The Sleepwalkers (55 page)

International developments gave further reason for concern. During 1913 and 1914, the policy-makers in Paris became increasingly aware of the growth of Russian power. French military observers reported that the Russian army had made huge advances since the setbacks of the Japanese war; the Russian soldier was ‘first class, tough, well trained, disciplined and devoted' and the Russian army was expected to prevail against its ‘eventual enemies'.
²⁴⁹
French financial experts corroborated this view of Russia's prospects. One keen student of the Russian economy was M. de Verneuil, a syndic of the brokers at the Paris Stock Exchange with the power to veto the admission of securities to the Paris Bourse. Verneuil had long been involved in Russo-French business ventures when he travelled to St Petersburg to discuss the terms of the new French loan with premier Kokovtsov. In a letter of 7 July 1913, he reported his impressions to Foreign Minister Pichon. Verneuil had already formed a very favourable opinion of Russian economic progress, he wrote, but his recent visit to the Russian capital had convinced him that the reality was far more impressive:

There is something truly fantastic in preparation, whose symptoms must strike the mind of even the most informed observers. I have the very clear impression that in the next thirty years, we are going to see in Russia a prodigious economic growth which will equal – if it does not surpass it – the colossal movement that took place in the United States during the last quarter of the XIXth century.
²⁵⁰

Verneuil was not alone: in 1914, the reports of the French military attaché in St Petersburg, General de Laguiche, evoked a Russian ‘colossus' supplied with ‘inexhaustible resources', armed with ‘first-class' soldiers and wielding a ‘limitless power'. After attending the spring manoeuvres of that year, Laguiche positively bubbled over with enthusiasm: ‘the more I go, the more I admire this material, the Russian man is superior to any I know. There's a source of strength and power there that I have never encountered in any other army.'
²⁵¹
Press reporting tended to reinforce this impression. In November 1913,
Le Temps
ran an article in which the paper's Russian correspondent Charles Rivet declared that

We cannot admire too much this great Russian [military] effort. It is produced without creating the slightest trouble of inconvenience to the prosperity of the country. [. . .] whereas in France, new military expenses posed a budgetary problem, Russia has no need to go in search of a new source of revenues. [. . .] In this arms race, Russia is thus better placed than anyone to sustain the competition. The development of its population is accompanied by a growth in wealth; the circumstances permit it to confront – even over the long term – the constant expansion of military contingents and expenses. It will never be obliged to propose slowing this growth, nor, for that matter, are Russia's military leaders at all disposed to do so.
²⁵²

Among those who subscribed to this starry-eyed vision of Russia was Poincaré himself.
²⁵³

All this was, on the face of it, good news for the Franco-Russian Alliance. But in Paris it also gave rise to nagging doubts. What if Russia became so wealthy and so powerful that it ceased to depend for its security on the promise of French aid? At the very least, such headlong growth would surely tilt the balance of power within the alliance to Paris's disadvantage, for, as General de Laguiche observed in February 1914, ‘the less need Russia has of other nations, the more she will be able to free herself from our pressure'.
²⁵⁴
This mood of apprehension seems risible to us in retrospect: it was founded on an absurd overestimation of Russian economic progress and military strength.
²⁵⁵
But these false futures were real enough to the people who perceived them; together with other factors in a rapidly changing environment, they suggested that the instruments currently available to contain Germany might not be around for very much longer.

In the last weeks of June 1914, rather to his own surprise, Poincaré was still in control. His policy was secure – at least until the current government fell. René Viviani was a highly effective parliamentary politician, but a complete novice in foreign affairs. It would be easy, should a crisis arise, for the president to steer policy. The offensive military strategy and the commitment to the Balkan
casus foederis
remained intact. But in the medium and longer term, Poincaré's future and that of his policy looked rather uncertain. This combination of strength in the present and vulnerability over the longer term would inform his handling of the crisis that broke out after Gavril Princip fired his fatal shots on 28 June in Sarajevo. Like so many of the decision-makers caught up in those events, Poincaré would feel that he was working against the clock.

‘Since I have been at the Foreign Office,' Arthur Nicolson wrote early in May 1914, ‘I have not seen such calm waters.'
¹
Nicolson's remark draws our attention to one of the most curious features of the last two pre-war years, namely that even as the stockpiling of arms continued to gain momentum and the attitudes of some military and civilian leaders grew more militant, the European international system as a whole displayed a surprising capacity for crisis management and détente. Does this mean that a general war was growing
less
probable in the last year and a half before it broke out? Or did the phenomenon of détente merely cloak the reality of a deepening structural antagonism between the alliance blocs? And if the latter is true, how did the processes implicated in détente interact with those pieces of causality that would enable a general war to break out in 1914?

In the summer of 1912, the German Kaiser and the Russian Tsar, accompanied by an entourage of senior statesmen, met for informal conversations at Baltic Port (Paldiski), a Russian naval facility on the Pakri peninsula in what is today north-western Estonia. The meeting, planned as the reciprocation of a visit by the Tsar to Potsdam in 1910, went extraordinarily well. While the monarchs walked, dined and inspected troops, the statesmen got together for amicable, wide-ranging discussions. Kokovtsov and Bethmann Hollweg – who met for the first time at Baltic Port – felt an immediate sympathy for each other. These were two restrained, conservative individuals of decidedly moderate views. In a calm and candid conversation, the two prime ministers dwelt on the armaments policies of the two powers. Each assured the other of the essentially defensive nature of his intentions and the two men agreed that the current surge in military expenditures was deeply to be regretted for the unsettling effect it had on public opinion. It was to be hoped, Bethmann remarked, ‘that all countries would have so many interests in common as to make them view armaments as a measure of prevention, without allowing them to be actually applied'.
²

Bethmann's conversations with Foreign Minister Sazonov ranged over a wider range of subjects, but were marked by the same striving for conciliatory language. On the subject of the deepening instability on the Balkan peninsula, Sazonov assured Bethmann that Russia's ‘mission' vis-à-vis the Christian Slavic states was historically complete and thus obsolete. Russia, Sazonov claimed, had no intention of exploiting the Ottoman Empire's current difficulties. Bethmann declared that although Germany was sometimes accused of wishing to interfere with the inner workings of the Entente, nothing could be further from his mind. On the other hand, he saw no reason why Germany should not cultivate friendly relations with the Entente powers. ‘How does it look with Austria?' Sazonov asked towards the end of the interview. Bethmann assured him that there could be no question of an aggressive Austrian Balkan policy. ‘So there will be no encouragement [by Germany] of Austria?' Sazonov asked, to which Bethmann replied that Berlin had no intention whatsoever of supporting a policy of adventurism in Vienna. Both men agreed before parting that it would be an excellent idea to make these summit meetings a ‘fixed institution' to be repeated as a matter of course every two years.
³

Count Vladimir Kokovtsov

Amazingly enough, even the Kaiser was on his best behaviour at Baltic Port. The Tsar always dreaded meetings with his talkative German cousin – he was reluctant to speak his own mind, because, as Kokovtsov observed, ‘he feared the expansiveness of the German Emperor, so foreign to his own nature'.
⁴
In a note composed in advance of the visit, the German ambassador in St Petersburg, Count Pourtalès, urged that the Kaiser be told to avoid tendentious conversation topics and adopt a ‘listening attitude' wherever possible, so that the Tsar would be able to get a word in edgeways.
⁵
For the most part, Wilhelm showed admirable self-restraint. There were a few small slips: after the first lunch on board the Tsar's yacht
Standart
, the Kaiser drew Sazonov apart and spoke to him (‘at him' might be a more appropriate locution) for over an hour in detail about his relationship with his parents, who, he claimed, had never loved him. Sazonov saw this as a shocking illustration of the German Emperor's ‘marked tendency to overshoot the boundaries of the reserve and dignity' that one would expect of someone in such an elevated position.
⁶
On the second day of the trip, during a visit in crippling heat to the ruined fortifications constructed around the port by Peter the Great, Wilhelm again forgot his instructions and buttonholed Kokovtsov on one his latest hobby-horses, the importance of establishing a pan-European oil trust that would be able to compete with American Standard Oil. The conversation, Kokovtsov recalled, ‘became extremely animated and went beyond the limits set by court etiquette'.

The sun was scorching. The tsar did not want to interrupt our conversation, but behind Emperor Wilhelm's back he made signs of impatience to me. The Kaiser, however, continued to answer my arguments with increasing fervour. Finally the Tsar seemed to lose all patience, approached us, and began to listen to our conversation, whereupon Emperor Wilhelm turned to him with the following words (in French): ‘Your Chairman of the Council does not sympathise with my ideas, and I do not want to permit him to remain unconvinced. I want you to allow me to prove my point with data collected at Berlin, and when I am ready I should like to have your permission to resume this conversation with him.'
⁷

It is worth picturing this scene – the glare of the sunlight on the broken stone of the old fort, Kokovtsov sweltering in his jacket, the Kaiser red-faced, his moustaches trembling as he warmed to his theme, gesticulating, oblivious to the discomfort of his companions, and behind him the Tsar, trying desperately to end the ordeal and get the party out of the sun. Whether Wilhelm ever sent Kokovtsov the ‘data collected at Berlin' on oil consortia is unknown but may be doubted – his bursts of enthuasiasm tended to be as short as they were intense. No wonder the German Kaiser was a figure of terror on the royal circuit.

Wilhelm's passing lapses did nothing to dent the good cheer of the two parties and the summit ended in an unexpectedly high mood. An official joint communiqué released to the press on 6 July declared that the meeting had ‘borne an especially warm character', that it constituted new proof of the ‘relations of friendship' obtaining between the two monarchs and confirmed the ‘firm resolution' of both powers to maintain the ‘venerable traditions existing between them'.
⁸

Baltic Port was the high-water mark of Russo-German détente in the last years before the outbreak of war in 1914.
⁹
Yet there were exceedingly narrow limits to what was achieved there. The conversations, though friendly, produced no decisions of substance. The official communiqué released to the press confined itself to waffly generalizations and explicitly stated that the meeting had neither generated ‘new agreements' nor effected ‘any change whatsoever in the grouping of the Powers, whose value for the maintenance of equilibrium and peace had been proven'.
¹⁰
The assurances offered by Bethmann and Sazonov on the Balkan situation concealed a dangerous inconsistency: whereas the Germans did in fact urge restraint on the Austrians, sowing doubts in Vienna about the firmness of Berlin's commitment to the alliance, the Russians were and would continue doing the opposite with their Balkan clients. Sazonov's assurances to Bethmann that Russia had no intention of exploiting the difficulties confronting the Ottoman Empire and that her ‘historic mission' on the peninsula was now a thing of the past were misleading, to say the least. If this was to be the basis for a Russo-German understanding, it was a fragile foundation indeed. And even the restrained formulae of the Baltic Port communiqué were enough to trigger spasms of paranoia in London and Paris. Both before and after the meeting, the ministry of foreign affairs in St Petersburg issued firm assurances to London and Paris that their commitment to the ‘triple entente' was stronger than ever. In a sense then, the tentative performances of rapprochement at Baltic Port revealed how elusive a truly multilateral détente was likely to be.