July 1914: Countdown to War

by Sean McMeekin

  Sazonov may have been sincere in his desire to defuse tensions by negotiating directly with Austria. Whatever the foreign minister’s true intentions, however, his conciliatory stance vis-à-vis Pourtalès and Szapáry Sunday morning and early afternoon was belied by the acceleration of Russia’s mobilization measures during the day. At 1:55 PM, France’s liaison officer at Russian military headquarters, General Laguiche, had reported to the War Ministry in Paris:

  Yesterday at Krasnoe Selo the war minister confirmed to me the mobilization of the army corps of the military districts Kiev, Odessa, Kazan and Moscow. The endeavor is to avoid any measure likely to be regarded as directed against Germany, but nevertheless the military districts of Warsaw, Vilna, and St. Petersburg are secretly making preparations. The cities and governments of St. Petersburg and Moscow are declared to be under martial law. . . . The minister of war has reiterated to us his determination to leave to Germany the eventual initiative of an attack on Russia.22

  German and Austrian intelligence on Russia’s Period Preparatory to War was necessarily less solid than this inside account from an allied liaison officer. Nevertheless, by nightfall Sunday it was thorough enough that Pourtalès felt the need to confront Sazonov at Chorister’s Bridge, notwithstanding their friendly morning conversation on the train. At around nine PM, the German ambassador put in a formal protest with Russia’s foreign minister about “the news widely reported among the circles of foreign military attachés, according to which several Russian army corps have been sent toward the western border in accordance with a mobilization directive.” Sazonov, Pourtalès reported to Berlin, “replied that he could guarantee that no mobilization order had been given, and that none could be expected until Austria-Hungary undertook hostile measures against Russia.” Nevertheless, in an important caveat that seemed to contradict his first statement, the Russian conceded that “certain military measures . . . had been taken.”23

  At about the same time Sunday evening, Russia’s war minister summoned Major Eggeling for an urgent audience. Evidently aware of German suspicions, Sukhomlinov sought to defuse them by offering the German military attaché “his word of honor that no mobilization order had yet been issued.” Certain preparatory measures were, he conceded, underway, but Sukhomlinov insisted that “not a horse was being requisitioned, not a reservist called up.” This was a bald-faced lie, although, lacking hard evidence, the German would have been hard-pressed to prove this. Instead, Eggeling confined his own comments to warning Sukhomlinov that even Russian “mobilization against Austria alone must be regarded as very dangerous.” Overall, the military attaché reported to Army Chief of Staff Moltke of his frustrating audience with the Russian war minister: “I got the impression of great nervousness and anxiety. I consider the wish for peace genuine, military statements so far correct, that complete mobilization has probably not been ordered, but preparatory measures are very far-reaching.” The Russians, he concluded, “are evidently striving to gain time for new negotiations and for continuing their armaments.”24

  Time was exactly what the Germans did not have. The clock was already running out on the prospect of an Austrian fait accompli against Serbia. With Russia having begun her own war preparations—as it appeared, against both Austria and Germany—the clock was also beginning to tick on Germany’s own strategy in case of war, which required striking a decisive blow against France before Russia would be ready to invade East Prussia. Earlier Sunday, Moltke, architect of Germany’s latest mobilization plan, had returned to Berlin after a month-long spa holiday at Karlsbad. Tirpitz, naval secretary, was expected back on Monday from Switzerland—against the orders of Bethmann, who wanted to avoid the impression that Germany was taking any steps toward war. Kaiser Wilhelm II, likewise disregarding Bethmann’s request to remain with Germany’s Baltic fleet off the Norwegian coast, had just docked at Kiel, en route for Potsdam on the overnight train. As they awoke Monday, Bethmann and Jagow would have some quick thinking to do. News was flooding in from Belgrade, Vienna, Petersburg, Paris, and London. Almost none of it was what anyone in Berlin wanted to hear.

  17

  The Kaiser Returns

  MONDAY, 27 JULY

  CONSIDERING THE PROMINENT ROLE that Germany’s leaders had played in encouraging Austria to pursue her aggressive course in the Balkans, it is remarkable how insouciant they remained as that course grew more and more dangerous later in July. When Army Chief of Staff Moltke, Naval Secretary Tirpitz, and the kaiser returned to Berlin on Monday, 27 July, after long absences, they were expecting the chancellor to bring them rapidly up to speed. And yet Bethmann himself had been at his country estate at Hohenfinow until late Saturday afternoon. Earlier that day it had been Foreign Minister Jagow, not Bethmann, who had urged Vienna, via Austrian ambassador Szögyény, to declare war immediately. True, Bethmann was firmly behind the fait-accompli policy, but this did not mean that he was abreast of all the latest developments. Indeed the chancellor had not seen the text of the Austrian ultimatum before it was sent to Belgrade on Thursday. Nor had he yet seen the text of the Serbian reply—nor even, it appears, requested that he be apprised of it. It was as if the author of Germany’s blank check to Austria was not interested in how the check was filled in, so long as she cashed it. Having helped to unleash the Austrians in all their blustering incompetence, Bethmann may also have been wary of examining too closely the consequences of his folly.

  By the time he returned to Berlin Saturday night, those consequences were beginning to come into focus. Serbia and Austria had mobilized against each other, while Russia had backed Belgrade with some kind of secret military preparations of her own. French and British intentions were murky, but there were no especially positive signs from either of those directions. Localization looked to be hanging by a thread. Not trusting the nerves of his erratic sovereign, Bethmann played down the seriousness of the situation in his first dispatches to the kaiser. While he did inform Wilhelm II on Saturday night that Serbia’s reply had been deemed unsatisfactory and that Austria’s minister, Giesl, had left Belgrade, Bethmann made no mention of Russia’s early steps toward mobilization, nor that Serbia had mobilized against Austria even before the ultimatum deadline expired.1

  In a Sunday afternoon telegram, the chancellor did pass on General von Chelius’s report from Petersburg that the Saturday military review at Krasnoe Selo had broken off and that regiments were returning to quarters (which report, he knew, the kaiser would have heard about from his military advisers). Still, Bethmann insisted that, Chelius’s report aside, “there was still no authenticated news on the Russian posture.”2 At around eight PM Sunday evening, just before Germany’s Ambassador Pourtalès and Military Attaché Eggeling issued formal protests at Russia’s secret mobilization, Bethmann wired the kaiser that the Russians were “visibly hesitating” (although he gave no source for the claim). There was thus no need to return home, much less dock the fleet at Kiel, as he had heard Wilhelm proposed to do.3

  The kaiser was having none of this. As supreme warlord he had his own sources of information, via the Admiralty and the army, which allowed him to see through Bethmann’s sugarcoating of the situation. In the kaiser’s marginal notes on these telegrams, we can trace a mounting exasperation with Bethmann that finally broke on Sunday. What angered Wilhelm most was that he had finally learned that day of the text of Austria’s Thursday ultimatum to Belgrade—not from Jagow or Bethmann, but from the Wolff news agency. The kaiser then ordered Germany’s Baltic fleet to return to Kiel, ostensibly taking this precautionary measure—the Admiralty reported to Berlin—in reaction to the “Wolff telegram.” When Bethmann, citing this rumor back to the kaiser, “ventured most humbly to advise that Your Majesty order no premature return of the Fleet,” Wilhelm exploded, writing on the margins of his chancellor’s telegram:

  Unbelievable assumption! Unheard of! It never entered my mind!!! [The return of the fleet to Kiel] was done on report of my minister about the mobilization at Belgrade! This may cause the mob
ilization of Russia; will cause mobilization of Austria. In this case I shall keep my fighting forces by land and sea collected. In the Baltic there is not a single ship! Moreover, I am not accustomed to take military measures on the strength of one Wolff telegram, but on that of the general situation, and that situation the Civilian Chancellor does not yet grasp.4

  Wilhelm II often adopted exaggerated poses playing All-Highest Warlord, but in this case his chiding of his “civilian” chancellor was not far from the mark. Bethmann, whom everyone knew to be a habitual pessimist, was fooling no one with his pose of affected calm, his reassurances that localization was working. When the chancellor sent a second message urging the kaiser to return to his Norwegian cruise and disperse the fleet—this is the telegram in which he claimed that Russia was “visibly hesitating”—Wilhelm underlined the word “hesitating” (schwankend) twice, asking rhetorically in the margins, “and from where do you infer this? Not from any of the materials laid before me.” Besides, as the supreme warlord informed his civilian chancellor, “There exists a Russian fleet! In the Baltic now on exercises there are five Russian torpedo boat flotillas, all or part of which could in sixteen hours be in a position . . . to cut [German naval] communications.” “My fleet,” the kaiser admonished his chancellor, “has orders to proceed to Kiel, and to Kiel it shall go!”5

  With impressive stubbornness, Bethmann responded to this hectoring by sending his sovereign one last, deliberately misleading telegram before he had to greet him Monday afternoon (the kaiser had insisted that the chancellor meet him at Potsdam’s Wildpark Station). In a remarkably optimistic reading of the diplomatic situation, Bethmann reported that “Austria seems not to be able to begin war operations until 12 August,” as Conrad had informed Germany’s Ambassador Tschirschky on Sunday; that Serbia “seems to intend to stand entirely on the defensive,” while also having offered what was reported to be a fairly conciliatory reply to the ultimatum (but which Bethmann had not yet read); that England and France were “desirous of peace”; and, most important, that “Russia on the latest reports seems not yet to be mobilizing and to be willing for negotiations with Vienna.”6 While none of these statements was literally untrue, taken together they were far from the whole truth, as anyone who had read even a few recent dispatches would have known. Small wonder that Bethmann, upon greeting his sovereign at Wildpark Station at one PM Monday afternoon, appeared “pale and wretched.” “How did it all happen?” the kaiser asked him. Bethmann, recalled Count August Eulenberg, one of Wilhelm’s confidants, “utterly cowed, admitted that all along he had been deceived and offered the kaiser his resignation.” His Majesty answered: “You’ve cooked this broth and now you’re going to eat it.”7

  Of course, Kaiser Wilhelm II himself was hardly devoid of responsibility for Germany’s disastrous diplomacy in July. It was he, not Bethmann, who had first offered the Austrian ambassador a blanket promise of support on Sunday, 5 July; he who, just like Bethmann, had all along urged speedy, decisive action against Serbia; and he who, like Bethmann, had failed to take the slightest interest in the text of the Austrian ultimatum before it was too late to revise it. In fact, so far from wishing that Austria modify its terms to make them acceptable to Belgrade, when one of Wilhelm’s ambassadors (Baron Schoen in Paris) had suggested that Austria do this to win international sympathy, the kaiser had furiously scribbled in the margins: “Ultimata are either accepted, or they are not! There is no discussion! That is why they have the name!” (Wilhelm may have been unaware of just how much effort the Austrians had put into denying that their “note with a time limit” was an ultimatum.)8 In truth the kaiser, Bethmann, and (after he returned from his honeymoon) Jagow had cooked up the broth together. They, along with Germany’s military service chiefs, would now eat it.

  SHORTLY AFTER THREE PM on Monday afternoon, Moltke and Jagow arrived in Potsdam to meet with the kaiser and the chancellor. Although Tirpitz was not called in, Admiral Müller, chief of the naval cabinet, attended in his stead. In view of the momentous developments of recent days, this should have been a council of decisive importance. With Austrian and Serbian mobilizations underway, Germany’s civilian and military leaders needed urgently to decide what posture to take regarding a prospective war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia. Next in importance was how to respond to reports of a secret early mobilization in Russia. There was also British foreign secretary Grey’s four-power conference proposal; whether or not Germany would play along fully, she needed at least to finesse the issue so as to prevent an open breach with Britain. While input from everyone was needed, it was up to Bethmann to get everyone on the same page and devise a sensible policy course. No one else had access to all the reports pouring into Berlin; no one else had the urgent duty, as head of government, to make sense of them.The chancellor, alas, was not up to the job. Unless it entirely escaped everyone’s recollection afterwards, neither Bethmann nor Jagow seems to have mentioned Pourtalès’s report of his dramatic Sunday evening confrontation with Russian foreign minister Sazonov, deciphered in Berlin just past ten PM, nor Eggeling’s report of his frustrating encounter with War Minister Sukhomlinov, which reached the Wilhelmstrasse at two thirty AM on Monday. Instead the basis for discussion remained Pourtalès’s earlier, more optimistic Sunday telegram in which he had surmised that Sazonov was “losing his nerve.” Bethmann seems also to have seized on a Sunday night report from Ambassador Schoen, in Paris, that Prime Minister Viviani was going to try to exercise a moderating influence in St. Petersburg (how the French premier would do this from the Baltic Sea was left unsaid).9 Meanwhile Grey’s four-power proposal, however unattractive to the Germans’ localization policy, could be and was interpreted as a sign that England was keen to prevent a European war, even if her method of doing so was questionable. Then, too, the rumor that Serbia’s reply to the Austrian ultimatum had been mild—agreeing on “nearly all points,” as Bethmann had wired the kaiser Monday morning—suggested that there might be a way out of the diplomatic impasse (strangely, however, Bethmann had still not bothered to read the actual reply, although a copy had arrived at the Wilhelmstrasse late Sunday evening).10 Put together in this selective fashion, the documents available as of early Monday afternoon, 27 July, were reassuring enough as to lull Bethmann into a posture of complacency.

  He was not alone in adopting this attitude. Before heading to Potsdam, Moltke had written to his wife that “the situation continues to be extremely obscure. . . . It will be about another fortnight before anything definite can be decided.”11 While no transcript of the Potsdam meeting survives, the evidence we do have suggests that nothing transpired there that jolted Moltke or the others awake. As General Plessen, the kaiser’s adjutant, recorded in his diary afterwards: “The Austrians are not nearly ready! It will be the beginning of August before operations can begin. It is hoped to localize the war! England declares she means to remain neutral. I have the impression that it will all blow over.”12 Müller, likewise, wrote after the meeting that “the tenor of our policy is to remain calm. To allow Russia to put herself in the wrong, but then not to shrink from war if it were inevitable.”13 The Potsdam council of Monday, 27 July, resolved nothing. The Germans would wait and see.

  Viewed in the context of what was going on elsewhere in Europe on that very day, the passive posture of Germany’s leaders seems astonishing. Monday morning at seven AM, the British First and Second Fleets, fortuitously concentrated at Portland Harbor off Dorset on the southern coast of England, had been scheduled to disperse following a test mobilization. On Sunday, Churchill, first lord of the Admiralty, had ordered them to stay in Portland. This “holding together” of the fleet fell well short of actual mobilization, but it was still a serious measure that kept Britain’s main naval forces facing Germany together.14 Russia’s secret mobilization was also gathering steam on Monday. A full Russian artillery division was observed marching westwards from Kiev. From Riga, German intelligence reported that the Düna (Dvina) River had been mined; all rolling st
ock had been commandeered for the army. Closer still to Berlin, the German consul in Warsaw telegraphed at three forty-five PM on 27 July:

  ALL TROOPS HAVE BEEN RECALLED FROM MANEUVERS STOP MUCH INFANTRY INCLUDING ALSO CAVALRY UNITS WERE SENT VIA THE BREST STATION TOWARDS LUBLIN AND KOVEL STOP THE ENTIRE NIGHT HUNDREDS OF MILITARY VEHICLES WENT UP AND DOWN THE AVENUE OF BREST-LITOVSK . . . YESTERDAY THE ARTILLERY STORES IN THE CITADEL BLEW SKY HIGH.15

  Finally, and most significantly, Ambassador Tschirschky reported Monday afternoon from Vienna that, contrary to the previous day’s report that Berchtold was going to wait before declaring war, the Austrians, “in order to cut the ground out from any attempt at intervention,” would “make an official declaration of war [on Serbia] tomorrow, or at the latest the day after tomorrow.”16

  Rarely has a statesman been so far off the mark in reading the international situation as Bethmann was on Monday afternoon, 27 July. How could he have been so wrong? One possibility is that, just as he had sugarcoated his dispatches to the kaiser on Saturday and Sunday, he wanted to keep Wilhelm in the dark on Monday, so as to prevent his nervous sovereign from intervening to restrain the Austrians from invading Serbia. Buttressing this theory is the fact that Jagow, shortly after the Potsdam meeting, called in Britain’s ambassador, Sir Edward Goschen, to reject Grey’s mediation proposal.17 There is also Bethmann’s strange incuriosity about the text of the Serbian reply, which he neither read nor presented at the Potsdam meeting. The text would not finally be dispatched to Potsdam until nine thirty PM Monday, and even then not by wire but by private courier. By the time it reached the Neues Palais, Wilhelm was in bed. Germany’s sovereign would thus not see Serbia’s reply until Tuesday, 28 July—nearly three days after it had been handed over to Giesl in Belgrade. Some of the delay can be attributed to difficulties in transcribing and decoding the text (a Wilhelmstrasse log entry says the telegram from Vienna containing it was “somewhat illegible”).18 But it is also likely that Jagow and Bethmann deliberately delayed its delivery to the kaiser, whom they expected might be impressed by its moderate wording and then seek to call off the Austro-Serbian war.