Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914. Max Hastings
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motoring holiday in Belgium the following week. Without question, replied Recouly: ‘If you are really determined to go driving, head instead for Biarritz or Marseille.’
By the evening of the 30th, Moltke was no longer willing to wait for the Russians to announce mobilisation. He told Bethmann that Germany must act. The two agreed that whatever the Tsar did, Germany would proclaim its own mobilisation at noon next day, the 31st. A few minutes before this deadline came, to the vast relief of the Germans, St Petersburg announced its own move. Berlin could thus go to war, having achieved its critical diplomatic purpose of seeing the Russians become first after Austria to draw the sword. Following an official ‘declaration of a war threat’ – ‘Zustand der drohenden Kriegsgefahr’, a legal definition – on the 31st, the army forthwith began to patrol Germany’s borders. Some unauthorised crossings took place by troops of both sides, notably in Alsace. German pioneers blew up a railway bridge near Illfurt, following false reports that the French were at hand. Only on 3 August, however, did Berlin formally authorise its soldiers to invade French soil.
After the Kaiser signed Germany’s mobilisation order at 5 p.m. on 1 August in the Sternensaal of his Berlin palace, with his usual instinct for the wrong gesture he ordered champagne to be served to his suite. The Bavarian Gen. von Wenninger visited the Prussian War Ministry soon after news of Russian mobilisation came through: ‘Everywhere beaming faces, people shaking hands in the corridors, congratulating one another on having cleared the ditch.’ Russia had acted in accordance with the ardent and freely avowed hopes of Wenninger, Moltke, Falkenhayn and their comrades; as Germany adopted pre-mobilisation measures on 31 July, they merely expressed fears that France might decline to follow suit, fail to enter the trap. Wilhelm despised the French as ‘a feminine race, not manly like the Anglo-Saxons or Teutons’, and this undoubtedly influenced his lack of apprehension about going to war with them.
There was one more internal crisis in Berlin that day: Moltke had already left the palace after the mobilisation decree ceremony when a telegram was brought to the Kaiser from Lichnowsky in London. This professed to bear an undertaking from Grey that Britain would remain neutral, and guarantee French neutrality, if Germany refrained from attacking France. Wilhelm exulted. Moltke was recalled, to be told that it was now only necessary to fight in the East. A legendary exchange followed: the chief of staff, appalled, said that the mobilisation plans could not be changed; such an upheaval would dispatch to the battlefield not an army, but a rabble. He was outraged that Wilhelm should seek to meddle when diplomacy was at an end; the issue was now that of conducting a war – the responsibility of himself.
It swiftly became plain that Lichnowsky’s dispatch reflected a foolish misunderstanding of the British position. The French were mobilising, and Germany had its two-front war. But the conversation with Wilhelm had a devastating impact on Moltke. He returned to the General Staff building incandescent, his face mottled deep red. He told his adjutant: ‘I want to wage a war against the French and the Russians, but not against such a Kaiser.’ His wife later testified that she believed him to have suffered a slight stroke. Moltke’s health was already fragile, his nerve unsteady. Now, on the brink of the collision of armies that he had done much to bring about, he showed the first signs of a moral and physical vulnerability which within six weeks would destroy him.
German mobilisation was accompanied by a declaration of war on Russia six days before the Austrians followed suit. A fourteen-year-old Bavarian schoolboy, Heinrich Himmler, wrote in his diary for 1 August: ‘Played in the garden in the morning. Afternoon as well. 7.30 Germany declares war on Russia.’ France was informed that its neutrality could be accepted only on condition that it surrendered its border fortresses to Germany ‘as a gesture of sincerity’. Bethmann was furious that the military now marginalised him: it was a General Staff officer, Major Hans von Haeften, who drafted a declaration to the German people for the Kaiser to deliver. The chancellor and the general had always disliked and resented each other. Hereafter, their animosity became manifest. On the afternoon of 1 August crowds cheered the Kaiser as he motored from Potsdam down Berlin’s Unter den Linden in the full-dress uniform of a cuirassier of the Guard. Wilhelm enthused: ‘a wonderful confidence prevails … unanimity and determination’. Journalist Theodor Wolff, a spectator, said of the crowd’s enthusiasm for the Kaiser’s appearance, ‘It was a warm, sunny day. In the hot air there was already the sweaty breath of fever and the smell of blood.’ A right-wing newspaper asserted that after Wilhelm had passed there was ‘a holy mood among the crowd, worthy of the moment’. Strangers shook hands with each other.
Russia’s mobilisation solved a critical political problem for Moltke. Germany’s Social Democrats might well have continued to oppose war had their own country been seen as the first to move. As it was, though the government had already made its own secret commitment to march, Berlin could assert that Germany was merely responding to a Russian initiative – preparing to defend the Reich against Slavonic aggression. Admiral Müller wrote on 1 August: ‘The mood is brilliant. The government has succeeded very well in making us appear as the attacked.’ Moltke, after his fall, wrote to a fellow field-marshal: ‘it is dreadful to be condemned to inactivity in this war which I prepared and initiated’. Nor was he alone among prominent Germans in avowing without embarrassment responsibility for the horrors that were now ordained. Foreign secretary Gottlieb Jagow later told a woman friend that he was haunted by contemplation that Germany had ‘wanted the war’ which went so wrong. In 1916, shipping magnate Albert Ballin declined to meet Jagow because ‘he wanted nothing further to do with a man who bore the responsibility for this whole dreadful disaster and for the deaths of so many hundreds of thousands of men’.
Wilhelm von Stumm, Jagow’s close associate, told Theodor Wolff in February 1915: ‘we were reconciled to the fact that we would have war with Russia … If the war had not come now, we would have had it in two years’ time under worse conditions … No one could have foreseen that militarily not everything would work out as one had believed.’ Prince von Bülow, a former chancellor, blamed Bethmann Hollweg for giving Austria the 5 July ‘blank cheque’; he did not suggest that Germany sought war, but said the chancellor should have insisted upon prior consultation about the terms of Vienna’s ultimatum to Belgrade, and condemned Berlin’s rejection of Britain’s proposal for a diplomatic conference.
During the last two days before and after mobilisation came, the German public mood became much less exuberant. On 31 July a Frankfurter Zeitung journalist recorded: ‘Over everything hangs a great gravity, a frightening peace and tranquillity … In their quiet rooms wives and young women sit, nursing their sombre thoughts about the immediate future … a great fear of terrible things, of what may be to come.’ Social democrat Wilhelm Heberlein said that in Hamburg news of mobilisation was grimly received: ‘most people were depressed, as if waiting to be beheaded the following day’. The Hamburger Echo said that on the evening of 1 August ‘the noisy mood which was ignited by a couple of unthinking fools in the first few days of this week is gone … one seldom hears a joyous laugh on the street’.
That day Gertrud Schädla repeatedly visited Verden’s town centre to garner the latest news, until finally at 6 p.m. she saw the mobilisation order posted. She described her community’s mixed feelings: ‘We were half happy because our government has behaved with nobility and firmness, half minded to cry because of our fears for the future.’ She added later: ‘Now all our fears have been realised, things that appeared both all too possible and yet impossible … Our enemies in the east, the west and the north tormented us pitilessly. Now they will see that we fight back! … We did not want war – if we did, we could have had it ten times during the past forty-three years of peace!’ On Sunday, 2 August, Berlin police warned against extravagant displays of enthusiasm, such as crowds surging up to the Kaiser’s car. For the first time, soldiers guarding public buildings appeared garbed in field grey. From the very onset of the struggle, Germany became the first power to characterise it not as a merely European affair, but as global war – Weltkrieg.
As Germany began to mobilise, in Paris Sir Francis Bertie called on the French prime minister, whom he found ‘in a highly nervous state … Evidently the Germans want to hurry matters before the Russians can be ready.’ France now lagged two days behind Germany’s military preparations: Joffre told the government that every further twenty-four-hour