The blank check was being prepared, however. The kaiser and Franz Joseph met in November 1908 to tighten the alliance. In 1909, the Austro-Hungarian and German militaries held their first staff talks since 1896. The last time the general staffs had convened, Russia had been the main order of business; at the new staff talks, Moltke told Conrad that he wished war had come in 1908, when “the conditions for Austria and Germany would have been better than they would be in a few years’ time.”39 The new conditions—and the plans intended to exploit them—were certainly different. Following the 1896 staff talks, the Germans had planned merely to hold off the French in the west and launch a crushing offensive with the Austrians against the Russians in the east. Everything had changed under the influence of the Schlieffen Plan—named for German general staff chief Alfred von Schlieffen—in 1905. Now the Germans planned the opposite: they would hold off the slow-mobilizing Russians with a skeleton force of their own and most of the Austrian army while massing 90 percent of their strength against the French. Within six weeks, the Germans, having beaten the French, would shift their troops to the Eastern Front to finish off the Russians as well.40
To say that this change of plan was worrisome to Austria-Hungary—which at full wartime strength would be outnumbered four to one by the Russians—would be an understatement. Yet Conrad accepted the change with surprising equanimity. The tactical writings that had brought him fame before his appointment in 1906, Studies on Tactics and The Battle Education of Infantry, argued that combat was more psychological than physical. “Tough and brave” troops conditioned to press forward and sacrifice themselves would prevail against even more numerous entrenched infantry and artillery, Conrad insisted.41 Most Austrian officers agreed with him; as in the other European armies, confidence in bayonet charges survived deflating evidence from the Boer, Russo-Japanese, and Balkan Wars. “The moral role of this primitive instrument must not be understated,” an Austrian officer wrote in May 1914. “The bayonet is the supreme expression of the offensive spirit; it bonds the soldier’s confidence to his desire to defeat the enemy.”42
The probability that politically disaffected Austro-Hungarian troops would be among the least likely in Europe to sacrifice themselves did not worry Conrad. Worse, he never pressed the Germans for details of their operational plans or shared his own. Both armies merely sketched their strategic aims—a defeated France, Britain, and Russia and a subjugated Balkans—without agreeing on how to achieve those aims. Eager to guard their operational independence, both sides merely agreed that the Austrians would hurl themselves at the Russians before the Russian mobilization was complete and that the Germans would deploy an unspecified number of troops to the east to buy time for the Austrians to get their troops to the Eastern Front.
Conrad knew he would need time because he planned to destroy Serbia en route to Russia, a plan that he never shared with the Germans. Conrad calculated that twenty Austro-Hungarian divisions thrusting out of Bosnia and southern Hungary would suffice to destroy the Serbs. He merely assumed that the remaining Austro-Hungarian divisions and a German army of indeterminate size would hold the line in Poland and Galicia until he had paraded victoriously through Belgrade and turned his attention to the east. This studied vagueness would be fatal to the Austrians. Even in peacetime, the Russian army counted a million and a half troops; when mobilized for war, it would grow to six million or more. The Austrians, with four hundred thousand under arms in peacetime and a maximum force of two million in wartime, none of them well-equipped, would drown under the Russian flood.43
Aerenthal had always assumed that a forceful Austrian policy in the Balkans would deter Russia, intimidate Belgrade, and persuade the Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes of Austria-Hungary to stop agitating for a South Slav kingdom. Just the opposite happened: enraged by the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Serbian press launched daily attacks on the Habsburgs and the Serbian government encouraged the formation of patriotic societies like Narodna Odbrana, which counted 220 branches in Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.44 In 1909, Aerenthal’s foreign ministry brought suit against fifty-three Croats, accusing them of treasonous ties to Belgrade. In this sensational “Friedjung Trial”—named after the Austrian historian Heinrich Friedjung, who was the prosecution’s key witness—the documents Friedjung, Aerenthal, and then Conrad certified as evidence of the treason proved to be forgeries concocted inside Aerenthal’s foreign ministry. This embarrassing fiasco offered a glimpse of the panic that was beginning to engulf the Danube monarchy. Karl Kraus’s satirical newspaper Die Fackel sputtered in disbelief: “This is Austrian history in a nutshell: so much happens and yet nothing actually happened.” The trial was an “earthquake, and yet not a leaf fell from a tree”; it represented “a battle between blunder and stupidity.” Aerenthal was “not making policy, he was compromising it.” Friedjung’s role was pathetic: “He spoke in the best Burgtheaterdeutsch, sonorous, rolling; he sounded like Ottokar—‘This Austria, it is a good land.’” Referring to the jolly music played in the Viennese wine bars, Kraus concluded that “Heurigenmusik will not deceive the world as to the actual meaning of this trial.”45
The Friedjung trial had been part of a broader strategy to undergird Aerenthal’s forward policy in the Balkans, yet the Serbs were having none of it. In June 1910, a Serbian assassin shot at the Habsburg governor of Bosnia and missed. To improve their aim, Serbian army officers grouped around Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic—alias “Apis”—founded a secret society called Union or Death. Better known as the Black Hand (Crna Ruka), Union or Death called for the gathering in of all Serbs in the Balkans, including those living inside the borders of Austria-Hungary.46 Apis, who had orchestrated the murder of the last Obrenovic king in 1903 and now called for “revolutionary, not cultural, action” against the Austrians, was a proven threat that Vienna could not discount.
Inside Bosnia-Herzegovina, the mood was even darker. The emperor had conceded the annexed population a Landtag or assembly, to consist of Orthodox Serbs, Muslim Bosniaks, and Catholic Croats based on their relative numbers in the provinces. He promised that the assembly would be a “true copy” of actual population numbers—43 percent Serbs, 35 percent Bosniaks, 22 percent Croats—but promptly reneged. Surprising no one, the assembly turned against Austria, the Serbs preferring Serbia and the Bosniaks the Young Turks, so Vienna resorted to gerrymandering (to sideline Serbian voters) and a vast church-building program to win converts to Catholicism. There had been just one Roman Catholic church in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878. Thirty years later, there were 179 of them, as well as dozens of new monasteries, convents, and schools. Young Serbs and Muslims were removed from the provinces in disproportionate numbers to man Habsburg army regiments in the far corners of the monarchy. The Habsburgs called this “de-nationalization.”47 But nationalism couldn’t be defeated unless the Austrians pulled up its roots. When General Oskar Potiorek arrived in Sarajevo in 1911 to command the XV Corps and serve as Bosnian military governor, he too embraced Conrad’s view that only war and victory against Serbia would slow the spread of Serbian nationalism inside Austria-Hungary.48
The deterioration of Austria’s position in the Balkans despite the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which had been intended to buttress the monarchy, depressed Conrad. Aerenthal’s “bold stroke” looked increasingly fruitless as Bosnia-Herzegovina crumbled internally. Serbia and its allies, meanwhile, were growing stronger. The appointment of a violently anti-Austrian Russian ambassador to Belgrade in 1909, followed by a state visit of the Russian tsar to Italy (and a Russo-Italian agreement to consult on all future changes in the Balkans), convinced Conrad that the monarchy had to lash out singly at its various enemies before they all combined against Vienna. All the hopeful premises of the Schlieffen (and Conrad) war plans were coming undone. French-financed railways would now convey the Russians to the Austrian border in weeks, not months.
Efforts to bind Serbia to Austria economically failed miserably, as Austrian agrarians and industrialists ba
ttled over commercial treaties with Serbia and agreed only to leave trade relations with Belgrade in a mutually destructive mess. One “pig war” followed another in the early 1900s as Austro-Hungarian governments were forced by parliamentary obstruction to appease Austro-Hungarian landowners by raising the tariffs on pigs, cattle, plums, wheat, barley, and corn, effectively sundering their most promising link to the Serbian state.49 Belgrade, which had routinely taken 60 percent of its imports from Austria before 1906, was down to 24 percent on the eve of World War I. The American ambassador in Vienna could not believe that the Austrians were missing the opportunity “to separate Serbia’s conservative business element from its radical war party.” The British embassy was equally incredulous: instead of “rendering Serbia innocuous by mutually profitable trade,” the Austrians “were creating ill-will with the Serbs, without any solution of their underlying differences.”50
Indeed, rather than driving a wedge between Belgrade’s business and war parties, Vienna’s policies pushed them closer together. In 1908, Austro-Hungarian agrarians succeeded in limiting imports of Serbian food to 1.6 percent of annual consumption (with a 400 percent increase in tariffs even on that niggardly amount), to which the Serbs reacted with devastating tariffs on Austrian manufactures: 70 percent on textiles, 100 percent on cutlery, and so on. Ominously, the Serbs also cancelled a big artillery order with Austria’s Skoda and gave it instead to France’s Creusot, which tightened Belgrade’s military links to the Triple Entente.51 Serbian governments rose and fell over this annual humiliation at Vienna’s hand, Aerenthal declaring that “if Serbia only learns how to take the right road, she can always reckon upon benevolent treatment by us.”52
Relations between the two states iced over, as the Austrians not only demanded access to the Serbian market (without compensation) but also insisted that Belgrade abrogate its trade treaties with neighbors like Bulgaria.53 In Serbia, hatred for the Magyars and Schwabas—the “Swabians” of Austria—mounted, and Serbian merchants quietly redirected their trade elsewhere: to Germany, Britain, and France. Conrad took little interest in these portents. He constantly pressed Aerenthal and the emperor to strike preemptively at the Serbs or the Italians (who bought every Serbian pig boycotted by Austria), and went hog wild after Italy’s invasion of Turkish Libya in September 1911. Conrad demanded war over Aerenthal’s protests, vowing that he would “cut off his arm” rather than back down. Austro-Hungarian fall maneuvers for 1912 were scheduled in the Alföld, the flat plain of Hungary, because it “resembled Upper Italy.”54
In a rare—and fleeting—display of decisiveness, the emperor briefly fired Conrad in 1911, insisting on a “policy of peace” for Austria. Franz Joseph wasn’t the only one who had become fed up with Conrad’s bellicosity. Having secretly promised Italy Libya in exchange for Rome’s acceptance of the Bosnian annexation three years earlier, Aerenthal rolled his eyes at Conrad’s bluster. Even Conrad’s mentor, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, saw that the general had gone too far, and agreed to his removal. Conrad had lost his grip, deeming his “responsibilities greater than [those of] the foreign minister” and warning Aerenthal never to let “diplomatic considerations” override “military preparations.” Auffenberg, war minister at the time, summarized Conrad thus: “He believed that the empire had to prove that it was willing to lash out, or it would be dragged into war.” The best defense, in other words, was a good offense. But this essentially theoretical demand for a demonstrative war with Italy could not be made to fit reality; simply put, it made no sense at any time after 1882, when Italy became an Austrian ally. There was no way for the Austrians to initiate a war with Italy over Libya, for as Auffenberg observed, an Austrian invasion of Italy would almost certainly “trigger a general European war” and cast Austria in the worst possible light.55 With Conrad now regarded as a liability in every quarter, the emperor replaced him with General Blasius Schemua in December 1911. Franz Ferdinand arranged a soft landing for Conrad in one of the army’s many well-paid inspectorates. “This,” Conrad grumbled after being dismissed by the emperor in an audience at Schönbrunn, is the same policy “which led us to Königgrätz.”56
The decision to dump Conrad was comically untimely, for the Balkans were on the verge of explosion when Conrad stepped down and Schemua stepped up. “I’ve been trying to get some information on just who General Schemua is,” the French military attaché wrote from Vienna. “No one seems to know much about him. He’s an introvert, and he’s never seen at the officers’ club; he lived in Persia for a time and has adopted aspects of their religion. . . . The chief of military intelligence says that Schemua is completely out of the loop and will need months to learn the intricacies of this new job.”57 In fact, Schemua had been sent to Persia in 1878 as part of an unsuccessful military mission to sell Austro-Hungarian advice and arms to the Qajar shahs; they had chosen German advisors and arms instead, leaving Schemua little to do but study with various fakirs and then, on his return to Austria, join a secret cult of anti-Semites, the New Templar Order of Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, which held occult meetings in a castle on the Danube flying the swastika flag.58
Schemua’s latest task seemed as hopeless as his mission to Persia or his New Templars, and he wouldn’t have months to get up to speed. The swift convergence of the Young Turk Revolution, the Bosnian annexation crisis, and the growing assertiveness of the Balkan states—all of which had security relationships of some kind with Russia and France—meant that no international consensus remained on how to preserve “Turkey-in-Europe.” “The Balkans are the battlefield of nations,” Robert Lansing wrote from the US State Department, “a land of blazing villages, a land of sudden death. . . . ‘Peace’ is a forgotten word. Slavs, Albanians, Greeks and Turks have deluged the land with their blood and buried it beneath ashes in their struggles to possess it.”59 Bismarck had famously declared that the region was “not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier,” but that declaration looked increasingly tenuous. Austria-Hungary and the other powers would not be able to evade the slaughter much longer.
chapter3
The Balkan Wars
The slaughter in the Balkans was about to get much worse. In March 1912, the Russian ambassador in Belgrade successfully forged a Serb-Bulgarian alliance that aimed to block the Young Turks’ recovery of lost ground in the Balkans and roll back Austro-Hungarian inroads. Russia then helped broker an agreement among the Greeks, Bulgarians, and Serbs to partition Macedonia. Austria had always assumed that the disputed past of Macedonia—which had belonged at various times to the Bulgarian, Serbian, and Byzantine empires—and its ethnic and religious complexity would prevent any of the Balkan states from expanding there. The Turks, after all, had ruled Macedonia in the twentieth century in part by encouraging the inhabitants—Bulgarians, Serbs, Greeks, Rumanians, and Albanians—to persecute each other, periodically forcing the great powers to insist on reforms and even to send international commissions to enact them.1
But Russia’s intervention threatened the plans of Turkey and Austria far beyond Macedonia. Thanks to Russian ministrations, Belgrade and Sofia made common cause, roped in Greece and Montenegro, and declared war on the Ottoman Empire in October 1912. The nations of this Balkan League would shortly fight over the spoils of the war, but they all had an immediate interest in defeating the Turks before the vigorous new government in Constantinople could consolidate its power at home and in its few remaining European vilayets like Macedonia and Albania.
The war that followed ripped big chunks from the Ottoman Empire and devastated its army. In just three weeks of fighting, half a million Turks—an army of 220,000 in Thrace and a second army of 330,000 in Macedonia—were beaten by a Balkan coalition that totaled 715,000. The Greeks took Salonika; the Bulgarians advanced to the gates of Constantinople; the Montenegrins advanced into Kosovo and Scutari (Shkodër); the Serbs plunged south into Macedonia as far as Monastir (Bitola) and then marched west to the sea in November. With the Greeks and Bulgarians lodged on Turkey’s
Aegean coast, the Serbs helped themselves to the Ottoman Empire’s four Adriatic ports in Albania: San Giovanni di Medua (Shëngjin), Alessio (Lezhë), Durazzo (Durrës), and Valona (Vlorë). The Treaty of London, signed in May 1913, sounded the death knell of Turkey-in-Europe, as the Ottoman Empire’s Balkan provinces were mostly made over to the Balkan League. Austria-Hungary, Europe’s Balkan power, got nothing. Vienna’s Die Zeit goggled in disbelief: “This Balkan crisis is an 1866 for our diplomacy.”2
Indeed, Austria-Hungary did not cut a dashing figure in the crisis. Aerenthal—who died in the midst of it, in February 1912—had been content to leave Macedonia in Turkish hands until Vienna was ready to renew its advance to the Aegean and absorb the province en route; suddenly the Greeks were in Salonika and the Serbs were in Skopje, Kosovo, and the Albanian ports. Economically, the episode was no less of a disaster. Austrian manufactures that had sold briskly under a Turkish tariff of 11 percent would never penetrate the new markets, which were walled off with tariffs on imports ranging from Bulgaria’s 33 percent to Greece’s 150 percent. Bohemian woolen mills that had supplied virtually every fez worn in the Ottoman Empire would shortly lose this lucrative business.3 “The first casualty of these flying Balkan bullets is the status quo,” an Austrian general bitterly noted. A status quo that had benefited Vienna suddenly lay “dead as a mouse,” Mausetot.4 Within Austrian military circles, the solution to the Balkan crisis seemed clear. “Let’s let this thing explode into war,” General Appel scribbled from Sarajevo. “What do we have to fear? Russia? They won’t do anything, and we need to smash the Serbs once and for all.”5
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