Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (64 page)

It is a striking measure of Habsburg weakness that it could only manage a geographical spoiling action, and only then with the cooperation of the Italians, who also relished a weak new state in the Adriatic – but who otherwise could not have been more inimical to the Empire, despite being its notional ally. From the perspective of the seventeenth or eighteenth century the Balkans should have been the final horizon of the great Habsburg mission, their troops effortlessly filling in the peninsula down to the Peloponnese, but it was a horizon which now vanished in a haze of vacillation and timidity. Romania and Serbia could with growing confidence look on other Romanians and Serbs still ‘trapped’ inside the Empire as hostages who would one day be redeemed. The Serbs felt the same about Bosnia-Herzegovina. Gavrilo Princip, born an Ottoman subject in western Bosnia in 1894, was entirely characteristic of bitter Christian Slavs who – harassed by the Habsburg police – made their way to Belgrade looking for revenge.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The curse of military contingency
»
Sarajevo
»
The Przemyśl catastrophe
»
Last train to Wilsonville
»
A pastry shell
»
The price of defeat
»
Triumphs of indifference

The curse of military contingency

In common with much of the rest of Europe, Austria-Hungary managed to be imbued with a militarist ethic while not really fighting anyone. After the humiliation of 1866 the army which stood at the heart of the state only saw action occupying Bosnia. The small and futile Habsburg navy had a curious outing as four ships and some three hundred marines became an almost unnoticed element in the international expedition to ‘restore order’ in China after the Boxer Rebellion. This fact is only of interest because one of the members of the expedition was Baron von Trapp, who was on board the armoured cruiser SMS
Kaiserin und Königin Maria Theresia
on the Yangtze. This was of course very many years before, played by Christopher Plummer, he sang ‘Edelweiss’ and won my ten-year-old daughter’s heart for ever, committing us as a family to playing the
Sound of Music
DVD so many times the digital coding almost wore through.

This pacific stance meant that despite countless manoeuvres, table-top plans, wave upon wave of uniform and weapon reform, nobody had any real experience of war. This was true too for Germany, where the army also became just a pleasant rite of passage – years of hanging around in a terrific uniform and making friends who would form drinking clubs, reunion dinners and mutually back-scratching business arrangements that would define the future shape of their millions of participants’ lives, but no fighting. This was, of course, entirely admirable. Franz Joseph loved reviewing troops and artists spent their entire careers doing paintings of him looking at smart cavalry regiments. This harmless activity could have put an entirely rosy glow on his reign if he had died before 1914 (as by almost any reasonable criterion he should have done) but the continuity of his values until 1916 shows how a poisonous sense of violence was a latent constant year after year. The military remained overwhelmingly the state’s principal preoccupation and the biggest factor noticeable in the Habsburg landscape. Dominant buildings in the cities, such as the Wawel Castle in Kraków or the Buonconsiglio Castle in Trento, were massive and unlovely barracks (the latter’s beautiful frescoes all whitewashed over) and the world wistfully recreated in Joseph Roth’s
The Radetzky March
or Stefan Zweig’s
Beware of Pity
was – looking between the lines – a narrow, macho, dreary place. Perhaps the clearest sense of the scale of Habsburg society’s commitment to the military was that by the end of 1914, 3,500,000 of its trained citizens had been activated for service. All those years of polishing boots, drill, small-town brothels and drinking contests before passing into civilian life meant that, even years after, you would suddenly find yourself reached out for, so that you could die or be wounded in some hideous way.

This was true across the whole of Europe. The lack of an ideological element to this obsession with military contingency makes it hard to understand now. Generals were constantly coming up with fresh plans for dealing with fresh enemies, with the stakes strangely low. Perhaps the only ideologically motivated European country was France – by far the most militarized as a percentage of population – grimly bent on its eventual war of revenge with Germany to regain Alsace-Lorraine. Otherwise everyone seems to take turns in being allies or enemies, to little effect. There was a common obsession with isolation (except, for much of the period, in the case of Britain, which had little stake in the Continent beyond peace in the west) and layer upon layer of public and secret treaties offered various forms of security while at the same time provoking counter-reactions. The actual combination in place in 1914 seems now like a mere accident, with quite different possibilities if war had broken out a couple of years earlier: in which case at the very least Italy would have fought alongside Germany and Austria-Hungary; or a couple of years later: in which case Russia and Britain would almost certainly have been totally antagonistic again.

As had often been the case in the nineteenth century, Germans, Austrians and Russians needed to cooperate to keep the Poles down but also so their rulers could visit each other’s houses, swap uniforms, have banquets and hang around sounding off about the evil of liberals. This was a great source of stability. The one constant was a grim determination by Franz Joseph to stick to Germany under all circumstances. His early reign had been marked by isolation and military humiliation. Moving in lock-step with Berlin gave him a magic shield. Russia was a problem, though. Bismarck had kept Russia quiet through the deeply secret Reinsurance Treaty, which in its most secret inner sanctum agreed even to allow Russia to attack Constantinople with impunity. Bismarck’s dyspepsia was brought on by knowing that France’s delirious fantasies of revenge could be realized through a treaty with Russia and to avoid this a nod and a wink to Russian expansion anywhere else was preferable. Bismarck’s departure in 1890 put everything into the hapless hands of Kaiser Wilhelm, who refused to renew the military treaty as he felt instead that he could rely on his sparkly personal magnetism to stage-manage the relationship just by speaking to the Tsar, man to man. This provoked total panic among the now isolated Russians, who in 1892 duly signed up with France. That a further twenty-two years went by before war broke out shows that the set-up was not fatal in itself. But it did hold the potential for turning a local problem into a pan-European one.

For the Germans eastern Europe became ever more of a backwater. Their interests – particularly via Hamburg and Bremen – were in trade, and the bulk of their most dynamic industrial areas were in the west, as were their best customers. With the exception of Silesia, the German eastern areas which had so defined the old state of Prussia no longer counted for much, and yet it was the east that saw the disasters of the twentieth century. From the early 1890s onwards Vienna and Berlin initiated ever more fevered and elaborated war-games to work out how to deal with the Russian menace. Germany was oddly placed as it had no interest in taking any Russian territory and Russia had no interest in taking any German territory. In that sense the countries, allies for much of the nineteenth century, were only antagonistic because of Russia’s alliance with France. Germany was also entirely defensive in the west: by 1914 it had given up its absurd plan to take on Britain’s navy and it just wanted France to carry on buying things. But, again, it was France and Russia’s alliance that turned Germany from a sated power into a paranoid one, its planners obsessed with the need
if there were to be war
to knock out first France and then Russia, in a military operation of more and more unfeasible vastness. But the plan’s principal author, Alfred von Schlieffen, had died of old age in 1913 without his ever more elaborately deranged heaps of train times, scribbled arrows and diktats ever coming close to being used.

Austria-Hungary’s situation was quite different as it had to deal with
active
interference by Russia. As in Austria-Hungary, Russia (whatever its rulers’ dreams) could not simply be run as a giant prison cell, nor were its elite able to function as cold and disengaged technocrats immune to wider trends. For Russia, particularly Russia totally humiliated by the 1905 war with Japan, a tear-stained, proud interest in their Slav ‘little brothers’ the Serbs and Montenegrins came to take on real importance: both as a genuine piece of mystical craziness and as an ideology based on the surprisingly hard late-nineteenth-century fighting that had taken Russia itself further into the eastern Balkans in its wars with the Ottomans. If the Habsburgs had occasional but rapidly suppressed thoughts about taking over Salonika, the Romanovs had more concrete plans, kept warm since Catherine the Great, to take over Constantinople. If they were to do this then they would need a quiescent or friendly Balkans. Bismarck had thought it worthwhile to buy Russian friendship by letting them into Constantinople, and the British and French had a similar secret clause in their agreement during the Great War, and it is odd in a way that it never actually happened.

This pan-Slavism was a variant on other standard-issue nationalisms across much of Europe, cutting across more local boundaries in a confusing manner and finding its fullest expression in Yugoslavism. Pan-Slavism was also, of course, highly selective – the Czechs were warmly embraced in St Petersburg when they sent delegations there to annoy their Habsburg masters, whereas, oddly, Russian–Polish toasts of friendship never seemed to happen. One indicative fruit to drop from this peculiar tree was perhaps the most futile of all declarations of war when, during the Russo-Japanese War, Montenegro, in solidarity with its ‘big brother’, declared war on Japan.

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.