The Final Crisis 887Bethmann-Hollweg now sent a sealed envelope to the German ambas
sador in Brussels, which was to be presented to the Belgian government when
the order came. It contained a demand that German troops be allowed to
march through Belgium. But, for the moment, there still seemed to be hope.
William II sent a telegram to the tsar expressing his desire for peace. He
signed it, “your very sincere and devoted friend and cousin, Willy.”
Russian ministers and generals had debated since July 28 whether the cri
sis called for a limited mobilization of a million soldiers on the Polish and
Galician frontiers, or a full mobilization. On July 29, word reached Saint
Petersburg that the Austrians had bombarded Belgrade from the Danube.
After twice changing his mind, Nicholas II ordered a full mobilization on
July 30 for the following day. The tsar s diary entry for that day read: “After
lunch, I received Sazonov. ... I went for a walk by myself. The weather was
hot. ... I had a delightful bath in the sea.” The Russian mobilization put an
end to any hope for a negotiated settlement to the crisis. In Vienna, Francis
Joseph declared general mobilization against Russia and Serbia.
A mood of anxious excitement prevailed in Paris. The army had already
readied France’s frontier defenses, but French troops were pulled back sev
eral kilometers from the frontier to avoid any incident with German units.
In France, only the Socialist Party spoke out against the imminent out
break of the international war. Many socialists still hoped that French and
German workers would lay down their weapons and refuse to fire on fellow
proletarians. Anti-militarism ran deep in some of France, not only because
the army took sons away from farms, industrial work, and families, but
also because the French government used the army to break strikes. The
government maintained a list of socialists and other leaders of the left to
be arrested in the event that war was declared.
In the meantime, the Russian and French ambassadors demanded assur
ance of British military support. The French ambassador even asked if the
word “honor” would be stricken from British dictionaries if Britain refused
to join France and Russia. Britain asked both Germany and France for a
guarantee that Belgian neutrality (which had been accepted by Britain,
France, Austria, Prussia, and Russia in 1839) would not be violated. Ger
many did not reply, Bethmann-Hollweg having earlier referred to the old
guarantee as “a scrap of paper.”
In Berlin, even the Social Democratic newspapers now accepted war as
inevitable. Helmuth von Moltke (1848-1916), chief of the German gen
eral staff, pushed for an immediate attack on France, fearing that should
Russian mobilization proceed any further, the Schlieffen Plan might fail.
On July 31, 1914, Germany warned Russia to suspend mobilization at once.
Germany demanded that France guarantee its neutrality in the event of a
Russo-German war, and that German troops be allowed to occupy a number
of French frontier forts as a show of French good faith. This no French
government could accept. When no response was heard from either Russia
or France, on August 1 the German army mobilized.