Читать книгу Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914 - Max Hastings, Sir Max Hastings, Max Hastings - Страница 18

The only untenable view of the July crisis is that war was the consequence of a series of accidents. On the contrary: the leaders of all the great powers believed themselves to be acting rationally, in pursuit of coherent and attainable objectives. A large enigma nonetheless persists about the exercise of authority in Germany: who was in charge? During the previous decade, the dysfunctionality of the nation’s governance had progressively worsened, even as its economic might increased. A new generation of elected politicians, many of them socialists, jostled for access to power outside palaces still dominated by the spurred topboots of a highly militarised autocracy. The Kaiser had become the symbol of his country’s assertive nationalism rather than an executive ruler, but he continued to make erratic interventions. Around him rival personalities, institutions and political groupings vied for mastery. The army and navy were at loggerheads. The General Staff scarcely spoke to the War Ministry. The Empire’s component states intermittently asserted themselves against Berlin.

A German author predicted in 1910 that during the period of political and military tension preceding any conflict, ‘the press and its key instruments, telegraph and telephone, will exercise immense influence, which may be for either good or ill’. Moltke agreed. However great the power of the army, the chief of staff recognised that to induce millions of conscripted civilians to engage in a twentieth-century conflict, the cause must command popular support. ‘Moltke told me,’ recorded a Prussian officer in 1908, ‘… that the time of cabinet wars was over and that a war the German people did not want or did not understand, and would therefore not greet with sympathy, would be a very dangerous affair. If … the people thought that the war had been conjured up in a frivolous fashion and was only intended to help the governing classes out of an embarrassment, then it would have to start with us having to fire on our own subjects.’ This goes far to explain why Germany had refused to go to war alongside Austria in earlier Balkan crises. It shows why, in July 1914, Moltke attached such importance to ensuring that Germany was seen, above all by its own people, as a threatened victim and not as an aggressor. The European crisis was overlaid on domestic turbulence. Labour unrest, manifested in frequent strikes, alarmed the Berlin government as much as similar troubles elsewhere prompted British, French and Russian fears about social stability.

It is difficult to assess the Kaiser’s conduct, because he changed his mind so often. Scribbled annotations on state documents emphasise his irredeemable intemperance: ‘Fool yourself Mr Sazonov!’; ‘Damnation!’; ‘No!’; ‘It’s not for him to decide’; ‘a tremendous piece of British insolence!’. The exclamation mark was his favoured instrument of policy-making. Wilhelm’s reversions to caution always came too late to undo the damage inflicted by his more usual imprudence. He allegedly told Bethmann on 5 July: ‘we should use all means to work against the growth of the Austro-Serbian controversy into an international conflict’. Yet next day he gave Vienna the ‘blank cheque’.

On 27 July his initial reaction, on returning from his Norwegian yachting trip to read the Serbs’ humble response to Vienna’s ultimatum, was that he saw ‘no more reason for a war’. But Bethmann that same day told the German ambassador to Austria: ‘We must appear as the ones being forced into the war.’ Gen. Erich von Falkenhayn, the Prussian war minister, met the Kaiser and Moltke on the 27th and recorded afterwards: ‘It has now been decided to fight the matter through, regardless of the cost.’ Three days later, on the 30th, the Bavarian Gen. Krafft von Dellmensingen wrote in his diary: ‘The Kaiser absolutely wants peace and the Kaiserin is working towards it with all her might. He even wants to influence Austria and stop her continuing further. That would be the greatest disaster! We would lose all credit as allies.’

By that time, however, the general’s court gossip was two days out of date. The Kaiser said on 28 July, ‘the ball that is rolling can no longer be stopped’, and seemed to mean it. One might liken his erratic behaviour to that of an amateur actor struggling to fill a monarch’s part in a Shakespearean history piece. Wilhelm strove to keep up with the rest of the cast, to play the warrior emperor, while being chronically uncertain what this required: he was forever snatching at the wrong cue or delivering misplaced lines.

But if German policy had vacillated earlier in July, now the march to war had attained its own momentum. In Berlin on the 29th, Falkenhayn sought to force the pace: he declared that the time for prevarication was over; Germany could no longer wait for Russia to move, but must mobilise. Bethmann and Moltke remained anxious, for domestic reasons, to be seen to follow rather than lead Russia, but they knew the hour was nigh. An ultimatum to neutral Belgium was prepared, demanding a right of passage through the country for the German army. Bethmann then made a diplomatic blunder. At a moment when British sentiment was wavering, he dispatched an offer to Sir Edward Grey: would Britain undertake to remain neutral, in return for assurances about German respect for Belgian and French territorial integrity? This essay in blackmail, which made plain that the Germans were preparing to attack in the West, provoked outrage in London. ‘There is something crude and almost childlike about German diplomacy,’ wrote Asquith disdainfully. Grey responded curtly that in no circumstances could Britain entertain so shameful a proposal.

This news from London precipitated a brief crisis of nerves on the part of Wilhelm and Bethmann during the night of 29 July. It had become apparent that they were leading their country into the greatest military clash in history, with the British unlikely to remain neutral. The Kaiser suddenly proposed that the Austrians should agree merely to occupy Belgrade until their terms were met. At 2.55 a.m. on the 30th, Bethmann telegraphed Vienna urging acceptance of diplomatic mediation. His message reached Berchtold, however, only after Austrian mobilisation had begun, and on the same day as the telegram from Moltke, urging the Empire to reject mediation and deploy its army against Russia rather than Serbia. Thus, before the chief of staff knew of full Russian mobilisation, he emphasised his personal commitment to a wider war, and his readiness to exercise his influence in the diplomatic sphere in a fashion well beyond the usual compass of an army chief of staff. Berchtold asked Conrad after reading the two contradictory messages: ‘Who rules in Berlin – Moltke or Bethmann?’ The Austrians figuratively and perhaps literally shrugged, then continued their mobilisation and bombardment of Belgrade.

The answer to Berchtold’s question was anyway now Moltke. Bethmann made no further attempt to dispute the chief of staff’s insistence that the march to war must take its course. Moreover, the chancellor would soon become an advocate of far-reaching war aims, explicitly directed towards securing German mastery of Europe. Though both the Kaiser and Bethmann havered during July, they could never bring themselves to adopt the only measure that would probably have averted disaster: withdrawal of German support for an Austrian invasion of Serbia. By the last days of the month, Moltke and Falkenhayn were asserting military imperatives – and the soldiers’ primacy in the decision-making process, now that war was inevitable – in a fashion that brooked no dissent. Wilhelm, like his chancellor, lacked strength to allow himself to be seen to draw back when the generals were insisting that his duty lay in acceptance of trial by combat. Falkenhayn had once argued that duelling must be maintained as a means of resolving personal disputes between officers, citing its importance ‘for the honour of the army’. Now, in the same spirit, he sternly silenced the Kaiser’s belated expressions of doubt: ‘I reminded him that he was no longer in control of these matters.’

Moltke became the critical personality in Germany’s endgame. The army was the country’s most powerful institution, and he directed its motions. Part of the historic indictment against the chief of staff is that, even if the charge that from the outset he pressed for war is disputable, he endorsed such a course while harbouring huge doubts about its implications, and about Germany’s prospects of success. If it was sufficiently wretched for a man as foolish as Conrad to have willed Armageddon, it seems even more base for one as intelligent as Moltke to have been complicit in this outcome. The most plausible explanation, supported by his subsequent conduct amidst the stress of war, is that like his royal master, the chief of staff was fundamentally a weak man seeking to masquerade as a strong one. In Vienna and Berlin alike – and in St Petersburg and Paris also, though to a lesser degree – there was now a fatal hunger for a showdown, a decision, in place of repeated inconclusive crises over a decade.

Many of Germany’s soldiers, as well as its conservative politicians, believed that war offered a prospect of reversing the social democratic tide which they deemed a threat to national greatness as well as to their own authority. The generals also saw that within two or three years, enhanced Russian capabilities would remove Germany’s last hopes of fulfilling Schlieffen’s mystic vision – smashing France before turning east. Deterrence was bound to fail, with or without a British commitment to fight, because the Germans believed that in 1914 they had a better chance of defeating any Entente combination than they would ever enjoy again. Berlin merely sought to ensure that the Tsar bore the odium for initiating mobilisation, and for the Kaiser’s mighty military response.

The Belgians suddenly recognised the peril facing their own country. Baron de Gaiffier d’Hestroy, political director of Belgium’s Foreign Ministry, holidaying with his family in the Engadine, was hastily ordered home, and departed for Brussels on 29 July. He found that many trains had already been commandeered by the Germans or Austro-Hungarians for troop movements; only a chance meeting secured him a place homewards in the private carriage of a Belgian industrialist, reaching Brussels on the morning of the 30th.

Sir Francis Bertie wrote that day, quite mistakenly but in a fashion reflecting the mood in Paris: ‘Things are hanging in the balance of peace and war. We are regarded as the deciding factor. The Italians suggested that they and we should both stand aside. A poor bargain for the French. I have written to Grey that the feeling here is that peace between the Powers depends on England and that if she declare herself solidaire with France and Russia there will be no war, for Germany will not face the danger to her of her supplies by sea being cut off by the British.’ That afternoon of 30 July, it was learned that French pedestrians attempting to cross the frontier into Germany were being turned back, while some motor cars and even railway locomotives with the same intentions were detained; telephone links were severed.

All over France, people gathered to discuss the news. Work stopped in the little factories of Beaurepaire, in Isère; solemn crowds filled the streets, discussing the crisis with gravity rather than excitement. In the words of one local man, ‘It was like a funeral. Our small town appeared to be in mourning.’ In Germany on 30 July, a thousand customers of Freiburg’s Municipal Savings Bank emptied their accounts, forcing it to restrict withdrawals, and there were matching queues outside most of the banks of Europe. Many shop-owners refused to accept payment in paper currency, while others shut their doors. In Le Havre, waiters warned restaurant customers before they ordered dinner that only gold rather than banknotes would be acceptable in payment.

There were still a few spasms of optimism: on the evening of the 30th, in the courtyard of the Palais Bourbon journalists thronged around M. Malvy of the Foreign Office, who told them of new exchanges between St Petersburg, Berlin and Vienna. ‘As soon as the diplomats start talking,’ he said, ‘we may hope for an accommodation.’ But late that night, as Raymond Recouly was writing his column at Le Figaro, a colleague burst into his office and cried: ‘Henri de Rothschild is downstairs. He has been dining with a senior official of the Foreign Ministry, who told him that war was a matter of days away, perhaps even of hours.’ Shortly afterwards a woman friend appeared, and asked the journalist whether she should cancel an intended 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 delay represented a prospective loss of up to twelve miles of French territory when Moltke’s offensive began. Some socialists remained implacably opposed to war, but their gestures towards peace were brushed aside. The sub-prefect of Isère was among many officials who banned public protests, prohibiting a socialist anti-war demonstration in Vienne on 31 July. Local unions planned another such rally in Grenoble for 2 August, but withdrew when it became plain it would receive little grassroots support, and would anyway be disallowed.

Jean Jaurès, France’s great socialist leader, complained to his companion in a taxi taking them to a Paris restaurant on the evening of 31 July that the driver’s manic haste would be the death of them. ‘No,’ said the other wryly, ‘like all Parisian drivers he is a good socialist and union man.’ It was not reckless speed that killed Jaurès that night, however, but instead a deranged fanatic who shot him in the back as he ate. This assassination prompted across Europe a wave of shock and horror far more emotional than that following the murder of Franz Ferdinand. Jaurès was recognised across frontiers as a political giant. Le Temps lamented that he was extinguished ‘just at the moment when … his oratory was about to become a weapon of national defence’.

Raymond Recouly wrote of that night of Friday the 31st: ‘As I came out of the paper with a friend, towards one in the morning, at the corner of the Rue Drouot we heard in the distance the sonorous clatter of a troop of cavalry. The cafés were just closing, but there were plenty of people about. The hooves resounded ever more loudly on the cobbles. A voice cried: “Here come the cuirassiers!” Something like an electric shock surged through the crowd. On every floor, windows opened. People stood up on benches, on the tables of cafés. A big taxi-driver hoisted himself up on the roof of his vehicle, at the risk of breaking it. Led by a band of children and young people, the horsemen appeared. In campaign kit, their helmets covered, gigantic in their long cloaks, they filled the roadway. A formidable clamour rose from every lip: “Vive la France! Vive l’armée!” The taxi-driver atop his vehicle looked frenzied. He cried more loudly than all the others, throwing his cap in the air and windmilling his arms.’

Later that night, a Le Temps office boy in front of the central post office in the Boulevard des Italiens saw the mobilisation order being posted. Just before 4 a.m. on 1 August, he ran into the newspaper manager’s office crying, ‘C’est affiché!’ The staff hurried outside to see for themselves. A crowd gathered before one of the post office windows to read the small blue sheet – Russia’s was lilac in colour. ‘Mobilisation is not war,’ prime minister Viviani had insisted when he signed the order. But as Raymond Recouly said, ‘no one believed him. If it was not war, it was in any event something equally terrible.’ The French army was instructed not to approach within six miles of the German or Belgian frontiers, to ensure that the odium for territorial aggression rested squarely in Berlin.

Sir Francis Bertie wrote, as French troops began to muster: ‘The populace is very calm. Here today it is “vive l’Angleterre”, tomorrow it may be “perfide Albion”. I was to have dined at Edmond de Rothschild’s Boulogne-sur-Seine villa; the rendezvous was in Paris instead, for all his horses and automobiles have been appropriated. His electric brougham cannot go outside the enceinte [city perimeter] – no automobile can do so without a special permit. Our 4 footmen have left to join their regiments at once and the under-butler left 10 days ago; 3 other men have joined the colours. I have asked to be allowed to keep the French chauffeur.’ There were violent demonstrations against German-owned businesses such as the Maggi food-processing company, which achieved a special virulence because small French milk-producers considered the giant a commercial menace. German and Austrian shops were looted while the police stood passively by. Viviani told the Chamber of Deputies: ‘Germany has nothing to reproach us with. What is being attacked are the independence, dignity and security which the Triple Entente has secured for the benefit of Europe.’ His words received thunderous applause.

The American novelist Edith Wharton, who was living in France, had spent July visiting Spain and the Balearics. She returned to Paris on 1 August, and found herself obliged to abandon plans to move on to England for the balance of the summer: ‘everything seemed strange, ominous and unreal, like the yellow glare which precedes a storm. There were moments when I felt as if I had died, and woken up in an unknown world. And so I had.’