Sazonov was not deeply concerned at the moment with Slav hearts of any temper. Serbia, he mused, might even be well-advised to submit to military occupation without resistance while continuing to appeal to the great powers for redress. But diplomacy unsupported by guns is at best a credit operation, and Russia’s international credit stood none too high in Sazonov’s mind. At a crown council on July 24, the foreign minister requested the initiation of a partial mobilization. This meant what amounted to general mobilization in the four military districts closest to Austria. Believing that such a measured mobilization did not mean war, Sazonov described it to the tsar and his fellow ministers as a defensive measure.66
The council confirmed Sazonov’s request. On the morning of July 26 the preliminary orders went out. On that same day, however, Sazonov described the Balkan Slavs as a burden to Russia. He expressed a willingness to see Serbia severely chastened—if only Austria would transfer the issue to a European stage. Sukhomlinov insisted “on his honor” that no mobilization order as such had been issued. Russia was taking preliminary measures, to be implemented only if Austria crossed the Serbian border. Peace with Germany, moreover, was “earnestly desired,” whatever Austria might do.67
What could be made of these mixed messages? In requesting action by the powers, Russia might be banking on her relations with France and Britain to bring the current crisis before a forum where Russia could expect a majority of sympathetic ears. She might simply be playing for time to complete her own military preparations. But Sazonov’s insistence that Serbia’s sovereignty not be infringed, that Russia would not tolerate her reduction to vassal status, was disquieting in itself. General wars are seldom a product of the automatic functioning of international systems. Instead they manifest disfunction: the breakdown of the agreements, implicit and implied, that hold an order together. If German ambitions before 1914 had contributed to this dysfunction, German policies at least incorporated some sense of Europe as a system. Could the same be said of Russia? The governments of the Balkan Peninsula had for years sustained an image as unstable and undeveloped, undeserving of a place at the head diplomatic table and certainly not worth a European war. If Russia now regarded the Serbian issue as a casus belli, if she could convince her allies to support her to the brink and beyond, this was virtually prima facie evidence that the gulf between the tsar’s empire and its immediate neighbors had indeed grown too wide to sustain the existing international order.
The German military was anything but sanguine. On July 3, Moltke’s deputy, Quartermaster-General Georg von Waldersee, son of the former chief of staff, had suggested to the Saxon military plenipotentiary that peace depended on Russia’s behavior, not Austria’s.68 On July 5 the general staff submitted memoranda to the foreign office on the Russian railway network and on Russia’s expanding military power. The latter report described a Russian army that proposed not only to increase its annual recruit contingent from 455,000 to 585,000 men, but to keep them with the colors three months longer during the spring. In three or four years, 2,300,000 Russians would be under arms during the winter months—a key time for individual training—and 1,800,000 the rest of the year. Three or four new corps were to be raised. The strength of the corps artillery was to be increased from 108 to 144 guns, including heavy howitzers with improved fire-control equipment.
This new-model army would be more than a human steamroller. The tactical training of officers had been greatly improved by war games and staff rides. The number and duration of maneuvers had been increased. In 1914 alone almost a half-million reservists would be recalled to the colors for six weeks of refresher training. Even more than the material improvements, these personnel changes threatened to render obsolete two generations of German military planning and a quarter-century of German diplomacy.69
The general staff’s pessimism encouraged Bethmann to turn his thoughts again and again to Russia. Few accounts of the chancellor’s behavior during this period make direct references to the death of his wife on May 11, after a long and painful illness. The couple had been married for twenty-five years in what was by all accounts a love match, and work had not proved a complete antidote to sorrow. Particularly in moments of letdown or relaxation, Bethmann was more prone than usual to slip into a neiges d’antan melancholy. As early as July 6 he mused to Kurt Riezler that this time things were worse than in the Balkan crisis of 1912. And the key to the crisis was Russia—the Russia that was underwriting Serbia, that was building its military power, that was negotiating a naval convention with England that would expose the north German coast to amphibious assault by Russian troops from British ships.70
Bethmann’s anxiety on the latter point was in part a product of Sir John Fisher’s long-standing enthusiasm for the Baltic Project—the movement of an invasion fleet into the Baltic, where it would embark Russian troops and land them on the German coast for a thrust into the Reich’s presumably unprotected heart. The risks of such a proposal, obvious to cooler heads, had led Britain even before 1914 to abandon an active naval strategy in the area. Given the weakness of Russia’s Baltic fleet, operational cooperation would be difficult to impossible while the German navy still commanded the inner line. From a British perspective, the negotiations were more important for their diplomatic than their military aspects.
The Russian government took the proceedings far more seriously. It was clear in St. Petersburg that a landing in Pomerania had prospects of success only at the victorious end of a war. Exactly that fact made an agreement attractive. It would help bind Britain to the entente to the bitter end—and be correspondingly useful as a means of applying diplomatic pressure on Germany.
In such a context it was scarcely remarkable that two weeks later Bethmann spoke again of Russia’s “growing aspirations and monstrous disruptive power.” In a few years, he said, she would be irresistible, particularly if the current alliance systems remained in existence. That very strength made her a correspondingly desirable ally. A permanent agreement with her was worth far more than even an English alliance, and Sazonov was supposed to have told Berlin banker Robert Mendelssohn that if Germany would drop Austria, Sazonov would promptly drop France. But in Bethmann’s mind, any possibility that Russia still might turn from her allies if they failed to support her in the Serbian crisis was far outweighed by the military build-up and the diplomatic ingenuousness of the tsarist colossus. Bethmann, far more than Holstein had ever done, regarded Russia’s behavior as a reaction to internal tensions. Panslavism was a counterweight to revolution. This, however, made it no less dangerous. Let Russia put her own house in order as need be, but not at her neighbors’ expense.71