Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914. Max Hastings

Soon everything that constitutes our lives will strike the world as useless. A period of barbarism is about to begin and it will last for decades.’

      Nicholas II was a sensitive man, more rational than the Kaiser if no more intelligent. Having seen the 1905 Russo-Japanese war – which Wilhelm incited him to fight – provoke a revolution at home, the Tsar understood that a general European conflict would be disastrous for most, if not all, of the participants. But he cherished a naïve faith in the common interests of the emperors’ trade union, supposing that he and Wilhelm enjoyed a personal understanding, and were alike committed to peace. He was contradictorily influenced, however, by Russia’s recent humiliations – in 1905 by Japan’s forces, in 1908 by Austrian diplomacy when the Hapsburgs summarily annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina. The latter especially rankled. In January 1914 the Tsar sternly declared to former French foreign minister Théophile Delcassé: ‘We shall not let ourselves be trampled upon.’

      A conscientious ruler, Nicholas saw all foreign dispatches and telegrams; many military intelligence reports bear his personal mark. But his imagination was limited: he existed in an almost divine seclusion from his people, served by ministers of varying degrees of incompetence, committed to sustaining authoritarian rule. An assured paternalist, on rural visits he was deluded about the monarchy’s popularity by glimpses of cheering peasantry, with whom he never seriously engaged. He believed that revolutionary and even reformist sentiment was confined to Jews, students, landless peasants and some industrial workers. The Kaiser would not have dared to act as arbitrarily as did the Tsar in scorning the will of the people: when the Duma voted against funding four battleships for the Baltic Fleet, Nicholas shrugged and ordered that they should be built anyway. Even the views of the 215-member State Council, dominated by the nobility and landowners, carried limited weight.

      If no European government displayed much cohesion in 1914, Nicholas II’s administration was conspicuously ramshackle. Lord Lansdowne observed caustically of the ruler’s weak character: ‘the only way to deal with the Tsar is to be the last to leave his room’. Nicholas’s most important political counsellor was Sergei Sazonov, the foreign minister. Fifty-three years old and a member of the minor nobility, he had travelled widely in Europe, serving in Russia’s London embassy, where he developed a morbid suspiciousness about British designs. He had now led the foreign ministry for four years. His department – known for its location as the Choristers’ Bridge, just as its French counterpart was the Quai d’Orsay – spoke scarcely at all to the Ministry of War or to its chief, Vladimir Sukhomlinov; meanwhile the latter knew almost nothing about international affairs.

      Russian statesmen were divided between easterners and westerners. Some favoured a new emphasis on Russian Asia and exploitation of its mineral resources. The diplomat Baron Rosen urged the Tsar that his empire had no interests in Europe save its borders, and certainly none worth a war. But Rosen was mocked by other royal advisers as ‘not a proper Russian’. Nicholas’s personal respect and even sympathy for Germany caused him to direct most of his emotional hostility towards Austria-Hungary. Though not committed to pan-Slavism, he was determined to assert the legitimacy of Russian influence in the Balkans. It remains a focus of keen dispute how far such an assumption was morally or politically justifiable.

      Russia’s intelligentsia as a matter of course detested and despised the imperial regime. Captain Langlois, a French expert on the Tsarist Empire, wrote in 1913 that ‘Russian youth, unfortunately supported or even incited by its teachers, adopted anti-military and even anti-patriotic sentiments which we can scarcely imagine.’ When war came, the cynicism of the educated class was evidenced by its many sons who evaded military service. Russian literature produced no Kipling to sing the praises of empire. Lack of self-belief, coupled to nationalistic aggressiveness, has always been a prominent contradiction in the Russian character. Nicholas’s thoughtful subjects were conscious of their country’s repeated failures in wars – against the British, French, Turks, Japanese. The last represented the first occasion in modern history when a European nation was defeated by an Asiatic one, which worsened the humiliation. In 1876 the foreign minister Prince Gorchakov told a colleague gloomily: ‘we are a great, powerless country’. In 1909 Gen. A.A. Kireyev lamented in his diary, ‘we have become a second-rate power’; he believed that imperial unity and moral cohesion were collapsing. When Russia acquiesced in Austria’s annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, he exclaimed bitterly: ‘Shame! Shame! It would be better to die!’

      France’s new relationship with Russia began in 1894, when the two governments signed a military convention; it derived from a belief that neither nation could alone aspire to climb into the ring against Germany, which posed a common threat, and that only such an alliance could offer security against the Kaiser’s expansionist ambitions. Thereafter, the French advanced large loans to St Petersburg, chiefly to fund the building of strategic railways. France had many cultural ties with Russia, symbolised by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, the toast of Paris. The close military relationship known as the Dual Entente evolved progressively: in 1901, the Russians agreed with the French that their army would engage the Germans eighteen days after any declaration of war. France’s cash funded a big rearmament programme; Russians even aspired to create a first-class navy by 1930.

      The Tsar’s peacetime army was Europe’s largest – 1.42 million men, potentially rising to five million on mobilisation. But could they fight? Many foreigners were sceptical. After attending Russian manoeuvres, the British military attaché wrote: ‘we saw much martial spectacle, but very little serious training for modern war’. France’s Gen. Joseph Joffre, invited to inspect Nicholas’s forces in August 1913, agreed. He found some of the Tsar’s advisers, the war minister among them, frankly hostile to their country’s French alliance. The Russian army was burdened with weak leaders and chronic factionalism; one historian has written that it retained ‘some of the characteristics of a dynastic bodyguard’. Its ethos was defined by brutal discipline rather than skill or motivation, though its commanders persuaded themselves that their men would fight better in a Slav cause than they had done against Japan in 1904–05.

      Russians were proud of their role in helping to free much of the Balkans from Ottoman rule, and determined not to see this supplanted by Austrian or German hegemony. The semi-official St Petersburg newspaper Novoe Vremya wrote in June 1908 that it was impossible ‘without ceasing to be Russian’ to allow Germanic cultural domination of southern and eastern Europe. In 1913 the British minister in Belgrade, G.H. Barclay, wrote that ‘Serbia is, practically speaking, a Russian province.’ This was an exaggeration, because Serb leaders were intensely self-willed, but St Petersburg made plain that the country was under its protection. Russian security guarantees to Serbia proved as fatal to European peace as was German support for Austria – with the important difference that the former were defensive, the latter aggressive. But at the very least, Russia was irresponsible in failing to insist upon a halt to Serbian subversion in the Hapsburg Empire as the price for its military backing.

      The south Slavs lived in four different states – the Hapsburg Empire, Serbia, Montenegro and Bulgaria – under eight different systems of government. Their impassioned nationalism imposed a dreadful blood forfeit: about 16 per cent of the entire population, almost two million men, women and children, perished violently in the six years of struggle that preceded Armistice Day 1918. Serbia fought two Balkan wars, in 1912 and 1913, to increase its size and power by seizing loose fragments of the Ottoman Empire. In 1912 the Russian foreign minister declared that a Serb–Bulgarian triumph over the Turks would be the worst outcome of the First Balkan War, because it would empower the local states to turn their aggressive instincts from Islamism, against Germanism: ‘In this event one … must prepare for a great and decisive general European war.’ Yet the Serbs and Bulgarians indeed triumphed in that conflict; a subsequent Serb–Romanian victory in the Second Balkan War – a squabble over the spoils of the First – made matters worse. Serbia doubled its territory by incorporating Macedonia and Kosovo. Serbians burst with pride, ambition and over-confidence. Wars seemed to work well for them.

      In June 1914 the Russian minister in Belgrade, the dedicated pan-Slavist Nikolai Hartwig, was believed actively to desire an armed clash between Serbia and Austria, though St Petersburg almost certainly did not. The Russian ambassador in Constantinople complained that Hartwig, a former newspaper columnist, ‘shows the activity of