Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  Generations of Habsburg senior officers launched plan after plan for dealing with a response to some unacceptable Russian incursion, either in support of France or in support of Serbia, with staff colleges overrun with rival scenarios, bitter arguments lasting whole lifetimes, and no actual war. The peace was so extended that the evil genius of Habsburg planning, Conrad von Hötzendorf, had, despite being in his sixties, no actual combat experience, nor had Oskar Potiorek, the Governor of Bosnia-Herzegovina, who led the fatuous invasion of Serbia in 1914. Entire careers had gone by with an only theoretical understanding of warfare, at a time when technological change in almost every imaginable field meant that a huge gap could open up between the most modern theory and actual practice in only a few months.

  It was understood perhaps instinctively by the Austro-Hungarians that anything other than a very limited war would be a disaster. This was clearly seen by the Hungarians, who had everything they wanted (their own empire, autonomy, a thriving capital city) and who worked to sabotage anything seriously military at every turn. Their reasons may have been self-serving, but as a group they were perhaps the most genuinely uninterested in war in the whole of non-neutral Europe. This meant that the Habsburg army was understrength and underfinanced and it is a routine part of any book on the First World War to blame the Hungarians for this, but given the glamour warfare had for so many in the years leading up to 1914 and the excitement it aroused, it is appealing to see the accidental pacificism of local selfishness in action. Once the war broke out, however, the Hungarians saw that it was their privileges that were at stake, and it was their land that would be invaded if the Central Powers’ front line broke. So, having starved the military budget for years, they now fought with great vigour and ferocity, but it was too late.

  Conrad – a very odd man – was principally famous for his self-confidence, and for his declaration on numerous occasions that war was the answer to any political question. He was at last believed in the summer of 1914 – and yet it turned out that all his obsessive planning was merely incompetent. Years had been spent working out the balance of forces in the event of war with Serbia and with Russia. Much of this was spent in wishful hoping that Serbia might be successfully isolated because of Russian fear of Germany. This hope had its roots in the shattered and humiliated Russia of 1906 after its war with Japan and abortive revolution, but by 1914 the Russian army was re-equipped, enormous and fully committed to its alliance with France. Conrad endlessly juggled with the quandary of having not enough soldiers and needing to send them to two separate places.

  An extreme but interesting argument could be made that both Germany and Austria-Hungary should have just doodled a few sums on the back of an envelope in 1914 and realized that they would lose. Against the solidity of the French–Russian alliance Germany invented a fantasy whereby most of its troops would invade France and defeat it in a few weeks so that the troops could then be redeployed east to defeat the Russians. The Austro-Hungarian variant was that Serbia had to be quickly defeated so that all those victorious troops in the Balkans could then be redeployed to the other end of the Empire to take on the Russians too. Neither side had any serious plan to deal with the result of even a slight delay in defeating the enemy they chose to tackle first – the logic of this blind-spot was that a delay would make it almost insuperably difficult to win. But it was a measure of the conditions under which these often highly intelligent figures were operating that nobody seems to have drawn the logical conclusion. For Conrad the obvious answer as the July Crisis unfolded was for Austria-Hungary simply to put a bare minimum of soldiers into defensive positions in the south to hold off the small Serb army. Everyone else could have been thrown at the Russians, who were the threat who could in fact erase the entire Empire, as they could have done quite easily in their 1849 intervention in Hungary if they had not been feeling so benign. Conrad assumed that on the eastern front he would be standing shoulder to shoulder with the Germans, refusing to even admit to himself the reality – that if most German troops were in France then in fact almost the entire weight of the Russian army would fall on his own drastically smaller forces.

  I go into this in such detail because much of the war simply played out this situation, its grim logic only fended off by German tactical brilliance. An already questionable war plan was further compounded by Britain becoming a belligerent rather than a neutral, something for which the Germans had simply made no plans and a country which, indeed, the Germans could not defeat (unless they ran down their armies in favour of surreally large numbers of U-boats). The Schlieffen Plan therefore continued to unfold despite the sudden arrival of yet another enemy for Germany with roughly the same GNP. Even worse, the notional third pillar of the Central Powers, Italy, decided to be first neutral and then, in May 1915, an enemy. This was fundamentally because of Austria-Hungary. Just as Germany had no stake in the Balkans, it had no interest whatsoever in the frenzied nationalist atmosphere south of the Alps. Berlin was driven purple-faced with rage at the Habsburg failure to negotiate seriously with the Italians who, predictably, wanted Dalmatia, Gorizia and other Italian-speaking bits of the Empire in return for joining in. The Habsburg view was that this would have been a betrayal of everything the Empire stood for, but flicking through picture-books about his ancestors Franz Joseph could have found there plenty of grotesque bits of betrayal in return for a wider strategic good. A more subtle German argument was that the Italians should be given what they wanted and then, once Germany and Austria-Hungary had won the war they could, as Europe-wide hegemons, turn on and destroy the Italians, taking back as many bits of its territory as they liked. But the proud tradition of Habsburg obtuseness prevailed, and a quite futile further military front opened up to add to all the other ones which could also not be adequately manned.

  Sarajevo

  Franz Ferdinand’s arrival in Bosnia-Herzegovina on a visit of inspection in June 1914 therefore put him at the centre of a number of enormous and overlapping ridges of pressure. Some of these were very long term and specific to the strange situation inside the Empire. Not the least of these was Franz Ferdinand’s own anger and boredom over his endlessly deferred accession to the thrones, as his hated (by FF) predecessor hung on in an unchanging sequence of dreary routine, just getting older and even older. Not the least of the grounds for this hatred was, as discussed earlier, Franz Joseph’s insistence that Franz Ferdinand’s wife was too common to have proper status at court. In Sarajevo, however, Franz Ferdinand was visiting in a military capacity rather than as heir to the throne, so the creepy world of the Hofburg went into abeyance and his wife was allowed to walk by his side and sit by him at banquets and in their touring car.

  All kinds of irredentist and separatist problems threatened the Empire, but none in itself could have been anywhere near fatal. Many national groups hated being in the Empire, but almost nobody could come up with a scheme that allowed a plausible separation. There was a further safety valve through emigration. If you really loathed the Habsburgs or your Hungarian landlord you could go to the United States. Some went on nationalist grounds, but most simply because of poverty, with Galicia remaining a developmental disaster. During the War a key Habsburg headache was that there were so many languages in the Empire (Conrad von Hötzendorf himself spoke seven) and such huge casualties that officers and men simply could no longer be trained to understand one another. It was almost inevitable that sooner or later a Slovak military unit was formed, with officers who had been taught English at high school commanding men who had learned English so that they could emigrate to the United States. This English-language unit was an ingenious Habsburg solution, but the reasons for its existence did not imply any great faith in the Empire’s future.

  The Empire therefore had considerable reserves of strength, but they turned out to be reliant on peace, as some of its rulers seem to have sensed. Franz Ferdinand himself, although very close to Conrad, was notably cautious. Franz Ferdinand’s enthusiasm for bringing Slavs into the
governing structure and engineering a sort of ‘approved Yugoslavism’ made his visit to the southern Empire particularly resonant. His ideas were well known so when he arrived in Bosnia-Herzegovina he was by a long way the most desirable imaginable candidate for assassination for any Serbian nationalist group. This was not just because any day now he could become a harsh, cold and effective Emperor but because Trialism could create a form of Slav solidarity which explicitly excluded the Kingdom of Serbia itself.

  The sheer scale of the plot against him, with Franz Ferdinand and his wife running the gamut of no fewer than six assassins, had no real precedent and was a very pure expression of the forces which had emerged from the massive recent changes that had surged across the Balkans. The Habsburgs had been in danger of simply looking old-fashioned for some decades, but both Vienna and Budapest had been subject to sufficiently radical constitutional twists and turns to make this incorrect. The Empire was nothing if not modern and contemporary, albeit with a funny superstructure of archdukes and so on, but in that sense little different from Germany or Russia or indeed Britain. It was perhaps the assassination itself that tipped the Empire into seeming irredeemably quaint. It was astonishing that the couple stayed alive as long as they did, with would-be assassins losing their nerve or mis-throwing their bombs, pitting fanatical teenagers against someone too fat for his uniform and wearing ostrich feathers.

  The sacred relics of the assassination – the car, the bloodstained jacket, Princip’s pistol, the chaise-longue on which the archduke died – understandably have pride of place in the Military History Museum in Vienna. The car, a totally spectacular Gräf and Stift Double Phaeton, is clearly the real culprit. Being pulled along by several horses in a coach is both potentially very fast and explicitly very high up, together with ample space on the back for security guards and around the carriage for cavalry. Moustachioed, automatic-wielding insurrectionaries would find such a vehicle a severe problem, whereas the Gräf and Stift, once stopped, left the archduke and archduchess with no protection of any kind. Princip simply had to walk up to them as though they were, rather oddly, sitting in the middle of the street. So the last serious Habsburg was effectively destroyed by new technology.

  From the world-view of the teenagers and their political masters in Belgrade – and perhaps by any standards – it was the most successful assassination in modern world history. It killed Serbia’s most determined opponent, it destroyed the entire Empire and it created a massively enlarged Serb-ruled state only finally dismantled in the 1990s. What would now be called the ‘collateral damage’ also puts it on a special level, with nobody across Europe the next morning having for one moment, as they read about the undoubtedly major and shocking story of the killings, any sense of what would happen next.

  The Przemyśl catastrophe

  The opening phases of the War were filled with grotesque shocks for everybody. All those years of military manoeuvres, secret codes and technological upgrades were held up to mockery. The French invasion of Alsace (the non-confidence-buildingly named ‘Plan XVII’) failed, the Russian invasion of East Prussia ended in Armageddon, the Germans’ Schlieffen Plan became an incoherent disaster within weeks. Austria-Hungary’s nightmare was therefore a shared one. Effectively the entire European military caste had been shown to be recklessly incompetent. Their notional political masters proved incapable of acting intelligently to end a conflict which it was rapidly clear threatened to destroy European society. The immediate scale of the horror offered simply no precedents. All generals dreamed of nineteenth-century actions where grit, cunning and boldness could win a decisive result. The Battles of Königgrätz 1866 (twenty-three thousand dead and wounded) and Sedan 1870 (twenty-five thousand dead and wounded) had been complete victories on a scale sufficient to devastate the defeated side’s entire political framework. What they got instead was the First Battle of the Marne with some five hundred thousand dead and wounded and no hint as to how the war might end. The very scale of the mutual massacre made it impossible for anyone in a position of power to admit defeat – and yet it was in these weeks that it might have been possible. Indeed it is striking how negligible and weak the principal leaders were and how willing to be swept along by events – not a Bismarck or Salisbury in sight.

  At least until the end of 1916 all the major fighting powers remained robust, each with a victory plan and each with sufficient economic strength and manpower to keep going. For the first time in European history humans were viewed in the same light as crops, with hideous calculations about each male ‘year group’ becoming old enough to be trained and kitted out to replace its ruined predecessor. This was a fundamental change in the way that populations were imagined and had a long and bitter legacy throughout the century: rulers who had before 1914 often barely impinged upon their subjects now carried out dreams of absolute control over life and death. Calculations which started with entire bureaucracies working out how to replace the regular armies erased in 1914 led by a direct line to everything from the Nazi ‘hunger plan’ to the Great Leap Forward.

  The exception to this military robustness was Austria-Hungary. Of all the major powers it was the only one where a dangerous gap quickly opened between its pretensions and its performance. After the initial shock, each of the major combatants, whatever the setbacks, girded itself for the next year’s fighting with fresh men, fresh plans and even greater military supplies, but the Austro-Hungarian base proved inadequate.

  As a large part of the Habsburg army pointlessly headed south to attack Serbia (because this was the casus belli), it became clear that the Russian army in the east was offering an immediate and overwhelming threat to the Empire. This required a humiliating and chaotic rerouting of trains en route to the south back to the east. With typical helplessness it was decided that the easiest way of doing this (to shunt them back to their starting points in the major cities and then head them out again) would be unacceptable for morale. Only days before, huge crowds of weeping family members, brass bands, hoarse cheering and thousands of flowers had seen the soldiers off and there would be consternation in Budapest if the same trains now sheepishly trundled back to the platforms. Of course such consternation would have been reasonable, because the manoeuvre did indeed indicate an overwhelming cock-up – after all that money, planning and prestige, Austria-Hungary’s military staff effectively lost their war in a quick handful of decisions, as soldiers dawdled down branch lines, dozed at remote stations and the railway personnel had nervous breakdowns.

  As had been the anxiety all along, the result was failure on both fronts: too small an army attacking Serbia and too few to hold off the Russians. In a series of disasters without parallel, hundreds of thousands of Austro-Hungarian casualties were generated on both fronts, with the Serbs having before the end of the year completely defeated an invasion which was notionally the only pseudo-rational element in the fighting (to avenge the death of Franz Ferdinand). In the east the Russians annihilated Habsburg forces, taking over much of Galicia and Bukovina within weeks. Battles were provided with names to give a shape and a geographical focus that they totally lacked, as vast and confused armed groups crashed into each other in a mockery of Napoleonic concision. Accounts at the time describe scenes of total chaos, with much of the population fleeing, whole towns in flames and – as it turned out – no real Habsburg plan for taking the Russians on, with elite cavalry units sent out into the devastated countryside and simply never seen again, swallowed up by the terrain as much as by enemy machine-gun units.

  As Cossacks posed for photographs in the ravaged city centre of Lviv, Austria-Hungary’s last hope for avoiding total disaster lay in the Galician town of Przemyśl. Some five hours by train east of Kraków, it had long been designated as the military heart of Galicia, the terrain’s unhelpful flatness relieved there by a moderate-size river (the San) and some moderate-size hills. Since the 1870s layer upon layer of fortifications had gone up, with the usual bickering and underfunding. The area today remains littered
with their fragments, some of a size which makes it seem as though a spaceship (oddly made out of bricks) has blown up above the site. On the road out to the Ukrainian border, next to a giant Tesco, I even managed to stay in a hotel built around one of the hundreds of surviving chunks. The fortification was never completed, or rather it spread out over such a huge area that nobody could ever have declared it complete – even with ten times the number of strong-points and a garrison of millions it would still have had weaknesses. In any event the Russians before the war had secured from their spy in the Habsburg military, Colonel Redl, all the details of the Przemyśl fortifications (and of the Habsburg invasion plans for Serbia – which they thoughtfully passed on to Belgrade).

  In the short term, in September 1914, Przemyśl’s fortifications were a success as the Russians were obliged to besiege the town. Without Przemyśl there would have been little to prevent the Russians from advancing into southern Poland and north-east Hungary and the war could have taken a quite different turn. An epic now unfolded with both sides committing ever greater resources to enforcing and to breaking the siege. In October a Habsburg army briefly got into the city and the Russians retreated. There is an extraordinary photo of the town centre filled with an infinity of people, every surface crammed with the astonishing diversity of Przemyśl’s inhabitants, civilian and military, a diversity best expressed in men’s and women’s hats and umbrellas (it is raining), as for one last time the subjects of the Empire pose for a cameraman on a high balcony: Poles, Jews, Hungarians, Austrians, Ruthenians. This was a brief respite though as only three weeks later disasters elsewhere along the front once more isolated Przemyśl. Habsburg relief forces tried to break the Russian front, battling through the Carpathians in temperatures below -15 degrees Celsius, suffering scarcely credible casualties, with exhausted troops desperately trying not to fall asleep, knowing they would then either freeze to death or be eaten by wolves. By early 1915 Habsburg troops had suffered a total of some eight hundred thousand casualties on the Eastern front. One final attempt to relieve Przemyśl generated a further fifty thousand. Eventually, the half-starved garrison surrendered in March 1915, having killed all its horses, burned all its supplies and blown up all its heavy artillery and major forts in what must surely have been the largest use of explosives in human history to that point. Eight generals, two thousand five hundred officers and some hundred and seventeen thousand troops surrendered and the Russians marched in. Przemyśl was going to become just another Russian city, Peremyshl, under military law and with the usual chilling ban on Polish in schools or offices. En route to Siberia, Habsburg prisoners-of-war were marched through Moscow in a great parade which eerily prefigured that of the shattered remnants of Heeresgruppe Mitte less than thirty years later.