The Sleepwalkers (72 page)

The Kaiser in particular remained confident that the conflict could be localized. On the morning of 6 July, before his departure from Berlin, he told the acting secretary of state for the navy, Admiral von Capelle, that ‘he did not believe there would be any further military complications', since ‘the Tsar would not in this case place himself on the side of the regicides. Besides, Russia and France were not prepared for war.' He briefed other senior military figures along the same lines. This was not just whistling in the dark: the Kaiser had long been of the opinion that although Russian military preparedness was on the increase, it would be some time before the Russians would be willing to risk a strike. Late in October 1913, in the aftermath of the Albanian crisis, he had told Ambassador Szögyényi that ‘for the moment Russia gave him no cause for anxiety; for the next six years one need fear nothing from that quarter'.
⁴⁰

This line of reasoning was not an alternative to the preventive war argument; on the contrary, it was partly interwoven with it. The argument in favour of launching a preventive war consisted of two distinct and separable elements. The first was the observation that Germany's chances of military success in a European war were diminishing fast; the second was the inference that Germany should address this problem by itself seeking a war before it was too late. It was the first part that entered into the thinking of the key civilian decision-makers, not the second. After all, the evidence that suggested diminishing chances of success also implied that the risk of a Russian intervention was minimal. If the Russians' chances of success in a war with Germany really were going to be much better in three years' time than they were be in 1914, why would St Petersburg risk launching a continental conflict now, when it was only half-prepared?

Thinking along these lines opened up two possible scenarios. The first, which appeared much the more probable to Bethmann and his colleagues, was that the Russians would abstain from intervening and leave the Austrians to sort out their dispute with Serbia, perhaps responding diplomatically in concert with one or more other powers at a later point. The second scenario, deemed less probable, was that the Russians would deny the legitimacy of Austria's case, overlook the incompleteness of their own rearmament programme, and intervene nonetheless. It was on this secondary level of conditionality that the logic of preventive war fell into place: for if there was going to be a war
anyway
, it would be better to have one now.

Underlying these calculations was the strong and, as we can see in retrospect, erroneous assumption that the Russians were unlikely to intervene. The reasons for this gross misreading of the level of risk are not hard to find. Russia's acceptance of the Austrian ultimatum in October 1913 spoke for that outcome. Then there was the deeply held belief already alluded to that time was on Russia's side. The assassinations were seen in Berlin as an assault on the monarchical principle launched from within a political culture with a strong propensity to regicide (a view that can also be found in some British press coverage). Strong as Russia's pan-Slav sympathies might be, it was difficult to imagine the Tsar siding ‘with the regicides', as the Kaiser repeatedly observed. To all this, we must add the perennial problem of reading the intentions of the Russian executive. The Germans were unaware of the extent to which an Austro-Serbian quarrel had already been built into Franco-Russian strategic thinking. They failed to understand how indifferent the two western powers would be to the question of who had provoked the quarrel.

Moreover, the Germans had not yet grasped the significance of Kokovtsov's removal from office as chairman of the Council of Ministers and found it difficult to read the balance of power within the new Council. In this they were not alone – British diplomats too struggled to read the new constellation and came to the entirely misleading conclusion that the influence of anti-war conservatives such as Kokovtsov and Durnovo was once again in the ascendant, and in Paris there was concern that a ‘pro-German' faction led by Sergei Witte might be about to secure control over policy.
⁴¹
The opacity of the system made it difficult – now, as on so many previous ocasions – to assess risk. At the same time, the recent German experience of hand-in-hand collaboration with London on Balkan matters suggested that England might well – despite the latest naval talks – understand Berlin's standpoint and press St Petersburg to observe restraint. This was one of the dangers of détente: that it encouraged decision-makers to underrate the dangers attendant upon their actions.

One could thus speak, as some historians have, of a policy of calculated risk.
⁴²
But this characterization excludes from view a further important link in the chain of German thinking. This was the supposition that a Russian intervention – being a policy indefensible in ethico-legal or in security terms – would in reality be evidence of something else more ominous, namely St Petersburg's desire to
seek
a war with the central powers, to exploit the opportunity offered by the Austrian démarche in order to commence a campaign that would break the power of the Triple Alliance. Seen from this perspective, the Austro-Serbian crisis looked less like an opportunity to seek war and more like a means of establishing the true nature of Russia's intentions. And if Russia were found to want war (which was plausible in German eyes, given the immense scope of its rearmament, the intense collaboration with France, the outrage over the Liman mission and the recent naval talks with Britain), then – here again the diminishing chances/preventive war argument fell into place as part of a second-tier conditionality – it would be better to accept the war offered by the Russians now than dodge it by backing down. If one did the latter, then Germany faced the prospect of losing its one remaining ally and of coming under steadily intensifying pressure from the Entente states, whose ability to enforce their preferences would increase as the balance of military power tilted irreversibly away from Germany and whatever remained of Austria-Hungary.
⁴³

This was not, then, strictly speaking, a strategy centred on risk, but one that aimed to establish the true level of threat posed by Russia. To put it a different way, if the Russians
chose
to mobilize against Germany and thereby trigger a continental war, this would not express the risk generated by Germany's actions, but the strength of Russia's determination to rebalance the European system through war. Viewed from this admittedly rather circumscribed perspective, the Germans were not taking risks, but testing for threats. This was the logic underlying Bethmann's frequent references to the threat posed by Russia during the last months before the outbreak of war.

In order to understand this preoccupation, we need briefly to recall how prominent this issue was in the public world shared by policy-makers and newspaper editors in the spring and summer of 1914. On 2 January 1914, the Paris newspaper
Le Matin
began to publish a sensational series of five long articles under the title ‘La plus grande Russie'. Composed by the paper's editor-in-chief Stéphane Lauzanne, who had just come back from a journey to Moscow and St Petersburg, the series impressed readers in Berlin not only by the sneering belligerence of its tone, but also by the apparent accuracy and texture of the information contained in it. Most alarming of all was a map bearing the caption ‘Russia's dispositions for war' and depicting the entire terrain between the Baltic and the Black Sea as a densely packed archipelago of troop concentrations linked with each other by a lattice of railways. The commentary attached to the map reported that these were ‘the exact dispositions of the Russian army corps as of 31 December 1913' and urged readers to note ‘the extraordinary concentration of forces on the Russo-Prussian frontier'. These articles expressed a somewhat fantastical and exaggerated view of Russian military strength and may in fact have been aimed at undermining the opposition to the new Russian loan, but for German readers who were aware of the massive loans recently agreed between France and Russia, they made alarming reading. Their effect was amplified by the suspicion that the information in them derived from a government source –
Le Matin
was notoriously close to Poincaré and it was known that Lauzanne had met with Sazonov and senior Russian military commanders during his trip to Russia.
⁴⁴
There were many other similarly hair-raising ventures into inspired journalism: in a New Year's editorial published at around the same time, the military journal
Razvechik
, widely viewed as an organ of the imperial General Staff, offered a bloodcurdling view of the coming war with Germany:

Not just the troops, but the entire Russian people must get used to the fact that we are arming ourselves for the war of extermination against the Germans and that the German empires [
sic
] must be destroyed, even if it costs us hundreds of thousands of lives.
⁴⁵

Semi-official panic-mongering of this kind continued into the summer. Particularly unsettling was a piece of 13 June in the daily
Birzheviia Vedomosti
(Stock Exchange News) whose headline read: ‘We Are Ready. France Must Be Ready Too'. It was widely reprinted in the French and German press. What especially alarmed policy-makers in Berlin was the (accurate) advice from Ambassador Pourtalès in St Petersburg that it was inspired by none other than the minister of war Vladimir Sukhomlinov. The article sketched an impressive portrait of the immense military machine that would fall upon Germany in the event of war – the Russian army, it boasted, would soon count 2.32 million men (Germany and Austria, by contrast, would have only 1.8 million between them). Thanks to a swiftly expanding strategic railway network, moreover, mobilization times were plummeting.
⁴⁶

Sukhomlinov's primary purpose was in all probability not to terrify the Germans, but to persuade the French government of the size of Russia's military commitment to the alliance and to remind his French counterparts that they too must carry their weight. All the same, its effect on German readers was predictably disconcerting. One of these was the Kaiser, who splattered his translation with the usual spontaneous jottings, including the following: ‘Ha! At last the Russians have placed their cards on the table! Anyone in Germany who still doesn't believe that Russo-Gaul is working towards an imminent war with us [. . .] belongs in the Dalldorf asylum!'
⁴⁷
Another reader was Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg. In a letter of 16 June to Ambassador Lichnowsky in London, the chancellor observed that the war-lust of the Russia ‘militarist party' had never been ‘so ruthlessly revealed'. Until now, he went on, it was only the ‘extremists', pan-Germans and militarists, who had suspected Russia of preparing a war of aggression against Germany. But now, ‘even calmer politicians', among whom Bethmann presumably counted himself, were ‘beginning to incline towards this view'.
⁴⁸
Among these was Foreign Secretary Gottlieb von Jagow, who took the view that although Russia was not
yet
ready for war, it would soon ‘overwhelm' Germany with its vast armies, Baltic Fleet and strategic railway network.
⁴⁹
General Staff reports of 27 November 1913 and 7 July 1914 provided updated analyses of the Russian strategic railway programme, accompanied by a map on which the new arterial lines – most with numerous parallel rails, reaching deep into the Russian interior and converging on the German and Austrian frontiers – were marked in stripes of brightly coloured ink.
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These apprehensions were reinforced by the Anglo-Russian naval talks of June 1914, which suggested that the strategizing of the Entente powers had entered a new and dangerous phase. In May 1914, in response to pressure from the French foreign ministry, the British cabinet sanctioned joint naval staff talks with the Russians. Despite the strict secrecy in which they were held, the Germans were in fact well informed of the details of the Anglo-Russian discussions through an agent in the Russian embassy in London, the second secretary, Benno von Siebert, a Baltic German in Russian service. Through this source Berlin learned, among other things, that London and St Petersburg had discussed the possibility that in the event of war, the British fleet would support the landing of a Russian Expeditionary Corps in Pomerania. The news caused alarm in Berlin. In 1913–14, Russian naval spending exceeded Germany's for the first time. There was concern about a more aggressive Russian foreign policy and a steady tightening of the Entente that would soon deprive German policy of any freedom of movement. The discrepancies between Edward Grey's evasive replies to enquiries by Count Lichnowsky and the details filed by Siebert conveyed the alarming impression that the British had something to hide, producing a crisis in trust between Berlin and London, a matter of some import to Bethmann Hollweg, whose policy had always been founded on the presumption that Britain, though partially integrated into the Entente, would never support a war of aggression against Germany by the Entente states.
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The diaries of the diplomat and philosopher Kurt Riezler, Bethmann's closest adviser and confidant, convey the tenor of the chancellor's thinking at the time the decision was made to back Vienna. After the meeting with Szögyényi and Hoyos on 6 July, the two men had travelled back out to the chancellor's estate at Hohenfinow. Riezler recalled his conversation of that evening with Bethmann:

On the verandah under the night sky long talk on the situation. The secret information [from the German informant at the Russian embassy in London] he divulges to me conveys a shattering picture. He sees the Russian-English negotiations on a naval convention, a landing in Pomerania, as very serious, the last link in the chain. [. . .] Russia's military power growing swiftly; strategic reinforcement of the Polish salient will make the situation untenable. Austria steadily weaker and less mobile [. . .]