The Sleepwalkers (22 page)

Berchtold brought to his new office a sincere desire to repair relations with Russia; indeed, it was the belief that he would be able to achieve this that prompted the Emperor to appoint him.
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The quest for détente was supported by the new Austrian ambassador to St Petersburg, Count Duglas Thurn, and Berchtold soon found that he had a powerful ally in the person of Franz Ferdinand, who immediately latched on to the new foreign minister, showering advice on him, assuring him that he would be much better than his ‘frightful predecessors, Goluchowski and Aehrenthal', and supporting the policy of détente in the Balkans.
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For the moment, it was unclear what could be done to improve matters with Russia: Nikolai Hartwig was encouraging Serbian ultra-nationalism, including irredentist agitation within the Habsburg monarchy; most importantly, and unbeknown to the Austrians, Russian agents were already working hard to build a Balkan League against Turkey and Austria. Nevertheless, the new administration in the Joint Foreign Office was willing to embark on an exchange of views. His policy, Berchtold announced in an address to the Hungarian delegation on 30 April 1912, would be a ‘policy of stability and peace, the conservation of what exists, and the avoidance of entanglements and shocks'.
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The Balkan Wars would test this commitment to breaking point. The chief bone of contention was Albania. The Austrians remained committed to the creation of an independent Albania, which, it was hoped, might in time become an Austrian satellite. The Serbian government, on the other hand, was determined to secure a swathe of territory connecting the country's heartland with the Adriatic coast. During the Balkan conflicts of 1912 and 1913, successive Serbian assaults on northern Albania triggered a sequence of international crises. The result was a marked deterioration in Austro-Serbian relations. Austria's willingness to meet Serbian demands (or even to take them seriously) withered away and Serbia, its confidence heightened by the acquisition of new lands in the south and south-east, became an increasingly threatening presence.

Austrian hostility to Belgrade's triumphant progress was reinforced from the autumn of 1913 by dark tidings from the areas conquered by Serbian forces. From Austrian Consul-General Jehlitschka in Skopje came reports in October 1913 of atrocities against the local inhabitants. One such spoke of the destruction of ten small villages whose entire population had been exterminated. The men were first forced to come out of the village and shot in lines; the houses were then set on fire, and when the women and children fled from the flames, they were killed with bayonets. In general, the consul-general reported, it was the officers who shot the men; the killing of the women and children was left to the enlisted men. Another source described the behaviour of Serbian troops after the taking of Gostivar, one of the towns in an area where there had been an Albanian uprising against the Serbian invaders. Some 300 Gostivar Muslims who had played no role in the uprising were arrested and taken out of the town during the night in groups of twenty to thirty to be beaten and stabbed to death with rifle butts and bayonets (gunshots would have woken the sleeping inhabitants of the town), before being thrown into a large open grave that had been dug beforehand for that purpose. These were not spontaneous acts of brutality, Jehlitschka concluded, but rather ‘a cold-blooded and systematic elimination or annihilation operation that appeared to have been carried out on orders from above'.
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Such reports, which accord, as we have seen, with those of the British officials in the area, inevitably affected the mood and attitude of the political leadership in Vienna. In May 1914, the Serbian envoy in Vienna, Jovanović, reported that even the French ambassador had complained to him about the behaviour of the Serbs in the new provinces; similar complaints were forthcoming from Greek, Turkish, Bulgarian and Albanian colleagues, and it was to be feared that the damage to Serbia's reputation could have ‘very bad consequences'.
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The glib denials of Pašić and his ministers reinforced the impression that the government was either itself behind the atrocities or unwilling to do anything to prevent or investigate them. The Austro-Hungarian minister in Belgrade was amused to see leader articles in the Viennese press advising the Serbian government to go easy on the minorities and win them over by a policy of conciliation. Such advice, he observed in a letter to Berchtold, might well be heeded in ‘civilised states'. But Serbia was a state where ‘murder and killing have been raised to a system'.
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The impact of these reports on Austrian policy is difficult to measure – they were hardly surprising to those in Vienna who already subscribed to a grossly stereotypical view of Serbia and its citizens. At the very least, they underscored in Vienna's eyes the political illegitimacy of Serbian territorial expansion.

Nevertheless: a war between Austria and Serbia did not appear likely in the spring and summer of 1914. The mood in Belgrade was relatively calm in the spring of that year, reflecting the exhaustion and sense of satiation that followed the Balkan Wars. The instability of the newly conquered areas and the civil–military crisis that racked Serbia during May gave grounds to suspect that the Belgrade government would be focusing mainly on tasks of domestic consolidation for the foreseeable future. In a report sent on 24 May 1914, the Austro-Hungarian minister in Belgrade, Baron Giesl, observed that although Serbian troop numbers along the Albanian border remained high, there seemed little reason to fear further incursions.
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And three weeks later, on 16 June, a dispatch from Gellinek, the military attaché in Belgrade, struck a similarly placid note. It was true that officers on holiday had been recalled, reservists asked not to leave their current addresses and the army was being kept at a heightened state of readiness. But there were no signs of aggressive intentions towards either Austria-Hungary or Albania.
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All was quiet on the southern front.

Nor was there any indication that the Austrians themselves had war in mind. Early in June, Berchtold instructed a senior Foreign Office section chief, Baron Franz Matscheko, to prepare a secret position statement outlining the empire's key concerns in the Balkans and proposing remedies. The ‘Matscheko memorandum', which was drawn up in consultation with Forgách and Berchtold and passed to the foreign minister's desk on 24 June, is the clearest picture we have of Vienna's thinking in the summer of 1914. It is not a cheerful document. Matscheko notes only two positive Balkan developments: signs of a rapprochement between Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria, which had finally ‘awakened from the Russian hypnosis', and the creation of an independent Albania.
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But Albania was not exactly a model of successful state-building: levels of domestic turbulence and lawlessness were high, and there was general agreement among Albanians that order would not be achieved without external help.
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And almost everything else was negative. Serbia, enlarged and strengthened by the two Balkan Wars, represented a greater threat than ever before, Romanian public opinion had shifted in Russia's favour, raising the question of when Romania would break formally with the Triple Alliance to align itself with Russia. Austria was confronted at every turn by a Russian policy – supported by Paris – that was ‘in the last resort aggressive and directed against the
status quo
'. For now that Turkey-in-Europe had been destroyed, the only purpose behind a Russian-sponsored Balkan League could be the ultimate dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire itself, whose lands Russia would one day feed to its hungry satellites.

What was the remedy? The memorandum focused on four key diplomatic objectives. First, the Germans must be brought into line with Austrian Balkan policy – Berlin had consistently failed to understand the gravity of the challenges Vienna faced on the Balkan peninsula and would have to be educated towards a more supportive attitude. Secondly, Romania should be pressed to declare where its allegiances lay. The Russians had been courting Bucharest in the hope of gaining a new salient against Austria-Hungary. If the Romanians intended to align themselves with the Entente, Vienna needed to know as soon as possible, so that arrangements could be made for the defence of Transylvania and the rest of eastern Hungary. Thirdly, an effort should be made to expedite the conclusion of an alliance with Bulgaria to counter the effects of the deepening relationship between Russia and Belgrade. Finally, efforts should be made to woo Serbia away from a policy of confrontation using economic concessions, though Matscheko was sceptical about whether it would be possible by this means to overcome Belgrade's hostility.

There was an edgy note of paranoia in the Matscheko memorandum, a weird combination of shrillness and fatalism that many Austrian contemporaries would have recognized as characteristic of the mood and cultural style of early twentieth-century Vienna. But there was no hint in it whatsoever that Vienna regarded war – whether of the limited or the more general variety – as imminent, necessary or desirable. On the contrary, the focus was firmly on diplomatic methods and objectives, in accordance with Vienna's self-image as the exponent of a ‘conservative policy of peace'.
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Conrad, on the other hand, who had been recalled to the post of chief of staff in December 1912, remained robotically committed to a war policy. But his authority was on the wane. In May 1913, it was discovered that Colonel Alfred Redl, former chief of military counter-intelligence and chief of staff of 8th Army Corps in Prague, had been routinely passing top-level Austrian military secrets to St Petersburg, including entire mobilization schedules, the outlines of which were forwarded in turn by the Russians to Belgrade. The scandal shed an unflattering light on Conrad's skills as a military administrator, to say the least, for all appointments at this level were his responsibility. Redl was a flamboyant homosexual whose indiscreet and expensive liaisons made him an easy target for the blackmail specialists of Russian intelligence. How, one might ask, had this escaped the notice of Conrad, the man who had been responsible for monitoring Redl's progress since 1906? It was widely noted that Conrad took little interest in this aspect of his work and had only a sketchy acquaintance with many of the most senior military appointees. He compounded his error by having the disgraced colonel pressed to commit suicide with a pistol handed to him in a hotel room. Redl turned the pistol on himself, an ugly dénouement that offended the devoutly Catholic heir to the throne and – more to the point – deprived the General Staff of the opportunity to extract from Redl a full account of what had been passed to St Petersburg and how.

This may have been Conrad's precise intention, for it emerged that the persons involved in trafficking Austrian military secrets included a staff officer of South Slav heritage by the name of Čedomil Jandrić, who happened to be a close friend of Conrad's son, Kurt. Čedomil and Kurt had been classmates at the Military Academy and often went out drinking and merrymaking together. Evidence emerged to suggest that Jandrić, together with the Italian mistress of Hötzendorf junior (in this respect, at least, Kurt was a chip off the old block) and various other friends from their circle had been involved in selling military secrets to the Italians, most of which were then passed by the Italians to St Petersburg. Kurt von Hötzendorf may himself have been directly implicated in espionage activity for the Russians, if the claims of Colonel Mikhail Alekseevich Svechin, who was then military intelligence chief for the St Petersburg military district, are to be believed. Svechin later recalled that the Austrian agents supplying Russia with high-quality military intelligence included the chief of staff's son, who, it was claimed, had stolen into his father's study and removed General Staff war-planning documents for copying. The impact of these bizarre entanglements on Conrad can easily be imagined. The full extent of Kurt von Hötzendorf's culpability (if indeed he was himself an agent) was not revealed at the time, but at a high-ranking meeting chaired by Conrad in Vienna during May 1913, it was announced that the young man had been found guilty of withholding important information about his compromised associates. Having urged the meeting to mete out the severest possible penalty, Conrad became dizzy, surrendered the chair and was obliged briefly to leave the room.
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For all his arrogance, the staff chief was profoundly demoralized by the Redl disaster, so much so that he was uncharacteristically quiet during the summer months of 1913.
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Franz Ferdinand was still the most formidable obstacle to a war policy. The heir to the throne worked harder than anyone else to neutralize the impact of Conrad's counsels on the leading decision-makers. In early February 1913, barely six weeks after Conrad's recall to office, Franz Ferdinand reminded him during a meeting at Schönbrunn Palace that ‘it [was] the duty of the government to preserve peace'. Conrad replied, with his usual candour: ‘But certainly not at any price.'
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Franz Ferdinand repeatedly warned Berchtold not to heed the arguments of the chief of the General Staff and sent his aide Colonel Carl Bardolff to Conrad with a stern instruction not to ‘drive' the foreign minister ‘to an action'. The archduke, Conrad was informed, would countenance ‘under no circumstances a war with Russia'; he wanted ‘not a single plum-tree, not a single sheep from Serbia, nothing was further from his mind'.
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Relations between the two men grew increasingly fractious. In the autumn of 1913, the hostility between them broke into the open. Franz Ferdinand sharply reprimanded the chief of the General Staff before a gathering of senior officers for changing the dispositions of the manoeuvres without consulting him. Only the mediation of Franz Ferdinand's former staff chief Brosch von Aarenau prevented Conrad from resigning. It was only a matter of time before Conrad would be forced from office. ‘Since the Redl case,' one of the archduke's aides recalled, ‘the Chief was a dead man [. . .] it was just a question of setting a date for the funeral.'
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After further angry exchanges at the Bosnian summer manoeuvres of 1914, Franz Ferdinand resolved to be rid of his troublesome chief of staff. Had the archduke survived his visit to Sarajevo, Conrad would have been dismissed from his post. The hawks would have lost their most resolute and consistent spokesman.