Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  The Habsburg Empire had been frozen in a state of impending collapse during the 1918 German offensives. For its peoples, the alternatives had at least become clearer. German victory would mean a Dualist Empire, its western half centralized and dominated by Austrian Germans, and satellite status under its powerful northern neighbour. After the French had embarrassingly published the letter that the Emperor had sent during the Sixtus peace approach of a year earlier acknowledging France’s ‘just claims’ to Alsace-Lorraine, Karl had tied his regime to this vision. In May he had made a humiliating trip to the OHL at Spa to assent to Mitteleuropa and with it sign away his Empire’s independence. By the end of the summer the consequences of defeat for the Empire were equally clear. The Allied position had hardened. In January 1918 the American President had advocated in his Fourteen Points speech a federal Austria-Hungary, whose peoples ‘should be accorded the freest opportunity to autonomous development’. In June, however, after Karl’s commitment to the Reich’s post-war Europe, Wilson had shifted to advocate that ‘all branches of the Slav race [sic] should be completely free from German and Austrian rule’. His allies, now sure that there could be no separate peace with the Habsburgs, began working to destroy them. At the start of June, the British, French and Italians had echoed the support Wilson had given in January to a ‘united and independent Poland with access to the sea’. More fatally, at the end of that month the French formally recognized Tomáš Masaryk’s dissident Czechoslovak National Committee in Paris as the legal representatives of a Czechoslovak nation. The British granted their recognition on 9 August and the Americans on 3 September. By the autumn, as the German army was forced back on the Western Front, it was clear that the last days of the Habsburg Empire were approaching.94

  The Habsburg army was powerless to shape events. In June it had tried to support the German offensives with one of its own on the Italian Front. Even had the attack been a success, it would have made no difference to the war’s outcome, but in the event it turned out to be a bloody failure. The cause was in part the perennial Habsburg problem of poor leadership. Emperor Karl, who had taken over the Supreme Command shortly after his accession to the throne, had been presented with two equally bad plans by the commanders on the spot, the former Chief of the General Staff, Conrad von Hötzendorff, in Tyrol, and the commander on the Isonzo Front, General Svetozar Boroević. With typical indecisiveness, he had divided his forces equally between the pair, ensuring neither would have sufficient strength for success.95 The material and psychological state of the army should have called into question the wisdom of launching any sort of attack, and certainly an ill-conceived one on an 80-kilometre front. The ammunition stockpiled for the assault, over six million shells, could not be brought up the mountains in time because the horses available were underfed, scraggy and simply too few. The force’s soldiers were in a similar condition. Since 1917, Habsburg field strength had dropped by 550,000 men, in large part through endemic desertion and the diversion of seven divisions to security duties in the interior of the Empire.96 Those troops who did remain on active service were on rations little more than half the size of those a year earlier, poorly clad and demoralized by Italian propaganda. When, on 15 June after a weak bombardment, the troops went forward, some units were stopped dead. Others used their German-style training to advance, but soon found themselves in an elastic defence system, where counter-attacks launched when they were exhausted and at their most vulnerable halted them. By the end of the second day, the attackers’ supplies were running out and Conrad was in retreat. On 20 June the offensive was called off and those gains that had been made on the right bank of the Piave River were relinquished. This useless operation cost 142,550 men.97

  The Emperor, as the army’s commander, took a severe reputational blow from the June defeat. Deputies in both the Magyar parliament and the Austrian Reichsrat condemned the offensive as ‘foolishness and irresponsibility’. Some even demanded that those who had authorized it be put on trial.98 Wags in Vienna started referring to their monarch as Karl the Last.99 The whispering campaign against Empress Zita, Karl’s wife, was a sure sign of the peoples’ distrust in their leadership, mirroring what had befallen Tsarina Aleksandra a year earlier in Russia. Zita was of French and Italian noble lineage and spoke with a foreign accent, enough evidence for wartime xenophobia to condemn her as a traitor. It was rumoured that she had betrayed the June offensive to the Allies. Some claimed that she had been locked up in a Hungarian castle to prevent her from doing any more damage.100 Hunger-induced paranoia doubtless contributed to the popularity of these conspiracy theories. Vienna’s food supply situation was particularly disastrous. In April, mass starvation had only narrowly been averted by the desperate expedient of confiscating barges carrying Romanian grain belonging to Germany up the Danube.101 There was a severe bread shortage that summer throughout much of the Empire and although the gathering in of the harvest provided some relief, this was brief: Austria’s plight by the beginning of October was summed up by the head of its Food Office, Hans Loewenfeld-Russ, as ‘utterly desperate’.102

  While the Emperor still stood precariously at the head of his realm, he had lost much of his power to rule it. Crownland officials, many of whom had been instrumental in the success of the double mobilization in 1914, were by this point prioritizing national allegiances and protecting local over imperial interests. It was especially unfortunate that the two peoples whom by 1918 the Empire had alienated more than any others, the Czechs and Poles, also happened to live in Austria’s two most important food surplus regions, Bohemia and Galicia. In both Crownlands, district officials and railway employees, urged on by local newspapers and public opinion, obstructed the export of supplies to other regions.103 Large tracts of countryside in these Crownlands and further south had anyway been wrested from state control by deserters formed into robber bands and Bolshevik ‘Green Cadres’. The towns too were fractious and violent. On the Slav peripheries they were full of hatred towards Germans and Jews. Vienna was a centre of anti-Semitism. Everywhere there were food riots, protests and debilitating strikes.104 Attempts to promote a multinational and dynastic ‘Austrian state idea’ were long abandoned. In a mark of its total bankruptcy, the Habsburg regime retained a modicum of control only by exploiting national enmities in their fragmented society. Security troops were deliberately garrisoned in areas foreign to them, where they could not communicate and where often they were actually hostile to the local populace. Magyar soldiers policed Czechs, and Czech military personnel kept order in Hungary. Austrian Germans watched over Slovene and Polish civilians, Bosnians over Germans, and Poles over Ruthenes. The Empire had finally become what its enemies had long and unfairly criticized it as: ‘a prison of peoples’.105

  The first clear sign that the Habsburg government was cracking was Karl’s appeal for peace on 14 September. His Foreign Minister, Count István Burián, had desired this since August, but the Germans had stalled and then instead advocated mediation by a neutral power. The note was therefore sent without their approval, an indication that in spite of Austria-Hungary’s wartime decline, the Emperor still had scope for independent action. However, at this late stage it achieved nothing besides further sour relations with the Germans. French and British leaders regarded the call as a ploy to split their coalition, and the American answer sent three days later pointed out that as the United States had already stated its peace terms, talks were superfluous.106 In spite of this negative response, Habsburg leaders were prompted to try again just a couple of weeks later. The catalyst was Bulgaria’s military collapse. Far more than for Germany, this mattered to Austria-Hungary, for it opened the way to Habsburg-occupied Serbia. Even more important, as Burián warned in a Crown Council on 27 September, after news of Bulgaria’s request for an armistice had arrived, was the ‘impact upon the nerves of our population’. He predicted it would be ‘the last straw’. ‘We must make decisions,’ he urged the assembled Austrian and Hungarian leaders, ‘if we want to avoid the p
eoples themselves taking fate into their own hands and making decisions about their futures over the heads of the governments.’107

  German and Habsburg elites adopted similar strategies at the start of October 1918 to end the conflict. Their appeals to President Wilson were issued in parallel on the night of 3 October. They proposed peace negotiations on the basis of the Fourteen Points and requested an immediate armistice. Both regimes also recognized that defeat made unavoidable long-delayed political reform. The ‘revolutions from above’ initiated in Germany and the Habsburg Empire were intended to pacify their resentful populations, and pre-empt violent upheaval. They were also undertaken in the hope of impressing the US President, who had made clear that he saw democracy as the bedrock of any lasting peace. In both aims they failed. There would be no easy peace and the central European monarchies would not outlast the defeat.

  In Austria-Hungary, Emperor Karl’s attempt to stave off revolution took the form of a roadmap for hasty reform, issued on 16 October while he waited for an American reply. The ‘Peoples’ Manifesto’, as its sponsors hopefully named it, promised to reorganize the Empire on a federal basis ‘as its people desire’. Karl envisaged German, Czech, South Slav and Ukrainian territories, each with their own institutions. The Habsburg Polish territories would be permitted to secede to the independent Polish state that Wilson’s Fourteen Points had demanded ‘should be erected’. As during consultations held four days before its release Czech and South Slav politicians had made clear that they would reject it, the manifesto was nothing more than a publicity exercise doomed to stillbirth. Moreover, instead of restoring faith in the Empire, it painfully exposed the inability of Habsburg leaders to offer any satisfactory reform. Strikingly, the only mention in the manifesto of the lands of the Hungarian Crown stressed that they lay outside its purview. The Magyar Minister President, Sándor Wekerle, had not only refused to permit any promise of federal reform in his land but had even threatened to halt food deliveries unless the manifesto explicitly excluded it. South Slav nationalist wishes for the unification of Croatia with Bosnia-Herzegovina, Dalmatia and Slovenia were thus not to be met. Appearing at the end of a lost war and issued by a broken, discredited monarch, the manifesto could not possibly compete with the full independence for the peoples offered by the Empire’s enemies. Nonetheless, it mattered, if only as a public sign of weakness that accelerated Habsburg collapse.108

  The Habsburg regime’s doom was sealed when Wilson’s response to the note sent two and a half weeks earlier arrived on 20 October. The Fourteen Points that Karl’s government had proposed as a basis for negotiation had left open the possibility of a post-war future for Austria-Hungary by demanding the possibility of ‘autonomous development’. However, any hope of survival was quashed by Wilson’s answer, which stated that having recognized the Czechoslovak National Committee as a de facto government and the justice of South Slav national aspirations, autonomy for these peoples could now not be a basis for peace. This pronouncement provided the signal for dissolution. National politicians were already waiting to take control. Already in July, Czech political factions had come together in a Czechoslovak National Committee, the Národní výbor československý.109 In early October other peoples had taken similar steps. A National Council of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes had hurriedly been formed in Zagreb two days after the Central Powers issued their peace notes. On the following day, 7 October, the Polish Council of Regency, the advisory body set up by the Germans in Warsaw, had proclaimed a ‘free and independent Poland’ to which Galicia was to be attached.110

  Ironically, the first acts of revolution were taken by the peoples most favoured by the Monarchy, the Germans and Hungarians. On the day after Wilson’s reply, the Austrian German parties came together and formed a twenty-member National Committee to take over government.111 In Hungary, where the suppression of opposition and resistance to reform had permitted greater pressure to build, the power shift was more turbulent. Wekerle’s conservative government had attempted at first to isolate Hungary from Karl’s federalist reforms by announcing on 16 October that it no longer considered itself bound by the 1867 Compromise. However, this could not stop the vocal demands for national self-determination crossing the border to Hungary’s Slovaks and Romanians. Magyar opposition politicians led by the ‘Red Count’, Mihály Károlyi, also became assertive. On 26 October, after demands that power be transferred went unheeded and Karl refused to appoint him Magyar Minister President, Károlyi, the Hungarian Social Democrats and the Radicals founded a National Committee that claimed for itself the sole right ‘to speak and act in the name of the Hungarian nation’. Its twelve-point programme demanded the abolition of the ruling system, universal male and female suffrage, independence, peace and the renunciation of the German alliance. By offering the national freedoms advocated by Wilson, it hoped naively that Hungary might retain all its territory and mixed peoples.112

  The people, or at least highly visible and politically assertive groups within it, were decisive in enabling the National Committee to grasp power. On 24 October the revolution began when thousands of students went onto the streets of Budapest to demand peace, independence and a Károlyi government. The following day saw cries of ‘Up the Republic!’ – and the first clashes with security forces. With the formation of the National Committee, the demonstrations swelled. On 27 October a 30,000-strong crowd gathered in front of parliament in support of the Committee and the next day the revolution gained its martyrs, when police fired on protestors trying to break through their cordons onto the city’s Chain Bridge across the Danube. Three died and fifty were wounded.113

  The old order’s days were already at this point numbered. Magyar officers loyal to the National Committee had formed a soldiers’ council, which agitated in Budapest’s garrison and prepared the overthrow of the city’s military command. On 30 October revolutionary officers and soldiers publicly swore an oath of loyalty at the Committee’s headquarters. The people too were on the streets, tearing Habsburg double-headed eagles from the buildings. Not the red flag but Hungary’s red-white-green tricolour was the symbol of this national revolution. General Lukachich at the head of the local military command attempted to resist, but his ability to deploy troops around Budapest was undermined when the city’s central telephone exchange defected to the revolution, and the soldiers anyway refused his orders to shoot at protestors. Even the once reliable Bosnians in the garrison mutinied and got drunk; their officers were eventually found cringing in a locked room for fear of being lynched. When Lukachich appealed to the Emperor for even just one reliable regiment to be sent, Karl quietly told him ‘enough blood has already been spilt’. On the morning of 31 October, Károlyi was appointed Minister President and the executive of the National Committee became the government. Lukachich was held under arrest. A few soldiers decided that one last act must be undertaken to eliminate absolutely the old order: that afternoon, they broke into Tisza’s villa on the outskirts of the city. The former Minister President was murdered in revenge for his part in starting the past four years of misery, hunger and death. Otherwise, the day was one of celebration. The national tricolour was hung out across Budapest, and hundreds of thousands rejoiced in the city’s squares. The Hungarian Republic had been born.114

  By this date, revolution had spread across the Empire, catalysed by a last Habsburg admission of defeat. On 24 October the Italians had launched a last-minute offensive on the South-Western Front in order to position themselves better for the coming peace negotiations. After three days, defending troops of all nationalities had refused to go into the line and on 28 October the imperial authorities had unconditionally requested an armistice.115 In Prague, the news unleashed a genuinely popular revolution. People came out into the streets and gathered in Wenceslaus Square to celebrate. Cries of ‘Long live Masaryk!’ and ‘Long live Wilson!’ echoed through the city. There the tone was, as in Budapest and in most of the Empire’s other major municipalities, national, rather than Socialist or
Bolshevik. The bourgeois politicians who dominated the national committees ensured that their ideology prevailed. When Czech Socialists had called a general strike on 14 October, in the hope of creating an opportunity for the proclamation of a republic, it had failed in the face of military counter-measures and a lack of support from the Czechoslovak National Committee. In Ljubljana, the Russian revolution of the previous year was held up as a warning, not an exemplar. On the same day as the Prague revolution, the Slovenian revolutionaries there were admonished to respect property and demonstrate for Yugoslav liberty. In Zagreb too, from 21 October revolutionaries flew Croatian, Slovene and Serb flags, not the red flag of leftist struggle. Democracy too was celebrated. As one of the Croatian leaders, Stjepan Radić, joyfully proclaimed on the following day, ‘The peoples rise in order to deliver freedom with their blood and over the whole world Wilson’s principles enjoy victory.’116

  A second characteristic of the Habsburg revolutions, contradicting Radić’s assertion, was their relative bloodlessness. Emperor Karl deserves credit here for encouraging restraint, but it was also in part a consequence of the somewhat ambiguous status of the national committees. Karl’s manifesto had promised that Austria was to be federalized on a national basis, which appeared to confer legitimacy on these organizations as prospective regional governments. The impression was reinforced on 25 October by the appointment of a new Minister President, the pacifist Professor Heinrich Lammasch, who hoped sincerely but futilely to lead not a cabinet but an ‘Executive Committee of the united National Governments’. The Czechoslovak National Committee’s way to power was certainly eased by this, for its members could claim to the local Habsburg military command that by taking control of the critical food supply they were merely acting according to the Emperor’s design.117 A further reason for the smooth transition was that the revolutions merely formalized the national fragmentation of the Empire that had already taken place during the war. In Bohemia and Moravia, Czech district officials had long prioritized their own people’s food supply over pan-Austrian solidarity. It was only natural that after the independent Czechoslovak state was declared on 28 October, these officials should place themselves under the authority of its National Committee.118