A World Undone

by G. J. Meyer

  In the Serbian capital of Belgrade, the uproar was more intense. An Austrian diplomat reported that the Serbs were falling “into one another’s arms in delight.” Disorderly crowds roamed the city, and as news arrived of the disturbances in Sarajevo, their jubilation was laced with anger. Belgrade’s newspapers fueled the fires, “behaving shamefully” according to a British diplomat on the scene, telling their readers that ten thousand of the Serbs living in Austria-Hungary had been injured or killed and that Serbian women were being subjected to outrages. (This was all untrue.)

  It is easy to make too much of all this. Even in Sarajevo the demonstrations came to an end after a few hours, and in Vienna the government promptly announced that victims would be compensated for their losses. The Serbian government conducted itself responsibly, attempting to discourage the demonstrations. In Vienna life quickly returned to normal. The slain archduke had been too cold and stiff a public figure ever to become popular, and there were few signs that his death was mourned. “The event almost failed to make any impression whatever,” said one observer. “On Sunday and Monday, the crowds in Vienna listened to music and drank wine as if nothing had happened.” Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were interred at their country estate with so little fanfare that the late archduke’s friends were offended and the emperor found it necessary to explain his failure to do more.

  The Austro-Hungarian leadership, though determined to take action against Serbia, was not yet ready to do so. The forty-eight hours after the assassination brought meeting after meeting—Foreign Minister Berchtold, Field Marshal Conrad, Hungarian prime minister István Tisza, Emperor Franz Joseph, and others conferred and dispersed in a continuous round robin, but no consensus emerged. Berchtold and Conrad wanted an attack on Serbia, and they wanted it to happen speedily. The emperor was uncertain; Tisza was opposed. The one point on which they agreed was that nothing could be decided until certain preliminaries had been attended to.

  First, the support of Germany had to be made certain. Nothing would be possible without it. Any Austrian action against Serbia was sure to be of concern to Russia, and Vienna alone was not nearly powerful enough to deter the Russians from intervening or to deal with their enormous army if they did intervene.

  It was just as essential to get Hungary on board, and that was likely to be at least as difficult. Under the clumsy arrangements of the Hapsburg system, Vienna could not make war without the consent of Budapest, and the Hungarians were sure to have little interest. Failure in such a war would be a disaster, obviously, but from the Hungarian perspective even success could be regrettable.

  Finally, no action would be possible until the Austrian army had been mobilized. Mobilization in 1914 was a cumbersome, difficult, expensive undertaking. It required calling up and organizing hundreds of thousands of reserve troops, commandeering entire national railroad systems for the movement of soldiers and supplies, and getting the most enormous and mechanized military machines the world had ever seen into motion according to timetables so intricate that years had been required for their development. Either of the Austro-Hungarian mobilization plans (Vienna was unusual in having two such plans, one for war against Serbia only and the other for war in conjunction with Germany against Serbia and Russia) would take weeks to implement. Part of the problem was that many thousands of soldiers had been sent home, as was customary each summer before the mechanization of agriculture, to help bring in the harvest. Conrad feared that calling them back to their units earlier than planned would alert Serbia and Russia to what was in process.

  Further complicating the situation—and a particularly exasperating complication because it was sheer bad luck—was the fact that the President of France, Raymond Poincaré, was going to be paying a state visit to the Russian capital, St. Petersburg, from Monday, July 20, to Thursday, July 23. If Austria-Hungary took any steps against Serbia before the end of that visit, if it mobilized before then or even signaled that it intended to mobilize, the leaders of France and Russia would be given a unique opportunity to coordinate their response and cement their alliance at the moment of decision. Thus, mobilization being the unavoidably slow process that it was in Austria-Hungary, the army could not be ready for action until mid-August, a month and a half after the assassination. By that time whatever sympathy the assassination had generated for Austria would be largely dissipated.

  There was no need for delay, however, in securing Germany’s support, and soon there seemed no need for concern about the extent of that support. Kaiser Wilhelm had liked and admired Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who understood the dangers of the Balkans and had been more restrained, more thoughtful, than Conrad. The kaiser and the men around him needed no reminding that, with Russia and France allied against them and Britain leaning the same way, Germany needed Austria and needed to help Austria defend itself against the centrifugal force that was Balkan nationalism. The Germans were far more ready to support Austria-Hungary than they had been during the Balkan wars of the preceding two years, more conscious of being surrounded by enemies who were growing in strength.

  Wilhelm had been racing his new sailboat, the Meteor V, off the coast of Norway when word reached him of the assassination. Returning almost immediately to his palace at Potsdam outside Berlin, he began to monitor events. There was not much to monitor, actually—not a great deal was happening in Vienna or elsewhere once the initial disturbances had played themselves out. As it became clear that the assassins were Bosnian Serbs who had been prepared for their mission in Belgrade, Wilhelm went into one of his belligerent moods. It was his practice to write in the margins of diplomatic dispatches as he read them, and his comments were often wildly dramatic; it was a way of blustering, of playing his beloved role of All-High Warlord, and also of letting the foreign office know where he stood. “Then he’s a false rascal!” he would soon be saying of Britain’s foreign secretary in one such note. “He lies!” “Rot!” When at the beginning of July he received a wire in which the German ambassador in Vienna reported having urged the Austrians not to be too quick in moving against Serbia, Wilhelm exploded. “Who authorized him to act that way?” he wrote. “Serbia must be disposed of, and that right soon!”

  Word of this reaction soon spread and reached official Vienna. The Austrians, of course, were delighted, especially as Berlin was sending similarly strong signals of support through other channels. The German ambassador, Heinrich von Tschirschky, had been shown the error of his ways: he knew now that the kaiser wanted him to be tough and to urge the Austrians to be tough as well. Tschirschky welcomed the lesson, actually. He was one of the many members of the old Prussian aristocracy who believed that Germany’s position in Europe was rapidly becoming unsafe. He feared that Austria-Hungary was weakening almost to the point of collapse. “How often have I asked myself,” he had lamented in one of his dispatches, “whether it really is worthwhile to commit ourselves to this state, creaking in all its joints, and to continue the dreary work of dragging it along.”

  On July 5 and 6 Wilhelm and Germany’s deputy foreign minister, Arthur Zimmermann, met separately with emissaries from Vienna. Wilhelm made no effort to tell the Austrians what to do. What he did tell them, emphatically, was what they wanted to hear: that this time something had to be done about Serbia, that action should be taken soon, and that the Austrians could count on Germany’s support whatever they decided. “It was his opinion that this action must not be delayed,” the Austrian ambassador said of Wilhelm II immediately after their meeting. “Russia’s attitude will no doubt be hostile, but for this he [Wilhelm] had been for years prepared, and should a war between Austria-Hungary and Russia be unavoidable, we might be convinced that Germany, our old faithful ally, would stand at our side. Russia at the present time was in no way prepared for war, and would think twice before it appealed to arms.” This report became famous as the “blank check”—the promise that Berlin would be with Vienna no matter what.

  Apparently the Austrians had made no effort to explain what exactly t
hey intended to do, or when. It is unlikely that they could have done so if asked; not yet having come to an agreement with Hungary, they had no settled policy or plan. Neither the kaiser nor Zimmermann took the trouble to ask—one indication among many that at this point the Germans did not regard the situation as being serious enough to require much thought or care. War Minister Erich von Falkenhayn, after being briefed on the meetings and the contents of a letter from Franz Joseph and an accompanying memorandum from Berchtold (these dealt less with the Sarajevo crisis than with Vienna’s long-term plans for changing the balance of power in the Balkans through alliance with Bulgaria), said that what he had learned “did not succeed in convincing me that the Vienna Government had taken any firm resolution.” Like a number of his colleagues, Falkenhayn thought it likely that the Austrians were going to have to be prodded into action.

  The Austrians, armed with the kaiser’s unqualified promise of support, would from this point feel free to proceed autonomously. They would be slow at best in telling Berlin of their plans. The Germans, for their part, would continue to be slow to ask. The Austrian envoys to Berlin hadn’t even explained that they regarded any action as impossible until after the French visit to St. Petersburg. The Germans continued to assume that Austria intended to proceed without delay to strike at Serbia, after which it would be free to move almost all of its forces to its border with Russia.

  Everything known about Kaiser Wilhelm and his closest associates indicates that in early July they saw little possibility of a general European war. Falkenhayn’s skepticism about whether Vienna would in the end actually do anything reflected widespread German doubt, based on much experience, about the Hapsburg empire’s ability to take action to save itself. Recent experience also encouraged the Germans to be equally skeptical—scornful, perhaps—about Russia. Evidently it was all but inconceivable to them that this time, unlike 1908 or 1912 or 1913, the Russians would feel not only capable of taking military action but compelled to do so. Almost immediately after his talks with the Austrians, when Falkenhayn asked the kaiser if military preparations were necessary, Wilhelm said no. He soon returned to his boat-racing vacation off Norway, telling one of his admirals before departing that “I don’t believe we are headed for a great war. In this case the tsar’s views would not be on the side of the prince’s [Franz Ferdinand’s] murderer. Besides this, France and Russia are not ready for war.”

  German chancellor Theobold von Bethmann Hollweg, an intelligent and conscientious servant of the crown but a statesman of limited vision, also went on vacation. Army Chief of Staff Helmuth von Moltke had not even been called back from the spa where he was recovering from a bronchial infection, and the head of the German navy went off to a spa of his own. Thus scattered, the principal figures in the German government and military were incapable of making or coordinating plans, of responding to anything done by other countries, or even of staying abreast of developments. At the July 5–6 meetings they had shown less interest in the Serbian problem than in Berchtold’s arcane scheme for using Bulgaria as a lever to pry Romania out of its alliance with Russia.

  In Vienna, where Germany’s promise of support was received as the best possible news, attention swung next to the Hungarians. At center stage now was Hungary’s prime minister, Count Tisza, a gruff but politically adroit man who cared little about the Hapsburg empire except insofar as its existence benefited the Hungarians. Tisza was so absolutely opposed to any Austro-Hungarian expansion into Serbia that he had once warned Emperor Franz Joseph that any effort in that direction would ignite civil war in Hungary. (Conrad, always ready for a fight, reacted by saying that after thrashing Serbia, Austria would probably have to thrash the Hungarians as well.)

  Hungarian Prime Minister István Tisza

  “Our exactions may be hard, but not such that they cannot be complied with.”

  On July 7 Austria-Hungary’s council of ministers was assembled by Berchtold to discuss measures to “put an end to Serbia’s intrigues once and for all” and, he hoped, to approve a course of action. Tisza surprised no one when he showed himself willing to do little. He tried to divert attention to Berchtold’s plans for Bulgaria and Romania. (Such diplomatic intrigues, typical of eastern Europe in the years before the war, are almost impossible to explain briefly.) When he saw that everyone had lost interest in such long-term speculative ventures, that nothing short of a showdown with Serbia would satisfy the Austrians, Tisza groped for ways to slow things down. He insisted that nothing be done until he had an opportunity to prepare a memo explaining his objections to Franz Joseph, who was away at his summer retreat. Berchtold and the council had no choice but to agree. Tisza was, after all, the head of the Hungarian government and not to be ignored.

  Much of the discussion focused on the idea, with which none of the council members disagreed, that Serbia should be presented with a set of demands. At issue was whether these demands should be framed in such a way that Serbia could reasonably be expected to accept and act on them. Again Tisza was alone: “Our exactions may be hard,” he said, “but not such that they cannot be complied with. If Serbia accepted them, we should have a splendid diplomatic success.” Such a success, he added, “would decidedly improve our situation and give a chance of initiating an advantageous policy in the Balkans.” A failure to limit the conflict to diplomatic measures, he warned, could lead to “the terrible calamity of a European war.”

  No one had any interest in going along with what Tisza proposed. The Austro-Hungarian war minister responded that “a diplomatic success would be of no use at all” and would be “interpreted as weakness.” According to a summary of the proceedings, everyone except Tisza agreed that “a purely diplomatic success, even if it ended with a glaring humiliation of Serbia, would be worthless.” It was finally decided, therefore, that “such stringent demands must be addressed to Serbia” that refusal would be “almost certain.”

  Implicit in all this was the assumption that an Austro-Hungarian invasion would lead without complications to the defeat of Serbia. This led to the question of Serbia’s fate after it was defeated. Tisza’s position was that “by a war we could reduce the size of Serbia, but we could not completely annihilate it.” Here he carried the council with him, probably because of the reason he offered: “Russia would fight to the death before allowing this.” But all agreed that Serbia was to be made smaller. Parts of it were to be given to Bulgaria, Greece, and Albania. What remained, though formally an autonomous state, was to be an Austro-Hungarian satellite. In this way Berchtold—always too clever by half—thought that he could proceed with the destruction of Serbia while promising Russia and the world that Vienna did not want an inch of Serbian territory.

  The summary of the council’s proceedings makes plain the near-desperation of the men participating. They were genuinely afraid of Serbia—convinced that, if Serbia were not crushed, it would be impossible to keep their South Slav subjects from fighting to break free of Hapsburg control. Another striking aspect of the discussion is the attention not given to how the other great powers—even Germany—might react to what was being planned. At the opening of the meeting, Berchtold had acknowledged that a “decisive stroke” of the kind he and Conrad wanted “cannot be dealt without previous diplomatic preparation.” But by this he meant only that Vienna could not proceed without an assurance of German support, and he had already been given that assurance. The council did not recognize the advisability of keeping Germany informed. Nor, beyond assuming that Russia would not intervene unless Vienna tried to absorb Serbia, did the ministers pay the slightest attention to the need to try to prepare Russia for what lay ahead. The emphasis, instead, was on secrecy. On secrecy, and on surprise, and on deceit: in the weeks to follow not even the Germans would be told of the council’s decision to dismember Serbia after taking it by force. To the contrary, all the great powers would be assured—falsely but repeatedly—that Austria had no territorial aspirations where Serbia was concerned. Even Tisza appears to have decided
in the end to go along with this approach. Late in the meeting he told the council that he “was anxious to meet the others halfway and was prepared to concede that the demands addressed to Serbia should be hard indeed, but not such as to make our intention of raising unacceptable terms clear to everybody else.” The shift in his tone is striking. Tisza was no longer insisting that the demands be acceptable, only that Vienna’s real intent be concealed from everybody else. In the case of Germany, the results of this secrecy would be unfortunate. They would keep the Berlin government from understanding what Vienna was doing until it was very nearly too late. In the case of Russia, the results would be disastrous. The Austrians’ duplicity assured that, when their intentions became clear at last, the Russians would be shocked, panicked, and—not without reason—convinced that they had been betrayed.

  This meeting was followed by a period of quiet waiting. For the sake of secrecy, and to Conrad’s consternation, little could be done to ready the Austro-Hungarian army for action. Tisza remained nettlesome. On the day after the council meeting he wrote to Franz Joseph, warning that an attack on Serbia “would, as far as can humanly be foreseen, lead to an intervention by Russia and hence to a world war.” He reverted to his original position that the demands to be made of Serbia should be “stiff but not impossible to meet, and that further action should be taken only if Serbia refuses.” Berchtold, occupied with drafting the demands, paid him no attention.