471. The Road to The Great War: The Austrian Ultimatum (Part 3)
2024-07-18 00:49:42
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Coffee had just arrived. when the French squadron signaled. The Tsar made me go up on the bridge with him. It was a magnificent spectacle. In a quivering silvery light, the France slowly surged forward over the turquoise and emerald waves, leaving a long white furrow behind her.
Then she stopped majestically. The mighty warship which has brought the head of the French state is well worthy of her name. She was indeed France. Coming to Russia, I felt my heart beating. For a few minutes, there was a prodigious din in the harbor.
The guns of the ships and the shore batteries firing, the crews cheering, the Marseillaise answering the Russian national anthem, the cheers of thousands of spectators who had come from St. Petersburg on pleasure boats. At length, the President of the Republic stepped on board the Alexandria. The Tsar received him at the gangway. So those were the recollections of Maurice Palliologue, the improbably named French ambassador to St.
Petersburg, who was remembering the arrival of the President of the French Republic, President Poincaré, on the 20th of July 1914. And Dominic, up front, we'll be coming to Monsieur Palliologue a bit later. But just to say, this is a golden age for comical French ambassadors, isn't it? It is, absolutely. So there's the ambassador to St.
Petersburg. The one to London is even better, and we'll be coming to him in due course. Yeah, it's absolutely brilliant. But this is, I mean, aside from the colour of the ambassador himself, I mean, this is a crucial moment in the story of the road to the outbreak of the First World War, isn't it? Because you have the Tsar and the President of the French Republic, two heads of state, allied, either side of Germany, the Western and the Eastern flank, respectively, meeting up in St.
Petersburg. Yes. And also, Tom, we ended last time with.
the Austrians preparing their ultimatum. The Austrians have been writing their ultimatum, but they have not yet delivered it. So they're waiting for the French to leave St. Petersburg before they will deliver it to Serbia. So they are meeting in ignorance of what they suspect something may be coming, but they don't really know what it is.
And so that makes this meeting all the more kind of pregnant with possibility. So last time, in the last couple of episodes, we talked about Austria and Germany. Let's turn our attention now to their great antagonist, and we'll start with Russia. So Russia, Tsarist Russia, is the world's largest country, 164 million people, huge, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural empire.
People compare it to the United States, don't they? Yeah. That it's a continental empire. Exactly. And just as America is rising, people talk of the rise of Russia.
That is exactly the right comparison. Those days, of course, Eastern Poland, Finland, Ukraine, they were all part of the Russian empire. At the head, since 1894, the autocrat of all the Russias, Nicholas II. Of course, we all know what's going to happen to him in the Russian Revolution. He's a very conservative man, family man, nervous, stubborn, not terribly bright.
Looks like George V.
Yeah, looks just like George V, but sort of slightly more Charles I. in personality, I would say.
Oh, yes. And indeed fate.
And in fate. And Russia has had a very tough beginning. to the 20th century. They fought the Russo-Japanese War, in which they were utterly defeated. Then there was a little revolution.
The Tsar had to call the Duma, a parliament, which he didn't like doing. And ever since then, Russia has turned away. So all through the 19th century, Russia expanding in Asia, and it's great rivalry with the British in Asia, the great game. But since the Russo-Japanese War, they've slightly turned back westward. And their focus has been on their alliance with France, which they signed in 1894, and the Balkans.
And their eyes have been fixed on Southeast Europe. And really, the question is, why? Because the Balkans are quite a long way from Russia. Now, some people say, and you'll see this repeated often, it's because of their mystical pan-Slav solidarity.
And orthodoxy.
And orthodoxy, and all that sort of stuff. And there's a bit of truth in that, but I think only a bit. So it's the kind of thing that newspapers get very excited about. In the same way, I think, as British newspapers right now are talking about our kith and kin beyond the seas. There's something slightly self-parodic, I think, about it.
Except that in Australia and Canada, they really are kith and kin, whereas the relationship between the Serbs and the Russians is much more loose.
Yeah, exactly it is. You're absolutely right. Another thing that people often talk about is Russia is the third Rome. The second Rome is still standing, Constantinople. And it's part of a kind of decaying Ottoman Empire.
And there are quite a lot of Russian nationalists who think, I'd love to have Constantinople. Imagine that commanding position, but at the city of the Caesars. That would be a brilliant thing.
But also, it's the strategic position of Constantinople, that it's the kind of the chokehold of the Bosphorus that links the Black Sea to the Mediterranean and therefore to the world. I mean, that's the crucial thing, isn't it?
I think that's the important thing, actually, Tom. It's not whether or not they actually control Constantinople itself. It's whether they control the straits that lead from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean. Because, in a nice sort of nod to events in the 2020s, Russia's economy depends upon Ukrainian grain exports. And the control of those straits is crucial to get those grain ships out of the Black Sea and into the Mediterranean.
And if the straits are closed off, then Russia's economy is in terrible trouble. And the Balkans are the hinterland to the straits. So it's very important, as the Russians see it, that no enemy power controls that hinterland and therefore, by extension, the straits themselves. Because they could hold the Russians to ransom over the grain exports. They could stop the Russian Black Sea fleet getting into the Mediterranean.
And so it's a problem for the Russians, isn't it? That the Balkans are kind of in a mess. So Ottoman power has collapsed. We've been talking about this in our previous episodes, about the assassination of the Archduke. And you have all these kind of nationalist, seething resentments bubbling away.
And I suppose you could either say, well, that's a real problem. Or you could say, it's a good place to fish.
Yes, exactly. I think it's both. So I think their fear for them is if the Austrians get hegemony in the Balkans or some other power. But the opportunity is, I mean, they had backed Bulgaria. Now they've switched horses and they're backing Serbia.
Serbia, as we said, has doubled in size since the Balkan Wars. So the Russians, Serbia, is their client. It hasn't all been plain sailing, though. Because the Russians have twice, as they see it, had to give ground in the Balkans. Once when Austria annexed Bosnia, and the Serbs are very cross about it.
But the Serbs and the Russians backed down. And again, during the Balkan Wars, there had been a great hullabaloo about whether or not Serbia was going to get Albania and access to the Adriatic. The Russians and Austrians had been slightly at daggers drawn about it. And again, Serbia and Russia had backed down. So the two sides there had drawn different lessons.
The Austrians said, hey, listen, Serbs and the Russians are always back down. And the Russians said, we've done it twice. Yeah, never again. And we can't afford to do it again. Yeah.
So that is a big problem. And the other thing, of course, is that Russia is in a different place in 1914 than it was before then. Because, as we said in the last episode, Russia has been modernizing very fast. It has been spending huge amounts of money training its men on armaments and, above all, on its railways. So their army is now the biggest in the world.
It's going to be 2 million people by the end of the 1910s, bigger than Germany and Austria put together. They are feeling much more self-confident than they were even 10 years earlier. But there is another thing, actually. The guy called has a book called Towards the Flame about Russia and the origins of the First World War, which is a brilliant book if people are interested in Russia. The Russians, like the Austrians and like the Germans, have this sort of ticking clock at the back of their heads.
So in their case, the ticking clock is they are frightened not that the Ottoman Empire will fall apart, but the Ottoman Empire will actually stage a bit of a comeback. The Ottomans have just ordered two dreadnoughts from a British firm, Armstrong and Vickers, and they've got five more to come further down the line. And do the Russians have any dreadnoughts in the Black Sea? They do not. Right.
So when all those Ottoman ships arrive, the Russians will be outnumbered in the Black Sea, six to one. And their foreign minister, a guy called Sergei Sazonov, says to his colleagues, this will be absolutely calamitous for our ambitions. We cannot, he says, stand by and watch the expansion of the Ottoman Navy because that will torpedo forever our chance of getting a hold, getting control of the straits on which our economy depends. And the Ottomans could close the straits. They could close the straits, exactly.
That sense of urgency is really important for the Russians. So I mentioned Sergei Sazonov. He is a massive figure in this story. He's not a household named by any means, but he's a really, really important figure because he is the person who directs Russian policy in the whole of this story. And he is the foreign minister.
He's been a foreign minister since 1910.
. The caricature is always that they are reactionary warmongers, itching for conflict. In Sazonov's case, everyone says he's actually quite a decent chap.
He's very anti-German, isn't he?
He doesn't like the Germans.
And he's very pro-Serb.
Exactly. He is. He looks like a bank manager. He's got this short man. He's got his bald head beard.
Dominic Levin says of him, one of the kindest and most decent men ever to serve as Russian foreign minister.
Well, let's be honest, that's not saying much.
I guess that's true. I guess that's true. He's no, Sergei Lavrov.
No.
He had the broad culture and polite manners of a well-educated European gentleman of the day. I mean, actually, I think by and large ambassadors do like Sazonov. They think he's a cultivated, civilized man. He's very highly strung. He's very nervous, and so on.
And his view of Balkan politics is, like everybody else. really, in this story, he thinks you rise or you fall, life is struggle. Some countries are doomed to fragmentation and disappearance from the map, and others are doomed to rise. Younger, more vital nations. And he thinks Austria is finished and Serbia has it.
It's on a historical mission. He talks about its historical path. And one day it will reach its promised land in the territory of Austria-Hungary. That's how a lot of Russian writers think about Balkan politics. He almost thinks that basically, the laws of history have doomed Austria-Hungary and indeed the Ottoman Empire.
And it's kind of illegitimate for them to resist that. They should just step aside and let history take its course.
It's like a bison on the Great Plains in the 1870s.
Exactly.
It's doomed.
It's like one of our old friends, General Sherman or Sheridan talking about the bison. And the comparison again between the Russians and the Americans, it's often been made about late 19th century, sort of these great expansionist empires. So when the Archduke is assassinated, Sazonov, Christopher Clarke in his book, The Sleep Book, because there's a brilliant section on Sazonov and his documents to all his ambassadors. He within days constructs, and I don't think it's entirely contrived, I think he believes it, an alternative narrative about what happened that day. He says, listen, everybody hated Franz Ferdinand.
So when the Austrians say they're really upset about it, that's nonsense. They didn't give a damn about Franz Ferdinand. If there was a plot against Franz Ferdinand, it's only because everybody in Bosnia hates the Austrians. And that just shows what terrible people they are. The killers were Bosnian.
I mean, to say it's because of Serbia is absurd and just a contrivance. It's just a pretext, because the Austrians already wanted to strike Serbia. Austria has actually no right to just accuse Serbia willy-nilly and to take action against her. And ultimately, if the Austrians are making a great fuss about this, we all know why it is. They're just the Mozart loving puppets of the strutting generals in Berlin, who are the.
people who are really pulling the strings. And so he sees Germany as the real enemy, doesn't he?
He does. And, as Chris Clarke says, that interpretation of the events of the summer of 1914, it's not just very enduring. It's the interpretation that large numbers of people have right now. That there are people listening to this podcast who say, yes, Sazonov was right. That is what people think.
Who cares about the Archduke? The Austrians, they didn't have any right to attack Serbia. And the Germans are pulling in the strings anyway. So that's a narrative that you get right then and there. And it's constructed even before the ultimatum was issued.
I think really important to make that point. So the Russians, they start to hear whispers in the middle of July before the ultimatum. They start to hear rumours that there was going to be an ultimatum. They've actually intercepted telegrams from the Italian embassy in St. Petersburg that seem to show that the Austrians have started to put out feelers to the Italians, because the Italians are normally the Austrians' allies, to see whether the Italians are all right with this.
So they know this is happening. And Sazonov raises it with the Russian ambassador and says then and there, if they do this, there will be a world inferno. He says, Russia cannot tolerate it if the Austrians get stuck in against Serbia. And of course, what makes this so ominous is that the Russians themselves have powerful allies. And this brings us on, Tom Dyer, our old enemies, the French.
And allies, Dominic.
And allies, our beloved allies. Yeah, England's great friends, the French. So the French obviously have a lot of skin in the game, as it were, because the big thing for the French, France, is a smaller country than Germany. now. I mean, it's very conscious that it's a much smaller country.
Which is a real shock for it, because, famously, France in the 18th century was the China of Europe, wasn't it? And now its population has declined and its territory has declined because it's lost its Alsace and Lorraine to Germany. We talked about that.
I mean, it's an amazing thing, actually. For as long as France had ever existed, France had been the great powerhouse of Europe, hadn't it? Culturally, militarily, demographically. And suddenly, after 1870, the French are in the shade.
But I suppose culturally, they still are. I mean, Paris is the capital of Europe. It is. French, remains the language of diplomacy, and so on.
It is. But when people publish, you know, there's these league tables of kind of industrial production and all that kind of thing. It's Germany, not France, that is challenging Britain. And similarly, look at British politicians, British writers. at the turn of the 20th century.
Germany is kind of the up and coming cool place to copy.
Yeah. But if you want to become a famous painter, you're not going to Berlin.
Yeah, but I don't, Tom.
You're going to Montmartre. Yeah, but I'm just saying.
My art teacher told my parents I was the single worst person she'd ever taught at art.
Well, this obviously explains why you're such a keen fan of German militarism. Yeah. All stands revealed.
Clearly, clearly. Anyway, listen, the big trauma for France is obviously that Franco-Prussian War. Their emperor, Napoleon III, a ridiculous and terrible man, captured by the Germans.
Although he did meet my great-great-grandfather at his hotel on the Isle of Wight.
Did he? Did your great-great-grandfather say to him, how could you betray the Emperor Maximilian in Mexico in that terrible way?
I don't know. But I do think I have a soft spot for him as a result.
Okay. Well, I don't. The German Empire had been proclaimed in Versailles. Alsace-Lorraine had been taken by the Germans. And there are tons of people in France in 1914 who are still very, very haunted by this, I think.
So France, in reaction to this, had gone into alliance with the Russians. And actually, the Franco-Russian alliance is more than just a kind of diplomatic alliance. It's a cultural thing. I was really struck by, have you ever had Russian salad?
I have. Yes. It's horrible.
It's terrible. Yeah.
Yeah. It's kind of lumps of stuff in a kind of mayonnaise, watery mayonnaise soup.
It's a terrible, terrible salad. So the first recipe for that was printed in 1894, which was the year of the alliance. It was dreamed up by a French chef.
So if you eat that, you're literally eating Franco-Russian imperialism.
And the fact is, there were postcards, there were cartoons, there were recipes, there was all this to celebrate this alliance. Because it's basically two quite anxious powers who are frightened about Germany. And that alliance means a huge amount.
to them. But Dominic, also, just to ask, I mean, it is the most autocratic of autocratic monarchies. And it is really Europe's only significant republic. Yeah. A republic kind of founded on the execution of a king.
Yeah, crazy. So a sign, actually,
that this is not really ideological. I mean, I always think this is a real problem for people who say the First World War was a noble crusade. But really? With Russia on your side? I mean, how do you expect?
Anyway, President Poincaré, who you mentioned, arriving in St. Petersburg, he is from Lorraine. He is from a part of France that was dismembered and part of it taken by the German empire. His hometown was occupied by the Germans. when he was 10 years old.
His family fled west. They did get it back eventually. But at 10 years old, you feel this, right? You're not four, you're 10, and you notice it. And he said, in my years at school, I saw no other reason to live than the possibility of recovering our lost provinces.
And when he comes to dominate French politics, sort of Edwardian era, I think there is a sense in France that we have basically been the whipping boy for too long. We've been licking our wounds. We've been tearing ourselves apart about the Dreyfus case, big espionage case, all this kind of thing. And actually, enough of that. now.
Let's get back on our feet again. There was a book, Young People Today, published in 1913.. War. That word has suddenly acquired a certain prestige, a young new word, radiating the kind of attraction that an age-old warmongering instinct has revived in the hearts of men. Young people see in it all the beauty they long for.
And all this kind of stuff about how brilliant war is, how France has always been a warlike nation. We should stop apologising.
So, Dominic, what you're saying is that actually, it's France that's the militarist power, not Germany. Is that what you're saying?
I think they're both militarist powers, actually.
But which is more militarised?
Well, Poincaré brought in a thing called the three-year law, which is three years of military service. And that raised French troop levels equivalent to those of Germany. But remember, Germany has a much bigger population.
So France is actually more militarised?
Per capita, France is the most militarised society in Western Europe. Now, listen, they're all relatively militarised societies, right? So I'm not saying that one thing is better than another, but I'm just making the point that the French like their neighbours.
Yeah, yeah, I know. The legacy of your failure at art. Casting its shadow over you. I am sticking up for France here.
Listen, Tom, if you don't want to take it from me, would you take it from the Belgian ambassador, Baron Guillaume?
Not necessarily, but the Belgians are notorious for their dislike of France.
Well, his name is Guillaume. Is that not enough for you? No. He wrote back to Brussels and said, I'm really worried about the new mood in French politics. Nationalist, jingoistic and chauvinist.
The greatest peril for peace in today's Europe. So that's a Belgian. I mean, I always listen to the Belgians. So for Poincaré, that alliance with Russia is incredibly important. And in his book, The Sleepwalkers, Christopher Clarke describes at some length how the French are very worried that the Russians, as they're becoming more and more powerful and more and more industrialised, might one day decide that they don't need the French.
I mean, that would be terrible for France. So rather, like the Germans and the Austrians, who are sort of always trying to, they're so anxious about their ally that they're doing more and more to kind of appease them. The guiding principle of French policy is like, we bind ourselves to Russia. We lend them money for their railways. We do all this kind of thing.
We never want to kind of let them out of our sight, as it were. And the French are very aware that if there is ever to be a war, they really need the Russians in on it. And so the best place for that war to start is the Balkans. So even before 1914, the French and the Russians have explicitly discussed what would happen if there was a flashpoint in the Balkans. And they've said, we will get stuck in.
We will not let you down. We will stand by you. That is the best place.
So do the French actively want a war? I know the French covers a broad remit. Does Poincaré, do the people around him, do they actively want a war? Are they looking for a casus belli?
No, I don't think they are. But I think it's maybe not massively dissimilar from the German perspective that they think, you know, they know that there will one day be another war and they want it to be on their terms and to win and to get back Alsace and Lorraine.
So again, it's aggression as a form of defence.
I think so, yes.
Although with the specific aim of getting back their territorial losses.
They are revanchist in a way that maybe some of these other empires aren't, because they feel that a part of France has been taken from them. And they're determined, someone like Poincaré is determined to get it back.
So do the French high command look at what's happening in the Balkans and think, brilliant, this is our chance to get back Alsace-Lorraine? Or is it more happenstance than that?
I think to some degree they do. Christopher Clarke talks of a Balkan trigger. I think it's almost more of a Balkan tripwire, constructed a tripwire across the Danube. They talk about this explicitly. And in the Balkan wars of 1912, the French had said to the Russians, you know, if you really want to get stuck in, you know where we are.
The thing I love about, you've said how everyone behaves according to the national stereotype, is that when the Archduke is assassinated in Sarajevo, actually French public opinion barely pays any attention to it, because they're all obsessed by the most incredible sex scandal, aren't they?
They are. So a former prime minister called Joseph Caillou, his wife, had burst into the offices of Le Figaro and shot the editor, shot him dead, because he had published letters from her husband's mistress.
So the trial is going on, you know, in the aftermath of, and she gets acquitted on the grounds that this is perfectly reasonable behaviour.
Yeah, that she'd been humiliated by this editor and therefore she had every right to shoot him dead. This drives Franz Ferdinand off the front pages. So actually, this is an important point. In France, the kind of sense of sympathy, I mean, the French hate the Austrians anyway, don't they? We're going to be doing Marie Antoinette next month.
I mean, the French have no time for the Austrians whatsoever. So there's really very little sympathy in France for Franz Ferdinand. There's far more sympathy in Britain than there is in France because the Caillou trial drives it off the front pages. And insofar as the Paris press mentions the Balkans at all, it says, listen, first of all, it is a disgrace that the Viennese papers are stirring things up against Serbia, poor Serbia, totally blameless.
Because Serbia has been a recipient of enormous French loans, hasn't it?
Yeah, French loans. And that the Austrian government would use this to make these cruel accusations against Belgrade. Disgraceful. So that is the context for Poincaré to go off to St. Petersburg.
He doesn't go on his own. He goes on a boat, as we've described in that lovely reading. And he goes with the prime minister of France, who's just taken over, who's a guy called René Viviani. And Viviani-.
He's not a warmonger, is he?
He's an anti-clerical socialist politician. He's always losing all his important papers. And he looks like, I mean, there's no other way of putting it, I'm afraid. He looks like a cross between Spectacluso and the cafe proprietor, René, in the sitcom, Allo, Allo.
So again, conforming to stereotype.
Yeah. So they arrive on the 20th and 21st of July in St. Petersburg. And right from the beginning, Poincaré takes a very hard line. So there's a big reception for ambassadors.
And at that, Poincaré meets the Habsburg ambassador to St. Petersburg. Now, of course, he has an absolutely tremendous name, Count Frigyes Zappari, de Zappar, Murazombat et Sesiciget. I think we'll just call him Count Zappari.
Edward Habsburg, that's a much simpler name, isn't it?
Poincaré says to this guy, to this ambassador, yeah, I'm very sorry about Franz Ferdinand, what a terrible shame that was. Then says,
are you thinking of forging documents to frame the Serbs? Is that what you're thinking of doing? Because don't even think about it. And the ambassador is really shocked by this. And then Poincaré says to him, let me remind you, Serbia has friends and they are watching.
And the ambassador actually writes back to Vienna and says, you know, I was really upset by this. I was really shocked that the president of France would be so tactless and insensitive and confrontational when he's supposed to be offering his condolences.
And poor old Viviani, I mean, he's getting more and more stressed by all this, isn't he? Yeah. The warmongering of Poincaré. He is. He basically has a breakdown.
So the next day, the 22nd of July, he is seen lurking around. There's a big sort of marquee and is seen outside the marquee. And I quote. Gibbering. Muttering, grumbling, swearing loudly and generally drawing attention to himself.
So Viviani has his breakdown. Poincaré says to him, get a grip of yourself, man. Go and have the doctor see you. And I think historians generally think this is because Poincaré is adopted. It's just as well because there's a banquet that evening, a military gala.
And at that, there are these two Montenegrin princesses.
Yes. Because what this story has missed so far is Montenegrin princesses. And they come in late, but they come in hard, don't they?
They do come in hard. So Montenegro, of course, very close to Serbia. Serbia's kind of sister kingdom in the Balkans. And these two Montenegrin princesses, they are married to sort of cousins of the Tsar. They're called Anastasia and Milica.
And they are the kind of bells of the ball. And they are shouting at this banquet to Poincaré.
Have a war. Crack on. Get Alsace-Lorraine back.
There's going to be a war. Nothing left of Austria. You're going to get back Alsace-Lorraine. We will meet in Berlin. All this kind of thing.
And a lot of people, French officials, not Poincaré himself, but a lot of French officials are quite perturbed by this.
Embarrassed.
Yeah, it's embarrassing. Anyway, the summit has gone as well as Poincaré wanted. Basically, he's cemented the alliance with Russia. They've agreed, we will work really hard to bring Britain further and further, deeper into our alliance. We need to bind Britain to us.
And this business in the Balkans, if it comes to anything, a hard line is the only way to deal with these Teutons.
Dominic, you say everything goes brilliantly, but there is one fly in the ointment, isn't there? Which is, I mean, terrible for a French president, that the dinner on board his ship, the Froz, is an absolute disaster.
Shambles.
The soup course is late. The Russians don't like any of the court dishes. A huge embarrassment.
I think this is the Russian salad issue again, personally. I tried to track down the menu for this and I couldn't find it. There's no doubt in my mind they would have served that Russian salad borscht, and nobody likes Russian salad. It's a terrible thing.
Do you think they would have tried to put a French spin on borscht or something like that? They would have done. Is borscht Russian? I can't remember.
Borscht is Russian. Yeah. It pours the rain and they have a marquee, and the marquee falls down and Poincaré is absolutely furious. He also has another row with Viviani, because they need to basically a press release, a communique. And Viviani says, the communique cannot be too hard line about the Balkans.
And he ends up slightly being overruled. Poincaré, basically, you don't know what you're talking about. You don't know anything about foreign affairs. Shut up. So that night, the 23rd of July, they set sail back on their ship.
Poincaré is like, great. We're on the same page, us and the Russians. Whatever happens will happen. But we're pretty confident that if the Austrians do do something, we will call their bluff and get them to back down, because only a fool would invite a world war against France and Russia combined. And, of course, the one thing they have not considered is exactly the same thing that the Austrians have not considered, which is what if the other side don't back down?
What if your calculations are wrong? What happens next? We'll find out, Tom, after the break.
Hello, welcome back to the rest is history. And, Dominic, I think it's fair to say that the doomsday clock is ticking down, isn't it? Never have those storm clouds of war, storm clouds of war gathering. Because, even as the French president and poor old Viviani, who's been having breakdowns left, right and centre, are sailing out of Kronstadt Harbour to go back to France, the Austrians have been getting their ultimatum ready. And, sure enough, on Thursday, the 23rd of July, the ultimatum is delivered to the Serbs.
It is exactly. And so it's going to be.
delivered by the Austrian ambassador, as is the law with the Austrian diplomatic service. He has a splendid name. He is Vladimir Rudolf, Karl Freiherr, Giesel von Gieslingen. And at six o'clock, so it's at six o'clock because Poincaré and Viviani have left on their ship from Kronstadt. He's waited till they've left.
And it's enough time so that the Russians will struggle to communicate with the French ship. That's the whole point of their plan. Another complication with the ultimatum, the Serbs are having an election campaign. So the prime minister, Nikola Pasic, is away on the campaign trail. So when Giesel, the Austrian ambassador, turns up to deliver the ultimatum, the only person there is the finance minister, who's a very large man, chain-smoking man, very unhealthy, I think it's fair to say.
And he doesn't speak any French, which is the language of diplomacy. And so they have to drag in somebody to act as a translator. And when the finance minister is given the ultimatum, he basically doesn't want to pick it up because he doesn't want to be tainted by it, like it's radioactive. And Giesel says to him, no, don't hang around. There's a 48-hour deadline.
And he says, oh, we'll need much more time. We're in the middle of an election. And Giesel, slightly patronizingly, sort of says, do you not have railways? Do you not have telegraphs in this country? 48 hours is more than enough time.
Because if you don't answer, I will sever diplomatic relations and leave Belgrade immediately. And then he sort of bows and goes out. Clicks his heels, I hope. Clicks his heels. I would like to think so.
So the Serbian minister's, still in the capital. They open the ultimatum, and they finally see this thing that the Austrians have been working on. So here is the ultimatum. It starts off by saying, for years, you have tolerated societies and groups that have sponsored acts of terrorism, outrages, and murders.
And they're not wrong.
Yeah, they're not wrong. They're not wrong at all. Our investigations, which, of course, have been continuing in Sarajevo all this time, our investigations have revealed that the men who carried out this murder were groomed, recruited in Belgrade, and they were helped over the border by your frontier service officials.
Again, not wrong.
Not wrong at all.
But they haven't tracked down the Black Hand, have they?
No, they haven't. This is the amazing thing, that at this point, the Austrians, they suspect that there are links to some of these kind of networks in Belgrade. But they haven't actually got that far. They don't actually know the half of it. They haven't got APIS, for example.
They've got the mastermind behind the plot. So there were 10 demands in the ultimatum, and most of them we can deal with very quickly. They are things like, you must suppress such and such a nationalist group, such and such an ultra-nationalist periodical. Then they mention, you must act against these people in the army, these people on the border. They have tracked down the two men who are most involved in grooming, and recruiting, and arming the gang.
That is a guy, if you listen to the Sarajevo series, a guy called Major Tankisic, and a guy called Milan Siganovic. So the Austrians have them. They say, we know their names. You must act against these two men. And, Dominic, this is very.
familiar to people who've lived through recent American wars. Yeah. You know, demands to the Taliban that they surrender Osama bin Laden, that kind of thing. Yeah. I think that's the obvious.
parallel that will have struck a lot of people. Yeah. Now, there are two really inflammatory points there in the ultimatum, points five and six. Point five says, to suppress the subversive ultra-nationalist movements, you must accept our collaboration on your soil. So, in other words, we will come and help you suppress these groups, whether you like it or not.
And point six, you must allow our investigators into Belgrade to take part in the investigations into the murder of Franz Ferdinand.
and Sophie. And that is a direct assault on Serbian sovereignty. It absolutely is. Now,
Winston Churchill said of this document, the most insolent document of its kind ever devised. Christopher Clarke points out that actually, it's not the most insolent such document in Serbian history, because NATO's ultimatum in 1999 over Kosovo was a much greater intrusion in Serbian sovereignty. The thing for Serbia is, of course, if they allowed in Austro-Hungarian investigators, those investigators would find all kinds of things. I mean, imagine if they opened the.
briefcase of that bloke who's got the breast of the queen in it. Right, exactly. What's this?
Exactly. There's a lot of stuff in basements. There's a lot of dodgy stuff. There's a lot of stuff. I mean, there's all these blokes who've been going and swearing oaths in front of skulls and stuff.
If they find, if the Austrians find all that, it's going to be hard to justify that in the Council of Europe, isn't it? I mean,
so when the Serbians see this ultimatum, they're very shocked.
So they had not seen this coming?
Well, it's complicated. I think some of them suspected it was coming, but I don't. I think they kind of hoped. They pretended it wasn't coming. It's like you're waiting for bad news and you sort of tell yourself.
Because Pasic, the prime minister, I mean, he's clearly thrown into a funk, isn't he? Because he's out on the campaign trail and he suddenly announces he's going to have a holiday in Thessaloniki.
Well, he doesn't announce. He's literally been on the campaign trail that day, shaking hands. And then he says to one of his aides, or something, he says, there's this ultimatum in Belgrade. He says, do you know what? Actually, I think we should go.
Let's have a weekend break.
Yeah. And some people think he had a breakdown.
He has form on this, doesn't he? Because he, earlier, when the king and queen were murdered and hacked to pieces by all the assassins, he'd scarpered off to the Adriatic coast. So obviously his instinct in a crisis is to head off to a resort.
Go to a resort. I mean, why wouldn't you? Yeah, he's about to go to Thessaloniki and basically his train has to be stopped. And a station master gives him a note from the Regent Alexander that says, there's this ultimatum in Belgrade. You can't run away.
You have to go back and deal with it. So he goes back and at dawn the next day, Friday, the 24th, remember 48 hour timeline.
Yeah. So the clock really is ticking.
Genuinely, the clock is ticking. He meets his cabinet at dawn on the Friday. So it's going to expire Saturday evening. Friday morning they meet and they are all very, very anxious and dejected. is the eyewitness account.
Their plan is, well, we'll ask for more time, because that will give other people a chance to get stuck in and we'll play for time. But they know that the Austrians really won't give them more time. So what are they going to do? There are two schools of thought on this among historians. Thomas Otte, for example, says the Serbians could never have accepted this note.
The intrusion on their sovereignty was too great and it would be disastrous for them, given they've got all the stuff hanging around in the basements or whatever. Chris Clark says, there's some evidence. actually, the Serbs, some of them, were tempted to accept. A historian called Luigi Albertini interviewed a lot of the Serbian ministers and Serbian officials. And some of them said, you know, at first our instinct was.
to just say, fine. Surely, I mean, ultimately it depends on whether Serbia can get support for its position against Austria, which basically means Russia. Yes, it does. Because if Russia comes in behind them, then obviously that completely changes the terms of their calculations.
It does indeed. And this is why I think any account of the origins of the First World War that doesn't give Russia a huge, huge part in this is missing something, because everything depends now upon how Russia reacts. Now, just after the France has left St. Petersburg, they get the news in Russia of the ultimatum. They have known that something is coming.
So, I don't think they are totally surprised because of their intelligence has warned them there was something on the way. But Sazonov, this foreign minister, looks like a bank manager, a nice beard, very kind man by all accounts. He opens this and he says, c'est la guerre européenne. It's a European war. And he rings the Tsar.
It's the first, I believe, one of the first times the Tsar had ever used a telephone.
Really? So, Sitting Bull was more familiar with the telephone than the Tsar is.
The Tsar would look down on the telephone as a democratic intrusion on Russia's traditions. And Sazonov says to the Tsar, oh, this is terrible. The Austrians are clearly itching for war. He blames the Germans, of course. They always say that Austria is merely a sort of a puppet of Germany, which is not quite right.
The Tsar says, I'm not sure about this because Vili, my cousin,
is a lovely man. Well, they just had a summit, hadn't they? Yeah. Just a few months before and got on tremendously well.
Yeah. And I think the Tsar makes a good point, which is, he says, Vili leads a country that, you know, no one likes the Germans, but they're very rich, they're very successful, everything's going well for them. Why would they risk everything with the world war? Mad.
Yeah, good point.
They don't want a world war. But Sazonov says, he's adamant. He believes his own propaganda because he meets the Austrian ambassador and he says to him that day, what are you doing? You're setting fire to Europe. This is all because the German papers have egged you on.
That's not really true. They've not been egged on by the Germans. They've wanted to do it themselves. And then now we can bring on Tom, the great person in this story that we've been looking forward to.
Yes.
So you began with him.
The second best French ambassador in this story, Maurice Pallialog, and alert listeners with an interest in Byzantine history may remember that the final ruling dynasty in Constantinople are the Pallialogs. And Maurice Pallialog claims to be descended from them, doesn't he?
He does. I don't want to give the game away right away, but maybe I'll just go for it. I think Maurice Pallialog is a terrible person, Tom. He's like a man from a casting agency who supplied a ridiculous Frenchman.
Well, although he's, I mean, he's the son of Greek, and what is it? Romanian? Belgian? Belgian. I can't remember.
Belgian.
Yeah. That Greco-Belgian combination was so dangerous in history.
So, in a way, he's kind of plus Francais que les Francais.
He is. He's exactly that.
A bit. He's maybe acting the Frenchman to a hilarious pitch.
He is. That's exactly what he's doing. He's a dandy. He's a womaniser. He's brought his own chefs from Paris.
He's also a novelist, isn't he? He is. Sir George Buchanan, who's his British colleague in Russia, said of him, his vivid imagination is apt to run away with him and disposes him to take a fanciful and exaggerated view of political questions. And I would posit that in a highly combustible situation that might result in a European war, that's exactly the kind of man you want to be running the policy of a key participant.
Well, the thing is, you see, Poincaré and Viviani are at sea. So it's down to Pallialog to deal with the Russians, right? And Pallialog, as you said, he's a novelist, not just in the realm of sort of traditional fiction, but also in the realm of diplomacy. Because when he goes to meetings with the Tsar, he will often write the report on the meeting before he's gone to the meeting to send it home.
But it saves time, doesn't it?
Yeah, it saves time. It tells Paris what they want to hear.
It's, like, you know, people who write up the football match before the final whistle.
Exactly. And the thing is, everybody has said in the French foreign ministry, Pallialog is a terrible man. Why would you give Pallialog this job? He's a complete loose cannon. And of course, the answer is, it's not just in Britain that this happens, Tom.
I'm pleased to say he had been to school with Poincaré. So President Poincaré said, my old schoolmate, Maurice Poincaré, quite a character.
Eye for the ladies and loves a chef. So at this meeting, Sazonov and Pallialog, Sazonov says, what are we going to do? Pallialog just eggs him on. He never, ever, ever says to Sazonov, let's slow down a minute. We don't want a world war.
He says, no, no, no, we must be hard on the Germans. The Germans and the Austrians are terrible people. We should take a hard line, because the only line they understand, you stand up to a bully, you know, and all this sort of stuff. So Sazonov has confirmed he's been encouraged in his existing assumption, which is a hard line is the only possible line to take. And so that afternoon, he goes to an absolutely vital, crucial meeting of the Council of Ministers in Russia.
And he says, listen, guys, we have appeased the Austrians and the Germans for too long. We have a historic mission in the Balkans. And if we back down now, we will lose all our prestige, all our authority forever. We will no longer be a great power.
Which is exactly what the Austrians are saying.
Of course.
Both of them are saying exactly the same.
Yes, exactly.
This defensive aggression.
So the question for me, actually, that has often puzzled me about this story is, I always understood why the Austrians cared. I mean, it's their heir that's been murdered. And they think it's their integrity of their empire that's at stake. What had always puzzled me was why the Russians cared. I mean, Serbia is a long way from Russia.
And actually, it was only in the last few weeks, while kind of reading about this, that I kind of finally understood. The Russians care a lot about the straits and access to the straits, because it's really, really important for them diplomatically and economically. They care a bit, I suppose, about Slav brotherhood and that sort of thing.
Yeah, orthodoxy and all that.
But the key thing is, from their perspective, they have backed down twice already in the last five or six years in the Balkans, over Bosnia, the annexation of Bosnia, and then in the Balkan Wars about whether or not Serbia would be allowed to occupy Albania. And as they see it, the Austrians are just asking too much to ask them to back down three times in five years. So, although I personally can completely understand why the Austrians acted as they did, it has to be said they are making a hell of an ask, as it were. A big ask. A big ask.
It's a very big ask. It's basically saying to the Russians, yet again, you must concede to us on this.
And at a time when the Russians are worried about the Ottomans getting all their dreadnoughts.
Exactly.
And will they be able to keep the straits open and all that kind of thing?
Now, you might think, come on, can the two of them get together and sort this out? But you made this point, I think, Tom, in the last episode.
Yeah. They don't have email.
They can't talk on the phone. Everything has to be done through intermediaries like Maurice Palliok.
And he's just making stuff up.
Yeah, ambassadors. Ambassadors who will put their own spin on things. And, you know, there are allies. There's real Chinese whispers. It's hard for them actually to get together and talk about it, even if they wanted to.
Yeah. And both sides think time is running out. We are embattled. The others are malevolent and plotting against us.
Because the Russians actually overestimate Austrian military prowess, don't they?
Well, I mean, I think the Austrians overrate Austrian military prowess.
Right. But the Russians, I mean, the Russians, even though they have these massive forces and are relatively confident, they're still, you know, they don't want to be caught out. They don't want to have a mobilizing empire on their doorstep.
Do you know, Tom, I was thinking about this in the break between recording these two episodes that we've recorded this morning. I was thinking about what made this different from Napoleonic Wars or something. And I guess part of it is that you can make a mistake and embark on, you know, the nine years war or the seven years war or something. And, you know, what's going to happen? You'll lose, Menorca.
The results will not necessarily be apocalyptic for you if it goes against you. But one reason that they are all so frightened, I think, is because they know with industrialized total warfare, the stakes are so high. Yeah. And if you get this wrong, it's not, you know, you'll lose a couple of provinces. If you get this wrong, you could lose everything.
Yeah. Your society could cease to exist. And I think that heightens the sense of urgency for them. You cannot allow your opponents to get a head start.
And so it's obvious that Austria is going to have to mobilize if it's going to have a crack at Serbia. And Austria is a hostile power on your doorstep if you're Russian. So that then implies, well, we'd better start thinking about mobilization.
Especially because you are slow. If you're Russian, you are slow. You have the vast army. You have vast territory. You have to bring in people from a long distance.
So that night, the 24th, 25th, they've sent a message to Serbia via the Serbian ambassador. They've said, you can't accept this ultimatum. That would be to commit suicide. You know, we will stand by you. They've almost effectively given the Serbians a blank check of their own.
You stand firm and we'll sort this out for you. So the Serbians have their decision to make. The French are off at sea. But, as you say, Tom, the big thing for the Russians is, do we get moving? Because we have to get cracking.
If this is going to go horribly wrong, we can't mess around. So dawn breaks on the 25th of July. And of course, it's not a minor point. The Russians are deciding before everybody. I mean, they're literally up before everybody else because of the time difference.
So on Saturday, the 25th of July, they know that that evening, the decision will be made, because the Serbians will have probably rejected the ultimatum. And so they meet in a place called Krasnoye Selo, which is outside the capital. It's like one of the Tsar's summer palaces. He is there, Nicholas II. He's in a very fancy kind of white uniform of the guards of Tsar's.
It's a beautiful day. It is that classic kind of a Viennese waltz.
Piano in the palace.
The French windows are open to the garden. And they're a very incongruous scene. And he's sitting around with his ministers. And Sazonov says, guys, we need to start mobilizing our troops now. That will make an impression on Austria-Hungary.
And what we'll do is we will mobilize just a bit of them. So the four Western military districts, that is, Moscow, Kyiv, Kazan, Odessa. So we will mobilize those. We'll cancel leave, reserve us back to the training camps, put the railways on alert, all of this kind of stuff. It's not full general mobilization.
And it's not a declaration of war or anything like it. But it's just getting stuff going.
Just a defensive measure.
It's a defensive measure. But also that will show the Austrians that we are serious. And that will mean that the Austrians say, OK, enough. We've gone too far. We will back down.
Of course, this is an absolutely crucial point in the story. Because at this moment, somebody is going to have to back down a long way. Either the Russians will have to call off their mobilization and send everybody back home again. Or the Austrians will have to not go through with the ultimatum that they have long prepared. So the stakes are suddenly very, very high now.
And a Russian mobilization also has knock-on effects for Germany.
It does indeed. Because what are the Germans going to do? And all the time, the clock is ticking. Because at 6 o'clock this afternoon, Saturday, the 25th of July, the Serbs will have to give their answer to the Austrian ultimatum. And, as it happens, there are now just seven days left before the world war begins.
Goodness, storm clouds, all of that. So in our next episode, we will follow the course of those seven days that leads to apocalypse. And patriotic listeners will be delighted to know that in our next episode, Britain will enter the story. So if you're not a member of the Restless History Club, you'll be getting that in due course. If you are, you can get that straight away.
And if you would like to join the club and get immediate access, you can go to the restlesshistory.
com. But until then, à bientôt.
Bye-bye.
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