A Mad Catastrophe

by Geoffrey Wawro

  But the Russians probably would do something, and neither Franz Joseph nor Franz Ferdinand had the stomach for war, even though war was precisely what had allowed Serbia to make vast annexations in Austria-Hungary’s prime sphere of influence. Aerenthal’s successor, Count Leopold von Berchtold—who had secured the backing of the emperor and the archduke to be the new foreign minister because of his determination to stop the war escalation and forge an Austro-Russian entente instead—now insisted that Austria-Hungary take no military action lest it remind the powers of its “aggressive role” in 1908.6 With no saber to rattle, Berchtold fell back on a limp diplomacy that impressed no one. He organized a visit by a “Macedonian delegation” (two professors from Sofia and a retired Turkish administrator from Skopje) to the British embassy in Vienna, where they pleaded for independence instead of partition. “Macedonia deserves autonomy and should not be handed over to the Greeks and Serbs,” they argued, to no avail.7

  But what realistically could the Austrians do to enforce their shrinking writ in the Balkans? In Berlin, the kaiser—who would have to backstop any major Austrian war effort—scoffed that he would not go to war “for a few Albanian goat-pastures.”8 Knowing that any war for Albanian goat pastures would expand to the fields of Galicia, General Schemua reacted with horror to the crisis, especially to Russian trial mobilizations in the Warsaw and Kiev districts in the fall of 1912. Schemua stoically ordered his own partial mobilization, half a million Austrians in Bosnia and Galicia, but had no intention of using them.9 Emperor Franz Joseph worriedly convened a military conference in Budapest that Conrad attended, along with Schemua and Franz Ferdinand, and they all agreed to do nothing. The situation was almost identical to the one the empire would face in July 1914: Serbia was challenging Vienna, and Russia and France were taking Serbia’s side. In 1912, however, the Austrian decision was markedly more sensible than it would be two years later. The Budapest conference concluded that there simply were no viable military options for an army as weak as Austria’s.

  The superficial suppleness of War Plan R + B—forces for Russia (R) and the Balkans (B) with a floating reserve between them—concealed glaring shortages of the coin of modern warfare: transport, artillery, and trained infantry. Berchtold thus focused on limiting Austria’s losses and containing the embarrassment, promulgating a modest, barely face-saving list of demands: that the enlarged Balkan states must “respect Austria’s economic interests, negotiate trade agreements with Vienna, and leave the roads and rails to the [Aegean and Adriatic] seas open.”10 Berchtold also became the unlikely father of independent Albania—to keep the land and its four Ottoman ports out of Serbia’s hands—and he insisted that Serbia remain landlocked, barred from direct access to Montenegro and the Adriatic by the Sanjak of Novipazar. The Austrians had controlled the fifty-mile-wide strip for years but had returned it to Turkey in 1908 as partial compensation for the Bosnian annexation. They now found themselves in the slightly absurd position of trying to defend the sovereignty of a vanishing Turkey-in-Europe. “I know the ‘old saw’ had it that at the moment the Ottoman Empire dissolved, Austria must grab the Sanjak to prevent a great Serbian state,” Berchtold explained to the Austrian Delegation, “but we find that such a course today would be too costly.”11 Serbia, flush with a heady sense of its own destiny, had just reconquered all of the territory it had lost to the Turks on the Field of the Blackbirds in 1389, and this was the best that Vienna could do, demanding an independent Albania?12 Traveling in Bosnia, General Appel detected contempt: “Even stupid villagers around here are starting to mutter ‘trula Austria’—‘rotten old Austria’—as is the press; everyone thinks the monarchy is weak and quaking in fear.”13

  Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who had always dismissed Serbia as a meager “land of pigs and pigherds,” now traveled to Berlin with Schemua to secure German pledges of support in case of war with the pigherds. The Berlin press studied these worried Austro-Hungarian allies with interest: “In theory, the six European great powers are all equal; in practice, there are vast differences in national traits, financial and economic strength, the ability to mobilize quickly and the quality of armed forces on land and sea.”14 Traits were the only item on the list that the Hofburg could change on short notice and so, in December 1912, Conrad—whose blustering traits were legendary—was recalled at Franz Ferdinand’s urging to replace Schemua. It now emerged that Conrad had been fired during the “Schönaich Crisis” as part of a deal between the Belvedere and the Hofburg. Franz Ferdinand had wanted to fire Aerenthal and War Minister Schönaich, but the emperor had insisted on a quid pro quo, to retain his grip on the army. Thus Franz Ferdinand had agreed to dump Conrad for Schemua if the emperor would let the archduke replace Schönaich with Auffenberg. But Auffenberg became too hot to handle, even for the archduke, in March 1912, when three Hungarian newspapers revealed the existence of the top-secret Plan U—the archduke’s 1905 plan to invade Hungary and shutter its parliament—and named Auffenberg as its author.

  The revelation of Plan U was so scandalous that another deal had to be botched together in December 1912, just a year after the last one. Auffenberg was fired and Conrad warily recalled, Brosch noting from the Belvedere that anyone else would have been preferable but all of the other candidates were “old wives.” Schemua had not worked out. He lacked stature, and with war looming, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the inevitable army commandant, would need Conrad at his side.15 The French embassy in Vienna found the crisis most interesting for the light it shed on the nonstop intrigues of the Hofburg and the Belvedere. The three newspapers that broke the Plan U story were all in the emperor’s pay, which meant that Franz Joseph had deliberately outed Auffenberg to “strike a blow against Franz Ferdinand and his creatures.” Such machinations, the French embassy observed, had the effect of reducing not just the effectiveness but also the caliber of Austria’s top brass. Conrad turned up to replace Schemua as chief of the general staff, but no one could be found to replace Auffenberg. “No quality officer will take the job of war minister,” the French noted. “These days the imperial war ministry is rightly viewed as a Hungarian subsidiary, and by now most senior officers are loyal to Franz Ferdinand anyway, and won’t risk compromising themselves in his eyes by taking this position, for the emperor is just too old, and not worth the risk to a career.”16 Bolfras finally found someone close enough to retirement not to care: sixty-three-year-old General Alexander Krobatin, a rather harmless duffer who was discovered in the Skoda works in Pilsen supervising the manufacture of new artillery.17

  The archduke and Conrad never resumed their old friendliness. The devoutly Catholic Franz Ferdinand resented the spectacle of Conrad’s semipublic affair with a married woman, as well as the general staff chief’s bellicosity, which simply could not be squared with Vienna’s military weakness. Always intrigued by the idea of an Austro-Russian conservative entente (and seeing no solution to the riddle of how to fight a war with Serbia, Russia, and probably Italy and Rumania too), the archduke was swinging over to the peace policy of Berchtold and the emperor.18 And yet there seemed little hope for peace policy either—the Serbs were spoiling for a fight, and Russia had no incentive to renew an Austrian alliance that had expired in 1878. Worse, Franz Ferdinand viewed Albania as analogous to Schleswig-Holstein in 1864, a territorial dispute that had caused the Austro-Prussian War. The Prussians had detached the Schleswig-Holstein duchies from Denmark, divided them with Austria, and then used the inevitable disagreements over the spoils as a pretext for war with the Habsburgs to settle the “German question” once and for all. Franz Ferdinand believed that the Russians were playing the same game in Albania, planning to “whittle down the borders of Albania” to beef up their “Serbian protégé” and provoke a war with Austria over the rump.19 He could only hope that the Germans would support Austria and check the Russians.20 If they didn’t, Austria would go under. Even old Franz Joseph was aroused, asking nervously, “Is the army ready for war?”21

  A tentative princip
als meeting at Schönbrunn on December 11, 1912, weighed Austria-Hungary’s options. Foreign Minister Berchtold speculated that the Germans would probably not support an Austrian “military adventure” in the Balkans.22 In fact, the Germans would; at a secret German council of war three days earlier in Potsdam, the kaiser and his generals had concluded that they would defend Austria-Hungary under all circumstances and that war should be invited, “the sooner the better,” to defeat Russia and France before their military expansions were complete.23 As usual, the Germans didn’t think to share this resolution with the Austrians, and the Austrians didn’t think to canvass their ally. As they would in July 1914, both powers operated in the dark as to the other’s real intentions. With or without German support, Austria-Hungary’s finance minister warned, the soaring costs of Austria’s posturing would lead to a fiscal calamity. The army had called up 172,000 reservists to augment those already in the field. Half of them deployed to Galicia, the other half to Bosnia, and then fifty thousand more were called. Scenes of mutiny among Czech reservists in Pilsen, Prague, and Königgrätz—men who sang Serbian, not Austrian, anthems as they deployed—shocked the emperor. In Königgrätz (Hradec Králové), a crowd of two thousand blocked the road from the barracks to the train station and stoned the police who tried to disperse them. Several hundred more demonstrators waited at the train station and had to be driven away by troops with bayonets. The commander of the departing regiment was attacked in his train car by an angry mob. As the train got up steam, dozens more civilians lay across the rails to prevent the troops from leaving, and had to be dragged away to jail.24

  Bismarck’s old phrase “When the emperor of Austria says ‘saddle up,’ people saddle up” no longer applied. In Sarajevo, Potiorek estimated that at least a third of the reservists who arrived there for the Balkan War emergency were unusable—politically disaffected, physically unfit, or both.25 Partial mobilizations such as this did not come cheap either: this little spurt of activity was costing 275 million crowns ($55 million), which amounted to half of the army and navy budgets for a normal peacetime year.

  Costs like those threatened to bankrupt the monarchy if carried through to actual war. Conversely, could the monarchy afford to incur expenses like this and not strike? Conrad reminded all who would listen that the partial mobilization begun in November 1912—just three corps in Galicia and two in Bosnia—was costing 2 to 3 million crowns a day. Extra horses alone—to haul supplies, artillery, and reinforced cavalry squadrons—cost more than 30 million crowns ($6 million), yet everywhere the emperor turned, funds were denied. The Hungarian parliament refused even to consider War Minister Auffenberg’s request for an emergency appropriation, and the Austrian Reichsrat stymied the request there with a filibuster. Eventually Franz Joseph—in a typical bit of Habsburg horse-trading—detached the Ukrainians from the filibuster with the promise of a Ukrainian university in Lemberg (Lviv), but it was too late: the desperate Finance Ministry had already sought a loan in New York on humiliating terms, as well as unpopular new taxes on income, capital gains, real estate, matches, tobacco, liquor, and, for the first time, the tips of waiters in coffeehouses.26

  Only the former war minister seems to have profited from the crisis. Auffenberg’s involvement in Plan U was one cause of his removal in December; the other was his insider trading on the shares of companies that received mobilization contracts. The tips were allegedly played at the stock exchange by a junior officer named Heinrich Schwarz, who would later commit suicide, leaving behind his correspondence with General Auffenberg.27 Clearly Vienna was at the end of its rope. It could not go through this humiliating exercise—scandals, filibusters, subprime borrowing, demonstrations, and mutiny—ever again; it would rather risk war. “The Austrian army needs to wage war, not merely play at it. . . . All of this waiting around has cost Austria-Hungary 200 million crowns,” a German newspaper fumed. “The peace-at-any-price crowd seems intent on buying the most expensive peace possible, while Serbia exhausts the Habsburg monarchy’s financial resources, holding itself in perpetual readiness for war so that when war comes Russia will easily destroy a weakened Austria.”28

  But the Russians—who called up three hundred thousand reservists of their own in the crisis—blinked first, concluding that Albanian ports for Serbia were not worth a Russian war with the Germans and Austrians.29 Russia, Austria, and the other powers convened an ambassadors’ conference in London in December 1912 to contain the crisis and avert war. “In the negotiations here, the [Ottoman] Empire is laid on the block and hacked to pieces,” the London correspondent of Vienna’s Presse reported. “Macedonia is lost, Old Serbia, Epirus and the Islands, Albania neutralized under Great Power protection. All that’s left to Turkey is a stump of Thrace around Adrianople.”30 Yet despite their losses, the Young Turks had survived another round. Entertaining foreign journalists in his office in Constantinople beneath portraits of Napoleon and Marshal Ney, Enver Pasha explained that by fighting for places like Scutari, Adrianople, and the four Greek islands at the entrance to the Dardanelles—and accepting every loss of ground as an opportunity to shovel Turkish foreign debt into Balkan hands—the Young Turks had paradoxically demonstrated their determination to maintain the fatherland.31 It was hard to disagree with this logic; Turkey had shrunk but shored itself up for the long haul, a process that the Austro-Hungarians—obsessed with honor and historical rights—seemed incapable of. There was a new Sick Man abroad, and his seat was Vienna.

  War did not come, but it almost had, and both sides drew the wrong conclusions from the scare. Franz Ferdinand’s Österreichische Rundschau growled that Vienna had narrowly averted “a second Königgrätz” and had nearly been “hunted out of the Balkans.”32 Colonel Brosch marveled at the “unexpected outbreak of peace” when everyone had been tensed up for war.33 Conrad assumed that the Russians had backed down because of his partial mobilization and that he could have gotten away with invading Serbia and Montenegro. Potiorek wrote that in the next crisis war would have to be undertaken, or else “the men and officers will assume that the political leadership has lost faith in the military.” Austria could not call up the reservists a third time, “as in 1909 and 1912—and not use them.” Any future provocation, in other words, would trigger a world war, yet the monarchy had become so unpopular with its own peoples that no less than a third of Austria-Hungary’s soldiers would probably refuse to fight in such a conflict.34

  Austria’s foes also misinterpreted the crisis. The Russians concluded that the Austro-Hungarians had not invaded Serbia because of their fear of the Russian army, not because the Germans had restrained them.35 The Serbs viewed their own provocative annexations as innocuous, and blamed the war scare on “sick old Franz Ferdinand’s saber-rattling.”

  Germany, for its part, was glad that Austria had averted war—in the Balkans, at least. In Berlin, the kaiser wavered, like a man peering into a box of chocolates, between European and global mastery. He was transfixed by the bigger prizes in “Turkey, China and South America,” where, as the Berlin papers reported, “the next decade will decide which of the economic great powers will win out over the others.”36 With such prizes within reach, the kaiser vowed that he would not be drawn into an Existenzkampf (war of national survival) against Russia, France, and Britain merely because “Austria did not want the Serbs in Albania.” German general staff chief Helmuth von Moltke—who initially had judged war “unavoidable”—now trimmed his sails to the imperial wind, characterizing the war scare in the relatively peripheral Balkans as “Austrian foolishness.”37

  More foolishness was in store. With war clouds gathering over the Balkans again in May 1913, the Bulgarians threatening a second Balkan war to enlarge their share of Macedonia, the Austrian press reported a remarkable event. Forty-seven-year-old Colonel Alfred Redl, one of the most talented and reputable officers in the Habsburg army—a man who had made colonel at an age when most of his peers were languishing at captain—was found dead in a Vienna hotel room. He had thrust a
Browning pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger, exploding his palate and brain and dying almost instantly from the torrent of blood that exited his left nostril. Redl had checked in on Saturday and was discovered Sunday morning, slumped in an easy chair, caked with dried blood, the pistol on the floor under his right hand, operating instructions for the pistol—clearly not his own—spread on the table beside him. Two letters lay on the desk, one to his last commander, General Arthur Giesl in Prague, and the other to his brother, along with a curt suicide note: “I ask for understanding and forgiveness.”38

  The Austrian press swarmed hungrily over this latest mystery. It had been a busy year of scandals. First there had been the Dreadnought Affair, when Austria’s first all-big-gun battleship, the Viribus Unitis, had been delivered overweight with a speed 50 percent slower than advertised. Admirals and shipyard directors had been fired, and Skoda, which had manufactured the offending guns and armor, had been publicly rebuked.39 Then came the Jandric Affair. Cedomil Jandric, an Austrian lieutenant of Bosnian Serb extraction and a close friend of Chief of Staff Conrad’s son Kurt, was convicted of selling technical data on Austrian artillery to the Russians. The army’s investigation of Jandric led to another spy—Kurt Conrad’s Italian girlfriend—and suggested that young Conrad himself may have been involved, removing top-secret documents from his father’s study for sale to the Russians.40 The impression of cynicism and avarice at the highest levels of the Habsburg state seemed confirmed by the Auffenberg Affair, which followed hot on the heels of the Jandric scandal. The Habsburg war minister was accused of insider trading on the shares of defense contractors and let go with a slap on the wrist. Now, when the hue and cry of that latest embarrassment had barely faded, one of General Conrad’s best and brightest had been found dead by his own hand in a hotel room.