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The Origins
of World War I
1871-1914
Joachim Remak
(1967)
Chapter 5: A Question of Responsibility
How had it happened? The victors, in
1919, were very certain of the answer-the Central Powers had willfully begun
this most terrible of wars! The Germans, in Article 231 of the Treaty of
Versailles, were made to admit their war guilt: "The Allied and Associated
Governments affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her
allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated
Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war
imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies."
Thirty-three years later, a committee of French and German
historians, engaged in an overall effort at removing some of the grosser errors
of fact and judgment from both nation's textbooks, agreed on the following,
rather different, statement: "The documents do not permit attributing, to
any government or nation, a premeditated desire for European war in 1914.
Distrust was at its highest, and leading groups were dominated by the thought
that war was inevitable; everyone thought that the other side was contemplating
aggression. ..."
Between these two statements, tons of documents, books, and
articles bearing on the cause of the First World War made their appearance.
Their often very different presentations of what ought essentially to be the
same facts are enough to shake anyone's faith in the feasibility of historical
objectivity. And the argument is not over yet. Nor should it be. We all have
good reason for wanting to discover how, particularly if no one really wished
it, a world war of such proportions could occur. We also possess an advantage
not of our own making: we should be far enough removed from the time, the
place, and the passions of these events to reach some fair and sober judgments.
What follows, then, is
We hated war with all our heart
Thought nothing more infernal
But now we gladly play our part
To usher in peace eternal.
Simplicissimus, April 27, 1915
132 Chapter 5 A Question of Responsibility
an attempt to do just that, although throughout, it will be
well to bear in mind that splendid phrase of the great Dutch historian, Pieter
Geyl, about "that argument without end which to us of the West is the
study of history." Or, in the words of one of Theodor Fontane's Prussian
squires: "Unassailable truths don't exist, or if they do, they are
dull."
NATIONAL
RESPONSIBILITY
Let us begin by considering what, in descending order, each
nation's share of the responsibility was. This is a consciously old-fashioned
approach. The tendency, once the hatreds of the war had faded, was to emphasize
less directly nation-centered causes of the war. But matters such as the
alliance system, imperialism, national sovereignty, or the powers of the press
were realities with which every statesman had to contend; they were a part of
the atmosphere that affected all of Europe. How then did each nation manage its
affairs in the real world in which it had to live and not in an ideal one of no
entangling alliances, of colonial satiety, of the rule of world law, or of a
press that promoted nothing but knowledge and love?
The nation that managed its affairs least well in 1914 was
Austria- Hungary. We have stood stooped over too long now, searching for the
underlying causes of the war. We have become so involved with subtitles that
the obvious has sometimes escaped us-we have not seen the forest for the roots.
The obvious fact is that it was the Austrian ultimatum of July twenty third
that not only invited war with Serbia but laid the basis for general war as
well. What an appalling document it was- tardy, incompetent, deceptive,
designed to be rejected. Austria was setting the course, and neither friend nor
foe had been allowed an honest look at its direction. Thus, to quote the
leading expert on Austria's involvement, "it was Vienna," without any
"pressure by Berlin to act," that "first resolved for war, that
sought German assurances, and that exploited them once received."1
1 Samuel R. Williamson, Jr. "Vienna and
July 1914: The Origins of the Great War Once More." In Williamson and
Peter Pastor, eds., Essays on World War I: Origins and
Prisoners of War (New York: 1983, p. 24).
National Responsibility 133
It
is entirely possible, of course, to present a case for the defense. It takes no
major effort to understand why those who set policy in Vienna were convinced
that this time Belgrade had gone too far, and that hence "only militant
diplomacy remains an option," or as the foreign minister put it even more
forcefully, that the time had come for a "final and fundamental
reckoning" with Serbia.2 Sarajevo, after all, was more than a
single incident. As seen from Vienna, many another provocation had preceded it.
And the Habsburg monarchy had some perfectly legitimate interests to
defend-Serbia was immensely closer to Austria than the many regions of the
world that Washington has by now considered to be vital to its interests are to
the United States. Surely, Austria's desire for self-preservation was as
sensible and honorble a motive as any. Besides, the state that one wished to
maintain had a great deal to be said in its favor. "My whole libido,"
wrote Dr. Freud the day after Serbia's reply had been received, "goes out
to Austria- Hungary."
But to understand all is not to forgive all. It was true enough that no government or nation had "a premeditated desire for European war in 1914." But Austria, in 1914, had very much of a premeditated desire for a small Balkan war. Did it want that war to spread? No, but the truth was that the people who were deciding policy in Vienna did not really care. This was Austria's war; perhaps only the fact that the countrymen of Johann Strauss and Sigmund Freud ordinarily made such poor villains (there would be some fairy obvious exceptions such as Adolf Hider) allowed that simple fact to be forgotten so thoroughly.
Austria's war, and Serbia's. Colonel Dimitrijevic, too, had not much cared what the repercussions of Franz Ferdinand's murder might be. Had he known that his deed would mean war, said one of the assassins during his trial, he would have preferred his own death to that of his victim. It is not likely that he was speaking for Dimitrijevic. But to what extent did the action of Serbia's chief of army intelligence incriminate his government? The murder, after all, had been planned by the Black Hand during the colonel's off-duty hours and not by Pasic or any of his ministers. The answer is that Dimitrijevic's action did incriminate the government, for reasons both long-range and immediate. For one thing, it is difficult to take exception to the observation of a close student
2 Samuel R.
Williamson, Jr., Austria-Hungary and the Origins of the First World War (New
York, 1991: pp. 194 and 213).
134 Chapter 5 A Question of Responsibility
134 Chapter 5 A Question of Responsibility
of the period that "the fact that the Serb government
could not control its own army or nationalists only in part diminishes its
responsibility for the murder."3 Beyond that, what had happened on
June 28 in Sarajevo was hardly all that astonishing, since that government had
for too many years been tolerating or even encouraging a movement for a Greater
Serbia, whose aims were bound to be offensive to Austria-Hungary, and whose
methods were bound to be offensive to anyone. Very specifically speaking, the
government in 1914 had taken no effective action to pre- vent the assassination
of Franz Ferdinand, of which it very probably had some foreknowledge, nor had
it managed to end the influence of the Black Hand, of which it assuredly had
knowledge.
Again, there was nothing ignoble about either Pasic's or Dimitrijevic's aims. The concept of a Greater South Slav State was fully as defensible as was Austria-Hungary's right to survival. Tragedy, in the Hegelian definition, consists not of the conflict of right with wrong but of right with right. But the Serbians set about achieving their purposes with a truly frightening disregard of the consequences. Here, then, was Serbia's vast share in the responsibility for the First World War, one that was matched only by Austria's: Belgrade surely knew that it was set on a collision course, yet it would not alter direction. There is, in the British files, a report from the ambassador to Vienna, Sir Fairfax Cartwright, written in January 1913 in connection with another, milder crisis brought about by Pan-Serb agitation, which sums up the entire matter better than any later historian can:
Serbia will some day set Europe by the
ears, and bring about a universal war on the Continent. ...I cannot tell you
how exasperated people are getting here at the continual worry which that
little country causes to Austria under encouragement from Russia. ...It will be
lucky if Europe succeeds in avoiding war on account of the present crisis. The
next time a Serbian crisis arises, I feel sure that Austria-Hungary will refuse
to admit of any Russian interference in the dispute and that she will proceed
to settle her difference with her little neighbor by herself coute que
coute.
Russia and
Germany
Russian encouragement and Russian interference-one wonders
how different Serbia's course of action might have been in 1914 without
3
D. C. B. Lieven, Russia and the Origins
of the First World War (New York: 1983, p. 139).
National Responsibility 135
National Responsibility 135
these. In the sixty years that preceded Sarajevo, Russia had
been involved directly in two wars-the Crimean War and the War of 1877-
1878-indirectly in two more-the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913- and, directly or
indirectly, in crises too numerous to list, all with the intent of weakening
the empire of the Sultan to the benefit of that of the Tsar. It was a policy
that, with its implications for the Balkans, acted as an irritant to
Austro-Russian relations; threats to one's survival tend to annoy. Yet the
Russians persisted. It was Russia rather than Austria that was the expansionist
power in Southeastern Europe. The Annexation Crisis was the exception, not the
rule. Under ordinary circumstances, Austria had considerably more to fear from
Russia's Balkan ambitions than Russia had from Austria's, even if we add the
reservation that, customarily, Russian official policy was more restrained and
rational than some of the truly extravagant Pan-Slav spokesmen would have
liked. Customarily, for in July 1914, as it had on some previous occasions, the
borderline between Pan-Slavism and government policy once more became blurred.
If Serbia chose to resist Austria's demands, then Russia would support its
Slavic brethren. The story of Germany's "blank check" to Austria is
well known, but the Russians were doing no better at counseling caution to
Belgrade. Yet just as Germany's decision to support Austria was a crucial element
in the crisis leading to war, so was Russia's decision to support Serbia. Or to
quote one of the most knowledgeable of experts on Russia's role in 1914,
Dominic Lieven, "Petersburg's stand made a European conflict
probable."
Perhaps St. Petersburg had no real alternatives. Caution might be seen to equal surrender, and to quote Lieven again, the Russian establishment, for all the "lack of coordination or even mutual comprehension between the State's diplomatic, military, and political leaders ...would not accept a clear and insulting demotion to the ranks of Europe's second class powers."
What made that concern all the more palpable was the memory of 1908. If Russia should once again fail to intervene, the damage inflicted on Russian prestige in Serbia and beyond would be incalculable. T o abandon Serbia now, said the Russian foreign minister in the cabinet meeting of July 24, 1914, which in essence set the signal for war, would mean the betrayal of Russia's "historic mission" as the protector of the Balkan Slavs, and relegate the country to "second place among the powers."
136 Chapter 5 A Question of Responsibility
The record of that meeting was confidential of course, yet the gist of what he was saying was known well enough. The Austrians, certainly, had no reason to assume that Russia would merely look on, let alone look the other way, while they were shooting their way into Belgrade.
Yet the Russian response, it should be noted, consisted of more than a move to halt the Austrians. Had Russia mobilized its forces against Austria only, a negotiated peace, taking both Russia's and Austria's legitimate interests into account, might still have been possible. The Russians did not do this. Instead, and here we come to Russia's quite staggering responsibility for World War I, they decided to marshal their forces against Germany as well as against Austria. Their reasons for general mobilization were technical rather than political; honest error and the absence of flexible military planning rather than premeditated design accounted for the Tsar's final decision on July 30. But no amount of explaining can change two facts. One was that Russia, in 1914, was the first power to mobilize. The other was that the Tsar and his advisers, by their behavior on July 29 and 30, showed that they were perfectly well aware of what mobilization meant.
What, though, of Germany's guilt? Was the Versailles indictment really that absurd? Surely, it could not have been due entirely to the machinations of Allied propaganda that Germany was seen as the chief culprit in 1914 and not Russia, Austria, or Serbia, or that so many subsequent accounts (this one included) written in a more temperate climate of opinion, would place Germany so close to the center of the narrative.
German responsibility for 1914 goes back at least to the 1890s, to the whole conduct of German diplomacy after Bismarck. The master's touch was shown by moderation, the touch of his successors by what Bismarck had accused post-Cavour Italy of: a large appetite and poor teeth. And to what did Germany's appetite really run after 1890? To "world power," to rivalry with Britain, to a German Central Africa, to security against France? None of these policies had been thought through. Activity there was aplenty; what was lacking was direction, and so was a decent regard for the concerns of others. No one put it more sharply than the man who had the misfortune to hold Bismarck's office in 1914, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg. "We have lived a lie," he said during the war's first year, "both in our domestic and our foreign policy. A spirit of the raised voice, of over-impetuousness, of loquaciousness, and of showing off has come to infest our people."
National
Responsibility 137
Thus by
1914, a new specter was haunting Europe. The specter of furor teutonicus. German
behavior in the final crisis certainly did little to banish it. The list of
German blunders is an all too familiar one: the blank check to Austria; the
failure, once it had become plain that an Austro-Serbian war was likely to
become European in scope, to search for a compromise with every last ounce of
energy; the final triumph of the military over the political rationale with the
invasion of Belgium and France. Bethmann himself again summed it up best
perhaps in a conversation with a visitor to his country estate toward the end
of the war. Germany, he said, and the emphasis was his, had pursued "a
policy of utmost risk," and thus "bears a large part of the
blame."
The extent of that German blame has become so familiar by now that one is tempted to point out that there is another side to it. One is especially tempted to do so in the light of the discussion initiated by the Hamburg historian Fritz Fischer. Fischer has maintained, in one of the most stimulating of reinterpretations of modern diplomatic history, that Germany's leadership had a will to war in 1914, and it was Germany, with its "bid for world power" and its readiness to engage in conflict with Russia and France, that bore a crucial part of the responsibility for the catastrophe.
Now it is disarming, and probably very healthy beside, to have a historian take this critical a look at his own nation's recent history. What is wrong with it, however, and with general allegations of Germany's war guilt as well, is that it involves a certain amount of confusion between Germany's war aims as they ultimately developed and Germany's intentions in July 1914. What is wrong with it, too, is that it depends for its effect on viewing Germany's actions in isolation. Germany indeed wished to be a great power, and why not? The concept of a German Samoa was no more absurd than that of a British Bahamas or a Belgian Congo.
But Germany, the distinction may be worth spelling out, wished to be a world power; it did not aim at world domination. To be sure, during the course of the war, some fairly grotesque German war aims emerged, from the annexation of Belgian iron mines to the establishment of a German Central Africa. But two things need to be noted. One is that Allied war aims were hardly more restrained. The Russians, French, and British were equally busy composing memoranda {and in some cases binding treaties) on the dismemberment of Austria, the truncation of Germany, the transfer of the Dardanelles to Russia, the acquisition of vast tracts of the Ottoman Empire by Britain and France.
138 Chapter 5 A Question of Responsibility
The other is that in August 1914, Germany no more went to
war for Belgian iron ore than Russia did for the Straits or Britain for
Palestine. That appetite grew with the eating. Motives are seldom simple, of
course, and one might say that expansionist thoughts were in the back of some
statesmen's minds that summer, but that was exactly where they were, not in
front. In the mountains of documents on the origin of World War I, we search in
vain for any that will show us that the statesmen of Germany or of any other
nation (with the possible exception of Serbia) went to war in 1914 for the sake
of their later war aims.
None of this absolves the Germans from their share in the responsibility. But it is a share only, to be divided with at least five other powers. Germany's responsibility, to reiterate the point, lies in the general foolishness, with which the nation behaved in the quarter century before Sarajevo and, more immediately, in the panicky and pernicious decisions that Berlin made during the July crisis. These things were bad enough; there is no need to add imaginary to real guilt.
Was it really five powers with which the Germans shared the responsibility? That Germany could point to Russia's mobilization, that Russia in turn to Austria's threat against Serbia, and Austria to Serbia's initial provocation should be obvious, but were not Britain and France innocent, bystanders? Not quite.
England's
responsibility, clearer than ~hat of France, lay not in the allegedly
insufficient warning the British gave the Germans of their intent to fight, the
topic that was so widely discussed in the years immediately after 1914. Surely,
any responsible German statesman should have known that it was a matter of
vital interest to Great Britain whether France survived as a power and who
would control the channel ports of Belgium and France. The implications of the Entente
Cordiale, and the very plain provisions of the Treaty of 1839, were quite
sufficient warning here.
What was involved in the case of Britain was something more long- range. There had taken place, in the half-century or so before the war, a tremendous expansion of British power, accompanied by a pronounced lack of sympathy for any similar ambitions, on the part of other nations. If any nation was compensation-conscious, it was Great Britain; if the Austrians wished to occupy Bosnia, for instance, then the British must
National
Responsibility 139
have
Cyprus. Even without this particular diplomatic gambit, the British, between
the eighteen-seventies and the turn of the century, were adding, adding, adding
to their Empire: Burma, Egypt, Uganda, Somaliland, Kenya, Zanzibar, Rhodesia,
the Boer Republic, all were flying the Union Jack. If any nation had truly made
a bid for world power, it was Great Britain. In fact, it had more than bid for
it. It had achieved it. The Germans were merely talking about building a
railway to Baghdad. The Queen of England was Empress of India. If any
nation had upset the world's balance of power, it was Great Britain.
The usually more modest appetites of others, however, were a different matter. That the French in Morocco or the Germans in South West Africa were doing quite as well as colonizers as were the British in Uganda was something that seemed all but impossible to perceive through the London fog. British territorial acquisitions were a part of the progress of mankind; those of others were a menace to world peace and civilization. Russia's desire for access to the Mediterranean was a provocation; Britannia Rule the Waves reflected a noble and natural sentiment.
After
the turn of the century, this attitude was directed with special force at
Germany, although it was seldom made clear just what the Germans were to do
with all their excess energy. Some of the British documents of the
period convey an impression of near-hysteria in the face of a rising Germany,
reaching from a British admiral's simple suggestion, cited before, to sink the
German fleet without warning, to the more erudite memoranda of some of the
senior officials of the foreign office decrying the German menace.
Unfortunately, if one nation imagines for long enough that another is a
menace-"the natural enemy" of Sir Eyre Crowe's phrase-the likelihood
is strong that that other nation will some day have to play the role it has
been assigned.
That
judgment does not exculpate the Germans, who had been willing to endorse a
Balkan war that clearly contained the risk of a war in the West. As far as
Great Britain's direct responsibility for the final crisis and the outbreak of
hostilities is concerned, it is indisputably less than Germany's. It was units
of the German army, not of the British navy that were lobbing shells into
Belgian towns. Before the guns had been moved into position, however, it can
scarcely be said that the British did much better in restraining the Eastern
member of the Triple Entente than they would accuse the Germans of doing
vis-a-vis Vienna. "Will to war" is too grand and at the same time
elusive a term to use
140
Chapter 5 A Question of Responsibility
with
any degree of comfort, but what do we do about the memory of what would happen
a quarter of a century later! In 1938, when the British definitely did not wish
war, their prime minister would hurry to Germany three times within the space
of two weeks and negotiate peace under terms far worse than those of 1914 with
a leader infinitely more dangerous than the Kaiser in his most Wagnerian moods.
The lamps were not "going out" {Lord Grey's celebrated figure of
speech) in 1914. Many people, the author of the phrase included, were helping
to put them out.
Last of all, there is the responsibility of France-last of all, and least of all. Had the ultimate decision been that of France, the lamps would have remained lit.
It was true that a generation or more after Frankfurt, the French still had not really reconciled themselves to the loss of Alsace and Lorraine. Poincare and his friends were still pursuing what Boulanger had, except that they were doing so with greater intelligence, tact, patience, and skill and hence with greater effectiveness. The desire to undo the decision of Frankfurt was as powerful a motive force in France's system of alliances as any. Germany, to put the matter differently, did not wish for any territorial change in Europe between 1871 and 1914; France did. It was equally true that during the July crisis, France failed to urge restraint on St. Petersburg. One cannot very well indict the Germans for their blank check to Austria without noting that the Russians held a similar piece of paper from France.
Yet when compared with the involvement of other nations, how mild the responsibility of France must appear. The French might mourn Strasbourg, but they were plotting no war to recover it. Even the most irreconcilable groups of Frenchmen were organizing no Pan-Gallic movements; there was nothing in France to compare, for ambition and folly, with either the Pan-Slavs or the Pan-Germans. Also, all speculations about France's ultimate objectives have about them a certain irrelevancy. Perhaps France would, some day, have fought to avenge Sedan, perhaps France would not. We-will never know. The fact is that the French, in August 1914, did not go to war for Alsace, but because the Germans, lacking the political imagination and the diplomatic skill to keep France neutral, first presented an unacceptable ultimatum and then began to march on Paris. The British had an element of choice, even after the Schlieffen Plan had gone into operation {major segments of British opinion certainly thought so); the French did not.
Other
Causes, Other Reasons: Diplomacy to Public Opinion 141
In 1914, the French entered the war because they had no alternative. The Germans had attacked them. It was that simple.
Were not certain other factors more complex, however? What of the forces which transcended traditional national responsibility: the alliance system, the role of economic motives, or the impact of imperialism, nationalism, and the press?
Having dealt with these topics before, what can be said rather summarily here is that while these factors unquestionably affected the atmosphere of 1914, and usually for the worse, none of them, by them - selves, were enough to cause a war.
The alliance system, with its resulting
division of Europe into two camps, did contribute to transforming Austria's war
into general war. But the alliances were effect, not cause. They were the
traditional and legitimate instruments of each nation's often equally
legitimate and traditional objectives, and not end in themselves. Nor were the
alliances nearly so firm and automatic as they sometimes appear in historical
literature. They certainly were considerably less integrated than the system of
alliances, both East and West that emerged after the Second World War. Italy,
for instance, would remain neutral in 1914 despite its formal treaty
obligations to the Central Powers. The Ottoman Empire, on the other hand, would
join them even in the absence of any such ties. In fact, one might well advance
the proposition that if only the alliances had been stronger-if only
Austria-Hungary had been absolutely certain that an attack on Belgrade meant an
attack on St. Petersburg, if only there had been no doubt at all in the
Germans' minds that a move against Brussels was a move against London-
everything might still have ended, if not well, at least short of disaster.
There
is even less strength in the economic argument, so tempting to Marxist
historians, who professed to believe that "the anarchy of the capitalist
world" was bound to lead to bloody conflict. And it was true, of course,
that the economic rivalry between the powers, most notably between Germany and
Great Britain, did not contribute to international amity. But few were the
businessmen who would risk the destruction of their entire national economy for
the sake of increasing their share
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Chapter 5 A Question of Responsibility
in
the export market. Businessmen were altogether capable of seeing the advantages
of peace, and of economic cooperation. In the case of the Berlin to Baghdad
Railway scheme, for instance, British and French bankers were very much in
favor of participating along with their German confreres; it was their
governments that persuaded them to abstain. And in 1914, businessmen,
particularly in Britain and Germany, were as vociferous as anyone, workers
included, in opposing war.
Nor should the influence of imperialism or even of the press be exaggerated. Conflicting colonial ambitions did add to Europe's ill tem- per, especially where Anglo-German relations were concerned. But then, they were an equal burden on Anglo-Russian and Anglo-French relations; yet in 1914, England, Russia, and France found it perfectly possible to fight on the same side. Besides, as a leading expert on British policy, Zara S. Steiner, has written "Rather than a cause of war, the division of far-off lands had often provided a safety valve for adjustments that preserved the European peace."
The press, with its tendency to exacerbate or invent diplomatic crises, with its daily offerings of international disaster (potential, imagined, or real), and with its habitual blurring of the distinction between patriotism and chauvinism, may have more to answer for. But public opinion alone can create no wars. If it could, the French would have gone to war against the British at the time of Fashoda and the Serbians and Russians against the Austrians at the time of the annexation crisis. Even William Randolph Hearst, once we separate fact from legend, was not able to deliver a Spanish-American War quite by himself.
One topic that cannot be dealt with quite so cavalierly is the question of militarism. Militarism is a vague and emotional term, so let it be said that two fairly specific aspects of it will be of concern here: the amount of arms available in 1914, and t-he more than occasional preponderance of military over political considerations.
The military expenditures of the European powers, as noted before, rose at an unprecedented rate in this period, until, at the beginning of 1914, they stood at 300 percent of what they had been in 1870. While the amount of weapons was thus very clearly measurable, the influence on policy was a more subtle matter. Yet Hegel's observation that at some point quantity will change quality was as true as ever. There were
The
Matter of Militarism 143
too
many deadly weapons about for their owners' good in 1914 Europe. With all these
splendid instruments of destruction available, it would have been surprising if
there had not been a few people who had no marked aversion to seeing them
tested.
Their numbers were small, but Austria's Berchtold was too close to them and so was Russia's Janushkevich. This brings us to the second and even more critical aspect of the matter, the undue influence of military over political decision making. The Germans and the Russians were the worst, though not the only, sinners here. Instead of serving policy, the preparations undertaken by Russia's and Germany's military authorities-general mobilization and Schlieffen Plan-decided policy and, as it turned out, disastrously so.
Relatively little blame attaches to the generals. It is their task to prepare for war and victory. Nor were the generals always automatically members of the war party. In January 1914, for instance, when Sazonov had advocated the forcible seizure of the Straits, it was the Russian military experts who had opposed the venture on the grounds of its impracticability. A great deal of blame, on the other hand, attaches to the statesmen. It was they who should have known how stretchable a term "military necessity" was, who should have seen how perilous the plans of their respective general staffs were and have countermanded them.
Why they did not is not an entirely easy question to answer. One can of course say the obvious, which is that they were men who were not given the qualities necessary to establish the absolute priority of civilian over military authority, qualities such as toughness, great clarity of purpose, and the ability to keep regular office hours. {Berchtold and Sazonov, one suspects, were so much the prisoners of their generals' plans in July 1914 largely because they had never bothered to find out just what those plans were.) And one can add that it was in those countries where the military stood at the top of the social hierarchy- attracting talent and bestowing prestige as perhaps no other profession did-that there occurred the worst violation of the rule, essential to sound government and sane diplomacy alike, that the sovereign must be commander-in-chief, not the commander-in-chief sovereign.
But
this is not the whole answer. For in Britain and France, too, membership in the
general staff tended to be an indication of more than usual intelligence and
social acceptability .N or did the military staff talks held under the shelter
of the Entente Cordiale invariably follow the instructions of the
representatives of people or crown; in the summer of 1914, the majority of the
British cabinet would be quite as surprised by
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Chapter 5 A Question of Responsibility
the
obligations incurred toward France as was the majority of the German government
by the modalities of the Schlieffen Plan. Still, there were some rather
important differences in degree. Thus the French government, when presented
with its counterpart of the Schlieffen Plan, providing for a French invasion of
Belgium, told the general staff to discard it and to submit a politically more
tenable one. And while the professional soldiers of all nations were perhaps
equally fascinated by the technological necessities of modern warfare, it was
in Russia and Germany again that technology was allowed its clearest triumph
over diplomacy.
World War I, as Herman Kahn has been among the first to point out, was to a large extent a war of railroad timetables: "the general staffs of the four great continental powers had spent decades planning meticulous timetables. The war plans were literally cast in concrete in the sense that governments built railroads according to the requirements of the war plan."4 Now the advantages of railroads, demonstrated on a large scale first in the American Civil War and then in the Franco-Prussian War, were considerable. They could be used to deploy large armies quickly, effectively, and cheaply and to transport these armies to fight on territory other than one's own. But the system also was notably rigid. A horse can change direction at the flick of the bridle, not so a train. Once set in motion, how was it to be stopped? Even if stopped, how could it be redirected without creating havoc with the remainder of the schedule? Hence, in the Russo-German impasse over mobilization, very much more was involved than diplomatic precedent or prestige. The means of war were being allowed to bring about a state of war.
The final irony was that as the armies began to move, not one of the carefully calculated timetables would really work. Everyone's plans had been predicated on what one historian has called "the short war illusion," that is to say on swift and surprising movement, on quick and decisive victory-or on precisely the sort of thing that would not come to pass. What no one had anticipated, to make a long mistake very short, was that the war they were about to fight was World War I.
That
was hardly the only miscalculation. Everyone was so intrigued by what might
happen if they did not risk war that they failed to perceive
4
Herman Kahn, On The1monuclear War (Princeton, 1961), p. 359.
"A
Tremendous Lack of Imagination" 145
the
cost of violence. The alternatives to war, in the innocent summer of 1914, thus
seemed very much worse than war itself. The Austrians were mortally afraid that
if they did not march, they might forfeit the final opportunity to save their
empire. The Russians felt that they could not possibly leave their Serbian allies
to fend for themselves again as they had during the annexation crisis. The
Germans concentrated their fear and imagination on the consequences of losing
their one remaining ally. The French were convinced that their alliance system
might suffer an irreparable blow if they as much as hesitated in aiding Russia.
The British did not see how they could acquiesce in German control of the
channel ports, let alone in German dominance over Europe.
None of these fears were groundless, but war was about as good an answer to them as suicide is to the fear of death. Hence what strikes one, at least at this distance in time, is that there was no all-out search for an alternative, but that instead the crisis was allowed to run its more or less routine diplomatic course. The price for that would be horrendous. The war's direct cost, often calculated and described, still fits no category of horror that we are capable of visualizing. At Verdun alone, perhaps a million Frenchmen and Germans died. How does one picture a million deaths? How does this small book hold the bloody fields of France? And bloodied to what end? To the end that the war would destroy the Austro- Hungarian Empire it was designed to save, end Russian influence in the Balkans for years to come, and leave Germany more weak and lonely than she had ever been before. Nor would it spare the victors. Without it, Britain might still be the world's banker and France still the master of an empire extending from Algeria to Indo-China. "This war," said Franz Kafka to a friend in 1916, "above all else was caused by a tremendous lack of imagination."
The
lack was understandable. Imagination, in cases other than Kafka's, more often
than not is the extension of the past into the future, and the past was
reassuring. None of the many crises to which people had been witness had led
to war. Nations had threatened one another, had dispatched curt notes and large
dreadnoughts, but at the final moment, they had always drawn back, whether over
Fashoda, Morocco, or Bosnia, since none among them really wanted a general war.
Hence, what each side expected was the customary mixture of public bluster and
private good sense. Once more, there would be the walk to the brink; once more,
one would, with a suitable show of resistance, permit oneself to be pulled
back.
Overconfidence, the alliance system, the press, national antagonisms, militarism-the list still is incomplete unless there is added to
"A
Tremendous Lack of Imagination" 147
it
the crucial event that made these and other factors operable. That event was
the crime of Gavrilo Princip. Without Sarajevo, Europe might have remained at
peace for no one can say how many years to come. 1914 was not 1939. Too much
was right with Europe then. The world had weathered {and would again weather)
considerably worse periods of crisis without recourse to global conflict. Or as
a poem by Arthur Guiterman, written on the occasion of an earlier crisis, that
of the Annexation of Bosnia, and published in the New York Times of
October 9, 1908, had it:
How I love to watch the War Cloud, as it gets an extra head on!
How I
love to hear the "trouble,
trouble,
trouble!" of the drums,
And the
wailings of the Prophets for the Day of Armageddon;
It's so
thrilling and romantic-and the trouble never comes!
Though
the Powers are pow-wowing and the Kaisers are contriving,
Yet we
know one party dassen't and the other one's afraid.
here'll
be scores of ultimatums and a bit of bargain driving,
And
then all will be as peaceful as a Temperance Parade.
A dubious forecast, as it would turn out, but then history is not prophet-friendly. Attitudes, alliances, conditions, constellations of power all have a tendency to change in the normal course of events, and often rapidly and unpredictably so. How they had changed between the 1880s and the turn of the century, for instance, and how, with Franz Ferdinand alive, they might have changed once more!
Sarajevo, then, was a major cause of the war, not merely its occasion. Princip killed more than two victims. It was his and Dimitrijevic's deed, as well as the errors of fact and judgment that occurred in its aftermath that gave all the various elements of friction their unique opportunity of coalescing. The errors and the pure bad luck, the sheer accidents, from a chauffeur's wrong turn to a German foreign minister's absence honeymooning to a Russian chief of the general staff's being new to his office.
148
Chapter 5 A Question of Responsibility
No power had any overall, conscious designs for war in 1914. Nowhere, even in the summer of 1914, was a calculated, advance decision made for global war. Rather, the powers, as a result of Sarajevo, became involved in a series of moves and countermoves-all of them, on the face of it, logical, reasonable, or at least defensible-that stage by stage, step by step, imperceptibly at times, and hardly ever with any true vision of the consequences, placed them in a position from which there was no way back to the negotiating table. Thus, all the trends, events, factors mentioned in these pages, both long-range and immediate, had their bearing on the origins of the First World War and were in some manner relevant. Thus, too, none of them were. For not one of the factors described was sufficient in itself to cause a war, nor had, in previous years, at least partly similar combinations of circumstances ended the way Sarajevo did. Perhaps all one can truly say in the end is that World War I was a twentieth-century diplomatic crisis gone wrong, the one gamble, or rather series of gambles (of how many in all, before or after 1) that did not work out. Such things happen.