Tannenberg: Clash of Empires, 1914 (Cornerstones of Military History)

by Dennis Showalter

  Whatever the soldiers’ opinions, in the aftermath of Sarajevo the Austrian foreign office had no doubt that a direct Austro-Serbian confrontation would pose a significant challenge to Russia. An Austrian success would be more than an object lesson to the rest of the Balkan states. It would diminish Russia’s diplomatic position in the region for years to come. Austria’s insouciant unconcern for the possibility of Russian intervention in the July Crisis, has been interpreted as a reaction to German pressures and as a response to German guarantees of support too often absent in the recent history of the Dual Alliance. It has been presented as a failure of crisis management, as a psychological response to a “catalytic situation,” and as a failure of judgment and imagination.46 An alternate hypothesis involves Austria’s recognition that Serbia was more than a stalking horse for Russian ambitions in the Near East. Russia at her most assertive still had general interests to defend and a general position to threaten. Serbia’s focus was local. A regional power prepared to risk all to gain all can achieve much against a far stronger rival whose behavior is constrained by a broader spectrum of pressure points. And Vienna’s decision makers were increasingly convinced that whatever might be her policies at a given moment, Serbia ultimately had no interest in a peaceful solution to the Balkan question.

  Since 1912, Austria’s Serbian policy had been steadily militarized—and not merely, as Samuel Williamson suggests, because mailed-fist diplomacy worked on specific occasions.47 The Habsburg Empire was increasingly perceived, by its small neighbors and its own generals alike, as unable to assert itself militarily in the Balkan Peninsula without a significant effort. In April, 1914, the ambassador to Bucharest told his German colleague that in case of a European war, twelve of Austria’s sixteen corps would be pinned in the Balkans to counter the combined armies of Rumania and Serbia. Four only would remain to stand by the side of the Second Reich.48 These figures, though exaggerated, nevertheless reflected the Balkan states’ development into formidable enemies on their home ground, able and willing to mobilize armies a quarter-million strong and larger in pursuit of their national interests. They were correspondingly unlikely to modify or abandon those interests for the sake of words alone.49

  From an Austrian perspective Serbia in particular seemed responsive to nothing but force. Whatever the long-term limits to her economic development, in recent decades Serbia’s rate of growth had been close to Europe’s average. She no longer depended on Austrian credit or Austrian trading connections.50 Economic sanctions had proved futile in the Pig War of 1906–09. Economic concessions in the commercial treaty of 1909 had brought no better result. Repeated pledges from Belgrade to end subversive propaganda had been shown to be so many scraps of paper. Great-power diplomacy as advocated by the Germans since 1912 appeared an even deader end. What remained to discuss with an adversary whose ultimate goal was nothing less than the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire itself? In November, 1913, Bechtold had moodily expressed belief that the solution to the Serbian problem would either leave only remnants of the present Serbian state or would shake Austria to its foundations. Eight months later it represented no obvious surrender to militarism to decide that Austria’s hawks were being proved right by the course of events, that it was the conciliators, the peace advocates, the internationalists, who inhabited the airy empire of dreams.51

  Austria’s relative delay in acting against Serbia reflected neither domestic discords nor dependance on German behavior. It was rather a product of calculation based on experience. Had the Dual Monarchy moved promptly in the aftermath of the assassination, demanding redress, moving troops to the frontier, occupying Belgrade, would not an outraged chorus have been raised against trigger-happy Habsburgs endangering the common good by overreacting to what was, after all, an isolated incident whose ultiimate responsibility was uncertain? In England, for example, the virulently Austrophobic Wickham Steed of the London Times insisted from the beginning that all was not as it seemed, that the Habsburg warmongers might well use Sarajevo as a pretext to destroy Serbia, that perhaps the assassination itself might have been stage-managed.52

  Better by far to take pains. Not until July 23 did Austria present its ultimatum to Serbia. There can be no questioning the nature of that document. Sir Edward Grey’s characterization of it as “the most formidable ... I had ever seen addressed from one State to another that was independent”53 indicated the clarity of Austria’s intentions: to establish beyond any chance of misunderstanding the difference between a great state and a minor one, almost certainly through force of arms. Yet by the summer of 1914 Austria had increasingly moved away from a great-power mentality and begun adopting de facto the position and attitude of a regional power.54 If during the July Crisis Austria’s policy makers acted virtually as if Russia did not exist, this reflected a fact too uncomfortable to be considered, let alone acknowledged: Austria could no longer function autonomously in an European context. She could no longer afford the luxury of balancing local sacrifices against maintaining a general order benefitting all the larger states in the European system. The Serbian boil must be lanced. The consequences of that action were tacitly accepted as being beyond Vienna’s control. Russia’s army had become as irrelevant as Germany’s blank check.

  The Serbian government was initially thrown into confusion by Austria’s ultimatum. Coming a month after the assassination, from a state that for years had seemed able to do nothing but bluster, it seemed not merely anticlimactic but unfair. Paši was away from Belgrade when the note was delivered. With his return tentative support for accepting Austria’s demands in their entirety for the sake of peace faded. Serbia’s final reply, delivered on July 25, was a model of injured dignity and studied moderation. Generally conciliatory, it nevertheless insisted that participation of Austro-Hungarian officials in the investigation of Franz Ferdinand’s murder was incompatible with Serbia’s position as a sovereign state. Since Austria had demanded complete acceptance, her ambassador to Belgrade declared the answer unsatisfactory and left for Vienna at 6:30 p.m. the same evening.

  Serbia’s hard-line attitude was a product less of confidence in Russia than of her history as an independent state. Since at least the 1840s Serbian foreign policy had been characterized by a strong irredentist streak. Whether as a Slavic Piedmont, as the nucleus of a Greater Serbia, or the matrix of a Yugoslav kingdom, Serbia’s future transcended existing boundaries. Now Serbia’s hour of destiny was upon her. The wine was drawn and must be drunk. It is no accident that the dates on the tomb of Yugoslavia’s unknown soldier are 1912 and 1918; for Serbia World War I at least began as the Third Balkan War.55

  Nor did Serbia’s coming election encourage moderation. After so many years of uninterrupted nationalist enthusiasm, what politician wished to face his constituents with a record of showing the white feather to Austria’s challenge? Pushing forward into the unknown offered grave risks but corresponding opportunities.

  Rejection of Austria’s demand to participate in the investigation was encouraged, finally, by a general sense of anxiety about what the foreigners might find. The tracks of the archduke’s killers did not lead directly to Belgrade. A Serbian government exhausted by war and preoccupied with absorbing its newly acquired territories had no interest in specifically provoking any kind of quarrel with Austria in the summer of 1914, to say nothing of giving such spectacular offense as murdering the heir to its throne. The exact nature and extent of Serbian involvement in the assassination vanished in the labyrinth of intrigue and counterintrigue that marked the government’s relationship with its intelligence service. There is evidence that some officials were aware before the Sarejevo murders that something involving clandestine operations in the Habsburg Empire was in the wind. Paši himself sent a vaguely-worded caution to Vienna, which promptly got lost in the Habsburg bureaucracy. But confrontation, to say nothing of disclosure, had obvious risks. Given Serbia’s long history of conspiratorial politics, could any cabinet minister or parliamentary deputy be sure exactl
y what all of his colleagues were doing? Might not an excessively rigorous inquiry into the activity of one’s associates prove physically as well as politically dangerous? The patriotic secret societies had proved their ruthlessness time and time again. It seemed by far the better part of valor and prudence alike to play the role of innocence outraged, and hope for the best.56

  Serbia’s increasing regional pretentions and Austria’s increasing regional focus put an unexpected strain on Germany’s continental visions. Most analyses of the July Crisis present the German chancellor as either a pessimistic fatalist who allowed events to take their course, or a willing initiator of a war designed to stabilize German society, confirm German military superiority and expand German influence throughout the world. At best he emerges as a man running a calculated risk, pursuing defensive ends with offensive means, his claims of supporting Germany’s last ally strongly contradicted by a dynamic, imperialist thrust towards European hegemony and eventual world domination.57

  Without denying the existence of a strong will at official levels to extend Germany’s influence by force of arms, support for such an extension was rather negative than positive. Bethmann himself had argued for years that even threats of war were criminal unless Germany’s honor, security, and future were inextricably involved. On June 4 he informed the Bavarian minister in Berlin that a world war was not likely to improve Germany’s domestic position, and that the time for a preventive war, if it ever existed, had passed in 1905.58

  Such statements cannot be dismissed out of hand as window-dressing. For a state dominated by the rhetoric of belligerence, a state constantly in diplomatic conflict with her neighbors, Germany in 1914 was surprisingly unready for the contingency of a major war. A. J. P. Taylor’s argument that the entente would have weakened over the next few years had war not occurred, that Germany in fact jumped the gun in 1914, is credible only in the context of the kind of cold, long-range calculations on general policy that were conspicuously absent in Berlin.59 Like their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, the generals and diplomats of the Second Reich were a long way from being unreconstructed warmongers. They accepted Germany’s capacity to win any future war. They accepted the fact that this victory would correspondingly enhance Germany’s continental and global position. But the moral and physical risks and costs were far too great to be accepted voluntarily, much less sought out or planned for.

  Wilhelm Groener’s sarcastic postwar comment that national economics did not form part of the officers’ training curriculum was only partially accurate.60 That average stocks of raw materials were sufficient for no more than six months was also unimportant in the context of belief in a short war that would be decided in the enemy’s country. Supplies could be imported through neutral states and third parties, replenished through conquest, or seized as part of the postwar settlement. What was significant was the attitude behind the preparations. Consultation between the government on one hand, the captains of industry and agriculture on the other, was minimal. Cooperation among public and private agencies involved little more than vague debates about the best ways of storing forage, or how Germany might best be fed in case of a British naval blockade. Administrative routine dominated the discussions. Memoranda were passed from bureaucrat to bureaucrat and office to office with no particular urgency. The army itself seemed hardly interested in front-loading for the off-the-shelf war it expected. In 1912 the general staff and the war ministry finally responded to the massive consumption of material by both sides in the Russo-Japanese War by instituting an expanded program of shell production. Two years later, business as usual had left the program still unfulfilled.61

  Among German policy makers this dissonance was perhaps most pronounced in Moltke. Moltke’s martial rhetoric in the context of his personality, the cello-playing dabbler in the occult, able to see four sides of every three-sided question, constantly doubting his fitness for the post he held, invites speculation along psychological lines: overcompensation through posturing.62 It seems more correct to assert that Moltke, along with many of his uniformed counterparts, expected war, perhaps even desired war—but not tomorrow and not next week. For years everywhere in Europe the time had not been quite right. Better to wait for the next arms bill, for the next round of negotiations, for something else in the future. It was the way of sustaining a dream whose risks were great, yet whose prospects were just alluring enough to inhibit any desperate efforts to preserve a peace whose preservation seemed in any case essentially beyond Germany’s control.

  The nature of the July Crisis has also been obscured by the issue of British policies. Since 1911 Anglo-German relations had steadily improved. Cooperation in the Balkan crises of 1912–13 was only one in a series of events that led observers everywhere in Europe to talk of detente between states whose rivalries were as recent as they seemed artificial.63 Fritz Fischer, Gerhard Ritter, and Egmont Zechlin, their students, their critics, and their epigoni, have devoted miles of typescript to discussing whether or not Bethmann in fact expected that Britain would stay out of a continental war, and whether Germany proposed to take advantage of that fact to keep the war localized in order to execute a planned program of continental conquest.

  Would a clear, early statement of British intention to intervene have deterred Germany? In 1914, the question was secondary in Berlin. Bethmann-Hollweg has been described as embarking in July on a diplomatic offensive testing the entente’s will for war. He interpreted his own actions as testing the entente’s, and specifically Russia’s, will for peace. Bethmann hoped for British cooperation in defusing the current Balkan crisis. He was shocked and upset when it failed to materialize. But ultimately he could not afford to depend on it.

  In 1861 Abraham Lincoln carefully publicized his intention to send supplies to a beleaguered Fort Sumter, not so much to provoke the embryonic Confederacy into firing the first shot as to provide an opportunity for the displaying of its general intentions. Peace bought at the price of union, the president insisted, was meaningless.64 Bethmann-Hollweg was no Lincoln. But in the minds of German policy makers one salient point distinguished the Sarajevo incident from all the other crises that failed to escalate beyond the pages of now-unread diplomatic histories. This time Austria was insisting that not merely her prestige, not merely her “vital interests” as a negotiating abstraction, but her very existence as a power was part of the stake. If Germany from the beginning encouraged decisive action against Serbia, she was not winding the Habsburg clock.65 Bethmann had not abandoned hopes for the Concert of Europe. But to function effectively concert diplomacy required full participation by all its members. The politics of restraint are effective only when pursued from a position of strength; otherwise they impress no one. Given Austria’s already shaky standing in the community of nations, given the increasing tensions within the Dual Monarchy, who would believe that unilateral efforts at conciliation showed anything but the absence of any consequent will to survive?

  At least as much to the point, what were the concrete prospects of entente restraint in this situation? Sazonov’s shocked response to the Austrian ultimatum, “C’est la guerre europèenne” reflected the position of a Russian government unable quite to believe what was happening. Hartwig, who died suddenly of a heart attack on July 10, and the Russian military attaché in Belgrade both had close and longstanding links with Serbia’s intelligence service—the agency most often mentioned in connection with possible government complicity in the assassination. Whatever the exact degree of information may have been in Belgrade, no evidence indicates Russian officials at any higher level had any foreknowledge of the deed. Russia was involved nevertheless. On July 24 Regent Peter of Serbia appealed personally to Nicholas, saying that Austria’s demands were unreasonable, and in any case Serbia could not defend herself against them. The tsar’s “generous Slav heart” must speak to him in this time of crisis.

  Sazonov was not deeply concerned at the moment with Slav hearts of any temper. Serbia, he mused, might even be w
ell-advised to submit to military occupation without resistance while continuing to appeal to the great powers for redress. But diplomacy unsupported by guns is at best a credit operation, and Russia’s international credit stood none too high in Sazonov’s mind. At a crown council on July 24, the foreign minister requested the initiation of a partial mobilization. This meant what amounted to general mobilization in the four military districts closest to Austria. Believing that such a measured mobilization did not mean war, Sazonov described it to the tsar and his fellow ministers as a defensive measure.66

  The council confirmed Sazonov’s request. On the morning of July 26 the preliminary orders went out. On that same day, however, Sazonov described the Balkan Slavs as a burden to Russia. He expressed a willingness to see Serbia severely chastened—if only Austria would transfer the issue to a European stage. Sukhomlinov insisted “on his honor” that no mobilization order as such had been issued. Russia was taking preliminary measures, to be implemented only if Austria crossed the Serbian border. Peace with Germany, moreover, was “earnestly desired,” whatever Austria might do.67

  What could be made of these mixed messages? In requesting action by the powers, Russia might be banking on her relations with France and Britain to bring the current crisis before a forum where Russia could expect a majority of sympathetic ears. She might simply be playing for time to complete her own military preparations. But Sazonov’s insistence that Serbia’s sovereignty not be infringed, that Russia would not tolerate her reduction to vassal status, was disquieting in itself. General wars are seldom a product of the automatic functioning of international systems. Instead they manifest disfunction: the breakdown of the agreements, implicit and implied, that hold an order together. If German ambitions before 1914 had contributed to this dysfunction, German policies at least incorporated some sense of Europe as a system. Could the same be said of Russia? The governments of the Balkan Peninsula had for years sustained an image as unstable and undeveloped, undeserving of a place at the head diplomatic table and certainly not worth a European war. If Russia now regarded the Serbian issue as a casus belli, if she could convince her allies to support her to the brink and beyond, this was virtually prima facie evidence that the gulf between the tsar’s empire and its immediate neighbors had indeed grown too wide to sustain the existing international order.