148 The Orthodox Church levied no tithe; the village Pope was remunerated (very modestly) out of subscriptions levied off his parishioners.
149 Kleinwächter, pp. 123–4, has another story, dating, indeed, from the war period, of a Ruthene peasant in the Bukovina who was asked how the Russian troops had behaved in 1915–16 when they were occupying his village. His reply was that it had not been too bad; ‘only when the Czar got angry and sent the Honvéds, it was terrible.’
150 A convenient account of this controversy will be found in G. D. H. Cole, The Second International, vol. III, part II, pp. 532 ff. See also Brügel, Geschichte, V. 77 ff. In 1911 the German and Czech Socialist Deputies in the Reichsrat sat in separate Parliamentary Clubs.
151 These included several German groups and the Czech ‘National Socialists’ or ‘National Workers’ Party’, founded in 1898 under Wenzel Choc, Georg Stribny and Wenzel Klofac. Of them it was said that ‘they outbid the Young Czechs on constitutional (staatsrechtlich) questions, the Social Democrats on social ones, and everything that had gone before in their readiness to obstruct in the Reichsrat’ (Sieghart, op. cit., p. 329).
152 On this subject see Kiszling, pp. 250 ff., far the fullest account of Francis Ferdinand’s various plans. The earlier biographies are scrappy on the subject.
153 Nearly all descriptions of this plan use the phrase ‘Southern Slav areas’, but I cannot find that Francis Ferdinand ever thought of including the Slovenes of Austria in it.
154 Oddly enough, Francis Ferdinand was a ‘Yugoslav’ in the sense that he held Serbs, Croats and Slovenes to be one people (Margutti, p. 125), but before 1906 he does not seem to have drawn the obvious conclusion.
155 See above, p. 732.
156 This was a plan for reorganizing the Monarchy into sixteen ‘States’ (German Austria, German Bohemia, German Moravia with Silesia, Czech Bohemia and Moravia, Magyar Hungary, Roumanian Transylvania, Croatia-Slavonia, Polish West Galicia, Ruthene East Galicia, Slovakia, Carniola, the Voivodina, Szekel-Land, Trentino-Trieste, Dalmatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina), each with its own Government, Parliament and judiciary, but all subject to a strong central authority. For the rest, there is nothing original or particularly profound in Popovici’s work, which is simply one of the innumerable blue-prints for reorganizing the Monarchy which crowd the shelves of libraries. It appealed to the Archduke because, in spite of the author’s past, it saw the future of Transylvania as lying inside the Monarchy.
157 Redlich, Schicksalsjahre, I. 230, II. 66.
158 See Kiszling, op. cit., p. 315.
159 The story which follows is given fully in Hantsch’s Berchtold, pp. 557 ff. A short, convenient account by Goldinger in Vorabend, pp. 48 ff. The minutes of the Joint Ministerial Council from 1914 to 1918 have been published with annotations by M. Komjáthy, Protokolle des Gemeinsamen Ministerrates, etc., Budapest, 1966.
160 Berchtold, Stürkgh, Bilinsky, Krobatin, Conrad. Admiral von Kailer also attended, representing the Navy, but the record does not show him as speaking.
161 According to M. Károlyi, Faith without Illusion, p. 56, Berchtold’s wife, who was a Károlyi, told him in October 1914 that ‘poor Leopold could not sleep on the day when he wrote his ultimatum to the Serbs, as he was so worried that they might accept it. Several times during the night he got up and altered or added some clause, to reduce this risk.’
162 Gestalter, p. 500.
18
The End of the Monarchy
The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy did not survive the conflict which it unleashed when it declared war on Serbia. The end of the war was also the end of the Monarchy. Many is the book which has been written on the question whether this consummation was forced on it, unnaturally, by foreign enemies, some of which had become so only by accident, or whether it was the natural and inevitable result of the forces of decay within its own organism. In fact, the mutual interaction of the internal and external factors was so intimate as to make any distinction between them highly artificial, and if in some cases the former gave the lead to the latter, in others the position was the reverse.
The death-sentence was certainly pronounced by foreign Powers, and the dismemberment carried through partly in the name of general principles sponsored by those Powers, partly in fulfilment of war-time agreements made by them, largely out of military expediency, with neighbours of the Monarchy which coveted parts of its territory, or with elements inside it whose help seemed desirable. Without war, these agreements would not have been made, and it is more than probable that they often went further than the peoples themselves wanted, at the time. Yet the preceding chapters have surely shown that in 1914 the future of the Monarchy was at best problematical. Francis Joseph’s attempt to make his peoples forget their national loyalties in an a-national one had never enjoyed even a semblance of success in Hungary or Galicia, and its failure in the West had become obvious by 1859. After that, the a-national spirit had lived on at the Court and, to an extent which at first was very considerable, among the Emperor’s chosen servants – the professional civil servants, the Army officers, some of the Catholic clergy, some of the high aristocrats. But the number of those whose loyalty was genuinely ‘Habsburg’ rather than to their own people had been dwindling year by year. If the Monarchy was to survive, it must be as a multi-national state, not an a-national one, and in 1914 the peoples of the Monarchy were further than they ever had been from finding the basis of an accommodation between themselves.
At the outset of the war, as at that of most wars in most countries, Kriegsstimmung in the population was fairly general, particularly since no one envisaged even the possibility of a long war (every European war since 1848 had been virtually over in a few weeks). The Germans of the Monarchy naturally stood behind their Government: the German nationalists, because they saw the war as a struggle between Teuton and Slav, waged at the side of Germany, and the Christian Socials and their sympathizers, because loyalty to the Dynasty was part of their creed. The Social Democrats, whom the crisis caught in the middle of preparations for a great international conference, had, while the storm was gathering and again on the day when war was declared, protested against it and washed their hands of responsibility; but when they failed to arrest the march of events, they, like their colleagues in Germany, found theoretical excuses – in this case, the threat of Czarist tyranny – for human feelings, and became quite astonishingly bellicose. The Hungarian Party of Work naturally backed Tisza (who did not reveal his own initial resistance to the ultimatum) and the Coalition leaders, headed for the time by Apponyi,1 hailed the news with cries of ‘At last!’ Afterwards they suggested joining a Cabinet of National Concentration – which proved impossible because they made the condition that Tisza himself should stand down, which he refused to do. Nevertheless, they accepted the necessity of prosecuting the war loyally. The one leading Magyar politician who might have taken a different line, Count Mihály Károlyi, was abroad, trying to convert the United States to his ideas, and got back to Hungary only in October.
The Croats were equally whole-hearted. The news of the assassination had already been greeted with anti-Serb riots, both in Croatia and Bosnia. When war broke out, only a handful of deeply compromised politicians – Trumbić, Supilo and a few more – slipped across the frontier to set on foot abroad the activities to which we shall return. When the Sabor met, the members of the Serbo-Croat coalition sat silent, while the Party of Right poured out objurgations on Serbia and Radić endorsed the war in terms of exuberant loyalty; it is true that in June 1915 the Sabor took the occasion to press for the unification of all the Croats ‘in one State organization’ under the Habsburgs.
The Austrian Poles were more divided than they would have been twenty years before, and the attitude of the ‘Lemberg Democrats’ gave the Austrian authorities considerable anxiety. The Parliamentary leaders of the nation, however, decided that Russia was the enemy in chief, and Pilsudski actually raised a legion to fight her. When the Grand Duke Nicholas, leading his a
rmies into Galicia in August, offered them ‘a re-born Poland under the sceptre of Russia’, there was little response. The Roumanians obeyed their calling-up notices without question and fought bravely, as they did throughout the war; in 1914 their politicians made loyal declarations (Roumania, of course, had not yet decided to break with her former allies). The Italians in 1914 took much the same line as the Roumanians, and the Slovenes, as the Croats.
Jarring notes came from only three of the nationalities in the Monarchy. Very many of the Serbs associated themselves with their nation, rather than their state; the authorities executed a frightening number of them for helping the enemy, and interned or deported even more. Although the Ruthene national parties had declared the war against Russia to be a war for the liberation of the Ukraine, many of the Ruthenes welcomed the Russian armies which occupied their homes in the first weeks of the war. It seems possible, indeed, that not all of them well understood what was happening around them.2 The disaffection was, however, very widespread. Finally, the Czechs followed that policy of keeping an iron in every fire which many small nations, most sensibly, try to pursue, but in which the Czechs had developed an unique expertise. Many of their political leaders, from Clericals to Social Democrats, volunteered declarations of loyalty, some of which were unquestionably sincere. Others, as there is equally little doubt, worked from the first to bring about the destruction of the Monarchy with Russian help. It was Czech émigrés in Russia who obtained an audience of the Czar and expressed to him the hope ‘to see one day the free and independent Crown of St Wenceslas shine in the radiance of the Crown of the Romanovs’; a number of leading nationalist politicians at home formed an underground organization, the Mafia, to organize sabotage and passive resistance; emissaries from Bohemia went to Russia to seek Russian support; and forged leaflets were circulated in Bohemia bearing alleged promises by the Grand Duke Nicholas that one of the Czar’s family would accept the Crown of Bohemia.
And these efforts, combined with the effects of a hostility to everything German which had by now become second nature to the Czech people, and of a more nebulous and less universal, but still fairly general sentimental attachment to Russia, really resulted in fairly widespread disaffection. Some regiments, in particular two from Prague (the 28th and the 8th Landwehr), demonstrated noisily when sent to the front; in April 1915 the 28th went across to the Russians, or at any rate surrendered without resistance, almost en masse; there were many other cases of desertion of individuals or formations to the Russians and the Serbs. Just what proportion of the Czech soldiers behaved ‘treacherously’ was a matter of dispute, even at the time, but it was not inconsiderable,3 and in the spring of 1915 the authorities took severe repressive measures. Klofač had been arrested as early as September 1914; now the same fate overtook Kramař (on 21 May 1915) and many others.4 Kramař was later tried and condemned to death for high treason, although Francis Joseph commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. The Mafia was driven underground, and the few leaders who had escaped abroad to convert the world to the idea of Czech independence – easily the most important of these was Masaryk, who had left for the West as early as December 1914 – were, for the time, almost without contact with their fellow-countrymen at home.
The disciplining of Bohemia did not, of course, mean that those who felt disaffected had undergone a change of heart, but only that they were silenced, but the silencing was, for the time, effectual (incidentally, widely applauded by other Czech politicians), and by the summer of 1915 it really looked as though the centripetal forces in the Monarchy had triumphed fairly decisively over the centrifugal. Neither had the States which were then Austria’s chief enemies yet come round to the belief that the assimilation of political to national frontiers was an overriding postulate of international morality:5 and if France and Britain had held such a view they would have been debarred from acting on it by the fact that Russia – more multi-national than Austria herself – was their ally. In any case, they were still impressed by the value of the Monarchy’s role as a factor in the European Balance of Power and as a barrier alike to German and Russian expansion.
These considerations explain why Britain and France, at this stage, made no attempt to appeal to national separatism in the Monarchy, and paid very little attention to the émigrés: Supilo’s success, described below,6 seems to have been almost fortuitous, and Masaryk and Beneš (who had joined him in September 1915) had no tangible successes at all for a long year after they had begun their work. As for the Russians, they soon lost interest in the Czechs – more, it appears, out of slackness and ignorance than of policy. On the other hand, the big Allies had existing allies, and were seeking new ones, among the Monarchy’s neighbours. These had to be bought, or rewarded, and the primacy enjoyed at the time by the ‘national’ idea made it inevitable that prices should be stated mainly in ‘national’ terms. Consequently, this principle was invoked as excuse for a number of bargains the effect of which would be to mutilate the Monarchy drastically. Sazanov himself began by proposing to turn the national principle to Russia’s own advantage by annexing East Galicia and rearranging the rest of the Monarchy on ‘national’ lines. Nothing came of this plan, which did not become an inter-Allied, nor even an official Russian war aim, nor of Sazonov’s early efforts to detach Roumania from the Triple Alliance.7 But on 26 April 1915, Italy signed with the Allies the Treaty of London, which promised her, in return for her entry into and continuance in the war, rewards which included substantial slices of Austrian territory: the South Tirol up to the Brenner, Gorizia-Gradica, Trieste, Istria as far as the Quarnero, then, after skipping the Hungarian and Croat Littoral, Northern Dalmatia as far as Cape Planka. On the strength of this, Italy declared war on the Monarchy on 23 May.
Meanwhile, the Serbian Government had been in continuous touch with the Allied Governments, especially that of Russia, while Supilo, Trumbić and a few others had founded a Yugoslav Committee which in May had established itself in London and developed a lively propaganda in favour of Yugoslav independence. Half-promises had been given to the Serbs in the spring (this was why Italy was denied the Hungaro-Croat Littoral and Southern Dalmatia), and on 17 August the Allies offered Serbia Bosnia-Herzegovina, Southern Dalmatia and, apparently, other parts of the Monarchy, Grey also promising ‘to facilitate Serbia’s union with Croatia, if the latter so desired’. He appears already to have given Supilo certain assurances, and now, in September, told him that ‘provided Serbia agreed, Bosnia-Herzegovina, South Dalmatia, Slavonia and Croatia should be permitted to decide their own fate’. It is true that the records of what was promised are singularly ambiguous, and the Allies appear later to have been themselves ignorant of the extent to which they were bound,8 but on any natural interpretation of the texts they were now pledged to amputate from the Monarchy all its Serb and Croat territories.
The Czechs, too, had founded a Czecho-Slovak National Council in Paris, under Masaryk’s Presidency,9 and on 3 February 1916, Masaryk got from Briand a promise, which again was at the time personal to the author of it and afterwards not treated as binding in the fullest sense, but yet left its mark on later negotiations, to ‘carry out’ Masaryk’s policy, which appears to have been the creation of a fully independent Czecho-Slovak State, with frontiers even larger than those of the later Republic, except that they did not include Carpatho-Ruthenia.10 And on 17 August 1916, the Allies concluded with Roumania a Treaty11 (on the strength of which she declared war on the Monarchy on 28 August), promising her, in return for her entry into and continuance in the war, all Transylvania, the Bánát, and a frontier ‘running past Szeged and Debrecen to the Carpathians, then East to the line of the Pruth, including the Bukovina’.
The Western Allies had been prevented by consideration for Russia from holding out any prospects to the Poles, but Russia herself had stated her intention of creating an united, autonomous Poland under the Russian sceptre. Thus it was already sure that if the Allies won the war, and fulfilled all their promises, what wou
ld be left of the Monarchy would be something for which the word ‘torso’ would be a strong meiosis. And meanwhile, opinion was hardening perceptibly against allowing even a torso to survive. In particular, the appearance in 1915 of Friedrich Naumann’s ‘Mitteleuropa’, with its vision of an enormous Central European unit which, although Naumann put its capital in Prague, would obviously be dominanted by Germany, immensely strengthened the hands of the party which was insisting that the idea that the Monarchy could form a counterweight to, or barrier against, Germany, was mere illusion. The enemies of the Monarchy gave their cause a great impetus when, in the autumn of 1916, a group of them, which included most of Britain’s acknowledged experts on the Danube Basin and the Balkans, besides non-British sympathizers, began issuing a journal, The New Europe, which pleaded with learning and brilliance that the Monarchy was delenda. The view even penetrated the Foreign Office. In the summer of 1916, Mr Asquith asked the Foreign Office to prepare a memorandum suggesting the basis for a peace settlement. The authors of the resultant memorandum boldly advocated reorganizing Central Europe in national States, arguing that the ‘conglomeration of States’ which would replace the Monarchy would ‘prove an efficient barrier against Russian preponderance in Europe and German extension towards the Near East, because those States would be happy and contented in the realization of their national aspirations, and strong as regards their economic future’.
The Central Powers had, indeed, succeeded in making Russia’s promises to the Poles look fairly toothless, for in 1915 their armies had not only recovered Galicia, but had driven the Russian armies out of Russian Poland itself, but they, too, had seen that it was necessary to do something about the Poles. Having failed to agree between themselves on a policy, they had ended by shelving the question and keeping in being the two Military Governments, in Warsaw and Lublin respectively, which they had established on occupying Russian Poland, but on 5 November 1916 they issued a Proclamation in the names of the two Emperors, that they intended to constitute Russian Poland a fully independent Kingdom, linked with the Central Powers especially as regards defence. The promises did not apply to either Austrian or Prussian Poland, but Austria promised Galicia extended autonomy. In any case, with both sides offering near-independence at least to most Poles, it was hard to anticipate that Galicia would very long remain part of the Monarchy. That both the Germans and the Austrians continued to believe it up to the late summer of 1918 is one of the curiosities of history.12
The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) Page 130
