Like every other politician in Europe Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg had spent his career talking of war, considering it, evaluating its prospects. Morocco, Durazzo, or Armenia—the obscure places of the globe had repeatedly inspired speculations of Armageddon. But at the eleventh hour, with reality on his doorstep, Bethmann sought to withdraw from the brink. He turned eastward, not to St. Petersburg, but to Vienna, encouraging Austria at least to consider the prospects of mediation. Germany, he declared, refused “to be drawn lightly into a world conflagration by Vienna.” A second dispatch, reflecting Pourtalès’ conversations with Sazonov, suggested that if Austria now declined to bend it would scarcely be possible to blame Russia for the outbreak of a war.89
Metaphorically at least, Bethmann was speaking into a wire deader than Yanushkevich’s demolished telephone. Berchtold did agree to discuss views with St. Petersburg, but remained adamant in his insistence that this time the great powers would have to accept Serbia’s reduction to vassalage. Apart from Austria’s particular circumstances, the risks to Europe as a whole of allowing this petty state a continued free hand were entirely too high.90
In this context, the final agreement between Bethmann and Moltke to proclaim Germany’s State of Imminent War (drohende Kriegsgefahrzu-stand) no later than the morning of July 31 reflected more desperation than affirmation. The initial decision was taken around 9:00 p.m. on July 30 at the end of another long, exhausting day of waiting for words from Vienna or St. Petersburg that never came. Unlike the Russian, the German system had no built-in grace periods. Implementing the drohende Kriegs-gefahrzustand meant automatic mobilization and war. The first rumors of a Russian general mobilization reached Berlin around 11:00 p.m. This was probably enough for Bethmann. His long-term forebodings about Russia’s aims and intentions could scarcely have led him to put much faith in any last-minute changes in St. Petersburg’s course. There was still time—twelve or fifteen hours—for something to happen, even if no one quite knew what. But one final corroboration, one final scrap of paper, remained important.91
The stream of reports to Berlin that Russia had ordered general mobilization steadily increased. At 8:00 a.m. on the 31st the intelligence officer of XX Corps at Allenstein sent a coded message. His agents had seen at several points along the Russian frontier red posters proclaiming general mobilization. Moltke was initially skeptical. Perhaps the poster announced no more than a practice mobilization, or a recall of reservists. When confronted with corroborating accounts from XVII Corps at Danzig and VI Corps at Breslau, Moltke breathed deeply and said that Germany now had no choice but to mobilize. His next step was to telephone XX Corps headquarters, insist he needed solid proof of Russia’s mobilization, and instruct that an actual notice be obtained by any means necessary.
Perhaps the chief of staff wanted physical evidence in case Bethmann changed his mind. Perhaps after a month of ephemera, of telegrams and conversations and phone messages, he just wanted to have something tangible in his possession. But any lingering thoughts that the red posters were phantoms of overheated imaginations, that this crisis would fade away as had so many others, vanished when the intelligence officer of XX Corps took the risk of telephoning over an open line to report that a copy of the Russian announcement was in German hands.92
German intelligence in the east depended heavily for low-level information on Polish and Lithuanian Jews. Cattle dealers and small-scale merchants, occasionally smugglers, they were constantly moving back and forth across the border. Few of them had any cause to feel loyalty towards a tsarist government that had systematically and brutally persecuted Jews for generations. Fewer still cared much about the high politics of the goyim except as it influenced their lives, threatening their sons with conscription or offering the chance to turn a profit. Selling grain to a commissary, horses to a remount officer, or information to an intelligence bureau—all were part of the same process of making a living on the margins of societies whose official representatives despised and distrusted them.93
Pincus Urwicz was a merchant in the Russian town of Kolno—a high-flown designation for a horse-and-cart trader in general merchandise who had a small sideline in military information. To date he had hardly been a Scarlet Pimpernel. The bits and pieces of news he delivered to Allenstein were so unimportant, the documents he obtained so routine, that he had never felt constrained to take security precautions more profound than carrying the material out of plain sight. Though German records are silent on this point, it is probable that Urwicz was a low-grade double agent, providing similar information to the Russians on his return trips. But on July 30 he noticed something unusual. Large placards in the Russian language were being posted all over Kolno. Like many of his coreligionists, Urwicz read no Russian. But talk of mobilization and war was as common in the marketplaces and synagogues along the border as it was in barracks or offices. Urwicz waited until dark, slipped out of his house, made his way to the city hall, and removed one of the posters. Then, with a coolness surprising under the circumstances, he returned home and went to sleep. After a few hours he harnessed his horse and started for the border, the poster carefully sewn into his coat.
Urwicz was both a familiar figure and a potential firsthand source of information on what the Germans might be doing. The Russian guards passed him through without question, and he promptly reported to the German customs office. When his contact officer, Captain von Röder, received a telephone call that a Jew with a Russian mobilization poster was on the German side of the frontier, he had no trouble securing a car to take him at the breakneck speed of thirty-five miles an hour to a rendezvous with Urwicz.94
The ironic implications of a Prussian aristocrat dashing off to meet a despised Ostjude are exceeded by the greater irony that made the whole event a footnote. At 11:45 a.m., only a few minutes after Röder confirmed to Berlin the fact of Russian mobilization, official notification arrived from St. Petersburg. At 1:00 p.m. Germany declared its own drohende Kriegs-gefahrzustand. At 3:30 p.m., Bethmann telegraphed Pourtalès to inform Sazonov that mobilization must follow unless Russia stood down her military preparations and clearly notified Germany of that fact within twelve hours.95 Pincus Urwicz slipped out of history’s pages. How might postwar anti-Semites have coped with the story had Urwicz crossed the border a few hours earlier, or had the Russians announced their intentions a few hours later? It would have been a challenge to deny the deed of a little man who, whatever his motives, risked his life to bring Germany its first proof that, at last, the Cossacks were coming.
PART II
NOW THRIVE THE ARMOURERS
4
The Virgin Soldiers
I
In the German army, high summer was a pause for breath. Officers contemplated long leaves and cures. Time-expiring NCOs thought of pensions and prospective civil-service posts. Privates in their last weeks of active duty invested in beer mugs, pipes, and photos commemorating their service. Regimental and brigade exercises were over. Next on the training schedule would be the autumn maneuvers, which, rumor had it, were this year expected to be more realistic than ever. In the garrison towns of East Prussia, parade grounds and barracks stood temporarily empty as the regiments turned to help bring in a bumper crop, one of the best in years.