In the last days of July, the weight of traffic flying between governments swamped the relatively primitive international communications system, so that vital cables became subject to chronic delay. Only a fraction of government messages were transmitted by diplomatic wireless: most relied upon the commercial telegraph network. Details of Russia’s mobilisation were slow to reach the French government, for instance, because every message from its St Petersburg embassy had to be carried more than two miles to the public telegraph office. The British Foreign Office cipher clerks, only four in number, were overwhelmed: they worked in pairs, one reading out the groups, the other transcribing them onto a Post Office form – everything was done in longhand. Since five-number groups cost more to send, they made efforts to achieve terseness in the interests of economy. Once completed, a message was sealed in an envelope and taken by a messenger half a mile to London’s central post office in The Strand for transmission.
German civilians were becoming increasingly conscious that they might have to fight. The prospect roused dismay among socialists, enthusiasm among conservatives. Wilhelm Kaisen was a twenty-seven-year-old Bremen plasterer, and a dedicated Social Democrat. On 26 July he wrote to his girlfriend Helene expressing revulsion at the prospect before Europe: ‘War – those letters embrace such a dreadful ocean of blood and horror that they make us shudder to contemplate them.’ Kaisen was full of hopes that the Socialist International would intervene to prevent conflict. If it failed to do so, he foresaw mutiny among soldiers, especially ‘once murderous aircraft unleash perdition from the sky’. Across Europe in the last weekend of July, fears of the breaking storm prompted tens of thousands of hasty weddings. In the small town of Linden near Hanover, the register office married forty-six couples before finally closing at 11 o’clock on Sunday night. In Hanover itself, two hundred couples tied the knot.
Admiral Tirpitz had told a diplomat earlier in 1914, with doubtful accuracy, that the British had their newspapers under much better control than did Germany. ‘In spite of your “liberty of the press”, at a hint from your government your whole national press becomes unanimous on questions outside your domestic politics.’ By contrast, German newspapers, said the admiral contemptuously, were ‘ocean tramps’, each representing the view of its own little party. There were 3,000 titles, fifty of them in Berlin. Now, the Berlin Post urged that Austria should be left alone to pursue whatever course she chose. The Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung said on 24 July: ‘we are not required to support Hapsburg wars of aggression’. Vorwärts, a Social Democratic publication, declared contemptuously on 27 July that ‘only immature adolescents could be attracted to a warrior adventure that must turn Europe into a slaughterhouse stinking of blood and decay’.
Contrarily, in Freiburg the town’s semi-official bulletin, Freiburger Tagblatt, asserted that Austria’s looming war with Serbia ‘holds sway completely over our city. Our whole life [has] played out as if we ourselves had to draw the sword – among families, in shops and public places, on the streets, in tram cars. These are genuine lofty sentiments, rooted in real German patriotism.’ Freiburger Zeitung wrote of ‘a wave of the highest patriotic enthusiasm [which] cascaded like a spring flood through the entire city’. Even the most pacifistic socialist papers said that if war came to Germany the working class would fight, rallying to the defence of the Fatherland. A German defeat would be ‘unthinkable, horrible … we do not desire that our women and children should be victims of the Cossack’s bestialities’.
A liberal journalist wrote on 26 July in Weser-Zeitung: ‘We cannot allow Austria to go under, for then we should ourselves be threatened with becoming subject to the greater Russian colossus, with its barbarism. We must fight now in order to secure for ourselves freedom and peace. The storm from east and west will be terrible but the skill, courage, and sacrifices of our army will prevail. Every German will feel the glorious duty of showing himself worthy of our forefathers [who fought] at Leipzig and Sedan.’ But even the most strident editorialists hoped that France and Britain would remain neutral, leaving Germany to direct its undivided military attentions to Russia. The Berlin government, in one of its spasms of moderation, urged the Austrians initially to mobilise only sufficient forces to address Serbia.
But on 26 July, Jules Cambon warned German foreign minister Jagow that the British would not this time remain neutral, as they had in 1870. Jagow shrugged: ‘you have your information and we have ours, which is completely different. We are confident of British neutrality.’ Cambon was among those who always thereafter believed this a critical misapprehension – that if the Germans had known Britain would fight, they would not have risked war. His view seems mistaken, however. The key German decision-makers, Moltke foremost among them, had long before weighed the possibility and indeed likelihood of British intervention – and discounted it as irrelevant. The outcome of a brief continental struggle would be determined by the clash of vast armies, to which a British troop contribution would perforce be tiny, and the Royal Navy irrelevant.
At this stage, too, most of Britain’s governing class remained indifferent to the fate of Serbia and strongly hostile to intervention. The British ambassador in Paris, Sir Francis Bertie, wrote on 27 July: ‘It seems incredible that the Russian Government should plunge Europe into war in order to make themselves the protectors of the Serbians.’ Many influential people questioned the wisdom of shattering European peace to save squalid little Serbia.
Meanwhile Berchtold, in Vienna, decided that it had become urgent to initiate military action: he wrote apprehensively that it was ‘not impossible that the Triple Entente might yet try to achieve a peaceful solution of the conflict unless a clear situation is created by a declaration of war’. From Berlin, without Bethmann’s knowledge, Moltke sent a message to Vienna urging general mobilisation and rejection of mediation; but this was decrypted and read by the Austrians only after they had already made their commitment to march. At 11 a.m. on Tuesday, 28 July, sitting at a little writing table in his study at Bad Ischl, the Emperor Franz Joseph signed a declaration of war, the document which would prove the death warrant of his own empire.
Early that afternoon, via telegraph, a copy of this missive reached the Serbian Foreign Ministry’s temporary quarters in Niš. Officials at first suspected a hoax. One of them, Milan Stojadinović, later wrote: ‘its form was so very unusual, in those days when the very etiquette of such things was still deemed important’. The language was undiplomatically crude and terse, but the Serbs eventually decided the telegram must be genuine. One of them bore it down the street to the Europa coffee house, where the prime minister was lunching with Strandman, Russia’s acting envoy.
The Serb leader read the brief words with every eye in the place upon him. Then he crossed himself, passed the fatal document to his Russian companion, rose and addressed the company: ‘Austria has declared war on us. Our cause is a just one. God will help us.’ Another Foreign Ministry official hurried in, to report that a similarly worded communication had just reached the army high command in Kragujevac. Shortly afterwards, a message from St Petersburg reached Strandman, which he was ordered to deliver personally to Pašić. Signed by the Tsar, it declared that while Russia desired peace, it would not remain indifferent to the fate of Serbia. After reading this, Pašić once again crossed himself and said reverently and theatrically, ‘Lord, great merciful Russian Tsar.’
In Paris, the sensation of 28 July was not, however, Austria’s declaration of war, but instead that day’s acquittal of Madame Caillaux for her admitted killing of Gaston Calmette. Amid worldwide amazement, a jury decided that Le Figaro’s coverage of her husband and of their relationship in the days when she was merely his mistress made it not unreasonable for her to have shot its editor. And all the while, France’s leaders remained almost incommunicado on their Baltic cruise. The trip had become a nightmare: Poincaré and Viviani were obliged to continue with exchanges of courtesies in Stockholm and an apparently interminable sea passage while war clouds swept towards western Europe. Many of the wireless messages that reached them on the 26th proved indecipherable. President and prime minister conducted tense conversations,