British perceptions were shared across the Atlantic. In May 1914, an anxious Woodrow Wilson dispatched his friend and confidant Colonel Edward House on a fact-finding mission to Europe. House was enough of an apostle of the strenuous life to boast of carrying a six-gun whenever he was with the president, and to believe himself a quicker and surer shot than any secret service man. He was not a particular admirer of the Second Reich. Writing from Berlin he described the atmosphere as “surcharged with war and warlike preparations… militarism run stark mad.” But Germany’s fears, according to House, were not entirely imaginary. England held her entente partners “like a cocked gun: whenever [she] consents, France and Russia will close in on Germany and Austria.”39
House’s efforts to defuse the tension, amateurish though they may have been, reflected his belief that Russia was ultimately the greatest menace to European order. Germany was the barrier between Europe and the Slavic hordes, and England did not want Germany crushed because this would leave her alone in Russia’s path. By August 30, Wilson himself was musing to the colonel that eventually the world might be reduced to only two great powers: the United States and Russia.40
Russia’s policy was not one of deliberate adventurism. Nor was it a consequent, reasoned reaction to a German threat. It reflected instead a growing sense of insecurity and confusion. From the first months of 1914 Sazonov had worked desperately to strengthen Russia’s entente relationships. He argued for a clear, public Anglo-Russian alliance, a political impossibility for liberal England. He remained unreassured by the increasing weight of opinion in the British foreign office that Russia’s rapidly expanding strength made her friendship worth retaining at any price—an attitude clearly manifested during the Anglo-Russian naval negotiations that took place in the summer of 1914.41 Sazonov’s alarm so disturbed French ambassador Maurice Palèologue that he informed his home government that France must retain the three years of active military service domestic critics argued were turning the country into a barracks and crippling the economy, because war could begin at any moment.42
It was in this tense environment that Sukhomlinov once again took pen in hand. On June 13 he published a long article asserting that “Russia is ready, France must be ready also.” The Russian war minister’s human and professional reputation has recently benefitted from some upward revision. From the warmongering incompetent described by Kokovtsov, Sazonov, and his other foes, Sukhomlinov has become a modernizing moderate, trying to move the Russian army into the twentieth century, rattling no more sabers than necessary to satisfy old-school officers and mistrustful allies, at worst no more than a bureaucrat devoted to the limited interests of his agency. But if Sukhomlinov was, in the words of the German military attaché, “energetic, methodical, and bold,” too often the last of these qualities dominated his public pronouncements. The intended thrust of his latest outburst may have been to convince France to keep her army up to strength by maintaining the Three Years’ Law. But Sukhomlinov reinforced his arguments with glowing, not to say lurid, descriptions of the massive power over which he presided as Russia’s war minister. Two weeks later Russia’s most prestigious daily, Novoye Vremya, urged Germany to abandon its warmongering Austrian ally rather than risk a century’s achievements in an unwinnable war with the Triple Entente. In a still-tense Germany the effect of such pronouncements was of gasoline on a fire.43
Russia’s ambivalent position was not lost on Serbia’s shrewd premier, Nikola Pašić. Convinced for decades that the main threat to Serbia’s independence came from Austria-Hungary, increasingly committed to the vision of a south Slav state unified under Serbian auspices, Pašić had journeyed personally to St. Petersburg in the spring of 1914 and obtained a grudging promise of protection in case of an unprovoked Austrian attack.44 It was anything but a guarantee. It did not encourage Pašić to return home and begin plans for the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. But neither did it encourage him to risk his domestic position by proceeding directly and energetically against the south Slav revolutionaries and their contacts and sympathizers in the Serbian government. On June 28, a half-dozen of them assassinated the heir to the Habsburg throne in Sarajevo.
III
As the murder escalated into an international crisis, Pašić manifested the steadiest nerves of any of the gamblers. Through the month of July he counted on Russia’s ultimate support—and in this context he read the minds of the tsar and his advisors better than they did themselves.
Or perhaps he read their souls. Certainly Austria’s statesmen shared his perspective. The decline of Russian influence in the Balkans after 1912 had not been matched by a corresponding improvement in the Habsburg Empire’s position. Rumania and Bulgaria were more interested in courting Berlin than Vienna, and increasingly concerned with St. Petersburg as well. In February, 1914, Franz Josef expressed fear of Russian military preparations in a conversation with the German ambassador. How, he asked, does Russia propose to use her increased strength? When answered by a homily on the importance of maintaining good relations, the old emperor grumbled, “but nothing more is to be done with the Russians.” A month later, Foreign Minister Leopold von Berchtold, who had succeed Aehrenthal in 1912, expressed a similar opinion, this time to the German foreign ministry’s representative to Franz Josef. Georg von Treutler suggested that overestimating Russia’s strength and Russia’s desire for war led to unnecessary alarm. No matter how highly the tsar’s empire was rated it almost always failed when put to the test. Berchtold responded by saying that his years as ambassador to St. Petersburg had made him well aware of Russian bluster. But now the situation was different. Russia was making her intentions clear by her military buildup. Even should she not choose to act directly, her new strength would be a formidable prop to any revived alliance of the Balkan states. Conrad too insisted that Russian military preparations were designed to underwrite a major move in the near future, perhaps as early as the coming fall.
On the other hand, Conrad’s alarmism was a minority position among Austria’s soldiers in the first half of 1914. The general staff as a body put little credence in talk of war with Russia. Alertness was desirable; fear was grist for Russia’s mill. The war minister suggested that Russia’s vast practice mobilizations and similar saber-rattlings were designed to do no more than encourage Austria to waste her limited resources in equivalent efforts. This mind-set may have represented a self-conscious distancing from the current trends in Germany. It persisted, however, well after Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. The German military attaché in Vienna reported as late as July 13 that his Austrian colleagues believed there was a fifty-fifty chance Russia would remain neutral in the face of military initiatives against Serbia.45
Whatever the soldiers’ opinions, in the aftermath of Sarajevo the Austrian foreign office had no doubt that a direct Austro-Serbian confrontation would pose a significant challenge to Russia. An Austrian success would be more than an object lesson to the rest of the Balkan states. It would diminish Russia’s diplomatic position in the region for years to come. Austria’s insouciant unconcern for the possibility of Russian intervention in the July Crisis, has been interpreted as a reaction to German pressures and as a response to German guarantees of support too often absent in the recent history of the Dual Alliance. It has been presented as a failure of crisis management, as a psychological response to a “catalytic situation,” and as a failure of judgment and imagination.46 An alternate hypothesis involves Austria’s recognition that Serbia was more than a stalking horse for Russian ambitions in the Near East. Russia at her most assertive still had general interests to defend and a general position to threaten. Serbia’s focus was local. A regional power prepared to risk all to gain all can achieve much against a far stronger rival whose behavior is constrained by a broader spectrum of pressure points. And Vienna’s decision makers were increasingly convinced that whatever might be her policies at a given moment, Serbia ultimately had no interest in a peaceful solution to the Balkan question.