Europe's Last Summer Read online

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Europe in 1914

  Title

  Prologue (i) Out of the Blue

  (ii) The Importance of the Question

  (iii) A Summer to Remember

  PART ONE EUROPE'S TENSIONS CHAPTER 1: EMPIRES CLASH

  CHAPTER 2: CLASSES STRUGGLE

  CHAPTER 3: NATIONS QUARREL

  CHAPTER 4: COUNTRIES ARM

  CHAPTER 5: ZARATHUSTRA PROPHESIES

  CHAPTER 6: DIPLOMATS ALIGN

  PART TWO WALKING THROUGH MINEFIELDS CHAPTER 7: THE EASTERN QUESTION

  CHAPTER 8: A CHALLENGE FOR THE ARCHDUKE

  CHAPTER 9: EXPLOSIVE GERMANY

  PART THREE DRIFTING TOWARD WAR CHAPTER 10: MACEDONIA – OUT OF CONTROL

  CHAPTER 11: AUSTRIA – FIRST OFF THE MARK

  CHAPTER 12: FRANCE AND GERMANY MAKE THEIR PLAY

  CHAPTER 13: ITALY GRASPS; THEN THE BALKANS DO TOO

  CHAPTER 14: THE SLAVIC TIDE

  CHAPTER 15: EUROPE GOES TO THE BRINK

  CHAPTER 16: MORE BALKAN TREMORS

  CHAPTER 17: AN AMERICAN TRIES TO STOP IT

  PART FOUR MURDER! CHAPTER 18: THE LAST WALTZ

  CHAPTER 19: IN THE LAND OF THE ASSASSINS

  CHAPTER 20: THE RUSSIAN CONNECTION

  CHAPTER 21: THE TERRORISTS STRIKE

  CHAPTER 22: EUROPE YAWNS

  CHAPTER 23: DISPOSING OF THE BODIES

  CHAPTER 24: ROUNDING UP THE SUSPECTS

  Picture Section 1

  PART FIVE TELLING LIES CHAPTER 25: GERMANY SIGNS A BLANK CHECK

  CHAPTER 26: THE GREAT DECEPTION

  CHAPTER 27: BERCHTOLD RUNS OUT OF TIME

  CHAPTER 28. THE SECRET IS KEPT

  PART SIX CRISIS! CHAPTER 29: THE FAIT IS NOT ACCOMPLI

  CHAPTER 30: PRESENTING AN ULTIMATUM

  Picture Section 2

  CHAPTER 31: SERBIA MORE OR LESS ACCEPTS

  PART SEVEN COUNTDOWN CHAPTER 32: SHOWDOWN IN BERLIN

  CHAPTER 33: JULY 26

  CHAPTER 34: JULY 27

  CHAPTER 35: JULY 28

  CHAPTER 36: JULY 29

  CHAPTER 37: JULY 30

  CHAPTER 38: JULY 31

  CHAPTER 39: AUGUST 1

  CHAPTER 40: AUGUST 2

  CHAPTER 41: AUGUST 3

  CHAPTER 42: AUGUST 4

  CHAPTER 43: SHREDDING THE EVIDENCE

  PART EIGHT THE MYSTERY SOLVED CHAPTER 44: ASSEMBLING IN THE LIBRARY

  CHAPTER 45: WHAT DID NOT HAPPEN

  CHAPTER 46: THE KEY TO WHAT HAPPENED

  CHAPTER 47: WHAT WAS IT ABOUT?

  CHAPTER 48: WHO COULD HAVE PREVENTED IT?

  CHAPTER 49: WHO STARTED IT?

  CHAPTER 50: COULD IT HAPPEN AGAIN?

  CHAPTER 51: SUMMING UP

  Epilogue CHAPTER 52: AUSTRIA'S WAR

  CHAPTER 53: GERMANY'S WAR

  APPENDIX 1: THE AUSTRIAN NOTE

  APPENDIX 2: THE SERBIAN REPLY

  WHO WAS WHO

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  www.randomhouse.co.uk/vintage

  EUROPE'S LAST SUMMER

  David Fromkin is Professor of International Relations, History and Law at Boston University. He has written six other books, including A Peace to End All Peace, which was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in New York City.

  ALSO BY DAVID FROMKIN

  The Way of the World

  Sarajevo Crossing

  In the Time of the Americans

  A Peace to End All Peace

  The Independence of Nations

  The Question of Government

  David Fromkin

  EUROPE'S LAST

  SUMMER

  Why the World Went to War

  in 1914

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

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  For Alain Silvera—

  The peremptory transition from an apparently profound peace to violent general war in a few midsummer weeks in 1914 continues to defy attempts at explanation.

  —JOHN KEEGAN, The First World War

  EUROPE'S LAST SUMMER

  PROLOGUE:

  (i) Out of the Blue

  Shortly after eleven o'clock at night on Sunday, December 29, 1997, United Airlines Flight 826, a Boeing 747 carrying 374 passengers and 19 crew, was two hours into its scheduled trip across the Pacific from Tokyo to Honolulu. It had reached its assigned cruising altitude of between 31,000 and 33,000 feet. Meal service was about to be completed. It had been an uneventful trip.

  In a terrifying instant everything changed. The plane was struck, without warning, by a force that was invisible. The aircraft abruptly nosed up; then it nosed down into a freefall. Screaming bodies were flung about promiscuously, colliding with ceilings and with serving carts. A thirty-two-year-old Japanese woman was killed and 102 people were injured. Regaining control of the jumbo jet, the captain and cockpit crew guided Flight
826 back to the Japanese airport from which it had taken off hours before.

  What was so frightening about this episode was its mysteriousness. Until the moment of impact, the flight had been a normal one. There had been no reason to expect that it would be anything else. There had been no warning: no flash of lightning across the sky. You could not see it coming, whatever "it" may have been. Passengers had no idea what had hit them and airline companies were in no position to assure the public that something similar would not happen again.

  Experts quoted by the communications media were of the opinion that Flight 826 had fallen victim to what they called "clear air turbulence." They likened this to a horizontal tornado, but one that you could not see. Some of the experts who were interviewed expressed the hope that within a few years some sort of sensing technology would be developed to detect these invisible storms before they strike. Transparency, the public learned from this episode, signifies little; a pacific sky can rise up in wrath as suddenly as can a pacific ocean.

  Something like such an attack of clear air turbulence is supposed by some to have happened to European civilization in 1914 during its passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. The world of the 1890s and 1900s had been, not unlike our own age, a time of international congresses, disarmament conferences, globalization of the world economy, and schemes to establish some sort of league of nations to outlaw war. A long stretch of peace and prosperity was expected by the public to go on indefinitely.

  Instead, the European world abruptly plunged out of control, crashing and exploding into decades of tyranny, world war, and mass murder. What tornado wrecked civilized Old Europe and the world it then ruled? In retrospect, it may be less of a mystery than some of those who lived through it imagined. The years 1913 and 1914 were ones of dangers and troubles. There were warning signs in the early decades of the twentieth century that catastrophe might well lie ahead; we can see that now, and military and political leaders could see it then.

  The sky out of which Europe fell was not empty; on the contrary, it was alive with processes and powers. The forces that were to devastate it—nationalism, socialism, imperialism, and the like—had been in motion for a long time. The European world already was buffeted by high winds. It had been traversing dangerous skies for a long time. The captain and the crew had known it. But the passengers, taken completely by surprise, insistently kept asking: why had they received no warning?

  (ii) The Importance of the Question

  In the summer of 1914 a war broke out in Europe that then spread to Africa, the Middle East, Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas. Known now, somewhat inaccurately, as the First World War, it ended by becoming in many ways the largest conflict that the planet had ever known. It deserved the name by which it was called at the time: the Great War.

  To enter the lists, countries of the earth ranged themselves into one or another of two worldwide coalitions. One, led by Great Britain,* France, and Russia, was called the Triple Entente;† the other, led by Germany and Austria-Hungary, was known at first as the Triple Alliance.§ Between them the two coalitions mobilized about 65 million troops. In Germany and France, nations that gambled their entire manhood on the outcome, 80 percent of all males between the ages of fifteen and forty-nine were called to the colors. In the ensuing clashes of arms they were slaughtered.

  *Beginning in 1801, the official title of Great Britain was the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland"; for short, the United Kingdom.

  † Called "the Allies" during the war.

  § with Italy as the third member in peacetime. Called "the Central Powers" during the war.

  More than 20 million soldiers and civilians perished in the Great War, and an additional 21 million were wounded. Millions more fell victim to the diseases that the war unleashed: upwards of 20 million people died in the influenza pandemic of 1918–19 alone.

  The figures, staggering though they are, fail to tell the whole story or to convey the full impact of the war on the world of 1914. The consequences of the changes wrought by the crisis of European civilization are too many to specify and, in their range and in their depth, made it the turning point in modern history. That would be true even if, as some maintain, the war merely accelerated some of the changes to which it led.

  On August 8, 1914, only four days after Great Britain entered the war, the London Economist described it as "perhaps the greatest tragedy of human history." That may well remain true. In 1979 the distinguished American diplomat and historian George Kennan wrote that he had "come to see the First World War, as I think many reasonably thoughtful people have learned to see it, as the grand seminal catastrophe of this century."

  Fritz Stern, one of the foremost scholars of German affairs, writes of "the first calamity of the twentieth century, the Great War, from which all other calamities sprang."

  The military, political, economic, and social earthquakes brought about a redrawing of the map of the world. Empires and dynasties were swept away. New countries took their place. Disintegration of the political structure of the globe continued over the course of the twentieth century. Today the earth is divided into about four times as many independent states as existed when the Europeans went to war in 1914. Many of the new entities—Jordan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia are examples that come to mind—are countries that never existed before.

  The Great War gave birth to terrible forces that would plague the rest of the century. To drive Russia out of the war, the German government financed Lenin's Bolshevik communists, and introduced Lenin himself into Russia in 1917—in Winston Churchill's words, "in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or of cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city." Bolshevism was only the first of such war-born furies, followed in years to come by fascism and Nazism.

  Yet the war also set in motion two of the great liberation movements of the twentieth century. As Europe tore itself apart, its over-lordship of the rest of the planet came undone, and over the course of the century, literally billions of people achieved their independence. Women, too, in parts of the world, broke free from some of the shackles of the past, arguably as a direct consequence of their involvement in war work—jobs in factories and in the armed forces—beginning in 1914.

  Another kind of liberation, a wide-ranging freedom from restraint, came out of the Great War and has expanded ever since in behavior, sex life, manners, dress, language, and the arts. Not everybody believes it to be a good thing that so many rules and restrictions have gone by the way. But whether for good or ill, the world has traveled a long way—from the Victorian age to the twenty-first century—along paths that were blasted out for it by the warriors of 1914.

  In searching for the origins of any of the great issues that have faced the world during the twentieth century, or that confront it today, it is remarkable how often we come back to the Great War. As George Kennan observed: "all the lines of inquiry, it seems to me, lead back to it." Afterwards the choices narrowed. The United States and even Great Britain had a choice, for example, of whether or not to enter the First World War—indeed disagreement has persisted ever since as to whether they were wise to do so—but, realistically, the two countries had little or no choice at all about whether or not to join battle in the Second.

  There was nothing inevitable about the progression from the earlier conflict to the later one. The long fuse could have been cut at many points along the way from 1914 to 1939, but nobody did cut it. So the First World War did in fact lead to the Second, even though it need not have done so, and the Second, whether or not it needed to do so, led to the Cold War. In 1991 historians Steven E. Miller and Sean M. Lynn-Jones maintained: "Most observers describe the present period of international politics as the 'post–Cold War' era but in many ways our age is better defined as the 'post–World War I' era."

  From the start, the explosion of 1914 seemed to set off a series of chain reactions, and the serious consequences were soon apparent to contempor
aries: In the Introduction to The Magic Mountain (1924), Thomas Mann wrote of "the Great War, in the beginning of which so much began that has scarcely yet left off beginning."

  Nor has it entirely left off today. On April 21, 2001, the New York Times reported from France the return to their homes of thousands of people who had been evacuated temporarily because of a threat from munitions left over from World War I and stored near them. These included shells and mustard gas. The evacuees had been allowed to return home after fifty tons of the more dangerous munitions had been removed. But a hundred tons of the lethal materials remained—and remain. So munitions from the 1914 war may yet explode in the twenty-first century.

  Indeed, in a sense they already have. On September 11, 2001, the Muslim fundamentalist suicide attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City destroyed the heart of lower Manhattan and took some three thousand lives. Osama bin Laden, the terrorist chieftain who seemingly conjured up this horror and who threatened more, in his first televised statement afterwards described it as vengeance for what had happened eighty years earlier. By this he presumably meant the intrusion of the Christian European empires into the hitherto Muslim-governed Middle East in the aftermath of—and as a consequence of—the First World War. Bin Laden's sympathizers who hijacked jumbo jets had smashed them into the twin towers in pursuance of a quarrel seemingly rooted in the conflicts of 1914.

  Similarly, the Iraq crisis that escalated in 2002–03 drove journalists and broadcast news personalities to their telephones, asking history professors from leading American universities how Iraq had emerged as a state from the embers of the First World War. It was a relevant question, for had there been no world war in 1914, there might well have been no Iraq in 2002.