“On the other hand, I imagine your expertise in that particular subject has helped your career along,” Swing guessed.
“Maybe,” Stilwell admitted, “but if it also means that I’m going to be permanently assigned to the paper-shuffling brigade, I’d rather still be a Captain in command of soldiers, even if it was only a company.”
Stilwell was particularly entertained by the reporter’s account of how he and Christina had shaken off the two foreign agents who were shadowing him. “That’s a peach!” he said, laughing. “Peachy” or “a peach” was Stilwell’s ultimate term of praise. “You outsmarted them by pretending to be stupider than they were. That Austrian agent sounds like quite a gal,” he added. “I’d like to meet her. Is she in Vienna now?”
“I don’t know,” Swing said, and immediately changed the subject
On the eighth day of the conference the delegates were given the morning off. Swing and Stilwell sat together at an outdoor café on the Ringstrasse in the center of town, munching rich Viennese pastries and sipping hot chocolate, reading the newspapers and talking over the current European political picture.
“It looks like the Hungarians may be in over their heads,” Stilwell said, as he rapidly read through an article in the Daily Telegraph. “The Czechs and Slovaks left inside the old borders of the Kingdom of Hungary want to join the Austrian Empire, the Romanians in Transylvania want to join the Kingdom of Romania, and the Croats are calling for their own independent state. The Romanians have mobilized their army, and the Hungarian Army, such as it is, has its hands full already putting out all the fires.”
“Chickens coming home to roost,” Swing said. “Their ethnic policies made a lot of internal enemies for the Hungarians, and now they’re paying the price. How are they responding in Budapest?”
“It looks like they’re pushing the panic button,” Stilwell answered. “Karolyi has canned the entire Cabinet with the exception of the Minister of War, and will be forming a new government today.”
“Meanwhile, Austria seems to have weathered the storm,” Swing said. He was reading a day-old edition of the Paris Herald. “The new Czech-Slovak Parliament passed a resolution confirming its loyalty to the Empire, and everything seems to be calm elsewhere. Makes an interesting contrast with the Magyar Republic, don’t you think?”
Before Stilwell could respond, a woman who had appeared out of nowhere said, “Very interesting, I agree. Hi, Ray. Who’s your friend?” Without waiting for an answer, she pulled up a chair and sat down. She was tall, had short, black hair, and was, to Swing, as desirable as ever.
“Christina!” Swing gasped. “Prince Sixtus told me you were on an assignment…”
“I was,” she interrupted, smiling. “Since your companion has forgotten his manners, I’ll introduce myself. My name is Christina Dietrichstien, at one time photographer for the famous reporter, Ray Swing.”
Stilwell laughed. “You know, I was going to guess that.” He rose and offered his hand. “Nice meeting you, Miss Diedrichtstien.” He glanced at Swing, who was staring at the Austrian girl as if he was having a vision. “It looks as if you two have some catching up to do, and I have some papers to shuffle, so I’ll be running along. See you later, Ray.” With that, he picked up his hat from the table, settled it on his head and departed.
Christina reached over the table to take Swing’s hand in hers. “It’s so good to see you again, Ray.”
He squeezed her hand. “I didn’t think I was going to see you again. I had just about given up on it.”
“Well, I was on a mission for the Bureau,” she said. “And now I have a new assignment, starting today.”
“Oh,” Swing tried unsuccessfully to hide his disappointment. “Didn’t they give you any time off at all between jobs, not even a day?”
“No, I was ordered to start immediately,” she answered in a surprisingly cheerful tone. “It is considered a very high-priority assignment.”
Swing wondered how she could announce such bad news so light-heartedly. “Oh, hell,” he said. “What is the assignment, anyway?” he asked dully, staring down at the table.
“Prince Sixtus is worried about the safety of a visiting American journalist, and I was assigned to protect him,” Christina answered. She grinned as he looked up at her, his expression brightening. “I have been designated as your bodyguard until you return to the U.S. I hope that is acceptable.”
Swing’s smile was so wide that it was almost painful. “I guess that would be all right,” he said.
Imperial Coat of Arms of the Empire of Austria by Sodacan based on a work by Hugo Gerhard Ströhl (1851–1919)
Chapter Sixteen
From the editorial page of the Philadelphia Inquirer, November 15, 1923
by Raymond Swing, Foreign Affairs Editor
…The ratification of the Trans-Atlantic Treaty by the United States, in tandem with the recently adopted Anglo-American Hemispheric Naval Agreement, marks the beginning of a new era in American foreign policy. For the first time in its history, this nation has undertaken treaty obligations in conjunction with foreign powers. It is sobering to think that these obligations may someday lead us into a foreign war, and such a risk is not to be taken lightly.
But, in the view of this reporter, it was the right thing to do. The new Trans-Atlantic Treaty Organization of which the United States is now a member, rather than increasing the risk of war, represents the best chance to avoid it. The member states are pledged to join together to defend each other against any aggressor nation. TATO will provide security for all, by presenting any aggressor with a united front of Great Powers, which no single nation, no matter how strong, can hope to defeat. As Mr. Churchill, the Prime Minister of Great Britain so aptly put it, “There are times when the surest way to prevent war is to be prepared for it.”
We have, as a nation, given up something precious by taking on new responsibilities outside of our traditions. No longer will America have the freedom to stand apart from the troubles of the Old World. But the ocean barriers that once protected this Republic now constitute potential highways for invasion. The world has become a smaller place than the one in which our Founding Fathers lived, and a more dangerous one, and we can no longer safely ignore events on the other side of the Atlantic, nor pretend that they cannot affect us. Let us pray that the military conventions of the new treaty are never invoked, and that we are not drawn into a new great war. But if such a war does come, it is worth considering that our participation will not merely be in the interests of the United States, but will be in the defense of freedom from tyranny for all the world.
Afterword
The Austro-Hungarian Empire was in 1914 the second-largest country in Europe (after the Russian Empire), and one of the world’s Great Powers. It does not nowadays claim a very prominent role in history, at least as the subject is taught in American schools. About all that anyone remembers about it is that the assassination of the Imperial heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, on June 28, 1914, was in some way the proximate cause of the First World War. The plot of the story is driven to a large degree by the history and politics of this long-vanished nation, and I have attempted to provide sufficient historical information in the body of the story to explain the motives and actions of the characters portrayed therein. But, it seemed to me that a brief essay on the history and politics of the Dual Monarchy might provide readers with a useful context for the fictitious events depicted in the preceding story.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was erased from the map after World War One, was a bizarre political contraption, in part an antique relict from the Holy Roman Empire, in part a by-product of defeat by Bismarck’s Prussia in 1866. Austria had been the seat of the Central European branch of the Hapsburgs since the 13th Century. In 1526 the dynasty inherited the Crown of St. Stephen. Thereafter, the two nations were for many years linked only by the person of the common ruler, who was at once the Emperor of Austria and the King of Hungary. Hungary retained many of the elemen
ts of sovereignty, with its own parliament (the Diet), government and budget, but it lacked two essential attributes of an independent nation: it lacked both its own currency and an army. In addition, the Imperial bureaucracy that administered the entire Dual Monarchy was controlled by Vienna. By the middle of the 19th Century, Hungary was slowly losing its quasi-autonomous status within the Empire.
Thus, Hungary was ripe for an independence movement in 1848, when a wave of liberal, nationalist revolutions threatened to overthrow monarchical governments from France to Poland, and from Denmark to Italy. In Hungary, a revolution led by lawyer and politician Lajos Kossuth initially succeeded in driving out the Hapsburg government, but the independent nation he created was soon crushed by an army of 300,000 Russians under Czar Nicholas I. Afterwards, the Hungarian Diet and government were suspended, and the Kingdom was governed exclusively from Vienna. Kossuth became a popular hero and symbol of Hungarian national aspirations.
In 1866, Austria and its allies were crushed by Prussia in the Seven Weeks War. The costs of this war combined with those stemming from a defeat at the hands of France and Sardinia in 1859, had brought the Empire to the brink of collapse, with an enormous state debt and a growing fiscal crisis. In order to stave off complete dissolution of the Empire, the government of Emperor Franz Joseph was forced to offer the Hungarians the Compromise of 1867, in return for Hungary’s agreement to take on a share of the Imperial debt, and to leave foreign policy in the hands of Austria. Under the terms of this agreement, Hungary’s independent legislature, government and separate budget were restored, and Budapest was granted what amounted to a monopoly of political power within the borders of the Transleithania (i.e. the Kingdom of Hungary).
This latter provision aggravated an internal problem for which the Dual Monarchy never found a solution, the problem of the ethnic minorities. There were more than ten major languages spoken within the Empire (major being defined as more than 700,000 speakers), including German, Hungarian, Czech, Polish and Serbo-Croatian. While some of these groups enjoyed comparatively favored status within the Empire (such as the Poles in the Austrian half and the Croats in the Hungarian), none had been granted what amounted to an autonomous state within the Empire, except for the Hungarians. Particularly displeased with the new arrangement were roughly 6 million Czechs, 3 million Romanians and the nearly 2 million Slovaks in the newly autonomous Kingdom of Hungary, who had virtually no say in how they were governed.
After 1867, Hungary and Austria began to part ways on the handling of the ethnic minorities, which aggravated the internal stresses that were pulling the Empire apart. In Austria the heir, Franz Ferdinand, came to believe that the nation could not survive unless its Slavic subjects were given a fair share of political power within the Empire. Various plans to dismantle the German monopoly of power in Austria and replace it with a federal system under which the minorities would have a share of the government began to gain influential adherents, such as Franz Ferdinand’s nephew, Charles. The Christian Socialist Party platform of 1905 proposed to reform the Cisleithania by creating a federation consisting of 15 ethnic nation-states under the Imperial umbrella.
Unfortunately for the proponents of these schemes, by the time Charles ascended the throne in 1916 it was too late to do anything to implement them. The war had virtually destroyed the Empire. All that remained was a shell operated by Germany in order to keep the Austrian army fighting.
The Hungarians demonstrated their favored approach to the nationalities problem even before the Revolution of 1848, with a series of laws requiring the exclusive use of Hungarian in public life. It was required for admission to the bar (1831); made the official language of laws passed by the Diet (1838); the exclusive language for all government administration (1843); mandatory in secondary education (1844); and as a test for voters (1848). This last was a product of Kossuth’s “liberal” regime. After 1867, the suppression of the minorities within Hungary, now called “Magyarization”, resumed. For the Magyar-speaking minority (roughly 48% of the population) this was the one policy that virtually all Hungarian political parties could agree upon. The pressure from the dissatisfied minorities continued to build through 1914, and it played a major part in the final dissolution of the Empire in 1918.
In addition to these internal problems, the Empire was beset by external foes. To the northeast, there loomed the menace of the Russians who, under the doctrine of Pan-Slavism, claimed the role of protectors of their ethnic kin, particularly those living within Austria-Hungary. In furtherance of this policy, Russia had a bi-lateral treaty with Serbia, under which the Czar was obligated to come to the aid of latter country if she was attacked by Austria-Hungary. It was this connection which led directly to Russia's entry into the First World War after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Serb nationalists.
Then there was the relatively new independent Kingdom of Romania (1878), on the eastern border of Hungary. Directly adjacent to Romania was Transylvania, legendary home of vampires and part of the Hungary since 1690. The majority of the province were ethnic Romanians, and after 1867, their desire to leave the Empire and join Romania grew steadily, as did the possibility of war.
In the south, the Kingdom of Serbia exerted a magnetic attraction on millions of South Slavs inside the Empire. The fear that Franz Ferdinand’s plan to extend political rights to their fellow Serbs, and thus quell their desire to leave the Empire, motivated the men who plotted the assassination in Sarajevo which touched off the World War.
The southwest bordered on the Kingdom of Italy. Italy claimed that the Trentino, Trieste, South Tyrol, Istria and Gorzia were all rightfully part of Italy. Since Italy and the Empire were partners in the Triple Alliance of 1882 (Germany was the third member), the two nations were theoretically allies. On the other hand, Italy had never dropped its claims to the afore-mentioned Imperial territories, and thus constituted yet another potential threat to the Dual Monarchy. This threat became a reality when, in 1915, Italy joined the Entente and declared war on Austria.
It was not surprising, in view of all of the above, that four years of total war caused the ramshackle structure to finally collapse in 1918. In retrospect, it is more surprising that the Empire was able to endure for as long as it did.
For information on the politics and policies of the Empire, and the various approaches to the minorities issue, including federalism and Magyarism, “The Dismantling of Historic Hungary: The Peace Treaty of Trianon, 1920” by Ignác Romsics; translated by Mario D. Fenyo, in The International History Review Vol. 26, No. 1 (Mar., 2004) proved to be indispensable.
Extremely helpful as source for the economic relationships between Germany, Austria and Hungary in the decade following the War was The Danube Basin and the German Economic Sphere by Antonin Basch, (New York, 1943).
I am indebted to Steven Sowards for his lucid and informative lecture “Nationalism in Hungary, 1848-1867” (Michigan State University, April 23, 2004), one of his Twenty-Five Lectures in Balkan History, (http://staff.lib.msu.edu/ sowards/balkan/lect07.htm).
Some readers may find the Emperor Karl’s choice of an American reporter as his diplomatic courier unbelievable, but in fact, Raymond Swing was asked by the Chancellor of Germany to carry a confidential message to the British Foreign Minister, Sir Edward Grey, during the First World War. (http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWswingR.htm)
For background on Churchill and Chartwell, I relied on William Manchester’s superb biography, The Last Lion: Alone 1932-1940 (Boston, Toronto, London, 1988). I recommend this book and the first volume, Visions of Glory, 1874-1932 to anyone who is interested in the life of this towering figure.
I was unable to find any biographical information concerning the Managing Editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, John T. Curtis (who was apparently not related to the famous Curtis family, publishers of the Saturday Evening Post and later the Inquirer), beyond a few cryptic references, as in the March 6, 1930 Scranton Republican cited below. (http://www. newspape
rs. com/newspage/49784700/)
For details of the interior of the Schonbrunn see (http://www.schoenbrunn.at/en.html)
Following are short biographical sketches of the principal historical characters in order of their appearances in the story. (Those whose biographical material follows the first story are so noted).
Prince Sixtus of Bourbon-Parma by Hoffotograf - Wikipedia-de
Prince Sixtus of Bourbon-Parma (1886-1934) was the son of Robert, Duke of Parma, and brother-in-law of Emperor Charles I of Austria-Hungary. Along with his brother Xavier, he served in the Belgian Army during the First World War. He carried out secret negotiations on behalf of the Emperor in 1917, in an unsuccessful attempt to obtain a separate peace for Austria-Hungary without the knowledge of Germany.
Charles I of Austria by Bain News Service - the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division
Emperor Charles (Karl) I of Austria (King Charles IV of Hungary) (1887-1922) was the last ruler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, becoming the heir of his grand-uncle Franz-Joseph after the assassination of his uncle, Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. He presided over the dissolution of the Empire after the end of the First World War in 1918, when his plan to restructure Austria-Hungary as a federation consisting of autonomous ethnic states was rejected by the victorious Allies. In 1922, while living in exile on the island of Madeira, he developed pneumonia and died at the age of 34.
Franz von Papen –
the German Federal Archive (Deutsches Bundesarchiv)
Franz von Papen (1879-1969) A Catholic Center Party politician, he served as Chancellor of Germany for a brief period in 1932. Papen was largely responsible for persuading the aging President of the Weimar Republic, Paul von Hindenburg, to name Adolf Hitler as Chancellor in 1933. Papen served as Vice-Chancellor in the Hitler government from 1933-34. He escaped assassination on the infamous Night of the Long Knives (June 30, 1934) through the intervention of Hermann Goering, then later was appointed as Ambassador to Austria and Turkey by the Nazi government.
Tidal Effects (Gray Tide In The East Book 2) Page 19