23 July: acceptance would have reduced her to a dependence less formal
but little less real than that of Bosnia, while the delay in
presenting the demands was used to complete the preparations for war
which rejection would provoke. It was not, however, against Serbia
that the German moves were planned. She could be left to Austria,
while Germany dealt with the Powers which would certainly be involved
by the attack on Serbian independence.

The great Power immediately concerned was Russia, which had long
aspired to an outlet into European waters not blocked by winter ice or
controlled by Baltic States. For that and for the less interested
reasons of religion and racial sympathy she had fought scores of
campaigns against the Turks which culminated in the liberation of most
of the Balkans in 1878; and she could not stand idle while the fruits
of her age-long efforts were gathered by the Central Empires and she
herself was cut off from the Mediterranean by an obstacle more fatal
than Turkish dominion in the form of a Teutonic corridor from Berlin
to Baghdad. Serbia, too, Orthodox in religion and Slav in race, was
more closely bound to Russia than was any other Balkan State; and an
attack on Serbia was a deadly affront to the Russian Empire. It was
not intended as anything else. Russia was slowly recovering from her
defeat in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5 and from the revolutionary
outbreaks which had followed; and there was little doubt that sooner
or later she would seek compensation for the rebuffs she had suffered
from the mailed fist during her impotence. Conscience made Germany
sensitive to the Slav peril, and her militarist philosophy taught her
that the best defence was to get her blow in first. Her diplomacy in
July was directed towards combining this advantage with the
appearance, needed to bemuse her people and the world at large, of
acting in self-defence.