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All of these agreements which had any binding force had, as we have seen, been purely business transactions which took into account the wishes of the Monarchy’s neighbours, but not of its peoples; it is true that when Italy and Roumania went over from alliance with the Monarchy to warring against it, the attachment to the Monarchy of its Italian and Roumanian subjects naturally diminished sharply. On the other hand, when the terms of the Treaty of London became known (as they quickly did), the Croats became more bellicosely loyal than ever; Grey’s vague assurance to Supilo counted for nothing compared with the prospect of seeing Croat territory given to Italy if the Monarchy were defeated. And right up to the end of 1916 the relations between the little ‘Czecho-Slovak National Council’ in Paris, still more those between the Czech émigrés in Russia and the Czech politicians in Bohemia and Moravia, were still ambiguous to a degree. To talk of the ‘loyalty’ or otherwise of most of those politicians is to use a misleading term, for their emotional loyalties were exclusively towards their own people.13 But most of the actively disaffected were under lock and key, and very many of the rest genuinely thought that Masaryk was only doing harm to his people: his ideas could never be realized, and only gave the authorities, and the Austrian Germans, an excuse to trample on the Czechs. The interest of the Czechs was still to work for the maintenance of the Monarchy, and for the optimum terms for themselves inside it. Their not infrequent repudiations of Masaryk’s activities, and protestations of their own loyalty to the Monarchy, were insincere only if an emotional connotation was read into them; they were perfectly sincere expressions of what their authors then believed to be the correct tactics for the Czech people to follow.
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The continued vitality of centripetal feelings in the Monarchy owed much to the successes achieved by its arms in the first two years of the war. Things had not, indeed, gone easily at the outset. Conrad’s plan14 had been to crush Serbia in a swift offensive and then to turn against Russia; a relatively large number of Austrian troops had been employed for the Serbian operation instead of being sent to the Russian front. But the Serbs put up an extraordinarily gallant resistance, twice throwing back the Austrians with heavy losses, and meanwhile the Russians proved more efficient than had been expected; although their right flank was nearly defeated by the Germans, they nevertheless overran East Galicia and the Bukovina in September 1914 and threatened, although, except for small raiding parties, they failed to force, the Carpathian passes. In March 1915 the great fortress of Premysl surrendered, and two months later, Italy’s entry into the war opened a third front. Nevertheless, 1915 on the whole passed off well for Austria and her allies. A great Austro-German offensive, which opened on 2 May, drove the Russians far back to a line east of Vilna, Pinsk and Luck, leaving, of Austrian territory, only a corner of East Galicia and the Bukovina in the hands of the enemy. The Italians were held on the Isonzo, and after difficult negotiations had brought Bulgaria into the war in September (Turkey had entered it already in November 1914), Serbia and Montenegro were overrun, and Albania occupied. In 1916 there were again dark months; the Italians won a little ground, Brusilov launched a new big offensive in Volhynia, and when Roumania entered the war, forces of hers penetrated Transylvania, which at the time was almost bare of troops. But the Italian line was stabilized after only a small retreat; that against Russia, after a retirement which was larger, but still stopped east of Lemberg; and the Roumanian armies were quickly thrown back, not only out of Transylvania but even out of Wallachia, and left holding only a precarious line in Moldavia.
But all this cost the Monarchy a heavy toll. Particularly its best officers and men suffered appalling losses in the first fighting (250,000 dead and wounded and 100,000 prisoners in the first four weeks), so that the 21–32 classes had to be called up as early as November 1914, and the 32–42 not long after. There were also very heavy losses in prisoners: 120,000 men were taken on the single day when Premysl fell and over 300,000 in Volhynia in 1916. Those who survived were in grievous state: the supply and hospital services were badly organized, and unscrupulous contractors, who flourished inordinately, especially after Galicia had been overrun, furnished boots soled with paper and uniforms of the most inadequate shoddy. There were also growing difficulties at home, where food soon began to run short. The Russian occupation of Galicia cut off one of the Monarchy’s granaries. Italy’s entry into the war and the British blockade pressed on other sensitive spots, and the domestic producers began to suffer under shortages of manpower and animal labour, lack of fodder and fertilizers, and deterioration of machinery. There were also severe shortages of industrial raw materials, especially those needed by the textile industry.
With these problems, too, the administrative services dealt inadequately, partly out of inexperience, and partly under the handicap of the Monarchy’s non-unitary Constitution, which allowed every component of it a large measure of control over its own internal affairs. Hungary set the example – in 1915 she had undertaken the entire provisioning of the armies, but beyond that she allowed only so much of provisions to go into Austria as her population could comfortably spare, and that at stiff prices. And while Hungary gave the lead, she was by no means the unique offender. Every Austrian Land followed suit, to the best of its powers, so that even by 1915 the food situation was difficult in Vienna and the big Austrian industrial centres. By 1916 it was a big degree worse still. The German Ambassador reported: ‘The people in the suburbs of Vienna are starving; they are being driven to despair by long waits, often in vain, in queues.’
Prices, too, were beginning to rise.
The political regime was highly oppressive. Areas designated as operational zones were, of course, under military administration, and the military saw to it that these zones should be as extensive as possible. In addition, jurisdiction over certain offences had, at the very outbreak of the war, been withdrawn from the civilian authorities and transferred to the military, and a ‘War Supervisory Office’ (Kriegsüberwachungsamt: K.U.A.) was established, as a sort of military security organization. As a military body, it was officially competent for the whole Monarchy, but Tisza’s vigorous defence of all Hungarian citizens, Magyar or non-Magyar, confined its operations to within very narrow limits in the Lands of the Hungarian Crown; it was thanks to Tisza that the Croat Sabor was able to meet, equally with Hungary’s own Parliament, and the regular Croat administration to function, throughout the war. He himself, indeed, set up a very efficient machinery of his own for harnessing Hungary’s resources to the service of the war effort. But the Austrian Landespräsidenten found it harder to resist the military. The Czechophile Governor of Bohemia, Prince Thun, was replaced in March 1915 and thereafter the military there, in Moravia and in Carniola, did much as they pleased. In all the Monarchy, the factories working for the armed forces – a very wide range of enterprises – were under the military: officers controlled them, the workers were subject to military discipline, and recalcitrants were clapped into uniform and sent to the front. The severity of this regime was one reason – the scandalous prevalence of embusqués from the upper classes was another – why the Monarchy never developed such a solidarity of feeling between officer and man, and such a cleavage between serving soldiers of all ranks on the one hand, and munition makers and workers both on the other, as was perceptible in Britain.
The civilian regime was a degree milder than the military, but it was harsh enough. Expression, in particular, was most closely controlled. A clerk was sentenced to death15 (on moral, not aesthetic grounds) for distributing translations of the then popular American pacifist doggerel ‘I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier.’ Nor was any protest constitutionally possible in the West, for while the Budapest Parliament and the Croat Sabor met, so that popular feeling could (within the limits of the franchise) express itself, no such outlet existed in Cis-Leithania, owing to the widespread apprehensions that if the Reichsrat were convoked, its non-German members, and the Social Democrats, would gi
ve voice to disloyal and defeatist sentiments, and thus hearten the Monarchy’s enemies. The German Nationalverband, which was the only group to which Stürgkh could reasonably look for Parliamentary support, had informed him that they would oppose the convocation of the Reichsrat unless he had previously met certain demands which they had worked out: these, besides such requirements as a closer political and economic connection with Germany, included a new status for Galicia, under which its Deputies should be excluded from the Reichsrat (although receiving representation in the Delegations); the recognition of German as the ‘language of State’; a new Bohemian settlement safeguarding their positions there; and revised Standing Orders. These reforms would have to be enacted by octroi.16
As Stürgkh shrank from trying this desperate remedy (to which he might not have got the Emperor’s consent), he had simply left the Reichsrat unconvoked and continued to enact all necessary measures through Para. 14. The Reichsrat building was actually turned into a hospital.
It was the impossibility of protesting in any other effectual way against war and its attendant tyrannies that eventually decided Viktor Adler’s son, Friedrich – in himself as gentle a spirit as stepped – to resort to desperate remedies. On 21 October 1916 he emptied a revolver into Stürgkh in a Viennese restaurant, then crying ‘Down with absolutism! We want peace!’ and surrendering himself to his captors. He had not kept a bullet for himself, because he proposed to utilize his trial for the exposition of his views; but before that could take place, several other events of the first magnitude had occurred.
First, in order of time, came the re-election of Woodrow Wilson to the Presidency of the United States, presaging as it did not only the military defeat of the Monarchy when the United States entered the War (as it was now almost certain to do) but also, in the general belief, political calamity for it on account of the President’s known devotion to the principles of democracy and ‘self-determination’. That he was not going to interpret these doctrines as necessarily fatal to the Monarchy was (most naturally, in view of the language used by him) not appreciated, and his re-election brought strong encouragement to those who liked to think of themselves as representatives and leaders of the ‘subject races’ of the Monarchy.
Then, on 21 November, Francis Joseph passed peacefully away, in the eighty-seventh year of his life and the sixty-eighth of his reign. It has been said that ‘the old Emperor’s person had, while he lived, come by sheer force of habit to constitute so strong a cohesive force among the peoples of his dominions as genuinely to diminish separatism and subversion among them’; while his end had so long seemed imminent that even the convinced advocates of revolutionary change had to a large extent put their plans into cold storage against the day of his death, after which they could be taken out in what would assuredly be a more favourable atmosphere. Thus the mere fact of his death released a whole multitude of pent-up forces, national and social, throughout the Monarchy, and it was humanly certain that the structure of the Monarchy would yield before their impact, in one direction or another; for the new ruler, Francis Joseph’s great-nephew, Charles, was known to be a man of pacific character and great good will, who would not wish, even if he were able, to rule with an iron hand.17
Charles was still only twenty-nine years of age, and little was known of his political ideas, but most of his advisers, including the man whom, as one of his first acts,18 he made his Foreign Minister, Count Czernin, had belonged to Francis Ferdinand’s circle and shared his views on the Magyars,19 and he was generally credited with ideas not dissimilar from his uncle’s: that is, of wishing to placate the Slavs and Roumanians of the Monarchy at the expense of its Germans and Magyars. He was in fact in favour of concessions to the Czechs in Austria, and to the Southern Slavs and Roumanians in Hungary, but he had none of Francis Ferdinand’s pathological detestation of the Magyars and in any case, he could not, at that juncture, venture to challenge Hungary, which by simply cutting off food supplies could have reduced Cis-Leithania to literal starvation. And Tisza, aware of his strong position, consolidated it by arranging for Charles’s early coronation. The ceremony took place in Buda on 30 December 1916 and by the oath which he then swore Charles bound himself to respect Hungary’s laws and to maintain her integrity. As reward for this, Tisza consented to a reasonable renewal of the economic Compromise, and a settlement, which was scheduled to last for twenty years, was eventually reached, although the Monarchy broke up before it came into effect.
Meanwhile, one of Charles’s promises to his peoples, made on his accession, had been to work for peace, and in fact, negotiations for a peace offer, initiated by Burian, had been on foot even before; the Note signifying the Central Powers’ readiness to negotiate went out on 12 December 1916. The effect, however, was disconcerting. Wilson offered himself as mediator and invited the two sides to state their terms. The Germans took charge of the Central Powers’ reply, which read arrogantly enough: inter alia it demanded cessions of territory to the Monarchy from Russia, Roumania and Serbia. The Allies’ terms included ‘the liberation of the Italians, as also of the Slavs, Roumanians and Czecho-Slovaks from foreign domination’.20 This did not in fact mean that the Allies had decided to dismember the Monarchy, but it sounded as though they had done so, and Charles and his advisers lost most of their hopes, for the time, of an early peace. This rather increased the urgency of getting wide support for what looked like being a long war yet; in which connection Charles placed considerable hopes in the influences of constitutional government and a measure of democracy.
In Hungary, Tisza was summoned to introduce suffrage reform at last. In Austria, Koerber, whom Francis Joseph had brought back to fill Stürgkh’s place, but whose ideas could not be brought into harmony with those of the young Emperor, resigned on 14 December, and after a financial expert, Dr von Spitzmüller, had failed to form an administration, the Minister-Presidency was, on 20 December, given to Count Heinrich von Clam-Martinic, who, unlike Koerber, was prepared to accept the Nationaluerband’s conditions préalables.21 Clam formed a Government which included, besides the customary Pole (Dr Michael Bobrzynski), two German Nationalists (Dr Josef Baernreither and Dr Karl Urban) and a clerical minded German civil servant (von Hussarek), and opened negotiations with the Germans and Poles on the measures to be enacted by octroi preparatory to the convocation of the Reichsrat. The proclamation announcing the measures was actually drafted.
But hard on these preliminary moves came the news of the March revolution in Russia. The new Russian Government’s promises to the Poles in fact went little further than the Czar’s, but the Poles of Russia now no longer feared their old masters; more important still, the Western Powers now felt their hands free to go further in their own Polish policies. In fact, declarations encouraging to the Poles came from both countries, and also from the USA, and in August a Polish National Committee was established in Paris. This was then recognized successively by Britain, France, Russia, Italy and the USA. It was now Germany and Austria which appeared as the chief obstacles to the fulfilment of Poland’s national ambitions. The Russians’ more general pronouncements in favour of national self-determination (to which Milyukov added a gloss advocating the disintegration of the Monarchy into national units) whetted national appetites, aad radical ones were encouraged by the amazing ease with which the mighty Czarist regime had been overthrown. Gone, too (although, as events a generation later were to prove, mistakenly), was the fear that the destruction of the Monarchy might result in its components being swallowed up by Russia.
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Under the circumstances the Poles refused to accept the measure of autonomy which Clam and the Nationalverband were offering them, and on 15 April, Charles withdrew his consent to the octroi. Baernreither, Urban and Bobrzynski offered their resignations, but were persuaded, as was the Nationalverband as a whole, to bow to the inevitable, and the opening of the Reichsrat – unreformed – was announced for 30 May.
In preparation for this event, the Polish, Ruthene, Czech
and Slovene Deputies organized their Parliamentary Clubs more tightly, so that in each, one man should speak for all his colleagues. In every case, the bolder and more radical spirits prevailed over the moderates. The Polish Club had met on 15–16 May and had adopted Resolutions to the effect that the situation afforded no basis for discussions on a separate status for Galicia, and that they would be unable to support the Government. Bobrzynski had thereupon resigned. On 30 May the Poles announced their objective to be ‘an independent and unified Poland, with access to the sea’; how this was to be brought about should be a matter for international consideration. The Ruthenes sent a greeting to the Ukrainians of Russia and declared that ‘they would not give up the struggle until the great Ukrainian nation was in enjoyment of its full rights on its entire national territory’, ‘which was to include the Ukrainian areas of Galicia-Lodomeria, as well as Cholm, Podlachia and Volhynia’. They repudiated ‘any organic connection between the Kingdom of Galicia and Poland’. Both the Czechs and the Southern Slavs now came a long way into the open. Both had protested their loyalty when the Allied peace terms were published, and both still made the motions, not altogether insincere, of seeing their future inside the Monarchy; but not as then constructed. The Czechs denounced the Dualist system as ‘injurious to the interests of both the ruling and the subject nations’ and demanded the transformation of the Monarchy into ‘a federation of free and equal States’, one of which was to include ‘all branches of the Czecho-Slovak nation’. The two ‘Progressive’ Czech Deputies went still further, calling for ‘a new Czecho-Slovak State’. The Southern Slav spokesman, the Slovene, Mgr Koroseč, demanded ‘the unification of all districts of the Monarchy inhabited by Slovenes, Croats and Serbs in an autonomous State, free from any national domination, resting on a democratic basis, under the sceptre of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine’.
The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) Page 131
