July 1914: Countdown to War by Sean McMeekin

AUTHOR’S NOTE
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    I WOULD LIKE TO THANK MY AGENT , Andrew Lownie, for taking on this project and sharpening it with his suggestions. Likewise, I am indebted to Lara Heimert of Basic Books for believing in the book and to Roger Labrie and Beth Wright for sharpening my prose. It is always a pleasure to find editors who share one’s enthusiasm for a subject. I am also indebted to the archivists without whom I could not have told my story. I have spent many happy months in the Foreign Office archives of Germany, Austria, Russia, France, and England. While it is impossible to thank everyone, I would like to single out Joachim Tepperberg of the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv in Vienna and Mareike Fossenberg of the Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes in Berlin, both of whom performed wonders on my behalf.
    I have drawn inspiration from secondary works. Like many other historians (particularly Americans, for whom the First World War is not quite as central to our own national story as it is for Europeans), I first fell in love with the subject when I devoured Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August (1962). I still have my tattered old paperback edition, with its cover price (75 cents) reminding me that it comes from another era. While not all of her conclusions have stood up over time, Tuchman’s perfectly wrought character sketches and incomparable scene settings ensure that her book will always find an audience among history lovers. The best thing about The Guns of August , for my purposes, is that she left the July crisis alone, picking up her narrative only on 1 August.
    The historical literature on the July crisis of 1914 is vast, although not quite so vast as that on the First World War, whichresulted from it. Anyone who tackles the July crisis realizes that, on almost any issue of scholarly dispute, Sidney Fay, Bernadotte Schmitt, or Luigi Albertini got there first. It is impossible to write about July 1914 without developing an intimate relationship with Albertini’s three-volume history. This is also true of the great documentary collections compiled by the major powers after the war. While the odd document slipped through the cracks, and revelations continue to emerge from former Soviet or Eastern Bloc archives opened in 1991 (of which I can claim credit for some), for the most part the basic documentation on the July crisis has remained unchanged since the 1930s. Like Albertini’s, like that of nearly all historians, my narrative draws primarily on these great documentary collections. I am grateful to their editors, particularly those behind the famous Kautsky-Montgelas-Schückert series of German documents, which reproduces not only the full text of most key telegrams but also marginalia scribbled on them, with precise time-dating, down to the minute, for dispatch, decoding, and even when they were read by the chancellor or kaiser.
    It has always been my preference to go back to the sources directly, rather than to filter my interpretation through those of others. For this reason, while acknowledging my debts to the historians in the bibliography, I have kept my narrative as clean as possible, eschewing scholarly disputation in the main text. Those wishing to read further may consult the bibliography; those interested in sources and the fine points of debate will find them in the endnotes.
    For readers, I can offer a note on 1914-era diplomatic terminology.
    “Chorister’s Bridge” is shorthand for the Imperial Russian Foreign Ministry. “Whitehall” stands for the British Foreign Office (and/or government), the “Wilhelmstrasse” for the German Foreign Office (and/or the Chancellery), the “Ballhausplatz” (or “Ballplatz”) for the Austro-Hungarian government, and “Quai d’Orsay” for the French Foreign Ministry.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE
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    Austria-Hungary
    Berchtold, Leopold von, Count. Foreign minister of Austria-Hungary, 1912–1915.
    Bienerth, Karl von, Count, Lieutenant-Colonel. Austrian