July 1914: Countdown to War

by Sean McMeekin

  The next question was how to send the diplomatic notes to Berlin. Berchtold could simply use a courier as usual, but this might not be enough to convince the Germans of how serious he was. Nor was Ambassador Szögyény an ideal candidate to announce a change in policy. Having served at his post since 1892, he was a part of the furniture of Embassy Row in Berlin, closer, in some ways, to the Wilhelmstrasse than to the Ballplatz, where his long tenure was resented, not least because Szögyény was untouchable, protected by Emperor Franz Josef himself. Moreover, he was Hungarian. Berchtold had long wanted the aging Szögyény, now seventy-three and in poor health, to retire so he could replace him with a loyal German-Austrian, Prince Hohenlohe-Schillingfürst. Szögyény’s retirement was expected in August, but in the current crisis that might not come soon enough.

  Of course, Berchtold could simply go himself. Such a high-level mission, however, would invariably attract unwanted attention from the other powers—and from Tisza. Finally, on Saturday morning, 4 July, Hoyos had an inspiration: perhaps he could go in Berchtold’s stead. The foreign minister trusted Hoyos, and so evidently—based on Naumann’s approach earlier that week—did the Germans. No one in Berlin would doubt his ability to represent the views of the Ballplatz. Better still, as a vigorous young hawk, Hoyos could counteract any impression of indecisiveness left by the aging Hungarian ambassador. A Hoyos mission was, Berchtold agreed, the perfect solution.

  Events now moved rapidly. Saturday afternoon, Berchtold wired to Szögyény, asking him to arrange an urgent appointment with the kaiser for the following day. Shortly before Hoyos left the Ballplatz, Berchtold furnished him with oral instructions that went further than his textual glosses. Hoyos was, Berchtold later recalled telling him, to “explain to Ambassador Szögyény that we believe the moment has come for a final reckoning with Serbia. We must obtain from the government in Belgrade specific guarantees for the future, the refusal of which will result in military action.” Szögyény’s task, Berchtold explained, was to “see if such a course of action [by Austria] would be supported . . . by official circles in Berlin.”7 Armed with these instructions, Hoyos boarded the night train for Berlin. Berchtold then returned to his estate at Buchlau, to cultivate the appearance that little was happening.

  Tisza knew nothing of these momentous decisions. Following his audience with the emperor at Schönbrunn on Wednesday, Hungary’s minister-president had returned to Budapest, where urgent domestic business awaited him. Having made his opposition to punitive action against Serbia clear to both the emperor and Berchtold, he did not suspect that any significant change in the foreign policy of the dual monarchy would be made without him. Tisza was therefore shocked when, on Sunday morning, he received a phone call from the Ballplatz, informing him that a diplomatic note had just been dispatched to Berlin, outlining Austria’s new Balkan strategy in light of the Sarajevo incident. Tisza demanded at once to be shown a copy of the text of the note, which was duly wired to Budapest. Recognizing at once the importance of Berchtold’s additions, which changed the entire meaning of his Balkan peace memorandum, Tisza called back the Ballplatz and demanded that he be allowed to delete objectionable passages—especially the one about “eliminating Serbia as a political power-factor in the Balkans,” obvious shorthand for war. It was too late: Hoyos, with Berchtold’s unedited texts in hand, was already in Berlin.8

  Upon his arrival in the German capital Sunday morning, 5 July, Hoyos went straight to the Austro-Hungarian embassy, where he briefed Szögyény on the two diplomatic notes and on Berchtold’s unwritten instructions. There was little time to waste, as Szögyény was expected at the Neues Palais for lunch with the kaiser. After the briefing was finished, the ambassador set off for Potsdam, while Hoyos headed over to the Wilhelmstrasse to meet with his contacts in the German Foreign Office.

  Count Szögyény, despite his frailty, had developed valuable skills during his extra-long tenure in Berlin. Above all, he was good at handling Wilhelm II. He knew the kaiser’s likes and dislikes, his capricious moods, and how to manipulate them. Szögyény began the lunchtime audience by telling Wilhelm II how strongly Franz Ferdinand had admired him. Serbian terrorism, both men readily agreed, was a threat to sovereigns everywhere. As the conversation shifted onto the always-favorable ground of the “monarchical principle,” Szögyény unveiled the sovereign-to-sovereign note signed by Franz Josef I (although actually written by Berchtold), along with the accompanying diplomatic note on the Balkans. The kaiser read both notes, he reported, “with the greatest attention.” This was the moment Berchtold and the Austrians had been waiting for. A week to the day after the Sarajevo incident, Wilhelm II would weigh in on Austria’s plans to demand satisfaction from Serbia. What would he say?

  Somewhat to Szögyény’s disappointment, Germany’s sovereign did not at first assent to the general thrust of the Austrian notes. His anger over the murder of his friend having apparently subsided over the course of the week, the kaiser told Austria’s ambassador calmly that “he had expected some serious step on our [i.e., Austria’s] part towards Serbia, but that at the same time he must confess that the detailed statement of His Majesty made him regard a serious European complication as possible.” Wilhelm was no less fooled than Tisza had been by Berchtold’s language in the sovereign-to-sovereign note: “eliminating Serbia as a political power-factor in the Balkans” clearly meant punitive war. The kaiser had been burned before for loose, bellicose talk, most famously in the Daily Telegraph affair of 1908. He was not about to stick his neck out so recklessly again. On a question of this magnitude, the kaiser told Szögyény, he “could give no definite answer before having taken council with the Imperial chancellor,” Bethmann Hollweg. The ambassador quietly dropped the subject.9

  Szögyény knew the kaiser too well, however, to let the matter rest there. It was well to let Berchtold’s diplomatic notes percolate in Wilhelm’s mind, which was never fixed for long. Having let his host relax over dessert and coffee, the ambassador tried once more in the early afternoon. “When I again called attention to the seriousness of the situation,” Szögyény reported later that day to Vienna, “the Kaiser authorized me to inform our gracious Majesty that we might in this case, as in all others, rely upon Germany’s full support.” Wilhelm insisted once more that he must speak with Bethmann, but this time he assured the ambassador that he was certain the chancellor would go along with his declaration of support.

  This should have been the end of the conversation, and, in the hands of a more seasoned statesman than Wilhelm II, it would have been. Having now twice told Szögyény that he could not say anything further without consulting his chancellor, the kaiser proceeded to do just that. It was “his opinion,” he offered, that

  our action against Serbia . . . must not be delayed. Russia’s attitude would no doubt be hostile, but to this he 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.10

  This would be more to Berchtold’s liking. The kaiser’s incandescent rage over the Sarajevo outrage may have dissipated, but his recklessness remained. Even if Wilhelm changed his mind later, Szögyény, and through him Berchtold, now had the kaiser’s belligerent remarks (even though made only in oral conversation) on the record: these remarks might prove invaluable in a policy tussle with Tisza. While Germany’s loose-lipped sovereign did remember to summon Bethmann from Hohenfinow to Potsdam for consultation, as far as Szögyény was concerned, the kaiser had said enough. He returned to the Austrian embassy that afternoon to report to Vienna on his promising conversation with the kaiser, expecting to speak to Bethmann the following day.

  In addition to the chancellor, Wilhelm also summoned to the Neues Palais those of his military advisers to be found in Berlin. These included his own adjutant, General Hans von Plessen; General Moritz von Lyncker, chief of
the military cabinet; General Erich von Falkenhayn, the Prussian minister of war; and, to represent the navy in Tirpitz’s absence, a Captain Zenker. Once everyone had arrived, shortly after five PM, the kaiser read out the diplomatic notes Szögyény had presented him, and briefly summarized his conversation with the ambassador. He then opened the floor for discussion.

  There is no precise transcript of what was said at this historic 5 July audience in Potsdam, but several of the participants wrote accounts shortly afterwards, which give a good idea of what was—and was not—decided. First, General Plessen wrote in his diary that night that the gist of the Austrian diplomatic notes, as presented by the kaiser, was that “the Austrians are getting ready for a war with Serbia and want first to be sure of Germany.” Everyone was agreed, Plessen recalled, that “the sooner the Austrians make their move against Serbia the better.” The “prevailing opinion” in the room, he observed, was that “the Russians—though friends with Serbia—will not join in.” There was thus no need for extraordinary military preparations, and the kaiser would proceed with his annual July Baltic cruise as normal.11

  Falkenhayn’s recollection of the audience was somewhat different. In his report to Moltke—the chief of staff was still taking his spa cure at Carlsbad—the Prussian war minister said that the kaiser’s somewhat “hurried” presentation made it difficult to figure out exactly what the Austrians were up to. Unlike Plessen, Falkenhayn seems to have taken Berchtold’s two notes literally, noting that neither of them “speaks of the need for war, rather both expound ‘energetic’ action such as the conclusion of a treaty with Bulgaria, for which they would like to be certain of the support of the German Reich.” Overall, he told Moltke, “these documents did not succeed in convincing me that the Vienna government had taken any firm resolution.” Chancellor Bethmann, he added, “appears to have as little faith as I do that the Austrian government is really in earnest, even though its language is undeniably more resolute than in the past.”12

  Berchtold, it seemed, had outsmarted himself. By camouflaging his appeal for German support for a war with Serbia inside Tisza’s Balkan peace plan, he had allowed doubt to creep into German minds that Austria really intended to punish Belgrade. His oral instructions to Hoyos, passed on verbally to Szögyény, had been enough to convince the kaiser of the warlike intentions of the Ballplatz. The kaiser had even given oral—though not written—support for this policy. When forced to justify himself before the chancellor and military advisers, however, Wilhelm had apparently hedged. Plessen, who as the kaiser’s adjutant may have understood his sovereign’s manner of speaking better than the others, was able to intuit what the Austrians were about. Falkenhayn and Bethmann were not. So far as they knew, the Austrians were still full of empty talk.

  Count Hoyos had been sent to Berlin precisely to dispel any doubts about Austrian intentions. He did his utmost to do so. While Szögyény lunched with the kaiser on Sunday, Hoyos met with Arthur Zimmermann, the undersecretary of state, who, as Jagow’s top assistant, was something like Hoyos’s equivalent as chief of staff to Berchtold—and a good friend. Zimmermann, like Hoyos, was hawkish, which in the German case meant he was a proponent of “preventive war” against Russia. Seeking to impress his friend, Hoyos laid out a position even more aggressive than Conrad’s, telling Zimmermann that Austria was considering a “surprise attack [on Serbia] without preliminary preparation,” which would lead to a “partition of her territory among Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Albania.” Zimmermann, Hoyos claimed in his report, merely smiled at this and offered no objections. As the two men parted, Hoyos told his friend, as if in triumph, “you could not have believed that Austria-Hungary would quietly accept the murder of the heir apparent and do nothing about it.” Zimmermann, in his reply, pithily summed up the feelings of the German war party: “No, but we were a little afraid you might.”13

  Satisfying as this conversation must have been for Hoyos and Zimmermann, they were, after all, both subordinates in policymaking. The next day, they were summoned to a more serious audience with the chancellor, with Ambassador Szögyény also present. Bethmann, not unlike Berchtold in Vienna and Sazonov in Petersburg, was distrusted by his country’s war party. His policy of rapprochement with England was acceptable to German hawks, so long as it kept the British navy off Germany’s back in case of war. But the very priority Bethmann put on relations with England suggested a certain softness, as did his periodic efforts to derail Tirpitz’s naval building program. Hawks referred to the chancellor and his neurotic sovereign as “the two old women.”14 Foreign Secretary Grey and his English colleagues shared this opinion of Bethmann, seeing him as a voice for peace in Berlin—a view that hardly commended Bethmann to the generals. Moltke could not stand him. The chancellor had been a cipher during the Balkan wars, allowing the kaiser’s naturally feckless instincts to prevail. Wilhelm himself liked and trusted Bethmann, whom he had known since childhood, but at times Bethmann’s opposition to armaments spending—especially on the navy, a pet cause of the kaiser’s—annoyed even him.

  Bethmann Hollweg, Germany’s brooding chancellor. A pessimist at the best of times, he was in an even deeper funk than usual in summer 1914, following the death of his wife, Martha, in May. Source: Bain News Service, Library of Congress.

  A temperamental pessimist at the best of times, Bethmann was in an even deeper depression than usual that July. His beloved wife, Martha, whose natural sociability and good cheer had nicely balanced out the chancellor’s solitary tendencies, had died of internal hemorrhaging on 11 May after a protracted illness. Martha’s death dealt Bethmann a crushing blow. He was having trouble sleeping, was putting on weight, and was generally ill at ease. Bethmann had taken a long leave of absence at Hohenfinow after his wife’s death to recover his morale and would have preferred to spend the entire summer there if he could. First the press hysteria over the Anglo-Russian naval talks, then the Sarajevo outrage, and now the Hoyos mission had interrupted what might have been a prolonged country convalescence. A new Balkan crisis was the last thing Bethmann wanted.

  Arriving at the last minute to the audience with the kaiser on Sunday, Bethmann probably had been too exhausted from his trip to perceive quite how acute the situation was. Recovering his faculties after a good night’s sleep, Bethmann was sharper on Monday afternoon when he received Count Hoyos, Ambassador Szögyény, and Zimmermann. With Szögyény present, Hoyos could not be as blunt as he had been with Zimmermann the previous day, but together the two of them were able to convince Bethmann that Austria was serious. Because Bethmann left no record of the conversation, we have to follow Szögyény’s version of what the chancellor said—which, if accurate, suggested a dramatic shift in German policy. “With regard to our relations toward Serbia,” the ambassador reported to the Ballplatz, “the German government is of the opinion that we must judge for ourselves what is to be done. . . . Whatever we decide, we may reckon with certainty, that Germany will stand by our side as our ally.” As for Bethmann’s own view, Szögyény informed Berchtold that “the chancellor, like the kaiser, believes that immediate action on our part against Serbia offers the best and most decisive solution to our difficulties in the Balkans.” From the “international standpoint”—that is, the prospect of a European war—Bethmann also “considers the present moment as more favorable than some later time.”15 Better now than later: this was what Moltke and Conrad had been saying for years. Now, for the first time, Bethmann was saying it too.

  In this way first Kaiser Wilhelm II and then Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg furnished Austria with a blank check for immediate military action against Serbia. In doing so, they remained unaware that Tisza stood resolutely opposed to Berchtold over this very policy, which might put a serious damper on the “immediate” part. Had they known of Tisza’s opposition, the chancellor, at least, might have been more circumspect in offering such blanket support for an uncertain policy course to be pursued in Vienna, but it is hard to be certain about this. As far as we know, Beth
mann’s shift toward support for a dangerously aggressive Austrian line against Serbia was genuine, although tinged as always with his natural pessimism. “Better now than later” did not necessarily mean that things would get better—only that, if the Central Powers waited any longer before confronting the Entente with a test of strength, things were sure to get worse.

  As the kaiser prepared to leave on Monday morning, he summoned Germany’s top-ranking active-duty army and navy officers. With Moltke and Tirpitz still absent, he spoke instead with Admiral Eduard von Capelle, the acting chief of Naval Staff, and General Hermann von Bertrab from the General Staff. He informed them of Austria’s plans to take action against Serbia. To Bertrab, he emphasized that he did “not think that Russia will intervene, particularly in view of the cause [e.g., a regicide], the Tsar . . . will hardly ever decide to do so. His Majesty therefore regards the affair as in the first instance a purely Balkan concern.” To Capelle, the kaiser said that “Russia and France were not prepared for war.” Significantly, he did not mention England as something about which the German navy should be concerned. No preparatory military measures, the kaiser concluded, needed to be undertaken.16