Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914. Max Hastings
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for the actions of the unprincipled little group which killed the Archduke should not be pinned on an entire nation, and maintained this view until mid-July.
By contrast the Austrian army’s chief of staff, Conrad, urged aggressive action. After the conflict ended Count Hoyos wrote: ‘No one today can imagine just how much the belief in German power, in the invincibility of the German army, determined our thinking and how certain we all were that Germany would easily win the war against France [deleted in original] would provide us with the greatest guarantee of our safety should a European war result from our action against Serbia.’
Many Austrian soldiers were not merely untroubled by the possibility of provoking war with the Russian bear, but regarded such a showdown as an indispensable contribution to the elimination of the pan-Slav threat. Wolfgang Heller, a General Staff officer, noted in his diary on 24 July that he felt confident Serbia would reject Vienna’s ultimatum, and was only worried that the Russians might not rise to the bait: ‘real success cannot be achieved unless we can implement Kriegsfall R [the plan to fight Russia]. Only if Serbia and Montenegro cease to exist as independent states can a solution of the [Slav] question be achieved. It would be useless to go to war with Serbia without being resolved to erase it from the map; a so-called punitive campaign – “eine Strafexpedition” – would be worthless, a waste of every bullet; the southern Slav question must be solved radically, so that all southern Slavs are united under the Hapsburg flag.’ Such views were widely held among Austria’s nobles, generals, politicians and diplomats.
An Austro-Serb war was thus ordained. But was a regional Balkan conflict doomed to become a general European catastrophe? Did Serbia deserve to be saved from the fate Austria and Germany decreed for it? The irresponsibility of Serbian behaviour is almost indisputable, but it seems extravagant, on the evidence, to brand the country a rogue state, deserving of destruction. It is much less surprising that the Hapsburg Empire, in the febrile mood generated by its weakness and vulnerability, chose to start a war to punish Apis and his compatriots, than that its neighbour, great and rising Germany, should have risked a general conflagration for so marginal a purpose.
There seem several explanations. First, Germany’s rulers, like many men of their generation, accepted the role of war as a natural means of fulfilling national ambitions and exercising power: Prussia had exploited this cost-effectively three times in the later nineteenth century. Georg Müller, head of Wilhelm’s naval cabinet, told his master in 1911, ‘war is not the worst of all evils’, and this belief pervaded Berlin’s thinking. The Kaiser and his key advisers underestimated the magnitude of the dominance their country was achieving through its economic and industrial prowess, without fighting anybody. They were profoundly mistaken to suppose that European hegemony could be secured only by the deployment of armies on battlefields.
But paranoia was a prominent feature of the German psyche at this period – a belief that the country’s strategic position, far from progressively strengthening, was being weakened by the rise of socialism at home and the Entente’s military capabilities abroad. Many German bankers and industrialists were morbidly convinced that the Western democracies were bent upon strangling German trade. Berlin’s ambassador in Vienna made initial attempts to cool the Austrian government’s bellicosity, but the Kaiser scribbled on his reports: ‘Who has authorised him to do that? It is extremely stupid!’ The Germans knew it was overwhelmingly likely that the Tsar would throw his protective mantle over Serbia – Nicholas had earlier committed himself to doing so. But Moltke and Bethmann Hollweg viewed Russia, to the point of obsession, as an existential threat; and if they had to fight Nicholas’s army, they preferred to do so sooner rather than later. On 20 May 1914, sharing a railway compartment between Potsdam and Berlin, the chief of staff told foreign minister Jagow that within a few years Russia would be winning the arms race. If the price of anticipating such superiority was also to be a clash with France, Russia’s ally – which Moltke assumed – the General Staff had planned meticulously for such a prospect, and professed to be confident of victory.
Bethmann was a natural government official rather than a leader. Lloyd George later recalled conversations with him during a 1908 visit to Germany to study its health-insurance law: ‘an attractive but not an arresting personality … an intelligent, industrious and eminently sensible bureaucrat, but he did not leave on my mind an impression of having met a man of power who might one day shake destiny’. Bethmann was also a vacillator, especially about the rival merits of peace and war. In 1912 he returned from a visit to Russia alarmed by the evidence of its rising might; and during the following year was heard to advocate a pre-emptive conflict. In April 1913 he lectured the Reichstag on the looming ‘inevitable struggle’ between Slavs and Teutons, and warned Vienna that Russia was bound to join any conflict between Austria and Serbia. In his better moments, however, the chancellor recognised the perils posed by a clash of arms. On 4 June 1914 he told the Bavarian ambassador that conservatives who imagined that a conflict would enable them to reassert their own domestic power, crushing the hated socialists, were mistaken: ‘a world war with its incalculable ramifications will strengthen social democracy, which sermonises the virtues of peace’. War, he added, could easily cost some rulers their thrones.
Bethmann’s judgement was not improved by personal isolation. His wife died in May 1914 after a long illness, and he was left to while away his leisure hours reading Plato in Greek. He had become almost politically friendless, especially in the Reichstag. Moltke had no time for Bethmann, whose career now rested solely in the hands of the Kaiser, his patron. The chancellor initially identified in the July crisis an opportunity to restore his personal authority and reputation by achieving a diplomatic coup for the Central Powers. He was a prime mover in encouraging the Kaiser to support Austria, and was highly selective about what cable traffic he showed his master, to preserve his steadiness of purpose. He believed that Germany should pursue its chosen course without fears of any response St Petersburg might see fit to make.
In tangled harness Bethmann, the Kaiser and Moltke made the critical decisions. Germany actively encouraged the Austrians to attack Serbia, and Berlin’s three principal actors made no attempt to manage events in such a way as to avert a wider calamity. Therein lies the case for their culpability for what followed. It seems mistaken to argue that they entered the July crisis bent upon precipitating a general European conflict; but a pervasive German fatalism about such an outcome contributed largely to bringing it about. The Social Democrat leader August Bebel, a hero to millions of workers, delivered an impassioned warning following the 1911 Agadir crisis. ‘Every nation will continue to arm for war until a day comes at which one or the other says: “Better a terrible end than a terror without end.” [A nation may also say]: “If we delay any longer, we shall be the weaker instead of the stronger.” Then the catastrophe will happen. Then in Europe the great mobilisation plans will be unleashed, by which sixteen to eighteen million men, the finest of many nations, armed with the best instruments of murder, will take the field against each other. The Götterdämmerung of the bourgeois world is approaching.’
Thomas Mann wrote that German intellectuals sang the praises of war ‘as if in competition with each other, with deep passion, as if they and the people, whose voice they are, saw nothing better, nothing more beautiful than to fight many enemies’. Some conservatives were impressed by a 1912 bestseller written by Gen. Friedrich von Bernhardi, Germany and the Next War, which proclaimed a German ‘duty to make war … War is a biological necessity of the first importance … Without war, inferior or decaying races would easily choke the growth of healthy, budding elements, and a universal decadence would follow … Might gives the right to conquer or occupy.’ Bernhardi was dismissed by Moltke, who called him ‘a perfect dreamer’, but the book was widely noticed in Britain, where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells were among those expressing repugnance. British opinion may have been coloured by the fact that their own nation had already done all the conquering and occupying it needed.
Fatalism about the desirability or inevitability of conflict was even more evident in the Hapsburg Empire. In March 1914 the influential military publication Danzer’s Armee-Zeitung declared that the international situation had seldom looked graver. Incessant Balkan wars, to which had been added Italy’s 1911 invasion and colonisation of Libya, were plainly mere overtures ‘to the great conflagration which is inevitably awaiting us.