Immediately prior to declaring war on Russia, Germany twice demanded that Russia halt its mobilization against “us and Austria-Hungary.”
And the pressure became especially acute on the night of 29 July, when the Germans warned St Petersburg that they would consider mobilizing their own forces unless Russia halted its own mobilization.
(Christopher Clark. The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, p. 504)
This is an absurd framing, implying as it does that there was any scenario in which Germany might “consider” going to war and then decide against it. In any case even Clark concedes shortly thereafter (p. 510) that Sazonov “viewed this warning as an ultimatum.” Clark is aware of, but does not quote, the message, in which Bethmann Hollweg warned that:
if Russia continued her military preparations, even though she did not proceed to mobilize, Germany would find herself compelled to mobilize, in which case she would immediately proceed to take the offensive
Christopher Clark hints at the reason for Russian concerns. For a start, the vast majority (90%) of Russian trade passed through the Black Sea, and Russia was aware of their vulnerability should the Ottoman Empire become unfriendly. This was, of course, about to happen—Germany was at that moment concluding their secret alliance with the Ottoman Empire.
(They would shortly thereafter preserve SMS Goeben and SMS Breslau by transferring the two ships to the “neutral” Ottomans, as the battlecruiser Yavuz Sultan Selim and the light cruiser Midilli. And by October—Admiral Wilhelm Souchon still commanding and with the German crew wearing fezzes—in one single stroke challenge the emerging stalemate on the Western Front and cut the Gordian knot of Ottoman indecision by bombarding Russian ports in the Black Sea, leading to a Russian declaration of war)
But Russia was also concerned by Austria-Hungary’s troop movements. Clark acknowledges this:
In 1913, for example, the Russians had learned from their intelligence sources that the Austrians had earmarked as many as seven army corps for the eventuality of a war with Serbia. But in July 1914, reports (of dubious accuracy) from Ambassador Shebeko and the Russian military attaché Vineken suggested that the number of corps currently in preparation might be as high as eight or nine. Russian intelligence read this discrepancy as an indication that Conrad might be shifting from his Serbian-focused Plan B to the Russian-centred Plan R, in other words embarking on a ‘covert shift to full or near-full Austrian mobilization’.
(Christopher Clark. The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, p. 514)
The parenthetical “of dubious veracity” is Clark’s editorializing. He cites Bruce Menning here (his 2015 article “Russian Military Intelligence, July 1914: What St. Petersburg Believed and Why It Mattered,” in The Historian). This is not what Menning says. Menning says:
For intelligence analysts within GUGSh these figures—even with discrepancies—were troubling. Eight corps far exceeded the five–six that the comprehensive intelligence estimate of 1 March 1914 (O.S.) had considered necessary to subdue Serbia, even if allied with Montenegro […] Still worse, there were ominous fragmentary reports of additional mobilizations and deployments, now including both Czech Corps (VIII and IX respectively at Prague and Josefstadt/Leitmeritz) and possibly III Corps (at Graz) in its entirety. Many of these corps-level formations matched intelligence materials for Fall R, the Austro-Hungarian strategic deployment scheme for war against Russia.
Clark simultaneously overstates Russia’s estimate of Austro-Hungarian troop allocations required for a Serbia-only campaign and understates the assessment of what had actually been mobilized (the “discrepancy” Menning mentions has a range of up to 10 corps, “depending on confirmation”).
The effect of minimizing the difference is that Clark acknowledges that Russia had reason to believe Austria-Hungary was mobilizing against it, while presenting that conclusion as irrational—“as many as 7 corps vs 8 or 9” implies the Russians took as little as one extra formation as an existential threat, while Menning’s paper could just as easily have been summarized as “twice as many (10 vs 5) as Russian intelligence guessed would be needed to subdue Serbia.”
For similar reasons, I expect, Clark really uses Menning only for these estimates and to obliquely insult the Russian decisionmaking process. He does not contextualize those reports—as Bruce Menning does, in explaining that, for the Russians, this matched a pattern of intelligence that had been developing over the preceding days:
One was that Berlin was recalling German reserve officers located in Russia. The second was that in Austria-Hungary “exceptional measures thoroughly prepared in peacetime enter into force either upon mobilization or before it, if the political situation so requires.” That same day a supplementary report from the Special Office of the Quartermaster General Section outlined the significance of these “exceptional measures,” especially within the context of secret instructions in GUGSh possession for Austro-Hungarian troop mobilization.
What the GUGSh (the Russian general staff) knew from these instructions was that, in their words, “in general the actual conduct of mobilization is possible before its declaration.” Clark, who must know this because he is citing the same article, does not acknowledge this in characterizing Russia’s military preparations as mere rationalizations so they could “claim to be standing with their backs against the wall” (p. 514).
This is part of a pattern of such editorializing, which always ends on the view most favorable to the German Empire, incidentally. For another striking example (p. 498):
As Grey was proposing his four-power mediation idea at the end of the cabinet meeting of 24 July, [French president Raymond] Poincaré and [French prime minister René] Viviani were crossing the Gulf of Finland on board the France, escorted by Russian torpedo boats. When they arrived in Sweden on the following day, Poincaré exploited the access to secure telegraphic links to ensure that control over the formulation of policy remained with himself and (nominally) Viviani.
Clark does not see fit to mention that we don’t know what Poincaré might have done before having secure telegraph links to “exploit,” because the German Empire was jamming the ship’s wireless signals, putting Paris out of contact with its leadership at a critical juncture before the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia had been issued.
Anyway, speaking of ultimatums, the final from Germany to Russia was of course the one immediately preceding the declaration of war, which demanded Russia “stop every measure of war against us and against Austria-Hungary within 12 hours.” This, alongside the corresponding telegram to France, are documents 24 and 25 in the German White Book.
The first begins: “In spite of negotiations still pending and although we have up to this hour made no preparations for mobilization,” which is a lie. Germany absolutely had made “preparations” by July 31st. Indeed, the ultimatum to Belgium that eventually precipitated French and British involvement had been drafted on the 26th, before any shots had been fired and while Germany was still pretending that they were open to negotiation.
(As Menning puts it, in another line of the article Clark chooses not to quote: “the Russians were not naïve. They understood that German mobilization was lightning fast and that major components might easily lie hidden from outside view.”)
You are the one who has said, repeatedly, that Christopher Clark “proved” the conventional history of the July Crisis is the result of calculated French lies impugning Germany. I assume it is important to you because this is at least the third thread in which you have made this claim. “In my opinion, Germany was an innocent bystander in the outbreak of the Great War” is not falsifiable. It would be a silly opinion, but it’s not making a statement of fact.
“The author of the Sleepwalkers found the documents that proved the French deceived the author the Guns of August and others” is making a statement of fact. It is also untrue, both in that Clark did not “find” anything—The Sleepwalkers merely cites existing scholarship around dates ascribed to documents in the French Yellow Book—and that neither Clark nor the authors he references make the allegation you attribute to them.
(Incidentally Clark mentions Barbara Tuchman exactly once, in a footnote, damning Proud Tower with faint praise as a “superb example” of the historical trend of portraying the pre-1914 world as uniquely “distant”)
To the extent that this misapprehension apparently informs a great deal of your erroneous beliefs about the evolution of the crisis, the “purpose” is to suggest you re-examine your sources. Of course, to the extent that it is simply about that specific source, the “purpose” is that you might, ideally, stop misrepresenting Christopher Clark’s scholarship or—in particular—attributing claims to the book it does not make, and then brushing aside any implication that this appeal to authority might require a cite.
