July 1914: Countdown to War

by Sean McMeekin

  The most delicate part of Bethmann’s presentation concerned Belgium. Here the case rested on the specious claim that “France stood ready for an invasion” and that, owing to Germany being encircled, “France could wait, we could not.” For this reason, Bethmann explained awkwardly, “we were forced to ignore the rightful protests of the Governments of Luxembourg and Belgium.” In a stunning admission, Germany’s chancellor admitted that the violation of Belgian territory was “a breach of international law”—the same “international law” he had just invoked to condemn French behavior. Bethmann then went still further, promising that this “wrong (unrecht)—I speak openly—the wrong we thereby commit we will try to make good as soon as our military aims have been attained.” To explain why Germany had been “forced” to commit a wrong, Bethmann argued that “he who is menaced as we are and is fighting for his highest values, can only consider how he is to hack his way through” (sich durchhaut). Although Tirpitz, for one, thought the brazen honesty of this confession of wrongdoing constituted “the greatest blunder ever spoken by a German statesman,” the Reichstag deputies did not agree: they broke into “great and repeated applause.”

  Having made his way through the most difficult issue, the chancellor addressed the matter of British neutrality. Citing Sir Edward Grey’s speech before the Commons, Bethmann reiterated Lichnowsky’s promise that the German fleet would not “attack the northern coast of France, and that we will not violate the territorial integrity and independence of Belgium”—that is, in any postwar settlement. These assurances, the chancellor continued, “I now repeat before the world.” He then concluded:

  now the great hour of trial has struck for our people. But with clear conviction we go forward to meet it. Our army is in the field, our navy is ready for battle—behind them stands the entire German nation—the entire German nation united down to the last man.

  The applause was deafening. Amidst “frantic applause and highest enthusiasm,” Reichstag party leaders rose as one to vote war credits—even Hugo Haase, on behalf of the Social Democrats.8 Just as in France, Socialist internationalism had evaporated in a frenzy of patriotism.

  On Bethmann’s instructions, the passage in his speech addressed to Britain was wired immediately to Lichnowsky in London—en clair, so that the British could read it themselves.9 Even now, the chancellor had not given up his dreams of reconciliation with England. True, Bethmann may not have been thinking clearly, as suggested by his desperate and self-indicting revelations before the Reichstag. Beaten down a week earlier when the folly of his fait-accompli policy first became apparent, the chancellor had given the appearance to Tirpitz of a “drowning man.”10

  The illusion was not all Bethmann’s fault, however. His hopes for British neutrality had been encouraged all along by Grey, who had twice promised neutrality on Saturday and told Lichnowsky on Monday morning that Britain “would like, if at all possible, to remain neutral.” Even after his supposedly decisive speech in the Commons on Monday afternoon, Grey’s wire to Goschen Tuesday morning contained only a pro forma protest against Germany’s violation of Belgian neutrality, giving no hint of armed intervention. One can hardly blame Bethmann for thinking that the British might, still, stay out.

  After dithering for days, however, Sir Edward Grey had finally gotten his act together. As against his earlier vague or misleading communications with the Germans, the ultimatum he wired to Berlin at two PM on Tuesday contained no grounds for ambiguity. When Sir Edward Goschen arrived at the Wilhelmstrasse at seven PM, he informed Jagow calmly and clearly that, failing a German vow to disengage from Belgium by midnight, he would be forced to ask for his passports: Britain meant war. The state secretary replied that, unfortunately, he could not give such an assurance, even if Germany were given twenty-four (rather than five) hours to reply. Jagow then, Goschen reported to Grey, expressed “poignant regret at the crumbling of his entire policy and that of the Chancellor, which had been to make friends with Great Britain.” He then “begged” Goschen to call on Bethmann, the man who had waged—and lost—so much on the mirage of British neutrality.

  Sir Edward Goschen was gentleman enough to comply with Jagow’s wish, although he regretted his decision almost immediately. The ambassador found Bethmann “very agitated.” Goschen knew that the chancellor had staked his policy—his very reputation—on rapprochement with England, a policy that had now “tumbled down like a house of cards.” Goschen’s ultimatum, Bethmann kept repeating, was “terrible, terrible.” Simply for the word “neutrality,” he complained—“a word which in war-time has so often been disregarded—just for a scrap of paper, Great Britain was going to make war on a kindred nation who desired nothing better than to be friends with her.” Britain’s taking up arms against Germany in the current war, he fumed, “was like striking a man from behind while he was fighting for his life against two assailants.” Goschen countered that Britain’s “solemn engagement” to defend Belgium’s neutrality was just as much “a matter of ‘life and death’ for the honor of Great Britain” as it was supposedly “a matter of life and death for Germany to advance through Belgium.” Bethmann, in turn, asked “at what price will that compact have been kept. Has the British Government thought of that?” By this point Bethmann was “so excited, so evidently overcome by the news of our action and so little disposed to hear reason” that Goschen decided to end the interview so as not to “add fuel to the flame by further argument.” According to Bethmann, it was Goschen who was overcome and “burst into tears.” They both may have done so.11 In four hours, the two greatest military powers in the world, Germany and Great Britain, would be at war.

  EVEN AS THESE EVENTS were taking place, a fascinating drama was underway in the Mediterranean over the fate of the SMS Goeben, the dreadnought that Germany’s Ambassador Wangenheim had requested be ordered to proceed to Constantinople. Wangenheim’s objective was to give ammunition to the war party in the Ottoman government, which, despite signing an alliance treaty with Berlin on Sunday, had still not declared war on Russia. At nine thirty AM Tuesday, while Grey was being authorized by the cabinet to send an ultimatum to Berlin, the Goeben, commanded by Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, and its support cruiser, the Breslau, had come into range of the superior British dreadnoughts Indomitable and Indefatigable. Because Britain was not at war, her ships could not fire. Throughout the day, as Grey waited for his answer from Berlin, Souchon raced across the Mediterranean for neutral Sicily, riding his coalstokers so hard in the August heat that four men died from exhaustion. At five PM, just as Ambassador Goschen was receiving his instructions from London, Souchon slipped out of firing range of the British warships. At seven PM, as Goschen was arriving at the Wilhelmstrasse to deliver Grey’s ultimatum, a fog descended off the Sicilian coast. At nine PM, as the ambassador’s tearful audience with the German chancellor was concluding, only three hours before Britain would declare war, the Goeben and Breslau disappeared from British view in the thickening fog.12 While no one knew it yet, Souchon’s lucky escape would allow the dreadnought Goeben shortly to reach Constantinople, neatly canceling out Churchill’s commandeering of the Sultan Osman I for Britain and making all but certain the entry of the Ottoman Empire into the war as a co-belligerent of Germany—thereby spreading the war to the Middle East, with consequences still being felt today.

  * Having not received Grey’s ultimatum yet, Bethmann still harbored hope that he could make a case for a just, defensive war that might impress London.

  EPILOGUE: THE QUESTION OF RESPONSIBILITY

  IF THE OUTBREAK OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR WAS, as Winston Churchill wrote, “a drama never surpassed,” its first month was only slightly less dramatic.1 After the initial disaster at Liège, the Germans regrouped and crashed violently through Belgium into northern France, very nearly reaching Paris before being pitched back by the French armies (with an assist from the British) at the Battle of the Marne in early September. On the eastern front, Russia’s earlier-than-expected offensives against both Austri
an Galicia and East Prussia allowed Moltke finally to persuade Conrad to abandon Plan B and reroute Austria’s 2nd Army northward to Galicia at a crucial stage in the Serbian campaign. Russia received her own comeuppance at Tannenberg, in East Prussia, in late August, when most of Samsonov’s 2nd Army was encircled and destroyed by the Germans. Despite the possibilities opened up by a war of movement in the conflict’s first month, neither of the two warring coalitions could achieve a decisive advantage. In the West, the outnumbered Germans took the high ground and dug in behind fortified positions; in the East the Russians proved they could beat the Austrians but not the Germans.

  With both sides thinking they could win, periodic peace parleys came to nothing. So evenly matched were the belligerent coalitions that the recruitment of allies—Turkey and Bulgaria for the Central Powers; Italy, Romania, and Greece for the Entente—scarcely disturbed the stalemate. Only in 1917, when the United States came in and Russia dropped out, was there a prospect of victory for either side—and even then the two events nearly cancelled out, so the carnage continued for another year. By 1918, the war had rung up a butcher’s bill of nearly nine million dead and as many wounded, and had brought about the grisly end of empires that had endured for centuries. Millions more died in the Russian Revolution and Civil War, in the bloodletting surrounding the collapse of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, and of course in the Second World War, born of Hitler’s ambition to refight the First.

  Why did all this happen? As one learns from standard textbooks, a number of long-term structural factors made the catastrophe of 1914 possible. The deadliness of the conflict required the rise of mass conscription armies along with industrialization and the improvement of weapons of death, resulting in that strange gap between “weight and mobility” that made it difficult for armies to maneuver quickly enough to take advantage of modern firepower and that gave such a decisive advantage to entrenched defenders. In diplomacy, one can go back to the Austrian-Russian break in the Crimean War to unravel the skein of causation that led to the creation, by the early twentieth century, of two alliance blocs of nearly equal strength, with Britain leaning toward (but not quite joining) one side owing to Germany’s foolish naval buildup.

  None of this structural background, however, is sufficient to explain what happened in 1914. Mass conscription and the arms race were not less advanced during the First Bosnian Crisis of 1908–1909 and the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913. France and Russia were just as free to determine whether or not to go to war in 1914 as in all previous years of their military alliance dating back to 1894. Austria had just as much interest in cutting Serbia down to size in 1912 and 1913 as she did in 1914; the Germans had no particular interest in the Balkans in any of these years. Russia could have found cause to go to war over Serbia—or the Straits—in 1908, 1909, 1912–1913, or the winter of 1913–1914, during the Liman von Sanders crisis. Britain, having decisively won her naval race with Germany by 1914, could easily have stayed out of this Balkan imbroglio, as she had in all previous ones.

  Absent the Sarajevo incident, a great power war might still have broken out at some point in 1914 or shortly thereafter. But there are good reasons to think otherwise. Without the diplomatic crisis born of Sarajevo, France would have remained consumed by the Caillaux affair in July 1914—until Caillaux’s wife was acquitted, which would have paved the way for a triumphant Caillaux-Jaurès cabinet. Caillaux and Jaurès, to emasculate the president, might have exposed Russia’s covert subsidies for Poincaré’s election campaign. Whether or not they succeeded in jettisoning the Franco-Russian alliance in favor of détente with Germany, their tussle with the president would have lit up the political skies. The French political and strategic landscape of 1915 might have looked very different from the one in July–August 1914.

  This was just as true in Great Britain. Before the July crisis sparked by Sarajevo, the drift in British diplomacy was toward rapprochement with Germany and growing tensions with Russia over Persia. Absent Sarajevo, this trend would have continued. More important, the Home Rule crisis over Ireland was building toward a climax in summer 1914. There is no telling how it would have ended. Catholic Ireland might have taken up arms against the Protestant Ulstermen, or vice versa. The threat of Irish civil war might have split the British army into hostile factions, as nearly happened anyway after Curragh. Or Churchill might have sent in the navy again, this time in anger (in March, he had vowed privately to “pour enough shot and shell into Belfast to reduce it to ruins”), to enforce Home Rule. In any case, without Sarajevo and the war it sparked, Irish affairs would have preoccupied British statesmen for years.

  Absent the murder of the heir to the throne in 1914, Austria-Hungary would still have seethed with ethnic tensions. She would not, however, have gone to war with Serbia, for one very simple reason: Franz Ferdinand, who had blocked Conrad every single time he had advocated doing so—all twenty-five of them in 1913 alone!—would have remained alive. The archduke, who cared little for the opinion of others, was nothing if not stubborn. One could imagine him getting angry after surviving an assassination attempt in Sarajevo—if, say, his car had not taken the wrong turn onto Franz-Josef Strasse. He would almost certainly have cursed Serbia, and Serbs, once he learned who was behind the plot. But then, he already hated Serbs, which had not prevented him from developing an almost religious aversion to the idea of war with Serbia. If anything, surviving a murder attempt would have strengthened his conviction that Hungary was to blame for the ills plaguing the dual monarchy, owing to her persecution of racial minorities. The archduke might have pulled off his longed-for Austrian reconciliation with Romania, quieting tensions in the Balkans. Or his quarrel with Tisza might have plunged the dual monarchy into a crisis between Hungary and Austria. Or some combination of the two. What Austria would not have done was fight a war with Serbia.2

  As for the Germans, absent Sarajevo, there remains a lingering suspicion that Moltke would have continued advocating a preventive war with Russia before the latter’s Great Program came to fruition in 1917. But then he, and other hawks at the General Staff and Wilhelmstrasse, had pushed for such a war before 1914, too, without success. Moltke was not sovereign of Germany; he was not even her chancellor. There is no evidence—none—that either Bethmann or Kaiser Wilhelm II—the “two old women,” as German hawks called them—advocated Präventivkrieg before the Sarajevo incident nor, indeed, after it.

  The idea that Berlin’s strategic position was uniquely favorable for war in 1914 is absurd. By 1912, Germany had decisively lost the naval race with Britain. As recently as 1911, her position vis-à-vis France and Russia had been reasonably strong, but France’s Three-Year Law, and Russia’s recent acceleration of her mobilization schedule under French pressure, had already wiped out any advantage Germany might accrue from her speedier deployment even before the Great Program would take effect. In 1914, the Austro-German strategic position was, in the words of military historian Terence Zuber, “nearing a ‘worst possible case’ scenario.” Indeed German planners, recognizing that they were decisively outnumbered on both fronts, were hoping to add six corps to the peacetime army by 1915 (if the Reichstag would pay for this), which might have restored parity, as France was already scraping the bottom of the recruitment barrel, conscripting nearly 90 percent of her available manpower. Expansion of the army could have given the Germans decisive superiority on the western front, with enough covering troops in the east to hold off any Russian attack.3 This would have soured even Poincaré on the strategic point of a Russian alliance. Or real détente with a Caillaux-Jaurès ministry in Paris might have ended the Franco-German arms race altogether. If any, all, or none of these scenarios transpired, Moltke—or the belligerent Prussian minister of war, Falkenhayn—might still have bent the kaiser’s ear with pleas for preventive war. They would not have been listened to. Talk of Präventivkrieg among German generals was qualitatively no different than French whispers of revanche in Alsace-Lorraine, Conrad’s entreaties that Austria must cr
ush Serbia, or Russian conferences plotting the conquest of Constantinople. Talk was talk. It was not war.

  With St. Petersburg, it is easier to imagine alternative scenarios leading her into war in 1914. With the Sultan Osman I scheduled to arrive in the Bosphorus in July, the clock was ticking—as soon as Turkey floated a single dreadnought, Russia’s “Straits window” would close for the foreseeable future. This fear, even more than the Liman von Sanders crisis, is what prompted the strategic planning conference of February 1914 focused on the Ottoman Empire, and Sazonov’s demand, following the Sarajevo outrage, for up-to-date information on the timetable for an amphibious strike on Constantinople. Even absent the assassination of the Habsburg heir, some kind of crisis over Turkey’s dreadnoughts would have come to a head for Russia in summer 1914.