Western Europe and its leaders were slow to address the Austrian ultimatum with the urgency it demanded. France’s president and prime minister were at sea. Raymond Recouly of Le Figaro described how, in Paris, he gained his own first intimations of the gravity of the crisis not from ministers or diplomats, but from financial journalists. Before the Austrians acted, between 12 and 15 July there was frenzied activity on the Vienna and Budapest bourses, probably driven by inside information. ‘Everybody’s selling everything for any price they can get,’ Le Figaro’s financial editor told Recouly. Stock exchanges discounted the delusion in some chancelleries that Austria-Hungary intended to act temperately: they expected war.
Across the Hapsburg Empire and in Serbia, millions held their breath. A Graz schoolteacher wrote on the 23rd: ‘nobody could think or speak about anything else’. In Serbia it was a season of lush blooming: gardens were full of roses, carnations, wallflowers, jasmine, lilac; pervasive scents of lime and acacia. Peasants drifted into Belgrade and other cities from surrounding villages, many accompanied by their families, to sell in the streets boiled eggs, plum brandy, cheese, bread. In the evenings the young gathered to sing songs, watched and heard by silent, grizzled old men. In the Serbian capital, Dr Slavka Mihajlović wrote on hearing of the ultimatum at her hospital: ‘We are astounded. We look at each other aghast, but must go back to work … We expected Serbia’s relations with Austria to get tense, but we did not expect an ultimatum … The whole town is in shock. Streets and cafés are filling up with anxious people … It is less than a year since our little Serbia emerged from two bloody wars, with Turkey and Bulgaria. Some of the wounded still lie in hospitals – are we to see more bloodshed and more tragedy?’
The July crisis entered its critical phase on the 24th, when the terms of the Austrian ultimatum became known in the chancelleries of Europe. Sazonov said immediately: ‘C’est la guérre européene.’ He told the Tsar that the Austrians would never have dared to act in such a fashion without German guarantors. Nicholas’s response was cautious, but he convened a Council of Ministers to meet later that day. Sazonov then received Sir George Buchanan, who urged allowing time for diplomacy. Paléologue inevitably maintained his insistence upon toughness. What took place in St Petersburg during the ensuing four days ensured that the looming conflict would not be confined to the Balkans.
All the operational plans in 1914 were complex, that of the Russians most of all, because of the huge distances involved. Each mobilised soldier of the Tsar must travel an average of seven hundred miles to reach his regiment, against a German’s average of two hundred. The strategic rail network required twelve days’ warning of a call to arms, and troop concentrations would anyway be much slower than Germany’s. An hour after receiving news of the ultimatum, Sazonov ordered the army to prepare to move onto a war footing. Later that day of the 24th, Peter Bark the finance minister instructed Foreign Ministry officials to arrange repatriation of a hundred million roubles of state funds lodged in Berlin.
Austria’s commitment to war, and Germany’s ‘blank cheque’ in support, predated every response by the Entente. During an earlier Balkan crisis in the winter of 1912–13, Russia adopted the same military precautions that it activated on 24 July 1914 – without provoking hostilities. Unless St Petersburg proposed to acquiesce in the Austrian invasion of Serbia, immediate warning orders to the Russian army represented not eagerness to precipitate a European catastrophe, but prudence. There was, however, a critical new factor. In 1912–13 Germany had declined to support a tough Austrian line in the Balkans: key elements of its own military preparedness were still lacking – the Rhine bridge at Remagen, the bridge at Karwendel across which Austrian heavy artillery could move northwards, the Kiel canal, a new Army Bill. Now those links were complete: Moltke’s machine was at near-perfect pitch. St Petersburg and the rest of Europe knew that if Russia moved, Germany was almost bound to respond. Sazonov claimed that mobilisation was not a declaration of war; that the Tsar’s army could remain for weeks at readiness, but passive – as it had done in the earlier crisis. But German policy was different and unequivocal: if the Kaiser’s army mustered, it marched.
The Russian Council of Ministers’ meeting on 24 July lasted two hours. Sazonov stressed Berlin’s war preparations – which he probably exaggerated – and the unhappy past, in which Russian concessions to Austrian or German assertiveness had been treated as admissions of weakness. He argued that it was time to take a stand; that it would be an intolerable betrayal to allow Serbia to succumb. The two service ministers, Vladimir Sukhomlinov and Igor Grigorovich, said that, while the national rearmament programme was incomplete, the army and navy were ready to fight. Their contributions were important: had they spoken more cautiously – or perhaps, realistically – Russia might have drawn back.
Implausibly to foreign eyes, it was the agriculture minister whose remarks appear to have exercised the strongest influence. Alexander Krivoshein was a skilful court politicker with an extensive network of connections. He said that ‘public opinion would not understand why, at a critical moment involving Russia’s vital interests, the Imperial Government was reluctant to act boldly’. While recognising the dangers, he thought conciliation mistaken. The Tsar held a long private conversation with his uncle Grand Duke Nicholas, who commanded St Petersburg military district. It is unknown what was said, but it is likely that the Grand Duke expressed confidence both in France’s support and in the power of its army: he had been much impressed by a 1912 visit, during which he viewed Joffre’s soldiers. Moreover, he and his brother Peter were married to sisters, daughters of the King of Montenegro, whose impassioned influence was exercised to urge the Russians to fight the Austrians to the last gasp.
The Tsar remained deeply unhappy about the prospect of a conflict which, he well knew, could destroy his dynasty. He remarked thoughtfully on 24 July: ‘Once [war] had broken out it would be difficult to stop.’ But he nonetheless consented to the measures preparatory to mobilisation. In an effort to play the part of the ruler of a great power, a status to which Russia’s claims were precarious, Nicholas acted not ignobly or wickedly, but rashly. He emulated Franz Joseph in setting a course for regime destruction – his own.
That evening, Sazonov told the Serbian ambassador that Russia would protect his country’s independence. He offered Belgrade no ‘blank cheque’, instead urging acceptance of most of the terms of the Austrian ultimatum. But his commitment was decisive in persuading the Serbian government to reject a portion of Vienna’s demands: without the Russians, absolute surrender was its only option. Sazonov felt confident that his country could count on France, while having no great expectation of support from Britain; he remarked gloomily that every British newspaper save The Times was backing Austria in the crisis. Many people in Britain, some of them holding office, were wholly unsympathetic to Russian intervention. They sympathised with the Austrians in viewing Serbia as a pestilential Balkan nuisance.
That day, while Europe held its breath, awaiting Serbia’s response to Vienna’s ultimatum, a violent thunderstorm struck central Europe. Outside the parliament building in Budapest a statue of Gyula Andrássy, one of the architects of the Dual Monarchy, was allegedly seen to totter. Troubled citizens told each other that their ancestors deemed such occurrences portents. But, as Finance Ministry official Lajos Thalloczy demanded in his diary: ‘for whom?’ That afternoon, expectant crowds gathered in the streets of Berlin, but by nightfall no further news was forthcoming.
Next day, Saturday the 25th, German teacher Gertrud Schädla described in her diary how her family lunged for their morning paper, desperate for the latest tidings. She wrote: ‘Despite the danger that we shall be dragged into a war, people applaud Austria’s muscular stance. The murder of the ducal couple demands harsh punishment.’ As a gesture to the gravity of the international situation, the local sharpshooters’ fair was cancelled, though booths and roundabouts had already been erected. Meanwhile Belgrade was thronged with worried people chattering in the streets, at their garden gates and in such cafés as The Russian Tsar. Each