Moltke, however, remained if not an enthusiast, at least a consistent fatalist about the inevitability of war with Russia and France. In October 1912, by then sixty-four, he said: ‘If war is coming, I hope it will come soon, before I am too old to cope with things satisfactorily.’ He told the Kaiser he was confident a decisive campaign could be swiftly won, and restated this advice early in the 1914 July crisis. The huge enigma about the chief of staff was that all the while, he nursed private doubts and fears which would burst forth in the most dramatic fashion when conflict came. The rational part of his nature told him that a great clash between great powers must be protracted and hard, not swift and easy. He once told the Kaiser: ‘the next war will be a national war. It will not be settled by one decisive battle but will be a long wearisome struggle with an enemy who will not be overcome until his whole national force is broken … a war which will utterly exhaust our own people even if we are victorious.’
Yet his own conduct in the years before 1914 belied such prudent caution. He acquiesced in the prospect of a grand European collision with a steadiness that prevailed when others – Bethmann and the Kaiser – sometimes faltered. Germany’s highest commander succumbed to a disease common among senior soldiers of many nationalities and eras: he wished to demonstrate to his government and people that their vastly expensive armed forces could fulfil their fantasies. Moltke famously, or notoriously, characterised himself to Prince von Bülow: ‘I do not lack personal courage, but I lack the power of rapid decision; I am too reflective, too scrupulous, or, if you like, too conscientious for such a post. I lack the capacity for risking all on a single throw.’ Yet, in contradiction of such a profession of self-knowledge, he yearned to show himself worthy of a responsibility for which most of his peers thought him unfit, by achieving a triumph for his country. This required an awesomely fast mobilisation and concentration of forces; the deployment of a small holding force to check the Russians, while the nation’s overwhelming strength conquered France in a campaign of forty days, before turning East.
Austria-Hungary’s plans were more flexible, indeed chaotic, because the Empire could not be sure whether it would be fighting Serbia alone – as it hoped – or contesting a second front on its Galician border with Russian Poland. Many bizarre figures jostled for attention on the European stage in 1914, but Conrad Hötzendorf was notable among them. Churchill described him as a ‘dark, small, frail, thin officer with piercing and expressive eyes set in the face of an ascetic’. It is hard to imagine a man less suited to his role: an epic incompetent, he was also an extreme imperialist, wanting the Hapsburgs to dominate the Adriatic, the eastern Mediterranean, the Balkans and North Africa. He perfectly fulfilled the elder Moltke’s dictum about the most dangerous kind of officer, by being both stupid and intensely energetic. His wife had died a decade earlier, and he shared a home with his mother. He had lately fallen in love with Virginie von Reininghaus, a brewery magnate’s wife, who became his obsession. He convinced himself that if he could lead Austria to a great military victory, he could surf a wave of personal glory to persuade his Gina to divorce her husband and marry him. He wrote to her of his hope for a ‘war from which I could return crowned with success that would allow me to break through all the barriers between us … and claim you as my own dearest wife’.
Since 1906 Conrad had been demanding military action against Serbia. In the seventeen months between 1 January 1913 and 1 June 1914, the chief of staff urged war on his government twenty-six times. He wrote to Moltke on St Valentine’s Day 1914, asserting the urgency of Austria’s need to ‘break the ring that once again threatens to enclose us’. For Conrad, and indeed for Berchtold, the Archduke’s death offered a heaven-sent excuse for war, rather than a justification for it. After witnessing the shrinkage of the Ottoman Empire, humbled by young and assertive Balkan nations during the regional conflicts of the preceding three years, Conrad believed that Sarajevo offered Austria its last chance to escape the same fate, by destroying the threat of assertive Slavdom embodied by Serbia. He said: ‘Such an ancient monarchy and such an ancient army [as those of the Hapsburgs] cannot perish ingloriously.’
Berchtold, Austria’s foreign minister, characterised Conrad’s policy in July 1914 as ‘war, war, war’. Wishing to expunge the shame of Austria’s 1866 defeat by Prussia, the general deplored ‘this foul peace which drags on and on’. So powerful was his craving for military collision that he gave scarcely a thought to its practical aspects. For years Austria’s army had lagged behind those of its neighbours, gathering mould. Parliament resisted the higher taxes that would have been required by bigger budgets, and the navy consumed much of the available cash. Though Austrian industry developed good weapons – especially heavy artillery and the M95 rifle – the army remained too poor to buy them in adequate numbers.
There were many disaffected people among the hotchpotch of ethnic minorities that made up the Empire. According to 1911 figures, among every thousand Austro-Hungarian soldiers, there were an average of 267 Germans, 233 Hungarians, 135 Czechs, eighty-five Poles, eighty-one Ukrainians, sixty-seven Croatians and Serbs, fifty-four Romanians, thirty-eight Slovaks, twenty-six Slovenes and fourteen Italians. Of the officer corps, by contrast, 76.1 per cent were Germans, 10.7 per cent Hungarians and 5.2 per cent Czechs. In proportion to population, Germans had three times their rightful number of officers, Hungarians half, Slavs about one-tenth. The Austrian army was thus run on colonial lines, with many Slav riflemen led into battle by Germans, rather as British officers led their Indian Army. Of all the European powers, Austria was least fit to justify its pretensions on the battlefield. Conrad simply assumed that, if Russia intervened in Serbia’s interest, the Germans would take the strain.
Vienna had been urged by Berlin to adopt harsh policies towards the Serbs. As early as 1912, Wilhelm and Moltke assured Franz Ferdinand and Conrad that they ‘could fully count on Germany’s support in all circumstances’ – what some historians have called ‘the first blank cheque’. Nor did Berlin make any secret of its commitment: on 28 November the secretary of state, Alfred von Kiderlen-Waechter, told the Reichstag: ‘If Austria is forced, for whatever reason, to fight for its position as a Great Power, then we must stand by her side.’ Bethmann Hollweg echoed this message on 2 December, saying that if the Austrians were attacked by Russia for asserting their legitimate interests in the Balkans, ‘then we would fight for the maintenance of our own position in Europe, in defence of our own future and security’.
A meeting of the Kaiser and his warlords – Bethmann and foreign minister Gottlieb von Jagow were absent – which took place at the Royal Palace on 8 December 1912 has been the focus of intense attention throughout the three generations since it was revealed. Wilhelm and Germany’s principal generals and admirals debated Haldane’s reported insistence upon Britain’s commitment to preserving a continental balance of power. Though no minutes were taken, immediately afterwards Georg Müller, chief of Wilhelm’s naval cabinet, recorded in his diary that Moltke said: ‘War the sooner the better.’ The admiral added on his own account: ‘he does not draw the logical conclusion from this, which is to present Russia or France or both with an ultimatum which would unleash the war with right on our side’.
Three other sources confirm Müller’s account, including that of Saxony’s military plenipotentiary in Berlin, who wrote on the 11th to his state’s minister of war: ‘His Excellency von Moltke wants war … His Excellency von Tirpitz on the other hand would prefer if it came in a year’s time when the [Kiel] canal and the Heligoland submarine base would be ready.’ Following the 8 December meeting, Germany’s leaders agreed that there should be a press campaign to prepare the nation to fight Russia,