July 1914: Countdown to War

by Sean McMeekin

  Nothing could have been further from the truth. As those who knew him best understood, the kaiser’s bluster was a classic case of loud bark and little bite. The last thing he wanted was a war with England. As the grandson of Queen Victoria, Wilhelm II longed for the approval of his English cousins and the English more generally. His enthusiasm for the High Seas Fleet, like his foolish outburst with the Daily Telegraph, was rooted in his craving for English respect, even if his provocative actions and reckless words tended to produce precisely the opposite effect on their intended audience. The kaiser was simply not subtle enough to realize that naval blackmail and thumping talk would annoy and frighten British policymakers, not impress them.

  The Moroccan provocation of 1905 illustrates the disconnect perfectly. Its real author was not the kaiser who went to Tangier but the men who sent him there: Bülow and his key adviser, Friedrich von Holstein, who were hoping to break the Anglo-French entente through a show of force. Bülow and Holstein knew their blackmail was mere bluff, for their supreme warlord had no real stomach for war. As Bülow later explained, “Wilhelm II did not want war, if only because he did not trust his nerves not to give way under the strain of any really critical situation. The moment there was actual danger His Majesty would become uncomfortably conscious that he could never lead an army in the field.”4

  The kaiser’s deep reluctance to take up arms was borne out clearly in the First Balkan War. By mid-November 1912, Serbia had already routed the Turks in Macedonia, reaching the Adriatic coastline via Albania; the Greeks had taken Salonica; and the Bulgarian army had raced across Thrace to the final Ottoman defensive lines at Çatalca, just thirty-seven miles from Constantinople. Although a formal Turkish-German alliance had never been formed, the kaiser had loudly championed the Ottoman cause ever since first visiting Turkey in 1889. In Damascus in 1898, he had notoriously proclaimed himself the “friend for all time” of the Muslim world. The Ottoman army had been trained by German officers; it fought with German weapons. It had been bested on all fronts by the Russophile armies of the Balkan League, which fought with French weapons of Creusot. If there was ever a time for Germany to intervene in the Balkans, this was it. But the kaiser, declaring a policy of “free fight and no favor,” refused.5

  There was, of course, a war party in Berlin, just as there was in Vienna and Petersburg. Moltke, the chief of staff, had made the case for intervention in the First Balkan War in a crisis meeting held in December 1912. Like Conrad—like, indeed, most high-ranking officers in both Austria and Germany—Moltke believed that time was not on the side of the Central Powers, with Russia growing stronger every year. A European war was, in his view, “unavoidable, and the sooner the better.”6 Naval secretary Tirpitz, recognizing that Germany’s construction of dreadnoughts lagged far behind Britain’s, was less keen. The chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, was also cautious, having invested much of his political capital in a rapprochement with England, which required slowing down the very dreadnought-building program that Tirpitz was pushing (or even giving Germany’s High Seas Fleet to Great Britain, as Bethmann suggested at one point—to the horror of both Tirpitz and Wilhelm II). In the end, the opinion that mattered most was the kaiser’s, and he was dead set against going to war over Balkan issues unless Germany’s hand were forced outright by a Russian invasion of Austria.

  Thus, far from backing up his Austrian ally in the Balkans, Wilhelm had seemed almost to take Serbia’s side. During the Second Balkan War of 1913, when Berchtold at last summoned up enough spine to demand that the Serbian army withdraw from Albania, it was the Russians—not wanting their Serbian client to become too powerful—who backed Austria, not the Germans. The kaiser called Vienna’s efforts to block Serbian access to the Adriatic “nonsense.” When, in March 1914, he heard Vienna opposed Serbian union with Macedonia, he retorted, “Unbelievable! This union is absolutely not to be prevented. And if Vienna attempts it, she will commit a great stupidity, and stir up the danger of a war with the Slavs, which would leave us quite cold.” Berchtold and Franz Josef I were wholly, and deeply, committed to the “stupidity” that left the kaiser cold. As Tisza warned his increasingly angry emperor, any Austrian move against Belgrade would run up against “the Kaiser’s preference for Serbia.”7

  By the time of the Sarajevo outrage, the kaiser’s growing hostility meant that Austria’s diplomatic isolation was nearly complete. In a sense, this was what the Konopischt meeting of June 1914 had been about: Wilhelm II was looking forward to a change of regime, so that Austria, under its new emperor, would pursue a more sensible policy in the Balkans, winning over the Romanians and calming down the Serbs. Now, with the murder of his friend, apparently by Serbian terrorists, these hopes were dashed.

  Knowing that his sovereign, along with Chancellor Bethmann, had long wanted to cool down tensions in the Balkans, Germany’s ambassador to Austria-Hungary, Heinrich von Tschirschky, sensibly urged caution following the Sarajevo outrage. His first dispatch from Vienna, dated Tuesday, 30 June, reported Berchtold’s ominous remark about how the “threads of the conspiracy come together at Belgrade,” and that the prevailing view at the Ballplatz was that there “must be a final settlement of accounts with the Serbs.” Tschirschky, evidently expecting the approval of Bethmann and the kaiser for his measured conduct, reported that he had felt compelled, “calmly but very emphatically and seriously, to utter a warning against such hasty measures.”

  Reading this report while still in shock over the loss of his friend, Wilhelm II lost his temper. “Who authorized him to do so?” he scribbled on Tschirschky’s dispatch, as he often did on official correspondence (the notorious “marginalia”). “That is utterly stupid! It is not his business . . . what Austria intends to do. Later on, if things went wrong, it would be said: Germany was not willing! Tschirschky will please drop this nonsense! Matters must be cleared up with the Serbs, and that right soon. That’s all self-evident and the plain truth.”8

  This was just the sort of reaction Berchtold had been hoping for. In a flash, Germany’s nervous, hesitating, Serbia-sympathizing Hamlet of a sovereign had been turned into a decisive Serb-hater ready to take up arms and fight—and the sooner the better, just as Moltke had long advised him. Of course, Wilhelm II was known for these kinds of outbursts, which often dissipated as quickly as they came over him. This is why Berchtold had hoped to corner the kaiser at the archduke’s funeral in Vienna, so as to pin him down in his state of grief and rage, before he could change his mind.

  It was Berchtold’s rotten luck that Bethmann, fearing a copycat terrorist strike in Vienna, had intervened to cut off the trip. As he had no access to the scribbled marginalia on Tschirschky’s dispatches to Berlin, for all Berchtold knew, Tschirschky’s urging of caution represented the kaiser’s own thinking on Sarajevo. And now, without the chance to make his case to the kaiser in Vienna, Austria’s foreign minister had to assume it would be much harder to win the support of Germany’s sovereign for a tougher line in the Balkans—support he desperately needed to overcome Tisza’s opposition.

  As usual, Berchtold would end up dragging his heels indefinitely in a crisis where decisive action was called for, cementing his reputation for cowardice and ineffectuality. Little did the Austrian know that his luck was about to turn around dramatically.

  II

  COUNTDOWN

  5

  The Count Hoyos Mission to Berlin

  SUNDAY–MONDAY, 5–6 JULY

  ON WEDNESDAY, 1 JULY, a prominent German journalist named Victor Naumann turned up at the Ballplatz, saying that he had urgent business to discuss. The man he wanted to talk to was Foreign Minister Berchtold’s chief of staff, Count Alexander Hoyos. There were good reasons for Naumann’s choice. As a subordinate in the Ballplatz, even if an exceptionally well-placed one, Hoyos could speak off the record, in the manner of back-channel diplomacy. In a sense he was Berchtold’s alter ego, free to speak his mind in a way Austria-Hungary’s careful foreign minister could not. Hoyos, thirty-eight years o
ld at the time of the Sarajevo incident, was energetic, highly motivated, and, by reputation, a hawk on Serbia. Hoyos had been sent to Berlin during the First Bosnian Crisis of 1908–1909 in order to win German support for the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, so his hawkish views were well known to the Germans. Naumann, for his part, was known to be well connected in Berlin, a trusted confidant of high-ranking military and naval officers. He was also good friends with the state secretary, Jagow, and with Wilhelm von Stumm, the political director of the German Foreign Office, who ran its day-to-day affairs. Hoyos therefore listened very carefully to what the German had to say.

  Naumann opened the audience with remarks on the general outlook in Berlin. The Russian army’s Great Program was viewed with growing alarm, and her planned test mobilization for fall 1914 seemed an ominous portent of a shift in the strategic balance. The idea of fighting a Präventivkrieg, or preemptive war, against Russia before the Great Program was complete had long been discussed seriously in the army command. Now, Naumann told Hoyos, this idea was gaining influence even at the Wilhelmstrasse. The German naval command, meanwhile, although still viewing itself as overmatched by Britain, was feeling increasingly sanguine about the risk of war, owing to the success of Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg’s rapprochement with England, as manifested recently at the Naval Week at Kiel. “For this reason,” Naumann informed Hoyos that “there was believed to be the certainty that England would not intervene in a European war.”

  All this was interesting enough, but it did not necessarily herald a change in Germany’s Balkan policy. The kaiser had pointedly refused to risk a European conflagration during the Balkan Wars and had been notably unsympathetic about Austria’s concerns about Serbian aggrandizement. As yet, there was no indication from either Germany’s Ambassador Tschirschky in Vienna, nor from Austria’s own ambassador in Berlin, Count Ladislaus Szögyény, of a shift in German policy following the Sarajevo outrage. Hoyos therefore broached the subject carefully with Naumann. “I let fall,” Hoyos reported to Berchtold, “the remark that this state of affairs [e.g., German war-readiness] would not be unpleasing to us if we should ever find ourselves under the necessity of taking action against Serbia.” To Hoyos’s pleasant surprise, Naumann told the Austrian that a punitive war against Serbia “was exactly what he had been going to suggest to me.” In Naumann’s opinion, “after the Sarajevo murder, it was a question of life or death for the Monarchy not to leave the crime unpunished but to annihilate Serbia. For Germany such a course would be the touchstone whether Russia meant war or not.”1

  Here, it seemed, was an astonishing stroke of luck. Hoping for, at best, a declaration of support from the Germans for a tougher line on Serbia, Hoyos was instead treated to a display worthy of Austria’s belligerent Chief of Staff Conrad. But who did Naumann really speak for? That Moltke and his colleagues in the German army command were keen for a test of strength with Russia was not news: it was their job to prepare for this, just as it was Conrad’s job to plan for a war with Serbia. Naumann did claim to have spoken recently with Stumm, the political director of the German Foreign Office (although not also with Germany’s Foreign Minister Jagow, who was still in Italy), which suggested there was a chance the Wilhelmstrasse had indeed come around to the German army’s point of view. Chancellor Bethmann, though, was not mentioned at all.

  As for Germany’s sovereign, Naumann said he believed that the kaiser could be brought around, but only if everyone acted quickly to convince him. “If, at the present moment,” the German emissary told Count Hoyos, “when Kaiser Wilhelm is horrified at the Sarajevo murder, he is spoken to in the right way, he will give us all assurances and this time go to the length of war, because he perceives the dangers for the monarchical principle.” If the Austrians, that is, wanted a war with Serbia, the kaiser could give it to them—but only if they presented their case to him while he was still enraged by his friend’s murder.

  Naumann’s report of the view from Berlin, whether reliable or not, gave Berchtold his first glimmer of hope that he could overcome the Hungarian minister-president’s opposition to a war with Serbia. On Thursday, the foreign minister received more good news from Sarajevo. After he had been taken into custody following his murder of the archducal couple, Gavrilo Princip had initially denied any connection to a larger conspiracy. This took some courage, for Princip had been beaten badly by an angry mob after he fired off his volley. He was still vomiting and bleeding from his head when he arrived at the police station, so weakened that he was at first unable to speak. Once he regained his composure, Princip claimed to have come up with the idea entirely by himself and to have acted alone on the quai. Improbably, he denied any acquaintance with Chabrinovitch, the assassin who had thrown a bomb at the imperial motorcade only an hour before Princip had shot the archducal couple.

  This transparent lie may not have held up for long in any case, but Princip was not helped by his fellow conspirators. Chabrinovitch himself admitted under questioning, on Monday, 29 June, that Princip was his friend, although—in a claim still more improbable than Princip’s—he insisted that the two friends had both come up with the same idea to assassinate the archduke independently of one another; it was mere coincidence that they had tried to do so on the same morning and on the same Sarajevo road. When his interrogator pointed out how absurd this sounded, Chabrinovitch confessed at once that the two had planned the crime together, although still denying that they had help from others. Next to slip up was Ilitch, the main Sarajevo organizer, who, despite having slipped away from the quai on Sunday, had been arrested, along with his entire family, in a widening dragnet that eventually ensnared more than two hundred Bosnian Serbs in Sarajevo alone. Because he, unlike Princip and Chabrinovitch, was over twenty-one, Ilitch was eligible for the death penalty. To spare his life, on Wednesday, 1 July, Ilitch rolled over on the three other assassins he had recruited in Sarajevo (who all, like him, had run away on Sunday), fingering also Grabezh, the third of the conspirators who had come in from Belgrade and who had likewise escaped the initial dragnet. The Austrian authorities were thus able to arrest six of the seven Serb assassins who had lined up on the Appelquai the previous Sunday, missing only Mehmedbashitch, the token Muslim, who had fled to Montenegro.

  The arrest of bomb-thrower Nedjelko Chabrinovitch, Gavrilo Princip’s coconspirator, in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. Source: Getty Images.

  Princip himself finally gave in on Thursday, 2 July, independently of the others (he seems not to have known that Chabrinovitch and Ilitch had already confessed). In order to spare innocent men the grief of guilt by association, Princip offered to finger his fellow-conspirators so long as he was allowed to see Ilitch and Grabezh in person, in order to explain why he was confessing and encourage them to confess, too. Taking charge of the confessions just as he had taken charge on the quai, Princip then told Ilitch to let the Austrian authorities know “among whom you divided the weapons and where the weapons are.” He told Grabezh to “confess everything, how we got the bombs, how we travelled and in what society we were, so that just people do not come to harm.”2

  By owning up and trying to get the others to stick to the same story, Princip hoped to cut off the Austrian investigation before it reached Belgrade. But it was not terribly hard for investigators to follow the leads they were given as far as the Bosnian border, where Serbian officials had connived in the smuggling of the assassins, and their weapons, onto Austrian territory. With Ilitch, in particular, showing no signs of resistance under interrogation, it was only a matter of time before the Austrians would know who in Serbia, if anyone, had armed and trained the assassins. While falling well short of legal proof, the confessions were still excellent news for Berchtold.

  There were other encouraging signs, too. Germany’s ambassador, so cool on Monday to Berchtold’s plan to punish Serbia, had begun to come around. Shortly before meeting the emperor on Thursday, 2 July, Tschirschky called on Berchtold and told him that “only vigorous measures against Serbia” woul
d do. Berchtold was not certain what accounted for the ambassador’s change of attitude—he had no inkling that Tschirschky had been rebuked by the kaiser—but it was still a welcome development. Above all, Germany’s ambassador told Berchtold, Vienna must this time develop a clear plan of action, ideally one that was “bold and decisive,” in order to convince policymakers in Berlin that Austria was not going to back down again.3

  This was exactly what Berchtold wanted to do. Just as he was beginning to see a way out of the impasse with Tisza, however, Emperor Franz Josef I threw up another obstacle. The Habsburg sovereign, after his own meeting with Germany’s ambassador on Thursday, felt obliged to call Berchtold in to discuss their conversation. Despite his own feelings on the matter, which were closer to Berchtold’s than Tisza’s—Franz Josef agreed that some kind of “powerful response to Serbia” was necessary—the emperor was worried that events were moving too quickly. With Tisza so resolutely opposed, he was not yet ready to speak of war. Berchtold and Conrad, Franz Josef said, must wait.4

  All day Friday, Berchtold mulled over his options. Some kind of approach must be made to Berlin, but how and on what pretext? Tisza was still insisting on his 24 June “peace plan” for winning over Bulgaria and Romania to the Central Powers. The Hungarian surely would not object if this plan were presented to Berlin. But if the Austrians sent Tisza’s memorandum off as is, it would hardly impress the Germans as, in Tschirschky’s words, a “bold and decisive” course of action. So Berchtold decided to write a postscript to Tisza’s text, informing the Germans that “the above memorandum had only just been completed, when the terrible events at Sarajevo happened.” Offering the murders as proof “that the gulf between the monarchy and Serbia was beyond bridging over,” Berchtold concluded that Austria must “tear asunder with a determined hand the threads which its enemies are weaving into a net over its head.”5 For good measure, Berchtold composed a letter to the kaiser for Franz Josef to sign, informing Wilhelm II that “the crime of Sarajevo is not the deed of a single individual, but the result of a well-arranged plot whose threads reach to Belgrade.” So long as the “source of criminal agitation in Belgrade lives on unpunished,” Berchtold’s royal letter continued with an eye to the kaiser’s strong feelings on the monarchical principle, “the peace policy of all European monarchs is threatened.” The danger, the letter concluded, would only pass “when Serbia . . . is eliminated as a political power-factor (politische Machtfaktor) in the Balkans.” While careful not to let slip the word “war” lest Tisza object, Berchtold wanted to leave the Germans in little doubt as to what Austria really intended to do.6