July 1914: Countdown to War

by Sean McMeekin

  Sazonov may really have believed that Serbia had nothing to do with the plot to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand, as he protested to the German ambassador. He does seem, however, to have clearly appreciated how serious the news was and to have expected that Austria-Hungary was going to lash out in reaction. By sending arms to Belgrade, Russia was preparing her ally for war with Austria-Hungary. By readying the Black Sea fleet, Sazonov was preparing for a European war, in which Russia’s key strategic objective was to seize Constantinople and the Straits.

  If the Habsburg foreign minister Berchtold, despite his reputation for weakness, was, as the Hungarian minister-president Tisza feared, going to use Sarajevo as the pretext for a “settlement of accounts” with Serbia, so was the beleaguered Sazonov rising quietly to Berchtold’s challenge. The stage was being set for a diplomatic showdown.

  3

  Paris and London: Unwelcome Interruption

  ON SUNDAY, 28 JUNE 1914, the better part of the French government, Europe’s ambassadors to France, and much of Paris society, were enjoying a resplendent spring afternoon at the Longchamp racetrack in the Bois de Boulogne. Longchamp was France’s answer to England’s Ascot, the place to see and be seen. The flowers surrounding the track and its famous windmill were in full bloom. The sun shone down brilliantly on the elegant patrons, all dressed to the nines, as they enjoyed the races over a four-course Sunday dinner—this was France, after all. In between the third and fourth course, an army officer quietly approached the president, Raymond Poincaré, and informed him that “the archduke heir to the throne of Austria and his morganatic wife were just assassinated in Sarajevo by a fanatic, believed to be of Serbian origin.” Although he was intrigued by the report, Poincaré did not leave his seat, not wishing to miss the finish of the race then underway. Certainly it was nothing to disturb his dinner over.1

  Nor did the French papers think much of the story from the Balkans. The front pages that weekend were aglow with the incandescent Caillaux scandal, the most sensational cause célèbre to titillate France since the Dreyfus affair. Joseph Caillaux was the leader of France’s center-left Radical Party and a prominent part of the furniture of the French government in the years before 1914. He had been premier for nearly six months in 1911–1912—a tenure that, in the election-mad Third Republic, almost qualified as legendary. Caillaux’s real brief was finance, which ministry he had headed under most of the left-leaning cabinets of the past decade. Caillaux was finance minister again in early 1914, with new elections approaching in May, when Gaston Calmette, editor of the nationalist Le Figaro, launched a smear campaign against him.

  Calmette had chosen his target well. Caillaux had inevitably dipped his hand in the till during the years he had overseen France’s finances, and it was not hard to find opponents eager to stick in the knife. By rumor it was Caillaux’s disgruntled servants who produced the most damaging material, which began to embarrass his political allies as well. It was when Calmette began publishing love letters between Caillaux and his mistress, Henriette, however, that the affair truly caught the public’s attention.* The long-legged Henriette was now the second Mme Caillaux—but she had begun sleeping with him, it emerged, during his premiership, when he was still married to the first. Even this burning scandale might have grown stale eventually, had not Henriette Caillaux brought it to white-hot flame by taking matters into her own hands. At six PM on 16 March 1914, she called on Calmette in his Figaro office. “You know why I have come?” she asked. “Not at all, madame,” Calmette answered. Then, “without a word,” Mme Caillaux drew a small brown pistol she had “hidden amidst her expensive fur muffs” and pumped six shots into him at point-blank range.2

  Joseph Caillaux himself was not, most believed, guilty of abetting the crime. The stylish murder had, in effect, emasculated him: his wife had not trusted him to be man enough do his own fighting. Still, it was understood that Caillaux could not remain in office while his wife was prosecuted for a murder committed on his behalf. The trial of Mme Caillaux was scheduled to open in July, giving French news editors cause to run sensational headlines all spring, building anticipation for the trial of the century.

  Adding political frisson to the scandal, the triumph of the Left in the May 1914 elections seemed to vindicate Caillaux’s cause. Caillaux himself was easily reelected to his parliamentary seat, but because of the scandal he remained ineligible to become premier as, by political right, he should have. Instead, Caillaux had to make do with forming a kind of shadow government, ready to take office if and when his wife’s name was cleared. His shadow foreign minister was Jean Jaurès, leader of France’s united Socialist Party (SFIO) and Europe’s leading pacifist orator, who thundered against militarism at international socialist congresses, advocating a “general strike” whereby laborers might stave off a European war if it ever came. Together, Caillaux and Jaurès had led the fight against Poincaré’s Three-Year Service Law in 1913, which had improved war-readiness against Germany by enlarging France’s army. Together, they planned, upon taking office, to “press for a policy of European peace,” beginning with rapprochement with Germany. A Caillaux-Jaurès ministry, locked in battle with President Poincaré, must rank as one of history’s greatest might-have-beens.3

  After several weeks of intrigue, Poincaré at last summoned René Viviani, a Radical (and former Socialist) flexible, or weak enough, to form a government not explicitly hostile to him. Like Caillaux and Jaurès, Viviani had voted against the Three-Year Service Law. Unlike them, however, he had not lit the skies with rhetorical fireworks against Poincaré’s militarism, had not accused him of being “more Russian than Russia” (Jaurès), nor vowed to overturn the Three-Year Law and bring détente with Germany once in office. Viviani agreed to support the Three-Year Law as a condition of his taking office as both premier and foreign minister, as he did on 16 June 1914. Although he was respected inside the Radical Party for his earnest progressivism, Viviani had such a bland personality that most suspected his to be a caretaker government, which would step down for Caillaux as soon as Mme Caillaux was cleared.

  A dramatic rendering of the assassination of Gaston Calmette by Mme Henriette Caillaux, from Le Petit Journal. Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

  By 1914, the rivalry between Caillaux and Poincaré was so explosive that Viviani would have been well advised to get out of the way once the trial ended. President Poincaré, founder of the center-right Democratic People’s Alliance, was a lawyer of middle-class origins, short, fastidious, and shy—the kind of man who preferred reading official documents in his study at night to socializing at banquets. A Lorrainer, born in territory lost to Germany in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, Poincaré had reached the pinnacle of French politics because of the purity of his nationalist convictions,* his keen intelligence, and an extraordinary work ethic. Or, as critics believed, he had won the presidency in 1913 owing to Russian bribes—as much as two million francs a year were wired in from Petersburg—and the help of corrupt journalists such as Calmette. As Russia’s ambassador, Alexander Izvolsky, boasted to Foreign Minister Sazonov after helping grease the wheels for Poincaré’s triumph: “We are therefore, for the period of his seven year term of office, perfectly safe from the appearance of such persons as Caillaux . . . at the head of the French Government.”4

  Caillaux was everything the president was not: rich, well-connected, a dashing ladies’ man-about-town. He had gone to the best schools, culminating in the Institut d’études politique de Paris (Sciences Po), then as now a training ground for France’s political elite. Despite their differences in background and temperament, Caillaux and Poincaré had once been close. In their bachelor days, they had cavorted around Italy together with their mistresses. Even here, however, the contrast in styles was striking. As Caillaux recalled, “Mine I displayed, his he kept hidden.” Poincaré had always respected Caillaux as his equal in political stature—and unquestionably his superior in charisma.5

  In recent years, the two rivals h
ad begun to clash sharply over foreign affairs. As prime minister, Caillaux’s concessions to Germany in Africa had helped defuse the Moroccan crisis of 1911 while lighting a fuse under nationalists like Poincaré who believed in France’s réveil national, a sort of national awakening in which there would be no more backing down to the Germans. The two had drawn political swords again over the Three-Year Law in 1913, when Caillaux had begun to sound almost as radical as Jaurès. By 1914, nationalists such as the Figaro editor Calmette viewed Caillaux as a pacifist menace to the republic’s military readiness, if not an outright traitor taking bribes from Germany. Le Figaro was rumored to possess documents linking Caillaux to German officials. Many believed that Caillaux, possessing compromising material of his own linking Poincaré to Izvolsky and the Russians, had blackmailed the president into suppressing them. Aside from rumors dogging him about Russian bribes, Poincaré had, as foreign minister, visited Russia in 1912 to strengthen military ties, a gesture seen as almost sacrilegious by the French Left, which viewed Tsarist Russia as the most backwards, antilabor country in Europe, the land of the knout and the pogrom. Now, as president, Poincaré was planning an even grander sovereign summit with Tsar Nicholas II in July 1914: preparations for it had been underway since January.

  In France, just as in Austria and Russia, foreign and domestic policy were intertwined in this era of constant international tension. At the time of the Sarajevo outrage, however, it was domestic, not foreign, affairs that were in the ascendant in Paris. The victory of the Left in the May polls threatened to ruin the upcoming summit in Petersburg, as Poincaré would have to bring along Viviani—a man who, despite his reluctant acceptance of the Three-Year Law, had no love for foreign or military affairs and thought about as ill of autocratic, labor-unfriendly Russia as did Caillaux and Jaurès. As Izvolsky reported to Sazonov, it was Viviani, not Poincaré, who was the man of the hour, and Viviani was bad news for the Russians (if not quite as bad as Caillaux would have been).6

  Minister of education before he was plucked from obscurity by Poincaré, Viviani scarcely bothered to feign an interest in foreign policy, let alone in alliance obligations to Russia, on which subject President Poincaré was now trying, and largely failing, to enlighten him. If the assassination of the Habsburg heir was not enough to knock Mme Caillaux off the front pages, nor to rouse even Poincaré from his seat at Longchamp, it was certainly not going to turn the milquetoast Viviani into a warrior. At the first cabinet meeting held after the Sarajevo incident, one minister recalled afterwards, the murders were “hardly mentioned.”7 Viviani, no less than Poincaré and the French public, remained preoccupied with the Caillaux affair—to which he owed his recent promotion. Viviani’s political fate, like Caillaux’s, Jaurès’s, and Poincaré’s, would depend on the verdict of the Mme Caillaux trial in July. He would not want to miss any twist or turn in the story. Nor would the partisans of Caillaux and Poincaré, who were already, on occasion, brawling in the streets.

  IN LONDON, THE READING PUBLIC, accustomed through long experience of empire to take an interest in incidents in far-off corners of the globe, was more likely to follow the latest Balkan imbroglio than were the domestic scandal–mad French. The Times was something like the paper of record for observers of global affairs and could hardly ignore the story. The paper’s Sarajevo correspondent did not disappoint, providing colorful details on the assassinations (including the failed bombing attempt that preceded the shooting), noting the presence of multiple assassins, and concluding sensibly that the attacks were “evidently the fruit of a carefully laid plot.” Other dispatches from Vienna rounded out the Austrian side of the story, weaving great drama out of the forlorn, doomed marriage of Ferdinand and Sophie and the (much exaggerated) grief of Emperor Franz Josef I. On Monday, 29 June, the Sarajevo outrage was front-page news in London, reported with all the verve and gusto one expected of Fleet Street. There was even a sharp downward blip in the London stock market that morning, reflecting investors’ fears of European complications in the Balkans. By Monday afternoon, however, the City of London had fully recovered its footing. On Tuesday, even the globally minded Times had shunted Sarajevo back to page 7. The Balkan drama did merit an editorial that day, but its purpose was to explain why, even though the story must “occupy the attention of all students of European politics,” it should not unduly concern anyone in Britain, where “our own affairs must be addressed.” By the following Monday, a Times editorial wrote off the Sarajevo incident as old history: it was no longer a matter “of European significance.”8

  By “our own affairs,” the Times meant Ireland. Just as France was consumed by the Caillaux affair, so was England convulsed with reverberations from the Curragh Incident of March 1914. By spring, Irish Loyalist Volunteers from Ulster (the “Ulstermen”) had put more than one hundred thousand men under arms to block any effort by the British government to impose Home Rule (that is, independence) on Ireland—on the northern counties of Ulster, anyway. In early March, the Liberal government in London had offered a “compromise” exempting Ulster from Home Rule for six years and only six years. The offer was rejected, and documents turned up by army intelligence suggested that the Volunteers were planning a coup. Winston Churchill, first lord of the Admiralty, ordered the HMS Pathfinder and HMS Attentive to the Irish coast and vowed privately that, if the Ulstermen took up arms against the British army, “he would pour enough shot and shell into Belfast to reduce it to ruins.” Churchill then gave an open-throated public speech on March 14, offering “the hand of friendship” to Ulstermen if they desired it but a confrontation if they did not (“let us put these grave matters to the proof”).

  Fearing, with good cause, that the government was about to strike, on Friday, 20 March, fifty English cavalry officers at the Curragh barracks in Ireland announced that they would not take up arms against the Ulstermen—a sort of mutiny, as critics called it, although no orders had yet been given that they could have disobeyed. General Hubert Gough, the head “mutineer,” then resigned with all his officers, which led Sir John French, chief of the General Staff, to resign, which in turn prompted the resignation of the secretary of state for war and the colonies, Colonel John Seeley. Just as the Caillaux affair divided Right and Left in France, Home Rule pitted pro-independence Irish Catholics against loyalist Protestants, pro–Home Rule Liberals against Conservatives and Unionists, and the Liberal/Irish Party–controlled House of Commons (which kept passing Home Rule bills, with a third reading scheduled in May 1914) against the more Conservative and Unionist-friendly House of Lords (which kept rejecting them). There was even a “treason” angle, as it was widely reported that German firms, in late April, had sold arms to Ulster in the hope of provoking an Irish civil war. (The total haul was later confirmed at thirty-five thousand Mauser rifles and three million rounds of ammunition.) The Curragh incident and all its echoes, said the Daily Mail, “was the biggest story since the Boer War” of 1899–1902.9

  While it lacked the sexiness of France’s Caillaux affair, Britain’s Irish crisis was more serious in nature. It was Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone’s attempt to pass the first Home Rule bill that had wrecked the Liberal Party in 1886, ushering in years of Conservative-Unionist dominance; his attempt to pass a second bill in 1893 had led to another thumping Tory-Unionist victory in 1895. So explosive was the issue that the Liberals, despite winning a landslide victory in 1905, had waited nearly seven years before introducing a Home Rule bill again in 1912. Many in the army wished that they had waited another decade. Sir Henry Wilson, an Irish Unionist major-general who was Britain’s key liaison staff officer with the French high command, in charge of planning joint operations in case of a European war, thought that using the army to enforce Home Rule would split it “from top to bottom.” This was hardly an unlikely scenario, considering that the mere rumor of impending Home Rule had nearly torn the army apart in March. Like Wilson, a large number of British officers hailed from Northern Ireland, and they tended, almost to a man, to be
Unionists. If the Liberal government chose to enact and enforce Home Rule, many feared it would lead to a real mutiny or even civil war.

  At the time of the Sarajevo incident, because of the fallout from the Curragh incident, Britain did not even have a secretary of state for war. This office was, in theory, occupied by the Liberal prime minister, Herbert Asquith, until a permanent replacement could be found, but Asquith had plenty else on his plate, beginning with Home Rule. Having been rejected by the House of Lords after its third reading in late May, the Home Rule bill was now eligible for enactment by royal assent, but Asquith was hardly going to tempt Gladstone’s fate, and risk a civil war in Ireland, by doing so without negotiating a compromise. Secret talks were underway all through June over some kind of partition exempting Ulster from Home Rule—talks that threatened to enrage Asquith’s Liberal and Irish nationalist supporters if they found out about them. In the House of Commons on 30 June, Asquith did set aside the burning Irish issue long enough to express “indignation and deep concern” on behalf of the House over the Sarajevo outrage, which he called “one of those incredible crimes which almost make us despair of the progress of mankind.” But this was all he had to say on the matter.10