470. The Road to The Great War: The Kaiser’s Blank Cheque (Part 2)

After the latest terrible events in Bosnia, you must surely agree that we cannot live any longer with this Serbian antagonism, and that, as long as this furnace of criminal agitation at Belgrade goes unpunished, all European monarchies are in danger. So that, Dominic, was Emperor, Franz Joseph, the 436-year-old Austro-Hungarian emperor, writing to the Kaiser Wilhelm II, and he wrote that letter on the 2nd of July 1914, but it's delivered to the Kaiser three days later, is it not, by the special envoy of the Austro-Hungarian government, Herr Hoyos.

Did you like the kind of?

Yeah. I mean, his wife has been murdered by an anarchist. His son took his own life in a weird suicide pact. His nephew has now been shot by a Bosnian terrorist. His brother was killed by Mexican revolutionaries.

Yes. Danger everywhere. Yeah. That sense of being embattled and encircled. I mean, a lot of the participants in this story feel this, but I think it's important to say the Austrians absolutely do feel it.

And you get a sense of that, I think, in that wonderful reading that you did, Tom. So we also talked last time about the Kaiser, didn't we? About the person who's going to be reading this letter. But let's concentrate for a second on how the letter gets there. So we are now a week after the assassination.

The 5th of July, which is a Sunday, Count Alex Hoyos, who is sort of a younger Austrian diplomat. Oh, I misranked him then.

You don't want to know the Dr. Valverde imbroglio, do you, I suppose? No, I don't. So Count Hoyos arrives in Berlin and it's absolutely deserted. And the reason is it's the summer.

Everybody's on holiday. So the chancellor of Germany, Theobald Bettmann-Hollweg, is away on his country estate. The head of the army, the chief of the general staff, Helmut von Moltke, the Younger, he has a problem with his liver and he is off taking the waters in Carlsbad, which is now in the Czech Republic. Of course he is,

The Kaiser, he loves yachting. Of course, Tom, as we have established. Yeah. A bit of a smorgasbord. Yeah.

He loves all that. He likes the bracing Baltic waters. I've been to that.

They're all China hands. So they had been in China during the Boxer Rebellion, 1900.. So they have a little chat about China and all that kind of thing, Hoyos and Zimmerman. And Hoyos is very frank to Zimmerman. And he says, look, I've got these letters.

I'm looking forward to handing them over, getting the Kaiser to see them. Personally, he says, I would like to see us hit Serbia really hard and actually just wipe it out. Let's partition Serbia among ourselves, the Austrians, the Bulgarians, and the Albanians. He says, actually, Serbia must be destroyed. It's very kind of Carthago de Lenda-esque.

He just says, you know, we have to be really hard line about this. But actually, Hoyos is not going to get to see the Kaiser himself. The man who's going to see the Kaiser is the Austrian ambassador. Now, Tom, I was very harsh on you last time by making you read the name. I was going to say, I won't make you do it this time.

Do you want me to do it?

Yeah. Anyway, he's Count Szugienyi. I think it's.

Szugienyi is the Austro-Hungarian ambassador. He's obviously, as you can tell from that, a Magyar. He is kind of the head boy of the Berlin diplomatic corps because obviously the Austrians are very close to the Germans. Everyone kind of slightly defers to him. among the other ambassadors.

He is very popular. The Kaiser loves him. The Kaiser is always playing jokes and japes on him.

Yeah. And the Kaiser calls him, you are my gypsy, my little gypsy and all this kind of stuff, because of his Hungarian-ness. So he's given these two documents and he goes to the Kaiser's palace in Potsdam to hand them over. Now, it is a sign, as Thomas Otte points out in his book, July Crisis, of just how unseriously the Germans have prepared for this, that nobody has briefed the Kaiser before the ambassador comes. If this was the United States right now, he would have a little piece of paper.

He'd be Joe Biden, and he'd have a piece of paper with bullet points telling him what they want, what we want, where we want to get to. The Kaiser has nothing like this.

We had those lovely scenes of him and Fran Ferdinand bonding over their rhododendrons. Remember that? So the Kaiser has actually been doing that this morning. He's gone and he's been admiring the rose bushes in his Potsdam garden. And then he went to a little, they'd put on a special exhibition for him of works by a kind of historical painter called Professor Scherbel.

And the Kaiser has been looking at all these paintings of scenes from German history. Oh, lovely, lovely paintings, nice roses. And then he goes in for this meeting with the Austrian ambassador. And it's not like. there's the whole apparatus of the German war machine behind him.

There's nobody there. There's just the two of them. So Genny, hands over these two documents. Now, one of them is basically just a sort of quite boring strategic overview of Austria's position in the Balkans. And the second one is the one you read out at the beginning.

So that was the letter from Franz Josef. And that's the personal appeal. It's the personal appeal. It's been very carefully drafted by the Austrian foreign ministry. And it's an appeal to the Kaiser on the principle of our great friendship, your friendship with Franz Ferdinand, and the principle of monarchical solidarity.

No European monarchy is safe with these crazy terrorists running around. And Wilhelm looks at all this. And actually at first he's pretty calm. You know, he doesn't start shouting, let's invade Argentina or something in his traditional way. I shall get out the crown of Burgundy and give it to the Belgians.

None of this nonsense. He actually says, listen, I completely understand where you're coming from. You know, you've suffered a terrible provocation. And he says, that said, you know, I understand why you want a serious action against Serbia, but there is a risk of a serious European complication to this.

The Kaiser knows he has to talk to the.

Something very hot. I think he's just been thinking about it. His friend has been killed, all of this stuff. And he sort of worked himself up. So when they reconvene after lunch, he says to the ambassador, Sergini, he says, actually, do you know what?

I completely understand why you want to have a crack at the Serbs. And I've been thinking about it and you have my absolute full support. I will talk to the chancellor, Bethmann-Holweg, but he's bound to agree with me. And you know what as well? You shouldn't hang about.

You know,

However, I'm pretty confident the Russians won't do anything stupid. We will stand by you. So that will deter them. The Russians don't want war. They're not prepared for war.

It'll probably be fine. And again, he repeats at the end, the current moment is the most advantageous one. It would be a massive mistake not to exploit it. This is the best chance you'll ever have. So never let a crisis go to waste.

Never let a crisis go to waste. You know, you don't want this shock of the crisis to completely dissipate. And I think every historian would say, the Kaiser's not wrong there. No. This is the obvious moment.

We talked.

Is this because he dreams of world conquest and fighting all his enemies and a world war in which Germany would be victorious? I think there is no evidence of that. I mean, he is specifically saying to the Austrian guy, there won't be a world war. So this is your chance to kind of crack on and do it. But also he has flagged up the fact.

Really, I think what this is, is textbook. Kaiser. You know, he's had his lunch. Whenever he has lunch with visiting dignitaries, he loses it and just starts ranting. This is what he has done.

And, as Thomas Ottey says, there is a personal dimension. I mean, it's so easily overlooked. This is his friend who was killed and he takes it very seriously. And he thinks they should be punished. Why would you not punish them?

So the meeting breaks up and then the Kaiser goes to the garden and there some of his sort of big wigs are waiting, including the Prussian war minister, who is called Erich von Falkenhayn. And he says to them, guys, the Austrians look like they're going to gear up for a war against Serbia. And they all say, yeah, I can understand that. That's fair enough. And actually, the Kaiser's adjutant, who's a guy called Hans von Plessen, he writes a diary, which is a brilliant source for us.

Gives us a real sense of what they're thinking. Here, the view prevails that the sooner the Austrians strike against Serbia, the better. And the Russians, although friends of Serbia, would not join in after all. So again, the emphasis on speed. Speed, exactly.

Now. the key person really the Kaiser needs to persuade, if he's keen on this, is the chancellor. The chancellor has just got back from his country estate. He is Thérbald Bertmann-Holweg. Now, because he's the leader of Germany and because he's got a beard, he's very easy to caricature as this sort of Mephistopheles figure.

And he's absolutely.

He's very melancholy. And he's been reading Plato. In Britain, people regarded him as quite an admirable person. He's a moderate conservative. He's not a super reactionary.

He's from a Frankfurt kind of law and banking family. Richard Haldane, who'd been Britain's Secretary of State for War in the Edwardian period, said he was the Abraham Lincoln of Germany. You know, an admirable man, measured, sensible, cultured, all of this kind of thing. And Bertmann-Holweg, the Kaiser, explains what's going on. He says, yeah, I mean, fair enough.

We'll stand by the Austrians. That'll work to deter the Russians. Let them have their crack at Serbia. So they're all agreed. The next morning, Monday, the 6th, the Kaiser goes off on holiday.

And there are some historians who say this is a sign of just how sinister and Machiavellian the Germans are, that they all go on holiday to fool everybody into thinking there's not going to be a world war. I think the Germans don't think there's going to be a world war, and so they go on holiday.

Well, we're familiar.

It is your call, and whatever you decide, we are your friend, and we are with you.

And when they don't, he's full of bitterness and anger. But I don't think there was any sense whatsoever. I mean, we will see throughout this story, let's be honest. The last thing that most German policymakers, including people in the military, want is war with Britain. Because they don't want to have to face the British Navy and the British economy and British industry and the empire and all of that kind of stuff.

What is a different story is Russia. Lots of Germans think that war with Russia in the long run is inevitable. So they've grown up in that world of the late 19th century, where people talk in terms of races and inevitable racial struggles.

It's getting bigger all the time. But also Russia, hitherto very backward, is modernizing, industrializing, building railways, rearming, all of this stuff. To give you a small example, in the summer of 1914, the Kaiser read an article in a Russian newspaper that had been planted by the Russian war ministry. And it was a boastful article about how they were rearming and how they had all this modern equipment. And they were going to have a massive army in a few years' time that would be three times bigger than Germany's army.

And he writes in the margin and he says, oh, the Russians have put their cards on the table. He says anybody who thinks that the Russians and their French friends are not planning a war against us should be in a lunatic asylum.

Yeah. We were in his old chateau, the great trees. There's a massive sense he hasn't got over his wife's death and melancholy and a restraint in landscape and people. And he says, they talked about the world situation. Russia's military power growing rapidly.

Austria continually weakening and more immobile. Austria, our last decent ally. In general, blindness all around, a thick fog over the people. The future belongs to Russia, which grows and grows and becomes for us an ever more oppressive nightmare.

And as a result of that, they do have war scenarios and plans drawn up. And obviously, if you are the Germans, you have to fight one of those two people first, either France or Russia. And their sense is France is the more dangerous adversary because it's much more industrialized and much more modern. Deal with them first. And then we turn back to this great lumbering leviathan.

Are they planning to launch this plan? Are they itching to get started? I think that is the wrong way of looking at it, because they're so gloomy. And a lot of them, when they talk about a future war, which they do all the time, the German generals, they think a war is coming. But when they talk about it, they're not.

What are you going to wear at the victory parade? You know, Fritz.

They're not going to follow through with this. Then most of the people think the Austrians will actually follow through this time, but the Russians won't join in. Now, there are some people who say, I mean, they're not idiots, right? They think there's always a chance the Russians might join in, but they say, well, listen, if that happens, there is no better time than now. So you can understand the logic of that.

In our own lives, we will have had situations where we say, I don't really want this to happen, but if it is going to happen, well, better to do it now than to do it later. It's a little bit like that stupid thing that people say when you're in a football tournament and you say, well, we don't want to draw Brazil in the second round. And then somebody says, yeah, but you've got to play them at some point, haven't you? Better to play them early on. That's the way they think about the Russians.

We don't really want to be drawn against them, but we've got to play them at some point. So why not now? Let's just do it. And I think they think if the Russians do get stuck in now, that will prove that they hate us. And they were always going to do that.

So it's better to do it now, actually. But it's the defensive mentality,

That sense that you mentioned of being encircled and the Schlieffen plan is their way out. That's massively, massively important to them and their sense of right being on their side. Nobody whatsoever, really, in Germany, in the Great War thinks we are the bad guys in this war. They think it's been forced upon them by a malevolent Russia. Anyway, at this point, they don't think there is going to be a world war, of course.

Falkenhayn says to Wilhelm, yeah, Wilhelm's bags are packed and he's about to go off. He's got his yachting shoes and he's got all this stuff. And he says, shall I make some preparations, just in case? And Wilhelm explicitly says, no. Preparations for what?

There isn't going to be a war. So off, he goes on his Baltic cruise. Bethman-Holweg, the chancellor, he goes back to his country estate to kind of stroll and think about Plato. General von Molke has spent the whole time surrounded by hideous sulfuric waters. Large men slapping his shoulders.

Exactly. Terrible scenes. Probably the worst scenes in this whole series of a German spot. So now some people would say, all very cunning from the Germans, of course, they're lulling everybody into it. But I don't think that's right at all.

I think they genuinely don't think this is going to lead to a conflagration. Hoyos returns and the ambassador telegraphs back to Vienna. And the people in Vienna, they think this is absolutely brilliant, of course, because they've got the blank check. Do what you like. We're not even going to try and influence you.

A lot of historians would say, very irresponsible of the Germans to give the Austrians this blank check. But for Berthold and General Conrad, they say, tremendous. Shall we crack on and do it?

But even in this book, he says, listen, if they had attacked Serbia the next day, there would have been no world war. Would they have been in a position to do that, though? No, they're disorganized. So it's an irrelevant argument, isn't it? I suppose it is.

But it makes the point that a shock has happened. And for the Austrians, the shock doesn't really fade. They are still nursing their sense of hurt. But for everybody else, it has faded. Now, their whole system, as you said, it's not just that, it's slow by accident.

It is built by design to be slow, because the whole basis of Austria-Hungary is a massive compromise. It's a compromise largely between Austria and Hungary. But also they have to take into account the Croats and the Slovenes, and the Ukrainians and the Poles and all these other people in their empire. So everything proceeds in a very, very nuanced, negotiated kind of conflict-avoiding, bureaucratic way. That's the way it works.

It's a bit like the EU or something. And as a result of that, they meet on the 7th of July and they still don't make a decision because the Hungarian prime minister, who we talked about last time, Istvan Tisza, he is still very reluctant. And he says, actually, do you know what? I know? the Germans are kind of up for this, but I still think it would be better to humiliate Serbia diplomatically.

And the Kaiser's option of just.

The Kaiser doesn't always get a lot of respect in this podcast, but this is probably the best idea.

Well, I have some sympathy with that.

Right. So on the 8th of July, we're now well over a week since the assassination, the Austrians draw up a new plan that they think will basically persuade Count Tisza, the Hungarian prime minister. And they say, look, here's what we'll do. We won't just attack Serbia. We will give them an ultimatum listing all our grievances.

And we will make an ultimatum, and I quote, with demands that Serbia can scarcely be willing to fulfill. Then, either war or such a humiliation for Serbia that she is eliminated as a factor for some time. In other words, we'll give them this ultimatum and they won't accept it. If they do accept it, they'll be completely humiliated. And if they don't accept it, we can strike them.

then. And do you know what? Still, they don't do anything. Still, the days go by, because Tisza is now making up his mind. And he's like, oh, I'll think about it.

And he thinks about it for almost another week until finally, on the 14th of July. So we are now more than two weeks after the assassination. He goes to see the German ambassador and he says, well, I've made up my mind.

Let's do this. So you think, finally. Do they go for it? No, of course not. They're Austro-Hungary.

Of course they don't do it. So now they have two other issues. One is their railway network is not built for swift mobilization. So at some point, I think they said to Conrad, well, great. You've been asking for this war for so long.

When would you like to start it? He's like 1916.. I mean, does it have to be this decade?

If you're doing a mass mobilization, that you.

So mobilizing your men, which means basically getting them moving, getting them to the front lines, is massively, massively important. If you are Germany, let's say, and you're looking at that massive Russian army, much bigger than yours, speed is the essence for you. You can't hang around, as we will see later, on the issue of the timetables and people going the wrong way on the network and all that stuff. That's actually really important. If you've set your army in train to basically commandeer the whole network and sending them off to the West, you can't then suddenly say, Oh, I should have changed my mind.

Oh, let's send them East. I mean, that's not how trains work. But also you can see.

And right now Conrad says, everyone's like, great, finally we can do it. And he says, yeah, there is just one thing actually. So a lot of big places in the empire, Zagreb, Bratislava, Budapest, Krakow, the soldiers have all gone home and they won't be back until the end of July. Now he could recall them now, but if he did that, everybody in Europe would know that there's going to be a war. So he doesn't want to do that, because that kind of gives the game away.

And what is worse, they work out that the end of the harvest leave kind of overlaps with a visit, a state visit, by the leaders of France to St. Petersburg between the 20th and the 23rd of July. And if they attack Serbia, then, then Serbia's best pals will be together in St. Petersburg and will be able to coordinate their response perfectly. So from the Austrian point of view, that's obviously bonkers.

You don't want to cause a great hullabaloo when they are actually having a summit, as it were, the French and the Russians, because they will be offended by it, but also they'll react to it straight away, then and there. So they say, okay, well, fine. Well, we'll have to get everybody back from the harvest. Then we'll have to wait for the French to leave St. Petersburg.

So actually, now that we look at it, the Thursday, the 23rd of July, which is the day the French leave St. Petersburg and the troops will be back from the harvest. That's when we'll.

So there's the issue that it's delayed and they've lost all the shock and the speed. The other thing that is absolutely astounding, even though I'm a bit of an Ostrophile and a Habsburgophile. I love the music of Mahler. Can I just say how thrilled I.

The soup. The soup is the wrong soup. All this stuff. And of course, the Austrians all live in the Strudelhof and have ridiculous names. So the question with the Austrians, right, is do they not think that this could go horribly wrong?

And the weird thing is in all these meetings, I mean, don't forget, they've had like a billion meetings about this where they decided nothing. But, as Chris Clark says in the Sleepwalkers, they never, ever really talk about what will happen if the Russians attack.

TISA, the Hungarian guy, is still very much against annexing it. But, as we've seen, there are other people, like Count Hoyos, who are like, let's actually partition Serbia and take bits of it for ourselves. By the way, this is all predicated on the idea that the Austrians will smash Serbia. And actually we won't really get into this in this series, but actually, when the Austrians do attack Serbia, they are utterly humiliated and forced back into Austria. Although in the long run, Serbia loses more than anybody.

Yeah. But I mean, that's down to the fact that the Germans have to bail out the Austrians as much as anything. Anyway, Chris Clark has this wonderful line. It says the Austrians resembled hedgehogs scurrying across a highway with their eyes averted from the onrushing traffic. Because often when they're having these discussions, it's like, have they forgotten that Russia exists?

Because they're not even mentioning it at all. And how do you explain that? One possibility is that they're so dazzled by Germany's military prowess that they think the Russians would never dare. And you can sort of see in the cold war, client states of the United States or the Soviet Union might think that about their own patron. Cuba, might think that about the USSR in the 1960s.

No one will dare mess with us. Not incorrectly. Yeah. Because we've got a very powerful friend. And I think an important thing with the Austrians, I think a lot of them genuinely think they have nothing to lose.

That fatalism that we talked about the Germans is in their soul as well. They think their empire is in danger of breaking up. They just think, if we don't do this now, what's the point? We might as well just leave the game. But also Chris Clark makes this point.

And I think it's, again, as I've said before, I don't think it's one that a lot of historians appreciate enough. The Austrians are so convinced that they are right. They just think this point that you made, the Tsar, why would he support regicide terrorists? Sure, the Russians have different interests from us, but they will surely recognize the heir to our throne and his wife have been shot in cold blood. Of course, the Russians will eventually say, yeah, fair enough.

And if they do turn out to be terrorist loving monsters, then the Germans will just deal with them. So actually, we don't need to give them any thoughts at all. And in fact, I mean, unbelievably, they basically leave their Eastern border undefended against the Russians because they're like, well, yeah, let's not even think about that. Let's just concentrate on Serbia. What's the worst that could go wrong?

We could lose our entire empire. The dynasty breaks up and it's all been for nothing. But they don't really envisage that. So, on the 21st of July, Berchtold and Count Hoyos, they go to Bad Ischl, which is the sort of nice lakeside resort.

And we will describe the ultimatum in a subsequent episode. And Franz Joseph says, when he sees it, he says, it's actually quite harsh. Like it's really harsh. And he says to them right then, and there, there's no way the Russians will tolerate this. This is very, very harsh.

But then, in that Austrian way, he says, yeah, but let's forget about Russia. It's crack on. Whatever. Let's do it anyway. Berthold said in his diary, the emperor was fully alive to the profound seriousness, even the tragedy, of the current historical moment.

But what an ironic line. that is, because of course they have no idea, Tom, of just how serious and just how tragic that moment would turn out to be.

So till next time, goodbye.