Watching thousands of Austrian troops sweeping down the field in close order to assault a line of flags, the French attaché turned to his Serbian colleague and asked him, “Did you ever see any situation in your last two wars that offered better opportunities for a defender than this?” The Serb hadn’t.65 But the archduke was unfazed; he was overheard rebuffing Conrad’s demands for greater realism thusly: “It’s not necessary to teach our soldiers to die in time of peace.”66
The Austrian press reported intrigues that went far beyond the maneuver field. General Rudolf Brudermann, “the darling of the Belvedere,” had been on the verge of being annihilated by Auffenberg—the latter tainted by scandals involving Hungarians, money, and women, and present at the exercises for a measure of reclamation. Rather than watch his preferred commander lose, the archduke had abruptly stopped the maneuvers at the moment when Brudermann’s army was dissolving, then ordered the flagged exercise to save face for Brudermann and deny Auffenberg the complete rehabilitation he so desperately craved.67 Thoroughly disgusted, Conrad offered his resignation on the spot, but he was rebuffed by the archduke. Franz Ferdinand reminded Conrad that the army could not afford yet another scandal on the heels of the Redl Affair, for “Jewish and Masonic papers” would make a sensation of the two men’s differences and Conrad’s departure.68 Reporting on the tension between Franz Ferdinand and Conrad, the Hungarian newspaper Budapest expressed indifference: “For the Hungarian public, it’s irrelevant whether Conrad or some other general occupies the post, for there is no connection between their army and our nation. It’s not our army and it doesn’t fight for our national goals.”69
Prevented from resigning, Conrad tried to make the best of his position. Meeting with the German kaiser in Leipzig on October 18, Conrad extracted a pledge of support from Wilhelm II in the event of a war with Serbia, which was already encroaching on the new country of Albania, created by the great powers just five months earlier. “Ich gehe mit Euch,” the kaiser rumbled—“I’m with you.” That same day, the Austrians delivered an ultimatum to Belgrade demanding withdrawal from all disputed Albanian territory and threatening war if the demand was not met. The Serbs—who had lost ninety-one thousand men in the two Balkan Wars—evacuated the territory a week later.
Once again, as in the Scutari crisis of the spring, the Habsburg threat of war had walked the Serbs (and the Russians) back from the brink. It was good that it did, for Austro-Hungarian bluster masked severe shortages in the army, particularly in field artillery and machine guns. From Bozen, Colonel Alexander Brosch informed Auffenberg that in his regiment “everything [was] lacking: artillery, machine guns, shells, rifles, and rifle ammunition.”70 Ignoring these omens, Berchtold congratulated himself that he had won another round with the Serbs, “even,” as he grandly put it in a letter to Franz Ferdinand on October 21, “without [German] tutelage,” although that seemed ensured, the kaiser having cabled his support to the emperor and his congratulations to Berchtold. “For once,” Wilhelm II told the Austrian military attaché in Berlin, “Austria has shown her teeth; I hope she’ll continue to do so.”71 Much of Berchtold’s self-congratulation was owed to a too-rosy reading of the international situation; Berchtold still assumed that Britain regarded “a powerful Austria-Hungary as a European necessity”—to check Russia—and had helped deny the Serbs their seaports in Albania to prevent formation of “a great Slavic Empire” dominated by Russia.72 These were big assumptions to take away from a messy skirmish with Serbia. (“Even an idiot gets lucky sometimes,” was Brosch’s acid judgment on Berchtold.)73
In fact, Vienna had lost most of its freedom of movement as a great power. There was no domestic consensus on foreign policy and the budget was a billion crowns in deficit. The old emperor was as dotty as ever—in a meeting with the British embassy staff in October, he rambled across the whole political field in the Balkans and, to the surprise of his hosts, concluded that “on the whole the Turks are the best element there.”74 Of course they were no longer there, a development that seems not to have altered the emperor’s view.
Austrian leaders less senescent than the emperor were only too aware of their dire predicament. Britain’s military attaché reported near panic in the War Ministry and general staff as the monarchy began to grasp just how weak it was. The war scare in the Balkans had forced the Austrians to consider how they would apportion strength in a real conflict, and they discovered that they would have too few troops to achieve any of their missions, whether against Russia, Serbia, Italy, Rumania, or even an uprising in Bosnia-Herzegovina. “I believe more and more that our purpose will merely be to go under honorably,” Conrad scribbled despondently on Christmas Eve, “like a sinking ship.”75
Externally, there was no escape from the German embrace. “They had been allied; they were now shackled,” Churchill would later write. The German army—or the threat of it—had become Austria’s only “means of life.” Austria-Hungary desperately needed to confront Serbia before it grew even more powerful, but it could not fight Serbia without fighting Russia, and could not fight Russia without Germany. Berchtold was rushing a major review of Habsburg foreign policy to completion in the Foreign Ministry, and its implications only confirmed this assessment of Germany’s importance. The review’s central finding was twofold: that Serbia, increasingly under the influence of the army and the Black Hand (as well as its aggressive new Russian ambassador), was implacable and could only be curbed by battle, and that Russia would not hold back in such an event. The review noted that St. Petersburg was now pulling every lever it could find in the Balkans to weaken the Austro-Hungarian position. The Russians were inciting the Serbs and were trying to detach Rumania from its Austro-German alliance, and they might lure away the Bulgarians and the Turks as well, with French loans. There no longer seemed to be anything specific to negotiate about—just a cloud of pan-Slav agitation enveloping the Balkans and seeping into the largely Slavic Habsburg monarchy. This handed the initiative to Serbia, which now grasped that Tsar Nicholas II, who conflated Russian and Serbian nationalism, would never again abandon Belgrade. He’d risk alienating the army, which was the pillar of the regime, if he did. Thus emboldened, the Serbs would no longer shrink from Austrian bluster. If war came, they would embrace it, trusting that the Russians would kick in Austria-Hungary’s eastern door and facilitate a Serbian conquest of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Slovenia.
Everything now hinged on Berlin, where the kaiser was having serious doubts of his own. Having promoted the Ausgleich since 1867, the Germans were deeply concerned about the looming succession in Austria-Hungary; they knew that Franz Ferdinand’s ascension—which was considered imminent—would strike at the root of the already troubled partnership between Vienna and Budapest. Franz Joseph was eighty-four in 1914 and so feeble that whenever Archduke Franz Ferdinand repaired to his Bohemian country house or his Adriatic palace, a special train was kept waiting to rush him back to Vienna in case the emperor was stricken. The archduke, not the emperor, opened the delegations in May 1914, because Franz Joseph was so ill. The emperor had not attended army maneuvers in years, the archduke going in his place.76 But Franz Ferdinand was hated in Budapest for his anti-Hungarian views. Nor was he liked anywhere else. Even the Croats, whom the archduke had wanted to favor with their own capital at Zagreb and shared leadership of the monarchy, had deserted him by the early 1900s.77 The Czechs too fell away; they spent the months before the outbreak of war in 1914 battling with the Germans of Bohemia for control of the Prague diet and the Austrian Reichsrat, a struggle that the Ukrainians of Galicia joined with attacks on the “Polish Club.” Could Austria-Hungary survive if every nationality demanded entry to the privileged ruling club of Vienna and Budapest, or the right to break away altogether? Obviously not: in March 1914, Franz Joseph instructed his prime minister, Count Karl von Stürgkh, to adjourn the Reichsrat indefinitely and govern by emergency decree.
Conrad and Moltke had held intermittent staff talks since 1909 and had loosely a
greed that in the event of a great war, the Germans would implement their Schlieffen Plan and knock out France while the Austro-Hungarians blunted any early Russian offensives in the east. Once France fell, the Germans would pivot east to rescue Austria from the Russian steamroller. That rough agreement was renewed at their last meeting at Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary) in Bohemia in May 1914. But there was a veil of obfuscation about the proceedings. Conrad’s war plan called for the three-part division of the Habsburg army into a Russian group (twenty-eight divisions), a Balkan group (eight divisions), and a floating reserve (twelve divisions). A great European war would almost certainly flare in the Balkans but spread immediately to Russia, and so it was essential that the Germans receive Austria’s assurance that Vienna would merely defend its borders in the south with the eight divisions of the Minimal Balkan Group and move everything else—forty divisions—briskly to the east to hold off the tsar’s armies.
Like Germany, Austria was only too aware of its eastern vulnerabilities. A study prepared by Franz Ferdinand’s military chancery in 1911 had concluded that the Austrians simply could not fight wars in Serbia and Russia simultaneously. To do so would isolate outnumbered Austro-Hungarian armies in the great space between Warsaw and Lemberg and virtually ensure their destruction.78 The Russian army had become so vast in the twentieth century—six million troops—that even the entire two-million-man Austro-Hungarian army would have a hard time blunting its attacks. If reduced to a fraction of its strength by detachments to Serbia, the Austrians would almost certainly fail.
Still, given Conrad’s nonstop fulminations against Belgrade, it was probable that he would attempt to fight the Serbs first. He would try to mass twenty divisions against Serbia’s twelve—thus effectively implementing Plan B instead of Plan R—which would leave Austria’s twenty-eight divisions in the east perilously exposed to the wrath of a Russian army three or four times bigger. Germany ignored this obvious danger. Moltke, who seemed chiefly concerned to deflect Conrad’s requests for German troops in the east, decided to skip over the details. Vagueness suited both sides: it gave Vienna the flexibility to crush Serbia, and it gave Berlin the option to strip the Eastern Front bare and launch everything into France.79
Both generals, Moltke and Conrad, were whistling past the graveyard. The Russia of 1914 was not the clay-footed colossus imagined in the first drafts of the Schlieffen Plan ten years earlier. Crushed in the Russo-Japanese War, Russia had since reformed itself, adding quick-firing light and heavy artillery and overhauling its mobilization procedures. New double-tracked railways had been built from Moscow and St. Petersburg to Warsaw, and battle-ready units—endowed with more artillery than the Austrians—would now deploy quickly to the frontiers without pausing to incorporate slow-arriving reservists. The Russians felt confident enough to promise the French in 1911 that they would deploy eight hundred thousand troops to their borders with Germany and Austria-Hungary no later than fifteen days after the first mobilization order.80 Though no one took such Russian promises all that seriously—it was an empire, after all, where the average reservist had to travel seven hundred miles from his home to his depot—the claims still suggested technological advance and a surprising optimism.
Meanwhile, the fraught situation in the Balkans made a war between Austria and Serbia all but inevitable, even though such a war would almost certainly provoke a Russian intervention for which German troops—diverted by the Schlieffen Plan and a likely Russian attack on East Prussia—would be unavailable. And Belgrade had the wind at its back. Despite Austria-Hungary’s containment policy, the Serbs had doubled their territory and increased their population to nearly five million. Vienna was looking into the chasm. Fighting Russia and Serbia together, a British paper warned, “would be madness.”81 Yet Conrad was contemplating just that madness. He wanted it now, more than ever.
chapter4
Murder in Sarajevo
During the Habsburg army’s annual maneuvers in Bohemia in 1913, Franz Ferdinand had instructed Conrad to plan two rounds of maneuvers for 1914. In addition to the normal September maneuvers simulating war with Russia, the archduke wanted a large-scale exercise with two corps in Bosnia for June 1914. This, it was hoped in Vienna, would frighten the Serbs (by simulating a war with them) and serve as a long-overdue Austrian show of force in the Balkans.
Franz Ferdinand, who would command the Austro-Hungarian army in any future war, would be on hand to direct the military exercises. This impending archducal visit to Bosnia—widely advertised in the Austrian and foreign press in March 1914—offered a tantalizing target to Serbian terrorists. Colonel Apis and the Black Hand wanted a terrorist spectacular to goad the Austrians, but they also wanted to drive Serbian prime minister Nikola Pasic to war by foreclosing all avenues of negotiation with Vienna.1 Pasic was more prudent than ultranationalists such as Apis, and far less sanguine about the Serbian kingdom’s ability to defeat an Austrian invasion while busy digesting so much recently annexed Macedonian and Albanian territory. To force Pasic’s hand, the Black Hand began training three Bosnian students in Belgrade in the spring of 1914: Gavrilo Princip and two others. The plan was for Princip and his fellows to assassinate the archduke in league with four additional assassins, who would be recruited in Bosnia.
While the assassins struggled to equip themselves, Conrad struggled to keep his job. The archduke had publicly rebuked Conrad at the army maneuvers in 1913 and seemed intent on rubbing his new post-Redl powers as “General Inspector of the Combined Armed Forces” in Conrad’s face. Though they reconciled—Conrad boasting to his mistress of the “honey-sweet words” the normally abrasive archduke had deployed to mollify him—Colonel Brosch’s letters to Auffenberg in October and November 1913 took for granted that der Wechsel, the change, was coming, and that a new general staff chief who did not “diminish” and annoy the archduke as Conrad did would be selected. Conrad’s replacement would probably be Potiorek (“who craves the job”) or the archduke’s new adjutant, Colonel Karl Bardolff (“who essentially ran the general staff during Schemua’s tenure anyway”).2
That those and other names were being leaked suggested the imminence of the change. Conrad heard the rumors and scuttled to the emperor to deflect the archduke. In October 1913, the beleaguered general staff chief had a long audience with Franz Joseph, who, learning that the archduke had soured on Conrad, was only too happy to take him on as a client. Conrad became the latest football in the constant scrimmaging between the Hofburg and Belvedere, with the emperor, who was repenting the broad new military powers he’d given the archduke during the Redl Affair, now guaranteeing Conrad his job and restoring his direct access to the Hofburg to undercut Franz Ferdinand. A protégé of the archduke, Conrad had previously been forced to correspond with the Hofburg via the Belvedere. Now his mail would travel in the opposite direction.3 Most of Conrad’s waking time must have been spent consumed like this—shifting between mentors and defending his shrinking turf. The rest of the time, he pondered Austria’s shrinking freedom of action.
The Schlieffen Plan of 1905 required certain things of the Austro-Hungarians. They would have to hold the fort in Galicia and Poland until the Germans had beaten the French (in six weeks, according to the plan), but they would also have to beat back the Serbs. During the Bosnian annexation crisis of 1908, when war had nearly come, Conrad had devised a superficially elegant plan to fulfill these obligations. For the unlikely event of a localized Austro-Serbian war, there was a Plan B (as in Balkan). For the likely event of an Austrian war with Serbia that dragged in Russia, there was a Plan R. To make it possible to fight either contingency, the Habsburg army was divided into three groups: Echelon A (A-Staffel, nine corps, twenty-eight divisions destined for the Russian front), Balkan Minimal Group (Minimalgruppe Balkan, three corps, eight divisions for use against Serbia), and Echelon B (B-Staffel, four corps, twelve divisions that would float between the two fronts as a general reserve). If an Austro-Serbian war could be localized, Echelon A would guard the Russian front
ier while Echelon B joined forces with the Balkan Minimal Group to implement Plan B with twenty infantry and three cavalry divisions. If the Russians intervened—which everyone took for granted—Plan R + B would be implemented: Echelon B would entrain immediately for Galicia, reinforce Echelon A, and fight Russia with forty infantry divisions, while the eight divisions of the Balkan Minimal Group merely defended the borders of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Hungary.4
Such a plan had seemed feasible in 1908, when the Serbian army had been small and weak and the Russians had been recovering from their defeat against Japan, but by 1914 the odds had shifted: at least fifty Russian divisions and eleven Serbian ones would immediately face Vienna’s forty-eight, with many more Russian reserve divisions to come and thousands of komitadji partisans girding to support the Serbian regulars. And whereas the Russian railways in 1908 had been primitive to the point where Schlieffen spoke of the “railwayless vastness” of Russia, by 1914 that vastness had been filled in with French-financed double-track railways that would punish any Austrian delay in the movement of troops to the east. Indeed, by 1914, Russian railways were better than Austrian ones. Russia had four single-tracked lines (which meant that traffic could flow in only one direction at a time) and five double-tracked lines (permitting two-way traffic). Austria had just seven single-track railways, and two of these had to stagger through the high Carpathians. By the grim arithmetic of the time, this meant that Russia could send 260 trains a day into the Polish-Ukrainian theater of war, versus Austria’s 153.5
The simultaneous growth and modernization of the Serbian military under tough, battle-hardened generals meant that a punitive Austrian expedition across the Danube or Drina with a small army would no longer work.6 As early as 1911, Conrad had discovered in war games that he would need at least fourteen divisions to beat the Serbs, an amount that simply could not be spared if there was also a war with Russia. And to thwart Austria completely, the Serbs had only to pull back from their frontiers and force the Austrians to undertake a time-consuming invasion of the mountainous Serbian interior. Indeed, Austrian maneuvers in 1907 and a war game in Vienna in 1913 had tested and confirmed the devastating stresses that would be placed on the ungainly Habsburg army by a Serbian fighting retreat. War minister Auffenberg had verified on the eve of the First Balkan War that any Austrian invasion of Serbia would have to use the broad avenue of the Morava Valley, not nibble at the strategically worthless northwest corner of the kingdom, where the Drina and Sava Rivers flowed together. But such a broad invasion on multiple lines of advance would require more troops and more time, neither of which the Austrians would have. On a visit to Dubrovnik in April 1914, Potiorek ran his own war game—a chess derivative using metal troop and supply indicators and two-minute moves constrained by logistical and terrain realities. To the amazement of all present, the Serbs won.
A Mad Catastrophe Page 12