A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (8 page)

By the summer of 1914 the Balkans were a region in which nobody was satisfied and everyone found reason to be angry and afraid. The Turks had lost almost everything they had ever possessed in the region; Bulgaria had lost much of its spoils from 1913; and although Greece had kept its gains, it did not think it had been given enough. The region was as unstable as it had ever been.

Russia and Austria both were aggrieved as well: Russia because it was seen as having failed the states whose patron it wanted to be; Austria because, only five years after it let slip its best opportunity to crush Serbia, it had been able to do nothing while the part of the world where it felt most threatened was reshaped to Serbia’s advantage. Certain that their credibility would be destroyed if they permitted any such thing to recur, both empires resolved never to be so weak and passive again.

The Austrians concluded also that the international conferences that ended both Balkan wars had done them no good. Only their ultimatum to Serbia, their direct threat of war, had made a difference. They had learned to regard peace conferences as traps.

Finally, the Austrians were disgusted by Germany’s failure to support them. Germany knew this; it was something that Berlin now had to take into account. Feeble though it might be, Austria-Hungary was the only even marginally dependable ally that Germany had in all of Europe. If the Germans again failed to support Austria-Hungary in a crisis, if they lost their junior partner as a result, they would be alone and surrounded by enemies. The conclusion, for Berlin, was obvious. Never again must Vienna have reason to doubt the value of its alliance with Germany.

Never again. For three weeks and more following the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, that was the German position.

Background

THE HAPSBURGS

IN 1914 EMPEROR FRANZ JOSEPH WAS IN HIS SIXTY-SIXTH
year at the head of the most successful family in the history of Europe. He ruled an empire that extended from what is now the Czech Republic and deep inside what is now Poland to the Italian port city of Trieste. He did so from grand palaces in and near Vienna, a city as cosmopolitan, as culturally rich, and as beautiful as any in the world. He had been doing so since he was eighteen years old, which made him one of the longest-reigning monarchs in the history of the world.

He was not only very old, however, but also sad, tired, lonely, and profoundly bored with life. He had always been the most conscientious of autocrats; even at eighty-four he rose daily before dawn, was at his desk by five
A
.
M
. after saying his morning prayers on his knees, and worked around the clock. And what he had to look back on, after so many decades of dull toil, was enough disappointment and failure to blight any three lives. Little wonder that he spoke, in unguarded moments, of yearning for death. It was almost as if he knew that his dynasty was now near the end of its thousand-year run.

But what a run it had been. The Hapsburgs had been kings of Austria and other places (Bohemia, Germany, Hungary, and Spain, to name just some) for six and a half centuries. With minor interruptions, they had been emperors for more than four and a half centuries. At their apex in the 1500s they had dominated Europe and the New World as no family has done before or since.

The name of the first member of the line to appear in recorded history, one Guntram the Rich, makes clear that even in his time, a century before the Norman conquest of England, the family was prospering to a far-from-common degree. In 1273 a descendant of Guntram’s became the first Hapsburg monarch, King Rudolf I of Germany. One of Rudolf’s sons succeeded him on the German throne, and another became King of Austria. Thereafter the Hapsburgs were never less than royal; the only question, from then on, was how many kingdoms the family would rule at any given time.

From the year 800, when the barbarian chief of a Germanic tribe called the Franks went to Rome and had himself crowned Emperor Charles (we remember him as Charlemagne, the Germans as Karl der Grosse), the rulers of Germany had fancied themselves successors to the ancient emperors of Rome. As a result of their ancestors’ success in overrunning the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries, they controlled much of Italy. They did so through the Dark and Middle Ages and on through the Renaissance into modern times. The highest possible honor for a German was to become Holy Roman emperor, a title that continued to represent supremacy over the fragmented German states even when the men who held it no longer controlled Rome. The last German emperor to be crowned in Rome was a member of the Hapsburg family’s Austrian branch. He became Emperor Frederick III in 1440, and though the throne was “elective” (the only voters were the hereditary rulers of major German states, including Austria), from that point on the Hapsburgs had so much wealth and power that until 1711 not a single non-Hapsburg was elected to it.

Emperor Franz Joseph
“All are dying, only
can’t
die.”

Apparently thanks to his mother, Frederick III was the first member of the line to display the famous “Hapsburg lip,” a sometimes grotesque protuberance of the lower lip and jaw that became a mark of the family as its members had increasing difficulty finding spouses worthy of their exalted status and so, increasingly, married one another. He was also distinguished by his success in raising the Hapsburg practice of making advantageous marriages to a level never equaled. The Hapsburgs were not warriors or adventurers; rather, they were congenitally risk-averse. They expanded their holdings less by the sword than by matrimony. In the days when every educated European knew Latin, a saying about the Hapsburgs became famous: Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube. “Let others wage wars; you, happy Austria, marry.”

First Frederick III married his son Maximilian to the heiress to the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and the Artois and Burgundy regions that are now parts of France. Then, a generation later, he married Maximilian’s son Philip to the eldest daughter and heir of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. By this marriage the family acquired not only Spain, not only the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily and Sardinia, but all of Spain’s vast possessions in the New World. That Philip’s Spanish bride happened to be insane scarcely seemed to matter.

All this was inherited by Philip’s son, Emperor Charles V, who thereby ruled more of the world than any man ever had and along the way added the kingdoms of Portugal and Milan to his domain. Charles ultimately found his possessions to be more than one man could manage, so he divided them. His son Philip II was based near Madrid as King of Spain (and was married for a time to Mary Tudor, the queen of England called Bloody Mary, failing however to produce a child with her and thereby to secure that promising little realm for the Hapsburgs). Charles’s brother Ferdinand became Holy Roman emperor and took charge of the eastern, German branch of the family business.

It was downhill from there. The Spanish line of the Hapsburgs died out after a few generations, evidently the victim of inbreeding (a practice that also weakened the German line, though not to the point of extinction) and of the insanity brought into the family through the marriage that had given it Spain in the first place. The last Hapsburg king of Spain, Charles II, married three times but failed to reproduce. The Austrian line was more vigorous but beset with problems. France under Louis XIV seized all of the Hapsburgs’ possessions west of the Rhine, including the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. The Ottoman Turks invaded Europe, conquered most of the Balkans, and twice reached the gates of Vienna before being turned back. The Reformation cast Catholic Austria into the role of enemy in newly Protestant northern Germany. This was particularly convenient for Prussia, the leading Protestant state on the continent, which grabbed important pieces of the Hapsburg inheritance. Finally there came the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. He occupied Vienna twice, stripped away many of the Hapsburgs’ southern possessions, and, determined to produce an heir, took a juicy little Hapsburg princess (the grandniece of Marie Antoinette, also a member of the family) as his bride.

Napoleon ended the fiction of the Holy Roman Empire, and from that point forward the Hapsburg monarchs bore the humbler title of hereditary emperors of Austria. The Congress of Vienna that followed the fall of Napoleon, as part of its program of restoring the old order across Europe, returned to the Hapsburgs some of their most important southern holdings, including northern Italy. After that things remained relatively tranquil for more than thirty years.

Then came the Revolution of 1848, an upheaval in which, from France to Russia, people demanding reform rose up against their rulers. Most of the major cities of the Hapsburg empire revolted, and for a time the survival of the dynasty was in question. The childless emperor at the time abdicated, and a younger brother was passed over in favor of his son Franz Joseph. The royalists hoped that this attractive boy, tall, vigorous, and only eighteen years old, could win the loyalty of his subjects. Their hopes were fulfilled. Franz Joseph, born during the presidency of Andrew Jackson and crowned twelve years before the election of Abraham Lincoln, was still on the throne when Woodrow Wilson moved into the White House.

Both personally and politically, however, Franz Joseph’s reign was almost as sorrowful as it was long. Everything went wrong for him in the end. As a young man, he married the most beautiful princess in Europe, Elizabeth of Bavaria, but after six happy years and four children he passed on to her the gonorrhea that he had contracted on one of his disastrous Italian campaigns. Formalities aside, that was the end of the marriage.

In 1859 Austria was driven out of Lombardy in northern Italy by the rising forces of Italian nationalism. Shortly thereafter it lost Tuscany and Modena as well.

In 1866 Prussia defeated Austria and forced it to abandon its ancient claim to leadership over Germany. At this point, fearful of further losses, Franz Joseph entered into a compact under which Hungary became not merely one of the empire’s possessions but an equal partner in a new and peculiar kind of dual monarchy. The ruler would be not only emperor of Austria but also “apostolic king” of Hungary. Austria and Hungary each would have its own prime minister and parliament, though the war, finance, and foreign affairs ministries would be centralized in Vienna. This arrangement was successful insofar as it gave the Magyars, who dominated Hungary, a more powerful and secure position in European politics than they could possibly have had otherwise. It gave them a reason to want the empire to survive. But it also created problems. It greatly complicated the process of making policy: all the most important decisions had to be approved not only in Vienna but in the Hungarian capital of Budapest as well. It also gave Hungary reason to oppose anything that might weaken its position within the empire. Thus Hungary would resist the transformation of the dual monarchy into a three-cornered arrangement that included the Slavs. It would do so despite the fact that by 1914 fully three-fifths of the empire’s subjects were Slavic: Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Serbs, and others.

In 1867 Franz Joseph’s younger brother Maximilian, who three years earlier had quixotically accepted an invitation to go to Mexico and become its emperor, was shot to death there by a firing squad.

In 1870, with Austria on the sidelines looking on, Prussia led a confederation of German states in a swift and stunning victory over France. The Franco-Prussian War led to the creation of a new German Empire in which the King of Prussia was elevated to kaiser and from which Austria was excluded. From this point Vienna could not hope to be more than the distinctly junior partner of a Berlin that had risen to first place among the continental powers.

In 1889 Archduke Rudolf, Franz Joseph’s only son, intelligent and talented but also frustrated, rebellious, neurotic, a drug addict, and syphilitic (he not only followed his father in infecting his wife with venereal disease but sterilized the lady in the process), committed suicide with his teenage mistress, leaving no male heir.

Nine years later Empress Elizabeth was stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist who had hoped to kill King Umberto I of Italy but, unable to raise the train fare to Rome, settled for her.

Two years after that came the refusal of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the soldierly nephew who had become heir after Rudolf’s death, not to marry Countess Sophie Chotek, mere lady-in-waiting to a Hapsburg cousin.

In his seemingly endless old age Franz Joseph was a kindly but inflexible man, devoted to preserving the traditions of his ancestors, ardently hoping to live out his remaining days in peace. He remained doggedly faithful to his responsibilities if only because they were his heritage and he had no one to share them with. Once, reminiscing with Field Marshal Conrad about a general both of them had known, he said plaintively that “all are dying, only I can’t die.” When Conrad offered a courtly response, expressing gratitude for the emperor’s long life, Franz Joseph replied, “Yes, yes, but one is soalone then.”