The Sleepwalkers (88 page)

One last thought on the Russian decision to mobilize: when Sazonov saw the Tsar on the afternoon of 30 July, he found him preoccupied with the threat posed to Russia by Austrian mobilization. ‘They [the Germans] don't want to acknowledge that Austria mobilized before we did. Now they demand that our mobilization be stopped, without mentioning that of the Austrians. [. . .] At present, if I accepted Germany's demands, we would be disarmed against Austria.'
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Yet we know that the Austrian preparations were at this point still entirely focused on the task of securing victory over Serbia, regardless of the growing threat of a Russian response. The Tsar's anxiety was not the expression of an individual paranoia; rather, it reflected a broader tendency in Russian military threat analysis. Russian military intelligence consistently overrated Austrian military capability and, more importantly, presumed a very formidable capacity for pre-emption by stealth, an assumption fortified by the Balkan crisis of 1912–13, when the Austrians had managed to raise troop strengths in Galicia without at first attracting the Russians' notice.
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These tendencies were reinforced, paradoxically, by the very detailed knowledge the Russians possessed (thanks to the now-deceased Colonel Redl and other well-placed sources) of Austrian deployment plans. This was not a new problem: already in 1910, Sukhomlinov, newly appointed as minister of war, boasted that he had seen specific Austrian army and naval deployment plans for the ‘conquest of Macedonia'. Such evidence, he claimed, revealed the immense scale of the threat posed to Russian interests by Austro-Hungarian expansionism on the Balkan peninsula and made a nonsense of all diplomatic assurances. That these – in fact antiquated and obsolete – documents might have been contingency plans rather than expressions of Austrian policy appears not to have occurred to Sukhomlinov, who presumably intended to use them as arguments for a hike in military funding.
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A tendency towards paranoid over-reading of captured planning documents continued to dog Russian security policy until 1914. Precisely because they were so well acquainted with Austrian mobilization schedules, the Russians tended, on the one hand, to read individual measures as part of a coherent whole and, on the other, to view any departure from the expected sequence as potentially threatening.

In 1913, for example, the Russians had learned from their intelligence sources that the Austrians had earmarked as many as seven army corps for the eventuality of a war with Serbia. But in July 1914, reports (of dubious accuracy) from Ambassador Shebeko and the Russian military attaché Vineken suggested that the number of corps currently in preparation might be as high as eight or nine. Russian intelligence read this discrepancy as an indication that Conrad might be shifting from his Serbian-focused Plan B to the Russian-centred Plan R, in other words embarking on a ‘covert shift to full or near-full Austrian mobilization'.
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In retrospect, we know that Austrian estimates of Serbian effectiveness had indeed been rising, pushing up the deployments they believed would be needed to subdue the country's armed forces. And the course of the first year of the war was to show that even these revised Austrian estimates were not large enough to secure a decisive victory against the Serbs, who really did ‘fight like lions', as the Tsar had predicted. It was a classic example of the misreadings that can arise when a dose of high-level, textured intelligence tempts the receiver to shoehorn incoming data into a pattern that is denuded of context and may be outdated. In an environment saturated by paranoia, sober assessments of actual threat levels were virtually impossible. But what matters most about these interpetations of Austrian measures is that they were taken seriously by the Tsar, who was an avid reader of the General Staff's daily intelligence surveys. And this in turn explains the otherwise puzzling tendency of the Russians to view their own general mobilization as equivalent to, and justifed by, Austrian measures. Like nearly everyone else in this crisis, the Russians could claim to be standing with their backs against the wall.

Throughout the middle weeks of July 1914, the German decision-makers stuck like barnacles to their policy of localization. During the early days it was still quite easy to imagine a very swift resolution of the crisis. Wilhelm II told Emperor Franz Joseph on 6 July that ‘the situation would be cleared up within a week because of Serbia's backing down . . .', though it was possible, as he remarked to War Minister Erich von Falkenhayn, that the ‘period of tension' might last a little longer, perhaps as long as ‘three weeks'.
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But even in the third week of July, when the hope of a swift resolution no longer seemed realistic, the political leadership remained committed to localization. On 17 July, the chargé d'affaires at the Saxon legation in Berlin learned that ‘a localisation of the conflict is expected, since England is absolutely pacific and France as well as Russia likewise do not feel inclined towards war'.
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In a circular of 21 July to the German ambassadors in Rome, London and St Petersburg, Bethmann declared: ‘We urgently desire a localisation of the conflict; an intervention by any another power will, in view of the divergent alliance commitments, lead to incalculable consequences.'
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Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg

One condition for successful localization was that the Germans themselves must avoid any action likely to trigger an escalation. It was partly with this end in mind, and partly to secure the autonomy and freedom from distraction he needed to manage the crisis, that Bethmann encouraged the Kaiser to leave Berlin for his scheduled cruise of the Baltic. For the same reason, the senior military commanders were encouraged to go or remain on holiday. Chief of the General Staff Helmut von Moltke, Imperial Naval Office chief Admiral von Tirpitz and the chief of the Admiralty Staff Hugo von Pohl were already on holiday, Quarter-Master General Count Waldersee left Berlin for a few weeks' rest on his father-in-law's estate in Mecklenburg, as did War Minister Erich von Falkenhayn, who set off for a brief inspection tour, to be followed by his annual holiday.

It would be a mistake to make too much of these departures. The individuals involved were aware of the gravity of the crisis and confident in the existing state of readiness of the German military; they also understood that a further escalation was unlikely until the Austrians took some kind of action vis-à-vis Belgrade.
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On the other hand, it is going too far to speak of an elaborate German feint to distract the attention of the world from preparations for a continental war that had already been resolved upon and planned in advance. The internal memoranda and correspondence of these days suggest that both the political leadership and the military and naval commands were confident that the strategy of localization would work. There were no summit discussions among the senior German commanders, and Helmut von Moltke did not return from taking the waters in Carlsbad, Bohemia until 25 July. On the 13th, he wrote to the German military attaché in Vienna that Austria would be well advised to ‘beat the Serbs and then make peace quickly, demanding an Austro-Serbian alliance as the sole condition, as Prussia did with Austria in 1866' – at this point he apparently still believed it possible that Austria would launch and complete its strike on Serbia without triggering a Russian intervention.
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Particularly noteworthy is the lack of activity on the part of the military intelligence networks. Major Walter Nicolai, head of Department IIIb of the General Staff, responsible for espionage and counter-intelligence, was away on a family holiday in the Harz mountains and was not recalled. The intelligence posts on the eastern frontier were issued with no special instructions after the meetings at Potsdam and appear to have taken no special precautions. Only on 16 July did it occur to someone in the operations department that it might be ‘desirable to watch developments in Russia more closely than this is done in times of complete political calm', but even this circular made it clear that there was no call for ‘special measures of any kind'.
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In several of the districts adjoining Russian territory, the local intelligence officers were allowed to remain on leave, like Moltke, until 25 July.
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In order not to compromise the localization plan, Bethmann and the German Foreign Office repeatedly urged the Austrians to get their skates on and produce their tensely awaited
fait accompli
. But the decision-makers in Vienna were unable or unwilling to comply. The cumbersome machinery of the Habsburg state did not lend itself to swift and decisive measures. Already by 11 July, Bethmann was starting to fret at the agonizing slowness of Austrian preparations. In a diary entry composed on Bethmann's estate, Kurt Riezler summed up the problem: ‘Apparently [the Austrians] need a horribly long time to mobilise. 16 days, says [Conrad von] Hoetzendorff. This is very dangerous. A quick
fait accompli
and then friendly to the Entente – that way the shock can be withstood.'
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As late as 17 July, Secretary Stolberg at the German embassy in Vienna notified Bethmann that ‘negotiations' were still taking place between Berchtold and Tisza.
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It was in order to meet the need for speed and minimize the likelihood of international complications that Berchtold set the deadline for the reply to the Austrian note to only forty-eight hours. For the very same reason, Jagow pressed the Austrians to bring forward the projected date of their declaration of war on Serbia from 29 to 28 July.

If the sluggishness of the Austrian response removed one of the preconditions for the success of the policy of localization, why did the Germans stick so doggedly to it? One reason was that they continued to believe that deeper structural factors – such as the incompleteness of the Russian armaments programme – militated against an armed intervention. The French government was harder to read, all the more so as the president, the prime minister and the head of the political department of the Quai d'Orsay were all in Russia or at sea for the third and fourth week of July. But German confidence in the likely inaction of the Entente was reinforced by the Humbert report on French military readiness.

The Germans greeted Humbert's sensational revelations on the supposed inadequacy of French military preparations with scepticism, recognizing in the intemperate language of Humbert's report an essentially political attack on War Minister Adolphe Messimy and his staff. German military experts were quick to point out that the smaller French field guns were in fact superior in quality to their German counterparts. Since the French army had abandoned its earlier defensive approach in favour of an offensive strategy, the relative decline of the border fortifications was a red herring.
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In a secret memorandum following up the Humbert revelations, however, Moltke concluded that French military preparations on the eastern frontier were indeed deficient, especially in the areas of heavy artillery, mortars and bomb-proof ammunition storage.
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At the very least, the Humbert report suggested that the French government, and in particular the French military command, would be in no mood to press the Franco-Russian Alliance into a war over Serbia; the Russians, too, would surely be discouraged.
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A further reason for the commitment to localization was the paucity – as the Germans saw it – of alternative options. Abandoning the Habsburg ally was out of the question, and not just for reputational and power-political reasons, but also because the German decision-makers really did accept the justice of the Austrian case against Serbia. If the balance of military striking-power was shifting to Germany's disadvantage, the situation would be incalculably worse, were Germany to be denuded of its only great power ally – German planners had already written off Italy as too unreliable to be counted as a substantial asset.
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Italian ambivalence also undermined the plausibility of the proposal, favoured by Grey, that a concert of the four less involved powers work together to resolve the dispute – if Italy, as seemed very likely, given its anti-Austrian Balkan policy – sided with the two Entente powers, Britain and France, what chance would there be of securing a fair outcome for Austria-Hungary? The Germans were willing to pass British suggestions to Vienna, but Bethmann's view was that Germany should support a multilateral intervention only between Russia and Austria, not between Austria and Serbia.
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Underlying the localization strategy – and preventing the emergence of alternatives – was still the belief, so important to Bethmann, that if the Russians decided, despite everything, to intervene on behalf of their client, the resulting war would arise as something beyond Germany's control, as a destiny visited on the central powers by an aggressive Russia and its Entente partners. We find this train of thought in a letter of 12 July from Foreign Secretary Gottlieb von Jagow to Ambassador Lichnowsky in London: