The Sleepwalkers (58 page)

Historians disagree about the significance of this ‘war council', as it was ironically dubbed by Bethmann, who was not invited. Some have argued that the war council of December 1912 not only revealed the continuing centrality of the Kaiser to the decision-making process, but also set the scene for a comprehensive war-plan that involved placing the navy, the army, the German economy and German public opinion on a war footing in preparation for the unleashing of a premeditated conflict.
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Others have seen the meeting as a reflex response to an international crisis, rejecting the notion that the German military and political leadership henceforth began the countdown to a pre-planned European war. Who is right? There is no doubting the belligerence of the military advice offered at the council, and it is clear that the Kaiser seemed willing for the moment to endorse the views of his most aggressive commanders. On the other hand, the meeting did not in fact trigger a countdown to preventive war. The only eyewitness report of the occasion that we possess, the diary of Admiral Müller, closes its comments on the council with the observation that its result amounted to ‘almost 0'. No national propaganda campaign followed and no concerted effort was made to set the German economy on a wartime footing.
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The key figure in the drama of 8 December was not Wilhelm, but Bethmann, who subsequently ‘put the Kaiser in his place' and ‘nullified' the decisions taken at the conference.
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The war council of 8 December remained an episode: by the beginning of January, the sense of crisis in Berlin had dissipated and Wilhelm had regained his calm. Bethmann talked him out of plans for an expanded naval programme, the accelerated submarine building demanded by the Kaiser never took place, and when a new crisis broke out in the Balkans in April–May 1913 over the Serbo-Montenegrin occupation of the Albanian city of Scutari, it was apparent that Wilhelm still opposed any moves that would incur the risk of war.
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Far more significant than the meeting at the Neues Palais in December was the decision in the previous month to seek an unprecedented growth in German peacetime military strength. The roots of the army bill of 1913 lay in anxiety over Germany's deteriorating security position, compounded by alarm at Russia's handling of the Balkan crisis. In a detailed memorandum of December, Moltke made the case for an ambitious programme of expansion and improvement. Should a war break out, he argued, it appeared likely that Germany would face a conflict on two fronts against France and Russia, with little help from Austria and none from Italy. If, as appeared highly likely in the light of Grey's warning of 3 December, Britain too were to join the fray, the Germans would be able to field 192 fewer infantry battalions in the west than Britain, France and Belgium combined. And Russia was no longer a negligible quantity – its power was growing from year to year.
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In presentations to secret sessions of the Reichstag Budget Commission during April, the generals painted a dark picture of German prospects; they saw little chance of a peaceful resolution of Germany's current encirclement and were downbeat about the German army's chances of success. The Russians would possess irrreversible military superiority by 1916. The French already enjoyed superiority in strategic railways and mobilization and deployment times – whereas the Germans possessed thirteen through railway lines to the common border in 1913, France had sixteen, all of which were double-tracked, with junction lines to bypass loops, stations and intersections.
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After much haggling over details and finance, the new bill passed into law in July 1913. The peacetime army grew by 136,000 to 890,000 officers and men. Yet the new measures still failed to meet German security needs, because they triggered hikes in armaments expenditure in France and Russia that quickly offset German growth. During the first cycle of armaments expansion, it had been the Russians who had set the pace; now it was the Germans. The 1913 army law was crucial to the passage in France during August 1913 of the Three Year Law. And in Russia, the German army law (plus French goading) triggered the schedule of expansions and refurbishments known as the ‘Great Programme'. In March 1913, massive sums were approved by the Tsar for artillery and other armaments in a vastly ambitious scheme that would by 1917 have increased Russian winter peacetime strength by 800,000 men, most of whom would (by contrast with the deployment plan of 1910) be concentrated in European Russia.
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As a consequence, the peacetime strength of the Russian army in 1914 was double that of the German, at around one and a half million men and 300,000 more than the combined strengths of the German and Austro-Hungarian armies; by 1916–17, the Russian figure was expected to exceed 2 million.
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And in 1914 these measures were complemented by the French-financed Russian strategic railways programme. Since 1905, Germany's answer to this predicament had been the Schlieffen Plan, which aimed to resolve the problem of a war on two fronts by first mounting a massive strike against France, accompanied by a holding operation in the east. Only when the situation on the western front had been resolved would Germany swing eastwards against Russia. But what if the balance of forces between the two alliance blocs shifted to the point where the Schlieffen Plan no longer made sense?

It has been pointed out that Germany was faster to implement its improvements than its two Entente opponents and that this furnished the German military leadership with a short-term strategic advantage in 1914.
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And the economic foundations of Russia's military might remained fragile: between 1900 and 1913 Russian productive strength was actually decreasing in relation to Germany's.
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But the outlook from Berlin's standpoint remained grim. In 1904, the combined strength of the Franco-Russian military had exceeded the Austro-German by 260,982. By 1914, the gap was estimated at around 1 million and it was widening fast. In a report dated 25 May 1914, the German military attaché in St Petersburg reported the latest enlargement of the recruit contingent (from 455,000 to 585,000) and calculated expected growth in peacetime strength over the next three to four years, concluding that ‘The growth of the Russian army will thereby increase at a rate never before seen in the armed forces of any country.' Moltke viewed the Franco-Russian loan as ‘one of the most sensitive strategic blows that France has dealt us since the war of 1870–71' and foresaw that it would bring about ‘a decisive turning point to Germany's disadvantage'.
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By 1916–17, German strategists believed, the striking power of Russia would be sufficient to nullify the calculations embodied in the Schlieffen Plan.
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Obsessed with the dangers looming from east and west and convinced that time was running out, Moltke became the eloquent exponent of a ‘preventive war' that would enable the German Empire to resolve the coming conflict on terms advantageous to itself. He came to view each passing pre-war crisis as a failed opportunity to redress a deepening strategic imbalance that would soon place Germany at an irreversible disadvantage.
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Preventive war thinking became widespread within the military command – a recent study has identified several dozen occasions on which senior commanders pressed for war ‘sooner rather than later', even if this involved taking the initiative and accepting the opprobrium of the aggressor.
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It was not just the Germans who saw the matter thus. Early in 1914, Poincaré remarked to the editor of
Le Matin
that the Germans feared the growth of Russia: ‘They know that this great body gains each day in cohesion; they want to attack and destroy it before it has attained the plenitude of its power.'
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In March 1914, when a summary of a dispatch outlining the improvements made to the Russian army since 1913 was sent to the British director of military operations, Major-General Henry Wilson, Wilson appended the following comment:

This is a most important despatch. It is easy to understand now why Germany is cautious about the future and why she may think that it is a case of ‘now or never'.
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A vein of fatalism underlay the bellicism of the German military. When they spoke of war, the German military tended to speak less of victory than of the ‘twin threats of defeat and annihilation'.
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The danger inherent in such thinking, which allowed commanders to sanction even the most aggressive initiatives as essentially defensive, is clear enough. But to what extent did the preventive war arguments of the military shape German foreign policy? Even in a praetorian system like the Prusso-German one, much depended on the ability of the most senior commanders to persuade their civilian colleagues to adopt their strategic viewpoint. In this, they were not especially successful. Moltke pressed for war ‘sooner rather than later' at the Neues Palais in December 1912, but although the Kaiser seemed briefly to endorse the staff chief's view, nothing came of it.

Paradoxically, the absence in Berlin of a collective decision-making organ like the Council of Ministers in St Petersburg made it more difficult for the militaries to build a political pressure group in support of their ideas, using military requisitions as a battering ram to smash through fiscal restraints. In Paris, the most powerful civilian and military officials worked closely together to achieve increased expenditure in support of a more offensively oriented strategy. In Germany, such deep institutional and constitutional barriers separated the military and civilian chains of command that this kind of synergy was far harder to achieve. There was no German equivalent of Krivoshein, and Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg was a more powerful and formidable figure than his Russian counterpart Vladimir Kokovtsov. After the Agadir crisis of 1911, Bethmann consistently pursued a policy focused on inconspicuous and pragmatic collaboration with Britain and Russia. ‘Our most urgent task is a modus vivendi with England,' he declared in December 1911. ‘We must keep France in check through a cautious policy towards Russia and England,' he wrote in March 1913. ‘Naturally this does not please our chauvinists and is unpopular. But I see no alternative for Germany in the near future.'
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Preventive war arguments thus never became the platform for policy in Germany before 1914 – they were rejected, like Conrad's even more vociferous demands in Vienna – by the civilian leadership. Neither in 1905 nor in 1908–9 or 1911 (when conditions were in fact much more favourable from the German standpoint than they would be in the summer of 1914) did the German government consider launching a preventive war. In the Agadir affair of 1911, it was the British, rather than the French or the Germans, who did most to militarize the crisis. And in the winter crisis of 1912–13, it was French rather than German policy that came close (though only intermittently) to embracing the notion of preventive war. Berlin was far more restrained in its advice to Vienna than Paris was in its communications with St Petersburg.

As for the Kaiser, though prone to outbursts of belligerent rhetoric, he panicked and counselled caution whenever a real conflict seemed likely, to the endless frustration of the generals. Wilhelm remained hopeful of a long-term accommodation with Britain. His remarks during 1913 suggest that he continued to regard an Anglo-German war as ‘unthinkable'. He also remained confident that German military prowess would deter Russia from an armed intervention in a conflict between Austria and Serbia.
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This complacency prompted the hawkish General Falkenhayn, soon to become minister of war, to observe in a letter of January 1913 that the deluded faith of the political leadership – including Wilhelm – in the possibility of a lasting peace left Moltke ‘standing alone' in his ‘struggle' with the Kaiser for a more aggressive foreign policy.
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The Kaiser's refusal to embrace preventive war thinking became the
bête noire
of a growing ‘military opposition'.
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The primacy of the civilian over the military leadership remained intact.
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Yet this does not mean that we should discount pro-pre-emption arguments as irrelevant to the actions of German or other policy-makers. On the contrary, preventive war logic exerted a stealthy but important pressure on the thinking of the key decision-makers during the crisis of summer 1914.

German policy-makers (other ones than those preoccupied with arming Germany for a future war on two fronts) also explored the possibilities of a future in which Germany would pursue its interests while avoiding the incalculable risks of war. An influential group of functionaries, including the state secretary of the Colonial Office Bernhard Dernburg, Ambassador Paul Metternich in London and his colleague Richard von Kühlmann, later state secretary of the Foreign Office in Berlin, continued to press for a policy of détente and concessions vis-à-vis London. This line of thought found formal expression in the political tract
A German World Policy Without War!
, published anonymously in Berlin in 1913, but written by Richard Plehn, who had worked closely with Kühlmann in London.
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And there were potential partners for such a policy in Whitehall, especially among members of the anti-Grey liberals, such as Colonial Secretary Lewis Harcourt.
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Despite the collapse of the Haldane mission, the quest for détente with Britain had yielded real fruits. A new round of negotiations over colonial questions opened in the summer of 1912; in April 1913, the two states signed an agreement on the African territories currently under the authority of the Portuguese Empire, whose financial collapse was expected imminently. The agreement was never ratified, because of differences between Berlin and London on when and how to publicize its contents, but it signalled a willingness in principle on both sides to demarcate spheres of interest and collaborate in excluding third parties from intervening.
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