On 14 July Count Berchtold presided over an important meeting at which the Empire’s next steps were decided. Conrad raised the issue of timing: given the economic difficulties threatened by mobilising reservists in the midst of the harvest season, he wanted war delayed until 12 August. The foreign minister rejected such a postponement. ‘The diplomatic situation will not hold so long,’ he told the army chief, meaning that Entente pressure on Vienna to maintain the peace might become irresistible. The German ambassador was informed that Berchtold’s staff was working on the wording of an ultimatum to Belgrade which was designed to be rejected.
Western Europe paid scant heed to the latest round of Balkan bickering. A note on The Times’s court and social page for 3 July declared: ‘The Domestic Servant Problem is one of the most serious problems of the present day. With the idea of helping to its solution, The Times some months ago instituted a scheme whereby Lady Experts assist Ladies to obtain able and reliable Servants …’ On the 16th, the newspaper addressed the European situation in a second leader, urging that Serbia should volunteer to conduct an inquiry into Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. It concluded dismissively that neither force nor the threat of force could play any useful part in Austria-Hungary’s diplomacy towards Serbia: ‘Any attempt to meet it in that fashion would constitute a fresh peril to European peace and that, we are confident, the EMPEROR and his most sagacious advisers clearly perceive.’ Two days later The Times’s foreign page was led by a report on Mexico; the only European news was headed ‘the Serbian scare’. On 17 July, Lloyd George told an audience of London businessmen that ‘although you never get a perfectly blue sky in foreign affairs’, some clouds seemed to be clearing. He asserted his confidence that the European problems would soon be solved. From the outset, Britain’s politicians and press – anyway preoccupied with the Ulster crisis – found it hard to conceive that Austrian grievances against Serbia merited a resort to arms.
France, chronically politically unstable after experiencing seven changes of government between 1911 and 1914, was engaged with its own lurid domestic affairs, prominent among them the trial of Joseph Caillaux’s wife Henriette for shooting dead Le Figaro’s editor Gaston Calmette. President Raymond Poincaré and René Viviani, his temporary prime minister, departed from Dunkirk early on the morning of 16 July aboard the battleship France, to pay a state visit to Russia. Both professed to welcome the trip as a holiday: Poincaré wrote later of ‘sailing under the illusion of peace’. The ship’s wireless facilities were primitive, and throughout their time at sea they found themselves almost incommunicado: ‘a heavy mist falls on the billow, as if to hide Europe’s shores’.
On the 20th the French party arrived at the landing stage of the Peterhof Palace, to be received by the imperial family and several of Nicholas II’s ministers. Maurice Paléologue, the French ambassador, reported hearing the Tsar say as he waited to greet his French guests: ‘I can’t believe the [Kaiser] wants war … If you knew him as I do … how much theatricality [there is] in his posing! It is all the more important for us to be able to count on England in an emergency. Unless Germany has gone out of her mind altogether she will never attack Russia, France and England combined.’ After the initial courtesies, Poincaré invited the views of Sergei Sazonov about the Sarajevo murders. According to the president’s memoirs, the foreign minister was dismissive, and messages from the French embassy in Vienna, warning that the Austrians seemed likely to take drastic action, were not forwarded to St Petersburg for days. At the banquet which followed, Paléologue, who grew ever more euphoric and emotional as the visit proceeded, wrote: ‘I shall long remember the dazzling display of jewels on the women’s shoulders … a fantastic shower of diamonds, pearls, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, topaz, beryls.’ Here was a last flourish of the serene complacency of old Europe’s ruling class.
René Viviani was an Englishman’s idea of a stage Frenchman: fluent, erratic, emotional, impulsive and subject to fits of extreme rudeness. On the Russian trip, it was plain that his mind was fixed more on domestic issues than on foreign affairs: he was fearful that evidence embarrassing to himself would emerge from the Caillaux courtroom circus, and anxious about his mistress, an actress at the Comédie Française. When messages arrived from Paris, Poincaré became increasingly impatient to see anything that bore upon the European crisis, but Viviani seemed to care only for the Paris gossip. He said the Serbian issue would obviously be resolved, so there was no purpose in hastening home.
Poincaré, passionately committed to the Entente, led the discussions with the Russians, writing in his diary in theatrical self-justification: ‘I have taken upon myself Viviani’s responsibilities. I fear that he is hesitant and pusillanimous.’ Paléologue noted: ‘It was Poincaré who had the initiative. Before long he was doing all the talking; the Tsar simply nodded acquiescence, but his whole appearance showed his sincere approval. It radiated confidence and sympathy.’ The ambassador was an unreliable witness, but right about the congenial mood of the talks.
There is a massive difficulty about assessing this Franco-Russian summit, as we should now call it, because no minutes were kept, and few relevant state papers survive. Memoirs written by some of the principals are evasive and perhaps actively deceitful about what took place. Poincaré and Sazonov alike claimed that they discussed generalities, because they knew nothing of the looming Austrian ultimatum to Serbia. This may well be untrue, because Russian codebreakers had cracked Vienna’s diplomatic traffic. The Tsarist General Staff had a good grasp of Hapsburg plans and manoeuvres: Col. Alfred Redl, the homosexual Austrian intelligence chief who killed himself in 1913, was only the most notable of a network of agents in St Petersburg’s pay. The Russians were much less well informed about Germany, though they had few doubts about its war plan for a grand envelopment in the West, after buying from a spy for 10,000 roubles the report of the German army’s 1905 war games.
It is likely that the French and Russian delegations had intensive discussions about the Balkan crisis, and agreed a tough line. Poincaré believed that the Germans were bluffers: ‘whenever we have taken a conciliatory approach to Germany she abused it; on the other hand, on each occasion when we have shown firmness, she has yielded’. Firmness was a perceived virtue which powerfully influenced the behaviour of all the Powers in July 1914. Some historians believe that in St Petersburg Poincaré stiffened the resolve for war of Sazonov – ‘a sad wobbler’, in the view of the British Foreign Office’s Robert Vansittart. During a state banquet at the French embassy, the foreign minister spoke to the president in terms that echoed Conrad on the other side: he said that, if the crisis worsened, Russia would face great difficulties in conducting a mobilisation during the harvest. The fact that the Frenchman acknowledged in his memoirs a conversation about such a contingency suggests that he and Sazonov already viewed the Balkan situation more gravely than either afterwards admitted.
But it is easy to accept that France and Russia agreed on coordinating a tough response to the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, even including a precautionary Russian mobilisation such as had taken place in the last Balkan crisis, without convicting them of precipitating a European war. The Tsar certainly had no enthusiasm for such a clash, and his generals knew that their military position vis-à-vis Germany would be much stronger in 1916. Russia’s ambassadors to Paris, Vienna and Berlin, together with Gen. Yuri Danilov, the army’s quartermaster-general and strongest personality, were absent from their posts until the Austrian ultimatum was delivered on 24 July, a further indication that St Petersburg did not anticipate hostilities. All that is known for sure of these meetings is that the Tsar proposed for himself a visit to France in 1915. On a scenic trip up the Neva, the Franco-Russian party passed shipyards where new battleships were under construction, but the workmen were on strike. Nicholas suggested that this represented an attempt by German agitators to blight the state visit, though Poincaré