The Sleepwalkers (83 page)

To be sure, there were moments when Sazonov's belief in a peaceful outcome seemed to revive. We have seen that the Austrians paused after receiving the ultimatum on 25 July, in the hope that the actuality of Austrian military preparations might prompt last-minute concessions from Belgrade. Sazonov mistakenly read this as a sign that Vienna might be looking for a climbdown and began to talk of a negotiated settlement. ‘Until the very last moment,' he told the French ambassador on 26 July, ‘I will show myself ready to negotiate.' What he meant by this became clear when he summoned Szapáry for a ‘frank and loyal explanation' of his views. Working through the Austrian note point by point, Sazonov insisted on the ‘unacceptable, absurd and insulting' character of every clause and closed with an offer: ‘Take back your ultimatum, modify its form and I guarantee you we will have a result.'
³⁹
This ‘negotiation' was hardly the basis for fruitful further discussions. In any case, the brief Austrian lull after the submission of the ultimatum was grounded not in Austrian doubts about the rectitude of their own course, but in the hope that Belgrade might back down at the last minute. The news of the Russian pre-mobilization naturally rendered these hopes groundless. No one was more excited by the spectacle of Cossacks boarding trains than Miroslav Spalajković, who saw in them the portents of a final struggle for Serbian unity and freedom. With the Tsar urging the Serbs to fight ‘like lions', it was unlikely that Belgrade would entertain second thoughts about the terms of the ultimatum. And, in the meantime, Sazonov had explicitly advised Belgrade
not
to accept a British offer of mediation.

Even as they allowed the crisis to escalate, the Russians had to observe a certain caution. The French were committed to support Russia in a Balkan intervention, regardless of the precise circumstances in which that intervention was deemed to be necessary. But it was still important to placate French and British public opinion and to keep the Germans quiescent for as long as possible. Since November 1912, it had been an established assumption of Russian mobilization practice that the concentration of troops and matériel should be completed, if possible, ‘without beginning hostilities, in order not to deprive the enemy irrevocably of the hope that war can still be avoided'. During this period of latent mobilization, ‘clever diplomatic negotiations' would be used to ‘lull to sleep as much as possible the enemy's fears'.
⁴⁰
When mobilization is ordered in Russia, Paléologue reported to Paris on 25 July after a conversation with Sazonov, it will take place against Austria only and will avoid taking the offensive, ‘in order to leave Germany with a pretext for
not invoking straight away
the
casus foederis
'.
⁴¹
It was also essential, for the sake of Russian, French and British public opinion, that
Austria
, not Russia, be seen as the aggressor. ‘We must let Austria place herself entirely in the wrong,' Sazonov told Paléologue on 24 July.
⁴²
This thought, that the opponent must be allowed to appear the aggressor, would crop up in all the key decision-centres on both sides during the last days of the crisis.

Was all this done on Serbia's behalf alone? Was Russia really willing to risk war in order to protect the integrity of its distant client? We have seen that Serbia's importance in Russian eyes grew during the last years before the war, partly because of the deepening alienation from Sofia and partly because Serbia was a better instrument than Bulgaria for applying pressure to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Sympathy with the Serbian cause was strong in Russian pan-Slavist and nationalist circles – this was an issue with which the government could build useful bridges to its middle-class public. On the other hand, St Petersburg had been willing to leave Belgrade to its own devices in October 1913, when the Austrians had issued an ultimatum demanding their withdrawal from northern Albania. And unlike Russia's neighbour Bulgaria, which possessed a piece of Black Sea coast, Serbia could hardly be seen as geopolitically crucial to Russian security.

The robustness of the Russian response fully makes sense only if we read it against the background of the Russian leadership's deepening anxiety about the future of the Turkish Straits. The Russians (or, more precisely, the Russian naval command) had been wishfully planning Bosphorus-seizing expeditions since the 1890s.
⁴³
And we have seen how the Bulgarian march on Constantinople, the disruption of grain exports during the Balkan Wars and the Liman von Sanders crisis pushed this issue to the head of the agenda in 1912–1914.
⁴⁴
By the summer of 1914, further factors were conspiring to heighten Russian apprehensions about the Turkish Straits. Most importantly, a regional arms and naval race had broken out between the Ottoman Empire and Greece, driven by a dispute over the future of the northern Aegean islands. In order to retain their edge over the Greeks, the Ottoman naval authorities had ordered two dreadnought-class battleships from the British firms Armstrong and Vickers, the first of which was due to arrive in late July 1914.
⁴⁵

This local power struggle was extremely alarming to the Russians. First, there was the danger, in the event of hostilities, of a further closure of the Straits to Russian commercial shipping, with all the costs and economic disruption that entailed. Then there was the possibility that some lesser state (Greece or Bulgaria) might suddenly grab a piece of Ottoman territory that the Russians themselves had their eyes on. A further worry was that a Graeco-Turkish war might bring the British navy on to the scene, just when the Russians were pressing London to scale down the British naval mission. But most important by a long margin was the prospect of a Turkish dreadnought presence in the Black Sea, where the Russians possessed no battleships of this class. The arrival of the new Turkish dreadnoughts, the Russian naval minister warned in January 1914, would create a naval power with ‘crushing, nearly sixfold superiority' over the Russian Black Sea Fleet.
⁴⁶
‘It is clear what calamitous results the loss of our superior position on the Black Sea would have for us,' Sazonov told the Russian ambassador in London in May 1914. ‘And therefore we cannot stand idly by and watch the continued and also very rapid expansion of the Ottoman naval forces.'
⁴⁷
At the end of July 1914, Sazonov was still entreating the British to retain the dreadnoughts destined for Constantinople.
⁴⁸

Exactly how much weight these concerns carried in Russian thinking during the July Crisis is difficult to ascertain.
⁴⁹
Since the official documents tended to focus on the Austro-Serbian epicentre of the crisis, there was a tendency to rationalize Russian decisions exclusively in terms of solidarity with the Slavic ‘little brothers' and the need to maintain Russian prestige on the Balkan peninsula. Sazonov had learned his lesson and knew that an open bid for control of the Straits was unlikely to play well with his allies. The picture is complicated somewhat, however, by the fact that the Bosphorus was a specifically naval obsession, not shared by the army General Staff.

On the other hand, the Straits issue doubtless carried considerable weight for Krivoshein, whose responsibility for agricultural exports made him especially aware of the vulnerability of Russian commercial shipping. Recent instability in the Balkans had tended to fuse the Balkan theatre with the Straits question, so that the pensinsula came increasingly to be seen as the crucial strategic hinterland to the Straits.
⁵⁰
Russian control of the Balkans would place St Petersburg in a far better position to prevent unwanted intrusions on the Bosphorus. Designs on the Straits were thus an important reinforcing factor in the decision to stand firm over the threat to Serbia.

Whatever the precise order of geopolitical priorities, the Russians were already on the road to war. At this point, the horizons of possibility began to narrow. It becomes in retrospect harder (though not impossible) to imagine alternatives to the war that actually did break out in the first days of August 1914. This is doubtless what General Dobrorolsky, head of the Russian army's mobilization department, meant when he remarked in 1921 that after the St Petersburg meetings of 24 and 25 July ‘the war was already a decided thing, and all the flood of telegrams between the governments of Russia and Germany were nothing but the staging for an historical drama'.
⁵¹
And yet throughout the crucial days of the fourth week of July, the Russians and their French partners continued to speak of a policy of peace. The policy of ‘firmness', as expounded by Poincaré, Sazonov, Paléologue, Izvolsky, Krivoshein and their colleagues was a policy that aimed, in the words of the Tsar, ‘to safeguard peace by the demonstration of force'.

It is tempting to dismiss this language as a smokescreen of euphemisms intended to disguise the aggressiveness of Russian and French policy and perhaps also to avoid putting off the policy-makers in London. But we find the same formulations in internal correspondance and private utterances. There is an interesting contrast here with the analogous German documents, which speak more directly of war as an external threat, a necessity and an instrument of policy. Yet a closer look at what Russian and French statesmen were actually doing when they spoke of the need to safeguard peace suggests that the difference was discursive, rather than substantial. Why this difference should have existed is not immediately clear, but we should be wary of seeing in it the symptom of Germanic militarism or war-lust. It may well reflect the deep impact of Clausewitz on German political language. The war of 1914–18 was the absolute negation of everything that Clausewitz had stood and argued for, but his subtle writings on conflict had depicted war as an eminently political tool, whose deployment – as a measure of last resort – should always serve political ends. By contrast, the language of the Russian and French decision-makers reflected the assumption that war and peace were stark existential alternatives. However, neither Clausewitz's sage injunctions on the primacy of politics nor heartfelt invocations of peace as the highest human good did anything to inhibit the decision-makers who took Europe into war in July 1914.

Throughout most of the July Crisis of 1914, the eyes of the decision-makers in London were riveted on the nine counties of Ulster in the north of Ireland. On 21 May 1914, a bill introducing Irish Home Rule was passed by the Commons at the third reading but rejected by the House of Lords. Dependent on Irish nationalist votes, Asquith's Liberal government resolved to use the provisions of the Parliament Act, which allows a government in such circumstances to circumvent the Lords and pass a bill by means of the Royal Assent. The prospect of a partial devolution of government functions to Catholic Ireland stirred deep and bitter controversy. The thorniest question concerned which counties, if any, of confessionally mixed Ulster should be exempted from Home Rule and thus allowed to remain in the Union. Despairing of a solution that would meet their demands, both sides – Catholic Irish nationalists and Protestant Unionists – began preparing for an armed power struggle. In the spring, Ireland was on the brink of a fully-fledged civil war. This was the seed-bed of the Troubles that would continue to bedevil northern Irish politics into the early twenty-first century.
¹

The tensions generated by the Ulster Question reached deep into the political life of the United Kingdom, because they touched on the past, present and future identity of the British polity. The Conservative Party (officially known as the Conservative and Unionist Party) was passionately opposed to Home Rule. Unionist feeling also ran high in the officer corps of the British army, many of whose recruits hailed from Protestant Anglo-Irish families with a strong stake in the Union. Indeed, it appeared doubtful whether the army would remain loyal if it were called upon to enforce Home Rule. In the Curragh Incident of 20 March 1914, fifty-seven British officers based at the Curragh Camp in County Kildare proposed to resign their commissions rather than enforce the introduction of Home Rule against unionist resistance.
²

H. H. Asquith

Among those within the army leadership who supported unionist insubordination was Director of Military Operations Henry Wilson, who had played such an important role in expanding the scope of the British contingency plans for a continental intervention. Wilson made less and less effort to mask his contempt for ‘Squiff' (as he called Asquith) and his ‘filthy cabinet'. He did not shrink from using the Home Rule question to blackmail the prime minister into meeting unionist demands. In a memorandum presented to the Army Council to be put before the cabinet on 29 June 1914, Wilson and his colleagues argued that the army would need to deploy the entire British Expeditionary Force to Ireland if it were to impose Home Rule and restore order there.
³
In other words: if the British government wished to impose Home Rule, it would have to renounce any military intervention in Europe for the foreseeable future; conversely, a continental military intervention would mean forgoing the introduction of Home Rule. This meant in turn that officers of unionist sympathies – which were extremely widespread in an officer corps dominated by Protestant Anglo-Irish families – were inclined to see in a British continental intervention one possible means of postponing or preventing altogether the introduction of Home Rule. Nowhere else in Europe, with the possible exception of Austria-Hungary, did domestic conditions exert such direct pressure on the political outlook of the most senior military commanders.