The Sleepwalkers (74 page)

The second effect related to Vienna's handling of the German partner. Berchtold blamed the Germans for compromising his strategy of stealth and responded to the leaks by shutting down communications with Berlin, with the result that the Germans were no better informed of the precise contents of the forthcoming Austrian ultimatum than their Entente opponents. It is one of the strangest features of Austria's handling of the crisis that a copy of the ultimatum was forwarded to the leadership in Berlin only on the evening of 22 July.
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Yet German protestations of ignorance naturally rang false with the diplomats of the Entente, who viewed them as evidence that the Germans and the Austrians were together in secret planning a long-prepared joint enterprise that must be met with a coordinated and firm response – an assumption that did not augur well for peace as the crisis entered its final phase.

It is worth touching once again on the oddities of the Austro-Hungarian decision-making process. Berchtold, disparaged by many of the hawks in the administration as a soft touch incapable of forming clear resolutions, took control of the policy debate after 28 June in a rather impressive way. But he could do this only through an arduous and time-consuming process of consensus-building. The puzzling dissonances in the documents that track the emergence of the Austrian decision for war reflect the need to incorporate – without necessarily reconciling – opposed viewpoints.

Perhaps the most striking defect of Austrian decision-making was the narrowness of the individual and collective fields of vision. The Austrians resembled hedgehogs scurrying across a highway with their eyes averted from the rushing traffic.
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The momentous possibility of a Russian general mobilization and the general European war that would inevitably follow was certainly glimpsed by the Austrian decision-makers, who discussed it on several occasions. But it was never integrated into the process by which options were weighed up and assessed. No sustained attention was given to the question of whether Austria-Hungary was in any position to wage a war with one or more other European great powers.
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There are several possible reasons for this. One was the extraordinary confidence of the Austro-Hungarian administration in the strength of German arms, which, it was believed, sufficed in the first instance to deter and, failing that, to defeat Russia.
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The second was that the hive-like structure of the Austro-Hungarian political elite was simply not conducive to the formulation of decisions through the careful sifting and balancing of contradictory information. The contributors to the debate tended to indulge in strong statements of opinion, often sharpened by mutual recriminations, rather than attempting to view the problems facing Vienna in the round. The solipsism of Austrian decision-making also reflected a profound sense of geopolitical isolation. The notion that Austro-Hungarian statesmen had a ‘responsibility to Europe' was nonsense, one political insider noted, ‘because there is no Europe. Public opinion in Russia and France [. . .] will always maintain that we are the guilty ones, even if the Serbs, in the midst of peace, invade us by the thousands one night, armed with bombs'.
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But the most important reason for the perplexing narrowness of the Austrian policy debate is surely that the Austrians were so convinced of the rectitude of their case and of their proposed remedy against Serbia that they could conceive of no alternative to it – even Tisza, after all, had accepted by 7 July that Belgrade was implicated in the crimes at Sarajevo and was willing in principle to countenance a military response, provided the timing and diplomatic context were right. Inaction would merely confirm the widely held conviction that this was an empire on its last legs. On the other hand, the moral effect of a bold action would be transformative: ‘Austria-Hungary [. . .] would again believe in itself. It would mean: “I have the will, therefore I am.”'
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In short, the Austrians were in the process of making what decision theorists have called an ‘opting decision', one in which the stakes are unimaginably high, the impact transformative and irrevocable, levels of emotion elevated, and the consequences of not acting potentially lasting. Decisions of this kind may acquire an existential dimension, in that they promise to re-invent the decision-making entity, to fashion it into something it was not before. At the core of such decisions is something rooted in identity that is not easily susceptible to rationalization.
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This is not to suggest that Austrian decision-making was ‘irrational'. The present crisis was assessed in the light of past developments, and various factors and risks were brought to bear on the discussion. Nor is it easy to see how the Austrians could made a less drastic solution work, given the reluctance of the Serbian authorities to meet Austrian expectations, the absence of any international legal bodies capable of arbitrating in such cases, and the impossibility in the current international climate of enforcing the future compliance of Belgrade. Yet at the core of the Austrian response – to an extent that does not apply to any of the other actors in 1914 – was a temperamental, intuitive leap, a ‘naked act of decision'
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founded in a shared understanding of what the Austro-Hungarian Empire was and must be if it were to remain a great power.

It was during the tranquillization phase of Austrian policy that the Russian minister in Belgrade suddenly died. Hartwig had been suffering from angina pectoris for some time. He was obese, and prone to increasingly fierce headaches, the result not just of stress, but probably also of hypertension. It was his practice each summer to take the cure at Bad Nauheim, whence he would return with his spirits restored and his weight reduced. When his subordinate Basil Strandmann, on hearing the news of the assassinations, broke off his own vacation in Venice and returned to Belgrade, he found Hartwig in poor physical condition and longing to take his cure. The minister informed Strandmann that ‘as no important events could be expected before Autumn', he had put in an application to take his vacation on 13 July.

On 10 July, three days before he was due to leave, Hartwig learned that the Austrian minister Baron Giesl had just returned to Belgrade. He telephoned the Austrian legation and arranged a visit in order to clarify various misunderstandings. It was widely reported in Belgrade that on 3 July, the day of the archduke's requiem service, the Russian legation had been the only one in the Serbian capital not to fly its flag at half-mast. Both the Italian and the British mission chiefs in Belgrade had noticed the omission.
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On the evening following the assassinations, moreover, it was said that Hartwig had hosted a reception in his legation, from which cheering and laughter could be heard in the nearby streets. The Russian minister was probably also anxious lest reports of other indiscretions had reached the ears of his Austrian colleague.
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In fact, the interview went quite amicably. Giesl cordially accepted Hartwig's explanations and excuses and the two men settled down for a long talk in Giesl's office.

Having spoken at some length of his poor health and his vacation plans, Hartwig came to the chief concern of his visit, a defence of Serbia's innocence of the murders and of its intentions for the future. But he had scarcely got through the first sentence when, at about 9.20 p.m., he lost consciousness and slowly slid, his cigarette still burning between his fingers, from the divan on to the carpet. Hartwig's carriage was sent at haste to collect his daughter Ludmilla and a local Serbian doctor appeared, followed by Hartwig's physician, but despite the application of water, Eau de Cologne, ether and ice, it proved impossible to bring him back to consciousness. Baroness Giesl's expressions of sympathy for Hartwig's daughter were brushed off with the comment that ‘Austrian words' were of no interest to her. Ludmilla von Hartwig, who had been spending the evening with Crown Prince Alexandar of Serbia, made a point of inspecting the room in which her father had died, digging around in some large Japanese vases, sniffing at the bottle of Eau de Cologne that had been used to try to rouse him and curtly enquiring whether her father had been given anything to eat or drink. Giesl replied that the minister had merely smoked a few Russian cigarettes that he had brought with him. The daughter asked for the butts and took them away in her purse. Neither the evidence of Hartwig's illness, of which he had made no secret, nor the assurances of the Austrian minister prevented assassination theories from circulating across the capital.
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One newspaper referred to Giesl and his wife as ‘modern Borgias' who poisoned unwelcome guests, and a few days later Giesl himself overheard a conversation between two clients in his barber's shop:

Austria sends us strange ambassadors. First we had an imbecile [Forgách] and now we have an assassin. Giesl has brought an electric chair from Vienna that causes the immediate death of anyone who sits down on it and leaves not the slightest trace.
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Fortunately, neither of the two interlocutors recognized Giesl in the next chair. At the request of Hartwig's family and the Belgrade government, Sazonov gave permission for Hartwig to be buried in Serbia, a highly unusual procedure for a Russian diplomat who had died in foreign service.
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The expressions of public grief and the unprecedented pomp that accompanied his state funeral in Belgrade bore witness to the extraordinary place he occupied in Serbian public awareness. However one assesses Hartwig's contribution to Balkan politics, it would be churlish to deny that the Russian minister had already achieved his primary objectives when he collapsed on Giesl's divan. In the words of the French envoy Descos, Hartwig died at the very moment when his ‘indomitable will' had triumphed by ‘imposing on Serbism his absolute authority, and on Europe the Serbian question in the violent form dear to his heart'.
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On 6 July 1914, the 26-year-old French diplomat Louis de Robien left Paris for St Petersburg, where he had been appointed attaché at the French embassy. The date of his departure had been pulled forward so that he would arrive in good time to help with the preparations for the state visit by President Poincaré, which was scheduled for 20 July. To gain time, de Robien did not take the Nord Express, which did not leave every day, but boarded an ordinary sleeping car in the fast train to Cologne. There was time to look briefly at the Rhine and the great Gothic cathedral before the connecting train crossed the industrial region of the Ruhr, ‘always so impressive and not without a certain beauty'. From there the train made its way eastwards, traversing Germany at its widest point, until it reached Wirballen (today the Lithuanian town of Kybartai) on the eastern border of East Prussia. Here, much to his annoyance, de Robien had to leave his comfortable German sleeping car and change trains because of the difference between the Russian and European gauges. His first encounter with the locals on the far side of the border made a lasting impression: as soon as the train had stopped, the carriages were invaded by a ‘horde of bearded persons' wearing boots and white aprons who took charge of his baggage with such haste that he was unable to follow them. De Robien and his fellow passengers were channelled towards a barricade before which stood ‘soldiers with great sabres'. Here their passports were verified, a procedure that astonished de Robien, because ‘in that era of liberty, one travelled everywhere in Europe except for Russia without carrying a passport'. After presenting his travel documents, de Robien waited in a vast room in whose corners were icons, lit by stands of burning candles, a ‘strange accoutrement', he felt, for what was effectively a waiting room. At last the formalities were complete and the train passed through a countryside ‘of terrible sadness' studded with villages over which loomed the onion domes of churches. He tried to speak with some officers, who appeared to be engineers, but they spoke only a few words of German. ‘We felt,' he recalled, ‘as if we were in China.'
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His arrival in St Petersburg, where he would spend the war years and live through the cataclysm of two revolutions, did nothing to dispel the sense of strangeness. On the contrary, it merely ‘completed our disappointment'. The Russian capital was full of ‘horrible little carriages, long, poorly maintained roads, and bearded, exotic-looking coachmen'. He initially booked in at the Hotel France, where the rooms were large but the furniture so ugly and the ambience so comfortless and ‘different from what we were used to in Europe' that he decided to cancel his reservation and move instead to the Hotel d'Europe on the ‘famous Nevsky Prospekt'. But even the Hotel d'Europe was not especially European and the shops along the great riverside avenue were disappointing – the best of them, the Parisian nobleman wrote, were reminiscent of a French provincial town.
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Getting about was difficult, because scarcely any passers-by could understand him, which was a shock, since his colleagues in Paris had assured him that the French language would be familiar to everybody. The food and drink of the city brought little comfort to the fastidious count: Russian cuisine, he reported, was awful, especially the fish soups, which were ‘detestable'; only borshch struck him as ‘a recipe worth keeping on the menu'. As for ‘their vodka', drunk at one draught, it was ‘unworthy of a civilized palate educated to the slow enjoyment of our cognacs, our armagnacs, our marcs and our kirsch'.
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Having found his bearings in the city, de Robien made his way to his new place of work. There was some consolation in the fact that the French embassy, housed in a fine palace that had belonged to the Dolgoruki family, was situated at one of the most beautiful points along the banks of the Neva. De Robien was especially impressed by the footmen in their blue livery and short breeches. On the ground floor looking out over the river could be found the ambassador's office, decorated with tapestries and paintings by Van der Meulen. Next door was a smaller room where the telephone was kept – it was here that the embassy staff gathered each afternoon for the ritual taking of tea. Next to this room was the office of the counsellor M. Doulcet, whose walls were decorated with portraits of all the ambassadors of France to the court of Russia. At the back, behind an office crowded with secretaries and archival files, was a door opening on to the embassy strongroom, where secret documents and the transmissions code were stored. The pride of the embassy was the reception room on the first floor, a fine boudoir with walls of green and gold damask hung with paintings by Guardi belonging to the ambassador, and gilt armchairs that were supposed to have furnished the rooms of Marie Antoinette.
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