Clam in his reply glided over these demands, announcing his programme to be ‘Austria. An Austria which has grown up through a splendid historical development.’ This satisfied no one, and he was also vehemently attacked for his extreme Conservative past (like his uncle and father, he had been a leader of the Bohemian Feudalists). As the Poles now definitely informed him that they would not support him, although they would consider voting essential legislation under another Government, Clam resigned on 23 June. To replace him, Charles made what was originally meant as the stop-gap appointment of Ignaz von Seidler, a permanent official in the Ministry of Agriculture, the only man anyone could think of who was not tarred with the brush of Para. 14. Seidler, although a German, was no extreme German nationalist. The Slav political leaders in the Reichsrat refused to co-operate with him, but he took into his Cabinet members of all the chief nationalities, and on 2 July, Charles amnestied a number of political prisoners, including Kramař, and made further concessions including restoration of trial by jury. But he was to learn, as others had found before him, that no formula existed for making a square out of the Austrian polygon. The Czechs swallowed the concession and asked for a second helping, while both the loyal ‘schwarzgelb’ elements and the German nationalists were correspondingly embittered. For the first time in Austria’s history, a proportion of German nationalist feeling began seriously to turn against the existence of the Monarchy.
The Germans and Poles nevertheless gave Seidler enough support to enable him to keep Parliamentary government in being for another year, but the Reichsrat led only a shadow-existence, of which few but its own members took any cognisance. The weight of political life in Cis-Leithania now lay almost entirely with the various ‘national’ committees and associations.
Meanwhile, Tisza had resigned the Minister Presidency on 23 May, rather than introduce what he believed to be the fatal measure of suffrage reform. Charles gave the position to the young Count Maurice Esterházy, who in September, owing to ill-health, handed it on to the old war-horse, Wekerle. The Cabinet was composed of members of the old Coalition, with a few new men, including a professing Jew, Vázsonyi, as Minister of Justice. They declared themselves ready to introduce suffrage reform, and Vázsonyi actually agreed a fairly radical measure with the Social Democrats, but Tisza, who still commanded the Party of Work, refused to agree to it; it was only a year later that Parliament accepted a watered-down version of the Bill, and that in return for acceptance of further ‘national’ demands, including those concessions over the army which Francis Joseph had refused so brusquely ten years before.22 Thus those Hungarians who still professed themselves ‘’67ers’ had made the link with Austria more tenuous than ever, while more and more ground was being gained by those who went further still. Chief among these was Count Mihály Károlyi, who was now propagating the thesis that if the Monarchy broke with Germany and asked for peace, and Hungary broke, or as near as might be, with Austria, and at the same time introduced democratic reforms and made concessions to the nationalities, all her troubles would be solved at once: her neighbours would drop their designs on her when they saw their kinsmen well treated, and the Entente would have no reason to treat her harshly. He soon gained a considerable following, composed partly of naïve nationalists who accepted his thesis, partly of radicals who wanted social reform for its own sake.
Meanwhile, the military situation of Austria and her allies was still far from being altogether unfavourable. The United States had declared war on Germany (although not on the Monarchy), but it would be some time before it could put an army into the field, and the unrestricted submarine warfare which Germany had initiated (against the Austrians’ protests) was taking a heavy toll of Allied shipping. Russia’s war effort had become almost ineffectual, and on 15 December the Bolsheviks were obliged to sign an armistice, Roumania following suit two days later. In the West, both France and Italy were near-exhausted – in October Italy suffered, at Caporetto, one of the heaviest defeats of the war – and Britain weary. Victory for Austria seemed not impossible, if she could hold on a little longer.
But at home, the autumn of 1917 and the following winter were grim indeed. The harvest was bad everywhere, yielding only half the anticipated quantities in the German and Hungarian districts and one-third in the Slav. Less than this was delivered to the authorities, for the farmers were hoarding everywhere. In a well-meant endeavour to tempt supplies on to the market, Esterházy had abolished the requisitioning machinery in Hungary. The foodstuffs appeared, but were bought up by speculators. Wekerle restored controls and even created an independent Ministry of Public Supply, but the damage was done. The Minister, Hadik, scraped together just enough to feed the army after a fashion, but there was little over for Austria. Then came an early and hard winter.
The prices of basic necessaries were controlled, but these were in such short supply that everyone had to supplement them, if he could, on the free market. Here prices were soaring and inflation setting in.
It was thus a time of great anxiety for the workers and middle classes, especially of Vienna and the big industrial centres, and a great war-weariness set in. Revolutionary feeling was stimulated by Friedrich Adler’s defence,23 which it took him two whole days to deliver – at his trial, in reality an eloquent attack on the ‘system’ and plea for peace – and by the example of the Russian revolution, of which sanguine stories were brought home by returning prisoners of war, many of them imbued with extremist doctrines.
In these circumstances, the Social Democrat Party became a force, the weight of which was on the side of ending the war. At its Congress in October 1917, the Party adopted a programme which in essentials was that of the Independent Socialists of Germany, calling for a peace without annexations or reparations. In January 1918, when the flour ration was reduced from 200 to 165 grammes per day, a strike broke out among the munition workers of Wiener Neustadt, whence it spread to Vienna and even Hungary. It was almost of revolutionary dimensions, and the Social Democrat leaders agreed to pacify the workers only on condition that certain internal alleviations be introduced, and that the peace negotiations with Russia then proceeding at Brest-Litovsk should not be allowed to break down on territorial issues. The Government had to promise formally to fulfil these terms.
At this time an important change came in the Party’s policy. Among the repatriates from Russia was Dr Otto Bauer, a very brilliant Socialist thinker who already before the war had made his name by his great study Die Nationalitätenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie. Bauer foresaw the break-up of the Monarchy and decided to make friends with the Nationalist leaders. In opposition to Renner’s Great Austrian programme, he proposed at the October Congress a resolution which practically endorsed separation on national lines. The Party found this too much, but a Left wing now formed, under Bauer’s leadership, and in January 1918, this group produced its own ‘nationalities programme’, recognizing the right of the non-Germans to self-determination and claiming the same right for the Germans.
The great strikes of January were followed by others in other parts of the Monarchy, and even, on 1 February, by a mutiny of the fleet in Cattaro harbour.
On 9 February the Central Powers concluded a separate peace with the Ukraine which, it was hoped, would relieve the supply situation. In the event, it brought only meagre help, for the task of getting more than a fraction of their hoards out of the Ukrainian peasants proved beyond the powers of the military. It also involved further political trouble with the Poles, since the Central Powers had in return to recognize as Ukrainian the district of Cholm, which was disputed between Poles and Ukrainians, and Austria had further to promise to constitute East Galicia and the Bukovina as a separate Crownland. Until then, a party among the Austrian Poles had still favoured an ‘Austrian’ solution for the Polish question: Charles was to have been proclaimed King of Poland. Now the Poles denounced him for betraying their cause, and Galicia became demonstratively disloyal – only a few Conservatives remained true to the Monarc
hy. As by this time the United States, Britain and France had all come out in favour of Polish independence, it was clear that failing a miracle, Polish Galicia, at least, was lost to the Monarchy. On the other hand, its prospects of retaining its Czech, Croat and Slovene districts had brightened, for although the United States had now declared war on the Monarchy also, and Wilson was making magniloquent speeches on self-determination as ‘not a mere phrase but an imperative principle of action which statesmen would thereafter disregard at their peril’, yet in fact, secret endeavours, in which precisely Wilson was a moving force, were being made to entice Austria into a separate peace. If this were to be achieved, her territory would have to be left intact in so far as engagements which could not be repudiated did not absolutely forbid, and the Allies appear not to have regarded their promises to Supilo and Masaryk, or even the Serbs, as falling under this heading. At any rate, they went back on them a long way.24
Map 6 (See note on p. 837)
But the spirits that were abroad now could no longer be layed. The Poles were practically ignoring Vienna. The Czechs were by now secretly taking their orders from the National Committee in Paris: these were, to make no move which might hinder or retard the disintegration of the Monarchy. On 6 January 150 Czech political leaders adopted a Resolution25 which declared that the ‘Czecho-Slovak nation’ now regarded itself as ‘quit of any obligation towards the Dualist Monarchy and the Dynasty’ and ‘master of its own combatant forces’. It demanded independence in a sovereign State ‘erected within the historic frontiers of the Lands of the Bohemian Crown and the Slovak people’.
On 20 July 1917, the Yugoslav Committee and the Serb Government had signed a Pact in Corfu for the union of ‘the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, also known as Southern Slavs, or Yugoslavs’ in a single State under the Karageorgević Dynasty. When the news of this reached Croatia, the Serbo-Croat Coalition recovered its position there. Radić went over to the Yugoslav idea, while the Party of Right, in any case weakened by the death of Starčević, ceased to oppose it.26 Now the Sabor passed Resolution after Resolution in favour of Yugoslav unity, not always troubling to insert the saving clause that this should be achieved within the framework of the Monarchy.
And in the event, their confidence proved well-founded. When the German offensive broke on the French front in March, and an Austrian attack threatened on the Italian, the British propagandists27 urged, and the Italians (whose hostility to the Yugoslav movement had thitherto been stubborn) agreed, that if defeat was to be avoided, it was necessary to proclaim Czecho-Slovak, Polish, Southern Slav and Roumanian independence as an Allied war aim. The decision does not seem to have been formally ratified on the highest level,28 and in any case, the U.S.A. was not a party to it, but propaganda in the sense of it began, and soon after, there occurred a contretemps which was disastrous for Austria. Charles, through his brother-in-law, Prince Sixtus of Parma, had written to Clemenceau promising to support France’s ‘just claims to Alsace-Lorraine’. This leaked out through an indiscretion, and the enraged Germans, among whom a party had for some time past been advising tightening the controls over Austria, compelled Charles to journey to Spa, protest his complete loyalty, and on 12 May promise to conclude agreements which, at least in the eyes of the Allies, would have left the Monarchy little more than a political, military and economic satellite of Germany’s.
The Allied Powers now dropped their hesitations, and after some hesitation, Wilson followed them. In the course of the next weeks, all Austria’s chief opponents pledged themselves, more or less definitively, to independence for Polish and Czecho-Slovak States. Objections by Italy and obstruction by the Serb Government prevented agreement from being reached so quickly on the Southern Slav question – the final answer here was not given until the end of the year – but in June the U.S.A. Government promised the Southern Slavs also ‘complete freedom’. Roumania had been forced to conclude a separate peace with the Central Powers on 7 May, thus rendering the Treaty of Bucharest invalid, but the Allied propaganda had not dropped the Roumanians from the list of ‘oppressed races’ to whom it was promising freedom.
All this became immediately known to the leaders of the nationalities in question inside the Monarchy, and naturally increased their confidence, and meanwhile, the Sixtus Letter and the Spa undertakings had also had disastrous effects elsewhere. The German national politicians saw themselves betrayed by the Monarch himself, and their loyalties moved yet further to the Reich. The Christian Socials and Clericals, on the contrary, being loyal to the Dynasty, found the prospective relationship with Germany intolerable, and saw their only hope of salvation in breaking away quickly. The Social Democrats, who wanted nothing but peace, concluded that only the break-up of the Monarchy could bring it.
Both the latter arguments applied, mutatis mutandis, to Hungary, and Károlyi’s following increased daily.
A few weeks after this, Austria, under German pressure, launched another offensive against Italy. The Italians, stiffened by British and French reinforcements, resisted it with unexpected stubbornness, and the attack had to be called off on 24 June, after fighting which had lasted only ten days, but had cost the Austrian armies 140,000 casualties in dead, wounded or missing.
By this time, conditions for the civilian populations of large parts of the Monarchy were reaching the limit of human endurance. In the big towns and industrial centres, queues waited all day for the miserable pittances to which their ration cards entitled them, and even those were often not available. Everyone who could went out into the country and brought back rucksacks or pockets full of food, bought from the peasants at enormous and constantly rising prices, or exchanged for commodities. But the peasants themselves, short of labour, of livestock and of implements, had little enough to spare.
The forces at the front were themselves short of rations, of uniforms, even of munitions,29 and after the failure of the offensive against Italy, a rot set in here also. Desertions to the enemy and mutinies multiplied. Men slipped away from the depots and went into hiding; ‘green cadres’ composed of such fugitives defied the authorities in parts of Bosnia and Croatia. So many units had to be kept in the hinterland ‘maintaining order’ as gravely to weaken the combatant strength of the army.
Czernin had resigned after the Sixtus affair, in connection with which he had, in good faith, told what had proved to be an untruth. Burian, recalled to take his place, exhausted himself throughout the summer in telling the Germans that Austria could not face another winter of war. Still confident, even after their armies’ ‘black day’ of 8 August, the Germans refused to listen to him, and on 14 September he himself sent a Note to the Allies proposing informal peace talks. This brought an unhelpful reply from Wilson and a telegram of rebuke from the German Emperor to Charles.
But on 19 September the Bulgarian front cracked, and on the 26th Bulgaria sued for an armistice. Now even the Germans gave up hope, and on 3 October Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey sent simultaneous Notes to Wilson asking for an armistice. Wilson took his time over his reply, and on 16 October, while the Monarchy waited for it, Charles, who had replaced Seidler by Hussarek as Austrian Minister President on 23 July30 made the peoples of Cis-Leithania a new offer, which he hoped would meet Wilson’s requirements: the Poles were to go their own way, and the rest to form a federal State, in which each nation was to form its own constitution on its own ethnic territory.31 But Wekerle, shown an advance draft of the Manifesto, had stipulated that no proposals for Cis-Leithania could affect the Lands of the Hungarian Crown, and the Manifesto included a reservation to that effect. The Czechs and Slovenes declared that they rejected out of hand any proposal which did not allow for their union with their brothers and cousins in Trans-Leithania. But they would not in any case have accepted the offer, without claiming the whole Province: a Czech National Committee had already practically taken charge in Bohemia, and on 6 October a ‘National Council of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes’ had established itself in Zagreb with the declared purpose o
f ‘uniting the whole people of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes … in a single entirely sovereign national State’. Local Councils in smaller provincial centres accepted the authority of this body. The Polish Council of Regency had proclaimed the establishment of a ‘free and independent Poland’ on the 7th, and thundered against the Manifesto because it did not give them East Galicia. Of the non-Germans, only the Ruthenes accepted the Manifesto, precisely because they hoped it would give them East Galicia, and the National Council which they, in their turn, set up, still looked to Vienna – across a great gulf. And on the 8th and 9th the German-Austrian Deputies of the Reichsrat, on the initiative of the Social Democrats, began discussing their own future, on the assumption that Polish, Czecho-Slovak and Yugoslav States were coming into being.
In Hungary, the Croats were openly going their own way, the Roumanians had set up a National Council on the 12th, and the Slovak nationalists were preparing to do likewise. Nevertheless, Károlyi was clamouring louder than ever to be put in power to negotiate a separate peace, while Wekerle himself announced that the Manifesto reduced Hungary’s link with Cis-Leithania to a personal union.
The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) Page 132
