The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (40 page)

Without giving up everything, we should do anything to uphold peace! If we enter a great war with Russia, it would be a catastrophe, and who knows whether our right and left flanks will function; Germany has to deal with France and Rumania makes excuses due to the Bulgarian threat. Therefore now is a very disadvantageous moment. If we wage a war specifically with Serbia, we will quickly overcome that hurdle, but what then? And what would we have? First all of Europe would fall on us and see us as disturber of the peace and God help us, if we annex Serbia.
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It is one of the smaller tragedies of the summer of 1914 that in assassinating Franz Ferdinand the Serb nationalists removed the one man in Austria-Hungary who might have prevented it going to war. We can never know what might have happened and it may be, in an age of increasingly intransigent nationalisms, that the multinational empire was doomed even without war.

For Austria-Hungary its internal and external policies were intimately linked and shaped by the nationalist forces which it confronted. Where it had once reached out to bring Germans or Italians or South Slavs under its rule, by the second half of the nineteenth century it was on the defensive, trying to prevent national groups around its borders from taking away its territory. Italian unification had, step by step, stripped away most of Austria-Hungary’s Italian-speaking areas and Italian irredentists still eyed the South Tyrol. Serbian ambitions now threatened to do the same for South Slav territories including Croatia and Slovenia in the south of the Dual Monarchy; Rumanian nationalists longed for the Rumanian-speaking parts of Transylvania; and Russian agitators were working on the population of Ruthenia in the
eastern part of Galicia to persuade them that they really belonged inside Russia. And the problem was only going to get worse as national groups outside Austria-Hungary increasingly strengthened their links to their compatriots inside what some were coming to call ‘the prison of nations’.

Pessimists – or perhaps they were simply realists – within Austria-Hungary believed in trying to maintain the status quo and preventing further divisions at home and decline abroad. The emperor certainly fell within that camp. So did the Foreign Minister until 1906, Count Agenor Gołuchowski. He was handsome, charming, rather lazy (his nickname was Gołuchschlafski –
schlaf
means sleep – for his general air of somnolence), and pragmatic. He was well aware of Austria-Hungary’s weakness and believed in a quiet foreign policy without sudden or exciting initiatives. His policies were based on the views that Austria-Hungary needed to maintain the Triple Alliance with Germany and Italy, keep on good terms with Russia and avoid falling out in the Balkans or over the Ottoman Empire, and, if possible, continue the agreements with Great Britain and Italy over the Mediterranean.

Optimists believed that the Dual Monarchy needed to and indeed could show that it was still a great power and in so doing build national unity. They resented Austria-Hungary’s weakness at home and in its own neighbourhood, and its inability to join in the scramble for colonies around the world. The Austrian ambassador in Washington, an experienced diplomat, wrote to one of his colleagues in 1899:

The way the great power politics have been developing through extra-European issues, is leading us to sink further into the background as a power factor. Within our lifetimes the problems which the politics of the eighties revolved around have become obsolete, such as our dominance in Italy in the fifties and our rivalry with Prussia in the sixties. No one is happy; unlike the previous period, we only want to hold on to the status quo and our only ambition is existence.

And, he concluded glumly, ‘Our prestige has sunk about as far as the level of Switzerland.’
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On Austria-Hungary’s own doorstep though, there were temptations for gains in the Balkans and perhaps further afield along the coast of Asia Minor as the Ottoman Empire faded away.
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Seven years later, by which time Austria-Hungary’s position had deteriorated still further, Conrad von Hötzendorf, the new chief of staff and one of the most influential men in the Dual Monarchy, laid out his views on foreign policy. Austria-Hungary needed to be forceful and positive both to show the world that it must be taken seriously but, equally important, to inspire its own citizens with pride in their country and overcome its enervating domestic disputes. Success abroad, and that included military success, would lead to more support for the government at home, which in turn would generate support for a more aggressive foreign policy. That result, which was the only possible one if Austria-Hungary were to survive, depended on strong armed forces. As Conrad put it a few years later: ‘It must always be kept in mind that the destinies of nations and dynasties are settled on the battlefield rather than at the conference table.’
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He was not alone by any means in holding such views: they were shared by many senior military men across Europe. What made his situation different was that he was able through a combination of his own personality and the incoherence in government in Austria-Hungary to exert great influence over both domestic and foreign policies. Apart from a year’s interlude in 1912, he was chief of staff from 1906 to 1917, during the prewar years with their growing crises, the arms race, and the tightening of the alliances, then in those crucial weeks of 1914 when the world went to war, and finally during the war itself as Austria-Hungary lurched from one disaster to another.

He was fifty-four years old when he became the most important military leader in the Dual Monarchy next to Franz Joseph himself. He was a devoted servant of the empire and the emperor. Born in Vienna into a German-speaking family, like many in the old empire Conrad learned several languages along the way including French, Italian, Russian, Serbian, Polish, and Czech. He felt that speaking many languages was part of what it meant to be Austrian. (When he became chief of staff he went to the Berlitz school to add Hungarian; Franz Ferdinand said he would be better off learning Chinese.
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Conrad was intense, self-confident, and vain (he never wore his glasses if he could help it). He had great energy and stamina and sat well on a horse, always important for officers in the European armies of the day. He could be charming; he was also very good at getting his own
way. His subordinates tended to love him but he quarrelled frequently with colleagues and superiors including Franz Ferdinand, who had initially wanted him in the post. Conrad’s background was relatively modest, certainly in comparison to other high-ranking officers (his father’s family were minor nobility and his mother’s father was a painter) and he had risen through the army through his own intelligence and hard work. This last quality had perhaps been instilled by his mother, who had always made him finish his homework before he could have supper. She remained a great influence on him and she and his sister came to live with him when Conrad’s father died. Conrad liked and respected women and had been happily married. When his wife died in 1904 at the relatively young age of forty-four, about a year before he became chief of staff, he was desolate. He had the first of what were to be recurring attacks of depression. He had never had much faith in religion and he now became cynical about its promises and increasingly doubtful about whether life had much meaning. That pessimism was to cast its shadow for the rest of his life and sit strangely with his repeated calls for positive action.
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By the standards of the time Conrad was a mildly unconventional officer. He was bored by hunting and impatient of formality. He also read widely – history, philosophy, politics, fiction – and formed strong views. One of his core beliefs, shared by so many at the time, was that existence was about struggle and that nations rose and fell depending on their ability to adapt. He hoped that Austria-Hungary would; he often doubted that it could. In politics he was conservative and, like his patron Franz Ferdinand, anti-Hungarian; in foreign policy, however, he was adventurous, even reckless. He saw Italy as a major, perhaps the major, threat to the empire, luring the country’s Italian citizens away and challenging Austria-Hungary in the Adriatic and the Balkans. When Russia was temporarily laid low in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War, he urged his government to carry out a preventive war to crush Italy. After he became chief of staff he continued to press for war. ‘Austria never has started a war,’ Franz Joseph told him. Conrad replied, ‘Unfortunately, your majesty.’ Although both the emperor and Franz Ferdinand rejected the idea of war on Italy, they did allow Conrad to strengthen Austria-Hungary’s fortifications in the South Tyrol along the border with Italy, thus diverting scarce resources from modernising
and equipping the empire’s armed forces. Conrad also undertook ostentatious staff exercises along the border, in one case practising an Austrian defence against Italy along the Isonzo River, later to be one of the bloodiest battlefields on that front in the Great War.
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Conrad saw Serbia as another enemy. He had come to dislike the South Slav inhabitants of the Balkans after serving in the force which put down rebellions in Bosnia and Herzegovina at the end of the 1870s. Their peoples in his view were primitives, driven by ‘bloodlust and cruelty’.
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As Serbia grew in strength and moved into Russia’s orbit after 1900, Conrad called for a preventive war against it as well, but until 1914 the emperor resisted him. After the Great War Conrad argued that Austria-Hungary’s defeat had been the price paid for missing its opportunities by not going to war against Serbia and Italy when it could. ‘The army is not a fire extinguisher, one cannot let it rust until the flames are coming out of the house. Instead it is an instrument to be used by goal-conscious, clever politicians as the ultimate defence of their interests.’
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Conrad’s ambitions to do something dramatic and on a large scale were fuelled by personal turmoil in his life. In 1907, he fell deeply in love again. Gina von Reininghaus was beautiful, less than half his age, and had a husband and six children. They sat together at a dinner and he poured out his sorrow at the death of his wife and his loneliness. According to Gina’s later account, as Conrad was leaving the party, he turned to his aide and said that he would have to leave Vienna immediately. ‘This woman will become my destiny.’ Far from leaving, Conrad declared his love and urged her to divorce her husband and marry him. This would have both been difficult (she would have lost custody of the six children, among other considerations) and caused a damaging scandal and she resisted. At some point, though, in the next few years Conrad and Gina became lovers with the acquiescence of her husband, who took the opportunity to start his own affair. Conrad wrote her letter after passionate letter, most of which he never sent, and he never stopped longing to make her his wife. During the Bosnian crisis in 1908 he wrote that it looked like war. Perhaps, he dared dream, he would return victorious. ‘Then, Gina, I would break all the chains, in order to win you, the greatest happiness of my life, as my dear wife. But what if things don’t happen this way and this rotten peace continues to drag on,
what then Gina? In your hands lies my destiny, completely in your hands.’ She saw the letter for the first time in 1925, after his death. He had finally got the war he wanted and had married Gina in 1915, after strings had been pulled in high places to get her an annulment.
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Fortunately for the peace of Europe in the short run, Conrad did not get his wish for war in 1908 or in the next set of crises in the Balkans between 1911 and 1913. The archduke was also becoming disillusioned with his protégé and perhaps somewhat jealous of Conrad’s reputation as the Dual Monarchy’s leading military thinker and strategist. Conrad did not show the necessary deference and took orders badly. The two men disagreed over the training of the army and its use. Franz Ferdinand would have willingly used it against domestic opposition, in Hungary and elsewhere, while Conrad insisted that it be kept for external wars. The final break came over Italy: in 1911 it went to war with the Ottoman Empire over Libya and Conrad saw this as the perfect moment to invade while Italian forces were occupied in North Africa. Both the emperor and his heir rejected his advice, as did the Foreign Minister, Aehrenthal. When an anonymous article appeared in a Vienna newspaper reflecting Conrad’s views and attacking Aehrenthal, the old emperor felt that he had no choice but to replace his chief of staff. Conrad was not dismissed altogether, however, but given a prestigious post in the army. He was reinstated a year later as chief of staff but Franz Ferdinand continued to regard him with mistrust and wrote to the new Foreign Minister, Leopold Berchtold, in 1913 warning him not to be influenced by Conrad. ‘For naturally, Conrad will again be for all kinds of wars and a great Hurrah-Policy, to conquer the Serbs and God knows what.’
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Franz Joseph and Franz Ferdinand were concerned to protect Austria-Hungary’s great power status but they were essentially conservative, as were most of the empire’s statesmen, in their approach to foreign affairs and preferred peace to war. Since the wars of the 1860s, which it had lost, Austria-Hungary had concentrated on building defensive alliances and trying to eliminate sources of conflict with the other powers. For several decades it remained on good terms with both of its two largest neighbours, Germany to the west and Russia to the east. It helped that all three were conservative monarchies opposed to revolution, as they had been during the wars of the French Revolution, at the
Congress of Vienna in 1815, in 1830 and again in 1848. In 1873 Bismarck had formed the League of the Three Emperors but it lasted only until 1887, although the idea came up again from time to time until as late as 1907.