Page - 77 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

Pre-emptive War: Yes or No? 77 against Russia. And without such an offensive he regarded German war plans and the necessary freedom of manoeuvre to develop its main strength against France as threat- ened. In view of the deteriorating situation, Moltke  – in an immediate audience with Kaiser Wilhelm  – demanded almost as an ultimatum the ‘recruitment of all Germans fit for military service’. He recommended to the Permanent Secretary in the Foreign Ministry, Gottlieb von Jagow, that he seize any opportunity to initiate a pre-emptive war if Germany wanted to have a chance of military victory.161 In contrast to the polit- ical leadership, as well as to Kaiser Wilhelm, Moltke indeed expected an intervention on the part of England. Pre-emptive War: Yes or No? It should by no means be assumed that it was merely Moltke and Conrad who fostered ideas about a pre-emptive war. The senior soldiers and some politicians of other states also entertained ideas about a pre-emptive war and worked on polishing the alliance mechanism. The consonance of the ideas and the perceptions to the effect that a war was unavoidable, as well as the willingness to wage war, and indeed better today than tomorrow, was evident across Europe. But everyone had something different in mind. Rarely, however, has the intention of a country to project domestic conflicts out- wardly and to by-pass them by means of war been so evident as in the case of Aus- tria-Hungary in 1914. And yet those in favour of a pre-emptive war did not get their way. In Germany, Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg rejected provoking a war in June 1914,162 and in Austria-Hungary Count Berchtold, like his predecessor Aehrenthal, was no less adverse towards demands for a pre-emptive war. And he at least had a pow- erful ally : the heir to the throne. The ambivalent image of Archduke Franz Ferdinand so often portrayed should be corrected in a number of respects. It would in particular be important not to confuse Ferdinand’s sometimes ‘iron-eating’ style and his overbearing character with his thoughts on war and peace. Attention has already been drawn elsewhere to the fact that he indulged in the perhaps illusionary vision of a renewal of the League of the Three Emperors and thus sought to improve relations with Russia at a single stroke. His notion of cooperation between the three European empires was orientated towards the Holy Alliance and likewise towards phases of mutual understanding or at least respect during the latter part of the 19th century. The heir to the throne would only too gladly have abandoned the alliance with Italy in favour of one with Russia. Franz Ferdinand’s in any case lim- ited plea for a war against Serbia in November/December 1912 was a rather isolated departure from both his earlier and his subsequent fundamental stance, for Ferdinand also envisaged a peaceful solution for the Balkans. During the course of 1913 it re-