A Mad Catastrophe

by Geoffrey Wawro

  The fatuity of all of this military and political floundering was not lost on someone as dry and methodical as Archduke Franz Ferdinand. In 1913, the fifty-year-old heir apparent vowed that when he became emperor, Bosnia-Herzegovina would become Austrian; he noted the strategic absurdity that Hungary, by its continual manipulation of the provinces (and the weak emperor), was effectively “cutting Austria off from the Balkans,” which, the archduke continued, were “Austria’s future.” The monarchy would thrust down to Salonika, absorb abandoned Turkish territory, open new ports on the Mediterranean, and became the engine of trade and development for the new Balkan kingdoms of Rumania, Bulgaria, Greece, and even Serbia.64

  But in this plan, as in all others, Hungarian cooperation was required, and by 1913 the Hungarians had all but dropped out of the imperial system. They were refusing even to sing the words to the Austro-Hungarian national anthem—Haydn’s Gott erhalte—because it contained the hated word Kaiser. They would hum, fall silent, or even hiss. Government efficiency, always a weak spot in Austria, plummeted, as the Hungarians insisted on ever-increasing paperwork and protocol to connect the two capitals, the two parliaments (one in Vienna, the other in Budapest), and the delegations that bridged the two governments. At best, this system was, as a foreign observer put it, “an incomplete federalism,” with no ultimate authority.65 At worst, the system was, as another foreign observer put it, one of Hungarian-administered “terror and blackmail . . . Franz Joseph has always given in to the Hungarians; a stronger and more intelligent monarch would have struck back by now against this little nation that is no more numerous than the people of Belgium.”66

  The stronger man who wanted to strike back was Franz Joseph’s nephew: Archduke Franz Ferdinand. After the suicide of Archduke Rudolf in 1889, the twenty-six-year-old Franz Ferdinand had survived tuberculosis and then been named Austria-Hungary’s crown prince and heir apparent in 1898. His energy, independence, and pugnacity were legendary; he was an obsessive hunter who shot 275,000 beasts in his lifetime; he chose as his wife not the Habsburg cousin selected for him but her lady-in-waiting, Countess Sophie Chotek, which caused a scandal and a “morganatic marriage,” which meant that the archduke’s children would be barred from the throne.67 Few liked this humorless, churchy son of a Habsburg archduke and a Neapolitan princess, least of all the emperor. Indeed, everyone assumed—until 1898, when they gave up assuming—that the emperor would simply remarry and produce another son, rendering his nephew irrelevant. But the emperor, besotted with Frau Schratt, never bothered remarrying, and so the monarchy was stuck with Franz Ferdinand.

  Whereas Franz Joseph viewed the Ausgleich as the unassailable basis of the monarchy, Franz Ferdinand viewed it as a cancer that had to be cut out. Like a puppy harrying an old dog, Franz Ferdinand established his own military chancery in the Lower Belvedere Palace in 1904 and ran it as a shadow government, with his own de facto ministers of war, foreign affairs, and domestic policy, most of whom had run afoul of Franz Joseph at one time or another.68 Whereas Franz Joseph was content to cling to the dissolving structure of the Habsburg monarchy, Franz Ferdinand wanted to tear the monarchy down to the foundation and rebuild it. The contrast between his youth and the emperor’s age had everyone speculating about abdication: the drowsy old emperor stepping down to make way for, as the French embassy put it, “the primordial solution—the resolute, energetic crown prince, who might save the monarchy, if it’s not already too late.”69 Ordered by the emperor to go to Budapest in 1907 to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Ausgleich, Franz Ferdinand had only grudgingly complied: “I must tell Your Majesty the truth—this celebration is really a confusion of concepts, this 40 years Jubilee of the Ausgleich at a moment when these people rule, people whom I can only describe as traitors and who constantly agitate against everything: Dynasty, Empire, Army, etc. etc.”70

  Like a puppy harrying an old dog, Archduke Franz Ferdinand created a shadow government in the Belvedere Palace that openly competed with Emperor Franz Joseph’s government in the Hofburg for control of the empire. “We not only have two parliaments, we have two emperors,” a senior Austrian official complained as the competition intensified.

  Credit: National Archives

  Officers and bureaucrats loyal to Franz Joseph increasingly had to hedge their bets in view of the emperor’s advanced age as well as the archduke’s ambitions and the deft office politics of his chief aide, Colonel Brosch von Aarenau, who was Franz Ferdinand’s adjutant from 1906 to 1911 and who began organizing the Thronwechsel or imperial succession in 1911, five years before the emperor’s death. Brosch’s program vowed to introduce Austrian voting rights into Hungary, end the abuses of Magyarization, solve the question of administrative languages everywhere, normalize the status of Bosnia-Herzegovina, put the joint army on a solid footing, and rename Austria-Hungary the “Austrian Monarchy,” with a single flag: the Habsburg double eagle on a black-and-yellow field. Most of all, Franz Ferdinand promised to obliterate the impression of “muddling through” (fortwursteln) that was Vienna’s hallmark.71 Overall, he would implement “a policy of even-handed repression” to replace the thankless pro-Hungarian policies of Franz Joseph. The Viennese satirist Karl Kraus was no friend of the Habsburgs but nevertheless had a grudging respect for Franz Ferdinand, who, unlike Franz Joseph, “never pandered to the fickle, tacky (kitschig), and smarmy (gemütlich) instincts of the Viennese, and never even tried to be popular.” The archduke was a “Fortinbras, not a Hamlet,” and the monarchy’s last best hope for “an orderly country and an end to chaos.”72

  Franz Ferdinand may have been the monarchy’s best hope—there were no imposing alternatives—but he was unlikely to succeed: the national problems were too intractable, and the archduke himself was a muddle of contradictions. He was more competent and focused than Franz Joseph—who wasn’t?—but he had no plan to harmonize the quarreling nationalities, and he was hemmed in by an alarmingly religious wife, who vetted generals and ministers on their Catholic piety, as well as by a coterie of sycophants. He was a bully, enabled by the obsequious Austrian system, and his oafish prejudices became his policy, as his analysis in 1909 of a conversation between an Austrian ambassador (Count Mensdorff) and a British official (Noel Buxton) made clear: “Mensdorff is totally incompetent. He’s married to a Hungarian and has forgotten that he’s an Austrian. Buxton, like all Englishmen, is blind and stupid. You may share these impressions with General Conrad.”73

  With supervision like this, it was no wonder that the Austro-Hungarian general staff chief, General Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, had a reputation for bluster and recklessness. Still, in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king. Made general inspector of the Habsburg armed forces in 1913, Franz Ferdinand poached more and more on the emperor’s last preserve. He and Conrad replaced every one of Austria-Hungary’s sixteen corps commanders that year, removing the emperor’s men and inserting their own.74 The press referred to the archduke guardedly and obliquely as “the Competent Office,” “the Very High Position,” or “the Alternate Factor.” Every great-power embassy had informants inside Schönbrunn and the Hofburg, telling them what medications the emperor was on, what his weight was, and how severe his regular illnesses were. Increasingly, the emperor avoided the Hofburg altogether, remaining in the summer palace at Schönbrunn year-round to spare himself the strain of a move.75 Most observers expected his death any day.

  Franz Ferdinand’s rise and the emperor’s eclipse divided the already fragmented empire further. “We not only have two parliaments, we have two emperors,” a senior official grimaced.76 The archduke—“the Sphinx of the Belvedere”—was instrumental in the appointment of Austro-Hungarian foreign minister Count Alois Lexa von Aerenthal in 1906, as well as Aerenthal’s successor in 1912, Count Leopold von Berchtold.77 General Moritz von Auffenberg, made war minister in 1911 at the archduke’s urging, deplored the emperor’s unwillingness to “solve the Hungarian question” and stop the erosion of army morale.78 General Franz Co
nrad von Hötzendorf had also rallied to the archduke’s policies, winning promotion to general staff chief in 1906 at the age of fifty-four.79

  Conrad never concealed his frustration that ten million Hungarians had achieved a headlock on the fifty-million-man monarchy’s foreign, fiscal, and military affairs. Like Franz Ferdinand—who had said that “the army’s main task is not defense of the fatherland against an external enemy but against all internal enemies”—Conrad believed that the monarchy’s mission was to “unite Europe’s western and southern Slavs” against Russian, German, or Hungarian domination.80 Like Aerenthal, he believed that a forward policy in the Balkans was needed to inspire Austria-Hungary’s demoralized peoples and deter the monarchy’s enemies.

  To give teeth to the empire’s Balkan strategy, Conrad reworked Austro-Hungarian war plans after 1906. Plan U, to invade Hungary, was supplemented with three additional scenarios: Plan I (Italy), Plan B (Balkans), and Plan R (Russia). The first of these plans targeted a nominal partner of Austria’s, but the fact that Italy had technically been an Austrian ally in the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria, and Italy since 1882 fooled no one. The Italians had joined the alliance only to get diplomatic cover in their regular spats with the French over North African colonies. They coveted Austrian Trieste, Dalmatia, and the Tyrolean region around Trento far more than Libya or Tunis. This made war between the “allied enemies”—as Austria and Italy were known in diplomatic circles—likely.

  The existence of Russian and Balkan war plans in Vienna was anything but surprising. Since war with Russia would almost certainly flow from an Austro-Hungarian clash with Serbia, Conrad’s Plans B and R kept to the defensive on both fronts, with a potentially decisive Echelon or Staffel of four corps held in reserve to intervene on either front as needed. If the Russians backed down, Serbia would be crushed; if they didn’t, they would be fought to a standstill in Galicia and then enveloped in Poland by allied Austrian and German armies. This, at least, was the idea.81

  chapter2

  Between Blunder and Stupidity

  The Russians smelled the decay of Austria-Hungary more acutely than most. Having themselves been crushed in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, the Russians knew a thing or two about decay. Earlier focused on expansion into East Asia—hence the war with Japan—the Russians now swerved opportunistically back to Europe. Inspired by pan-Slavism, which held that all Slavs were a single family best led by Russia, Tsar Nicholas II vowed to push into the Balkan space, nurture Slavic kingdoms like Serbia, and annex a land bridge to Constantinople and the Dardanelles, reclaiming the old Eastern Orthodox capital and linking the Black Sea and the Mediterranean through the Turkish Straits. In this way, the Russians would expunge the shame of their Asian defeat, escape the “prison” of the Black Sea, and proclaim their arrival as Europe’s dominant power.1

  Russia’s selection of Serbia as a key ally in this strategic reorientation was a disastrous development for Austria-Hungary. In 1903, the pliable, pro-Austrian Obrenovic dynasty in Serbia had been overthrown by the pro-Russian, aggressively nationalistic Peter Karageorgevic. King Peter and his prime minister, Nikola Pasic, detected weakness in both Sick Men of Europe: the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires. The 1878 Congress of Berlin—a tortured compromise between the old policy of propping up the Ottomans and the new policy of recognizing new nations (like Greece, Rumania, Serbia, and Bulgaria) cut from “Turkey-in-Europe,” as the Balkan provinces of the Ottoman Empire were called—had opened the door to all kinds of changes by its inconsistencies. Serbia felt free to nibble at surrounding (still Ottoman) provinces including Macedonia, the Sanjak of Novipazar, Kosovo, and Albania, and even to claim the 2.1 million Serbs living under Austrian rule in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Hungary, Croatia, and Dalmatia.2 The Serbs resolved to use the heft of a Russian alliance to expand into Macedonia and Albania, open a corridor across the Sanjak to Montenegro and the sea, and begin the demolition of the Habsburg monarchy, which the Serbs derided as “a gaudy bird made of borrowed feathers.”3

  Many of those borrowed feathers had been plucked from Serbia’s historic dominions. The Serbia that had wrung independence from the Turks in 1867, with its capital in Belgrade, encompassed barely half the landmass of the old Serbian Empire shattered by the Turks in the fourteenth century. The Serbs were determined to reconstitute that empire in the twentieth, by retaking Macedonia (seat of the ancient Serbian capital at Skopje), Kosovo (site of the mythic Field of the Blackbirds, where Serbia had lost an epic battle and its independence to Turkey in the fourteenth century), and as much of Austria-Hungary as they could grab.4 Serbia now styled itself the “Prussia of the Balkans,” planning to unite all of the South Slavs in an enlarged Kingdom of Serbia, just as Bismarck had united the Germans. There were ten million South Slavs on the Balkan Peninsula in 1903, but only three and a half million of them lived within the borders of Serbia or Montenegro. The rest were in the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires. Serbia wanted them all, and was prepared to fight to get them.5

  Franz Joseph and Franz Ferdinand perceived the danger: if the Serbs succeeded in uniting all of the southern Slavs under a single crown, they would shoulder Austria-Hungary out of the Balkans by creating a Serb-run “Yugoslavia.” This “Slav South,” governed from Belgrade, would unite Austria’s military occupation zones and Turkey’s dying vilayets or provinces in a single, Slavic, Christian hand.6 The situation was analogous to the 1860s, when the Piedmontese had pushed the Austrians out of Italy and the Prussians had pushed them out of Germany. Now Archduke Franz Ferdinand began referring to the Serbs as the Donaupiemont—the Danubian Piedmont—and he persuaded the emperor to appoint Count Alois Lexa von Aerenthal foreign minister in 1906 to energize the Habsburg foreign office, which had stagnated under his two unimaginative predecessors.7 Whereas Aerenthal’s predecessors had dully promoted an Austro-Russian entente in the Balkans, the new foreign minister wanted to wipe the slate clean and start fresh. That Austria-Hungary lacked the power to reorganize the Balkans did not trouble him. As the Viennese wit Karl Kraus jotted, “Policy is what you do in order to conceal what you are.”8 Austria was weak, but it would pretend to be strong.

  Having served as ambassador in St. Petersburg during the Russo-Japanese War, Aerenthal assumed that the Russians would be unable to oppose a newly aggressive Austrian policy in the Balkans. It never occurred to him that the opposite might be true: that, having lost in East Asia, the Russians could not afford to lose in Europe as well. Blissfully secure in assumptions that took no account of Austria-Hungary’s military weakness, Aerenthal embarked on a strong policy in the Balkans, determined to push back the Russians, rally the Habsburg peoples to a revived dynasty, intimidate the Serbs, and remind the Germans that Austria-Hungary was still capable of managing its (shrunken) sphere of influence. It was time, Aerenthal argued, to convert the hesitant, thirty-year occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina into a bold annexation. Annexation of Bosnia would open the door to a wider Austrian aim: Salonika. Once the greatest city of Macedon, then a rich Roman and Byzantine port, Salonika in the twentieth century remained the greatest strategic prize in the Balkans. Aerenthal planned to seize it, link it to the Habsburg Empire by a corridor through Macedonia and the Sanjak, command the Aegean port’s trade routes to the Middle East and Asia, and use it to spring open Austria’s Adriatic “backwaters” of Trieste and Fiume (Rijeka).

  Aerenthal and his mentor, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, envisioned using these new annexations, from Bosnia down to Salonika, as a means to reshape the monarchy. Externally, the Turks and Serbs, who had prevented construction of an Eastern Railway (Ostbahn) from Vienna to Salonika, would be brushed aside. Austria would become, as Franz Ferdinand’s mouthpiece put it, “Europe’s bridge to the Levant and the Middle East.”9 Internally, Hungary would be shorn of Croatia, which would be beefed up with the new Balkan conquests and used, in league with Austria, to cut Hungary and its colossal pretensions down to size in a refashioned system. The hugely inefficient Dual Monarchy would become a (hop
efully) more efficient Triple Monarchy, with capitals at Vienna, Budapest, and Zagreb. If the Hungarians continued to obstruct, they would simply be outvoted, two against one, by the Austrians and Croats.10

  Little Serbia blocked all of these soaring plans. In the past, the Serbs had kowtowed to Austria. But with firm Russian backing, they now could assert their national interests with little fear of a crushing Austro-Hungarian invasion. Historically restrained by republican France and imperial Britain, the Russians by 1907 had allied with both of those powers in the Triple Entente. The effect of that diplomatic revolution was to bolster Serbia and push Austria-Hungary deep into the pocket of what Vienna considered its only reliable ally, Germany. But Germany was hardly reliable. Berlin had adopted a new strategy of Weltpolitik—world policy—and begun to build a high-seas fleet at the turn of the century to challenge the British and French overseas empires. Even Germany’s impressive population (sixty-eight million), army (eight hundred thousand men in peacetime, three million in war), and industry (the biggest in Europe) would probably be insufficient to defeat Britain and France and still have enough force left over to aid the Austrians against the Russians. Unless Austria-Hungary built an army big enough to deter the Serbs and the Russians, it might find itself alone on the Eastern and Balkan Fronts facing vast numbers of enemy troops.

  Despite the obvious urgency, Vienna was in no mood to contemplate the massive military expenditures that the twentieth century demanded. Warfare and technology had advanced in giant bounds since 1866, and every European military would have to either adapt or face ruin. The first stride forward—universal conscription—all but ensured financial ruin, as armies that had never exceeded three hundred thousand in the past now ballooned to nearly a million in peacetime, and several million in the event of war. Whether one followed the French doctrine of a massed army on a narrow front aiming at a breakthrough or the German doctrine of a dispersed army on a broad front aiming to outflank, huge troop numbers were required to attack the mass conscript armies and extensive fortifications of the modern age. But the Austrians lacked the funds and political will to draft and arm the masses; on the eve of war in 1914, they were still training just 0.29 percent of their population, compared with 0.75 percent in France, 0.47 percent in Germany, 0.37 percent in Italy, and 0.35 percent in Russia. This fact alone should have persuaded Vienna never to go to war with another great power. After mobilizing all of its reserves, it would have fewer than 2.3 million trained troops for a major war, whereas Russia alone would have three or four times as many, and France, with ten million fewer citizens than Austria-Hungary, would have twice as many.11