The Ottoman Turks
It is one of history's little jokes, surely, that Turkey and the Ottoman Empire that it ruled had no part to play in the July crisis that brought the Great War. For this crisis could never have unfolded as it did if not for the profound impact that the empire of the Turks had had on the development of Eastern Europe. And no one would be affected by the war itself more profoundly than the Turks and the many peoples who, century after century, had been their unhappy subjects.
And with the decline of the Ottoman Empire, was the only reason the Hapsburg where in Bosnia at all, and there could have been no Kingdom of Serbia. There would have been no power vacuum in the Balkans. Russia and Austria-Hungary could never have been pulled into vacuum or into such dangerous conflict with each other.
To go back further, without the rise of the Ottomans the whole bitter saga of the Balkans would have been unimaginably different. The Turks ruled the peninsula for 500 years, reaching at their height westward into Italy, northward into Austria, Hungaryy, and Russia, and all the way around the Black Sea. For a time they seemed destined to conquer the whole Eastern half of Europe, if not the entire continent. When the great war began their empire, while maintaining only a toehold in Europe proper, still extended across the Middle East to the Arabian Peninsula.
When the empire reached its pinnacle, its decline began, with the life of a single man, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent(also known as Suleiman the Lawmaker). He ruled from 1520 to 1566 and led the Ottomans to their zenith both culturally and geographically. He was 10 generations removed from the Turkish-Mongol Chieftain named Osman who founded the dynasty 300 years before and give it his name. In everyone of those 10 generations, in a unbroken sequence of achievements that no other family has ever approached, the Ottoman Turks were led by yet another dynamic, heroic, conquering figure. Generation after generation, starting where Osman had 1st emerged from obscurity in what is now Eastern Turkey and from there moving outward in all directions, the dynasty took control of more and more of the world around it. The Sultans forced their way into Europe for the 1st time in 1354, and 99 years later they captured Constantinople, the heart of the Byzantine Empire. From the on Constantinople was their home.
The Ottomans continued their expansion for another century after taking Constantinople, conquering among other places all of Eastern Europe, South of the Danube. Suleiman's father, Selin I, doubled the size of the empire by winning a single battle that made him the master of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Algeria. The domain that he passed on to Suleiman included among its major cities, Alexandria, Algiers, Athens, Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, Jerusalem, and Smyrna. The Ottomans had become not only the political and military masters of the Islamic world but also-what put their supremacy beyond challenge-the custodians of Mecca and Medina and the other holy places associated with the Prophet Muhammad.
As its power increased, the dynasty evolved into something that was not a family in any ordinary sense of the term, but a chain of fathers and sons who never married. Instead of taking wives, the Sultans kept scores and even 100's of women who were property rather than spouses. These women lived as prisoners in a harem. They were allowed no contact with men except for the rulers who owned them and an army of custodians, many of them black Africans whose sexual organs had been removed surgically.
Suleiman, a contemporary of Henry VIII of England, took this strange heritage to a peak of vitality. Like his forebears, he was a warrior, personally leading his army in 13 campaigns. He pushed deeper into Europe, capturing Belgrade and Budapest and completing the conquest of the Balkans. He besieged Vienna, the keystone of Central Europe, and would have captured it too if torrents of rain had not made it impossible for him to bring his heavy guns north.
Suleiman had some 300 concubines, as well as a promising young son and heir named Mustafa, when he was given a red-haired Russian girl named Ghowren, who came to be known as Roxelana. She came into his harem as part of his share of the booty from a slave gathering raid into what is now Poland, and she must have been a remarkable creature.(Not surprisingly, in light of the power she aquired in Constantinople, she eventually won a 2nd new name "the witch".) Almost from the day of her arrival, Suleiman never slept with another woman. Eventually and amazingly, he did something that no Sultan had done in centuries; he married. Their love story would have been one of the great ones if it hadn't eneded up taking the dynasty and the empire in such a sordid direction.
Mustafa gave every indication of developing into yet another mighty branch on the family tree. At an early age he showed himself a bold military leader adored by his troops, a capable provincial governor, and a popular hero. But he stood in the way of the son whom Roxelana had bourne to(presumably) Suleiman, and so he was doomed. Working her wiles, Roxelana persuaded Suleiman that Mustafa was plotting against him. (Even though he wasn't) With his father looking on, Mustafa was overpowered and strangled by 5 professional executioners who's tongues had been slit and eardrums broken so that they would hear no secrets and could never speak of what they saw. And when Suleiman died some years later, master of an empire of almost increduble size and power, he was succeeded by Roxelana's son, Selin II. Nothing was ever the same again.
Selin the Sot was short and fat and a drunk. He never saw a battlefield and died after 8 years on the throne by falling down and fracturing his skull in his marble bath. His son, Murad III, was also a drunk and an opium addict as well; during a reign of 20 years he sired 103 children and apparently did little else. His heir, Mahomet III, begin his reign by ordering all fo his many brothers, the youngest of them mere children, put to death, thereby introducing that custom into Ottoman royal culture. Having done so he followed his father in devoting the rest of his life to capulation. And so it went. Every Sultan from Roxelana's son forward was a monster of degeneracy or a repulsive weakling or both.
The abruptness and premanence of the change, the sharpness of the contrast between the murdered Mustafa and his half brother Selin II, has give rise to speculation that perhap's Roxelana's son was not Suleiman's son at all.
In the post-Suleiman empire, a new breed of craven Sultans came to live in terror of being overthrown by rivals from within the dynasty. Appalling new traditions emerged, to be observed whenever one of them died. All the women of the deceased Sultan would be moved to a distant place and kept in even deeper solitude for the rest of their miserable lives. Any one happened to be pregnant would be murdered and the younger brothers and half-brothers of the new monarch were murdered as well.
The rulers erected a windowless building called the Cage in which thier heirs were confined from early childhood until they died or were put to death or, having been taught nothing about anything, were released to take their turns on the throne. The result was as inevitable as it was monstrous; an empire ruled year after year and finally century after century by utterly ignorant, utterly incompetent, sometimes half-imbecilic, half-mad men, some of whom spent decades in the Cage before their release and all of whom, after their release, were free to do absolutely anything they wanted, no matter how vicious, for as long as they remained alive. They commonly indulged their freedom to kill or maim for any reason-for playing the wrong music or for smoking, for example- or for no reason at all.
Throughout the 3 1/2 centuries from the death of Suleiman until the Great War, only one Sultan displayed some of the fire and strength of the men who built the empire. This was Murad III, who reigned from 1623 to 1640. He became Sultan when he was only 10 years old- to young to have been incapacitated by the cage-and he grew into a man of immense courage and physical power. He was the 1st Sultan since Suleiman to be a soldier, leading his army into Persia, where he savagely put down an uprising. He was also even more insanely cruel than most Sultans. In just 1 year of his reign, 1637, some 25,000 of the empire's subjects were executed, many of them by Murad's own hand. He claimed the right to kill 10 innocent people per day, and occasionally he would sit on the wall of his palace shooting randomly at passersby. At night he would make incognito visits to the taverns of Constantinople, where anyone found smoking would be executed on the spot.
Almost uniquely among the Ottomans, Murad produced no children, and on his deathbed he ordered the death of his brother and heir, Ibrahim, who had been living in the Cage from the age of 2. This order was not obeyed, Ibrahim being the last living member of the dynasty, but from that point there were few further signs of vitality in the Ottoman line. Ibrahim devoted himself to building up a harem of 280 young women. The acting on a dubious report that one of these women had become romantically involved with a eunich, so Murad had all of them drowned.
So it was not surprising that the empire rotted from within under this kind of leadership. And became an inviting target. Young General Napoleon Bonaparte 1st showed Europe just how impotent the Ottomans had become when in 1798 he invaded and almost effortlessley conquered Egypt. But he was driven out of Egypt by the British, with no help from the Turks. From this point on, the survival of the Sultans and their decaying empire depended less on themselves than on the jealousies and rivalries of the European powers.
The Ottomans hung on through the 19th century and that was only because Britain and France kept Russia from finishing them off. Even so, the 100 years leading up to 1914 brought uninterrupted losing wars; with the empire's own Turkish satraps as they tried for autonomy in Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere; with Arab Chieftans seeking independence; with Persia; with the Christian peoples of the Balkans; and-four times between 1806 and 1878 with Russia hungering for Constantinople.
In 1830 the French seized control of Algeria in North Africa. At about the same time the British began building a power base in Arabi and the Persian Gulf. In 1853 Russia, tempted by what appeared to be easy pickings, invaded the Ottoman provinces nsouth of the Danube. The Ottoman presence in Europe might have come to an end then if not for the Crimean War, in which Britain and France intervened to stop the Russians.
Now Britain, fearful that its postion in the eastern Mediteranean and control of India might be lost if Russia broke through to the south, saved the Ottomans from destruction yet again in 1878. But by that time several European coutries, Britain included, were feasting on the Turkish empire's extremites. Austria-Hungary took possession of Bosnia and Herzehovina, literally preparing the ground for the Sarajevo assassination. France, with British support took Tunisia and Morocco in North Africa. Britain took Egypt and Cypus, and finally even Italy reached across the Mediteranean to grab Tripoli(today's Libya), along with islands in the Aregean and Mediterranean. Germany meanwhile, having arrived too late to share in the plunder, focused on building ties with the Turks. They began work on a Berlin-to-Baghdad railway and Kaiser Wilhelm II paid a state visit to Constantinople and Jerusalem.
In 1908, the year when Autria-Hungary formally annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, a group of would be reformers called the Young Turks(Their leader and army officer named Enver Pasha) seized control of the government in Constaninople and introduced a constitution. In 1912 the 1st Balkan War drove the Turks almost entirely out of the Balkans. This, and the failure of the Constantinople regime to deliver the reforms expected of it or to stop the disintegration of the empire, gravely damaged the prestige of the ruling faction, which was replaced by nationalist extremist(once again led by Enver). Some of it was regained the following year, however, when the 2nd Balkan War led to Turkey's recovery of the city of Adrianople on the European mainland. The Sultan was at least as ridiculous a figure as the sorriest of his predeceddors. No one even pretended that he matter.
In January 1914, Evner Pasha left the army to become minister of war, and in July he took his empire into a secret defensive alliance with Germany. Astonishingly in light of all the humiliations it had experienced, the Ottoman Empire of July 1914 was still bigger geographically than France, Germany, and Austria-Hungary combined. It still ruled Arabia, which soon would emerge as the world's greatest source of oil; If war did erupt no one knew if the empire would enter it or, if so, on which side. It would be a coveted ally- or a rich, probably easy conquest.
Sunday, December 29, 2013
Friday, December 20, 2013
Born November 30, 1874 was a British politician who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955. Widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the 20th Century. Churchill was also an officer in the British Army, a historian, a writer, and an artist. He is the only British Prime Minister to have received the Noble Prize in Literature, and was the 1st person to be made an honorary citizen of the United States.
Churchill was born into the aristocratic family of the Dukes of Marlborough, a branch of the Spencer family. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was a charismatic politician who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer; his mother, Jennie Jerome, was an American socialite. As a young army officer, he saw action in British India, The Sudan, and the 2nd Boa War. He gained fame as a war correspondent and wrote books about his campaigns.
At the forefront of politics for 50 years, he held many political and cabinet positions. Before the 1st World War, he served as President of the Board of Trade, Home Secretary, and First Lord of the Admiralty as part of the Asquith Liberal Government. During the war, he continued as First Lord of the Admiralty until the disastrous Gallipoli Campaign caused his departure from government. He then briefly resumed active army service on the Western front as Commander of the 6th Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliars. He returned to government as Minister of Manitions, Secretary of State for War, and Secretary of State for Air. After the war, Churchill served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Conservative Government of 1924-1929, controversially returning the pound sterling in 1925 to the gold standard at its pre-war parity, a move widely seen as creating deflationary pressure on the U.K. economy. Also controversial was his opposition to increased home rule for India and his resistance to the 1936 abdication of Edward VIII.
Out of office and politically "in the wilderness" during the 1930's, Churchill took the lead in warning about Nazi Germany and in campaigning for rearonament. On the outbreak of the 2nd World War, he was again appointed First Lord of the Admiralty. Following the resignation of Neville Chambalain on May 1940, Churchill became Prime Minister. His steadfast refusal to consider defeat, surrender, or compromise peace helped British resistance, especially during the difficult early days of the War when Britain stood alone among European countries in its active opposition to Adolf Hitler. Churchill was particularly noted for his speeches and radio broadcasts, which helped inspire the British people. He led Britain as Prime Minister until victory over Nazi Germany had been secured.
After the Conservative Party lost the 1945 election, he became Leader of the Opposition to the Labour Government. After winning the 1951 election, he again became Prime Minister, before retiring in 1955. Upon his death on January 24th, 1965, Elizabeth II granted him the honor of a state funeral, which saw one of the largest assemblies of world statesman in history. Named the Greatest Briton of all time in a 2002 poll, Churchill is widely regarded as being among the influential people in British history, consistently ranking well in opinion polls of Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom.
General Helmuth von Moltke
Born May 23rd 1848, was also known as Moltke the Younger, he was a nephew of Field Marshal Count Moltke and served as the Chief of the German General Staff from 1906-1914. The Moltke's are often differentiated as Moltke the Elder and Moltke the Younger. Moltke the Younger's role in the developments of German war plans and the instigation of the 1st World War is extremely controversial.
Helmuth von Moltke was born in Mechlenburg-Scheverin and named after his uncle, Helmuth Karl Bernhard von Moltke, future Field Marshal and hero of the wars of Unification. During the Franco-Prussian War, Moltke served with the 7th Gredadia Regiment, and was cited for bravery. He attended the war academy between 1875 and 1878 and joined the General Staff in 1880. In 1882 he became personal adjutant to his uncle, then Chief of the General Staff. In 1891, on the death of his uncle, Moltke became aide-de-camp to Wilhelm II, thus becoming part of the Emperor's inner circle. In the late 1890's he commanded first a brigade and then a division, finely being promoted to Lieutenant General in 1902. In 1904 Moltke was made Quartermaster General; in effect, Deputy Chief on Schbieffen's retirement. His appointed was controversial then and remains so today. The other likely candidates for the position were Hans Hartwig von Beseler, Karl von Bulow, and Colman Freiherr von der Goltz. Critics charge that Moltke gained the position on the strength of his name and friendship with the Kaiser. Certainly Moltke was far closer to the Kaiser than the other candidates. Historians argue, however, that Beseler was too close to Schbieffen to have succeeded him, while Bulow and Goltz were too independent for Wilhelm to have accepted them. Indeed, Motlke's friendship with the Kaiser permitted him latitude that others could not have enjoyed. Goltz, at least, saw nothing wrong with Moltke's performance as Chief.
But do to the stress of World War I, Moltke's health took a bad decline, so on October 25th, 1914, he was succeeded by Erich von Falkenhayn.
After being succeeded by Falkenhayn, Moltke was entrusted in Berlin with the office of Chief of the Home Substitute for the General Staff. Which had the task of organizing and forwarding the reserves and controlling the territorial army corps, corresponding to those at the front. Moltke's health continued to deteriorate and he died in Berlin on June 28th, 1916. He left a pamphlet entitled Die Schuld am Kriege(The Blame for the War), which his widow Eliza intended to publish in 1919. She was dissuaded from doing so because of the problems this might cause. The pamphlet was designed to show the "chaotic" nature of events leading up to the war, in order to counter allied accusations of deliberate warmongering in Germany. However, army Chiefs and the German Foreign Ministry were disturbed by its contents. General Wilhelm von Dommes was sent to advise Eliza von Moltke against publication. Having read the pamphlet he confided to his dairy that it "contains nasty stuff". Instead Eliza published the blander Erinnerwngen, Briefe, Dokumente, a collection of her husband's letters and documents. Other material was archived. Some was later destroyed in World War II, and the original pamphlet has not been since accessible.
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
Friday July 31
When they learned of Russia's mobilization-unofficial reports reached Berlin almost immediately-the German generals intensified their demands. Because Germany continued to be the only European power not to have undertaken any military preparations at all, and the situation was becoming intolerable. Even Britain was on the move, First Lord of the Admiralty Chruchill 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.
So many holes were appearing in Germany's war plans. No one has foreseen a situation in which Russia mobilized without declaring war, or in which war erupted between Germany and Russia with France waiting on the sidelines. No one had a clue as what to do. The generals, of course-Chief of Staff Moltke included-were all but howling for action. The generals argued that Germany was in a better position to win a 2-front war now, than it would be after a few more years of French and Russia military buildup, and with every passing day of delay it was being drawn deeper into a death trap. The Kaiser refused mobilization, but agreed to declare a State of Impending War, which put in motion a variety of measures(securing borders, railways, and Germany's postal, telephone, and telegraph systems, and recalling soldiers on leave) in the expectation that mobilization would follow within 48 hours. He did this with the same deep reluctance shown by Franz Joseph when asked to declare war on Serbia, and by Tsar Nicholas when begged for mobilization. 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.
Bethmann too, desperately worried about keeping Britain out of any war and bringing Italy in on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary, agreed only when, minutes before noon, the earlier reports of Russia's mobilization were confirmed.
Berlin continued to ask Vienna to demonstrate some willingness to negotiate on the basis of various proposals being offered by London and St. Petersburg(such proposals had become numerous and complex), but Berchtold maintained his silence. Short-circuiting diplomatic channels, Kaiser sent a telegram directly to Franz Joseph, requesting his intervention. After conferring with Berchtold and Conrad, the Hapsburg Emperor replied that Vienna could not do more than it had already done. He didn't bother to explain that Austria-Hungary too was now caught in the snares of its own military planning. 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.
But Conrad feared, as the Russian generals had feared before their mobilization and as Germany's generals would soon be fearing with equally fateful consequences, that attempting to change his arrangements could lead only to disorder. Vienna couldn't regard this as a tolerable option with Serbia mobilizing and the Russians assembling immense forces along their common border.
But Conrad was not in touch with reality. Even as war with Russia became likely, he remained obsessed with punishing Serbia. Just as foolishly, he clung to the delusion that Italy would be entering the war on the side of the Central Powers, providing hundreds of 1,000's of additional troops.
All options except the military ones were shutting down. Power was moving into the hands of the soldiers and away from the diplomats and politicians. The soldiers were motivated mainly by fear. And as the Austrian Ambassador to France had observed on Thursday in a message to Berchtold, "Fear is a bad counselor."
In a display of German diplomacy at it ham-handed worst, Berlin informed London that if Britain remained neutral, Germany would promise to restore the borders of both France and Belgium(though not any overseas colonies that Germany might seize at the end of whatever war might ensue), this was ominous-no one had even mentioned Belgium until now.
Grey saw the offer as nothing better than a crude attempt at bribery, an insult to be rejected out of hand. his anger is transparent in his instructions to the British Ambassador in Berlin. "You must inform the German Chancellor that his proposal that we should bind ourselves to neutrality on such terms can not for a moment be entertained. He asks us in effect to engage to stand by while French colonies are taken and France is beaten so long as Germany does not take French territory as distinct from the colonies. From the material point of view such a proposal is unacceptable, for France could be crushed as to lose her position as a Great Power, and become subordinate to Germany policy without further territory in Europe being taken from her. But apart from that, for us to make this bargain with Germany at the expense of France would be a disgrace from which the good name of this country would never recover."
To this warning he added assurances that German assistance in averting war would be rewarded. "If the peace of Europe can be preserved and this crisis be safely passed," he said "my own effort would be to promote some arrangement to which Germany could be a party, by which she could be assured that no hostile or aggressive policy would be pursued against her or her allies by France, Russia, and ourselves, jointly or separately."
He appeared to be pointing toward fundamental changes in the overall system of European alliances, changes calculated to make this the last crisis of its kind. The implication was that until now Grey hadn't understood the intensity of Germany's fear of encirclement, but that his eyes had been opened.
Grey than took the next step that would give Bethmann much reason to regret having broached the question of Belgium. With the approval of the cabinet, he asked France and Germany to declare their intention to respect Belgian's neutrality in case of war. France was able to agree without difficulty. France's plan for an offensive against Germany were focused far to the south of Belgium in the area of Alsace-Lorriane, and Poincare understood that British support in case of war would be infinitely more valuable than any possible use of Belgium territory.
Germany, trapped by the inflexibility of its mobilization plan, was unable to respond at all. Thus was the 1st major step taken toward Britain's entry into the war. Germany now sent what would become known as its double ultimatum to France and Russia. This message warning that German mobilization "must follow in case Russia does not suspend every war measure against Austria-Hungary and ourselves withing 12 hours." France was asked for a declaration of neutrality. The deadline for responses was Saturday afternoon.
The double ultimatum was in part Berlin's desperate final effort to escape mobilization and in part effort to precipitate a breakdown in diplomatic relations to help justify the westward invasion that must follow mobilization. As directed to Russia, it was a straightforward request for cooperation. As directed to France, it was a kind of wild theatrical gesture aimed at making clear to the world that if war with Russia came, Germany and France would be at war also. It was intended to explain, in the court of public opinion, a German attack on France.
But what it really looked like was overbearing German bluster. The likelihood that Berlin never expected Paris to accept it is supported by the outrageous additional demand that the German Ambassador to France was instructed to make in case of acceptance; France's temporary surrender of its great fortress at Verdun and Toul, in return for a promise that they would be returned at the end of Germany's fight with Russia.
Now came the final flurry of Nicholas's-Kaiser's telegrams. The Kaiser told the Tsar that he was continuing to try to mediate in Vienna, and that "the peace of Europe may still be maintained by you, if Russia will agree to stop the military measures which must threaten Germany and Austria-Hungary."
Once again, messages between the two emperors crossed in Midair. Nicholas told Kaiser that it was "technically impossible" to stop Russia's mobilization but that Russia did not want war and still did not see war as unavoidable. "So long as the negotiations with Austria on Serbia's account are taking place, my troops shall not take any provocative action. I give you my solemn word for this. I put all my trust in God's mercy and hope in your successful mediation in Vienna for the welfare of our countries and for the peace of Europe."
As soon as the Kaiser's message reached the Tsar, Nicholas sent back an answer. He said he understood that Russian mobilization might require Germany to mobilize as well. He said he accepted this, but it need not mean war. He asked the Kaiser for "the same guarantee from you as I gave you, that these measures do not mean war and that we shall continue negotiating for the benefit of our countries and universal peace dear to all our hearts. Our long proved friendship must succeed, with God's help, in avoiding bloodshed. Anxiously, full confidence await you answer."
It was obviously heartfelt and must have seemed the richest of opportunities. But nothing would come of it. Because of all that had already happened, nothing could.
When they learned of Russia's mobilization-unofficial reports reached Berlin almost immediately-the German generals intensified their demands. Because Germany continued to be the only European power not to have undertaken any military preparations at all, and the situation was becoming intolerable. Even Britain was on the move, First Lord of the Admiralty Chruchill 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.
So many holes were appearing in Germany's war plans. No one has foreseen a situation in which Russia mobilized without declaring war, or in which war erupted between Germany and Russia with France waiting on the sidelines. No one had a clue as what to do. The generals, of course-Chief of Staff Moltke included-were all but howling for action. The generals argued that Germany was in a better position to win a 2-front war now, than it would be after a few more years of French and Russia military buildup, and with every passing day of delay it was being drawn deeper into a death trap. The Kaiser refused mobilization, but agreed to declare a State of Impending War, which put in motion a variety of measures(securing borders, railways, and Germany's postal, telephone, and telegraph systems, and recalling soldiers on leave) in the expectation that mobilization would follow within 48 hours. He did this with the same deep reluctance shown by Franz Joseph when asked to declare war on Serbia, and by Tsar Nicholas when begged for mobilization. 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.
Bethmann too, desperately worried about keeping Britain out of any war and bringing Italy in on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary, agreed only when, minutes before noon, the earlier reports of Russia's mobilization were confirmed.
Berlin continued to ask Vienna to demonstrate some willingness to negotiate on the basis of various proposals being offered by London and St. Petersburg(such proposals had become numerous and complex), but Berchtold maintained his silence. Short-circuiting diplomatic channels, Kaiser sent a telegram directly to Franz Joseph, requesting his intervention. After conferring with Berchtold and Conrad, the Hapsburg Emperor replied that Vienna could not do more than it had already done. He didn't bother to explain that Austria-Hungary too was now caught in the snares of its own military planning. 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.
But Conrad feared, as the Russian generals had feared before their mobilization and as Germany's generals would soon be fearing with equally fateful consequences, that attempting to change his arrangements could lead only to disorder. Vienna couldn't regard this as a tolerable option with Serbia mobilizing and the Russians assembling immense forces along their common border.
But Conrad was not in touch with reality. Even as war with Russia became likely, he remained obsessed with punishing Serbia. Just as foolishly, he clung to the delusion that Italy would be entering the war on the side of the Central Powers, providing hundreds of 1,000's of additional troops.
All options except the military ones were shutting down. Power was moving into the hands of the soldiers and away from the diplomats and politicians. The soldiers were motivated mainly by fear. And as the Austrian Ambassador to France had observed on Thursday in a message to Berchtold, "Fear is a bad counselor."
In a display of German diplomacy at it ham-handed worst, Berlin informed London that if Britain remained neutral, Germany would promise to restore the borders of both France and Belgium(though not any overseas colonies that Germany might seize at the end of whatever war might ensue), this was ominous-no one had even mentioned Belgium until now.
Grey saw the offer as nothing better than a crude attempt at bribery, an insult to be rejected out of hand. his anger is transparent in his instructions to the British Ambassador in Berlin. "You must inform the German Chancellor that his proposal that we should bind ourselves to neutrality on such terms can not for a moment be entertained. He asks us in effect to engage to stand by while French colonies are taken and France is beaten so long as Germany does not take French territory as distinct from the colonies. From the material point of view such a proposal is unacceptable, for France could be crushed as to lose her position as a Great Power, and become subordinate to Germany policy without further territory in Europe being taken from her. But apart from that, for us to make this bargain with Germany at the expense of France would be a disgrace from which the good name of this country would never recover."
To this warning he added assurances that German assistance in averting war would be rewarded. "If the peace of Europe can be preserved and this crisis be safely passed," he said "my own effort would be to promote some arrangement to which Germany could be a party, by which she could be assured that no hostile or aggressive policy would be pursued against her or her allies by France, Russia, and ourselves, jointly or separately."
He appeared to be pointing toward fundamental changes in the overall system of European alliances, changes calculated to make this the last crisis of its kind. The implication was that until now Grey hadn't understood the intensity of Germany's fear of encirclement, but that his eyes had been opened.
Grey than took the next step that would give Bethmann much reason to regret having broached the question of Belgium. With the approval of the cabinet, he asked France and Germany to declare their intention to respect Belgian's neutrality in case of war. France was able to agree without difficulty. France's plan for an offensive against Germany were focused far to the south of Belgium in the area of Alsace-Lorriane, and Poincare understood that British support in case of war would be infinitely more valuable than any possible use of Belgium territory.
Germany, trapped by the inflexibility of its mobilization plan, was unable to respond at all. Thus was the 1st major step taken toward Britain's entry into the war. Germany now sent what would become known as its double ultimatum to France and Russia. This message warning that German mobilization "must follow in case Russia does not suspend every war measure against Austria-Hungary and ourselves withing 12 hours." France was asked for a declaration of neutrality. The deadline for responses was Saturday afternoon.
The double ultimatum was in part Berlin's desperate final effort to escape mobilization and in part effort to precipitate a breakdown in diplomatic relations to help justify the westward invasion that must follow mobilization. As directed to Russia, it was a straightforward request for cooperation. As directed to France, it was a kind of wild theatrical gesture aimed at making clear to the world that if war with Russia came, Germany and France would be at war also. It was intended to explain, in the court of public opinion, a German attack on France.
But what it really looked like was overbearing German bluster. The likelihood that Berlin never expected Paris to accept it is supported by the outrageous additional demand that the German Ambassador to France was instructed to make in case of acceptance; France's temporary surrender of its great fortress at Verdun and Toul, in return for a promise that they would be returned at the end of Germany's fight with Russia.
Now came the final flurry of Nicholas's-Kaiser's telegrams. The Kaiser told the Tsar that he was continuing to try to mediate in Vienna, and that "the peace of Europe may still be maintained by you, if Russia will agree to stop the military measures which must threaten Germany and Austria-Hungary."
Once again, messages between the two emperors crossed in Midair. Nicholas told Kaiser that it was "technically impossible" to stop Russia's mobilization but that Russia did not want war and still did not see war as unavoidable. "So long as the negotiations with Austria on Serbia's account are taking place, my troops shall not take any provocative action. I give you my solemn word for this. I put all my trust in God's mercy and hope in your successful mediation in Vienna for the welfare of our countries and for the peace of Europe."
As soon as the Kaiser's message reached the Tsar, Nicholas sent back an answer. He said he understood that Russian mobilization might require Germany to mobilize as well. He said he accepted this, but it need not mean war. He asked the Kaiser for "the same guarantee from you as I gave you, that these measures do not mean war and that we shall continue negotiating for the benefit of our countries and universal peace dear to all our hearts. Our long proved friendship must succeed, with God's help, in avoiding bloodshed. Anxiously, full confidence await you answer."
It was obviously heartfelt and must have seemed the richest of opportunities. But nothing would come of it. Because of all that had already happened, nothing could.
Friday, December 6, 2013
Thursday July 30th
The European public was now fully awake to the possibility of war. Runs on banks were becoming widespread. Austria, Germany, and Russia were all withdrawing their reserves from foreign banks. The financial markets in Berlin and Brussels had to be shut down because of panic selling.
Even the Kaiser and Tsar telegrams were beginning to go wrong. In one of his middle of the night messages, in a maladroit attempt to assure the Kaiser that Russia has no hostile intentions where Germany was concerned, Tsar Nicholas told him that "the military measures which have now come into force were decided on 5 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 the morning the leaders of the Russian General Staff came back to Sazonov with bad news. They told him there was no acceptable way of executing the kind of partial mobilization that the Tsar approved. Any such mobilization would have to be done off the cuff and would throw Russia's armed forces into a state of confusion that might leave them helpless in case of a German attack. In practical terms only general mobilization was possible, the couldn't wait any longer.
When the Chief of the General Staff telephoned the Tsar and again asked him to approve a general mobilization, Nicholas refused, saying that the question was closed. He had been persuaded grudgingly, to meet with Sazonov at 3 p.m. The meeting was a long one, with foreign minister arguing the generals case. Austria, Sazonov said was preparing to destroy Serbia and refusing to talk. Germany was playing a double game, appearing to restrain the Austrians but really just trying to buy time for its own preparations; Germany was far along with an undeclared mobilization of its own. Russia could not afford not to respond. Russia also could not mobilize in any way short of fully. Sazonov was wrong about almost everything except Austria's determination to attack Serbia. He was not lying, but he was dangerously misinformed.
Nicholas continued to refuse, and Sazonov continued to plead. The Tsar, conscious of the manitude of what he was being asked, agonized aloud. "Think of the responsibility which you are asking me to take!" he declared. "Think of the 1,000's and 1,000's of men who will be sent to their death!" Finally, Nicholas was worn down. He was a stubborn but not a strong man, and even the strongest of men would have found it difficult to resist when being told that war could no longer be avoided regardless of what they did and that nothing less than national survival was at stake. Perhaps Sazonov's most powerful argument-another falsehood that he believed to be true-was that a general mobilization would not necessarily drive Germany to war.
What neither Savonov nor Nicholas understood was that Russia's mobilization would arouse in Germany's generals a panic indistinguishable from the fears driving the Russians, and that those generals would demand a German response. Far worse, neither of them had nay way of knowing how fast the Germans would be able to mobilize, or how inflexible and therefore dangerous the German mobilization plan was. Not even Kaiser Wilhelm or Chancellor Bethmann understood. Clearly at this point Germany was literally incapable of mobilizing without invading its neighbors to the west and igniting the continental war that all of them dreaded. 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.
Russia's general mobilization, decided just a little more than 48 hours after Austria's declaration of war on Serbia, added 900,000 active duty troops to the number that would have been affected by partial mobilization. It also called up the Russia reserves-a staggering total of 4 million men, enough to frighten any nation on earth. By making German mobilization-therefore war- a near- certainty, it drastically reduced the possibility that the Kaiser-Nicholas's telegrams or any of the other increasingly desperate efforts to defuse the situation(cables were flying among the capital cities around the clock) could produce results before it was too late. It all but ended the hope of negotiations, or of a compromise based on Stop-in-Belgrade.
Tragically, Russia's mobilization, while dictated by military considerations, was not only militarily unnecessary but counter productive. Tactically it was a gift to the Austrians(or would have been, if Conrad had taken advantage of it), relieving them of the anquish of not knowing whether they needed to prepare to fight the Russians or were free to focus on Serbia alone. Strategically it was an act of high folly. In no real sense had the security of Russia ever been threatened by the July crisis. Even the destruction of Serbia-something that certainly could have been averted without resorting to war-would have had little impact on Russia's strategic position. Russia would still have had the biggest army in the world by a huge margin, and it would still have been in the beginning stages of a program aimed at expanding that army by 40% within 3 years.
Tsar Nicholas was shown a telegram that the monk Rasputin had sent to Tsarina Alexandra. Because of Rasputin's distance from the capital, there was no way he could know what was happening in St. Petersburg or know what was happening in St. Petersburg or Vienna or elsewhere. Thus his telegram mystified everyone. It read "Let Papa(Rasputins name for Nicholas)not plan war," "With war will come the end of Russia and yourselves, and you will lose to the last man." The Tsar read it and tore it into pieces.
British foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, alarmed by the deepening seriousness of the crisis, finally stopped being so diplomatic as to be nearly incapable of saying anything. Speaking without the knowledge of the British Cabinet, he told Germany's Ambassador Lichnowsky that in his opinion, quite unofficially, "unless Austria is willing to enter upon a discussion of the Serbian question, a world war in inevitable," and that he would expect such a war to bring Britain in on the side of France and Russia. So when the Kaiser and Bethmann learned of this, they abandoned any lingering hopes that war if it came could be a "local one involving only Austria-Hungary and Serbia, so they intensified their attempts to restrain the Austrians. If Grey would have been this forthright just a few days earlier, Berlin almost certainly would have changed its position more quickly and firmly. Austria might then have deferred its declaration of war, and Russia would have had little reason to mobilize. Now it was all but to late. Also too late, Bethmann awakened to the fact that the Russians were laboring under a misunderstanding about Vienna's willingness to talk. Bethmann told Tschirschky to alert Bercthold to the problem, but things were happening so fast and diplomacy being submerged under the concerns of the generals, there was little chance that talks could get under way in time to avoid war.
Bethmann was peppering Tschirschky with telegrams, each one more urgent and exasperated than the last. In one he instructed the Ambassador to make clear to Berchtold that any Austro-Hungarian refusal to negotiate with Russia would be no only a 'serious error" but " a direct provocation of Russia's armed intervention." "We are of course, ready to fulfill the obligations of our alliance," he said in another, "but must decline to be drawn wantonly into a world conflagration by Vienna, without having any regard paid to our counsel.
But here again the remedies were coming too late-all the more so because Berchtold had withdrawn into an almost total silence. He was bent on war and wanted no discussion. The Tension continued to increase. President Poincare, concerned about jeopardizing France's alliance with Russia, sent assurances to St. Petersburg through Ambassador Paleologue hurried to tell Sazonov, not yet knowing that Russia had already mobilized(if Paleologue knew, he did not deign to inform Paris), Poincare also told the Ambassador to urge the Russians to proceed cautiously. Paleologue had no interest in doing this.
Now Paris and St. Petersburg continued to receive reports of extensive military preparations withing Germany, reports that were untrue. France was beginning to prepare, but doing so extremely tentatively, to avoid alarming the Germans or, what Poincare cared about even more at this point, giving the British any cause to see France as an aggressor. No reserves were called up, and no movement of troops by train was permitted. Determined to bring Britain to France's assistance if war started, and mindful that this would require casting Germany in the role of aggressor, Poincare ordered that all troops be kept 6 miles back from the border.
So when the French Commander in Chief, General Joseph Joffre, requested permission to mobilize, he was refused. Even limited movements of troops towards the 6 mile limit were not permitted-until Joffre, later in the day, threatened to resign.
Poincare summoned the British Ambassador to his office. He asked for a firmer line in London. he said that if Britain would declare its intention to support France, Germany might be deterred and war averted. The Ambassador, aware of how divided the government in London remained, was able to say nothing more than "how difficult it would be for His Majesty's government to make such a statement."
General Helmuth von Moltke, Chief of the German Staff, checked on the status of Austria's mobilization. When he learned that Conrad was still deploying unnecessarily large numbers of his mobilized troops to the south-the field marshal continued to be unable to put aside his dream of invading Serbia-Moltke panicked. As things stood, the Austria troops on the Russian border would, if fighting began, be outnumbered by 2 to 1. Moltke sent a wire to Conrad, urging him to shift his main force to the north to mobilize against Russia in effect. Unless Conrad did so, Germany, in beginning a war against France, would be unprotected in its rear.
Now getting into matters that were not suppose to be the business of generals, Moltke also warned Conrad that Vienna must refuse to be drawn into the Stop-in-Belgrade proposal. That proposal of course was exactly what Bethmann had been pushing Berchtold to accept. "What a joke!" Berchtold exclaimed when he learned of Moltke's warning. "Who's in charge in Berlin?"
At 9 p.m. Moltke took Erich von Falkenhayn, the War Minister, with him to the Chancellor's office. They told Bethmann that German mobilization had become imperative, that a postponement would put the country at risk, and that at a minimum a State of Imminent War(Germany's version of a Period Preparatory to War) must be declared. Bethmann, reluctant to commit to military action, but equally unwilling to assume responsibility for Germany undefended, promised a decision by noon on Friday. He too was coming to regard was as inevitable, and his focus was shifting from preserving the peace, to preparing for hostilities. Knowing that Conrad had declared Stop-in-Belgrade to be infeasible and was supported in this by Berchtold, he, like Moltke, was yielding to a fatalistic acceptance of the notion that if Germany's enemies were determined to make war, now was better than later.
The European public was now fully awake to the possibility of war. Runs on banks were becoming widespread. Austria, Germany, and Russia were all withdrawing their reserves from foreign banks. The financial markets in Berlin and Brussels had to be shut down because of panic selling.
Even the Kaiser and Tsar telegrams were beginning to go wrong. In one of his middle of the night messages, in a maladroit attempt to assure the Kaiser that Russia has no hostile intentions where Germany was concerned, Tsar Nicholas told him that "the military measures which have now come into force were decided on 5 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 the morning the leaders of the Russian General Staff came back to Sazonov with bad news. They told him there was no acceptable way of executing the kind of partial mobilization that the Tsar approved. Any such mobilization would have to be done off the cuff and would throw Russia's armed forces into a state of confusion that might leave them helpless in case of a German attack. In practical terms only general mobilization was possible, the couldn't wait any longer.
When the Chief of the General Staff telephoned the Tsar and again asked him to approve a general mobilization, Nicholas refused, saying that the question was closed. He had been persuaded grudgingly, to meet with Sazonov at 3 p.m. The meeting was a long one, with foreign minister arguing the generals case. Austria, Sazonov said was preparing to destroy Serbia and refusing to talk. Germany was playing a double game, appearing to restrain the Austrians but really just trying to buy time for its own preparations; Germany was far along with an undeclared mobilization of its own. Russia could not afford not to respond. Russia also could not mobilize in any way short of fully. Sazonov was wrong about almost everything except Austria's determination to attack Serbia. He was not lying, but he was dangerously misinformed.
Nicholas continued to refuse, and Sazonov continued to plead. The Tsar, conscious of the manitude of what he was being asked, agonized aloud. "Think of the responsibility which you are asking me to take!" he declared. "Think of the 1,000's and 1,000's of men who will be sent to their death!" Finally, Nicholas was worn down. He was a stubborn but not a strong man, and even the strongest of men would have found it difficult to resist when being told that war could no longer be avoided regardless of what they did and that nothing less than national survival was at stake. Perhaps Sazonov's most powerful argument-another falsehood that he believed to be true-was that a general mobilization would not necessarily drive Germany to war.
What neither Savonov nor Nicholas understood was that Russia's mobilization would arouse in Germany's generals a panic indistinguishable from the fears driving the Russians, and that those generals would demand a German response. Far worse, neither of them had nay way of knowing how fast the Germans would be able to mobilize, or how inflexible and therefore dangerous the German mobilization plan was. Not even Kaiser Wilhelm or Chancellor Bethmann understood. Clearly at this point Germany was literally incapable of mobilizing without invading its neighbors to the west and igniting the continental war that all of them dreaded. 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.
Russia's general mobilization, decided just a little more than 48 hours after Austria's declaration of war on Serbia, added 900,000 active duty troops to the number that would have been affected by partial mobilization. It also called up the Russia reserves-a staggering total of 4 million men, enough to frighten any nation on earth. By making German mobilization-therefore war- a near- certainty, it drastically reduced the possibility that the Kaiser-Nicholas's telegrams or any of the other increasingly desperate efforts to defuse the situation(cables were flying among the capital cities around the clock) could produce results before it was too late. It all but ended the hope of negotiations, or of a compromise based on Stop-in-Belgrade.
Tragically, Russia's mobilization, while dictated by military considerations, was not only militarily unnecessary but counter productive. Tactically it was a gift to the Austrians(or would have been, if Conrad had taken advantage of it), relieving them of the anquish of not knowing whether they needed to prepare to fight the Russians or were free to focus on Serbia alone. Strategically it was an act of high folly. In no real sense had the security of Russia ever been threatened by the July crisis. Even the destruction of Serbia-something that certainly could have been averted without resorting to war-would have had little impact on Russia's strategic position. Russia would still have had the biggest army in the world by a huge margin, and it would still have been in the beginning stages of a program aimed at expanding that army by 40% within 3 years.
Tsar Nicholas was shown a telegram that the monk Rasputin had sent to Tsarina Alexandra. Because of Rasputin's distance from the capital, there was no way he could know what was happening in St. Petersburg or know what was happening in St. Petersburg or Vienna or elsewhere. Thus his telegram mystified everyone. It read "Let Papa(Rasputins name for Nicholas)not plan war," "With war will come the end of Russia and yourselves, and you will lose to the last man." The Tsar read it and tore it into pieces.
British foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, alarmed by the deepening seriousness of the crisis, finally stopped being so diplomatic as to be nearly incapable of saying anything. Speaking without the knowledge of the British Cabinet, he told Germany's Ambassador Lichnowsky that in his opinion, quite unofficially, "unless Austria is willing to enter upon a discussion of the Serbian question, a world war in inevitable," and that he would expect such a war to bring Britain in on the side of France and Russia. So when the Kaiser and Bethmann learned of this, they abandoned any lingering hopes that war if it came could be a "local one involving only Austria-Hungary and Serbia, so they intensified their attempts to restrain the Austrians. If Grey would have been this forthright just a few days earlier, Berlin almost certainly would have changed its position more quickly and firmly. Austria might then have deferred its declaration of war, and Russia would have had little reason to mobilize. Now it was all but to late. Also too late, Bethmann awakened to the fact that the Russians were laboring under a misunderstanding about Vienna's willingness to talk. Bethmann told Tschirschky to alert Bercthold to the problem, but things were happening so fast and diplomacy being submerged under the concerns of the generals, there was little chance that talks could get under way in time to avoid war.
Bethmann was peppering Tschirschky with telegrams, each one more urgent and exasperated than the last. In one he instructed the Ambassador to make clear to Berchtold that any Austro-Hungarian refusal to negotiate with Russia would be no only a 'serious error" but " a direct provocation of Russia's armed intervention." "We are of course, ready to fulfill the obligations of our alliance," he said in another, "but must decline to be drawn wantonly into a world conflagration by Vienna, without having any regard paid to our counsel.
But here again the remedies were coming too late-all the more so because Berchtold had withdrawn into an almost total silence. He was bent on war and wanted no discussion. The Tension continued to increase. President Poincare, concerned about jeopardizing France's alliance with Russia, sent assurances to St. Petersburg through Ambassador Paleologue hurried to tell Sazonov, not yet knowing that Russia had already mobilized(if Paleologue knew, he did not deign to inform Paris), Poincare also told the Ambassador to urge the Russians to proceed cautiously. Paleologue had no interest in doing this.
Now Paris and St. Petersburg continued to receive reports of extensive military preparations withing Germany, reports that were untrue. France was beginning to prepare, but doing so extremely tentatively, to avoid alarming the Germans or, what Poincare cared about even more at this point, giving the British any cause to see France as an aggressor. No reserves were called up, and no movement of troops by train was permitted. Determined to bring Britain to France's assistance if war started, and mindful that this would require casting Germany in the role of aggressor, Poincare ordered that all troops be kept 6 miles back from the border.
So when the French Commander in Chief, General Joseph Joffre, requested permission to mobilize, he was refused. Even limited movements of troops towards the 6 mile limit were not permitted-until Joffre, later in the day, threatened to resign.
Poincare summoned the British Ambassador to his office. He asked for a firmer line in London. he said that if Britain would declare its intention to support France, Germany might be deterred and war averted. The Ambassador, aware of how divided the government in London remained, was able to say nothing more than "how difficult it would be for His Majesty's government to make such a statement."
General Helmuth von Moltke, Chief of the German Staff, checked on the status of Austria's mobilization. When he learned that Conrad was still deploying unnecessarily large numbers of his mobilized troops to the south-the field marshal continued to be unable to put aside his dream of invading Serbia-Moltke panicked. As things stood, the Austria troops on the Russian border would, if fighting began, be outnumbered by 2 to 1. Moltke sent a wire to Conrad, urging him to shift his main force to the north to mobilize against Russia in effect. Unless Conrad did so, Germany, in beginning a war against France, would be unprotected in its rear.
Now getting into matters that were not suppose to be the business of generals, Moltke also warned Conrad that Vienna must refuse to be drawn into the Stop-in-Belgrade proposal. That proposal of course was exactly what Bethmann had been pushing Berchtold to accept. "What a joke!" Berchtold exclaimed when he learned of Moltke's warning. "Who's in charge in Berlin?"
At 9 p.m. Moltke took Erich von Falkenhayn, the War Minister, with him to the Chancellor's office. They told Bethmann that German mobilization had become imperative, that a postponement would put the country at risk, and that at a minimum a State of Imminent War(Germany's version of a Period Preparatory to War) must be declared. Bethmann, reluctant to commit to military action, but equally unwilling to assume responsibility for Germany undefended, promised a decision by noon on Friday. He too was coming to regard was as inevitable, and his focus was shifting from preserving the peace, to preparing for hostilities. Knowing that Conrad had declared Stop-in-Belgrade to be infeasible and was supported in this by Berchtold, he, like Moltke, was yielding to a fatalistic acceptance of the notion that if Germany's enemies were determined to make war, now was better than later.
Saturday, November 30, 2013
Fear is a bad counselor
Wednesday July 29th
At 1 o'clock in the morning Tsar Nicholas sent a telegram to Kaiser Wilhelm and it expressed indegnation that an "ignoble war has been declared on a weak country". He asked the Kaiser "in the name of our old friendship to do what you can to stop your allies from going to far". While Nicholas's telegram was on its way to Wilhelm, Wilhelm sent a telegram of his own to the Tsar. Wilhelm signed it "your very sincere and devoted friend and cousin". In it the Kaiser declared his hopes for peace and said, " I am exerting my utmost influence to induce the Austrians to deal straightly to arrive to a satisfactory understanding with you. This exchange was promising, though in his marginal scribblings, the Kaiser dismissed Tsar Nicholas's message as "a confession of his own weakness, and an attempt to put the responsibility on my own shoulders".
In any case, like every glimmer of hope during this exhausting and interminable with, the exchange would soon be submerged in the rush of events. The Tsar's Foreign Minister, Sazonov, continued to be under intense pressure from all sides. He needed little persuading when, later in the morning, War Minister Vladimir Sukhomlinov and the army's Chief of State came to him with their solution to the crisis, mobilization. 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.
The Chief of Staff then took the train to Tsar Nicholas's summer palace(the Tsar, capable of a strange degree of detachment when terrible things were happening around him, had not visited the capital once since Franz Ferdinand's assassination) and got his signature on two decrees. One ordered the mobilization of 12 army corps, 55 divisions, in 4 military districts where secret preparations were already most advanced. This army was bigger than the Austro-Hungarian army, but it would include less than half of Russia's troops ans so was not intended as a threat to Germany.
The other decree would put in motion a general mobilization involving all districts including those nearest Germany and thereby drastically escalate the crisis. Nicholas believed he was merely putting in place the paperwork necessary for possible action later. he told his visitor that neither order was to be executed without specific authorization from him.
That night army headquarters were preparing for execution of the general mobilization-and Sazonov was telling lies to the British Ambassador, assuring him that Russia was considering no action that could possibly distress the Germans-when the Tsar sent word that he had made a decision. Only a partial mobilization, he said, would be allowed; There must be no move against Germany. Nicholas was continuing to exchange telegrams with the Kaiser, who was continuing to assure him-truthfully that he was trying to slow the Austrians down.
On this same day President Poincare of France and Prime Minister Viviani landed at Dunkirk and hurried to Paris by train. They were surprised to learn that Austria had declared war. And Poincare was surprised to see that people where gathered and cheering "To Berlin" and it was just not here this was happening, other capitals were having the same reactions. People eager for their countries to go to war. Across Europe socialist leaders were mustering their followers in opposition to the impending conflict. Even among the political and military elites, the mood was generally grim.
Sir Edward Grey, from his office at the Foreign Ministry, made his famous comment that "the lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime". (Ironically long before the wars end Grey would have to retire from public life because he was going blind). Even though Poincare was touched by his peoples reaction, he was determined to avert hostilities if possible.
Poincare and Viviani sent a telegram to St. Petersburg urging the Russians not to do anything that would provoke the Germans. But this telegram came to late, for Nicholas had done gave approval of a partial mobilization.
Now out of all the holders of high office, one man, young Winston Churchill was overly exited about the up coming war. "I think a curse should rest on me," he wrote to Prime Minister Asquth's wife, "because I love this war. I know it's smashing and shattering the lives of 1000's every moment-and yet- I can't help it-I enjoy every second of it". Churchill was still a little premature in writing of "this war".
As Wednesday ended, the outlook appeared to be slightly less dark, the likelihood of war diminishing if only slightly. The Kaiser and the Tsar were not only communicating but cooperating in an attempt to impose restraint.
Only 2 things now seemed necessary for a resolution of the crisis to remain possible. One Russia must refrain from general mobilization; the Kaiser seemed willing to accept, temporarily, limited Russian measures that did not threaten German directly. And Austria must agree to something akin to the Stop-in-Belgrade plan. The 2nd condition was likely to be met eventually, simply because Germany wanted it to happen; Austria would find it very hard to proceed without Berlin's support. It all came down, therefore, to the question of whether the Russians would mobilize and stampede the Germans into doing like wise.
Now the German military authorities remained divided. War Minister Erich von Falkenhayn, frightened by the dangers of allowing a Russian mobilization to go unanswered, was urging preliminary step towards mobilization. But for Chief of Staff Moltke(sometimes accused, unjustifiable, of having plotted from the start to provoke a preventive war), the greatest fear at this point was of doing anything that might cause the Russians to mobilize.
In a memorandum dated July 29th, he told Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg that if war came,"the leading nations of Europe would tear one another limb for limb... in a struggle that would destroy the culture of almost all of Europe for decades to come." Bethmann, who needed no persuading, sent an evening telegram instructing Ambassador Pourtales to "kindly impress upon Minister Sazonov very seriously that further progress of Russian mobilization measures would compel us to mobilize and that then European war could scarcely be prevented".
Wednesday July 29th
At 1 o'clock in the morning Tsar Nicholas sent a telegram to Kaiser Wilhelm and it expressed indegnation that an "ignoble war has been declared on a weak country". He asked the Kaiser "in the name of our old friendship to do what you can to stop your allies from going to far". While Nicholas's telegram was on its way to Wilhelm, Wilhelm sent a telegram of his own to the Tsar. Wilhelm signed it "your very sincere and devoted friend and cousin". In it the Kaiser declared his hopes for peace and said, " I am exerting my utmost influence to induce the Austrians to deal straightly to arrive to a satisfactory understanding with you. This exchange was promising, though in his marginal scribblings, the Kaiser dismissed Tsar Nicholas's message as "a confession of his own weakness, and an attempt to put the responsibility on my own shoulders".
In any case, like every glimmer of hope during this exhausting and interminable with, the exchange would soon be submerged in the rush of events. The Tsar's Foreign Minister, Sazonov, continued to be under intense pressure from all sides. He needed little persuading when, later in the morning, War Minister Vladimir Sukhomlinov and the army's Chief of State came to him with their solution to the crisis, mobilization. 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.
The Chief of Staff then took the train to Tsar Nicholas's summer palace(the Tsar, capable of a strange degree of detachment when terrible things were happening around him, had not visited the capital once since Franz Ferdinand's assassination) and got his signature on two decrees. One ordered the mobilization of 12 army corps, 55 divisions, in 4 military districts where secret preparations were already most advanced. This army was bigger than the Austro-Hungarian army, but it would include less than half of Russia's troops ans so was not intended as a threat to Germany.
The other decree would put in motion a general mobilization involving all districts including those nearest Germany and thereby drastically escalate the crisis. Nicholas believed he was merely putting in place the paperwork necessary for possible action later. he told his visitor that neither order was to be executed without specific authorization from him.
That night army headquarters were preparing for execution of the general mobilization-and Sazonov was telling lies to the British Ambassador, assuring him that Russia was considering no action that could possibly distress the Germans-when the Tsar sent word that he had made a decision. Only a partial mobilization, he said, would be allowed; There must be no move against Germany. Nicholas was continuing to exchange telegrams with the Kaiser, who was continuing to assure him-truthfully that he was trying to slow the Austrians down.
On this same day President Poincare of France and Prime Minister Viviani landed at Dunkirk and hurried to Paris by train. They were surprised to learn that Austria had declared war. And Poincare was surprised to see that people where gathered and cheering "To Berlin" and it was just not here this was happening, other capitals were having the same reactions. People eager for their countries to go to war. Across Europe socialist leaders were mustering their followers in opposition to the impending conflict. Even among the political and military elites, the mood was generally grim.
Sir Edward Grey, from his office at the Foreign Ministry, made his famous comment that "the lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime". (Ironically long before the wars end Grey would have to retire from public life because he was going blind). Even though Poincare was touched by his peoples reaction, he was determined to avert hostilities if possible.
Poincare and Viviani sent a telegram to St. Petersburg urging the Russians not to do anything that would provoke the Germans. But this telegram came to late, for Nicholas had done gave approval of a partial mobilization.
Now out of all the holders of high office, one man, young Winston Churchill was overly exited about the up coming war. "I think a curse should rest on me," he wrote to Prime Minister Asquth's wife, "because I love this war. I know it's smashing and shattering the lives of 1000's every moment-and yet- I can't help it-I enjoy every second of it". Churchill was still a little premature in writing of "this war".
As Wednesday ended, the outlook appeared to be slightly less dark, the likelihood of war diminishing if only slightly. The Kaiser and the Tsar were not only communicating but cooperating in an attempt to impose restraint.
Only 2 things now seemed necessary for a resolution of the crisis to remain possible. One Russia must refrain from general mobilization; the Kaiser seemed willing to accept, temporarily, limited Russian measures that did not threaten German directly. And Austria must agree to something akin to the Stop-in-Belgrade plan. The 2nd condition was likely to be met eventually, simply because Germany wanted it to happen; Austria would find it very hard to proceed without Berlin's support. It all came down, therefore, to the question of whether the Russians would mobilize and stampede the Germans into doing like wise.
Now the German military authorities remained divided. War Minister Erich von Falkenhayn, frightened by the dangers of allowing a Russian mobilization to go unanswered, was urging preliminary step towards mobilization. But for Chief of Staff Moltke(sometimes accused, unjustifiable, of having plotted from the start to provoke a preventive war), the greatest fear at this point was of doing anything that might cause the Russians to mobilize.
In a memorandum dated July 29th, he told Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg that if war came,"the leading nations of Europe would tear one another limb for limb... in a struggle that would destroy the culture of almost all of Europe for decades to come." Bethmann, who needed no persuading, sent an evening telegram instructing Ambassador Pourtales to "kindly impress upon Minister Sazonov very seriously that further progress of Russian mobilization measures would compel us to mobilize and that then European war could scarcely be prevented".
Sunday, November 24, 2013
The Romanovs
In 1914 the Romanov Family had just competed the celebration of its 300th year on the Russian Throne. It had been a turbulent and often bizarre 3 centuries. Geniuses and degenerates had worn the crown by turns, with strong women succeeding weak men. There had been royal murders and assassinations, questions about whether a Tsar who was presumably dead and buried had actually died at all, and enough sexual irregularity to make it uncertain whether the Romanovs of the 20th Century were even related to the founders of the dynasty.
By fits and starts. Russia changed from a remote and exotic Eastern Kingdom into one of Europe's dominating powers-still only half modern still not entirely European, but an Empire of immerse wealth reaching from Poland to the Pacific Ocean.
By 1914 the Romanovs had be stable and respectable for 5 generations. The reigning Tsar, Nicholas II, was far more virtuous man than his predecessors, but unfortunately he was far weaker than the best of them. The 1st Romanov Tsar was Micheal, crowned in 1613 when he was 16. He was given the crown only because Russia's previous royal family died out; and with 15 years of nothing but leaderless disorder, the country's most powerful factions were desperate for stability; and no better choice was available. Micheal's blood was not quite royal, but close enough, his Aunt Anastasia, his father's sister, had been the beloved 1st wife of Ivan The Terrible, and the mother of the last Tsar in Ivan's line.
The grief over her death is suppose to be the reason he turned into a homicidal maniac of inconceivable savagery. After this the Romanovs didn't burst onto the European scene until almost a century later, when Peter the Great became Tsar. He was a gigantic figure in every way; more than 6 1/2 feet tall, immensely strong, infinitely energetic, violent, a reformer of everything. But was a very ruthless tyrant.
He had become so determined to force Russia into the modern Western World, that he moved its capital from Moscow to some swampy piece of wilderness on the coast of the Baltic Sea. He built a magnificent new city that was laced with canals and became known as the Venice of the North. He name it St. Petersburg, because that was more Western than the Russian equivalent, Petrograd. There was nothing that he wasn't determined to change, and when his ministers weren't quick enough in doing wdhat he wanted, he would lash even the most exalted of them with his stick. He forced the mean of Russia to shave their beards and adopt Western dress; He modernized the government and the military. He conquered and developed seaports not only on the Baltic but on the Black Sea, beginning the long process of pushing the Ottoman Turks southward, back toward their capital of Constantinople. By the time of his death in 1725, he had transformed Russia into a major player among the nations of the world.
As a young man Peter had married a woman from the Russian nobility, but he soon found her tedious and eventually sent her to a convent. He replace her with a mistress, a Lutheran girl named Marta who begun her life as a humbly born orphan in Latvia. She had became a prisoner when an invading Russia army captured her hometown. She was give to a man who happened to be close to Peter, and was then taken back to St. Petersburg, where she was discovered by Tsar. Marta and Peter had 12 children together(only 2, both of them daughters, survived to adulthood), and she came to be the one person in whom he had complete confidence. She was christened in the Orthodox faith and give the name Catherine, and was married to Peter in 1712, when she was 28 and he 50. Peter had her crowned his Empress consort in 1724(Peter was the 1st Tsar to call himself Emperor), and upon Peter's death she was proclaimed Empress Catherine I in her own right. Her career has to be considered among the more remarkable in history.
The story becomes fuzzy in the years following Catherine's death. The Romanovs become extinct in the male line(Peter had his heir, a son by his 1st wife, but tortured him until he died), and in time the crown went ta an obscure German Princeling whose mother had been Peter's and Catherine's daughter. This new Tsar, Peter III, was nothing but a drunk, a fool and sexually impotent, and an ardent admirer of Russia's enemy Frederick the Great of Prussia. The only reason he matters in history, is because before becoming Tsar, he had married a 15 year old German Princess-another Catherine, as it happened-who quickly succeeded him on the throne.(Plotters from the army, in collusion with this 2nd Catherine, murdered him less than a year after his coronation). She became Catherine the Great, the 2nd monumental figure of the Romanov Era. She was a physically tiny woman whose appetites and ambitions equaled those of Peter the Great. She became more Russian than the Russians, and during her 34 year reign, the empire expanded tremendously and again was prodded along the road to modernization. Just like Peter the Great, she reached out to the West.
She corresponded with such enlightened giants as Voltaire and Diderot. She brung John Paul Jones from the New World to take command of her Black Sea Fleet and use it against the Turks. It was with Catherine that the Russians began to aspire seriously to the road of patron of the Christian peoples of the Balkans. And under Catherine, they 1st dreamed of driving the Turks out of Constantinople. Like Peter the Great and many of her other descendants, Catherine was a perplexing mixture of reformer and tyrant. She was a woman of intellect and cultivation. She also had many lovers before her husband passed and it was questioned whether or not her son was actually son of Peter III.
Now Catherine had no confidence in her son Paul, in fact, she despised him. So she took charge of raising Paul's sons, especially the eldest, Alexander. She carefully supervised his preparation for the throne. When Catherine died, Paul succeeded, but was murdered just as his father Peter III-assuming he was his father. He was then succeeded, as Catherine had planned, by the tall, handsome, and intelligent young Alexander I.
In what would become a Romanov pattern, Tsar Alexander began his reign as a reformer of whom great things where expected. his 1st 15 years on the throne were turbulent in the extreme, with Napoleon marching his enemies up and down Europe and finally occupying and burning Moscow. It fell to Alexander to save Russia and his dynasty, and he succeeded brilliantly. In the end he out waited and outwitted the French Emperor. At one point he even pretended to consider offering his sister to Napolean, though in fact giving a Romanov Princess to such an upstart was unthinkable. But Napolean took an Austrian bride(it seems the mighty Hapsburgs turned out to be more submissive than Alexander) and was driven into exile. Shortly after, Alexander restored the old order.
Intriguing questions hang over the death of Alexander. In 1825, childless and at the peak of his power, he was suddenly reported to have died in a town where he had been staying far from the capital. When his coffin arrived in St. Petersburg, his brothers refused to open it, even though rumors where flying around that he didn't die at all. Everyone was saying that he had withdrawn to a monastery in Siberia to spend the rest of his life in contemplation. But nothing was ever proven if he did or not.
But towards the end of the 20th century, his coffin was finally opened and it was empty. And since Alexander had no kids, the throne was passed to his brother Constantine, but he turned it down, so it was then passed onto a much younger brother Nicholas I. He would prove to be a worthless ruler, he had no ephemeral reforming instincts, was a reactionary in all ways from the start. When he died in 1855, he was known as the man who had frozen Russia for 30 years. Now his son Alexander II was also conservative but more intelligent and therefore able to understand the need for change. He began his career as a reformer and even something of an idealist, abolishing the serfdom that had long been the shame of Russia. Gradually he too went in the direction of reaction and repression, taking such severe measures against a movement of young reformers that some became bomb-throwing radicals. In the last few years of his life in the throne, they were repeated attempts on his life, but Alexander never completely abandoned his efforts to move Russia closer if not quite into the modern world. In 1881, shortly after he had approved the creation of a parliament like body that was to be allowed to advise on legislation without actually passing laws, a young pole threw a bomb and blew him apart.
Barely alive, he was taken back to the palace where he died, horribly in the presence of his family, including his eldest son who then became Alexander III, and the latter's eldest son, 13 year old Nicholas. He was the 3rd Tsar to be murdered in 6 generations. He dedicated himself to reversing as many of his father's reformers as possible(a restoration of serfdom was not among the possibilities), refusing any innovations that might reduce the power of the Romanovs, and he clamped down in an almost totalitarian fashion on every form of dissent. Newspapers were not even allowed to print the word constitution.
Alexander III's son Nicholas was unlike his father in almost every respect; physically slight, something of a playboy in his youth, though in fairly innocent ways, and utterly lacking in self-confidence. He was given the same tutor as his father, Constantine Pobedonostsev, known as the High Priest of Social Stagnation. Nicholas learned that it was not only the Tsar's right but his sacred duty to be a strong father to all the Russians, to yield power to no one. But Nicholas has absolutely no wish to succeed the throne. But there had been no cause for worry on that score for Nicholas, who in 1894 was in his mid 20's and marrying Princess Alex of Hesse-Darmstadt, to which his parents weren't pleased. But his father Alexander III was not yet 50 and was a fountain of vitality. And would seem he would rule another 20 years or more, so Nicholas was never prepared to take the throne and all responsibilities that went with it.
But Alexander's III's health went into a swift decline-the problem was diagnosed as nephritis and soon died. his heir Nicholas went into total panic, he was never taught a prepared to be Tsar. He knew nothing of how to rule or make decisions. And in his own words "I have no ides how to even talk to the minister".
In 1914 the Romanov Family had just competed the celebration of its 300th year on the Russian Throne. It had been a turbulent and often bizarre 3 centuries. Geniuses and degenerates had worn the crown by turns, with strong women succeeding weak men. There had been royal murders and assassinations, questions about whether a Tsar who was presumably dead and buried had actually died at all, and enough sexual irregularity to make it uncertain whether the Romanovs of the 20th Century were even related to the founders of the dynasty.
By fits and starts. Russia changed from a remote and exotic Eastern Kingdom into one of Europe's dominating powers-still only half modern still not entirely European, but an Empire of immerse wealth reaching from Poland to the Pacific Ocean.
By 1914 the Romanovs had be stable and respectable for 5 generations. The reigning Tsar, Nicholas II, was far more virtuous man than his predecessors, but unfortunately he was far weaker than the best of them. The 1st Romanov Tsar was Micheal, crowned in 1613 when he was 16. He was given the crown only because Russia's previous royal family died out; and with 15 years of nothing but leaderless disorder, the country's most powerful factions were desperate for stability; and no better choice was available. Micheal's blood was not quite royal, but close enough, his Aunt Anastasia, his father's sister, had been the beloved 1st wife of Ivan The Terrible, and the mother of the last Tsar in Ivan's line.
The grief over her death is suppose to be the reason he turned into a homicidal maniac of inconceivable savagery. After this the Romanovs didn't burst onto the European scene until almost a century later, when Peter the Great became Tsar. He was a gigantic figure in every way; more than 6 1/2 feet tall, immensely strong, infinitely energetic, violent, a reformer of everything. But was a very ruthless tyrant.
He had become so determined to force Russia into the modern Western World, that he moved its capital from Moscow to some swampy piece of wilderness on the coast of the Baltic Sea. He built a magnificent new city that was laced with canals and became known as the Venice of the North. He name it St. Petersburg, because that was more Western than the Russian equivalent, Petrograd. There was nothing that he wasn't determined to change, and when his ministers weren't quick enough in doing wdhat he wanted, he would lash even the most exalted of them with his stick. He forced the mean of Russia to shave their beards and adopt Western dress; He modernized the government and the military. He conquered and developed seaports not only on the Baltic but on the Black Sea, beginning the long process of pushing the Ottoman Turks southward, back toward their capital of Constantinople. By the time of his death in 1725, he had transformed Russia into a major player among the nations of the world.
As a young man Peter had married a woman from the Russian nobility, but he soon found her tedious and eventually sent her to a convent. He replace her with a mistress, a Lutheran girl named Marta who begun her life as a humbly born orphan in Latvia. She had became a prisoner when an invading Russia army captured her hometown. She was give to a man who happened to be close to Peter, and was then taken back to St. Petersburg, where she was discovered by Tsar. Marta and Peter had 12 children together(only 2, both of them daughters, survived to adulthood), and she came to be the one person in whom he had complete confidence. She was christened in the Orthodox faith and give the name Catherine, and was married to Peter in 1712, when she was 28 and he 50. Peter had her crowned his Empress consort in 1724(Peter was the 1st Tsar to call himself Emperor), and upon Peter's death she was proclaimed Empress Catherine I in her own right. Her career has to be considered among the more remarkable in history.
The story becomes fuzzy in the years following Catherine's death. The Romanovs become extinct in the male line(Peter had his heir, a son by his 1st wife, but tortured him until he died), and in time the crown went ta an obscure German Princeling whose mother had been Peter's and Catherine's daughter. This new Tsar, Peter III, was nothing but a drunk, a fool and sexually impotent, and an ardent admirer of Russia's enemy Frederick the Great of Prussia. The only reason he matters in history, is because before becoming Tsar, he had married a 15 year old German Princess-another Catherine, as it happened-who quickly succeeded him on the throne.(Plotters from the army, in collusion with this 2nd Catherine, murdered him less than a year after his coronation). She became Catherine the Great, the 2nd monumental figure of the Romanov Era. She was a physically tiny woman whose appetites and ambitions equaled those of Peter the Great. She became more Russian than the Russians, and during her 34 year reign, the empire expanded tremendously and again was prodded along the road to modernization. Just like Peter the Great, she reached out to the West.
She corresponded with such enlightened giants as Voltaire and Diderot. She brung John Paul Jones from the New World to take command of her Black Sea Fleet and use it against the Turks. It was with Catherine that the Russians began to aspire seriously to the road of patron of the Christian peoples of the Balkans. And under Catherine, they 1st dreamed of driving the Turks out of Constantinople. Like Peter the Great and many of her other descendants, Catherine was a perplexing mixture of reformer and tyrant. She was a woman of intellect and cultivation. She also had many lovers before her husband passed and it was questioned whether or not her son was actually son of Peter III.
Now Catherine had no confidence in her son Paul, in fact, she despised him. So she took charge of raising Paul's sons, especially the eldest, Alexander. She carefully supervised his preparation for the throne. When Catherine died, Paul succeeded, but was murdered just as his father Peter III-assuming he was his father. He was then succeeded, as Catherine had planned, by the tall, handsome, and intelligent young Alexander I.
In what would become a Romanov pattern, Tsar Alexander began his reign as a reformer of whom great things where expected. his 1st 15 years on the throne were turbulent in the extreme, with Napoleon marching his enemies up and down Europe and finally occupying and burning Moscow. It fell to Alexander to save Russia and his dynasty, and he succeeded brilliantly. In the end he out waited and outwitted the French Emperor. At one point he even pretended to consider offering his sister to Napolean, though in fact giving a Romanov Princess to such an upstart was unthinkable. But Napolean took an Austrian bride(it seems the mighty Hapsburgs turned out to be more submissive than Alexander) and was driven into exile. Shortly after, Alexander restored the old order.
Intriguing questions hang over the death of Alexander. In 1825, childless and at the peak of his power, he was suddenly reported to have died in a town where he had been staying far from the capital. When his coffin arrived in St. Petersburg, his brothers refused to open it, even though rumors where flying around that he didn't die at all. Everyone was saying that he had withdrawn to a monastery in Siberia to spend the rest of his life in contemplation. But nothing was ever proven if he did or not.
But towards the end of the 20th century, his coffin was finally opened and it was empty. And since Alexander had no kids, the throne was passed to his brother Constantine, but he turned it down, so it was then passed onto a much younger brother Nicholas I. He would prove to be a worthless ruler, he had no ephemeral reforming instincts, was a reactionary in all ways from the start. When he died in 1855, he was known as the man who had frozen Russia for 30 years. Now his son Alexander II was also conservative but more intelligent and therefore able to understand the need for change. He began his career as a reformer and even something of an idealist, abolishing the serfdom that had long been the shame of Russia. Gradually he too went in the direction of reaction and repression, taking such severe measures against a movement of young reformers that some became bomb-throwing radicals. In the last few years of his life in the throne, they were repeated attempts on his life, but Alexander never completely abandoned his efforts to move Russia closer if not quite into the modern world. In 1881, shortly after he had approved the creation of a parliament like body that was to be allowed to advise on legislation without actually passing laws, a young pole threw a bomb and blew him apart.
Barely alive, he was taken back to the palace where he died, horribly in the presence of his family, including his eldest son who then became Alexander III, and the latter's eldest son, 13 year old Nicholas. He was the 3rd Tsar to be murdered in 6 generations. He dedicated himself to reversing as many of his father's reformers as possible(a restoration of serfdom was not among the possibilities), refusing any innovations that might reduce the power of the Romanovs, and he clamped down in an almost totalitarian fashion on every form of dissent. Newspapers were not even allowed to print the word constitution.
Alexander III's son Nicholas was unlike his father in almost every respect; physically slight, something of a playboy in his youth, though in fairly innocent ways, and utterly lacking in self-confidence. He was given the same tutor as his father, Constantine Pobedonostsev, known as the High Priest of Social Stagnation. Nicholas learned that it was not only the Tsar's right but his sacred duty to be a strong father to all the Russians, to yield power to no one. But Nicholas has absolutely no wish to succeed the throne. But there had been no cause for worry on that score for Nicholas, who in 1894 was in his mid 20's and marrying Princess Alex of Hesse-Darmstadt, to which his parents weren't pleased. But his father Alexander III was not yet 50 and was a fountain of vitality. And would seem he would rule another 20 years or more, so Nicholas was never prepared to take the throne and all responsibilities that went with it.
But Alexander's III's health went into a swift decline-the problem was diagnosed as nephritis and soon died. his heir Nicholas went into total panic, he was never taught a prepared to be Tsar. He knew nothing of how to rule or make decisions. And in his own words "I have no ides how to even talk to the minister".
Friday, November 22, 2013
He was born on January 13th, 1859 in Paris as the son of a Wallachiann Romanian Revolutionary who had fled to France after attempting to assassinate Prince Gheorghe Bibesar during the 1848 Wallachian Revolution; Alexandru was one of 3 illegitimate children of Elisabeta Vacarescu of the Vacarescu family of boyars-he and his siblings were later adopted by Zoe Vacarescu, Elisabeta's mother, who gave the children her maiden name Paleologu. The name became Paleologue in French language spellings.
After graduating in Law, Maurice Paleologue obtained an office at the French Foreign Ministry in 1880, and moved on to become Embassy Secretary at Tangiers, in the Morocco Protectorate, then in Beijing and later in Italy. A Minister Plenipotentiary in 1901, he represented France in Bulgaria(1907-1912) and Imperial Russia(1914-1917) and moved on to become General Secretary of the Foreign Ministry in the Alexandre Millerane Cabinet.
At the same time, Paleologue published essays and novels, and wrote contributions for the Revue des deux moneles. He also wrote several works on the history of Russia in the wake of WWI, which included an intimate portrait of the last Tsarita Alexandra Fyodorovna(he had been present at meetings between her and Grigori Rasputin, among others.) He was called on to give testimony during the Dreyfus Affair, and left important notes on the topic.
Paleologue was elected a member of the Academic Francaise in 1928. He died in Paris a few months after the city's liberation during WWI.
Born on July 15th, 1858 in Dresden, he was the son of Otto von Tschirschky und Bogendorff, the Director General of the Royal Saxon State Railways, and a member of the Tschirchsky noble family. He joined the German Foreign Service in 1883, and served from 1885 to 1886 as personal secretary to Herbert von Bismarck. He was subsequently stationed in Vienna, Athens, Berne, Constantinople and St. Petersburg, before he became Minister Resident in Luxenbourg in 1900, Prussia Envoy to Mechlenburg and the Hanse-states in 1902. He also accompanied Emperor William on travels as a representative of the Foreign Office.
On January 17th, 1906 he was appointed Secretary of State, succeeding the late Oswald von Richthofen He served until October 7th, 1907, when he was succeeded by Wilhelm von Schoen.
After his term as Foreign Secretary, he was appointed Ambassador to Vienna, and served until his death on November 15th 1916.
Prince Henry of Prussia
He was born on August 14th, 1862 in Berlin. Prince Henry of Prussia was the 3rd of 8 children born to Crown Prince Frederick(later Emperor Frederick III) and Victoria, Princess of the United Kingdom(Later Empress Victoria and in widowhood Empress Frederick), eldest daughter of the British Queen Victoria. Henry was 3 years younger than his brother, the future Emperor William II.
After attending the gymnasium in Kassel, which he left in the middle grades in 1877,n the 15 year old Henry entered the Imperial Navy Cadet program. His naval education included a 2 year voyage around the world(1878-1880), the naval officer examination in October 1880, and attending the German Naval Academy(1884-1886).
As an Imperial Prince, Henry quickly achieved command. In 1887, he commanded a torpedo boat and simultaneously the 1st Torpedo Boat Division; In 1888 the Imperial Yacht: SMY Hohenzollen; from 1889-1890 the 2nd Class Cruiser SMS Irene, the Armored Coastal Defense Ship SMS Beowolf, and the Capital Ships SMS Sachsen and SMS Worth.
Then in 1897, Prince Henry commanded several naval tasks forces' these included an improvised squadron in consolidating and securing the German Tsingtao in 1898. The Prince's success was more diplomatic than the military variety; he became the 1st European potentate ever to be received by the Chinese Imperial Court. In 1899 he became officially the commander of the East Asia Squadron, later of a Capital-Ship-Squadron and in 1903 Commander of the Baltic Sea Naval Station. From 1906 to 1909, Henry was Commander of the High Seas Fleet. In 1909, he was promoted to Grand Admiral.
At the beginning of WWI, Prince Henry was named Commander-in-Chief of the Baltic Fleet. Although the means provided him were far inferior to Russia's Baltic Fleet, he succeeded, until the 1917 Revolution, in putting Russia's naval forces far on the defensive, and hindered them from making attacks on the Germans coast. After the end of hostilities with Russia, his mission was ended, and Prince Henry simply left active duty. With the wars end and the dissolution of the monarchy in Germany, Prince Henry left the navy.
Henry was truly popular in Northern Germany, and on account of his humble and open manner was beloved by those under his command. On foreign travels, he was a good diplomat, who unlike his brother, was able to strike the right tone. Thus, on his 1902 trip to the US, Henry made a favorable impression with critical
American press and succeeded in winning sympathy of more than just the numerous German American Segment of the population.
As a naval officer, Henry had a profession that completely satisfied him and that he loved. He was thoroughly a pragmatist. He received one of the 1st pilot's licenses in Germany, and was judged a spirited and excellent seaman. He was dedicated to modern technology and was able to understand quickly the practical value of technical innovations. A yachting enthusiast, Prince Henry became one of the 1st members of the Yacht Club of Keil, established by a group of naval officers in 1887 and quickly became the club's patron.
Henry was interested in motor cars as well and supposedly invented a windshield wiper and, according to other sources, the car horn. In his honor, the Prince-Hienrich-Takrt(Prince-Hienrich-Tour) was established in 1908, like the earlier Kaiserpreis precursor to the German Grand Prix. Henry and his brother gave patronage to the Kaiserlicher Automobile Club(Imperial Automobile Club).
Henry also was early proponent of introducing submarines and airplanes. He had a steamship converted into a primitive aircraft carrier for operations in the Baltic Sea.
Henry respected his brother, but this attitude was not returned in the same measure. Wilhelm kept his younger brother far from politics, although Henry served as his representative as long as the Crown Prince was still in his minority. Henry complied with this, for he did not interest himself in either politics or grand strategy. He did not recognize what political effect the German naval build-up would entail, and also would not have been in the position to move his brother toward a different policy.
After the German Revolution, Henry lived with his family in Hemmelmark near Eckernforde, in Schleswig-Holstein. He continued with motor sports and sailing and even in old age was a very successful participant in regattas. He popularized the Prinz-Heinrich-Mutze(Prince Henry Cap) which is still worn, especially by older sailors.
In 1899, Henry received an honorary doctorate(Doctor of Engineering) from the Technical University of Berlin, also in foreign countries he received numerous similar honers, including an honorary doctorate in 1902 from Harvard University.
Prince Henry died of throat cancer on April 20th, 1929.
Thursday, November 21, 2013
Radomir Putnik also known as Vojvoda Putnik was born January 24th, 1847 in Kragjevac, Serbia. Putnik's family, which fled with 1,000's of other Serbian families from Kosovo during the Great Serb Migration of 1690 into Hapsburg Empire, returned from exile in Austria-Hungary to a Serbian entity independent of Ottoman rule in the middle of the 19th century. Putnik's father, Dimitrye, was a teacher in Kragjevac, and Radomir completed his basic schooling there. He attended the Artillery School in Belgrade, where he graduated in 1863, placing 8th in his class. In 1879, he married Ljubica Bojovic, the daughter of a colonel, with whom he had 7 children.
Contemporaries describe him as an ascetic, introverted man, and a heavy smoker; however, he also thought to have been tough on professional issues. He proved himself on the battlefield during Serbia's war against the Ottomans that were fought between 1876 and 1877. It was his detachment that took Grjilane and Gracanica from the Ottoman's in Kosovo, during the closing phase of the 2nd Serbo-Ottoman War. Putnik was famous for being righteous and demanding officer, strongly defending his point of view.
Putnik became a professor in the military academy holding that position from 1886 to 1895. In 1889, he was appointed the Deputy Chief of the General Staff. However, he soon came into conflict with King Milan I, partly for not allowing a King's protege to pass an examination. Political intrigue and latent conflict with King Milan Obrenovic and his successor, King Alexander I, would follow him throughout this part of his career. In 1895, he was forced to retire by the King under suspicion of sympathy for the Radical Party of Nikola Pasic.
After a military coup d' etat against Alexander I Obrenovic in 1903, Putnik was under the new King of Serbia, Peter I Karadjordjevic rehabilitated, promoted to the rank of General and was appointed the Chief of The General Staff. Putnik was Serbian War Minister 3 times; 1904, 1906-1908, 1912. Putnik was the 1st officer to be appointed to the highest rank of Vojvoda(Field Marshall) In 1912 he led the Serbian army into spectacular victories in the 1st against Ottomans and the 2nd Balkan War against Bulgarian.
Now during the crisis that was going on in Austria over the assassination of the Archduke, Putnik was caught in Budapest when Austria-Hungary declared war on his county, but was allowed safe passage back to Serbia by the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph. After a very troublesome trip home, Putnik gave his resignation to King Peter I of Serbia, on the grounds of ill health. But the King rejected it and insisted that he take command of the army. He was to give the orders, while the younger generals carried them out. Putnik done all this from a well heated room. However, his impaired health did not prevent him from successfully organizing a campaign.
Serbia defeated the Austro-Hungarian army's offensives in August and September 1914. Now everything had been quiet until Autumn 1915 when joint Austro-Hungarian, Germany, and Bulgarian forces led by Field Marshall August von Machensen, began a large offensive against Serbia with more than 300,000 soldiers. Before this attack came Putnik warned his government this attack was coming, but no one listened. So when war broke out, Putnik's men who where farmers, didn't stand a chance against this attack, so he ordered a full retreat in an attempt to save his men, and in doing so, his government dismissed him and also dismissed all other officers for their failure to keep the Austrians for crossing the borders.
With everything that Putnik had done for his country, the government never told him he had been dismissed. He didn't find out until a cashier had gave him his salary without a Chief General Staff's supplement. After he learned of being dismissed, he traveled to Nice, where French Authorities welcomed him with open arms. He lived here without ever seeing his homeland again and died in Nice at his villa on May 17th, 1917. But in November 1926 his remains were transferred to Serbia and buried with honors in a chapel at Belgrade's New Cemetery. The grave carriers the epitaph "Grateful Homeland to Radomir Putnik"
Prince Karl Max Lichnowsky
Born March 8th, 1860 in Krzyzanvice, Upper Silesia(Now Poland) He was the 6th Prince and 8th Count Lichnowsky. He succeeded his father in 1901. His father was a general of calvary, and his mother a princess of Croy. Karl was the head of an old noble Bohemian family and of immense wealth, possessing estates at Kurchelna in Silesia and Graz in Austria. As an hereditary member of the upper house of the Prussian Diet, Lichnowsky played some part in domestic politics, adopting in general or moderate attitude and deprecating party legislation. Though a Roman Catholic, he avoided identifying himself with the clerical party in Germany.
Entering diplomatic service, Karl was appointed an attache at the London Embassy in 1885 and later served as Legation Secretary at Bucharest. He became German Ambassador to Austria-Hungary in 1902, replacing Philipp, Prince of Eulenburg-Hertefeld, but was forced into retirement in 1904, accused of too much independence from the Foreign Office after several conflicts with Freidrick von Holstein, Senior Political Division.
He spent 8 years in retirement and in 1912 became Imperial German Ambassador to the Court of St. James's when the preferred candidate for the job was thought to be to young and the 2 other candidates turned the job down. Karl held this position from 1912-1914.
During the July Crisis of 1914, Lichnowsky was the only German diplomat who raised objections to Germany's efforts to provoke an Austro-Serbian War, arguing that Britain would intervene in a continental war. On July 25th, he implored to the German government to accept an offer of British mediation in the Austro-Serbian dispute. On July 27th he followed with a cable arguing that Germany could not win a continental war. This cable wasn't shown to Kaiser Wilhelm II. A cable on July 28th relayed an offer from King George V to hold a conference of European Ambassadors to avoid general war. A final cable on July 29th to the German Foreign Office stated simply "if war breaks out it will be the greatest catastrophe the world has ever seen." These warnings want unheeded, and by the time the final cable reached Berlin, Austrian troops were already bombarding Belgrade. On Britain's declaration of war on August 4th, 1914, Lichnowsky returned to Germany.
Now in 1916 Karl printed a pamphlet, My Mission to London 1912-1914. It started to circulate in Germany's Upper class circles, he accused his government of failing to support him in efforts to prevent World War I. But Germany was not the only place his pamphlet began to circulate in. It made its way all the way to the US in 1917, this led to his expulsion from the Prussian House of Lords. But his pamphlet didn't stop there. It got published in the Disclosures from Germany, New York's; American Association for International Conciliation in 1918 and made its way to the Swedish Journal Politiken in 1918 and finally it had made its way all they way to Britain and was published by Cassel and Co. in 1918.
Karl had his pamphlet broke down into 3 main points of blame that caused the war.
1. We (Germany) encouraged Count Berchtold to attack Serbia.
2. Between July 23th and July 30th, Sazonov having declared that Russia would not tolerate an attack on Serbia, all attempts to mediate the crisis was rebuffed by Germany.
3. On July 30th when Berchtold wanted to come to terms, we sent an ultimatum to Russia merely because Russian mobilization, although Austria was not attacked: and on July 31st we declared war on Russia. Which destroyed the possibility of a peaceful settlement.
At the end of the pamphlet, he said the Central Powers must loose WWI. He says the world will belong to the Anglo-Saxons, Russians, and Japanese, and the Germans will remain alone with Austria and Hungary.
Karl died February 27th, 1928, but his pamphlet became a formative and primary source in the minds of all the allied politicians who arranged the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919.
Saturday, November 16, 2013
Secrets and Lies
Tuesday July 28th
Wilhelm II was back in his office seated in his saddle chair. (Wanting no doubt to be the perfect Hohenzollen Warrior-King, and proud no doubt of the agonies he had endured in boyhood to become a skillful horseman in spite of his crippled arm, he claimed to be more comfortable in a saddle then in a chair.)
He had an lot of work to catch up on. 1st he read the most recent wire from Lichnowsky in London; Grey stated that an Austrian attack on Serbia would have disastrous consequences, but the Serbian response to Austria appeared to provide a basis for negotiations. He then read Serbia's response, and his reaction was much the same as Grey's. "This was more than one could have expected" he declared. "A great victory for Vienna; but with this every reason for war drops away, and Giesl might have remained quietly in Belgrade."
Seeing an opportunity and eager to seize it, Wilhelm sent a handwritten note to Jagow declaring the Serbia response " a capitulation of the humiliating kind' so that " every cause for war falls to the ground." He instructed the Foreign Ministry to send a message to Vienna in his name, informing them that a basis now existed in resolving the crisis through mediation, and that he was prepared to help. He added that the Serbs where nothing but liars, tricksters, and masters of evasion and that Austria should send its army across the border and occupy Belgrade, but then go no further. In possession of the Serbia capital, the Austrians would be in a position of strength as mediation proceeded.
This would be called the Stop-in-Belgrade. It offered a solution much like the one that ended the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. The Germans remained in France until Berlin's terms where met.
Bethmann and Jagow still had not told the Kaiser that Austria declared war and would announce it in just a few hours. They prepared the Kaiser's note, but held it, so it would arrive to late. Even though Bethmann and Jagow had deceived the Kaiser, depriving him of any chance of intervening before Austria declared war, their motives may well have been good. As clumsy as their behavior had been at a crucial juncture where nothing less than brilliance was required, they knew Wilhelm all to well-his childish arrogance, his unpredictability, his history of reversing himself and even breaking down in the midst of a crisis. (Like he had done so in 1908, 1911, and again in early 1914, sinking so low that he had to be talked out of abdicating.) So they felt they had a better grasp of the situation then the Kaiser. Considering they where in Berlin and had been more informed of what was going on, and they only done this so they could keep the Kaiser uninformed. Plus they thought by giving their support to Austria, they had been carrying out the Kaiser's wishes. They also felt that involving the Kaiser this late would only complicate an already confusing situation.
When the Austrians declared war in the middle of the afternoon, it changed everything. It had been one of the two or three blunders committed by any of the great powers during the days leading up to the war. As with the delivery of the not to Serbia 5 days earlier. Since Serbia had moved its government, Berchtold didnt know where to send the note. So he took it upon himself to send a telegram coded in French, informing Prime Minister Pasic, that a state of was now existed between the two countries. Shortly thereafter, in an abundance of caution, he sent a 2nd identical telegram via the Serbian Foreign Ministry.
The 1st telegram enraged Pasic. But when got the 2nd telegram, he thought it was or could be a hoax. He never heard of one nation declaring war on another in such a manner. When they asked the German Ambassador about the declaration of war, he had no idea what they were talking about and he was being truthful; not even the Kaiser, as we have seen, was informed in advance of Austrians declaration of war. But the authenticity of the telegrams were confirmed soon enough. This sparked anti-Serbian demonstrations in Vienna and Berlin, but there was no movement of Austrian troops, only Conrad merely shelling Belgrade from the Bosnian side of the border.
After learning the truth, the Kaiser met with Chancellor Bethmann, who became visibly unhappy man. After his meeting with Kaiser, he sent a telegram to Tschirschky in Vienna, complaining that the Austro-Hungarian government left them in the dark concerning its intentions, despite repeated interrogations, and because of this, they left Germany to be the ones to take the blame for starting the war. He urge Tschirschky to have the Austrians respond positively to what was now Grey's not just the Kaiser's, Stop-in-Belgrade proposal. Berchtold was completely taken aback. For 3 weeks the Germans had been prodding him to act. Now that he was taking action-they suddenly wanted him to stop.
But the day brought one additional misfortune, and a serious one. Russia's Ambassador to Austria, having been kept waiting since Monday, finally got to meet with Berchtold. He wanted to discuss a number of ideas that were being passed around among various capitals; a suggestion by Saznov that he and Vienna's Ambassador to St. Petersburg should review the original Austrian note to see if it might be modified enough for Serbia to accept it, and that the Serbian reply should be used as a starting point for negotiations, rather than a reason to go to war. Everyone was so distracted by the rush of events, that Berchtold and the Ambassador lost track of exactly which idea they were discussing at various points. The results were misunderstood.
Berchtold thought he made it clear that he would not negotiate with Serbia, but he would with Russia. But the Ambassador came away with the impression that Berchtold didn't want to negotiate with anyone, and this was do to that both parties had to much on their minds and were approaching exhaustion, and an important door had been inadvertently closed. So needless to say, Tuesday ended badly. Vienna with its declaration of war, had convinced Sazonov in St. Petersburg that it was mobilizing, not merely to underscore its grievances but to destroy Serbia.
The Russians had accelerated their preparations for war, Sazonov had been told that talks with Vienna where impossible and he took this as further evidence that war had become inevitable. He was also being told by France's Ambassador Paleologue that Paris wanted him to stand firm, by Germany's Ambassador Friedrich von Pourtales that if Russia proceeded with its mitlitary preparations, Germany would have to mobilize as well, by Serbia's Ambassador that the Austrians were bombarding Belgrade, and by Russian's Generals that Germany was preparing for war and they must do the same. In so many important ways, Sazonov was being deceived.
Now the French Prime Minister Rene Viviani, and President Poincare who where on a ship returning from St. Petersburg, sent a telegram urging Paleologue to do everything possible to resolve the crisis without war. But Paleologue was so determined to encourage Russian belligerence that he was in effect creating his own foreign policy, he told Sazonov of the complete readiness of France to fulfill her obligations as an ally.
Paleologue's motivation in all this was clear. He warned everyone that there would be a war by years end, and now that war was coming. He was afraid if France failed to demonstrate a willingness to support Russia, St Petersburg would abandon the Entente and ally itself with Berlin. So in his decision, he saw himself as preventing the collapse of France's entire Foreign policy, and therefore of France's security.
Tuesday July 28th
Wilhelm II was back in his office seated in his saddle chair. (Wanting no doubt to be the perfect Hohenzollen Warrior-King, and proud no doubt of the agonies he had endured in boyhood to become a skillful horseman in spite of his crippled arm, he claimed to be more comfortable in a saddle then in a chair.)
He had an lot of work to catch up on. 1st he read the most recent wire from Lichnowsky in London; Grey stated that an Austrian attack on Serbia would have disastrous consequences, but the Serbian response to Austria appeared to provide a basis for negotiations. He then read Serbia's response, and his reaction was much the same as Grey's. "This was more than one could have expected" he declared. "A great victory for Vienna; but with this every reason for war drops away, and Giesl might have remained quietly in Belgrade."
Seeing an opportunity and eager to seize it, Wilhelm sent a handwritten note to Jagow declaring the Serbia response " a capitulation of the humiliating kind' so that " every cause for war falls to the ground." He instructed the Foreign Ministry to send a message to Vienna in his name, informing them that a basis now existed in resolving the crisis through mediation, and that he was prepared to help. He added that the Serbs where nothing but liars, tricksters, and masters of evasion and that Austria should send its army across the border and occupy Belgrade, but then go no further. In possession of the Serbia capital, the Austrians would be in a position of strength as mediation proceeded.
This would be called the Stop-in-Belgrade. It offered a solution much like the one that ended the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. The Germans remained in France until Berlin's terms where met.
Bethmann and Jagow still had not told the Kaiser that Austria declared war and would announce it in just a few hours. They prepared the Kaiser's note, but held it, so it would arrive to late. Even though Bethmann and Jagow had deceived the Kaiser, depriving him of any chance of intervening before Austria declared war, their motives may well have been good. As clumsy as their behavior had been at a crucial juncture where nothing less than brilliance was required, they knew Wilhelm all to well-his childish arrogance, his unpredictability, his history of reversing himself and even breaking down in the midst of a crisis. (Like he had done so in 1908, 1911, and again in early 1914, sinking so low that he had to be talked out of abdicating.) So they felt they had a better grasp of the situation then the Kaiser. Considering they where in Berlin and had been more informed of what was going on, and they only done this so they could keep the Kaiser uninformed. Plus they thought by giving their support to Austria, they had been carrying out the Kaiser's wishes. They also felt that involving the Kaiser this late would only complicate an already confusing situation.
When the Austrians declared war in the middle of the afternoon, it changed everything. It had been one of the two or three blunders committed by any of the great powers during the days leading up to the war. As with the delivery of the not to Serbia 5 days earlier. Since Serbia had moved its government, Berchtold didnt know where to send the note. So he took it upon himself to send a telegram coded in French, informing Prime Minister Pasic, that a state of was now existed between the two countries. Shortly thereafter, in an abundance of caution, he sent a 2nd identical telegram via the Serbian Foreign Ministry.
The 1st telegram enraged Pasic. But when got the 2nd telegram, he thought it was or could be a hoax. He never heard of one nation declaring war on another in such a manner. When they asked the German Ambassador about the declaration of war, he had no idea what they were talking about and he was being truthful; not even the Kaiser, as we have seen, was informed in advance of Austrians declaration of war. But the authenticity of the telegrams were confirmed soon enough. This sparked anti-Serbian demonstrations in Vienna and Berlin, but there was no movement of Austrian troops, only Conrad merely shelling Belgrade from the Bosnian side of the border.
After learning the truth, the Kaiser met with Chancellor Bethmann, who became visibly unhappy man. After his meeting with Kaiser, he sent a telegram to Tschirschky in Vienna, complaining that the Austro-Hungarian government left them in the dark concerning its intentions, despite repeated interrogations, and because of this, they left Germany to be the ones to take the blame for starting the war. He urge Tschirschky to have the Austrians respond positively to what was now Grey's not just the Kaiser's, Stop-in-Belgrade proposal. Berchtold was completely taken aback. For 3 weeks the Germans had been prodding him to act. Now that he was taking action-they suddenly wanted him to stop.
But the day brought one additional misfortune, and a serious one. Russia's Ambassador to Austria, having been kept waiting since Monday, finally got to meet with Berchtold. He wanted to discuss a number of ideas that were being passed around among various capitals; a suggestion by Saznov that he and Vienna's Ambassador to St. Petersburg should review the original Austrian note to see if it might be modified enough for Serbia to accept it, and that the Serbian reply should be used as a starting point for negotiations, rather than a reason to go to war. Everyone was so distracted by the rush of events, that Berchtold and the Ambassador lost track of exactly which idea they were discussing at various points. The results were misunderstood.
Berchtold thought he made it clear that he would not negotiate with Serbia, but he would with Russia. But the Ambassador came away with the impression that Berchtold didn't want to negotiate with anyone, and this was do to that both parties had to much on their minds and were approaching exhaustion, and an important door had been inadvertently closed. So needless to say, Tuesday ended badly. Vienna with its declaration of war, had convinced Sazonov in St. Petersburg that it was mobilizing, not merely to underscore its grievances but to destroy Serbia.
The Russians had accelerated their preparations for war, Sazonov had been told that talks with Vienna where impossible and he took this as further evidence that war had become inevitable. He was also being told by France's Ambassador Paleologue that Paris wanted him to stand firm, by Germany's Ambassador Friedrich von Pourtales that if Russia proceeded with its mitlitary preparations, Germany would have to mobilize as well, by Serbia's Ambassador that the Austrians were bombarding Belgrade, and by Russian's Generals that Germany was preparing for war and they must do the same. In so many important ways, Sazonov was being deceived.
Now the French Prime Minister Rene Viviani, and President Poincare who where on a ship returning from St. Petersburg, sent a telegram urging Paleologue to do everything possible to resolve the crisis without war. But Paleologue was so determined to encourage Russian belligerence that he was in effect creating his own foreign policy, he told Sazonov of the complete readiness of France to fulfill her obligations as an ally.
Paleologue's motivation in all this was clear. He warned everyone that there would be a war by years end, and now that war was coming. He was afraid if France failed to demonstrate a willingness to support Russia, St Petersburg would abandon the Entente and ally itself with Berlin. So in his decision, he saw himself as preventing the collapse of France's entire Foreign policy, and therefore of France's security.
Thursday, November 14, 2013
Secrets and Lies
Monday July 27th
This was yet another day, when, so far as the public knew, nothing much of importance was happening. But the fact was, the Austro-Hungarian Council of Ministers met in secret and voted to declare war on Serbia. This was a totally stupid and unnecessary decision. Even Conrad, who was eager for action question it. He couldn't understand why the council was declaring war two weeks before the completion of them mobilizing their troops. But Berchtold's determination to commit the dual monarchy to military action before Germany's position softened or the mediation proposals coming out of Britain could have any effect, brought Conrad around.
The declaration of war was to be announced Tuesday, but required the approval of Franz Joseph. But when Berchtold and Conrad went to see him, he was very reluctant about declaring war. Berchtold and Conrad told him lies about Serbian attacks. Nothing really happened except for a little gunfire at a border town. But believing Berchtold and Conrad, the Emperor signed to go to war. In preparing to sign, he trembled so badly that he could hardly put on his glasses.
Back in London, Grey read the text of Serbia's response to the ultimatum and found it promising. He met with Lichnowsky and repeated his suggestion of a conference of the powers. Lichnowsky again relayed this message to Berlin, urging them to pursue it. But Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, who hated the proposal, but didn't want to offend the British, responded by telling them he was forwarding the message to Vienna. But the Chancellor made it clear to Austria's Ambassador to Berlin, that the German government wanted nothing to do with Grey's ideas. He tells them to disregard them, but they have to pass the message on to Austria to satisfy the English.
Germany and Austria had reason to be skeptical of this conference, because at least 2 of the 4 countries that would participate, France and Italy would have little reason to be sympathetically on Austria's grievances. And 3rd, Britain seemed unlikely to do anything to damage its relations with France or Russia. The Germans and Austrians believed a conference would just be a substitute talk for action, degenerating into a sterile debate over the wording of the Austrian not and Serbia's response. In the end they feared that Serbia would walk away scot-free, with Austria-Hungary looking on helplessly as in 1912-1913. This would only encourage the Serb activists both in and outside the Hapsburg Empire to continue to make trouble. This would also cause Austria-Hungary's other minorities to do the same.
The Austrian's also had financial reasons to for resisting mediation. Conrad had never been given enough money to keep their armies of Vienna competitive with the other great powers in size, equipment or technology and the mobilizations during the 2 Balkan Wars had been very costly as they where fruitless. By 1914 all the great powers, but Austria-Hungary especially, were creaking under the weight of an arms race that was becoming constantly more onerous as the machinery of war grew more massive and complex. Vienna could not afford to keep mobilizing year after year. So when they mobilized this time, they wanted to make sure they got something for its money.
Kaiser Wilhelm arrived home this same afternoon all this was going on. Chancellor Bethman and Gottieb von Jagow, the head of German Foreign Ministry, were not delighted by this at all. They feared that Kaiser would interfere in their handling of the crisis. Now with or without the presence of the Kaiser around. Berthman and Jagow were not an ideal pair to be steering the most powerful state in Europe through such difficult straits.
Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg
Bethmann was a tall, dour career civil servant who five years earlier had been raised to Chancellorship despite having no experience in foreign affairs and despite being disliked by the Kaiser. Like many Germans in high places, he was terrified by the presence of unfriendly powers to the east and west. He was convinced that Germany could only grow more vulnerable with the passage of time.
Gottlieb von Jagow
Jagow was a frail hypochondriac who had used an elder brother's connections to get into the Foreign Service and had then successfully leveraged those same connections to get a series of plush and undemanding assignments in Rome and elsewhere. When summoned home to head the Foreign Ministry, he had pulled every string he could reach in a futile effort to escape. But nothing worked. He was appointed.
Late that night, Vienna sent went to Berlin of its decision to declare war. When Bethmann and Jagow got the message, they were not astonished. This is what Berlin had been pushing and hoping for. No one told the Kaiser, after all its what he had wanted to.
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