by Jack Beatty
From a catalog of atrocities, one from 1916 stands out. After overwhelming the Carrancista garrison of the city of Camargo, Villa was approached by a woman who tearfully pleaded with him not to execute her husband, a paymaster in the garrison. When a subordinate informed Villa that the man was dead, the woman cursed Villa; enraged, he pulled out his pistol and shot her. “But this was not enough to assuage his fury.” So he ordered the ninety other soldadera attached to the Camargo garrison to be shot as well. Villa’s secretary was long haunted by the memory of an infant playing in his mother’s gore.93
On July 20, 1923, on a visit to Parral, Pancho Villa was shot nine times by assassins who left town much as he had done years earlier after putting aside his ice-cream cone long enough to shoot the informer in Chihuahua City—that is, riding slowly, as if, a witness reported one saying, they “had no reason to run.”
The Mexican government “probably organized” Villa’s assassination. Obregón sought full diplomatic recognition from the United States. According to a theory Mexican intelligence agents found current in Mexico City, the Americans, seeking revenge for the Columbus raid, “had informed Obregón that one stumbling block to recognition was Pancho Villa and that the sooner they removed him the sooner recognition would be extended.”
What is certain is that, three weeks after Villa’s death, the Warren Harding administration granted de jure recognition to the Obregón government. Thus ended the dance of recognition, ten years after Woodrow Wilson spurned Huerta and, seeking a worthier recipient of American favor, embraced the Mexican Revolution, the Constitutionalist rebels, and Pancho Villa.94
A visitor to Canutillo once asked Villa if he planned to send his children to the United States for higher education. “No Señorita,” Villa answered. “Not to the United States. The first thing I am teaching my children is to hate the enemy of my race.” He never got over Woodrow Wilson’s betrayal—the cause, he felt, of his defeat—and named a mule President Wilson.95
5
AUSTRIA-HUNGARY
FRANZ FERDINAND LIVES: A COUNTERFACTUAL
So first of all an energetic internal clean-up and external peace for us … That is my profession of faith, for which I will work and struggle for as long as I live.
—Archduke Franz Ferdinand, February 1, 1913
For the man who started World War I, death came violently when it came at all. That was the family history of Francis Joseph, emperor of Austria and king of Hungary. His younger brother was shot by a Mexican firing squad, his son was a suicide, his wife was stabbed to death, his nephew and heir apparent assassinated. In 1853, five years into his sixty-eight-year reign, while taking his constitutional in Vienna, Francis Joseph was himself stabbed in the neck, the thick golden embroidery on the stiff collar of his uniform saving his life. At a Bosnian railway station in 1910 a would-be assassin armed with a revolver was close enough to touch the emperor; but in a tragedy for humanity, he lost his nerve in the royal presence. Francis Joseph seemed to court death by walking alone through the streets of Bad Ischl, the resort town outside his summer villa—but death would not come. “All are dying, only I cannot die,” he complained in his early eighties. While he lived to die, millions died because he lived.1
The debate over German “war guilt,” codified in Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty, has obscured Francis Joseph’s primary responsibility for the war. “Austria-Hungary has escaped the scrutiny of many historians for far too long,” Annika Mombauer wrote in 2007. In particular, “German historians have been duped … by the Austro-Hungarian attempt to pass the blame for the outbreak of the war onto Berlin” when “the initial decision for war … was made in Vienna, not Berlin.” Yet Vienna chose war with Serbia with the “blank check” it received in Berlin; history did not run an experiment in which it came away empty-handed. That consideration casts a thin shadow of ambiguity over statements like “Vienna independently made the crucial decision to go to war in July 1914,” the conclusion reached by Samuel R. Williamson Jr. and Ernest May in a major review essay surveying the scholarship on the war’s origin written over the past generation.2
“The Empire of Death,” by Alberto Martini. This Italian postcard is tough on the “old gentleman,” but then he did start World War I. The skeleton in Francis Joseph’s left eye socket is Franz Ferdinand assassinated in Sarajevo by the skeleton in the right socket, Princip. Hanging from the emperor’s ears are victims of post-assassination reprisals against Bosnian Serbs in Austria-Hungary and Serbs in the Balkans. From the right ear, “Trento” and “Trieste,” Austrian provinces coveted by Italy; from the left, “Serbia.”
Francis Joseph’s military aide, Baron Margutti, asked the central question: “How could it possibly have come about that the peace-loving old Emperor, of all men, should have lighted the torch that set the world aflame?” There is a big-picture answer.3
Austria-Hungary was the memory of a Great Power, spending three times as much on beer, wine, and tobacco as it did on defense. “Let the others wage war,” the Emperor Charles V declared in the fifteenth century, “you, faithful Austria, marry.” The Habsburgs—Francis Joseph’s thousand-year-old dynasty—had conquered by the bed, not by the sword; their empire was an artifact of strategic marriage. When Napoleon married Marie Louise, the sister of Francis I, a cynical prince summed up Habsburg diplomacy: “Better an Archduchess should be foutue [fucked] than the monarchy.” Since losing midcentury wars to France and Prussia, Austria-Hungary had been living on bankrupt repute. In the days after the assassination in Sarajevo of Franz Ferdinand by a Bosnian Serb student with ties to Belgrade, its leaders feared that, if upstart Serbia got away with conspiring to murder its next ruler, not just big powers like Russia but small ones like Italy and pups like Montenegro would pick the empire apart. A show of power was imperative to maintain the shield of prestige.*4
Such was the first requirement of deterrence according to the influential Prussian historian Heinrich von Treitschke. Sounding like Woodrow Wilson brandishing battleships at General Huerta for refusing to salute the stars and stripes, Treitschke held that “if the flag of the state is insulted, it is the duty of the State to demand satisfaction, and if satisfaction is not forthcoming, to declare war, however trivial the occasion may appear, for the State must strain every nerve to preserve for itself the respect which it enjoys in the state system.” Great Powers had to be willing to fight to uphold their independence, territorial integrity, and standing. Austria-Hungary was willing because Francis Joseph was. He was it. For him, “taking up the sword” against Serbia amounted to “an affair of honor,” as Wilson dignified American truculence over Tampico. In the war manifesto of July 29, 1914, the emperor used the pronoun “I” twenty-six times and referred to “my House,” “my monarchy,” “my peoples,” and “my army,” casting Serbia’s challenge to Austria-Hungary as a personal affront, something he would have settled with a duel if he were not aged and did not have an army for an arm.5
A second, more speculative answer to Margutti’s question may lie in Francis Joseph’s bleeding biography. Francis Joseph would not have been human if he were not prey to dark wishes that all should suffer as he had. “If the monarchy is doomed to perish,” he remarked when he decided for war, “let it at least perish decorously.” The law knows that as “depraved indifference to human life.” To the hard deposit of tragic experience, Francis Joseph’s great age added the apathy of the failing grip. Whereas during the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, he led five ministerial conferences in twelve days, in the three years before July 1914 he missed all thirty-nine meetings of his Council of Ministers.
After ascending to the throne at eighteen—“Farewell to youth,” he commented—Francis Joseph did not read a single book for pleasure, starving his moral imagination. By 1914 his self had long since been “crushed” under the weight of his throne. In the dual monarchy empathy went up, from subject to emperor, not down.6
The emperor gave at the foot washing on Holy Thursday. Standing in for the apo
stles at this annual ritual were twelve old men rounded up from Vienna’s almshouses, cleaned, and installed in chairs in a ceremonial hall of the Hofburg palace. Francis Joseph served them meat, and the archdukes cleared away the dirty dishes. Then, while a priest read from the New Testament, he knelt before them and “touched their bare feet with a napkin dipped in water from a golden basin.” The gesture only appeared humble: The emperor was imitating the Son of God.7
Francis Joseph (1830–1916). His suffering propped up his rule. People felt sorry for him. He felt sorry for himself.
On the feast of Corpus Christi in May crowds gathered in St. Stephan’s Square to witness the emperor’s arrival for another ceremony of humility. Marching ahead of him came soldiers and officials of an empire, extending from the Swiss border to Russia, that required the mobilization orders issued in July 1914 to be printed in fifteen different languages:
The light-blue breeches of the infantry were radiant … The coffee-brown artillerists marched pass. The blood-red fezzes on the heads of the azure Bosnians burned in the sun like tiny bonfires lit by Islam in honor of His Apostolic Majesty. In black-lacquered carriages sat the gold-decked Knights of the Golden Fleece and the black-clad red-cheeked municipal councilors. After them … came the horsehair busbies of the bodyguard infantry … The Imperial and Royal anthem … floated over all heads, a sky of melody, a baldachin of black-and-yellow notes … The loud fanfares resounded, the voice of cheerful heralds: Clear the way! Clear the way! The old Kaiser is coming!
And the Kaiser came; eight radiant-white horses drew his carriage. And on the white horses rode the footmen in black gold-embroidered coats and white periwigs. On each side of the carriage stood two Hungarian bodyguards each with a black-and-yellow panther skin over one shoulder … The Emperor wore the snow-white tunic known from all the portraits in the monarchy, and an enormous crest of green parrot feathers on his hat.
The procession began at seven A.M. and lasted nearly three hours. Its cynosure was the Eucharist. The dynasty rested on a foundation myth centered on this symbol of Christ’s body and blood. Hunting the stag, the first Habsburg, Rudolf I (1218–94), met a priest bringing the Host to a dying man. A swollen stream barred the way. But Rudolf lent the priest his horse, who carried him across. In return, the grateful (and connected) priest promised Rudolf’s descendants “a worldly Empire mandated and protected by God.” The House of Habsburg thereafter styled itself God’s chosen House. God never denied it.
In 1898, concurrent with the celebration of its longest tenant’s fiftieth year on the throne, the monarchy’s publicists topped Rudolf as the Good Samaritan by identifying Francis Joseph with Christ. This medievalism had a political purpose—to highlight Francis Joseph’s divine claim to legitimacy at a time of empire-shaking controversies over language and nationality. From two years before the twentieth century, Francis Joseph was “Christ in the noblest meaning of the word,” or so an article printed by the Imperial and Royal Court and State Press impiously asserted.
The Corpus Christi procession evoked this dragooning of God in aid of State. Members of the high nobility held a balduchin over the cardinal archbishop of Vienna carrying the Host in his monstrance. Bareheaded, his plumage tucked under his left arm, his white trident beard extending his long thin face, Francis Joseph came next. Holding a burning candle emblemizing the light of faith, he followed the Host along a path of boards strewn with fir branches through the city of Freud and Wittgenstein.8
On Francis Joseph’s last Corpus Christi circuit in 1913 the press chivalrously remarked on “the Emperor’s youthful step.” People felt sorry for their emperor. “ ‘Surely you can’t do that to the old man,’ was one of the standard expressions in the Dual Monarchy’s public life.” As an 1898 biography had it, wasn’t the emperor, for all his bodyguards in panther skins, “one of the most sorely tried bearers of human pain”? “The Emperor Franz Joseph succeeded at an early age in acquiring the deep personal attachment of his subjects,” the Times of London Vienna correspondent, Wickham Steed, reported in 1902. “In the course of time this feeling was enriched by the sympathy aroused by his participation in the national misfortunes and by his terrible family afflictions.”9
Those afflictions left Francis Joseph alone with his duty. After his wife, Elizabeth (“Sisi”), was murdered by an Italian anarchist in front of her Lake Geneva hotel in 1898, “Apart from his youngest daughter, who with her numerous children gave him something of the warmth of family life, he would not have had a single creature about him who treated him as a human being.” The sole exception to this mean rule was Francis Joseph’s thirty-five-year bond with the actress Katharina Schratt. Unable to abide life in the gilded cage of royalty (“I like the emperor so much,” she remarked at fifteen when he was courting her. “But if only he were not emperor!”),10 the peripatetic Sisi had encouraged their relationship.
It was certainly an upgrade over the emperor’s thirteen-year affair with Anna Nahowski, whom he encountered during an early morning walk near his Schönbrunn palace. At sixteen, Anna was blond, plump, and mercenary. She and her husband, an accommodating railway official, were set up in a house overlooking Schönbrunn Park, and in time in a summer home in the Styrian Alps, where the emperor vacationed. This arrangement only came out after a hundred years.11
In contrast, Francis Joseph’s affection for Frau Schratt, a single mother abandoned by her debt-fleeing Hungarian husband, provoked gossip from the beginning. In a St. Valentine’s Day “letter of meditation,” she once offered to become his mistress. Though flattered—“especially when I look in the mirror and my old wrinkled face stares back at me”—Francis Joseph gallantly declined. “I love my wife and do not wish to abuse her confidence and her friendship with you,” he replied in the most intimate of his more than five hundred letters to her. “I am too old to be a brotherly friend, but treat me as a fatherly friend.” Without her he would have been unbearably alone.12
A political diary kept by Joseph Baernreither, a former minister and senior civil servant, highlights a conspiracy to isolate Franz Joseph: “He is surrounded by a ring of advisors, domestic, military, and medical … For them, there is one law only—to spare the Emperor, to save him from every unpleasantness, to put no difficult decisions before him. Hence they wash their hands and keep their places.” Observers noted this “system of palace sanitation” as early as 1881, when it came out that the emperor “read only the sections marked by his officials in red” in the newspapers and so believes “that we are enjoying one of the happiest epochs of Austrian history.”13
Palace sanitation figured in the confrontation with Serbia that began the world war. In December 1912, his government rebuffed overtures from Serbia’s prime minister for direct talks in Vienna, but no one told the emperor. And, just before declaring war on Serbia on July 28, 1914, he was falsely told that Serbian troops had invaded Bosnia and Hungary.14
Rural folk believed that whenever “something happened to the detriment of one of his subjects, it happened without his prior knowledge and against his will, and they were convinced he would remedy any grievance if only his bad or wicked advisors would let him do so.” They were not so far wrong.15
“The great tides of life of our time hardly reach[ed] his ear as a distant echo,” Baernreither wrote of the aging, isolated, incurious emperor who resisted bathrooms in his palace (a bucket was good enough for him) and saw no need to equip the empire’s civil servants with telephones or, lest they scare the horses, the army with armored cars. An Austrian invented the tank in 1911, but the General Staff, in the emperor’s spirit, rejected it as unworkable. Entertaining Theodore Roosevelt in 1910, Francis Joseph declared, “You see before you the last monarch of the old school.”16
Yet with subjects from eleven nationalities and multiple religions, he stood for a principle a century ahead of its time—the “Austrian idea.” Children were taught that Austria-Hungary was a state of a “higher order—one that had or could overcome the tribal instincts of natio
nalism and serve as a model for the transnational European future.” Removing his shoes to visit mosques and attending High Holiday services at Jewish temples, Francis Joseph was a multicultural ruler. Such bows to pluralism were well judged in an empire in which, out of every one hundred soldiers, twenty-five were Germans, twenty-three Magyars, thirteen Czechs, nine Serbs or Croats, eight Poles, eight Ruthenes, seven Rumanians, two Slovenes, and one lonely Italian.
The emperor’s gestures to diversity, however, could not reliably contain the fissiparous pressures of nationalism and irredentism mounting within Austria-Hungary. An analogy captures the scope of the challenge: “A great power can endure without difficulty one Ireland, as England did, even three, as Imperial Germany did (Poland, Alsace, Schleswig [seized from Denmark in 1864]). Different is the case when a Great Power is composed of nothing else but Irelands, as was almost the history of Austria-Hungary.” Haunting its future was the question whether the mystique of Francis Joseph as the protector of peoples, in his own words, “too weak to remain independent if left to their own devices” would attach to the empire after the emperor was dead.17
In 1910 fewer than a million of his nearly fifty million subjects could remember a time when Francis Joseph, who ascended the throne in 1848, was not emperor. His image was ubiquitous, appearing on banknotes, stamps, and coins, as well as on the kitsch of empire—busts, vases, cups, ashtrays, aprons, jackknives, scissors, and rubber balls. The Interior Ministry put its foot down when a company requested permission to display his likeness on crates of fish.* Otherwise there was no escaping his vacant mien: “Above the bed was a portrait hanging of the all-illustrious monarch. During all the primogenitive acts (and there were quite a number of them) Mrs. Stukla kept her eyes fixed on this picture—a fact that displeased Mr. Stukla, the more so as he with good reason demanded of his spouse active participation in pursuing an operation designed to increase the subjects of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.”18
