A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918

by G.J. Meyer

In 1914, as before and since, the Balkan Peninsula was the most unstable region in Europe, a jumble of ill-defined small nations, violently shifting borders, and intermingled ethnic groups filled with hatred for one another and convinced of their right to expand.

Through many generations the Balkans were a prize fought over by Muslim Turkey, Catholic Austria, and Orthodox Russia.

It was largely with Constantinople in mind that the Russians anointed themselves patrons and protectors of the Slavic and Orthodox populations in the Balkans, the Serbs included.

Thereby they helped to ensure that a thousand years hence their descendants would identify themselves with the greatest of Slavic and Orthodox nations, Russia, and would look to the Russians for protection. They assured also that religious differences would contribute to separating them from Catholic Austria and from the Magyars (many of them Calvinist Protestants) who dominated Hungary.

the incorporation of Bosnia into an Orthodox and Slavic Greater Serbia became an integral part of the Serbs’ national dream.

In 1908 Austria-Hungary enraged Serbia by annexing Bosnia and the adjacent little district of Herzegovina, taking them from the Ottoman Turks and making them full and presumably permanent provinces of the Hapsburg empire.

France’s motives were transparent: to make Serbia strong enough to tie up a substantial part of the Austro-Hungarian army in case of war, so that France and its ally Russia (and Britain too, if everything went perfectly) would be free to deal with Germany alone.

He had become, in short, dangerous: a weak man determined to appear strong.

By the summer of 1914 the Balkans were a region in which nobody was satisfied and everyone found reason to be angry and afraid.

Russia and Austria both were aggrieved as well: Russia because it was seen as having failed the states whose patron it wanted to be; Austria because, only five years after it let slip its best opportunity to crush Serbia, it had been able to do nothing while the part of the world where it felt most threatened was reshaped to Serbia’s advantage. Certain that their credibility would be destroyed if they permitted any such thing to recur, both empires resolved never to be so weak and passive again. The Austrians concluded also that the international conferences that ended both Balkan wars had done them no good. Only their ultimatum to Serbia, their direct threat of war, had made a difference. They had learned to regard peace conferences as traps. Finally, the Austrians were disgusted by Germany’s failure to support them. Germany knew this; it was something that Berlin now had to take into account. Feeble though it might be, Austria-Hungary was the only even marginally dependable ally that Germany had in all of Europe. If the Germans again failed to support Austria-Hungary in a crisis, if they lost their junior partner as a result, they would be alone and surrounded by enemies. The conclusion, for Berlin, was obvious. Never again must Vienna have reason to doubt the value of its alliance with Germany.

in the weeks to follow not even the Germans would be told of the council’s decision to dismember Serbia after taking it by force.

Austria’s ambassadors were under instructions to assure Russia and even Germany that Vienna was planning nothing that would cause concern.

Kaiser Wilhelm, back to his customary weeks of summertime sailing, didn’t learn about the Austrian note until news of it reached him through the Norwegian newspapers.

Not only had he left the Russian government completely unprepared for the harshness of his note, he had actively encouraged the Russians to expect something very different. He had done nothing to help newspapers across Europe, and thereby the European public, understand why Austria was taking action at last. Little had been disclosed, and less had been publicized, about Vienna’s success in tracing the assassination plot back to Belgrade and establishing the likelihood that officials of the Kingdom of Serbia had been involved.

He complained that he had been deceived, that Russia couldn’t possibly stand by while Serbia was humiliated or worse, that Austria couldn’t possibly have sent such a note without the knowledge and approval of Germany, and that both countries must be plotting to drive Russia out of the Balkans.

Nicholas was being told that his people would not tolerate another abandonment of their brothers, the South Slavs. Russia would be disgraced, would have no more friends in the Balkans, no respect in Europe. A failure of such magnitude might trigger a revolution worse than the one in 1905.

Because of his prior knowledge of the Black Hand’s plot, and also because of the efforts he had made to stop the assassination, Serbia’s prime minister had abundant reasons for not wanting Austria-Hungary to become involved in any investigation.

And if its actions were “preparatory,” they were far from trivial. They involved the mustering of 1.1 million troops in the four districts nearest to Austria-Hungary.

They also assumed—this was arguable but not unreasonable—that they could not expect to win a protracted war against both. For this reason their mobilization plan was focused on a single overriding objective: to knock France out of action in the west in no more than six weeks, before Russia could launch a major attack from the east.

For Germany alone, mobilization equaled war.

it also wanted to demonstrate that the situation was serious, that if France and Britain wanted to avoid something worse than a localized Balkan problem, they had better restrain Russia.

He believed that if war were to break out between Austria and Russia and lead to war between Germany and France, Britain would have to side with France. This did not mean, however, that he wanted war.

Russia’s declaration of a Period Preparatory to War had a less subtle purpose than the Austrian mobilization. Its goal was, simply, to make the Austrians reconsider.

He appears to have been unwilling to do anything that might discourage them from proceeding. He did not even tell his own government what he knew; he didn’t want anyone in Paris to restrain the Russians either.

A similar game was being played in Vienna by Germany’s Ambassador Tschirschky, a onetime foreign minister who had decided that it was his duty to encourage Austrian aggressiveness without doing so openly.

Heinrich sent a message to Berlin reporting that “Georgie” had given him the impression that London wanted to stay neutral.

And so the final week of peace had begun with Austria mobilizing while sending signals that no one was available to receive; with Russia in the first stages of mobilizing while pretending not to be; with Germany beginning to feel directly threatened; and with France’s ambassador urging the Russians as well as the Serbians on. Britain was sending ambiguous signals that the continental powers were free to interpret as they wished. Berlin and Paris were both, for the time being, effectively leaderless. Nothing irreversible had happened, but neither was anyone quite in control.

Persuaded by this tale that war had begun and that Serbia was responsible, the emperor signed.

No effort was made to inform the kaiser.

Bethmann and Jagow, incredibly, had still not told Wilhelm that an Austrian declaration of war was only hours away.

The Austrian declaration, issued in the middle of the afternoon, changed everything. It was one of the two or three most important blunders committed by any of the great powers during the days leading up to war.

He composed a long telegram to Tschirschky in Vienna, complaining that the Austro-Hungarian government “has left us in the dark concerning its intentions, despite repeated interrogations” and that its declaration of war had put Germany in “an extraordinarily difficult position” that could cause it to “incur the odium of having been responsible for a world war.”

Berchtold, when the meeting was over, believed that he had made it clear that while he would not negotiate with Serbia, he was prepared to do so with Russia. But the ambassador came away with a distinctly different impression. He reported to Sazonov that Berchtold was not willing to negotiate even with Russia.

French prime minister René Viviani, from the ship on which he and President Poincaré were returning from St. Petersburg, had sent a telegram urging Paléologue to do everything possible to resolve the crisis without war. Paléologue, so determined to encourage Russian belligerence that he was in effect creating his own foreign policy, instead told Sazonov of the “complete readiness of France to fulfill her obligations as an ally in case of necessity.”

Among the terrors that tormented him was the thought that, if France failed to demonstrate a willingness to support Russia almost unreservedly, St. Petersburg would abandon the Entente and seek to ally itself with Berlin. Thus he saw himself as preventing the collapse of France’s entire foreign policy, and therefore of France’s security.

Mobilizing the army, they said, would put Austria-Hungary on notice in the strongest possible way. Not mobilizing, on the other hand, would leave the army unable to respond if Austria’s troops entered Serbia. In case of a wider war, the army would be totally unprepared. Sazonov was quick to agree.

Only a partial mobilization, he said, would be allowed; there must be no move against Germany.

He and Viviani sent a telegram to St. Petersburg urging that the Russians do nothing that might provoke a German mobilization; this arrived, however, after the tsar’s approval of partial mobilization.

It all came down, therefore, to the question of whether the Russians would mobilize and stampede the Germans into doing likewise.

Tsar Nicholas told him that “the military measures which have now come into force were decided on five days ago for reasons of defense on account of Austria’s preparations.” Wilhelm concluded from this that Russia “is almost a week ahead of us,” and that “that means I have got to mobilize as well.”

In practical terms only general mobilization was possible, and it must be postponed no longer.

The final tragedy is that the tsar’s decision was based largely on the things that Sazonov told him about Germany’s preparations for war, when in fact Germany remained the only one of the continental powers to have taken no military action at all.

In no real sense had the security of Russia ever been threatened by the July crisis.

Even Britain was on the move, First Lord of the Admiralty Churchill having ordered the Grand Fleet to take up a position in the North Sea from which it could respond quickly to any forays by the German High Seas Fleet and protect France’s Channel ports.

Like his fellow emperors, he yielded only because the military men, now taking charge in Berlin, St. Petersburg, and Vienna, were insisting that there was no alternative.

Just as Russia had been unable to limit its mobilization to Austria because (as the generals claimed) it had no plan that would permit it to do so, and just as Germany had no way of mobilizing without attacking its neighbors, Austria had no plan that would send its army into Belgrade but no farther.

With the approval of the cabinet, he asked France and Germany to declare their intention to respect Belgian neutrality in case of war. France was able to agree without difficulty. Its plans for an offensive against Germany were focused far to the south of Belgium in the area of Alsace-Lorraine, and Poincaré understood that British support in case of war would be infinitely more valuable than any possible use of Belgian territory. Germany, trapped by the inflexibility of its mobilization plan, was unable to respond at all. Thus was the first major step taken toward Britain’s entry into the war.

The double ultimatum was in part Berlin’s desperate final effort to escape mobilization and in part an effort to precipitate a breakdown in diplomatic relations to help justify the westward invasion that must follow mobilization.

It all came to nothing in part because of the unmanageable difficulties that mobilizing and then waiting would have created for Germany and Germany alone. An open-ended postponement of hostilities after the great powers had mobilized would have destroyed Germany’s chances of defeating France before having to fight Russia.

the plan continued to have one unchanging thesis at its center: speed was everything.