The Sleepwalkers (89 page)

We need to see to localising the conflict between Austria and Serbia. Whether this is possible will depend in the first place on Russia and in the second place on the influence of the other members of the entente. [. . .] I have no wish for a preventive war, but if the fight offers itself, we dare not flinch.
⁹⁹

Here again is the tendency we can discern in the reasoning of so many of the actors in this crisis, to perceive oneself as operating under irresistible external constraints while placing the responsibility for deciding between peace and war firmly on the shoulders of the opponent.

Through their support for Austria-Hungary and through their blithe confidence in the feasibility of localization, the German leaders made their own contribution to the unfolding of the crisis. And yet nothing in how they reacted to the events of summer 1914 suggests that they viewed the crisis as the welcome opportunity to set in train a long-laid plan to unleash a preventive war on Germany's neighbours. On the contrary, Zimmermann, Jagow and Bethmann were remarkably slow to grasp the scale of the disaster unfolding around them. On 13 July, Zimmermann was still confident that there would be no ‘great European conflict'. As late as the 26th, it was still the view of the senior Foreign Office staff that both France and England would stay out of any Balkan conflict. Far from being masters of the situation, the German policy-makers appeared to be struggling to stay abreast of developments. During the decisive days of the crisis, Jagow struck senior colleagues as ‘nervous, irresolute, fearful' and ‘inadequate to the responsibilities of his office', while Bethmann reminded Tirpitz of ‘a drowning man'.
¹⁰⁰

During these hot July weeks, the Kaiser was taking his Scandinavian cruise. Extended journeys by ship, mostly in the Baltic, had long been a fixture in Wilhelm II's summer calendar. They allowed him to escape from the tension, complexity and the sense of impotence that dogged him in Berlin. On board the royal yacht
Hohenzollern
, surrounded by agreeable sycophants who could always be press-ganged into imperial amusements, the Kaiser could be master of all he surveyed and give free rein to the impetuous currents of his personality. After a few pleasant days at the Kiel regatta, accompanied by much jovial fraternizing with officers of the Royal Navy, Wilhelm sailed on to the Norwegian coastal town of Balholm, where he remained anchored until 25 July. It was from here, on 14 July, that he sent a first personal reply to Franz Joseph's message requesting German help. The letter reiterated the earlier assurance of support and denounced the ‘crazed fanatics' whose ‘pan-Slavist agitation' threatened the dual monarchy, but interestingly enough, it made no reference to the waging of war. Wilhelm stated that although he must ‘refrain from taking a view on the question of current relations between Vienna and Belgrade', he saw it as a ‘moral duty of all civilized states' to counter anti-monarchist ‘propaganda of the deed' with ‘all the available instruments of power'. But the rest of the letter referred exclusively to
diplomatic
initiatives in the Balkan region to prevent the emergence of an anti-Austrian ‘Balkan League under Russian patronage'. It closed with best wishes for the Emperor's swift recovery from his bereavement.
¹⁰¹

The Kaiser's comments on the state papers that reached him on the yacht reveal that, like many of the leading political and military figures in Berlin, he was impatient to hear of a decision from Vienna.
¹⁰²
His chief concern appears to have been that allowing too much time to elapse would squander the benefits of international indignation at the Sarajevo murders, or that the Austrians might lose their nerve altogether. He was pleased to hear, on around 15 July, that ‘an energetic decision' was imminent. His only regret was that there would be a further delay before Austrian demands were delivered to Belgrade.
¹⁰³

On 19 July, however, Wilhelm was shocked into a state of ‘high anxiety' by a telegram to the
Hohenzollern
from the secretary of state for foreign affairs, Jagow. The telegram contained nothing essentially new, but its warning that an ultimatum was now planned for 23 July and that measures were to be taken to make sure that the Kaiser could be reached ‘in case unforeseen circumstances should make important decisions [mobilization] necessary' brought home to Wilhelm the potential scope of the crisis that now loomed.
¹⁰⁴
He immediately issued an order that the High Seas Fleet should cancel a planned visit to Scandinavia and instead remain together in a state of readiness for immediate departure. His anxiety was understandable, given that the British navy happened at this time to be in the midst of a trial mobilization and was thus at a high level of battle-readiness. But Bethmann and Jagow rightly took the view that this would merely arouse suspicion and exacerbate the crisis by discouraging a British demobilization; on 22 July, they overruled Wilhelm and ordered that the sojourn in Norway proceed as planned. At this point, diplomatic priorities still outweighed strategic considerations.
¹⁰⁵

Despite the rising tension, Wilhelm remained confident that a more general crisis could be avoided. Presented with a copy of the text of the ultimatum to Belgrade, he commented: ‘Well, what do you know, that
is
a firm note after all' – Wilhelm had evidently shared the view widely held within his entourage that the Austrians would ultimately shrink from confronting Serbia. When Admiral Müller suggested that the ultimatum meant that war was imminent, the Kaiser energetically contradicted him. The Serbs, he insisted, would never risk a war against Austria. Müller interpreted this – correctly, as it turned out – as a sign that the Kaiser was psychologically completely unprepared for military complications and would cave in as soon as he realized that war was a real possibility.
¹⁰⁶

Wilhelm returned to Potsdam on the afternoon of 27 July. It was very early on the morning of the following day that he first read the text of the Serbian reply to the ultimatum served by Vienna five days before. His response was unexpected, to say the least. He inscribed on his copy of the Serbian reply the words: ‘An excellent result for a forty-eight hour [deadline]. This is more than we could have expected! But this does away with any need for war.' He was astonished to hear that the Austrians had already issued an order for partial mobilization: ‘
I
would never have ordered a mobilization on that basis.'
¹⁰⁷
At ten o'clock that morning, the Kaiser dashed off a letter to Jagow in which he declared that since Serbia had tendered a ‘capitulation of the most humiliating kind', ‘any reason for war has now been eliminated'. Instead of invading the country outright, he went on, they should consider temporarily occupying the evacuated city of Belgrade as a means of ensuring Serbian compliance. More importantly, Wilhelm ordered Jagow to inform the Austrians that this was his wish, that ‘every cause for war [had] vanished', and that Wilhelm himself was prepared to ‘mediate for peace with Austria'. ‘This I will do in my own way and as sparingly of Austria's national feeling and of the honour of her arms as possible.'
¹⁰⁸
He also let Moltke know in writing that if Serbia abided by her undertakings to Austria-Hungary, the grounds for war would no longer exist. During that day, according to the minister of war, he made ‘confused speeches which give the clear impression that he no longer wants war and is determined to [avoid it], even if it means leaving Austria-Hungary in the lurch'.
¹⁰⁹

Historians have seen this sudden bout of circumspection as evidence of a failure of nerve. On 6 July, when the Kaiser had met Gustav Krupp in Kiel, he had repeatedly assured the industrialist: ‘This time, I shall not chicken out' – Krupp was struck by the pathos of these feeble attempts to prove his mettle.
¹¹⁰
As Luigi Albertini aptly put it: ‘Wilhelm was full of bluster when danger was a long way off but piped down when he saw a real threat of war approaching.'
¹¹¹
There is something in this: the Emperor's readiness to commit himself to the defence of Austrian interests had always been inversely proportional to his assessment of the risk of conflict. And on 28 July, the risks appeared very grave indeed. The latest telegrams from Lichnowsky in London reported Sir Edward Grey as saying that Serbia had given satisfaction to a degree ‘he would never have believed possible' and warning that a major conflagration was in prospect if Austria did not moderate its position.
¹¹²
Hypersensitive as he was to the British viewpoint, Wilhelm must have taken these warnings seriously – indeed they may even account for his interpretation of the Serbian reply, which was so at odds with the view of the chancellor and the Foreign Office. In some respects, however, Wilhelm's note of 28 July was less out of line with his previous interventions than the idea of a failure of nerve might imply; his comments during the crisis suggest that, unlike those figures in Vienna and Berlin who saw the ultimatum as a mere pretext for military action, he regarded it as an authentic diplomatic instrument with a role to play in resolving the crisis and that he remained wedded to the notion of a political resolution of the Balkan problem.

A fissure had opened within the German decision-making structure. The view of the sovereign was at odds with that of the most senior political decision-makers. But the fissure was soon closed. The most remarkable thing about the letter to Jagow of 28 July is that it was not acted upon. Had Kaiser Wilhelm II enjoyed the plenitude of power that is sometimes attributed to him, this intervention might have changed the course of the crisis and possibly of world history. But he was out of touch with developments in Vienna, where the leadership was now impatient to press ahead with the strike on Serbia. And, more importantly, having been away at sea for the better part of three weeks, he was out of touch with developments in Berlin. His instructions to Jagow had no influence on Berlin's representations to Vienna. Bethmann did not inform the Austrians of Wilhelm's views in time to prevent them from issuing their declaration of war on 28 July. And the chancellor's urgent telegram to Tschirschky, dispatched only a quarter of an hour after the Kaiser's letter to Jagow, incorporated some of Wilhelm's proposals, but omitted the crucial insistence that there could now be no reason for war. Instead, Bethmann stuck to the earlier line, since abandoned by Wilhelm, that the Germans must ‘avoid very carefully giving rise to the impression that we wish to hold the Austrians back'.
¹¹³

Why Bethmann did this is difficult to establish. The view that he had already harnessed his diplomacy to a policy of preventive war cannot be supported from the documents. It is more probable that he was simply already committed to an alternative strategy that focused on working alongside Vienna to persuade Russia not to overreact to Austrian measures. On the evening of 28 July, Bethmann persuaded the Kaiser to send a telegram to Nicholas II assuring him that the German government was doing its level best to bring about a satisfactory understanding between Vienna and St Petersburg; only twenty-four hours before, Wilhelm had rejected such a move as premature.
¹¹⁴
The result was the note mentioned earlier to Nicky, begging him not to compromise Willy's role as intermediary. Bethmann was thinking in terms of localizing the conflict, not of preventing it, and he was determined to protect that policy against interventions from above.

From 25 July onwards, there was growing evidence of military movement in Russia. The intelligence officer in Königsberg reported that an ‘unusually long' batch of encrypted transmissions had been intercepted between the Eiffel Tower and the Russian wireless station at Bobruysk.
¹¹⁵
On the morning of Sunday 26 July, Lieutenant-General Chelius, the German military plenipotentiary to the court of Nicholas II, reported that the authorities appeared to have inaugurated ‘all preparations for mobilization against Austria'.
¹¹⁶
In order to acquire a fuller picture of what was happening across the border, Major Nicolai of Department IIIb returned to Berlin, cut short his holiday leave and issued orders that the ‘tension travellers' (
Spannungreisende
) were to be mobilized. These were volunteers from a range of backgrounds whose task was, at the first sign of international tension, to enter Russia and France under the guise of vacationers or commercial travellers and record covert observations in order to establish, as Major Nicolai put it in their brief, ‘whether war preparations are taking place in France and Russia'.
¹¹⁷
Some of them made repeated short trips across the border and reported their observations in person, like the indefatigable Herr Henoumont, who managed to visit Warsaw twice in the space of three days and was trapped for a time in Russian Poland when the borders closed. Others travelled further afield and sent lightly coded cables through the public telegraph service. There was as yet no sense of hurry – the intelligence officers handling the travellers were informed on 25 July that the period of tension might be quite protracted. If, on the other hand, the tension waned, those travellers whose leave had been cancelled would be able to go back on vacation.
¹¹⁸

The tension travellers and other agents operating out of the intelligence stations on the eastern frontier soon began to generate a picture of Russian military preparations. From the station at Königsberg came reports of empty freight trains moving eastwards, troop movements around Kovno and alerts to frontier guard units. At 10 p.m. on 26 July, tension traveller Ventski reported from Vilna, using the commercial telegram service, that war preparations were already well underway in the city. Throughout the 27th and 28th, a steady flow of details from tension travellers and other agents reached the newly created ‘intelligence assessment board' at the General Staff. On the afternoon of 28 July, the board produced an appraisal summarizing the latest information to hand: