A Mad Catastrophe

by Geoffrey Wawro

  The rump of actually active officers was no less alarming, as General Moritz von Auffenberg’s 1910 report on the Austro-Hungarian officer corps made clear. The army until 1866 had been officered at the highest levels by aristocrats and at the junior levels by gentry and upwardly mobile sons of rich peasants—what Auffenberg called “conservative, calm, and safe social elements.” Those were the sort of men who could bond platoons of peasant infantry and persuade them to endure hard marches and take casualties. The new officers of the twentieth century, however, were changing along with the rest of society; the aristocrats, Auffenberg discovered, had “almost entirely abandoned the military career,” and the gentry and rich peasant sons were also declining—down to 40 percent or less, by Auffenberg’s reckoning. Now most officers descended from “railway personnel, innkeepers, clerks, petty officials, teachers and shopkeepers.” They lacked the “toughness, spirit, and panache [Schwung]” of the old breed, who had commanded a largely peasant army as if they had been born to it, which, of course, they had. Now the army mingled rural and urban troops and put them under plebeian officers who were susceptible to the very national politics that were tearing the monarchy apart, and who would probably not hold up well under fire. It didn’t help that 80 percent of these officers and the great majority of NCOs were Germans, in general decidedly mediocre men who had judged the army’s notoriously low pay and slow promotion acceptable. Dionysus Gablenz, the son of the only Austrian general to wring a victory from the Prussians in 1866, found himself a sixty-year-old major in 1914, still active, if you could call it that, in the fortress administration of Theresienstadt (Terezin).

  Austria-Hungary’s enlisted men were largely non-German and would not obey these officers for long in war or peace.47 Much was made of the facility of Austro-Hungarian officers with the languages of their men, but here too Auffenberg was unimpressed, observing that the “national chauvinism” of the age required far more than a German officer with a smattering of Czech or Slovenian. It required German-speaking Czech or Slovene officers, who would be able to inspire their men, but such men had long since left the professional army for other opportunities.

  Auffenberg also rued the absence of educated officers of the well-situated middle class. Those candidates were all flocking to finance and the professions “in pursuit of riches and status.” The army had lost and never recovered its social prestige after the twin blows of 1859 and 1866, and it was fighting a losing battle with the “easy money” and “materialist spirit” of the modern age. In the peacetime army it took on average sixteen years to rise from lieutenant to captain, the rank at which the Durchschnittsoffizier—average officer—would probably retire, single and unloved (no ambitious woman would marry such a man), and on a meager pension, with most of his savings squandered on horses, uniforms, gambling, prostitutes, balls, and the debts contracted to pay for them. A man lucky enough to make major after a plodding twenty-five-year career would be earning just 3,600 crowns ($500) a year: less than a schoolteacher, a trolley conductor, or even a plumber. And those were the lucky ones, who had to cope only with the slow promotion and niggardly salaries that had been frozen (by the Hungarian Delegation) at 1860s levels to discourage an army career. The unlucky were forced out earlier with an injury, an illness, or some disciplinary infraction and forced to live out their lives in grinding poverty.

  The result of these social changes in the Austro-Hungarian officer corps, Auffenberg reported in 1910, was a “deep and dangerous complacency that one finds in greater measure only among officers of the Turkish army.” There was also a joylessness about the Austrian mess. “Walk into one,” Auffenberg noted, having visited dozens of them as army inspector, “and you won’t even find wine on the table.” Everyone present fretted about the cost of it. The old “happy warrior spirit” or Landsknechtsgeist that had united drunken, guffawing Austrian officers in the evening had become a relic of the past.48

  There was also a tendency toward corruption in the penny-pinching Habsburg army, which Auffenberg revealed in 1910 (and which he was punished for in 1915, after his own insider trading on the shares of defense contractors). “Strivers will do anything to raise their social standing, improve their finances, and escape their little border posts. . . . Gloominess, rage, doubt, and sick brains drive our officers to criminal acts,” he observed. Auffenberg spoke scathingly of the poor education of army officers, “most of whom lack even the ability to carry on a decent conversation.”49 Those who were socially gifted waged ferocious turf wars to place themselves closer to Vienna and its circles of wealth and influence.

  The defeat at the hands of Prussia in 1866 had also changed the status of the general staff in Austria. Until 1866, the staff—which was responsible for intelligence collection, mobilization, and war plans—had been regarded as a despised backwater; service with it had impeded careers, not accelerated them. But the brilliant victories wrought by the great general staff of Prussia’s General Helmuth von Moltke in the German Wars of Unification had persuaded all armies—including Austria’s—to increase and empower their general staffs. It was never an easy transition, not even for Prussia. Moltke had famously issued an order to a corps commander at the Battle of Königgrätz in 1866, and the general had replied, “This is all fine, but who is General Moltke?” He had known, of course, but he hadn’t wanted to know, lest the general staff try to micromanage his affairs.

  The same personnel politics (Personalpolitik) that had once bedeviled the Prussian army now rooted themselves in Austria-Hungary. Staff officers warred with regimental officers, infighting that was only encouraged by the military’s new proclivities. On the pretext of making the army smarter and “more Prussian,” the Habsburg general staff had continually increased the number of staff officers serving with every regiment, so by 1910 there were ten or more, two per battalion. But this was viewed in the field army more as a way to extend the reach and patronage of the reigning general staff chief than to make the field troops more effective. Cliques were notorious. General Friedrich Beck, who had been Emperor Franz Joseph’s general staff chief for twenty-five years, from 1881 to 1906, was the only man in the world whom the old emperor called “mein Freund” (my friend). The old fox Beck had accumulated so much wealth and power through that friendship that he was fearfully known as the Vizekaiser (vice emperor).50 An increasingly idle bon vivant, Beck stubbornly refused to retire, relying on subordinates to do his work. The most reliable of these, known as “Beck’s crown prince,” was General Oskar Potiorek, who would play a ruinous role in 1914. When the sagging Beck was finally forced out—by Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1906, the sad emperor compensating Beck with a lucrative sinecure—the cliques intensified, as new factions jockeyed for the powers Beck had accumulated over a quarter century.51

  As army inspector and heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand ran a potent clique, but Emperor Franz Joseph and his adjutant, General Arthur Bolfras, had their own. Beck had been the emperor’s confidant since 1866, and so the emperor and Bolfras naturally intended to make Beck’s crown prince, Potiorek, the next general staff chief. But Franz Ferdinand had no desire to see Beck’s tenure continued by other means and thus hit upon General Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, whom he had met at imperial maneuvers in Hungary in 1901.52 Bewildering alliances formed and dissolved. General Franz Schönaich, the Austro-Hungarian war minister from 1906 to 1911, used the war ministry as a mafia, pushing his protégés up the ladder. He allied with the emperor and Bolfras against Conrad, but also against the archduke and his über-efficient military secretary, Captain (then Major, then Colonel—promotion was not slow in these charmed circles) Alexander Brosch von Aarenau.

  The Schönaich Crisis of 1911 exposed these rivalries to the public eye. A grand bargain was hatched that year: the emperor, who loathed Conrad for his war-mongering and anti-Hungarian rhetoric, would secure the archduke’s assent to Conrad’s dismissal in return for the emperor’s assent to Schönaich’s dismissal. The archduke despised Schönaich for his
softness and readiness to appease the Hungarians. Potiorek, “cold, dry, always nervous and brittle,” in the judgment of the French embassy, had the seniority and gravitas to ally with this “Schönaich circle” against Conrad in Potiorek’s fierce quest for the general staff chair. “He craves the fauteuil of the general staff,” the French noted. This time Potiorek’s craving was unappeased, but he would keep intriguing until the outbreak of war in 1914, and indeed into the war itself.53

  To keep the encroaching archduke at bay and underscore his own continuing relevance, the aging emperor insisted that he, not Franz Ferdinand, hand promotions and assignments down from the throne each year. Austro-Hungarian officers waited jealously to see who got “the best garrisons” and offices and who was exiled to the backwaters. Field officers were reviled by staff officers as Frontbestien, “beasts of the front,” and the “beasts” in turn reviled the nonstop intrigues of the staff officers in das graue Haus—the gray house, which was the general staff headquarters in Vienna. Under Beck and Conrad, the neglected “beasts of the front” got older and the coddled staff younger, one officer in 1912 deploring what he called the “disturbing asymmetry” of an army that blended Europe’s oldest field officers with its youngest general staff.54 Auffenberg recommended in 1910 that the windows of the gray house be thrown open so that “light, air, and fresh breezes [could] be let in to blow away the Vienna cliques, the coffeehouse crowd, and the office-bound dynasts.”55 Colonel Brosch warned in 1913 that Conrad—an early protégé of the archduke—had founded his own clique in the general staff operations bureau, which now was known as the Feldhernngestüt, the stud farm for generals. If Conrad never rotated an officer through it, the man would never get a corps or an army. Like Beck before him, “Conrad had become too powerful, overshadowing the whole officer corps, and filling the best jobs with his creatures, which had devastated morale.” Invidious rumors “born in the coffeehouse, the nest of all gossip,” divided one faction from another.

  Colonel Brosch, with his protective connections to the archduke, whispered nonstop against Conrad in the years before the war, and also complained about money. The contrast between a (well-placed) officer’s social status and the poverty those without independent means were forced to endure both during and after their service made the entire officer corps nervous. General Urban, a war ministry section chief, retired with a full pension in 1911 only to return to active duty in the ministry in 1913 “because he found that he could not make a good living on the outside.”56

  Moneygrubbing and corruption flourished in this atmosphere. Writing to Auffenberg from Bozen (Bolzano), where Franz Ferdinand had arranged for him to command the prestigious 2nd Kaiserjäger Regiment after his long tour in the Belvedere, Colonel Brosch sighed that “even though I am in a spa town, I cannot relax.” He fretted about a planned cruise to Greece and Sicily with his wife: “How will I make my little money go a long way?” They were cruising in the winter, “not the best time for a sea voyage,” because “it will be cheaper to sail then and to live on a ship.” Since safe and comfortable liners such as those of Hamburg-Amerika or the Austrian Lloyd were expensive, he had chosen a cheap tub—“it is small and cramped and heaves around sickeningly in a heavy sea”—to save yet more money. Brosch proudly observed that he had chiseled the price down to 95 crowns, as “officers and their families receive a 50 percent discount!” This was a double savings, since the cruise would remove him from Bozen and the obligation to attend the various Carnival balls for officers, NCOs, and veterans, all of which were a drain on his paltry salary. Regimental command was essential to his career—and Brosch owed his illustrious regiment and salubrious garrison to his contacts—but he clearly missed access to what he called “the well-endowed positions” of Vienna.57

  While the Habsburg army thus scrounged around for the means of subsistence, the Habsburg Empire teetered on the brink of extinction. The economic and military terms of the Ausgleich or Compromise of 1867 had to be renewed every ten years, and the renewal debates in 1907 were more furious than ever. They had become intertwined with the fraught question of universal male suffrage. To give the wheezing empire a new lease on life, the emperor had conceded the vote to all adult males in both halves of his monarchy, but only the Austrian half implemented it. Accustomed to ignoring inconvenient directives from Vienna, the Hungarians ignored this one as well, continuing to enfranchise just 7 percent of their population in a pointed snub to their peoples and monarch. Only the emperor’s belated threat to force—as opposed to merely order—implementation of universal male suffrage in Hungary persuaded the Magyars in 1907 to renew the Ausgleich and give the constitution another decade of life. The survival of Magyar supremacy in Hungary depended on keeping the kingdom’s Slavs and Rumanians cowed in a system that gave the Hungarians, with only 55 percent of Hungary’s population, 98 percent of its 405 parliamentary deputies. By now, this medieval arrangement had become an international embarrassment even for the thick-skinned emperor. Franz Joseph recoiled at the publication (and international sensation) of Oxford scholar R. W. Seton-Watson’s 1908 book Racial Problems in Hungary, which detailed Budapest’s myriad abuses of non-Hungarians in Transleithania. To end the scandal and persuade Hungarian lawmakers to do what the Austrians had already done—and what they had expected Hungary to do as well—the emperor took the highly unusual step of transferring his court to Budapest in the fall of 1908 to implement electoral reform.

  After enduring a jolting ten-hour train ride from Ischl to Budapest to settle the issue of male suffrage, the seventy-eight-year-old emperor-king was jilted instead. Magyar supremacy rested on rigged elections, and Hungarian “Liberals” saw no reason to change this state of affairs, even at the emperor-king’s orders. Actual Hungarian suffrage “reform” in 1908 amounted to this: one out of every ten illiterates—more than 25 percent of the population—was conceded one vote in elections (the other nine could not vote at all); high school graduates, all of whom were educated in Magyar, received two votes each; university graduates and wealthy taxpayers could vote three times. Nor was voting secret; ballots had to be cast publicly so that “voters would not break their promises under the veil of secrecy.” With rules such as these, Magyar-speaking gentry and professionals would have little trouble ruling the roost in Hungary forever against the wishes of less privileged Hungarians, Slavs, and Rumanians.58

  Hungary, in short, was dragging the Habsburg Empire over a cliff. The only hope for the monarchy in an era of expanding literacy, liberalization, and national consciousness was a softening of the grip of the “master nationalities.” The Austrians were willing; the Hungarians weren’t. They shunned manhood suffrage and even extorted lower tax rates in return for nothing more than renewing the Ausgleich, leaving the Austrians with 64 percent of the “common” tax bill, the Hungarians with just 34 percent. Austrian taxpayers—already deeply resentful of Hungarian privileges—increasingly found themselves paying for Hungarian projects. No less than a quarter of the military units raised in Hungary ended up being paid for by Austrian taxpayers. Artillery that had always been manufactured in Austria by the Skoda works would now be made at a new Hungarian facility in Diosgyör.

  In the last years before World War I, the Hungarians gave only lip service to the joint monarchy. Head of the National Liberals and prime minister from 1903 to 1905, István Tisza gave the old party a face-lift in 1910, renamed it the National Party of Work, and resumed the premiership in 1910. Tisza superficially supported the Ausgleich, but he resisted every effort by Vienna to tighten or even equitably share the costs of the Austro-Hungarian union.59 Not without reason, Italian commentators jocularly referred to Franz Joseph as “il Kaiser d’Ungaria,” the emperor of Hungary—a reference to the way real power in the monarchy was wielded from Budapest.60

  The growing disparity between Austrian and Hungarian influence came into sharp focus during the suffrage and renewal debates, when Austria attempted to close its grip around the small eastern region of Bosnia-Herzegovina. I
n 1908, with the Young Turk revolution shaking Constantinople and a pro-Russian Serbian dynasty hungrily eyeing Bosnia-Herzegovina, which lay between Austria-Hungary and the tottering Ottoman Empire, Vienna felt bound to annex the territories it had merely occupied thirty years earlier at the Congress of Berlin. This led to another, revealing round of Hungarian obstruction. Budapest would not agree to incorporate Bosnia-Herzegovina into either part of the monarchy. Instead, the Hungarians insisted on yet another half measure. Though the new provinces would be treated as a “hereditary possession of the Habsburg house,” they would actually be ruled not by the emperor but by the Austro-Hungarian finance minister.61 That minister would spend most of his time trying to figure out how to communicate with his subordinates, the emperor having agreed that all Bosnian correspondence with Austro-Hungarian ministries would be in German, with Hungarian offices in Hungarian, and with Croatian officials in Croatian.62 These absurd arrangements were calculated to leave the new Balkan crown lands in permanent limbo as a “special administrative territory”; Budapest feared strengthening Cisleithania, yet also feared adding more Slavs to Transleithania, especially South Slavs, who might ally with the Croats and Serbs of Hungary against the Magyars.63