The Sleepwalkers (20 page)

The Balkan Wars destroyed Austria's security position on the Balkan peninsula and created a bigger and stronger Serbia. The kingdom's territory expanded by over 80 per cent. During the Second Balkan War, the Serbian armed forces under their supreme commander General Putnik displayed impressive discipline and initiative. The Habsburg government had often adopted a dismissive tone in its discussions of the military threat posed by Belgrade. In a telling metaphor, Aehrenthal had once described Serbia as a ‘rascally boy' pinching apples from the Austrian orchard. Such levity was no longer possible. A General Staff report of 9 November 1912 expressed surprise at the dramatic growth in Serbia's striking power. Improvements to the railway network underway since the beginning of the year, the modernization of weaponry and equipment and the massive increase in the number of front-line units, all financed by French loans, had transformed Serbia into a formidable combatant.
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It was very likely, moreover, that Serbia's military strength would increase with time; 1.6 million people lived in the new territories conquered by Serbia during the two Balkan Wars. In a report of October 1913, the Belgrade military attaché Otto Gellinek observed that while there was no cause for immediate alarm, no one should underestimate the kingdom's military prowess. It would henceforth be necessary when calculating the monarchy's defence needs to match all Serbian front-line units man-for-man with Austrian troops.
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The question of how to respond to the deteriorating security situation in the Balkans divided the key decision-makers in Vienna. Should Austria-Hungary seek some sort of accommodation with Serbia, or contain it by diplomatic means? Should Vienna strive to mend the ruined entente with St Petersburg? Or did the solution lie in military conflict? It was difficult to extract unequivocal answers from the multi-layered networks of the Austro-Hungarian state. Foreign policy in the empire did not emanate from a compact executive cell at the apex of the system. It emerged from interactions across an archipelago of power-centres whose relationships with each other were partly informal and in constant flux. The General Staff was one such centre, the Military Chancellery of the heir to the throne another. The Foreign Office on the Ballhausplatz was obviously a key player, though it really functioned as a framework within which competing policy groups jostled for influence. The dualist constitution required that the Hungarian prime minister be consulted on questions of imperial foreign policy and the intimate connection between domestic and foreign problems ensured that other ministers and senior officials also laid claim to a role in resolving specific issues: Leon Biliński, for example, the joint minister of finance with responsibility for the administration of Bosnia-Herzegovina, or even his theoretical subordinate Governor Potiorek, the
Landeschef
of Bosnia, whose views did not always accord with those of the minister. So open was the texture of this system that even quite junior figures – diplomats, for example, or section heads within the foreign ministry – might seek to shape imperial policy by submitting unsolicited memoranda that could on occasion play an important role in focusing attitudes within the policy-making elite. Presiding over it all was the Emperor, whose power to approve or block the initiatives of his ministers and advisers remained unchallenged. But his was a passive rather than a proactive role – he responded to, and mediated between, initiatives generated by the loosely assembled power-centres of the political elite.
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Against the background of this strikingly polycratic system, three figures emerge as especially influential: the chief of the Austrian General Staff, Fieldmarshal Lieutenant Franz Baron Conrad von Hötzendorf; the heir to the Habsburg throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Este; and the joint foreign minister from 1912, Count Leopold von Berchtold.

Conrad von Hötzendorf was one of the most intriguing figures to hold high military office in early twentieth-century Europe. He was fifty-four years old when he was appointed chief of the General Staff in 1906 and remained throughout his career a steadfast advocate of war against the monarchy's enemies. In his views on the empire's external relations, Conrad was relentlessly aggressive. Yet he also entertained deep and sincere doubts about his fitness for office and often toyed with the idea of resigning. He was shy in elegant company and relished the solitude of walks in the mountains, where he produced melancholy pencil sketches of steep slopes shrouded in dark conifers. His tendency to self-doubt was reinforced by periodic bouts of severe depression, especially after the death of his wife in 1905. He sought an escape from this turmoil in his relationship with Gina von Reininghaus, the wife of a Viennese industrialist.

Count Leopold Berchtold

Conrad von Hötzendorf

Conrad's pursuit of this potentially scandalous liaison casts a vivid light on his personality. It began at a Vienna dinner party in 1907, when the two happened to be seated together. A week or so later, Conrad presented himself at the Reininghaus villa in the Operngasse and announced to his hostess: ‘I am terribly in love with you and have only one thought in my head: that you should become my wife.' Taken aback, Gina replied that this was completely out of the question; she was bound by a ‘sevenfold commitment' in the form of a husband and six children. ‘Nevertheless,' Conrad persevered, ‘I shall never rest – this wish will be my guiding star.'
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A day or so later, an adjutant popped by to inform Reininghaus that, in view of the staff chief's fragile mental state, she should think twice before depriving him of hope. Conrad himself made a further appearance eight days later, at which he declared that if she were to turn him down definitively, he would resign his post as chief of the General Staff and disappear from public life. They reached an agreement: Reininghaus would remain for the foreseeable future with her husband and children. But should it appear opportune at some point to separate from her husband, she would keep Conrad in mind. The staff chief's bold gambit – a triumphant application of the cult of the offensive to the art of courting – had paid off.

Gina was to remain with her husband for another eight years. Exactly when she and Conrad started an affair is not known. Gina's husband, Hans von Reininghaus, was in any case a complacent cuckold – the wealthy businessman had other women to divert himself with and the connection with Conrad provided welcome access to lucrative military supply contracts. In the meanwhile, Conrad visited his beloved whenever he could. He also wrote love letters, sometimes several a day. But since it was impossible to post them to his intended without risking a scandal, he collated them in an album bearing the title ‘Diary of my Sufferings'. Apart from scraps of news, the theme was consistent: she was his sole joy, only the thought of her could lift him from the abyss of despair, his destiny was in her hands, and so on. In all, he accumulated over 3,000 letters between 1907 and 1915, some stretching to sixty pages in length. Gina became aware of the album's existence only after his death.
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It would be difficult to overstate the importance of this relationship; it was at the centre of Conrad's life throughout the years from 1907 to the outbreak of war, eclipsing all other concerns, including the military and political questions that came to his desk. Its obsessive quality may help to explain some features of Conrad's professional demeanour – his willingness, for example, to risk his professional standing by associating himself with extreme positions, and his relative immunity from the fear of being exposed or discredited. He even came to see war as a means of gaining possession of Gina. Only as a victorious war-hero, Conrad believed, would he be able to sweep aside the social obstacles and the scandal attaching to a marriage with a prominent divorcée. He fantasized in a letter to Gina about returning from a ‘Balkan war' draped in the laurels of triumph, throwing caution to the winds and making her his wife.
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Photographs taken of him during these years show a man fastidiously concerned with maintaining a manly, dapper and youthful outward appearance. Among his private papers, now deposited in the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv in Vienna, can be found advertisements for anti-wrinkle creams cut from the pages of the daily press. In short, Conrad exemplified a brittle, rather overwrought form of European masculinity that was in some respects characteristic of the
fin-de-siècle
.

Conrad approached the geopolitical predicaments of the Habsburg monarchy with the same monomaniacal fixity he brought to his love life. Even in the context of the pre-1914 European military commanders he stands out as unusually aggressive. His answer to virtually every diplomatic challenge was ‘war'; in this there was virtually no change between 1906 and 1914. Conrad repeatedly counselled preventive wars against Serbia, Montenegro, Russia, Romania and even Italy, Austria's disloyal ally and Balkan rival.
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He made no secret of these convictions, but rather broadcast them openly through journals such as the
Militärische Rundschau
that were known to be close to the General Staff.
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He was proud of the immobility of his opinions, which he saw as an indication of manly solidity and steadfastness. ‘I am advocating here the position I have always maintained' was a favourite phrase in the letters and reports he sent to ministers and colleagues. Moreover, he favoured an abrasive, carping and self-righteous style of communication that irritated his colleagues and superiors. In 1912, when their affair was an established fact, Gina advised Conrad that he might get on better with the Emperor if he spoke mildly with the old man and avoided ‘the method of cudgel-blows'.
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There were many potential enemies on Conrad's horizon, but Serbia became his chief preoccupation. In a memorandum composed at the end of 1907 he called for the invasion and annexation of Serbia, which he described as ‘a constant breeding ground for those aspirations and machinations that aim at the separation of the South Slav areas [of the Empire]'.
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During 1908–9, when the annexation crisis was at its height, he called repeatedly for preventive war against Belgrade. ‘It is a crime,' he told Gina von Reininghaus in the spring of 1909, ‘that nothing is being done. War against Serbia could have saved the monarchy. In a few years we shall atone bitterly for this omission, and I shall be chosen to bear the entire responsibility and drain the chalice to its dregs.'
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He called for war against Serbia again during the Balkan War crisis of 1912–13. During the twelve months between 1 January 1913 and 1 January 1914, he counselled a Serbian war no fewer than twenty-five times.
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Underlying this single-minded pursuit of conflict was a social Darwinist philosophy in which struggle and the competition for primacy were seen as unavoidable and necessary facts of the political life between states. Conrad's was not yet a racist outlook (though there were certainly many younger Habsburg officers who envisaged a coming clash between the Germanic and the Slavic peoples), but rather a bleak Hobbesian vision of eternal strife between states bound to pursue their own security at the cost of all else.
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Until the outbreak of the Balkan Wars, Conrad's interventions were higher in volume than in impact. The immutability of his views itself undermined their credibility among the civilian leadership. Emperor Franz Joseph flatly rejected his calls for preventive war against Serbia in 1908. Aehrenthal, too, remained impervious to his arguments and grew increasingly impatient at the staff chief's efforts to intervene in the policy-making process. By October 1911, when Conrad pushed hard for war with Italy, Aehrenthal had had enough and filed a formal complaint with the Emperor. Conrad, Aehrenthal wrote, had created a ‘war party' within the General Staff. If this development were left unchecked, it would ‘paralyse the Monarchy's capacity for political action'.
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The conflict came to a head during a stormy audience with the Emperor on 15 November. Fed up with the obstreperous staff chief, Emperor Franz Joseph summoned him to Schönbrunn for a dressing down: ‘These incessant attacks on Aehrenthal, these pinpricks, I forbid them,' he told Conrad. ‘These ever-recurring reproaches regarding Italy and the Balkans are directed at
Me
. Policy – it is
I
who make it! My policy is a policy of peace. Everyone must learn to live with that.'
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It is worth emphasizing this clash between the Habsburg Emperor and his chief of staff. A collision of this kind would have been unthinkable under Conrad's predecessors.
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It was a sign that the constituent bits of the Habsburg command structure were drifting apart, acquiring a partial autonomy that gravely complicated the process of decision-making. Completely undaunted by the Emperor's reproaches, Conrad busied himself preparing a trenchant reply, but Franz Joseph dismissed him from his post before he had the chance to present it. His removal was officially announced on 2 December 1911.
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