Free Dönitz: The Last Führer by Peter Padfield

in the Balkans. She had made this very clear after the previous crisis: she would consider an attack on Serbia as a
casus belli
—‘
une question de vie et de mort’. 59
    So in alternating realism and wishful thinking, optimism and doubt and increasing high nervous tension, as in any great conspiracy, the secret preparations went ahead in Berlin and Vienna behind a façade of normality and calm deliberately created to prevent alerting the other powers prematurely. Meanwhile the fleet was put on a war footing. Of the Mediterranean ships, the
Goeben
, which had not been in dock for two years and whose speed was seriously affected by boiler trouble, had been ordered to Pola in the Adriatic and workmen and materials were sent overland from Germany for the necessary repairs. Cruisers on foreign stations were alerted to the state of tension. 60
    Dönitz, as signals officer of the
Breslau
, must have been aware of the alert. In common with all other German naval officers who wrote of this period, he made no mention of it in his memoirs. To outward appearances there was no change in the international squadron lying off Durazzo; occasionally the
Breslau
’s landing parties went ashore to repel insurgents, from time to time in off-duty hours a
Breslau
team played
Wasserball
against a team from HMS
Defence
, yet ‘the continually increasing tension lay like a shadow overall’. 61 This is a revealing sentence if it refers to July as a whole for in accordance with the German policy of complete normality until the very moment to strike, the only ‘constantly increasing tension’ was in Berlin and Vienna and aboard the
Hohenzollern
and the ships of the High Seas Fleet on exercises in the North Sea and in Tirpitz’s hideaway in the Black Forest—and aboard the
Breslau
, now the only Imperial warship in operationalcondition in the Mediterranean, and anchored close by a British heavy cruiser!
    The British position was an enigma. In Berlin the Foreign Ministry pondered the question with the chief of the Admiralty staff: ‘How would it be if we threatened England that if she declared against us we would occupy Holland? How would the Admiralty staff evaluate that?’ 62
    Tirpitz received a report of this conversation, which could not have reassured him about the competence of the diplomats in charge of the game, and in the same post a letter informing him that Austria would deliver a note to Serbia on July 23rd: ‘Private information over its tone differs. Zimmermann thinks Serbia cannot swallow it.’ 63 Tirpitz underlined the final words. The letter went on to say that the German Ambassadors in St Petersburg, London and Paris would go into action on the same day to call for localization of the conflict; evidently it was believed Serbia would not swallow it.
    The Austrian note was delivered as planned while the French President and Premier were at sea on their way home from a visit to Russia and just a few hours out of Kronstadt. As the deliberately humiliating terms and extraordinarily short time for reply became known in the European capitals and the German Ambassadors went into their prepared professions of surprise and complete ignorance of the ultimatum, and sought to advise their host governments of the ‘inestimable consequences’ which might arise as a result of the alliance system if they were to become involved, it was clear that Bebel’s forecast was about to be fulfilled and they were ‘on the eve of the most dreadful war Europe has ever seen’.
    The British Foreign Secretary tried desperately to pull the powers back from the edge and into another international conference, but the timetable of the central powers admitted no delay. On July 28th Austria declared war on Serbia, then one after another—although not without prodding from Berlin—the links of the alliance machinery began to clank together. Finally by July 29th only a few large questions remained: would Italy join the central powers, which way would Turkey