Still photographs also played their part in establishing the image of the war. Wellington House formed a pictorial section in April 1916, which then published War Pictorial as a means of making use of the photographs being taken: over 40,000 official photographs were taken, well over half of the Western Front. On the home front, Horace Nicholls, appointed as ‘official photographer of Great Britain’ in July 1917, produced a memorable series of scenes in munitions and ordnance factories. Later war photographers of the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War had smaller, more compact cameras, and pushed back much further the parameters of what was acceptable. The photographers of the Great War, however, began the process and helped transform photography into a mass medium. Photographic exhibitions were arranged by Beaverbrook, the Ministry of Information opening a shop to sell official photographs in October 1918. Sales were also licensed through postcards issued by the Daily Mail and stereoscopic prints produced by various firms. Photographs, of course, were also a means of commemoration. The Imperial War Museum initiated an appeal for photographs of serving soldiers in July 1917, but was so swamped that the museum called a halt in 1919 after 15,000 images had been deposited.
In reaching mass audiences, film and photographs had a far greater impact in shaping the popular memory of the war than officially sponsored war art, much of which was influenced by pre-war modernist artistic movements such as cubism and futurism. The public much preferred more traditional art forms, as was also apparent in the wide choice of entirely neoclassical monuments to the memory of the war dead. Similarly, little literature or poetry of ‘disillusionment’ appeared in print much before the late 1920s. It was often rather ambiguous, being aimed against wartime propaganda and those who had manufactured it. Much wartime literature was decidedly patriotic, and post-war fiction about the war continued in the same vein. Children's literature, often written by war veterans, continued to display a positive view of the war as justified sacrifice, pre-war writers for the juvenile market simply reusing old plots and stereotypes without varying the heroic ideal.
Much of post-war film, too, was not intended to be critical of the conduct of the war, or to depict the war as a grisly horror, even when film-makers began to try and convey more of the reality. In Britain, there was a whole series of films made between 1919 and 1927 almost as documentaries – ‘reconstructions’ as they were billed at the time – by Harry Bruce Woolfe's British Instructional Films, in cooperation with the War Office and the Admiralty. Mostly, these films, which included versions of Mons, the Somme, Jutland, and the Zeebrugge Raid, concentrated on the exploits of winners of the Victoria Cross. A concern to make sacrifice heroic and palatable persisted into the era of sound: the Hollywood film version of All Quiet on the Western Front in 1930 was as much an anomaly as the 1928 novel on which it was based.
Yet, the power of image merely compounded the effect already produced by real wartime film such as The Battle of the Somme. The meaning of war was now understood in an entirely different way from what had been the norm prior to 1914. The visual reference points that the film established have proven unshakeable by the efforts of historians. In 1964 the scriptwriters of the landmark BBC television series, The Great War, sought to counter what they regarded as the pervasive misrepresentation of the war. Audience research reports showed that, whatever the narration, the visual content had simply reinforced the popular concept of the war's futility for a mass audience estimated at 8 million per episode. The successful television comedy, Blackadder Goes Forth, first broadcast in 1989, had characters and situations that needed no explanation, so familiar was the audience with the received version of the war. In 1999 the final moments of the series, where the characters became freeze-framed as they went over the top, counted as first among the ten clips voted, with no apparent irony, ‘the nation's all-time favourite’ moment from a television comedy. ‘Blackadder’ also became the only fictional entry in the Top Ten of ‘100 Greatest Television Moments’ voted for in 2000.
Despite Malins's bombast, he and McDowell could have had little true idea of just what an impact their efforts would have. Malins continued to work in France until invalided home in the spring of 1917. He returned to France in January 1918, and was then discharged in June 1918. He made a number of post-war documentaries, before moving to South Africa in 1928, where he died in 1940. McDowell worked in France until the end of the war, receiving the MBE for his services. He worked as a freelance cinematographer after the war, then for Agfa between 1926 and 1936. He died in 1954. Their flickering silent images transformed the public perception of the war, both at the time and for posterity. Appropriately, in July 2005, as the first feature-length battle documentary, The Battle of the Somme was one of the very few films accepted on UNESCO's Memory of the World global register of key cultural artefacts. It is ranked alongside the Bayeux Tapestry and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
CHAPTER 6
THE DEATH OF KINGS
The Passing of Emperor Franz Joseph, 21 November 1916
ON 30 NOVEMBER 1916 a ceremony first supposedly enacted in 1657 on the death of the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand III, took place at the Kapuzinerkirche (Church of the Capuchins) in Vienna. As the coffin reached the gate of the Kaisergruft crypt, Prince Montenuovo, the Lord Chamberlain, knocked three times with the golden staff of his office. A voice from within enquired, ‘Who Knocks?’, to which Montenuovo replied, ‘His Apostolic Majesty, the Emperor of Austria.’ The response was, ‘Him I know not.’ After another three knocks from Montenuovo, the same question was asked. The reply this time was, ‘The King of Hungary’, which received the same response from within. Another three knocks, and the same question elicited, ‘Franz Joseph, a poor sinner who begs for God's mercy’. This time, the response was, ‘Enter then.’ Thus was the body of Franz Joseph laid between the tombs of his empress, Elizabeth of Bavaria, assassinated in 1898, and his son, Crown Prince Rudolf, an apparent suicide in 1889. The bodies of 138 Habsburgs lie in the Kaisergruft though, traditionally, their hearts were placed in caskets in the Loreto Chapel of Vienna's Augustinerkirche (Church of the Augustinian Order), and the entrails in the catacombs of the Stephansdom (St Stephen's Cathedral). Franz Joseph was not the last imperial ruler of Austria-Hungary to be buried in the Kapuzinerkirche. His successor and the last emperor, his great-nephew Karl, died in exile on Madeira in 1922, but Karl's empress, Zita of Bourbon-Parma, was buried in the Kapuzinerkirche with the appropriate ceremony after her death in 1989.
In so many ways, the passing of Franz Joseph on 21 November 1916 sounded the death knell of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Despite the accession of the seemingly dynamic young couple of Karl and Zita, the loss of the father figure of the old emperor undermined any remaining faith in the ability of traditional imperial paternalism to mitigate increasing wartime sacrifice and privation. Had he lived for eleven more days, Franz Joseph would have marked the sixty-eighth anniversary of his accession as emperor. Britain's Queen Empress, Victoria, reigned for sixty-four years from 1837 to 1901 and, though Louis XIV was King of France for seventy-two years from 1643 to 1715, his mother was regent for the first eight years of the reign. Not initially popular, the ageing Franz Joseph had become the very embodiment of his empire, a symbol of permanence and, seemingly, the last true believer in the concept of Austria-Hungary. In 1904 he had remarked to his aide, Albert von Margutti, that the monarchy ‘is a place of refuge, an asylum for all those fragmented nations scattered over central Europe who, if left to their own resources would lead a pitiful existence, becoming the plaything of more powerful neighbours’.1 That vision, however, had long been seriously undermined by rising nationalism. It was fear of the appeal of militaristic Serbian aspirations to the subject Southern Slav population within the empire's boundaries that propelled Austria-Hungary into war in July 1914. It was a fateful decision and one that an aged emperor had accepted with too great a degree of fatalism. As the Foreign Minister from 1916 to 1918, Count Ottokar von Czernin und Chudenitz wrote, ‘We wer
e bound to die. We were at liberty to choose the manner of our death, and we chose the most terrible.’2
On being told the news of the death of his empress, who had been murdered while visiting Geneva in 1898, Franz Joseph had exclaimed, ‘So I am to be spared nothing in this world.’3 At least he did not experience the final collapse of his empire, but the signs of impending disaster could hardly have failed to escape the old man's notice. Not least there was the failure during the summer of 1916 of the Austro-Hungarian offensive in Italy, and the near total collapse of the Austro-Hungarian position on the Eastern Front during the Russian ‘Brusilov’ offensive. Reviewing the situation on the Eastern Front, the German staff officer Max Hoffmann remarked that the Austro-Hungarians were like a mouth full of bad teeth, ‘every time there's a slight breeze, there's an ache somewhere’.4 Similarly, the Chief of the German General Staff from 1914 to 1916, Erich von Falkenhayn, had dismissed the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a ‘cadaver’ and, in imitation of the Greek stoic philosopher of the first century AD, Epictetus, German officers frequently said that they were shackled to a corpse.5 On the home front, the portents were just as ominous. There were serious food riots in Vienna in both May and September 1916. In October the Austro-Hungarian minister-president, Count Karl von Stürgkh, was assassinated while he was dining in a Vienna hotel. At a time of shortages and the perceived failure of the state to maintain food supplies, reports of Stürgkh's death dwelt on what he was eating rather than on the murder itself: he even continued to receive hate mail after his death. In such circumstances, the death of the old emperor seemed to set the seal on a collapse of imperial power that a younger, more vigorous Franz Joseph might have succeeded in averting.
Austria-Hungary was already an unlikely survivor amid the growth of the ideal of the nation state and the emergence of nationalism as the dominant ideology in nineteenth-century Europe. Austria, as it had emerged after the Napoleonic Wars, was a multinational empire with eleven major racial groups and fourteen recognised languages. An emerging Prussia could see the natural frontiers of a potential united Germany as being bounded by the North Sea, the Baltic, the Rhine, the Alps, and perhaps the Vistula. Austria could not aspire to the leadership of such a Germany. Any Austrian appeal to wider German nationalism would raise the spectre of self-determination by others. The subsequent emergence of a united Germany and a united Italy in 1870–71, both effectively at the expense of Austria, inevitably increased the pressure on Vienna. Indeed, the great compromise, or Ausgleich, of 1867, creating the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, had resulted directly from the political pressures of defeat in the brief Austro-Prussian War of 1866. The common government controlled finance, defence and foreign policy but, in effect, there were now three administrations since Austria and Hungary were separately administered. Yet, notwithstanding the difficulties arising from diversity of language, nationality, religion, class and politics, there remained some unifying factors. First, there was the sense of an institutionalised state in its widest sense, once characterised as a standing army of soldiers, a sitting army of officials, a kneeling army of priests and a creeping army of informers. Second, there was a certain economic integration deriving from the great international trade route represented by the Danube. Third, there was a recognition even by some of the subject nationalities that other great powers such as Russia and Germany would pose a threat to the integrity of small states, and that it was better to press for autonomy within existing state structures than to seek full independence. Adding to this was the effective use of divide and rule generally: neither Austria nor Hungary had a majority of Germans or Magyars respectively. Above all, there was the unifying role of the common monarchy in the person of Franz Joseph, not just as emperor, but also as King of Hungary and King of Bohemia.
The increasing respect in which Franz Joseph was held was certainly the empire's ‘strongest centripetal force’.6 If the emperor was his empire's greatest strength, he was also its greatest weakness. By nature a conservative and centralist, he had never sought popularity and, in many respects, the affection in which he was held grew from his dignified acceptance of personal tragedy, as well as from sheer longevity. Franz Joseph had never cared for liberalism, but had tolerated periods of liberal government when necessary and was prepared to countenance expediency if it served the dynasty. Universal male suffrage was embraced in Austria in 1907 as a means of reconciling democratic elements to the empire, but Franz Joseph stepped back from insisting on a similar suffrage in Hungary for fear of alienating the entrenched Magyar elite. At heart, Franz Joseph's dynastic instincts prevented him from using his powers to impose the kind of changes that might have maintained the empire: the preservation of a personal dynastic identity compromised the construction of an Austro-Hungarian state identity.
Franz Joseph, then eighteen, had succeeded to the Austrian throne on the abdication of his ineffectual, feeble-minded and epileptic uncle, Ferdinand, in the revolutionary year of 1848 when Hungary, Bohemia and Italy were all in revolt, and Vienna itself was affected by rioting. In what amounted to a coup of doubtful legality from above, orchestrated by the army, Franz Joseph bypassed his own father at the insistence of his mother, Archduchess Sophie. She thought her son far more capable of securing the dynasty than her husband. In many ways, Franz Joseph, or Franzi as he was known within the family, was a man of contrasts, and even those who had closest contact with him rarely penetrated the exterior veil. On the one hand, he had expected a military career and was seemingly shy with no gift for small talk, frugal and austere in his habits, with a rigid conception of duty, and a desire for a carefully ordered private life. A strict observer of court ritual, he always stood to receive his ministers, whom he tended to treat as he would military subordinates. Habitually, his everyday wear was the uniform of a junior officer, and it was said that one major relaxation was reading the Army List. He slept on a simple iron bedstead and, lacking a bathroom at the Schönbrunn palace, made do with pitchers and bowls. To the end of his life, he rose daily at 4 a.m., working on his papers from 5 a.m. until breakfasting at 7.30 on coffee, rolls and butter. After a walk, he would eat two or three slices of sausage and bread at 10.00 a.m., then return to his work until lunch in his private study at 12.30 or 1 p.m., consisting always of soup, fish, vegetables, a light dessert, fruit, coffee and a small glass of wine. Meetings and other official duties consumed the afternoon and evening and, following a supper of bread roll, slice of ham and another small glass of wine or beer, he would retire at 9 p.m.7
Subjected to a rigid and illiberal educational programme as a boy, Franz Joseph spent long hours at his desk hoping to promote the welfare of his people, for he saw himself as their ‘first servant’. However, he always resisted self-government for his subjects, believing firmly in the strength of paternalism. The significance of imperial paternalism was evident in the thousands of petitions and begging letters – as many as 30,000 annually in the 1870s – sent by his people to the emperor every year, ranging from requests for advice to those for financial help. In reality, the police dealt with most such correspondence from ordinary citizens, but imperial propaganda and rhetoric played assiduously on Franz Joseph's role as ‘father of his people’.
On the other hand, as a young man Franz Joseph enjoyed hunting and dancing and had a lifelong interest in women. He had fallen in love at first sight with his beautiful sixteen-year-old first cousin, his mother Sophie's niece, Elizabeth of Bavaria, known as Sisi. Notwithstanding sexual indiscretions, he remained infatuated with her until her death. Sophie had actually wanted Sisi's elder sister as her son's bride and thought Sisi inadequate, leading to an increasingly frosty relationship between them. Spirited and wayward, Sisi was resentful of the stiff protocol surrounding the court in Vienna compared to the freer atmosphere in Bavaria. Brittle, wilful and self-absorbed, she steadily grew more distant from Franz Joseph, her frequent illnesses brought on by the rigorous diets she inflicted on herself to keep her figure. Yet, though frequently absent from Vienna, Sisi
was a great asset to the empire. Her affection for Hungarian culture, albeit partly embraced in defiance of her mother-in-law, who hated Hungarians, did much to persuade Franz Joseph to accept the division of the monarchy in 1867. He tried often to attract Sisi to stay longer in Austria-Hungary, even creating a Hungarian home she had long wanted at Gondollo. Realising, however, that she could not give him the emotional support he craved, Sisi encouraged Franz Joseph's close friendship with the actress Katherina Schratt, who remained a comfort to the old man for the last thirty years of his life.
The marriage was also overshadowed by frequent personal tragedy. Franz Joseph's younger brother, Archduke Maximilian, was executed in Mexico in June 1867 following the failure of a French-inspired attempt to install him as emperor there. Franz Joseph's second brother, Karl Ludwig, died of typhoid in 1896: he had drunk contaminated water from the Jordan on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Franz Joseph and Sisi's son and heir, Rudolf, whom some saw as the great liberal hope for a future of increasing recognition for the minorities, died apparently by his own hand alongside his seventeen-year-old mistress, Marie Vetsera, at Mayerling in the Vienna Woods in January 1889. Much remains unexplained and conspiracy stories abound. Sisi was then assassinated by a deranged Italian anarchist armed with a sharpened file while she was visiting Geneva in September 1898: his actual target had been King Umberto of Italy but, lacking enough money to get to Rome, he had chosen Sisi instead. As it happened, Franz Joseph had narrowly escaped assassination himself by a Hungarian nationalist in 1853. The heir was now the eldest son of Karl Ludwig and the emperor's nephew, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a humourless and unpopular autocrat with violently anti-Magyar and anti-Semitic prejudices. At least Franz Ferdinand was energetic, with decided views on restructuring the empire that appealed to radical conservatives. He was also devoted to his wife Sophie Chotek, an impoverished Czech aristocrat he had been forced to marry morganatically as a result of Franz Joseph's disapproval. Their children, therefore, were barred from the succession and she was allowed no royal precedence, bearing the purely courtesy title of Duchess of Hohenberg. Ironically, it was an unusual honour for her to be allowed to accompany Franz Ferdinand on his visit to Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, the 525th anniversary of the destruction of the old Serbian kingdom by the Turks in 1389. Both fell victim to the young Bosnian Serb student, Gavrilo Princip. On hearing the news, according to an aide, Count Eduard Paar, Franz Joseph's first comment was, ‘A higher power has restored that order which I myself was unable to maintain’, the new heir presumptive being a young man of whom he thoroughly approved.8 This was the emperor's great-nephew, the young Archduke Karl, the son of Karl Ludwig's second son (the dissipated Otto, who had died in 1906) and thus the nephew in turn of Franz Ferdinand.
The Making of the First World War Page 14
