Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  Most important, Ludendorff understood after three years of total war that ‘corn and potatoes are power, just like coal and iron’.51 The ‘turnip winter’ of 1916–17 had revealed that the Reich’s own farmland was insufficient to feed its population. Ludendorff’s answer to this problem was to seize an eastern empire, a solution Hitler would also hit on a quarter of a century later for making German-dominated Europe what he termed ‘the most blockade-proof place in the world’.52 Ludendorff’s experience of exploiting Ober Ost convinced him that the territory must be permanently retained as a granary.53 Like the Polish border strip intended to protect the Reich’s eastern frontier, it would be secured by displacing the native population and settling German soldier-farmers. The Reich’s civil authorities proposed that 20,000 German refugees from the Volhynia region of Russian-controlled Ukraine who had fled the fighting and were living in the Reich would make ideal colonists. The racial thinking behind these schemes was similarly a harbinger of Nazi plans. The German settlers were to act as a ‘human wall’ protecting the Reich and the occupied land would serve, Ludendorff hoped, as ‘breeding grounds for people, who will be necessary for further fights’ in the barbarous, threatening east.54

  The Austro-Hungarians were dragged along in Germany’s wake only very reluctantly. Emperor Karl was sincere in his manifesto: he and his new Foreign Minister, Ottokar von Czernin, were intensely anxious about what would befall the Monarchy should hostilities not be concluded quickly. Unbeknown to the Germans, Karl had begun to put out peace feelers to the western Entente already in December 1916, using as an intermediary his wife’s brother, Prince Sixtus de Bourbon-Parma, an officer of the Belgian army. By February 1917, Karl was in indirect contact with leading French statesmen and had been made to understand that no peace in the west would be possible unless Germany surrendered Alsace-Lorraine and restored Belgium’s independence. In great secrecy, without informing even his own Foreign Minister, he wrote a letter on 24 March, addressed to Sixtus but intended for the French President, Raymond Poincaré, in which he pledged to support ‘by every means’ France’s ‘just claims’ to the German region, agreed that Belgium ‘must be re-established as a sovereign state’, and even offered Serbia access to the sea, if it promised to drop its Great Serb propaganda. A second letter in May conceded that Italian claims to the Trentino might be met through an exchange of territory.55

  Karl’s peace feeler was doomed for the same reasons that blighted other approaches: the gulf between the two sides’ interests and the strength of the alliances. The Emperor himself, despite his reputation as a man of peace, was little less opportunistic than other statesmen of the First World War. He stated his chief war aim in January 1917 as simply ‘the preservation of the Monarchy’s integrity’, yet he also embraced a maximum programme encompassing the annexation of Congress Poland, Montenegro and Serbian Mačva, some territory on the Transylvanian border, and the replacement of Serbia’s Karadjordjević dynasty.56 The Sixtus initiative in no way compromised Karl’s minimum objective: it was intended to extract the Empire from a debilitating war through a general peace paid for not by Karl but by the Germans. The Empire urgently needed a quick, compromise peace, not only because of its dire internal state but also because its weakness was such that a German total victory would leave it effectively as a satellite state of its much more powerful ally. Czernin attempted to speed up peace in the east by publicly renouncing on 26 April any ambition to annex Russian territory. Both he and the Emperor urged the Germans to moderate their war aims in the hope of enabling a separate peace with Russia or, better still, an end to the world war. Yet they simultaneously continued to haggle with their ally over any prospective spoils. At a meeting on 17 and 18 May 1917, Czernin not only received a German guarantee of the Habsburg Empire’s integrity but also, in exchange for giving over Poland after the war, acquired rights to Romania and a sphere of influence in the Balkans.57

  Karl had no leverage with which to bring his ally to surrender Alsace-Lorraine and he had no wish to seal a separate peace with his western enemies. The Sixtus approach demonstrated his impotence. Significantly, it also showed that the Entente’s intransigence left no scope for any sort of compromise peace in 1917. Karl’s approach was extremely enticing: he conceded France and Britain’s primary war aims, and although he stated that he was not seeking a separate peace, his interlocutors still hoped that after minor compromise Austria-Hungary might be torn from Germany. The French were very excited; President Poincaré was even ready to sweeten the deal by offering Karl Silesia and Bavaria from a defeated Germany. British Prime Minister David Lloyd George too was interested. However, when they approached their Italian ally, Foreign Minister Sidney Sonnino categorically refused to negotiate on the enormous gains his country had been promised as a reward for entering the war in 1915. Without Italian consent, negotiations were stuck, for Karl was unwilling to cede south Tyrol or any part of Istria and Dalmatia to an enemy whose war effort and army he and his generals held in contempt. Britain and France feared that abandoning their greedy ally would undermine their claim to be fighting to uphold international treaties and would shake the confidence of Serbia, Romania and possibly Russia in the alliance. This too was a reason why the Sixtus approach led nowhere.58

  The Central Powers chose to go for broke in 1917. The rise of the Third OHL hardened and expanded Germany’s official war aims. Hindenburg and Ludendorff, although anyway never interested in negotiation, were more realistic than many about the Entente’s readiness to offer a compromise peace. With Russia tottering and the US lacking any significant army, they thought that they had a window of opportunity to win total victory. The Austro-Hungarians trailed reluctantly behind their allies, largely due to an absence of any real strategic alternative. However, Ludendorff had miscalculated. He not only underestimated his enemies, especially the United States, but also ignored the German people. They had been mobilized in 1914 to fight a war of defence, to protect what Bethmann had described in the Reichstag as ‘the inheritance that we won in 1870’.59 Ludendorff may have regarded his demands as the bare minimum for perpetual German security, but they went far beyond this inheritance. While the Reich government had the sense to keep them secret, officials’ euphemistic talk of ‘safeguards’, ‘frontier rectifications’ and ‘an honourable peace for the Fatherland’ all excited widespread fear that rulers were shedding the people’s blood in a needless war of conquest.60 At a time when public exhaustion, the regimes’ waning legitimacy and ideological challenge from overseas all sponsored a great and growing popular desire for some way out of the suffering, this was intensely dangerous. Czernin recognized the likely consequence: ‘If the monarchs of the Central Powers are unable to conclude peace within the next months,’ he warned in a memorandum of 12 April 1917 drawn up for Karl and sent to Wilhelm II, ‘then the peoples will make it over their heads, and then the waves of revolution will sweep away everything for which our brothers and sons are still fighting and dying today.’61

  OPPOSITION

  ‘A terrible time we live through at the moment,’ confided the Cracovian Aleksandra Czechówna glumly to her diary at the start of March 1917. ‘We hear absolutely nothing about the end of the war but instead they speak ever more often about the hunger threatening us.’62 Across central Europe, the public mood was subdued. The food shortages had not eased. Exhaustion, despair and anger were growing. During April reductions in the bread and flour ration sparked a rash of riots in Austria and Germany. Strikes also multiplied as everybody grappled with inflation. In the Reich, the number of workers downing tools was up by over half a million on the previous twelve months, reaching 650,000 by the end of 1917.63 So bitter was the atmosphere in Vienna that Amalie Seidel, the leader of the Socialist women’s movement in the Habsburg capital, felt ‘that we are sitting on a volcano’.64 Above all, there was a growing wish for peace. In Germany, people hoped at first that the U-boats might bring a rapid end to the war, but there, and even earlier in Austria, the ideas from abro
ad, President Wilson’s ‘peace without victory’ and the Petrograd formula of a settlement ‘without annexations or indemnities’, captured the public imagination. Radical Socialists and nationalists, who offered ways out of the horror and new visions of the future, capitalized on popular distrust of governments and began to gain adherents.65

  In Austria, Emperor Karl’s recall of the Reichsrat was a brave attempt to shore up the state and restore the dynasty’s waning legitimacy. The parliament’s reopening on 30 May 1917 was supposed to mark the start of a new relationship between the Habsburg peoples and their Emperor. The monarch hoped for reconciliation and public support. More cynically, a return to a legal and more representative system of rule also offered the opportunity to spread the blame more widely for the realm’s continuing woes. The summons to the deputies betrayed this prime purpose of the recall, as well as the limited political concessions on offer, when it began by declaring that the Reichsrat would ‘deal with the food question, as well as economic, social, and financial matters arising out of the War’.66 The idea was good, but its execution revealed just how out of touch Karl’s government was. Three years of repressive bureaucratic-military dictatorship had left deep psychological scars, distrust and bitterness, represented at the Reichsrat’s opening by the absence of 40 of its 516 members due either to exile or imprisonment.67 Moreover, Minister President Clam-Martinic had alienated most Slav deputies with his first plan to implement pro-Austrian German reforms of the Empire by decree. His belated attempt at reconciliation by organizing meetings with parliamentarians barely a week before the Reichsrat reopening was utterly inadequate to win their goodwill. Astoundingly, Karl and his government, in recalling the peoples’ representatives, were permitting a forum for long-suppressed grievances to be expressed, without any plan for how to manage or resolve them.68

  The Reichsrat opening was dominated by statements from national groups that illustrated how tenuous loyalty to the Habsburg order had become. The Czech Union, a body of all but two of the Czech parties, formed in November 1916 at the initiative of the chairman of the powerful Czech Agrarian Party, Antonín Ŝvehla, to defend national interests, made the greatest impact. Most politicians had expected the Czechs to read out the statement that they had delivered at every Reichsrat opening since 1879, which asserted Bohemia’s historic rights that had been disregarded under the Dualist system. Instead, the message that Frantiŝek Staněk, the Czech Union’s chairman, read to the assembled members was new and shocking, for it was manifestly inspired by the dangerous ideas that the Russian revolution and America’s entry into the war had unleashed:

  The representatives of the Czech nation are deeply convinced that the present Dualist system has led to the emergence of ruling and subject nationalities which is detrimental to the interest of all of them, and that in order to remove every national injustice and assure the general development of each nation in the interest of the empire and dynasty as a whole it is necessary to transform the Habsburg-Lorraine monarchy into a federal union of free and equal national states.

  Basing ourselves at this historic moment on the natural right of nations to self-determination and free development, reinforced moreover in our case by inalienable historic rights, we shall demand the unification of all branches of the Czechoslovak nation in one democratic state, including the Slovak branch living in a unit contiguous to its Czech motherland.69

  From the perspective of Habsburg officials, the best that could be said for the statement was that it at least advocated reform within the bounds of the Monarchy. This had been by no means assured; when the statement was drawn up, there had been heated argument within the Czech Union about whether the Monarchy should be mentioned at all.70 In all other respects, however, it was decidedly menacing. The call to the ‘natural right of nations to self-determination’ echoed both Wilsonian idealism and Russian revolutionary rhetoric, and showed how radical Czech political aspirations had become. The hope in 1914–15 of the Young Czech leader Karel Kramář to resurrect a Czech kingdom under the pan-Slavic protection of the Russian Tsar – a hope embraced by only a tiny band of conspirators – was now seriously outdated. Instead, freedom, democracy and self-determination, the ideals of 1917 embraced by the Czech Union’s statement, were attracting a far wider following by challenging the monarchical ideology and historical legitimacy that underpinned the Habsburg Monarchy. The Czechs, while not entirely abandoning historical ‘state rights’, were now prioritizing a more modern conception of the nation based on popular will and national self-determination. By laying claim not only to the traditional Czech lands in Austria but also to Slovak-inhabited territories that by historical state right lay under the Hungarian Crown of St Stephen, they were demanding that the entire Empire be reconstructed. No longer would its legitimacy rest on history, venerable law and the divine rights of kings. If Czech politicians had their way, it should instead reflect an alleged ‘natural right of nations’ and its structure should be defined by race.

  There was also no good news for the Empire from the political groupings of the other nationalities. The South Slavs, who two months earlier had formed an alliance with the Czech Union, echoed its demands. In their vision of the future, Slovenes, Croats and Serbs would be united ‘in one autonomous state . . . ruled in a democratic manner and under the sceptre of the Habsburg dynasty’. Other national groups advanced conflicting demands. The Poles, once firm supporters of the Monarchy but now aggrieved by the government’s failure to realize its promises to them of November 1916, wished for an independent Poland with access to the sea. Their aspirations clashed with those of the Ruthenian deputies, who wanted Galicia to be broken up into Polish and Ruthenian Crownlands. The united German parties were horrified by the implication for their co-nationals in Bohemia of Czech demands and promised to oppose the federalizing ambitions of both the Czech Union and the South Slavs. The deputies’ division into unified national groups, the antagonism between them, and the contradictory nature of the programmes that they put forward on that first day, exposed the naivety of hopes that the Reichsrat’s return might bring reconciliation and stability to the beleaguered Monarchy. The speech by Emperor Karl the following day was too vague on how governance of his realms might be reformed. His refusal to take an oath to the Austrian constitution, an attempt not to reprise the mistake he had made in Hungary, merely increased the unease of deputies. His Minister President was also unhelpful. Although the paralysis between the nationalities was entirely foreseeable, Clam-Martinic was not ready to respond to the deputies’ speeches for two weeks. When he did reply in the Reichsrat on 12 June, he dismissed the nationalities’ plans as irreconcilable and therefore unrealizable and instead vacuously proclaimed that ‘the programme of my government is Austria’.71

  The Reichsrat’s reopening was only the most important of an array of measures that changed how wartime Austria was ruled. The government, belatedly recognizing that the Habsburg war effort stood or fell on the will of its peoples, attempted to co-opt them and their representatives. At the very highest level, this strategy failed. When Ernst von Seidler, successor to the woeful Clam-Martinic as Minister President, attempted to reconstruct the Austrian cabinet in August from one of officials to one representing the nationalities, no Czech parliamentarian accepted the invitation. Other Slav politicians and Social Democrats also refused to form so close a link to the regime without political reforms.72 However, further down the hierarchy there was some double-edged success. Two new ministries, a Ministry for Social Welfare and a Ministry of Food, were established. The Ministry of Social Welfare was particularly significant, for it drew into its service the expertise of nationalist activists and the extensive welfare organizations that these activists had created for their own peoples. The state hoped to bolster its legitimacy through association with these popular organizations, as well as to alleviate more effectively the hardship of its peoples. Nonetheless, this was no reprise of the ‘double mobilization’ of 1914 and 1915, for whereas then national feeli
ng had been channelled towards an imperial war, now nationalists marked out their own turf. The nationalist-run orphanages and welfare centres absorbed under the Ministry of Social Welfare in 1917 were strictly segregated. Nationalists’ participation in imperial welfare converted social problems into national issues, accelerating the dissolution of the already frail bonds between peoples even as they combated the deprivation and misery.73

  The new spirit of governance was also manifested in a reduction in repression and an attempt at conciliation by the Emperor. The army’s conduct at home had been very divisive, and in the summer of 1917 its powers there were curtailed. The government revoked emergency legislation permitting the military to issue orders to Crownland civilian officials, and the Reichsrat abolished the jurisdiction of military courts over civilians in the hinterland. In September, at the Reichsrat’s urging, the secretive War Supervision Office, tasked with overseeing censorship and maintaining order, was disbanded. The War Ministry took on its responsibilities, but pressure from parliamentarians ensured that information flowed much more freely than earlier in the war.74 The most controversial measure was Emperor Karl’s amnesty for all political crimes, declared on 2 July. Karel Kramář, Václav Klofáč and around a thousand other Czech prisoners were released. As with the Reichsrat opening, the impact of the measures was not all that Karl or his government wished. Limiting the state’s repressive capabilities at a time of popular discontent was perilous, especially as the amnesty failed to elicit the expected goodwill from Czech nationalists. Embittered enemies of the dynasty as well as innocents were released into society. Austrian German opinion was horrified. Additionally, the state’s authority suffered. The amnesty was an implicit admission of the injustice of much of the past repression, and the parliamentary debates that accompanied the judicial reforms publicly revealed just how vicious the army’s conduct had been in Galicia and on the Serbian Front in 1914 and 1915.75