Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

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  Mobilizing a multi-ethnic empire like Austria-Hungary was a much more complicated matter than bringing a nation state into war, even one as imperfect as the German Reich. Unity was no less important, yet the Habsburg peoples’ immense diversity made this difficult to achieve. It was not simply that mobilization posters had to be issued in fifteen languages. Rather, Habsburg subjects lacked a common identity. Each nationality had its own history and traditions, a state of affairs that peacetime Habsburg education had perpetuated and accentuated, rather than challenged.138 For all the ‘national indifference’ felt by many individuals in 1914, cultural specificity mattered, as did varying attitudes towards the state and its enemies.139 In a polity in which national ideology divided rather than unified peoples, the horizontal links binding society were fragile; Bohemians serving on the South-Eastern Front hardly felt more affinity to their fellow Habsburg subjects in Bosnia, whether Muslim, Croatian or Serb, than to the Serbs whom they marched against. Tyroleans sent to the east could not distinguish between Russian-subject Slavs and those of their own Emperor.140 Still, Austria-Hungary was not without ideological appeal. Vertical bonds with the state, above all, in the form of loyalty to the Emperor, were strong. The dynasty’s centuries of rule and, especially in Austria, readiness to treat with national aspirations lent it great legitimacy. Moreover, Habsburg subjects were, if divided by ethnicity and language, united to a great degree by religion. The Catholic Church had long been a stalwart and influential supporter of the Monarchy, almost four-fifths of whose population was Catholic. The principal Habsburg enemies in 1914, Serbia and Russia, were Orthodox. The Empire’s loyal clergy thus had no difficulty in presenting the struggle as ‘a just, a holy war’ and a fight ‘to preserve Christian culture and the Catholic belief’.141

  The Habsburg authorities also made explicit from the start that they would brook no opposition. In both halves of the Empire, emergency legislation suspending basic rights and increasing state control over society and economy was activated. In Hungary, it was the civilian administration that under Law LXIII of 1912 accrued new coercive powers.142 In Austria, by contrast, civil officialdom subordinated itself, and the population, to the military. The new responsibility of the army’s courts to try civilians for political offences, a measure supposed to ensure rapid punishment and deter disloyal action, was just one of the earliest extensions of the soldiers’ influence over the workings of the state. At the end of July, a military-headed War Supervision Office (Kriegsüberwachungsamt) was established in the Habsburg War Ministry and tasked with overseeing and coordinating the use of the emergency laws to suppress dissent. So secret was this agency that newspapers were permitted only to mention its name, not explain its function. Moreover, on 31 July, the day on which general mobilization was ordered, large parts of Austria were designated as the ‘Area of the Army in the Field’. Galicia, Bukovina, eastern Silesia and north-eastern Moravia in the north, and Dalmatia in the south, all fell into this area. Later, when Italy declared war on the Monarchy in May 1915, not only the Crownlands abutting the south-western border, Tyrol, Carinthia, Gorizia, Gradisca, Trieste and Istria, but also those behind them, Salzburg, Carniola, Styria, Vorarlberg, were drawn in. Here, unlike in the rump hinterland, army commanders-in-chief had the power to issue orders to the local civil administration and imposed very harsh martial law. While pre-war planning had envisaged that the extraordinary measures could be rolled back, at least partially, once the army had successfully mobilized and departed for the front, this did not take place. The emergency laws remained in force and were even extended up to the recall of the Austrian parliament, the Reichsrat, in 1917. Only then were some of the more repressive measures lifted, and the army command lost its authority in the wide areas behind the front.143

  The tight control over Habsburg society from the end of July 1914 proved, against expectations, to be largely unnecessary. Conrad von Hötzendorf, Chief of the General Staff, who distrusted the nationalities and had called already at the start of July for martial law to be imposed across the Empire, confessed the following month that ‘the enthusiasm of the people for the war was . . . a great surprise to him’.144 Reports from the time testify to widespread support for the imperial cause. In Vienna, citizens were characterized as ‘steady and resolute’ after general mobilization was ordered. ‘In all classes,’ noted officials, ‘a deep sympathy for the honour of the Monarchy and conviction in the necessity of what has happened is perceptible.’145 In Hungary too, at least among the Magyars, Minister President Tisza testified at the start of August to a ‘very good’ atmosphere. Soldiers passing through the Kingdom were greeted everywhere with ‘frenetic rejoicing, with music and song’.146 More remarkable was the reaction of the once squabbling peoples in the Austrian Crownlands. In Carniola, home to a predominantly Slovene population, the regional president described how men obeyed the summons to arms ‘with enthusiasm, thoroughly convinced of the necessity and justice of the warlike action forced upon the Empire’.147 In Bohemia, the Military Command in Prague recorded that after partial mobilization against Serbia was ordered, ‘against expectations, the reservists reported for duty punctually and in large numbers; even a certain enthusiasm was noticeable.’148 Railway officials watching departing draftees and their families were still more upbeat: Bohemia was calm, Moravia and Lower Austria were enthusiastic.149 Similar goodwill and obedience were observed on the Empire’s peripheries. In the Trentino, Italian irredentists conceded that the rural population was loyal to the Habsburg dynasty.150 Far to the east in Bukovina, Ruthenes were characterized as ‘with few exceptions very ready to make sacrifices and patriotically minded’.151 Military units in Galicia were, as elsewhere, overwhelmed when far more men than expected reported for duty. Some of those arriving at barracks were under no obligation to serve. Those who were superfluous were transferred to the north of Hungary, to fill the ranks of new formations.152

  The Habsburg Empire demonstrated over the summer that, for all the troubles of peacetime politics, it still possessed great legitimacy among its peoples. The nationalities’ politicians and Church leaders were unstinting in their declarations of loyalty to Franz Joseph, conscripts everywhere obeyed the call to arms, and officials were emphatic, though amazed, that loyalty, not fear, lay behind the impressive popular response. There were even war volunteers. Vienna’s Reichspost described men ‘storming the war administration in person, by telegraph or by letter to get enlisted’. Already before the end of the first week of August, ‘many thousands’ were said to have come forward.153 Still, despite the pride with which such enlistments were reported, the volunteers were revealing of the limits of dynastic patriotism’s mobilizing potential. To judge from newspaper descriptions, these men were not from the broad, urban middle-class volunteering movement seen in the German Reich but instead came predominantly from a narrower circle of cosmopolitan elites. Aristocrats, parliamentary deputies and retired soldiers were reported to have offered their services. Many state officials were among the volunteers; they requested release from the civil service to enlist in sufficiently large numbers to necessitate discussion in the Austrian ministerial council about whether this should be permitted.154 Students also joined their ranks, although numbers were paltry compared with the thousands enlisting in Germany; 184 from Vienna, 38 from Graz and a mere 14 from Prague had joined the Habsburg army by the end of September 1914.155 There were also some men of lesser social standing among the volunteers, but they were not necessarily all keen to die for the Emperor. Sigmund Sperber, for example, a thirty-nine-year-old pharmacist, worried that a draft order would carry him away from his frail mother and force his shop into bankruptcy. Volunteering seemed to offer a solution. In early August he wrote to the War Ministry offering his immediate services, but only on condition that he be given a posting in Vienna. That way, he earnestly informed the Ministry, he would, in his free time, ‘alongside the true fulfilment of duty for our much loved Emperor and my dear Fatherland, also be able to
discharge the responsibilities of a son’.156

  The Habsburg mobilization, while revealing strong vertical bonds between peoples and Emperor, never achieved the horizontal social solidarity or depth of commitment seen in Germany. Partly this was simply a function of the greater distance between peoples of different language and cultures living in a multi-ethnic empire than between members of a unitary nation state. Still, Germany’s divisions, particularly of class, were stark before the war. Equally influential, therefore, were the actions of government. Austro-Hungarian leaders were focused on compliance not unity in the summer of 1914; the strenuous efforts made in the Reich to reconcile, or at least suspend, peacetime disputes had no real equivalent in Franz Joseph’s lands. Hungary did, it is true, benefit from a political truce, the Treuga Dei, from the end of July. In November, when parliament met for its first wartime session, Tisza eulogized the conflict as a unifying force: it ‘has put a stop to party strife, it has put a stop to the class struggle, relegated the nationality conflicts into the background, and given rise to splendid manifestations of unity and mutual love both at home and on the battlefield’.157 Nonetheless, this demonstration of unity could not exert so powerful an impact on public opinion as the German Reichstag’s war-credit vote of 4 August. The Hungarian parliament lacked the same legitimacy and representativeness; its small franchise, rigged elections and discrimination against non-Magyars meant that it spoke only for the elite.

  The Hungarians did, nonetheless, at least attempt to create a semblance of political unity. In Austria, by contrast, the Reichsrat, which had been closed in March 1914, was not recalled. The building was instead ostentatiously converted into a military hospital. Minister President Stürgkh may have been correct to fear that assembling unruly deputies would result in a damaging public relations debacle. However, the readiness of the Monarchy’s peoples to heed its call in the crisis indicates that the government underestimated their loyalty, and the penalties of not reconvening parliament were very great.158 First, a chance was missed to reinforce the conflict’s legitimacy by gaining the sanction of the nationalities’ democratically elected representatives. Crucially, it also denied the peoples a forum in which to bury past quarrels publicly and declare Austrian solidarity. The decision to run the war effort through decree, rather than parliamentary consent, additionally left the government highly vulnerable to criticism; should the war go badly, it would be clear that the regime alone was at fault. More dangerous still, Stürgkh’s administration not only failed to recognize the importance of cementing broad political consent for war, but actually abandoned the strategy of negotiating with and conciliating nationalist interests which in peace had helped to keep the Austrian half of the Monarchy functioning. A demand for unconditional obedience, backed by the threat of military repression, took its place. The Minister President laid out the new attitude in a circular to Crownland heads at the end of July: ‘considerations of administrative procedure, regard for the mood of the parties, calculations about the present or future circumstances of domestic politics; all this has stopped. There is only one thing now: the orientation of all forces in the state towards the certain, speedy and complete attainment of the purposes of war.’159

  In the absence of any Austria-wide Burgfrieden, the Habsburg Empire’s success in bringing its peoples to war was underpinned by what can be described as a double mobilization. First, there was the official patriotic mobilization, comprising the call up of the army and the appeal to the population as loyal imperial subjects. In tandem, however, there was a semi-official national mobilization, varying in strength in different regions, and which at this early stage supported the state’s own efforts. Elected local politicians such as town mayors and also clergy were important figures in this second mobilization. Although many were nationalists, they combined ethnic with imperial loyalty and drummed up support for the Habsburg cause in their communities.160 People were appealed to not just as imperial subjects but often and emotively as members of a national group. In western Galicia, for example, reservists were reminded that they belonged to a Polish nation whose historic role was to be a bulwark defending ‘western Europe against the barbaric Asiatic deluge’.161 Similarly, in Ljubljana, Mayor Dr Ivan Tavčar told mobilized men from the town hall’s balcony that they ‘go to fight for the Slovenian nation, since every stone of this house speaks loudly that the Slovenians would have long been vanquished, had the majestic House of Habsburg not taken them under protection’.162 The military bands circulating the streets of the Empire’s cities in the first days of hostilities, drawing the crowds that Vienna’s bourgeois press interpreted as proof of universal war enthusiasm, attracted a following by playing not just imperial marches but also national songs.163 Men mustered to the army might choose to wear imperial symbols, such as medallions showing the Emperor, to express Habsburg patriotism. Equally, however, they often left for war waving Bohemian, Slovenian or Croatian flags or, in the case of Poles, singing the national refrain ‘Boże coś Polskę’.164

  The Empire’s more than two million Jews stand out as a special case, for they were mobilized on the basis of three identities. They were among the most loyal of Habsburg subjects. Many revered Froyim Yossel, as Yiddish speakers’ communities affectionately called Franz Joseph, as the ruler who had granted them emancipation. Feelings of civic pride in Austria too were well developed among both more traditional shtetl communities and the modernizing Jews in major cities. A second identity that propelled Jews to war was consciousness of their membership as a religious group and people. The fight against Tsarist Russia, which cruelly suppressed its Jews, was understood as a war of liberation, even a ‘holy war’.165 Finally, modernizing Jews, due to their identification with one or other of the Monarchy’s peoples – most frequently German, but also sometimes Hungarian, Czech or Polish – often underwent a triple mobilization. In the days following the outbreak of war, for example, a placard was posted on the streets of Cracow addressed to the town’s Jewish population. Characterizing the war as a ‘blood feud between civilization and barbarism, between freedom and despotism’, the anonymous authors urged their fellow believers to do their duty, not just as Jews but as Austrians and also as Poles: ‘In this historical moment, we, the Jews of the Polish lands – full of unwavering civic fidelity towards the Austrian constitutional state – are paying homage to the still relevant laws and ideals of Poland. We ardently desire that these ideals will be fulfilled as quickly as possible, we wish fervently for the victory of the right and just cause.’166

  The appeals to national sensibilities, though a crucial element in mobilizing the peoples, were not without drawbacks. As was familiar from peacetime, any incitement of national feelings could rapidly provoke clashes between rival ethnic groups, fracturing wider imperial unity. This was exactly what happened in Fiume (today Rijeka), where already from August 1914 soldiers raised from the city’s Croatian-populated surroundings and proudly displaying Croatian colours were repeatedly attacked on their way to the main railway station by Italian-speaking residents and police. In one typical case, recruits who had pinned Croatian cockades and tricolours to their uniforms and were shouting ‘Up Austria!’, ‘Up Croatia!’, ‘Down with Serbia!’ were stopped on the bridge into the city by Fiume policemen, who demanded that they remove their insignia. When they refused, a constable with drawn sword lunged at one of the soldiers, ripped the colours from his chest and trampled them in the dirt. Other incidents involved gangs of Italian-speaking youths, who, sometimes with the police’s help, beat up Croatian soldiers and forced them to remove their national badges. The attacks continued into the autumn, despite the army’s protests. Needless to say, they were not conducive to building a feeling of Habsburg solidarity among either the mixed local populations or Croatian soldiers setting off for the front.167

  The lack of an Austria-wide Burgfrieden also meant that bonds of solidarity strengthened within, rather than between, ethnicities. Political truces were called by rival factions in some national grou
pings. Thus, in Galicia, Polish parties came to agreement and on 16 August jointly established in Cracow a Supreme National Committee (Naczelne Komitet Narodowy). This was an impeccably loyalist organization, but it sought to advance Polish interests within the Empire, hoping in particular to reform the Dualist Austro-Hungarian structure into a Trialist system, with Galicia joined to annexed Russian-held Congress Poland as a third Habsburg state.168 National interest groups also manoeuvred to improve their negotiating positions for the expected post-war reordering of the Empire by setting up legions to fight alongside the Common Army. An attempt by Josip Frank’s Serbophobe Pure Party of the Right to start a special Croatian volunteer formation was quashed by Tisza, who saw it as the first step in a plan to separate Croatia from Hungary and realize another trialist vision, different from that of the Poles, involving the creation of a new South Slav state within the Habsburg Empire. However, small units of Ukrainian- and Romanian-speaking volunteers were formed in Bukovina, and a Ruthenian nationalist unit, the Sič riflemen, operated in Galicia from the autumn of 1914. This latter was 2,000-men strong, mostly intelligentsia but with a smattering of peasants and workers.169

  The Polish Legion was by far the most impressive of the nationalities’ volunteer forces, and also best illustrative of the Pandora’s box opened by the national mobilization at the war’s start. The formation of the Legion had its roots in the pre-war intrigues of Polish exiles from Russia, foremost among whom was the nationalist, Socialist, freedom fighter and revolutionary, later Marshal of independent Poland, Józef Piłsudski. In 1906, Piłsudski had offered the services of his conspiratorial group, the Polish Socialist Party-Revolutionary Fraction (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna-Frakcja Rewolucyjna), to Habsburg military intelligence, promising to supply information on Russian forces in Congress Poland in return for a secure base in Galicia from which to carry on the struggle for Polish independence against the Tsarist Empire. Then, the offer was rejected, but two years later, after the Bosnian annexation crisis had soured Austria-Hungary’s relations with its eastern neighbour, a deal was reached. The PPS-FR, now combined with other Polish independence groups to form the dramatically named Union of Active Struggle (Związek Walki Czynnej), was permitted by the Habsburg army and Cracow police, without the knowledge of the Galician Statthalter or the government in Vienna, to prepare for insurrection in Tsarist Poland. Funded from the proceeds of a mail-train robbery carried out by Piłsudski in Russia in September 1908, the group at first set up terrorist schools, which trained activists in skills such as bomb-making. In 1910, when rifle clubs were made legal in Austria, thinly disguised paramilitary formations were also quickly founded across Galicia. Their membership was modest: by 1914, the two organizations sponsored by the ZWC and secretly armed by the Habsburg army, Strzelec in Cracow and Związek Strzelecki in Lwów, counted at a generous estimate around 8,290 men, while rival groups like the National Democrats’ Polskie Drużyny Strzeleckie together had a further 5,000.170