two Governments should have a frank and friendly exchange of views on the whole situation in Persia.” He knew, he added, that he could count on Nicky’s friendship to remove any misunderstandings.
In Germany, meanwhile, talk of “inevitable struggles” and “preventive wars” just wouldn’t go away. The idea of imminent war had acquired a momentum of its own. In November 1913 Bethmann-Hollweg had delivered a Reichstag speech warning against a preventive war. The Pan-G
erman League announced in April 1914 that “France and Russia68 are preparing for the decisive struggle with Germany and Austria-Hungary and they intend to strike at the first opportunity.” Moltke, the chief of staff, held talks that spring with the foreign minister, Jagow, and told him that, while now Germany was still a match for its enemies, in a couple of years they would be too strong. “The Chief of Staff therefore proposed that I should conduct a policy with the aim of provoking a war in the near future.” The kaiser himself told the Hamburg banker Max Warburg that the Russians were preparing for a war in 1916, and mused that it might be better to attack first. On 27 June the American special envoy Colonel Edward House, who had come to Europe to try to broker a compact between the United States, Germany and Britain to prevent a major war, came from Germany to meet Sir Edward Grey in London. He described to Grey “the militant war spirit in Germany and the high tension of the people. I thought that Germany would strike quickly when she moved … I thought the Kaiser himself and most of his immediate advisors did not want war … but the army was military and aggressive and ready for war at any time.”69
The next day Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the empire of Austria-Hungary, and his wife, Sophie, were assassinated at Sarajevo.
* Lloyd George’s views had begun to shift after a private visit to Germany in the summer of 1908. He’d gone ostensibly to examine Germany’s social insurance system, but actually to see if he might bypass the Foreign Office and find what the German government’s real attitude to Britain and arms reduction was. He had been taken aback by the pervasiveness of army culture and admiration for the army, and discouraged by the German government’s refusal to engage with him. The only minister who would meet him, a then unpromoted Bethmann-Hollweg, wouldn’t discuss arms at all, and after a couple of beers started accusing Britain of hating Germany.
* In fact Wilhelm did harbour fantasies of taking over the Turkish army. Seeing off Liman von Sanders’s mission, he had told them their task was the “Germanisation of the61 Turkish army through leadership and direct control of the organisational activity of the Turkish ministry of war,” and said he hoped “the German flag will soon fly over the fortifications of the Bosphorus”—but this, as so often, expressed an aspiration rather than a plan.
16
JULY
1914
The month between the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the outbreak of the First World War demonstrated perhaps more than anything how events had slipped away from Wilhelm, Nicholas and George. The kaiser was at the Kiel regatta racing yachts when he heard the news. He had been entertaining a squadron of visiting British battlecruisers, and the town was full of fraternizing British and German officers. He was clearly upset by the news. “This cowardly, detestable crime has shaken me to the depths of my soul,” he cabled Bethmann-Hollweg. In recent years Franz Ferdinand had become one of his closest friends—they had been hunting the week before—even though, as with so many of Wilhelm’s relationships, he regarded the friendship as instrumental: he liked to claim he had the Hapsburg heir in his pocket.
The tsar was on his annual Baltic summer cruise. Nine-year-old Alexis had fallen jumping from a ladder and twisted his ankle. He was haemorrhaging and crying with pain; Alix was white with worry. Then news came that Rasputin had been stabbed by a madwoman. Everyone on the boat apart from the imperial family hoped he was dead. Franz Ferdinand’s assassination was barely registered.
George, too, was preoccupied. The latest chapter in Irish Home Rule had been dominated by bitter arguments over the fate of the predominantly Protestant six northern counties of Ireland, which had threatened to fight if they were separated from Britain. Large numbers of guns had been smuggled into the North. George was obsessed with what might happen if the British army—his army—had to fire on British citizens, and had complained repeatedly to Asquith about “‘the terrible cross-fire’1 to wh. he conceives himself to be exposed.” “Terrible shock for2 the dear old Emperor,” he wrote in his diary. As it happened, Franz Joseph was remarkably sanguine. He hadn’t much liked his nephew and didn’t even go to the funeral.
No one expected the shooting would result in war. Initially, there was collective outrage at the deed and sympathy for Austria. Even if the murder could be traced back to Serbia—the nineteen-year-old assassin, Gavril Princip, had said he’d killed “an enemy of the Southern Slavs” to “avenge the Serbian people”—everyone expected it to blow over. “Kaiser Wilhelm will3 show his teeth,” the former Russian foreign minister, Alexander Izvolsky, told Nicholas’s cousin Sandro. “And everything will be forgotten by the fifteenth of the next month!” Wilhelm did show his teeth, in his characteristic way. On a memo from the German ambassador in Vienna, he wrote that the Serbs must be dealt with “now or never4 … the Serbs must be disposed of, and that right soon.”
The Austrian government, however, saw the assassination as an opportunity. More than ever it regarded Serbia, which had doubled in size after the Balkan Wars and constantly proclaimed itself leader of the southern Slavs, as a threat to the Hapsburg empire. It had asked Germany for support to crush Serbia three times since mid-1913; Wilhelm had refused each time. The Austrian military was quite as enthusiastic about the idea of war as the most gung-ho of German officers. The Austrian chief of staff, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, like Moltke, was a convinced Social Darwinist who believed that struggle was a fundamental principle of life, and had been itching to fight Serbia for years. In 1913 alone he’d demanded war5 twenty-five times.
A week after the murder, on 5 July, the Austrian ambassador came to Wilhelm with a confidential letter from Emperor Franz Joseph stating that the assassination had been traced to a plot organized by the Serbian government and Serbia must be “eliminated.” It asked for German support. The implication was that Austria would launch a quick war to punish Serbia while Europe was on its summer holiday. It would all be over before anyone could complain. Germany’s role would be to make sure no other Powers would feel tempted to get involved. Wilhelm hesitated. Pointing out that acting against Serbia might “bring about a serious European complication,”6 he ate his lunch. Then he told the Austrian ambassador that Austria could rely on Germany’s full support against Serbia, even if the war threatened to spread, but Austria must act fast. Bethmann-Hollweg was summoned and entirely agreed.
Why did they agree? Wilhelm was upset by his friend’s death; he saw Austria as the wronged party and believed Serbia was a poison in the Balkans. But before, when it had come to the crunch, he had always shied away from confrontation. He had often seen this as a weakness in himself. “This time I7 shall not give in,” he told the armaments manufacturer Krupp. As for Bethmann-Hollweg, he had spent four years countering the military’s calls for war. His decision seems to have emerged from a deeply depressed sense that Germany was trapped and had almost nowhere else to go: his attempts to ease its foreign relations had failed, while the country’s internal divisions made it increasingly ungovernable. And like the army, he had begun to obsess about Russia as a future threat. “Russia grows and grows and weighs on us like a nightmare,” he said. As Germany’s only consistent ally, Austria, meanwhile, needed to be supported. A small war would allow it to recover its dignity and eliminate the threat of Serbia. What seems to have convinced them both was the perception that any war would be quick and localized—it was almost as if after all the talk of European conflagrations, it was easy to agree to a small war in which Germany would not actually take part. But there was always a risk. Crucially both men were certain that Russia was not, as Wilhelm said, “ready for war8 and would think twice before it appealed to arms.” It wasn’t an unreasonable assumption. For months the German ambassador in St. Petersburg had been sending reports about the problems in Russia: the millions of striking workers, the barricades on the Moscow streets. Wilhelm was sure, moreover, that Nicholas wouldn’t put himself on the side of regicides. He told his political and military chiefs that he didn’t want war preparations made, so convinced
was he that only the threat would be needed. The next day he set off for his annual yachting trip along the Norwegian coast.
Two weeks later the Austrians had accomplished precisely nothing. They had failed to find any evidence incriminating Serbia in the assassination. They had failed to draft an ultimatum. And it transpired they wouldn’t be able to gather together an army until after the harvest in mid-August. So much for a quick war. Finally, on 19 July, the German Foreign Office cabled the kaiser that an Austrian ultimatum would be delivered to the Serbians on 23 July, and that he must be reachable, in case important decisions needed to be made. As the possibility of European war suddenly became real to him, Wilhelm was seized with anxiety. He wanted to return to Berlin, but Bethmann-Hollweg—dreading the thought of the kaiser sweeping back to Berlin in a flurry of inflammatory pronouncements—insisted he stayed put, telling him that cutting short his trip might alarm the British navy.
At midnight on 23 July the Austrians delivered their ultimatum to Serbia. They’d deliberately delayed it because the French president, Raymond Poincaré, had been visiting the tsar in St. Petersburg and they wanted to wait until he was out of port so France and Russia could not coordinate a response. The ultimatum demanded that Austrian officers be allowed to enter Serbia to conduct their own investigation, that all Serb nationalist propaganda be suppressed, that all Serb nationalist societies be disbanded and that Serbian military officers regarded as “anti-Austrian” be dismissed. It gave the Serbs forty-eight hours to reply. The ultimatum’s ferocity stunned European diplomats. Sir Edward Grey felt that no sovereign state could possibly agree to it.
The day after the Austrians issued their ultimatum, Sergei Sazonov convened a meeting of the Russian Council of Ministers. He told his colleagues that he was sure Austria had been encouraged by Germany, which wanted to dominate the continent, and that the two states thought they could win a war against Russia. He desperately wanted to avoid war, but at the same time he was convinced that if it came to it and Russia did not stand up for Serbia and failed “to fulfil her historic9 mission she would be considered a decadent State and would henceforth have to take second place among the powers.” Another “humiliation” was simply too much to bear. Moreover, “public opinion”—or what passed for it—demanded action. The Russian press was near-hysterically insisting that this couldn’t be another Bosnia. Knowing that if Russia went to war it might end in revolution, the ministers convinced themselves that if it didn’t, the country might rise against them in patriotic disgust.
The Three Emperors Page 49
