With Asquith up to his neck in Irish affairs, and no secretary of war in the cabinet, foreign and defense policy was largely left to Sir Edward Grey, His Majesty’s foreign secretary, and Churchill, the first lord of the Admiralty. While neither was as directly involved in the Home Rule business as was Asquith, it still dominated cabinet discussions; they could not afford to ignore it. Grey was also embroiled in another controversy that June. German newspapers, led by the Berliner Tageblatt, had gotten wind of ongoing naval talks between Britain and Russia, which they used to trumpet the nightmare of encirclement: the idea was that the British and Russian navies might team up against Germany’s Baltic fleet. Germany’s chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, had issued a formal protest to London, via his ambassador, Prince Karl Max Lichnowsky, on 24 June. Bethmann, whose entire foreign policy hinged on rapprochement with Britain—he saw this as a “question of life and death for Germany”—was obviously disturbed. So was Grey when he learned how upset the Germans were. In conversation with Lichnowsky, Grey dismissed the rumors about an Anglo-Russian naval convention, pointing out that Britain had no formal alliance “committing us to action” with either France or Russia, although he conceded that “we did from time to time talk as intimately as Allies.” This “intimacy” was, Grey insisted, absolutely “not used for aggression against Germany.” Lichnowsky, a notorious Anglophile, “cordially endorsed” Grey’s suspiciously vague assurance, but it was an open question whether less Anglophilic statesmen in Berlin would do so.11
What Grey told Lichnowsky was deeply misleading. While it is true that England’s own “Entente Cordiale” with France, first negotiated in 1904 over colonial questions in Africa, fell far short of a bilateral military alliance such as France had with Russia, over the years since, British naval and army officers had begun cooperating ever more closely with their French counterparts in joint war-planning against Germany, without their superiors ever publicly owning up to this. Grey himself had personally worked out a secret naval agreement in 1912 with France’s ambassador to London, Paul Cambon, under which the French navy would “cover” the Mediterranean, leaving France’s northern and western coastlines undefended against Germany—with the understanding that the British fleet, covering the Channel, would defend them on France’s behalf by interdicting the German navy.
Meanwhile, still-more-secret staff talks between the French and British armies had, by June 1914, reached the point where a top-secret liaison agreement specified that a British expeditionary force (BEF) of six divisions would be dispatched across the Channel if German armies violated Belgian territory in a European war, as Franco-British intelligence suggested they might do. All the powers, including Germany, had guaranteed Belgian neutrality by treaty, but the country, owing to its location alongside the Channel opposite the south of England, had outsized strategic importance for Britain. Indeed, the treaty creating an independent Belgium had been signed in London in 1839 under the watchful eye of one of Britain’s greatest foreign ministers, Lord Palmerston. Not all British statesmen agreed that Belgian neutrality was worth a war: Lord Salisbury, the Tory titan of the 1880s and 1890s, would have preferred to water down the obligation because either France or Germany would inevitably have to violate Belgian territory if they went to war. But then not even Salisbury had succeeded in altering the London treaty.
Most ordinary Britons, and even most British members of Parliament, would have been astonished to learn that their country might go to war over a treaty obligation to uphold Belgian neutrality dating to 1839. And yet the staff work of recent years, along with Grey’s shifty secret diplomacy, had made this scenario increasingly plausible. Sir Henry Wilson, the Irish Unionist general in charge of joint planning with the French in case the Germans violated Belgium, had done his work so thoroughly that the BEF deployment plan to France was now “complete to the last billet of every battalion, even to the places where they were to drink their coffee.”12 Curiously, by 1914 not only the French army but even German military planners, too, had a rough idea what to expect from the BEF (because the Germans knew their war plan required violating Belgian territory, they had to reckon with the possibility of British intervention), but Britain’s own civilian government, including Grey, had been kept in the dark. Aside from lying about the Franco-British naval agreement with Cambon, Grey was therefore telling Lichnowsky the truth as he knew it, but then he did not know very much.
Much the same could be said of the Anglo-Russian naval talks. Despite German fears, discussions of joint maneuvers had, by June 1914, barely gotten off the ground, which is why Grey felt no need to enlighten Lichnowsky about them. And yet serious naval talks were indeed afoot that spring between London and St. Petersburg—not about Russia’s Baltic fleet but about her Black Sea fleet. With their own Black Sea dreadnoughts-under-construction nowhere near completion, the Russians were terrified that the Turks were about to float their own state-of-the-art British dreadnoughts in the Bosphorus, which would effectively rule out any future Russian attempt to seize Constantinople and the Straits. Just as Germans like Liman von Sanders were helping train the Ottoman army, a British mission under Admiral Sir Arthur Limpus was modernizing the Turkish navy. Skeleton crews were being trained to take over the first British-built dreadnought, scheduled to reach Ottoman territorial waters in July. This was the Sultan Osman I, which would mount more guns than any ship ever afloat—13.5-inch guns that were larger, faster-firing, and more accurate than the Russians’ 12-inchers. And the inferior Russian dreadnoughts would not be completed before 1916, giving the Turks nearly two years to assert their dominance over a Russian Black Sea fleet rendered obsolete by the Sultan Osman I. Small wonder that Sazonov, via Russia’s ambassador to Britain, Count Benckendorff, was requesting that the British government block, or at least delay, delivery of the Sultan Osman I—the first of no less than four dreadnoughts that British yards were building for the Ottoman navy. Alas for Russia, Grey and Churchill, on 12 June 1914, declined, on the classic Liberal grounds that the British government could not interfere with private business contracts.13
Winston Churchill, Britain’s first lord of the Admiralty in 1914, at 39 years old, in his explosive, high-energy prime. Source: Getty Images.
It is curious that neither Churchill nor Grey recalled anything of these momentous discussions in their memoirs. In Grey’s case, the omission—and his general ignorance of what was going on around him in 1914—may have been owing to faulty memory, in part caused by his failing health. All year he had suffered from deteriorating eyesight. In May, he was told that his condition was “probably irreversible.” Having had no luck with English doctors, Grey was planning a trip to Germany to see an ocular specialist sometime that summer, if he could ever find the time. His failing eyes, along with the burgeoning Home Rule crisis, preoccupied him to such an extent that Grey seems barely to have understood what Benckendorff was talking about when he issued his protests about the Turkish dreadnoughts in May and early June. Neither then, nor later, did Grey perceive the nature of Russia’s strategic concerns over the Ottoman naval buildup. He was not unduly bothered by the Sarajevo incident, either—not enough for him to cancel a fishing trip that week. An avid outdoorsman and “master of the complex art of fly-fishing”—he had written a book on the subject—Grey was keen to enjoy his favorite hobby while his failing eyes still allowed him to pursue it.14
In Churchill’s case, it is not likely that poor memory accounts for his failure to recall the dreadnought discussions with Russia. Just thirty-nine years old, Churchill was entering his explosive, high-energy prime in the spring of 1914. Grey, having failed to inform Churchill of what was going on all through May, had brought the first lord of the Admiralty in on the discussions with Benckendorff only at the last minute in early June, and even then he had done nothing to explain what the whole thing was about. Churchill’s priority in June was not the Russian naval talks at all, but rather preparations for Fleet Week at Kiel, where the German and British fleets were st
aging joint maneuvers as part of an ongoing détente between the rival navies. Churchill had helped kick off the opening ceremonies at Kiel on Wednesday, 24 June, before returning to England that weekend. On Monday, 29 June, he learned about the assassinations, like most Britons, from the morning papers, which he picked up at the ferry terminal in Portsmouth en route to London and the Admiralty. More imaginative than Grey, Churchill, in his book The World Crisis, recalled being overcome by “a sudden and vivid feeling that something sinister and measureless had occurred. . . . I reflected that it would be nice to get our great vessels back from the Baltic soon.”15 Intriguing as this suggestion of geopolitical prescience is, the remark has the unmistakable sound of literary license. In fact, there is no evidence that Churchill, after hearing the news from Sarajevo, ordered any precautionary naval measures or changed his daily routine any more than Grey did.
If Russia’s clearly stated desire to prevent Britain from destroying her strategic position in the Black Sea by selling dreadnoughts to the Ottoman navy did not register in the minds of Churchill or Grey in June 1914, it is hardly surprising that neither man took much interest in the news from the Balkans. Prime Minister Asquith, preoccupied with Ireland, had little time for foreign policy at all. The failure of Britain’s key policymakers to pay mind to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand was understandable. It did not bode well, however, for their ability to master events in case the Sarajevo outrage snowballed into a real crisis.
* It is not hard to see why. In one of Caillaux’s letters to his mistress, intercepted by his wife, he signed off with “a thousand kisses all over your adorable little body.”
*“In all my years at school,” Poincaré once wrote, “I saw no other reason to live than the possibility of recovering our lost provinces.”
4
Berlin: Sympathy and Impatience
KAISER WILHELM II WAS RACING HIS YACHT in a regatta at Kiel on Sunday afternoon, 28 June 1914, when he saw a small motorized launch steaming toward him at full speed. Anxious to complete the race, he gestured for the boat to change its course. The man captaining the motorboat, Admiral Georg von Müller, responded with a still more emphatic gesture, urging the yacht to slow down as he had an important message for the kaiser. When the launch came in range, the admiral folded his message into a cigarette case and tossed it on board the yacht. Seeing his messenger, Wilhelm could not have been pleased. Müller, chief of the German naval cabinet and one of Wilhelm’s least favorite advisers, seemed to always bring him bad tidings. This time was no different. The kaiser opened Müller’s case, unfolded the message, and turned pale as he read the news from Sarajevo. He then ordered his crew to come about and abandoned the regatta.
Wilhelm was deeply saddened to learn of the loss of his friend, whom he had just visited two weekends previously at his estate at Konopischt, and no less so by the loss of the archduke’s wife. The kaiser, something of a social misfit himself despite his august lineage, had always had a soft spot in his heart for this earnest, loving couple cast out by the Habsburgs. To get around the problem of court rank during official banquets at Potsdam, the kaiser had come up with the clever solution of seating everyone at smaller tables of four, so that he and his wife, Auguste, could sit alone with Ferdinand and Sophie, without any archduchesses complaining that they should have been placed ahead of her. The kaiser had always made a point of calling on Sophie when visiting Vienna and of addressing her by her proper rank. The Duchess of Hohenburg could have asked for no greater respect from a sovereign, nor her husband for a better friend and supporter.
It was not mere sentiment that led the kaiser to indulge the archduke’s morganatic marriage. With Franz Josef’s health failing, Wilhelm had been expecting Franz Ferdinand to inherit the Habsburg throne in the near future, a prospect he welcomed, not least because the kaiser’s relations with the aging emperor were far less cordial. The two friends had discussed far-reaching questions of European politics and diplomacy at Konopischt, reaching agreement on nearly all of them. The only real point of contention between them was over the Hungarian minister-president Tisza, whom Franz Ferdinand hated for Hungary’s persecution of its minorities. The kaiser thought Tisza intelligent and worth humoring, not least because the Hungarian was, publicly at least, advocating closer relations with Romania, notwithstanding his persecution of Romanians inside Hungary. Even here, the two friends had reached a rough accord, after the kaiser proposed that the archduke popularize a slogan for hoisting Tisza on his own petard: “But sir! Remember the Romanians!” The archduke, in turn, had tried to calm the kaiser’s fears about Russian saber-rattling, which he did not take seriously on account of Russia’s internal problems.1
It was painful for the kaiser now to recall this amiable discussion. He and Franz Ferdinand would never again discuss affairs of state together nor, indeed, be able to enact those policies they hoped, perhaps optimistically, might help to defuse the Balkan powder keg. In a hostile international climate, Franz Ferdinand had been Wilhelm’s diplomatic anchor, the one man he could always count on. Now his anchor was gone. Like Berchtold and Conrad in Vienna, but unlike President Poincaré in Paris and Grey and Churchill in London, Germany’s sovereign was stopped cold by the news from Sarajevo. He called off all further engagements at Kiel and returned to Berlin.
He found the city nearly empty of imperial officials. The chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, was at his country estate at Hohenfinow. Helmuth von Moltke, Conrad’s counterpart as army chief of staff, was taking his annual cure at Carlsbad. The naval secretary, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, was summering at his estate in the Black Forest. Gottlieb von Jagow, state secretary for foreign affairs, was on his honeymoon in Italy.
The kaiser was therefore initially left alone to react to the news from the Balkans, without his usual coterie of advisers. Constitutionally speaking, this was not inappropriate. Under the German Imperial Constitution of 1871, the power to declare war, or to make peace, rested solely with Germany’s emperor as “supreme warlord,” not with the Reichstag. Only the upper house of Parliament, the Bundesrat, had the power to veto a declaration of war. In foreign policy more generally, there was no countervailing power to the emperor whatever, beyond the ability of the Reichstag to influence it by vetoing spending bills. As sovereign of the country with the most powerful army—and second most powerful navy—in Europe, the kaiser therefore bore an awesome responsibility. Whether the Austrian-Serbian dispute over the Sarajevo incident would spark a major European war would depend largely, although not exclusively, on him.
Wilhelm II was one of the most fascinating, if often misunderstood, statesmen of his era. Born in the breech position after a grueling ten-hour labor his mother barely survived, he had suffered nerve damage that crippled his arm. By the time he reached adulthood, Wilhelm’s left arm was six inches shorter than his right and all but useless. It was his peculiar misfortune to become supreme warlord of a country with a proud martial tradition, while being unable to cut his own meat at table, let alone handle weapons properly. Understandably, this led to an insecurity complex, a need for constant attention and acclaim. As one of his many critics put it, the kaiser needed to be “the stag at every hunt, the bride at every wedding, and the corpse at every funeral.”2
Kaiser Wilhelm II, striking an implausible warrior’s pose. It was his strange misfortune to be supreme warlord of a country with a proud martial tradition, while being unable to use his left arm properly. Source: Bain News Service, Library of Congress.
Eager for praise, taking offense at the merest slight, the kaiser was a difficult man to work for. Bismarck had disdained to gratify Wilhelm II’s fragile ego after he became emperor in 1888, which led to his sacking two years later. The only other chancellor serving under Wilhelm II to approach Bismarck in terms of accomplishment, Bernhard von Bülow, had likewise been fired in June 1909, in part because he had failed to defend his sovereign forcefully enough after an embarrassing interview with the kaiser was published in the English Daily Telegraph i
n October 1908. In this disastrous interview, Wilhelm II had managed to insult the English, frighten the French, anger the Russians, and threaten the Japanese. The affair had so damaged Wilhelm II’s reputation that many German papers had called for his abdication. Chastened, the kaiser had gone into hibernation for much of the winter, reemerging only the following spring, when he pressed for Bülow’s resignation.
The Daily Telegraph affair was emblematic of Wilhelm II’s erratic statesmanship, but it was also misleading about his real character. In England, the kaiser had long been suspected of warlike tendencies due to his promotion of Germany’s High Seas Fleet, which seemed so clearly aimed at upending British naval supremacy (it had not escaped the Admiralty’s notice that Germany’s own dreadnoughts had storage room for only enough coal to reach the North Sea, allowing more space for guns).3 When the kaiser personally visited Tangier in March 1905, precipitating a diplomatic crisis over Morocco for what appeared to be no good reason, it seemed to French and English policymakers that his real aim was to start a European war before their nascent entente of 1904 had produced real military cooperation. The belligerent tone of his remarks during the Daily Telegraph interview crystallized Wilhelm II’s reputation as a warmonger.
July 1914: Countdown to War Page 8
