The Sleepwalkers (82 page)

In view of these difficulties, it is astonishing that the partial mobilization policy was ever given serious consideration. Why did Sazonov press for it? One can understand the superficial appeal of a measure that seemed to offer something short of the full mobilization that must by necessity trigger a continental war. Sazonov doubtless remembered the winter crisis of 1912–13, when the army had improvised a stop-gap mobilization plan against Austria-Hungary. And as a civilian in an environment where military expertise was jealously guarded and civil– military communications were poor, Sazonov, whose ignorance of military matters was notorious, may have known no better. He clearly received extremely poor advice from the chief of the General Staff, Yanushkevich, a man of very modest abilities who was still somewhat out of his depth after only five months in office. Yanushkevich, a courtier rather than a soldier, had seen no service in the field and his promotion, which was said to have excited general surprise, was probably due more to the Tsar's affection for him than to his professional qualifications.
¹⁹
Yet even after Yanushkevich's subordinates and Yanushkevich himself had pointed up the absurdity of the partial mobilization plan, Sazonov refused to discard it. Perhaps he felt he needed to be able to offer the Tsar an alternative to full mobilization; perhaps he hoped that partial mobilization would suffice to persuade the Austrians and the Germans to back down. Perhaps, on the other hand, he hoped with the offer of partial mobilization to coax the Tsar into a situation from which he would be forced to progress to the real thing. At the very least, these uncertainties suggest a certain disjointedness at the apex of the Russian executive, an impression reinforced by the fact that the Tsar was allowed to add the Baltic Fleet to Sazonov's partial mobilization plan, although this made a nonsense of the foreign minister's intention to avoid antagonizing Germany.
²⁰

In any case, for the moment, the policy of partial mobilization remained a red herring – at least until 28 July, when the government chose actually to announce it. In the meanwhile, the Council of Ministers had resolved an even more important decision, namely the activation of the ‘Regulation on the Period Preparatory to War of 2 March 1913'. This pre-mobilization law provided for heightened security and readiness at magazines and supply depots, the accelerated completion of railway repairs, readiness checks in all departments, the deployment of covering troops to positions on threatened fronts and the recall of reservists to training camps. And there were other measures: troops in training at locations remote from their bases were to be recalled immediately; around 3,000 officer cadets were to be promoted to officer rank to bring the officer corps up to wartime strength; harbours were to be mined, horses and wagons assembled, and the state of war was to be declared in all fortresses in the Warsaw, Vilnius and St Petersburg districts, so that the military authorities would possess the fullness of powers required to ensure speedy general mobilization when the order came. And these measures were put in force not only in the Austrian border zones, but across the entirety of European Russia.
²¹

Needless to say, these measures were fraught with risk. How would the Germans and the Austrians be able to tell the difference between Russia's far-reaching pre-mobilization measures and the opening phase of a mobilization proper? The text of the Regulation of 2 March conveys an impression of the scale of the measures underway. According to its stipulations, reserves were to be recalled to frontier divisions and ‘instructed as to the uniforms and probable dispositions of the enemy.

Horses are to be reshod. No more furloughs are to be granted and officers and men on furlough or detailed elsewhere are to return at once to their troop divisions. Espionage suspects are to be arrested. Measures to prevent the export of horses, cattle and grain are to be worked out. Money and valuable securities are to be removed from banks near the frontier to the interior. Naval vessels are to return to their harbours and receive provisions and full war equipment.
²²

Yanushkevich raised the likelihood of misunderstandings by expressly advising the commanders in each district not to feel bound by the letter of the Regulation of 2 March and to overstep the prescribed measures if they judged it appropriate.

And sure enough, many obervers mistook the pre-mobilization for a partial mobilization. The Belgian military attaché in St Petersburg reported on 26 July that the Tsar had ordered the mobilization of ‘ten army corps in military circumscriptions of Kiev and Odessa', adding that the news had been ‘received with the greatest enthusiasm in military circles' and pointing out in a dispatch of the following day that the press had been informed that any public discussion of the ‘mobilization of the army' was strictly forbidden.
²³
German and Austrian consuls, diplomats and attachés began firing off alarmed reports. From Copenhagen, the Austrian minister Count Széchényi reported on 26 July that the Danish foreign minister Eric Scavenius had received news from St Petersburg suggesting that Russia had already begun to mobilize – though in view of these precipitate offensive measures, Széchényi thought it unlikely that France or England would feel obliged to intervene.
²⁴
On the following day, the Austrian Consul Hein in Kiev reported the recall of officers to garrisons and long lines of artillery units marching westwards out of the Kiev encampment, their destination unknown. Later on the same day (27 July), he reported sixteen trains loaded with artillery and Cossacks leaving Kiev and twenty-six military trains carrying artillery and sappers en route from Odessa, all bound for the Austrian border. The vast Kiev military camp was now empty – the troops had either moved to their winter quarters or were assembling at the station for embarkation.
²⁵
From Szczakowa in the Polish salient came a coded dispatch reporting that manoeuvres taking place in the area had been broken off and all troops concentrated in the city; a ‘large contingent' of artillery had been loaded into wagons at the city's Vienna station. During the previous night, seven trains full of sappers had passed out of the station.
²⁶
From Moscow came reports that the Imperial Russian Airforce, second only to the French in size, had pushed westwards, while a cavalry regiment had arrived in the city from far-off Ekaterinoslav (today: Dniepropetrovsk) nearly 600 miles to the south.
²⁷
From the Austrian authorities in Galicia, there were reports of ‘decidedly large' masses of troops, including artillery and Cossacks, moving into positions just across the border.
²⁸
From Batum on the east coast of the Black Sea came news of regiments of infantry, Cossacks and dragoons on their way to Warsaw.
²⁹
Consular dispatches sent from across Russia to the German embassy in St Petersburg reported the mining of rivers, the seizure of rolling stock, an entire Russian artillery division seen marching westwards out of Kiev, the interdiction of German encrypted telegraphy through the Moscow telegraph office, troops on their way back from manoeuvres, infantry and cavalry units approaching Lublin and Kovel, the assembly of masses of horses at their points of concentration, large convoys of military vehicles on the move and other signs of a mass army preparing to make war.
³⁰
As early as the evening of 25 July, when Maurice Paléologue went to the Warsaw station in St Petersburg to say goodbye to Izvolsky, who was travelling back to Paris ‘in hot haste', the two men were struck by the commotion around them:

There was great bustle on the platforms. The trains were packed with officers and men. This looked like mobilization. We rapidly exchanged impressions and came to the same conclusion: ‘It's war this time.'
³¹

In taking these steps, Sazonov and his colleagues escalated the crisis and greatly increased the likelihood of a general European war. For one thing, Russian pre-mobilization altered the political chemistry in Serbia, making it unthinkable that the Belgrade government, which had originally given serious consideration to accepting the ultimatum, would back down in the face of Austrian pressure. It also heightened the domestic pressure on the Russian administration, for the sight of uniformed men and the news that Russia would not ‘remain indifferent' to the fate of Serbia stirred euphoria in the nationalist press. It sounded alarm bells in Austria-Hungary. Most importantly of all, these measures drastically raised the pressure on Germany, which had so far abstained from military preparations and was still counting on the localization of the Austro-Serbian conflict.

Why did Sazonov do it? He was not a candid man and never produced a reliable account of his actions or motivations during these days, but the most plausible and obvious answer lies in his very first reaction to the news of the ultimatum:
‘C'est la guerre européenne!
' Sazonov believed from the outset that an Austrian military action against Serbia must trigger a Russian counter-attack. His response to the ultimatum was entirely consistent with his earlier commitments. Sazonov had never acknowledged that Austria-Hungary had a right to counter-measures in the face of Serbian irredentism. On the contrary, he had endorsed the politics of Balkan irredentism and had explicitly aligned himself with the view that Serbia was the rightful successor to the lands of unredeemed South Slavdom within the dual monarchy, an obsolete multi-ethnic structure whose days, in his view, were in any case numbered. It does not seem to have occurred to him that the days of the autocratic, multi-ethnic Russian Empire, whose minority relations were in worse condition than Austria-Hungary's, might also be numbered.

Sazonov had denied from the start Austria's right to take action
of any kind
against Belgrade after the assassinations. He had repeatedly indicated in a range of contexts that he would respond militarily to any action against the client state. Already on 18 July, shortly after it became known that an Austrian note of some sort was in preparation, Sazonov had told Sir George Buchanan that ‘anything resembling an Austrian ultimatum in Belgrade could not leave Russia indifferent, and she might be forced to take some precautionary military measures'.
³²
Sazonov must have been aware of the immense risks involved, for he had joined Kokovtsov in opposing such a partial mobilization against Austria in November 1912 at the height of the Balkan crisis, on the grounds – as Kokovtsov put it – that ‘whatever we chose to call the projected measures, a mobilisation remained a mobilisation, to be countered by our adversaries with actual war'.
³³

The situation in 1914 was different, of course. The risks were greater and, with Kokovtsov out of the way, the mood was less inhibited. But there was another important difference: even in November 1912, Sazonov had added a rider to his support for a stand-down, saying that ‘even if we were ready for war [. . .] we had no right to undertake such steps without first coming to an understanding with our allies'.
³⁴
About this understanding – at least with France – there could no longer be any doubt in the summer of 1914. It was not just that Poincaré and Paléologue had pressed so hard for Russian firmness on the Serbian question, it was that a crisis of this kind conformed exactly to the Balkan inception scenario that the alliance, over many discussions and summit meetings, had come to define in recent years as the optimal
casus belli
. In a fascinating dispatch filed on 30 July, the Russian military attaché in Paris, Count Ignatiev, who had numerous contacts among the most senior French military commanders, reported that he saw in all around him ‘unconcealed joy at the prospect of having the chance to use, as the French see it, beneficial strategic circumstances'.
³⁵
The Belgian minister in Paris registered the same upbeat mood: ‘The French general staff is favourable to war,' he wrote on 30 July. ‘The general staff desires war, because in its view the moment is favourable and the time has come to make an end of it.'
³⁶

It is simply not the case, as has sometimes been claimed, that Paléologue misrepresented French intentions and made undertakings to St Petersburg for which he had no authorization from Paris. Nor is it true that he misinformed Paris about Russian mobilization in order to allow the crisis to mature to the point where Paris would be unable to restrain her ally. On the contrary, he alerted the French foreign ministry throughout to the measures adopted by the Russian government. A telegram composed at 6.30 on the evening of 24 July endorsed the principle of alliance solidarity in the interests of ‘preserving peace by the use of force'; a further telegram of eleven o'clock that night referred to the measures that Russia ‘would without doubt be obliged to take if Serbia were to be threatened in her independence or her territorial integrity'. And a further telegram composed at 4.45 p.m. on the following day and marked ‘urgent' and ‘secret' reported that the Council of Ministers had that day agreed ‘in principle' the mobilization ‘of the 13 army corps that are destined to operate against Austria'. There followed the crucial sentence:

The mobilisation will be made public and effective only when the Austro-Hungarian government attempts to constrain Serbia by force of arms. However, secret preparations [
preparatifs clandestins
] will begin from today.
³⁷

Viviani would later explode with indignation at the news that things had been allowed to go so far so quickly and would demand from Paléologue a full account of his doings during the crucial days of the crisis, accusing him of having withheld vital information on Russian measures (this is where the myth of Paléologue's unauthorized manipulations began). But athough Viviani was out of the loop (as Poincaré no doubt intended him to be), Poincaré and Paris were not. In case the notes from Paléologue did not suffice, there were parallel dispatches streaming in from the French military attaché General Laguiche, who reported on 26 July, for example, that ‘secret military dispositions' were already underway in Warsaw, Vilna and St Petersburg, all districts abutting the German frontier.
³⁸
Yet there was no call for restraint from the Quai d'Orsay. Nor did Poincaré, though he later falsified key details of his own involvement in the crisis, ever disavow Paléologue or the policy he had so enthusiastically represented in St Petersburg.