The Sleepwalkers (39 page)

Only in the last pre-war years did the tide begin to turn in favour of the French military. In France, as earlier in Russia, the army leadership was streamlined in 1911 and the chief of the General Staff, Joseph Joffre, was designated as the official responsible for military planning in peacetime and the command of the main army at war. The ‘long and painful story' of the struggle to secure increased funds continued, but in 1912–14, the pro-military attitude of the Poincaré government and then of the Poincaré presidency, reinforced by complex realignments in French politics and opinion, created an environment more conducive to rearmament.
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By 1913 it was politically feasible to press for a return to a three-year training regime, albeit over the protests of Finance Minister Louis-Lucien Klotz, who argued that the reinforcement of border fortifications would be cheaper and more effective.
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In Germany, too, the souring of the mood after Agadir encouraged Minister of War Josias von Heeringen and Chief of Staff Helmuth von Moltke to press harder for army growth. From his position in the Reich Treasury Office, Adolf Wermuth fought a robust rearguard action against higher expenditures, but resigned in March 1912, after it became clear that his policy no longer enjoyed broad governmental support. The fiscal rigorism of the Wermuth era was renounced, and the exponents of military expenditure gradually gained the upper hand over their naval rivals. After a long period of relative stagnation, the army bill of 3 July 1913 took German military expenditure to unprecedented heights.
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In Russia, Vladimir Kokovtsov, who remained finance minister and succeeded Pyotr Stolypin as premier after the latter's assassination, found it harder and harder to fight off the relentless lobbying and backstairs intrigues of War Minister Sukhomlinov. The feud between the two men came to a head at an important ministerial meeting in the spring of 1913, when Sukhomlinov ambushed the premier with a major budgetary proposal on which everyone at the table had been briefed except Kokovtsov himself. The support of the sovereign was crucial to this shift in the balance of power. ‘In your conflicts with Sukhomlinov you are always right,' Nicholas II told Kokovtsov in October 1912. ‘But I want you to understand my attitude: I have been supporting Sukhomlinov not because I have no confidence in you, but because I cannot refuse to agree to military appropriations.'
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Did this massive transfer of resources entail a transfer of power, or at least of political influence? An answer to this question has to take account of the diverse conditions prevailing in the various states. The country where we encounter the firmest regime of civilian control is without doubt France. In December 1911, when Joffre outlined his new strategic plan, focused on a massive offensive deployment across the Franco-German border, the Radical prime minister Joseph Caillaux curtly informed the staff chief that decision-making was ultimately the responsibility of the civilian authorities.
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The task of the CGS, Caillaux frequently pointed out, was merely to advise his political masters on the matters that fell within his expertise. The switch to increased military expenditure and the decision to invest in Joffre's offensive deployment in 1912–14 emanated not from the military, but from the politicians, under the leadership of the hawkish but in constitutional terms emphatically civilian Raymond Poincaré.

The situation in Russia was quite different. Here, the presence of the Tsar as the focal point of the autocratic system made it possible for individual ministers to carve out a certain relative autonomy. War Minister Vladimir Sukhomlinov is a characteristic example. At the time of his appointment in 1909, a struggle was raging in St Petersburg over parliamentary control of the army. An influential group of deputies was attempting to assert the Duma's right of oversight over defence policy. Sukhomlinov was brought in to see off the Duma, prevent the infiltration of ‘civilian attitudes' into military decision-making and protect the Tsar's prerogative, a role that earned him the hatred of public opinion, but assured him strong support from the throne.
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This backing from the sovereign enabled the war minister to formulate a security policy dramatically at variance with official Russian commitments to the alliance with France.

Rather than meeting French demands for a swift offensive strike against Germany in the first phase of mobilization, Sukhomlinov's Reorganization of 1910 shifted the focus of Russian deployments away from the western border zones in the Polish salient to locations in the Russian interior. The aim was to achieve a better balance between unit strengths and population density and to create a force that could be deployed, if necessary, to an eastern theatre of operations. The extreme west was to be abandoned to the enemy in the first phase of hostilities, pending a massive combined counter-offensive by the Russian armies.
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It does not seem that any effort was made to square this innovation with the ministry of foreign affairs. French military experts were initially horrified at the new plan, which they saw as depriving the Franco-Russian Alliance of the military initiative against Germany. The Russians did ultimately address these French concerns, but it is remarkable nonetheless that Sukhomlinov possessed sufficient independence to devise and implement a policy that appeared to run against the grain of the alliance with France, the centrepiece of Russian foreign policy.
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Armed with the support of the Tsar, Sukhomlinov was also able to undermine the authority of Prime Minister Kokovtsov, not just by challenging him over military budgeting, but also by building a hostile bloc in the Council of Ministers. And this in turn furnished him with a platform from which he could expound his views on Russia's security situation. In a series of key meetings in the fourth week of November 1912, Sukhomlinov expounded the view that war was inevitable, ‘and it would be more profitable for us to begin it as soon as possible'; a war, he argued, ‘would bring [Russia] nothing but good'. These bizarre and deluded claims astonished the cautious Kokovtsov.
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But Sukhomlinov was able to do this only because he had the support of other civilian ministers, Rukhlov, Maklakov, Shcheglovitov, and most importantly the powerful A. V. Krivoshein, minister of agriculture and a confidant of the Tsar. In the last months of 1912, a ‘war party' emerged within the Council of Ministers, led by Sukhomlinov and Krivoshein.
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In Germany, too, the praetorian character of the system assured the military a certain freedom of manoeuvre. Key figures such as the chief of staff could clearly acquire intermittent leverage on decision-making, especially at moments of heightened tension.
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Establishing what military commanders said is easy enough; ascertaining the weight of their counsels in government decision-making is much less straightforward, especially in an environment where the absence of a collegial decision-making organ like the Russian Council of Ministers removed the need for open conflict between military and civilian office-holders.

One way of understanding the interaction between military and civilian policy-making is to examine the relationship between the official diplomatic apparatus of ambassadors, ministers and legation secretaries and the parallel network – overseen by the General Staff and the Admiralty – of the military and naval attachés, whose perspective on events sometimes diverged from that of the official diplomatic networks. To take just one example: in October 1911, Wilhelm Widenmann, the German naval attaché in London, sent an alarming report to Berlin. British naval officers, Widenmann wrote, were now openly admitting that England had ‘mobilised its entire fleet' during the summer months of the Agadir crisis. England, it seemed, had ‘merely been waiting for a signal from France to fall upon Germany'. To make matters worse, the new First Sea Lord was the ‘unscrupulous, ambitious and unreliable demagogue' Winston Churchill. Germany must therefore steel itself for the possibility of an unprovoked attack, in the manner of the British annihilation of the Danish fleet at Copenhagen in 1807. Further naval rearmament was essential, for ‘only one thing impresses in England: a firm goal and the indomitable will to accomplish it'.
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These dispatches were passed to Wilhelm II, who covered them in delighted annotations – ‘correct', ‘correct', ‘excellent' and so on. There was nothing especially remarkable in any of this – Widenmann was reacting in part to what he had observed in London, but his underlying purpose was to prevent the General Staff back in Berlin from using the Agadir crisis to challenge the financial pre-eminence of the navy.
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The significance of the Widenmann reports lay less in their content or the Kaiser's reactions than in the response they elicited from the chancellor and the foreign secretary. Irritated by this para-diplomatic panic-mongering, Bethmann Hollweg requested the German ambassador in London, Count Metternich, to file a counter-dispatch refuting Widenmann's arguments. Metternich responded with a report that nuanced Widenmann's claims. While it was true that ‘all England' had been ‘prepared for war' in the summer of 1911, this did not imply a readiness for aggressive action. To be sure, there were many younger naval officers to whom a war would ‘not be unwelcome', but this was an attitude common to the military functionaries of other countries. In any case, Metternich observed – and here was the sting – in England, such questions were decided not by army or naval officers, nor by ministers of war, nor by the First Sea Lord, but rather by a cabinet composed of responsible ministers. ‘Over here,' Metternich announced, ‘fleet and army are regarded as the most important instruments of policy, as means to an end, but not as determinants of the course of policy.' In any case, the English were now keen to put the tensions of the summer behind them. Instead of putting all of its eggs in the armaments basket, therefore, the German government should seek an improvement in its relations with London.
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This time, the Kaiser was less happy: ‘wrong', ‘rubbish', ‘unbelievable hogwash!', ‘scaredy-cat' screamed the scribbles on the margins of the document. ‘I don't agree with the judgement of the Ambassador! The Naval Attaché is right!'
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The odd thing about this pair of conflicting dispatches is that both of them went on to shape policy: the Kaiser used the Widenmann report as a pretext for demanding a further naval law, while Bethmann persisted with the policy of détente recommended by Metternich. In Germany, as one senior commander later observed, ‘the Kaiser made one policy, the Chancellor another [and] the General Staff came up with its own answers'.
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It looks, at first glance, as if we can draw a line between democratic, parliamentary Britain and France on the one hand, where civilian decision-makers called the shots, and the more authoritarian constitutions of Russia, Austria and Germany, where, despite variations in the degree of parliamentarization, military personnel could compete with their civilian colleagues on an equal or superior footing for political influence, thanks to their privileged access to the sovereign. But the reality was more complex than this dichotomy would allow. In France, the restructuring of the military after 1911 produced an extraordinary concentration of authority in the hands of Chief of Staff Joffre, to the extent that he wielded greater power over the armed forces than his aristocratic, militarist German counterpart, Helmuth von Moltke; what is more, the new French measures secured for the army almost complete autonomy within the state – though this autonomy depended, unlike that of the German army, upon the cooperation and support of the relevant civilian ministers.
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In Britain, too, the deepening of the entente with France was driven by military, rather than civilian negotiations and agreements. We have already seen how eagerly key military figures in Britain proffered support to France during the first Moroccan crisis in 1905–6. And it is far from clear that the leading British military commanders saw themselves as compliant servants of their political masters. Wilson was not simply acting on instructions; he had his own views on Britain's military role in a future continental war and consistently pressed for a military confrontation. Like his continental colleagues, Wilson despised civilian politicians, believing them entirely incapable of understanding military affairs. Sir Edward Grey, he wrote in his diary, was an ‘ignorant, vain and weak man, quite unfit to be the foreign minister of any country larger than Portugal'. As for the rest of the Liberal cabinet, they were no more than ‘dirty, ignorant curs'. The whole idea of civilian government of the army was ‘vicious in theory and hopeless in practice'.
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Conservative in his politics, Wilson intrigued energetically against a Liberal political leadership he despised, siphoning information from the Foreign Office through his close associate Permanent Under-secretary Sir Arthur Nicolson and passing it to his allies in the Conservative Party. In Major General Henry Wilson, Britain possessed ‘its own version' of Austria-Hungary's Conrad and Serbia's Apis.
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The significance of the military discussions with France lay not just in the pressure they exerted on the civilian leadership, but also in the fact that they seemed, by virtue of their very existence, to imply a moral obligation to fight with France in the event of a war with Germany. The militarization of the Entente thus exposed the widening discrepancy between British military planning and an official diplomatic stance for which the commitments associated with the term ‘alliance' were still anathema.

Something analogous took place in the context of the French alliance with Russia. The efforts of the French military commanders to undo the effects of Sukhomlinov's 1910 deployment plan led to a deepening interdependence of military planning in the two allied states – a process managed by the military, but sanctioned by the civilian leadership. But even as the civilians licensed this process, they could not prevent it from shifting the parameters within which political decisions could be made. When the French insisted at the annual Franco-Russian joint General Staff meetings that the Russians spend vast amounts of borrowed money to upgrade their westward strategic railways, the effect was to push the balance of power in St Petersburg away from Kokovtsov towards his adversaries in the Russian military command. Kokovtsov was probably right when he accused the military command of exploiting inter-service ties within the alliance in order to strengthen their own leverage within the Russian political system.
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