These catastrophes ended Habsburg Europe. The final scene of Miklós Bánffy’s brilliant Transylvanian Trilogy, written in the 1930s, does not concern itself with the war, but shows all the young men whose lives the reader has followed over so many pages excitedly putting on their devastatingly smart cavalry uniforms in July 1914 and heading off to their units. It was simply understood by Bánffy’s readership that they would all die in Galicia shortly thereafter. Already in early 1915 there were mass defections of Slav troops to the Russians. This is the era immortalized in The Good Soldier Švejk when bitter Hungarian troops mockingly put their hands up in surrender when they saw Czech troops. With the fall of Przemyśl, the remaining army became ‘a militia’, ever more unreliable and capable only of defeating the Italians.
In the summer a renewed offensive against the Russians chased them out of the ruins of Przemyśl and there is a strange genre of postcards featuring Habsburg soldiers posing rather sheepishly inside blocks of smashed concrete and weird Brobdingnagian metal hoops and cones from wrecked fortress cannon. An even odder photo shows officers standing to attention outside the town hall as some strikingly burly and ferocious-looking troops march past. But these troops are different: they are carrying an immense Bavarian flag and wear spiked helmets. These are Germans a long way from home. Their presence meant the eclipse of Austria-Hungary: the Habsburgs now became mere adjuncts to their vastly more powerful ally, unable to defeat even Serbia and Romania without the German army. Already some Germans were talking about carving out their own empire from the Imperial corpse. For Przemyśl itself, events since 1914 had converted a multi-ethnic backwater into a principal stage on which the disasters of the new era were played out. The Germans left in 1918, but returned in 1939 as the town and the River San that runs through it became the front line between Nazi-ruled and Soviet-ruled Poland. In the following years most of the population fatally crossed both of their new rulers on racial, linguistic, political or class grounds.
Last train to Wilsonville
For Austria-Hungary the most severe damage was perhaps not even done by the annihilatory battles it found itself fighting, but by the strange gangs of intellectuals and artists who it could not even hope to defeat and for whom the Great War was a sort of dream come true. Europe was really not a normal environment at this time. One small example is the grotesco Italian poet, propagandist and fighter pilot Gabriele d’Annunzio, who celebrated the first day of Italy’s attack on Austria-Hungary with:
Our vigil is ended. Our exultation begins … the blood is spurting from the veins of Italy!… The slaughter begins, the destruction begins … All these people, who yesterday thronged in the streets and squares, loudly demanding war, are full of veins, full of blood; and that blood begins to flow …
Pronouncements like this drew huge applauding crowds rather than a frontal lobotomy, and were not uncharacteristic of the sort of unhinged disgustingness which now engulfed Europe.
Within moments of Franz Ferdinand’s death, the area around the rim of the Empire began to seethe with peculiar figures like d’Annunzio, concocting entirely mystical reasons for such-and-such an outcome to the war. The most straightforward of these were the Romanians. The origins of Romanian nationalism lay in cities such as Sibiu and their ‘redemption’ was uncontroversial, except for the immense numbers of Germans and Hungarians who would be swept up too in such an annexation. The Poles looked for some form of disarray in either the Central Powers or the Russian Empire which would give them the space to re-establish their own state. The total surprise that all sides wound up imploding, clearing the ground for a genuinely independent new Poland, only revealed itself in 1918.
More extreme were the Serbs, Italians and Czechs. The Serbian government found itself in the summer of 1914 threatened with invasion by Austria-Hungary, but also – to its amazement – as the ally of Russia, Britain and France and therefore surely on the winning side. Ethnographers, linguists, geographers and historians swarmed over Belgrade, coming up with almost limitless possibilities for a future Serbian mega-state. Serbia had already been in discussions before the war with Montenegro about joining forces, but a near-cosmic ‘Yugoslavism’ now took over, with everything to the north including such cities as Klagenfurt, Timişoara and Szeged seen as ripe for absorption into the kingdom. There were also serious discussions with Bulgaria about a pan-Balkan federation: a state from the Adriatic to the Black Sea of a similar land area to Germany. Everywhere earnest and bespectacled figures were coming up with reasons why Slovenes were (despite an unrelated political history for many centuries) in fact ‘little brothers’, or why Croats (despite being ruled by Hungary since 1102 and being Catholic and using Roman rather than Cyrillic script) had some freshly discovered deep affinity with the Belgrade regime. Nobody ever really worked out how Muslim Bosnians or Albanians would fit in at all, but a new, southern version of the Habsburg Empire minus the Habsburgs now took clear shape. It is striking that among the few surviving would-be assassins in Sarajevo one wound up teaching at the University of Belgrade and another ran the ethnographic department at the Sarajevo Museum. Essentially ‘Yugoslavism’ was a series of mere academic nutty assertions – but like many nutty assertions it took on an extraordinary solidity.
The Italian state was fuelled up by generations of hatred for Austria-Hungary. Garibaldi had spoken of the ‘cesspool of humiliation’ into which Italy had been tipped by the slinking, desperate way it had received Venetia from the hands of other European powers, after having had its own armed forces whipped by the Habsburg army. The decision-making processes within the Italian government were bewilderingly incoherent (although in 1914 no European state exactly shone). Despite being part of the Triple Alliance with Austria-Hungary and Germany since 1882 there had been regular bolts of nationalist dementia about the really quite small and unimportant areas partly filled by Italian-speakers and ruled by Vienna – the valleys of the South Tyrol and the region to the north and north-east of Venice in which the dominant city was Trieste. Italy had plenty of ports (and indeed was quite famous for already having a whole lot of coastline), so adding an extra one should have been of no interest, particularly, as it turned out, when Trieste’s significance only stemmed from its supplying the whole of the Empire – once in Italian hands it withered away. Many Italian politicians disdained the rubbish of ‘irredentism’ – the liberation of all Italian-speakers – but it was nonetheless almost a religion for others. Quite rapidly it shaded into a broader land-grab, with the small scatterings of Italians sprinkled down the Dalmatian coast becoming an excuse to take over that area too – plus the Albanian port of Vlorë, which had already been seized in 1914. This held out the prospect of the Adriatic becoming an ‘Italian lake’, despite much of it being strikingly devoid of Italians. The South Tyrol issue similarly started off as irredentism and ended as a land-grab, with the Italian-speakers around Lake Garda and Trento shading into a large block of Germans well before the Brenner Pass, now proclaimed by Italy as a ‘natural border’. So – as with the other countries lurking on the fringe of the Empire – Italy’s claims were no less and no more mystical than those of the Habsburgs themselves. In this sense they were falling in the footsteps of a grand old tradition of nonsense, fuelled by academics of a kind who would have been wearily familiar to Maximilian I. But they became serious as the weakness and military incapacity of the Habsburgs in the opening months of the war ushered in a golden age of hostile cartographers and philologists.
Most academic of all were probably the Czechs. As the war turned against the Central Powers it became ever more plausible that the Empire might collapse completely, in which case the Czechs could either be absorbed into some expanded German-speaking state or have a fleeting chance to carve out an empire of their own. All the ingenuity of the usual figures was obliged to whip up a plausible conjunction between Czechs, Slovaks and Ruthenians which would allow a new multi-ethnic state (which also included millions of Germans and a lot of Hungarians) to undulate its way fr
om west to east in the small gap between other German- and Hungarian-speakers and many Poles. This was, again, an act of will. Slovaks and Czechs had much in common, but ultimately the state had no real historical roots beyond some vague appeal to an imagined set of shared Slav values which excluded a large part of the population. This mysticism perhaps met its apogee of absurdity in October 1918 when the Czech ideologue Masaryk and his associates posed in front of the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia as they proclaimed the independent Czechoslovak republic in Pennsylvania. This photo crystallizes the really extraordinarily donnish and prissy figures – fuelled by folk costume, epic poetry, grammatical niceties and prettily coloured maps – who now seemed to inherit the Habsburg Earth. Posing with the Liberty Bell was meant to imply a shared democratic inheritance, but the delegation had been in Pennsylvania in the first place to find some almost comically unrepresentative American Slovaks with whom to do a deal. Notionally apostles of modernity, they come across as monuments of the purest fust. The new state used a Hussite motto (Pravda vítězí: ‘Truth shall prevail’) and promoted pride in a notionally authentic Bohemian heretical past, despite most Czechs being Catholic. Masaryk then crazily hailed the enormous German population as a ‘colonizing avant-garde’ in contrast to the ‘settled’ Czech-speakers, as though the Germans, living throughout Bohemia and Moravia since the Middle Ages, were somehow interloping wetbacks. This shameless photo with the Bell was followed up by another breathtaking piece of sucking up with the suggestion that the new state’s second city should be called Wilsonovo (‘Wilsonville’). The city in question only had German and Hungarian names – Preßburg and Pozsony, awkwardly reflecting its actual German-Hungarian heritage. Perhaps mercifully Wilsonovo was dropped for the plausible-sounding new name of Bratislava, itself stemming from an old mistranscription of the name of the medieval Prince Braslav.
What is striking about all these groups is that they all inherit varieties of Habsburg weirdness. None of their statements, visions, assertions, acts of violence are in any sense actually worse, all improvising on variants of old Habsburg wishful thinking. The results only seem more hollow and ridiculous because they are more recent, with Bratislava merely a very recent example of what must presumably have been countless misunderstandings and bits of ineptitude behind many older place-names. The war carved out a fresh batch of multi-ethnic states which proved to be merely smaller versions of what they had replaced, and no more rational than, say, Ferdinand I’s magic narwhal tusk. Their visions of greatness also, of course, fatally overlapped with and contradicted one another. The following decades showed the degree to which the Habsburgs’ legitimacy had been based on being able to defend their hotchpotch state – something which their successors all proved tragically unable to do.
A pastry shell
While the first years of the war brought nothing but disaster and humiliation to the Austro-Hungarians, much of the remainder seemed an extraordinary triumph. This proved an illusion, but it was sufficient to give a disastrous semi-confidence to the regime until shortly before the war’s end.
The nadir was the summer of 1916 when a colossal Russian attack – the ‘Brusilov Offensive’ – further devastated Galicia and Bukovina. The incompetence which had dominated Habsburg conduct of the war had been in some measure sheltered by matching fiascos on the Russian side. It is curious that in two such hidebound armies it should just happen to have been the Russians from among whom a single commander, Aleksei Brusilov, emerged brilliant enough to stop the floundering and change the strategic balance. No such lucky chance ever occurred on the Habsburg side – and nor could it have. Conrad and his commanders were living agreeably at the distant headquarters in Teschen (nearly four hundred miles from the front, which makes the chateau generals of the Western Front seem positively hands-on) and refused to interrupt a ‘gala dinner’ when the news of Brusilov’s attack came, with Conrad confident the Russians could not get far. As one account put it, the Habsburg front ‘crumbled like a pastry shell’ and in only three days the Russians took an extraordinary total of two hundred thousand prisoners (nearly half the Habsburg forces opposing them). By the time the offensive had been stopped through German counterattacks and general exhaustion the Habsburg army had more or less ceased to exist as an independent force, with a total of some seven hundred and fifty thousand casualties, over half of them prisoners.
As was the case with any victory on the Eastern Front, the spoils were simply an accumulation of barren marshes and forests and burning villages, and the Russians gained nothing from their new territory (much of it wrecked anyway by them during their earlier scorched-earth retreat). But whoever owned the remnants of Galicia, it was absolutely clear that the Habsburg Empire’s future was now fatally reliant on that of Germany. There had been grand plans for a reordering of the Empire to put a Habsburg on a revived Polish throne with its capital at Lublin (now in the Habsburg zone of occupation), but the Germans began to look much more coldly on their allies, with the first serious discussions about absorbing the German-speaking areas into the Reich of a kind which would be realized in 1938. Future offensives were led by the Germans, generally with Habsburg troops only a minority element.
The chaos of the Brusilov Offensive suggested to the Romanians that the time had come for them to declare war on the Central Powers or risk missing out on what appeared, by the summer of 1916, to be the strategic endgame. Their invasion of Transylvania resulted in the easy capture of Braşov and mass panic as the invaders had little to prevent them reaching Budapest. It turned out that now their test had come, the Carpathians were only really a major obstacle on maps, and generations of planners droning on about eastern ramparts had been wrong. The Romanian timing however was catastrophically wrong. The Russian offensive petered out and joint Habsburg, German, Bulgarian and Turkish forces turned on Romania and destroyed it in a few weeks. In early August the Romanians were marching through south-eastern Transylvania, but by early December Bucharest had been captured in one of a handful of genuine lightning campaigns, of a kind of which generals had dreamed back in the summer of 1914. The Braşov Museum has a rare First World War atrocity photo – of a grinning Hungarian soldier posing next to a ditch filled with the corpses of Romanian soldiers dusted with lime: a photo which must have appealed first to vengeful Hungarians and then to counter-vengeful Romanians when they finally marched in to take over the area in 1918.
Franz Joseph died in November 1916 and on the face of it he left the Empire in a position of triumph that Conrad must have longed for at many points in his career. On every front the strategic dilemmas which had made the previous decades so unattractive had ended. Habsburg troops occupied Belgrade and Bucharest, they had their own occupation zone in what had been Russian Poland, and at regular intervals their troops in the south-west humiliated the Italian army. In 1917 scarcely credible prospects unfolded as the Russian front collapsed. An early Habsburg embarrassment in the opening days of the war was the release of a Russian citizen captured near Zakopane, Lenin, who had been allowed to proceed to his Swiss exile. Now the Germans carefully arranged for his reintroduction into the prostrate Russian Empire to foment further chaos. A final pleasure in November 1917 was the Battle of Caporetto, a joint German–Habsburg campaign against Italy which tore off a huge hunk of the Italian north-east, threatened Venice and inflicted some three hundred thousand Italian casualties, mostly prisoners. All that was needed to end the war was a final German campaign in the West to finish the British, Americans and French.
Everyone knows now that this was a will-o’-the-wisp, but until the failure of the final German offensives in the summer of 1918 victory still seemed genuinely plausible. German strength gave Austria-Hungary the semblance of a great power, but in every theatre of conflict it was in practice a mere haggard extra and in the one theatre that mattered – the Western Front – it was hardly even present. But for surviving elements in the Austro-Hungarian army the situation appeared fabulous, with Russia in pieces and no serious enemies on
any of its fighting fronts. However, the arguments about how to take advantage of this showed immediate problems. The new Emperor, Karl I, was effectively an incapable cipher. In the early twenty-first century churches have shrines to Karl, who was beatified in 2004 and is therefore en route to sainthood. Being useless seems a funny path to religious greatness and I stare at my Blessed Charles bookmark and medallion in some disbelief. Suddenly moved into the starting blocks by Franz Ferdinand’s death and uneasily aware that Franz Joseph could die at any moment, Karl had spent only two years trying to work out how to become ruler of a multinational empire. He was crushingly described by one of his generals: ‘you hope to meet a thirty-year old … but you find a man with the appearance of a twenty-year old … who thinks, speaks and acts like a ten-year old’.
Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe Page 51