Chapter V: Slow Music

July in Berlin of the red summer of 1914 began as placidly as a feast day in Utopia. The electric shock of Serajevo soon spent its force. Germans seemed to be vastly more concerned over the effect of the Archduke's assassination on the health of the old Austrian Emperor than over resultant international complications. It was Sir Edward Goschen, British Ambassador in Berlin, previously accredited to the Vienna court, who recalled to me Francis Joseph's once-expressed determination to outlive his heir. The doddering octogenarian had realized his grim ambition.

The German Emperor returned to Berlin from Kiel on Monday, the 30th of June. Ties of deep affection united him to his aged Austrian ally. It was universally assumed that the Kaiser, with characteristic impetuosity, would rush to Vienna to comfort Francis Joseph and attend the Archduke's funeral. So, as events developed, he ardently desired to do; but intimations speedily arrived from the _Hofburg_ that "Kaiser Franz" had chosen to carry his newest cross unmolested by the flummery and circumstance of State obsequies, and William II remained in Berlin for honorary funeral services in his own cathedral in memory of the august departed. Some day a historian, who will have great things to tell, may relate the real reason for the baffling of the Kaiser's desire to play the role of chief mourner at spectacular death-rites in the other German capital. He had telegraphed the orphans of the murdered Archduke and Duchess that his "heart was bleeding for them." Men who have an X-ray knowledge of Imperial William's psychology were unkind enough to suggest that he longed to parade himself before the mourning populace of the Austrian metropolis as Lohengrin in the hour of its woe, an Emperor on whom it were safer to lean than on the decrepit figurehead now bowed in impotent grief, with a beardless grand-nephew of an heir apparent as the sole hope of the trembling future.

Until the late Archduke Francis Ferdinand began to assert himself, William II's influence at Vienna had been profound. Francis Joseph liked and trusted him. Austria was frequently governed from Potsdam. With the great bar to his ascendency removed from the scene, the German Emperor may well have thought the hour at length arrived for the virile Hohenzollerns to save the crumbling Hapsburgs from themselves, and invertebrate Austria-Hungary from the Hapsburgs. But Vienna decided it was better the Kaiser should stay at home. His political physicians, on the evening of July 1, suddenly discovered that His Majesty was suffering from that famous German malady known as "diplomatic illness," whereupon the court M.D. dutifully announced, through the obliging official news-agency, that "owing to a slight attack of lumbago" the Kaiser would not attend the funeral of the murdered Archduke, "as had been arranged." Forty-eight hours later other "face-saving" procedure was carried out--the Viennese court proclaimed that by the express wish of the Emperor Francis Joseph, no foreign guests of any nationality were expected to attend the Royal obsequies.

On Monday, July 6, William's "lumbago" having yielded to treatment, there was sprung one of the most dramatic of all the _coups_ which preceded the fructification of the German War Party's now fast-completing conspiracy. Although martial law was being ruthlessly enforced in Bosnia and Herzegovina and all Austria-Hungary was in a state of rising ferment over the "expiation" which public opinion insisted "the Serbian murderers" must render, the Kaiser's mind was made up for him that the international situation was sufficiently placid for him to start on his annual holiday cruise to the North Cape. Four days previous, July 2, though the world was not to know it till many weeks afterward, the military governor of German Southwest Africa unexpectedly informed a number of German officers in the colony that they might go home on special leave if they could catch the outgoing steamer. These officers reached Germany during the first week in August, to find orders awaiting them to join their regiments in the field. Notifications issued to Austrian subjects in distant countries were subsequently found also to bear date of July 2. Things were moving.

The _Hohenzollern_ steamed away to the fjords of Norway with the Kaiser and his customary company of congenial spirits. The Government-controlled _Lokal-Anzeiger_ and other journalistic handmaids of officialdom forthwith proclaimed that "with his old-time tact our Emperor, by pursuing the even tenor of his way, gives us and the world this gratifying and convincing sign that however menacing the storm-clouds in the Southeast may seem, _lieb' Vaterland mag ruhig sein_. All is well with Germany." Or words to that effect. Germany and Europe were thus effectually lulled into a false sense of security, for, as one read further in other "inspired" German newspapers, "our patriotic Emperor is not the man to withdraw his hand from the helm of State if peril were in the air." So off went the Kaiser to his beloved Bergen, Trondhjem and Tromsoe to flatter the Norwegians as he had done for twenty summers previous and to shake hands with the tourists who always "booked" cabins in the Hamburg-American North Cape steamers in anticipation of the distinction the Kaiser never failed to bestow upon Herr Ballin's patrons.

The Kaiser's departure from Germany was particularly well timed to bolster up the fiction subsequently so insistently propagated, that Austria's impending coercion of Serbia was none of Germany's doing. The _Hohenzollern_ had hardly slipped out of Baltic waters when Vienna's "diplomatic _demarche_" at Belgrade began. It was specifically asserted that these "representations" would be "friendly." Europe must under no circumstances, thus early in the game, be roused from its midsummer siesta. The official bulletin from the _Hohenzollern_ read: "All's well on board. His Majesty listened to-day to a learned treatise on Slav archeology by Professor Theodor Schiemann. To-morrow the Kaiser will inspect the Fridthjof statue which he presented to the Norwegian people three years ago."

Austria-Hungary has a press bureau, too, and doubtless a Hammann of its own; now it cleared for action. While Vienna's "friendly representations" were in progress at Belgrade, the papers of Vienna and Budapest began sounding the tocsin for "vigorous" prosecution of the Dual Monarchy's case against the Serbian assassins and their accessories. The Serbian Government meantime remained imperturbable. Princip and Cabrinovitch, the takers of the Archduke and Duchess' lives, after all were Austrian-Hungarian subjects, and their crime was committed on Austrian-Hungarian soil. Serbia, said Belgrade, must be proved guilty of responsibility for Serajevo before she could be expected to accept it. Then the Berlin press bureau took the field. The _Lokal-Anzeiger_ "admitted" that things were beginning to look as if "Germany will again have to prove her Nibelung loyalty," _i.e._, in support of Austria, as during the other Bosnian crisis, in 1909.

By the end of the second week of July the world's most sensitive recording instruments, the stock exchanges, commenced to vibrate with the tremors of brewing unrest. The Bourse at Vienna was disturbingly weak. Berlin responded with sympathetic slumps. To the _Daily Mail_ in London and the _New York Times_ I was able, on the night of July 10, to cable the significant message that the German Imperial Bank was now putting pressure on all German banks to induce them to keep ten per cent. of their deposits and assets on hand in money. On the same day an unexplained tragedy occurred in Belgrade: the Russian minister to the Serbian court, Monsieur de Hartwig, Germanism's arch-foe in the Balkans, died suddenly while taking tea with his Austrian diplomatic colleague, Baron Giesling.

Germany the while was going about its business, which at mid-July consists principally in slowing down the strenuous life and extending mere nocturnal "bummeling" in home haunts to seashore, forests and mountains for protracted sojourns of weeks and months. The "cure" resorts were crowded. In the _al fresco_ restaurants in the cities, one could hear the Germans eating and drinking as of peaceful yore. The schools were closed and Stettiner Bahnhof, which leads to the Baltic, and Lehrter Bahnhof, the gateway to the North Sea, were choked from early morning till late at night with excited and perspiring Berliners off for their prized _Sommerfrische_. _Herr Bankdirektor_ Meyer and _Herr_ and _Frau Rechtsanwalt_ Salzmann were a good deal more interested in the food at the _Logierhaus_ they had selected for themselves and the _kinder_ at Heringsdorf or Westerland-Sylt than they were in Austria's avenging diplomatic moves in Belgrade. Stock-brokers were only moderately nervous over the gyrations of the Bourse. Germans who had not yet made off for the seaside or the Tyrol felt surer than ever that war was a chimera when they read that Monsieur Humbert had just revealed to the French Senate the criminal unpreparedness of the Republic's military establishment.

Strain between Austria and Serbia was now increasing. Canadian Pacific, German stock-dabblers' favorite "flyer," tumbled on the Vienna and Berlin Bourses to the lowest level reached since 1910. Real war rumors now cropped up. Austria was reported to have "partially mobilized" two army corps. Canadian Pacifics continued to be "unloaded" by nervous Germans in quantities unprecedented. Now Serbia was "reported" to be mobilizing. It was July 17. England, we gathered in Berlin, was thinking only of Ireland. Berlin correspondents of great London dailies who were trying to impress the British public with the gravity of the European situation had their dispatches edited down to back-page dimensions--if they were printed at all. One colleague, who represented a famous English Liberal newspaper, had arranged, weeks before, to start on his holidays at the end of July. He telegraphed his editor that he thought it advisable to abandon his preparations and to remain in Berlin. "See no occasion for any alteration of your arrangements," was wired back from Fleet Street.

The German War Party, acting through Hammann, now perpetrated another grim little witticism. It was solemnly announced in the Berlin press--on July 18--that the third squadron of the German High Seas Fleet was to be "sent to an English port in August (!) to return the visit lately paid to Kiel by a British squadron." Britain's Grand Armada the while was assembled off Spithead for the mightiest naval review in history--two hundred and thirty vessels manned by seventy thousand officers and men. King George spent Sunday, July 19, quietly at sea, steaming up and down the endless lines of dreadnoughts and lesser ironclads. The Lord Mayor of London opened a new golf course at Croydon. And Ulster was smoldering.

Highly instructive now were the recriminations going on in the German, Austrian and Serbian press. Belgrade denied that reserves had been called up. The _North German Gazette_, the official mouthpiece of the Kaiser's Government, no longer seeking to minimize the seriousness of the Austrian-Serbian quarrel, expressed the pious hope that the "discussion" would at least be "localized." Canadian Pacifics still clattered downward. Acerbities between Vienna and Belgrade were growing more acrimonious and menacing from hour to hour. Diplomatic correspondence of historic magnitude, as the impending avalanche of White Papers, Blue Books, Yellow Books and Red Papers was soon to show, was already (July 20) in uninterrupted progress, though the quarreling Irishmen and militant suffragettes of Great Britain knew it not, any more than the summer resort merrymakers and "cure-takers" of Germany. The foreign offices, stock exchanges, embassies, legations and newspaper offices of the Continent were fairly alive to the imminence of transcendent events, but the great European public, though within ten days of Armageddon, was magnificently immersed in the ignorance which the poet has so truly called bliss.

Her "friendly representations" at Belgrade having proved abortive, Austria now prepared for more forceful measures. On July 21 Berlin learned that Count Berchtold, the Viennese foreign minister, had proceeded to Ischl to submit to the Emperor Francis Joseph the note he had drawn up for presentation to Serbia. As the world was about to learn, this was the fateful ultimatum which poured oil on the European embers and set them aglare, to splutter, burn and devastate in a long-enduring and all-engulfing conflagration. Simultaneously--though this, too, was not known till months later--the Austrian minister at Belgrade sent off a dispatch to his Government, declaring that a "reckoning" with Serbia could not be "permanently avoided," that "half measures were useless," and that the time had come to put forward "far-reaching requirements joined to effective control." That, as events were soon to develop, was an example of the diplomatic rhetoric which masters of statecraft employ for concealment of thought. It meant that nothing less than the abject surrender of Serbian sovereignty would appease Vienna's desire for vengeance for Serajevo.

During all these hours, so pregnant with the fate of Europe, the German Foreign Office was stormed by foreign newspaper correspondents in quest of light on Germany's attitude. Was she counseling moderation in Vienna, or fishing in troubled waters? Was she reminding her ally that while Serajevo was primarily an Austrian question, it was in its broad aspects essentially a European issue? Was the Kaiser really playing his vaunted role as the bulwark of _European_ peace, or was Herr von Tschirschky, his Ambassador in Vienna, adjuring the Ballplatz that it was Austria's duty to "stand firm" in the presence of the crowning Slav infamy, and that William of Hohenzollern was ready once again to don "shining armor" for the defense of "Germanic honor"?

These are the questions we representatives of British and American newspapers persistently launched at the veracious Berlin Press Bureau. What did Hammann and his minions tell us? That Germany regarded the Austrian-Serbian controversy a purely private affair between those two countries; that Germany had at no stage of the imbroglio been consulted by her Austrian ally, and that the last thing in the world which occurred to the tactful Wilhelmstrasse was to proffer unasked-for counsel to Count Berchtold, Emperor Francis Joseph's Foreign Minister, at so delicate and critical a moment. Vienna would properly resent such unwarranted interference with her sovereign prerogatives as a Great Power--we were assured. Germany's attitude was that of an innocent bystander and interested witness, and nothing more. That was the version of the Fatherland's attitude sedulously peddled out for both home and foreign consumption.

Behind us lay a week of tremor and unrest unknown since the days, exactly forty-four years previous, preceding the Franco-Prussian War. The money universe, most susceptible and prescient of all worlds, rocked with nervous alarm. Its instinctive apprehension of imminent crisis was fanned into panic on the night of July 23, when word came that Austria had presented Serbia an ultimatum with a time limit of forty-eight hours. My own information of Vienna's crucial step was prompt and unequivocal. It was on its way to London and New York before seven o'clock Thursday evening, Berlin time. I was gratified to learn at the _Daily Mail_ office in London three weeks later that I had given England her first news of the match which had at last been applied to the European powder barrel. It was five or six hours later before general announcement of the Austrian ultimatum arrived in Fleet Street.

I was not surprised to learn that my startling telegram had aroused no little skepticism. During many days preceding it was the despair of the Berlin correspondents of British newspapers that they seemed utterly unable to impress their home publics with the fast-gathering gravity of the European situation. London was no less nonchalant than Paris and St. Petersburg. England was immersed to the exclusion of everything else in the throes of the Irish-Ulster crisis. Mr. Redmond and Sir Edward Carson loomed immeasurably bigger on the horizon than all Austria and Serbia put together. In the boulevards, cafes and government-offices of Paris the salacious details of the Caillaux trial absorbed all thought. In St. Petersburg one hundred sixty thousand working men threatened an upheaval which bore an uncomfortable resemblance to the revolutionary conditions of 1905. But it was the invincible indifference of London, as it seemed in Berlin, which appealed to us most.

The newspapers of July 21, 22 and 23 came in and indicated that for England Ulster had become Europe. There was obviously little space for, and less interest in, dispatches from Berlin or Vienna describing the "undisguised concern" prevalent in those capitals. On July 21 I quoted "high diplomatic authority" for the statement that the pistol would be at Serbia's breast before the end of the week. But London remained impervious. More than one of my British colleagues, equally unsuccessful in stirring the emotions of his people, threw up his hands in resignation, muttering things about "British complacency," which would have come with poor grace from a mere American.

Since then it has occurred to me that England's sublime unconcern in the approach of Armageddon may have been more apparent than real. Sir Edward Grey's strenuous days and nights of telegraphing to his Continental ambassadors, as England's White Paper revealed, had set in as early as July 20, when he wired Sir Edward Goschen to Berlin that "I asked the German Ambassador today if he had any news of what was going on in Vienna with regard to Serbia." That was No. 1 in the series of historic dispatches comprising the official British record of the genesis of the war, which shows that there was no lack of anticipation of coming events, as far as Downing Street was concerned. So I am impelled to think that there may have been method in Fleet Street's "splashing" (_Anglice_ for "featuring") pretty Miss Gabrielle Ray's entangled love affairs and minimizing the determination of Austria to plunge Europe into war. There is a fine spirit of solidarity in England concerning foreign affairs. British editors in particular traditionally refrain from crossing the policy of the Foreign Office, no matter what the party complexion of the minister in charge. They are accustomed to supporting it unequivocally either by omission or commission, as the interests of Great Britain from hour to hour suggest. Whenever an attitude of debonair detachment toward a given "foreign affair" is best designed to promote the country's diplomatic programme, Fleet Street can be insensibility incarnate, national _esprit de corps_ effectually fulfilling the function of a censor. No one has ever told me that that is why the appointment of a new principal for Dulwich College received almost as much prominence on the morning of July 24 as news from Berlin, Vienna or Belgrade. My suggestion of the reason is a diffident surmise, pure and simple. It contributed materially, no doubt, toward making Germany believe that England was too "preoccupied" with Irishmen and suffragettes to think of going to war for her political honor.

But in Berlin things were now (July 24) moving toward the climax with impetuous momentum. On that day, summing up events and opinion in official and military quarters, I telegraphed the following message to London:

"'We are ready!' This was the sententious reply given today by a high official of the General Staff to an inquiry with regard to Germany's state of preparedness in the event that an Austro-Serbian conflict precipitates a European war.

"I am able to state authoritatively that the _casus foederis_ which binds Austria, Germany and Italy in alliance would come into effect automatically the instant Austria is attacked from any quarter other than Servia.[1]

[1] The "assurances" given me by Foreign Office spokesmen, as reproduced in the foregoing telegram, were, of course, made at a moment when the German Government, no doubt quite sincerely, felt surer than it did ten days hence that the _casus foederis_ which obligated Italy to join Germany and Austria in war would be recognized by her without quibble. Germany, as the world was so soon to find out, had convinced her own people that her war was a holy war of defense, but Italy, visiting upon her Triple Alliance partners the supreme condemnation of contemporary political history, deserted them on the palpable ground that their war was war of aggression, pure and unalloyed.

"I am further able to say that while Germany expects that war between Austria and Serbia is possible, owing to the admittedly unprecedented severity of the Austrian demands, this Government confidently hopes that hostilities will be confined to them.

"It would be going too far to say that 'war fever' prevails in Berlin to the extent it is reported to be rampant in Vienna. I find, however, even in circles to which the thought of war is ordinarily repugnant, that the imminent possibility of a European conflict is contemplated with equanimity. They say that Austria's resolute action has already cleared the atmosphere of long-prevailing 'uncertainty' which was gradually becoming insufferable. They declare in accents of relief that a situation has finally been reached where there can be no retreat. Far worse things, it is declared, are conceivable than the conflagration which Europe for years has half dreaded and half prepared for.

"Official Germany, nevertheless, does not believe that Russia will force the issue. It is argued that the matter at stake is entirely a domestic quarrel between Austria and Serbia and involves Pan-Slavism only indirectly. If Russia makes the controversy a pretext for assisting the Serbians, it is pointed out that 'the world's strongest bulwark of the monarchial principle would practically place the stamp of approval on regicide.' As suppression of regicide propaganda, root and branch, is the mainspring of the Austrian action, the German Government holds it is inconceivable that Russia could in such circumstances align herself with Serbia. If she does, and I am permitted to underline this phase of the crisis with all possible emphasis, the full strength of Germany's and Italy's armed forces are ready to be mercilessly hurled against her, and will be.

"A war against Russia would never be more popular in Germany than at the present moment. For months past the country has been educated by its most distinguished leaders to believe that an attack from Russia is imminent. During the past week Professor Hans Delbrueck has been giving wide publicity to an 'open letter' received from a Russian colleague, Professor Mitrosanoff, containing the following passage:

"'It must not be forgotten that Russian public opinion plays a vastly different role than it did a decade ago. It has now grown into a full political force. Animosity toward Germans is in everybody's heart and mouth. Seldom was public opinion more unanimous.'

"Almost simultaneously Professor Schiemann, the Kaiser's confidential adviser on world politics, has heaped fresh fuel on the anti-Russian fire by declaring: 'We have reason to think that the underlying purpose of President Poincare's visit to the Czar was to expand the Triple Entente into a Quadruple Alliance by the inclusion of Rumania against Germany.'

"The Bourse closed amid undisguised alarm and the wildest fears for what the week-end may bring forth. The public is inclined to remain reassured as long as the Kaiser consents to remain afloat in the _Hohenzollern_ in the fjords of Norway, but he can reach German waters in twenty-four hours aboard the speedy dispatch-boat _Sleipner_, which is attached to the Imperial squadron.

"I asked a military man today what show of force Germany would make at the outbreak of hostilities involving her. He said: 'She could easily mobilize one million five hundred thousand men within forty-eight hours on each of her frontiers, east and west. That gigantic total of three million would represent only the active war establishment and reserves.'"