A World Undone

by G. J. Meyer

  The Austrians had financial reasons too for resisting mediation. Theirs was a financially starved administration—Conrad had never been given enough money to keep the armies of Vienna competitive with the other great powers in size, equipment, or technology—and the mobilizations during the two Balkan wars had been as costly as they had been fruitless. By 1914 all the great powers, but Austria-Hungary especially, were creaking under the weight of an arms race that was becoming constantly more onerous as the machinery of war grew more massive and complex. Vienna could not afford to be mobilizing year after year. It wanted to be sure that this time it got something for its money.

  In the afternoon Kaiser Wilhelm arrived home from his vacation cruise. Chancellor Bethmann and Gottlieb von Jagow, the head of the German foreign ministry, were not delighted by his return. They had urged him to stay away, telling him that a premature end to his vacation might alarm the other powers. What they really feared, probably, was that the unpredictable kaiser would interfere in their handling of the crisis.

  German Foreign Minister Gottlieb von Jagow

  “Nothing has helped. I am appointed.”

  With or without the kaiser’s presence, Bethmann and Jagow were not an ideal pair to be steering the most powerful state in Europe through such difficult straits. Bethmann was a tall, dour career civil servant who five years earlier had been raised to the chancellorship despite having no experience in foreign affairs and despite being disliked by the kaiser. (“He was always lecturing me,” Wilhelm complained, “and pretends to know everything.”) Like many Germans in high places, he was terrified by the presence of unfriendly powers to the east and west and convinced that Germany could only grow more vulnerable with the passage of time. Jagow was a frail hypochondriac who had used an elder brother’s connections to get into the foreign service and had then successfully leveraged those same connections to get a series of plush and undemanding assignments in Rome and elsewhere. When summoned home to head the foreign ministry, he had pulled every string he could reach in a futile effort to escape. “Nothing has helped,” he had said despairingly at last. “I am appointed.”

  Late in the night Vienna sent word to Berlin of its decision to declare war. When the message reached Bethmann and Jagow, they were not astonished. The Austrians were doing at last what Berlin had been urging from the start: they were taking action. No effort was made to inform the kaiser. This was, after all, exactly what he too had demanded at the start.

  Tuesday, July 28

  Wilhelm II was back in his office, seated in his saddle chair. (Wanting no doubt to be the perfect Hohenzollern warrior-king, and proud no doubt of the agonies he had endured in boyhood to become a skillful horseman in spite of his crippled arm, he claimed to be more comfortable in a saddle than in a conventional chair.) He had much work to catch up on. First he read the most recent wire from Lichnowsky in London: it quoted Sir Edward Grey as saying that an Austrian attack on Serbia would have disastrous consequences, but that the Serbian response to Austria appeared to provide a basis for negotiations. Then he read the Serbian response itself. Perhaps in part because he had just seen Grey’s thoughts on the subject—Wilhelm was one of those men who tend to agree with whoever talked with them last—his reaction was much the same as Grey’s. “This was more than one could have expected,” he declared. “A great moral victory for Vienna; but with it every reason for war drops away, and Giesl might have remained quietly in Belgrade. On the strength of this I”—he underlined the pronoun, implicitly rebuking the Austrians—“should never have ordered mobilization!”

  Seeing an opportunity and eager to seize it, Wilhelm sent a handwritten note to Jagow declaring the Serbian response “a capitulation of the most humiliating kind,” so that “every cause for war falls to the ground!” He instructed the foreign ministry to prepare a message to go out over his name informing Vienna that a basis now existed for resolving the crisis through mediation, and that he was prepared to help. He added an idea that a member of his military staff had suggested to him at the start of the day. Because the Serbs could not be trusted (“Orientals,” Wilhelm called them, “therefore liars, tricksters and masters of evasion”), Austria should send its army across the border and occupy Belgrade but then go no farther. In possession of Serbia’s capital, the Austrians would be in a position of strength as mediation proceeded. This would come to be called the Stop-in-Belgrade proposal, and soon Grey too would be suggesting it. It offered a solution much like the one that ended the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. The German armies had remained in France until Berlin’s terms were met—the payment of immense reparations plus the surrender of Alsace and Lorraine—then paraded through the streets of Paris and gone home.

  Bethmann and Jagow, incredibly, had still not told Wilhelm that an Austrian declaration of war was only hours away. The kaiser assumed that such a declaration would not come for another two weeks if at all. Just as incredibly, Bethmann and Jagow prepared the kaiser’s message to Vienna as instructed but surreptitiously delayed its transmission for twelve hours, making certain that it wouldn’t be received until after the Austrians issued their declaration.

  Though Bethmann and Jagow had deceived the kaiser, depriving him of any chance of intervening before Austria declared war, their motives may well have been good. As clumsy as their behavior had been at a crucial juncture where nothing less than brilliance was required, they knew Wilhelm all too well—his childish arrogance, his unpredictability, his history of reversing himself and even breaking down in the midst of a crisis. (He had done so in 1908, 1911, and again early in 1914, sinking so low that he had to be talked out of abdicating.) No doubt they thought they had a better grasp of the situation than he. Having been in Berlin while he was still away, they definitely were better informed, if only because they had gone to such lengths to keep him uninformed. And they had reason to think that, in their support of the Austrians, they had been carrying out the kaiser’s wishes. They must have felt that involving him more directly at this late hour could only complicate an already confusing situation.

  The Austrian declaration, issued in the middle of the afternoon, changed everything. It was one of the two or three most important blunders committed by any of the great powers during the days leading up to war. And, as with the delivery of the Austrian note to Serbia five days earlier, there was a farcical aspect to how it happened. Berchtold, knowing that the Serbian government had withdrawn from Belgrade to the interior and not knowing how to make contact with that government wherever it now was, sent a telegram, uncoded and in French, informing Prime Minister Pasic that a state of war now existed between their two countries. He addressed this message to Pasic via Serbian army headquarters. Shortly thereafter, in an abundance of caution, he sent a second, identical telegram via the Serbian foreign ministry. The two messages reached Pasic separately after being routed through Romania. The first was handed to him as he was having lunch at a provincial hotel. After reading it he got to his feet and addressed the room. “Austria has declared war on us,” he said gravely. “Our cause is just. God will help us.” When the second telegram arrived a short time later, Pasic became suspicious. Never having heard of one nation declaring war on another in such a manner, he began to think that the whole thing might be a hoax. The German ambassador, when asked, replied that he knew nothing about a declaration of war. (He was being truthful; not even the kaiser, as we have seen, was informed in advance of Austria’s declaration.) The authenticity of the telegrams was confirmed soon enough. News of the declaration sparked anti-Serbian demonstrations in Vienna and even in Berlin, but there was no movement of Austrian troops. Conrad merely began shelling Belgrade from the Bosnian side of the border.

  The kaiser met with Bethmann after learning the truth. The chancellor, a visibly unhappy man afterward, immediately began steering a new course. He composed a long telegram to Tschirschky in Vienna, complaining that the Austro-Hungarian government “has left us in the dark concerning its intentions, despite repeated interrogati
ons” and that its declaration of war had put Germany in “an extraordinarily difficult position” that could cause it to “incur the odium of having been responsible for a world war.” He instructed Tschirschky to urge the Austrians to respond positively to what was now Grey’s, not just the kaiser’s, Stop-in-Belgrade proposal. No doubt Tschirschky, who shortly after the assassination had been rebuked for urging caution on the Austrians, was taken aback. Berchtold was more than taken aback. For three weeks the Germans had been prodding him to act. Now at last he was taking action—and suddenly the Germans wanted him to stop.

  The day brought one additional misfortune, and a serious one. Russia’s ambassador to Austria, having been kept waiting since Monday, finally was allowed to meet with Berchtold. He wanted to discuss a number of ideas that were being passed around among the various capitals: a suggestion by Sazonov that he and Vienna’s ambassador to St. Petersburg should review the original Austrian note to see if it might be modified enough for Serbia to accept it, for example, and Sir Edward Grey’s proposal that the Serbian reply be used as a starting point for negotiations rather than a reason for war. Everyone was distracted by the rush of events, however, and Berchtold and his visitor apparently lost track of exactly which idea they were discussing at various points in the conversation. The result was misunderstanding. Berchtold, when the meeting was over, believed that he had made it clear that while he would not negotiate with Serbia, he was prepared to do so with Russia. But the ambassador came away with a distinctly different impression. He reported to Sazonov that Berchtold was not willing to negotiate even with Russia. Probably for no other reason than that both parties had too much on their minds and were approaching exhaustion, an important door had been inadvertently closed.

  So Tuesday ended badly. Vienna, with its declaration of war, had convinced Sazonov in St. Petersburg that it was mobilizing not merely to underscore its grievances but to destroy Serbia (which was, in fact, not far from the truth where Berchtold and Conrad were concerned). The Russians had accelerated their preparations for war, Sazonov had been told that it was not even possible to talk with Vienna, and he took this as further evidence that war had become inevitable. Meanwhile he was also being told by France’s Ambassador Paléologue that Paris wanted him to stand firm, by Germany’s Ambassador Friedrich von Pourtalès that if Russia proceeded with its military preparations Germany would have to mobilize as well, by Serbia’s ambassador that the Austrians were bombarding Belgrade, and by Russia’s generals that Germany was preparing for war and they must do the same. In important ways, Sazonov was being deceived. French prime minister René Viviani, from the ship on which he and President Poincaré were returning from St. Petersburg, had sent a telegram urging Paléologue to do everything possible to resolve the crisis without war. Paléologue, so determined to encourage Russian belligerence that he was in effect creating his own foreign policy, instead told Sazonov of the “complete readiness of France to fulfill her obligations as an ally in case of necessity.”

  Paléologue’s motivation in all this is clear enough. Notoriously excitable, so inclined to take the darkest possible view of every situation that he was widely distrusted (he owed his appointment to a lifelong friendship with Poincaré), he had been warning even before the July crisis that a European war was inevitable by year-end. Among the terrors that tormented him was the thought that, if France failed to demonstrate a willingness to support Russia almost unreservedly, St. Petersburg would abandon the Entente and seek to ally itself with Berlin. Thus he saw himself as preventing the collapse of France’s entire foreign policy, and therefore of France’s security.

  Background: The Romanovs

  THE ROMANOVS

  IN 1914 THE ROMANOV FAMILY HAD JUST COMPLETED THE celebration of its three hundredth year on the Russian throne. It had been a turbulent, often bizarre three centuries. Geniuses and degenerates had worn the crown by turns, amazingly strong women succeeded by alarmingly weak men. There had been royal murders and assassinations, questions about whether a tsar who was presumably dead and buried had actually died at all, and enough sexual irregularity to make it uncertain whether the Romanovs of the twentieth century were even related to the founders of the dynasty. By fits and starts Russia had changed from a remote and exotic eastern kingdom into one of Europe’s dominating powers—still only half modern, still not entirely European, but an empire of immense wealth reaching from Poland to the Pacific Ocean. By 1914 the Romanovs had been, by the standards of Russian history, stable and respectable for five generations. The reigning tsar, Nicholas II, was a far more virtuous man than many of his predecessors. He was also, unfortunately, far weaker and less capable than the best of them.

  The first Romanov tsar was Michael, crowned in 1613 when he was sixteen years old. He was given the crown because Russia’s previous royal family had died out; because after fifteen years of leaderless disorder the country’s most powerful factions were desperate for stability; and because no better choice was available. If Michael’s blood was not quite royal, it was nearly so: his aunt Anastasia, his father’s sister, had been the beloved first wife of Ivan the Terrible and the mother of the last tsar in Ivan’s line. Grief over her death is supposed to have been a factor in Ivan’s transformation into a homicidal maniac of almost inconceivable savagery.

  The Romanovs did not burst upon the European scene until almost a century later, when Peter I, Peter the Great, became tsar. He was a gigantic figure in every sense: more than six and a half feet tall, immensely strong, infinitely energetic, violent, a reformer of everything and at the same time a ruthless tyrant. He was so determined to force Russia into the modern Western world that he moved its capital from Moscow to a swampy piece of wilderness on the coast of the Baltic Sea. Here he built a magnificent new city that was laced with canals and became known as the Venice of the North. He named it St. Petersburg because that was more Western than the Russian equivalent, Petrograd. There was nothing that he wasn’t determined to change, and when his ministers weren’t quick enough in doing what he wanted, he would lash even the most exalted of them with his stick. He forced the men of Russia to shave their beards and adopt Western dress; the traditionalists were scandalized. He modernized the government and the military. He conquered and developed seaports not only on the Baltic but on the Black Sea, beginning the long process of pushing the Ottoman Turks southward back toward their capital of Constantinople. By the time of his death in 1725, he had transformed Russia into a major player among the nations of the world.

  The Russian royal family: Nicholas, Alexandra, their four daughters and son

  As a young man Peter had married a woman from the Russian nobility, but he soon found her tedious and eventually sent her to a convent. He replaced her with a mistress, a Lutheran girl named Marta who had begun her life as a humbly born orphan in Latvia. She had become a prisoner when an invading Russian army captured her hometown, was given to a man who happened to be close to Peter, and so was taken back to St. Petersburg, where she was discovered by the tsar. Marta and Peter had twelve children together (only two, both of them daughters, survived to adulthood), and she came to be the one person in whom he had complete confidence. She was rechristened in the Orthodox faith and given the baptismal name Catherine, and was married to Peter in 1712, when she was twenty-eight and he fifty. He had her crowned his empress consort in 1724 (Peter was the first tsar to call himself emperor), and upon Peter’s death she was proclaimed Empress Catherine I in her own right. Her career has to be considered among the more remarkable in history.

  The story becomes fuzzy in the years following Catherine’s death. The Romanovs became extinct in the male line (Peter had his heir, a son by his first wife, tortured until he died), and in time the crown went to an obscure German princeling whose mother had been Peter’s and Catherine’s daughter. This new tsar, Peter III, was a drunkard, a fool, probably sexually impotent, and an ardent admirer of Russia’s enemy Frederick the Great of Prussia. Not surprisingly, the Russian nobility de
spised him. He matters in history for one reason only: before becoming tsar, he had married a fifteen-year-old German princess—another Catherine, as it happened—who quickly succeeded him on the throne. (Plotters from the army, in collusion with this second Catherine, murdered him less than a year after his coronation.) She became Catherine the Great, the second monumental figure of the Romanov era.

  She was a physically tiny woman whose appetites and ambitions equaled those of Peter the Great. She became more Russian than the Russians, and during her thirty-four-year reign the empire expanded tremendously and again was prodded along the road to modernization. Like Peter the Great, she reached out to the West. She corresponded with such Enlightenment giants as Voltaire and Diderot. She brought John Paul Jones from the New World to take command of her Black Sea Fleet and use it against the Turks. It was with Catherine that the Russians began to aspire seriously to the role of patron of the Christian peoples of the Balkans. And under Catherine they first dreamed of driving the Turks out of Constantinople, the ancient and holy imperial city of the East.