Cornwall M. The Undermining of Austria-Hungary: The Battle for Hearts and Minds

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14 The Undermining of Austria-Hungary

27. Conrad von

tzendorf,

Private Aufzeichnungen. Erste Vero

ffentlichungen aus den

Papieren des k.u.k. Generalstabs-Chefs, ed. Kurt Peball (Vienna and Munich, 1977)

p. 111.

28. Arthur Arz

von Straussenburg, Zur Geschichte des Grossen Krieges 1914±1918 (Vienna,

1924) p. 132. See also, for instance, Count Buria

n, the wartime foreign minister,

whose memoirs mentioned the `systematic efforts of foreign propaganda': Stephen

Buria

n von Rajecz, Austria in Dissolution (London, 1925) pp. 149, 318, 410.

And Joseph Redlich's works: O

sterreichisch

e Regierung und Verwaltung im Weltkriege

(Vienna, 1925), p. 143; Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria: a Biography (New York, 1929)

p. 530.

29. Edmund von

Glaise-Horstenau, The Collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (London

and Toronto, 1930) pp. 117ff; Edmund Glaise-Horstenau and Rudolf Kiszling (eds),

sterreich-Un

garns Letzter Krieg 1914±1918, 7 vols (Vienna, 1930±8) [hereafter OULK],

vol. 7: Das Kriegsjahr 1918, pp. 18±19.

30. An addition

was Hamilton Fyfe, Northcliffe (London, 1930).

31. Jeno

Pilch,

Ahõ

rszerze

ske

mkede

sto

rte

nete, 3 vols (Budapest, 1937) III, pp. 139±236:

this long chapter is a very able synthesis but the emphasis is almost wholly on the

propaganda of the western Allies.

32. Max Ronge,

Kriegs- und Industriespionage. Zwo

lf Jahre Kundschaftsdienst (Zurich

Leipzig and Vienna, 1930) pp. 268ff, 298ff, 323ff and 340±2 for the organization

of enemy propaganda.

33. Antoni Szuber,

Walka o PrzewageÎ DuchowaÎ . Kampanja Propagandowa Koaliciji 1914±

1918 (Warsaw, 1933) p. ix.

34. Ljudevit Pivko,

Carzano, 4 vols (Maribor, 1924); Pivko, Rame ob Ramenu, 4 vols

ch Hanzal, Vy

zve

ÏÂ

õci v Italii a na Slov(Maribor, 1925±8);

Vojte enskem (Prague,

1928); Hanzal, SVy

zve

ÏÂ

õky od S

carsky

ch Ledovcu

po Mor

e Adriaticke

(Prague,

1938); Frantis

ek Hlava

ek, `C

innost

dra Ed. Benes

ezaVa

lky v Italii a moje Spolu-

pra

s nõ

m', Nas

e Revoluce XII (Prague, 1936).

35. See, for

instance, Frantis

ek Bednar

ik, V Boj! Obra

zkora Kronika C

eskosloven

ske

Revoluc

nõ

ho Hnutõ

v Italii 1915±1918 (Prague, 1927); Adolf Zeman (ed.), Cestami

Odboje (Jak z

ily a kudy ta

hly C

Legie), 5 vols (Prague, 1927); Ernst Turk, Josip Jeras

and Rajko Paulin (eds), Dobrovoljci Kladivarji Jugoslavije 1912±1918 (Ljubljana, 1936).

The shaping of a national myth was especially strong in Czechoslovakia where a

large number of wartime activists (politicians, journalists, and others) published

their memoirs alongside the accounts of Czechoslovak legionaries who had fought

on the Eastern and Italian Fronts.

36. A point

made by Szuber who noted that the Italians had allowed Northcliffe to take

the credit: Walka o PrzewageÎ DuchowaÎ , p. 104.

37. C.P.L. Finzi,

Il Sogno di Carzano (Bologna, 1926): this work was suppressed; Cesare

Pettorelli Lalatta [Finzi], `I.T.O.' Note di un Capo del Servizio Informazioni d'Armata,

1915±1918 (Milan, 1931; 2nd edn: Milan, 1934).

38. Luigi Villari,

The War on the Italian Front (London, 1932) p. 3.

39. OULK, VII,

pp. 219±21; Ronge, Kriegs- und Industriespionage, p. 323.

40. Friedrich Felger

was a rare voice on the German side in trying to assess the front

propaganda of all the belligerents: `Frontpropaganda bei Feind und Freund', in Was

wir von Weltkrieg nicht wissen, ed. Felger (Berlin, 1929) pp. 498±516. Although he still

ascribed particular skill to the British (that Northcliffe was head of propaganda on all

Entente fronts) and belittled Italy's role, he gave some attention to Germany's work,

suggesting that much of it was `excellent' (p. 512).

A Theory of Front Propaganda 15

41. Hermann Wandersc

heck, Weltkrieg und Propaganda, 2nd edn (Berlin, 1939), (here

p. 237). See

also Ludolf Gottschalk von dem Knesebeck, Die Wahrheit u

ber

den

Propagandafeldzug und Deutschlands Zusammenbruch (Munich, 1927).

42. See Gerhard

Krause, Die britische Auslandspropaganda. Organisation, Methoden, Inhalt

1914±1940 (Berlin, 1940) pp. 4, 7; and Gerhard Baumann, Grundlagen und Praxis der

internationalen Propaganda (Essen, 1941) pp. 151ff. France's propaganda machinery

also came in for scrutiny: Matthias Schwabe, Die franzo

sische Auslandspropaganda.

Ihre Grundlagen und Voraussetzungen (Berlin, 1939).

43. For example

, John Hargrave, Words win Wars: Propaganda the Mightiest Weapon of All

(London, 1940).

44. Hans Thimm

e, Weltkrieg ohne Waffen (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1932); George G. Bruntz,

Allied Propaganda and the Collapse of the German Empire in 1918 (Stanford, 1938;

reissued: New York, 1972). Admittedly some earlier memoirs had already described

France's front propaganda: see Hansi [ Jean Jacques Waltz] and Henri Tonnelat,

Travers

les Lignes Ennemies (Paris, 1922).

45. For example

, Z.A.B. Zeman, The Break-Up of the Habsburg Empire 1914±1918 (Oxford,

1961) pp. 183ff; A.J. May, The Passing of the Hapsburg Monarchy 1914±1918, 2 vols

(Philadelphia, 1966) II, pp. 604±11.

46. Leo Valiani,

The End of Austria-Hungary (London, 1973) pp. 227±46; Luciano Tosi,

La Propaganda Italiana all'Estero nella Prima Guerra Mondiale. Rivendicazioni Territoriali

e Politica delle Nazionalita

(Udine, 1977).

47. Manfried Rauchenste

iner, Der Tod des Doppeladlers. O

sterreich-Un

garn und der

Erste Weltkrieg (Graz, 1993) pp. 440ff; Jo

zsef Gala

ntai, Hungary in the First World War

(Budapest, 1989) pp. 228±231, 272±3. Cf. the absence of any mention in Holger

Herwig, The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary 1914±1918 (London, 1997).

48. The conclusio

n of Colonel Granville Baker: School of Slavonic and East European

Studies, R.W. Seton-Watson MSS [hereafter SWP], Draft `Report on the work of the

Department of Propaganda in Enemy Countries', p. 39. This report was compiled by

C.S. Kent, Crewe

House's financial officer, and was submitted to the British Cabinet

in February 1919 as CAB 24/75, GT 6839. Stuart's Secrets of Crewe House was largely a

shortened version of Kent's report (cf. Philip Taylor, British Propaganda, p. 59).

Austria-Hungary and the Control

of Wartime Morale

In the days after 28 July 1914, when the Habsburg Empire declared war on

Serbia, three million men were called to the colours. They represented 11

different nationalities, with their homes in regions of Austria-Hungary which

had witnessed bitter national tensions in the prewar period. Yet, there seemed a

good deal of truth in the Hungarian Prime Minister's observation on 4 August

that `the atmosphere prevailing in the whole Monarchy is very good'.

Whether

in Vienna or Budapest, in Prague or Ljubljana, in Innsbruck or Krako

w, the

publicized image in the principal cities seemed to be the same, of a spontaneous

enthusiasm for war against Russia and Serbia, and of troops marching off to the

railway stations bedecked in garlands and surrounded by cheering crowds. In

`loyalist' memoirs written after the war this image was naturally sustained. In

Vienna, one kaisertreu officer recalled how the mayor, Richard Weiskirchner,

had suddenly interrupted a music concert in order to make the announcement

of general mobilization; it was greeted with brief silence followed by stormy

applause and a burst of the national anthem. In Budapest, another observer

recalled how a crowd of 20 000 swept through the streets, waving black and

yellow (Habsburg) flags, all inspired by `love of country, the intoxication of the

hour, the flame of national instinct'.

Nor was the mood confined to the `ruling' capitals of Vienna and Budapest.

In Prague, notwithstanding a postwar `consensus' that Czechs had been over-

whelmingly opposed

to the war from the start, a certain euphoria was also

evident and by no means confined to the city's German population. Franz

Kafka for one noted in his diary on 6 August how troops were greeted as they

marched along Na Pr

ÏÂ

õkope

: `Flowers, shouts of hurrah! and nazdar!' Only in his

next entry did Kafka observe another side to the spectacle as he looked at the

soldiers: `The rigidly silent, astonished, attentive black faces with black eyes.'

In each corner of the Empire, the ceremonial of the march to war was being

played out by individuals with mixed emotions of excitement and sorrow. The

latter was well captured by the artist Oskar Kokoschka in a letter to his mistress:

BOHEMIA

GERMANY

VENETIA

CARINTHIA

ITALY

GALICIA

BUKOVINA

MOLDAVIA

Vienna

Budapest

STYRIA

CARNIOLA

Pula

ISTRIA

LIKA

BOSNIA-

DALMATIA

Mostar

Bucharest

SERBIA

ALBANIA

MONTENEGRO

Cattaro

ADRIATIC SEA

State borders

The fronts in

December 1917

Prague

Plzen

Innsbruck

TYROL

Trento

Padua

MORAVIA

Lublin

Kraków L’viv

Tarnopol

Kolozsvár

TRANSYLVANIA

Bratislava

Graz

Maribor

Ljubljana

Zagreb

CROATIA

Sarajevo

HERCEGOVINA

Nagyszeben

Belgrade

WALLACHIA

ROMANIA

BULGARIA

Skoplje

VOJVODINA

Internal borders

Hungary

Key

Map 2.1 Austria-Hungary in the First World War

18 The Undermining of Austria-Hungary

`Today, in my street [in Vienna], there was a woman who fell on her husband's

neck like one demented, because he was having to leave, carrying his few

worldly goods in a piece of sacking. Yet the recruits are docile and grateful for

a friendly look.'

If the Empire appeared superficially to be united behind a common objective

in the summer of 1914, it is an image which needs to be set against the reality of

the political and military regimes which were introduced as the war began.

These regimes, which had their own distinctive colour in the two halves of the

Monarchy (Austria and Hungary), were similar in the way that they immedi-

ately adopted

a discriminatory policy towards certain nationalities. Such dis-

crimination not

only belied the facËade of patriotic euphoria, but more

importantly, it had a fatal long-term impact: whole sections of the population

were treated as `unreliable' and alienated from the Empire's cause at a very early

stage. It would be next to impossible for the authorities to `re-mobilize' these

civilians later in the war in a way that was achieved in Britain, France and Italy.

According to

legislation which had been prepared in 1912, the political

regimes in both Austria and Hungary assumed emergency powers at the start

of the war. However, while in Hungary the legislation for the eventuality of war

had already been passed by the Budapest Parliament in late 1912, in Austria a

wartime regime was imposed in a thoroughly unconstitutional fashion.

Since

March 1914 the Austrian Parliament or Reichsrat had been adjourned and the

Prime Minister, Count Karl Stu

rgkh,

had been ruling by decree (the infamous

paragraph 14 of the constitution). On the day of general mobilization, Stu

rgkh

proceeded to pass the whole range of emergency powers by decree, and refused

until his death in late 1916 to recall the Reichsrat which constitutionally was

supposed to approve any such legislation within a few months. The result was

a bureaucratic-military regime in Austria which, until the Reichsrat was recon-

vened in

May 1917, was unaccountable to any forum and could exercise

dictatorial powers. Some historians have condoned Stu

rgkh's

decision,

the grounds that he rightly feared that many Reichsrat deputies would not be

loyal in a war against Russia. It is also true that many German-Austrian MPs,

with an eye to what they themselves might achieve with the goodwill of the

Stu

rgkh

regime, were undisturbed by the Reichsrat closure. Nevertheless, the

absence of a political forum for non-Germans (since all provincial assemblies

were also closed) had fatal consequences when it came to the long-term mobil-

ization of

the Austrian population. Perhaps under no other wartime belligerent

regime was the abyss between the government and the governed so striking.

Most fatally,

the same laws which in Austria gave the political authorities the

power arbitrarily to intern dissidents, suspend freedom of speech and associ-

ation, abolish

trial by jury and impose a severe press censorship, also placed

substantial power in the hands of the military authorities. The regions of the

Empire which in August 1914 became the direct hinterland of the military

Austria-Hungary and the Control of Wartime Morale 19

fronts were designated as `war zones' where the military authorities had over-

riding control

(although the political regime was not wholly extinguished). At

first this meant Bosnia-Hercegovina in the south and Galicia, Bukovina and

parts of Moravia in the north-east. But from May 1915, when Italy opened

hostilities against the Monarchy, the war zone was extended to cover most

crownlands in the south-west of the Empire as well. While this gave branches of

the military sweeping powers by mid-1915 over most of Austria, civilians out-

side the

war zone, in Bohemia or `Austria proper', were also subject to military

law for certain types of offence. And military power went further. In late July

1914, with Stu

rgkh's

agreement, the Armeeoberkommando [AOK ± Army High

Command] was able to create through the package of emergency laws a new

body which was to act as a military watch-dog for subversive tendencies, or

anything which could be stamped on under the emergency laws as detrimental

to the war effort. This Kriegsu

A ± War Surveillance Office]

berwachungsamt

[KU

was attached to the War Ministry in Vienna with employees seconded from the

various Austrian ministries. It allowed the AOK to interfere directly in what

were otherwise non-military spheres of influence in the Austrian hinterland,

ordering local military officials to arrest suspect individuals, or the regional

censors to suppress `unpatriotic' news in the press. Because of the secrecy which

surrounded its activity, the KU

A's

influence has probably been exaggerated, but

its very existence was symptomatic of the type of regime which ran Austria for

the first three years of the war. It provided the Chief of Staff, Conrad von

tzendorf,

with an extra lever in his struggle to expand the AOK's control in

Austria at the expense of Stu

rgkh was

rgkh's

bureaucratic regime. Even if Stu

largely able to counter the AOK's manoeuvres (in Bohemia, for example), the

fact remains, as Joseph Redlich observed, that the military dimension to

Austria's regime was a logical consequence of Stu

rgkh's

own unconstitutional

behaviour.

Both would be responsible together for the powerful backlash

which would come from the `oppressed peoples' in the new constitutional

circumstances of 1917.

Stu

rgkh's

precept from the beginning was that local authorities should focus

everything upon the requirements of the war. When combined with the

behaviour of the military leadership in the war zones, this rapidly produced

a mood of vigilance bordering on discrimination against certain nationalities of

the Empire. Admittedly, in the war zones of Bosnia and Galicia, the military had

a difficult path to tread. It was a proven fact that many Serbs in Bosnia and

many Ruthenes in eastern Galicia sympathized or were active collaborators with

the enemy. Thus, it was not simply on the basis of prewar prejudice, but also due

to actual evidence of treason that the military engaged in summary executions

of `unreliable' Serbs and Ruthenes in the first weeks of the war. The real danger

lay in the wider implications of this. The military leadership tended towards

a blanket assumption that the Monarchy's Serb and Ruthene populations

20 The Undermining of Austria-Hungary

were unreliable as a whole. By September 1914 they had transported out of

Bosnia over 1000 political suspects (many of whom were hostages to ensure

good Serb behaviour); much of the Bosnian Serb leadership, including 100

clergy and seven delegates of the Bosnian Diet, were among those interned in

Bosnia itself.

When General Stjepan Sarkotic

became governor of Bosnia at the

end of the year he found that all was quiet but he was not deceived; sensing that

he was `sitting on a volcano', he resolved to `prevent any outbreak of lava' by

ruling dictatorially, banning any political activity (the Bosnian Diet would not

be reconvened), and launching a series of trials of treacherous Serbs.

Similarly in Galicia, the army was so paranoid about civilian links to the

enemy that it sent thousands of Ruthenes westward into the hinterland. From

Vienna, one influential Austrian politician, Josef Baernreither, noted in his

diary that all of the Ruthene peasant population seemed to be treacherous: he

had heard of 3000 men imprisoned in L'viv [Lemberg] ready for transporta-

tion.

It may well have been the case that, as in Bosnia, the scale of executions

in Galicia at this time was exaggerated, feeding the rumour-mill of atrocity

stories. But it was also a fact that the military regime set a standard of behaviour

which could only alienate Ruthenes and Poles from believing that the war was

being fought on their behalf. It dealt a blow at the start of the war to any

possible unity in the hinterland, while providing a crisis of conscience for many

Serbs, Ruthenes or Poles in the armed forces.

As new

foreign enemies appeared on the horizon, most notably Italy in 1915,

the military behaved in a consistently defensive fashion. Early in the war, the

Monarchy's Italians seem to have been given a clean bill of health by the

authorities; according to one assessment at least, they were `by no means

suffering from Austrophobia but in most cases strongly dynastic and absolutely

loyal'.

But from May 1915, as a new front opened in the south-west, the cloud

of suspicion fell over Italian soldiers and civilians. While the former would

eventually only be employed on the Eastern or Balkan Fronts, 7500 of the latter

were transported out of Tyrol to be interned in the interior. With the AOK

demanding that irredentism be rooted out, the military in Tyrol itself began to

behave indiscriminately, imposing widespread use of the German language

which was only likely to antagonize the Italian population and push them

further into the irredentist camp.

It could be argued that the military's behaviour was logical in regions border-

ing the

battlefields where security was vital. Yet because of the way that ethnic

groups were distributed in the Monarchy, the AOK directly antagonized certain

nationalities while privileging others. Moreover, it was a policy mirrored in the

Austrian hinterland itself, where it revealed on the one hand the degree of

actual national disunity by 1914, and on the other, the way that the authorities

poisoned a patriotic atmosphere which could perhaps have been nurtured.

Such was the case among the Slovenes. Although in July 1914 Slovene leaders

Austria-Hungary and the Control of Wartime Morale 21

such as Ivan Tavc

ar and Ivan S

ters

had made public statements of loyalty,

and the AOK always tended to view the Slovenes as reliable military material,

the civil and military authorities in the south engaged in the mass arrest of

community leaders. In Carinthia and Styria, where Slovenes and Germans

particularly rubbed shoulders, there were 910 arrests in the first four months

of the war.

Justifiably one might emphasize the scale of this, for it was on a

par with Dalmatia or Bohemia, two regions where there was far more evidence

of openly `unpatriotic' behaviour. In Dalmatia, the real heartland of Yugoslav

agitation before 1914, hundreds were arrested on the outbreak of hostilities, put

on a prison-ship at Split, and taken northwards to Maribor to be interned. They

included the distinguished Croat politicians, Josip Smodlaka and Ante Tresic

Pavic

, friends of the British historian R.W. Seton-Watson who had done so

much in the previous years to alert Europe to the Monarchy's Southern Slav

problem (other Yugoslav leaders such as Ante Trumbic

and Frano Supilo had

escaped to Italy).

Meanwhile in the Czech lands, the KU

observed after only a few months of

war that the mood of the population, initially quite promising, had turned

sour. By September, hundreds of wounded soldiers were returning from the East

into the Czech communities and painting a quite different picture from that

which had been described in the official newspapers. One town councillor

concluded in his diary that the war would last a very long time: `Already the

people are grumbling out loud now, although any criticism is strictly forbid-

den.'

By the end of 1914 in Bohemia, 950 people had been arrested for

political offences and 32 societies dissolved. As the Russian army advanced

into Galicia in the autumn, the evidence had increasingly suggested that

many Czechs sympathized with the enemy and had little enthusiasm for the

Habsburg cause. Most notably, as we will see later, Czech soldiers in these

months quickly acquired a reputation for unreliability to match that of their

Serb colleagues. For this reason above all, the military authorities increasingly

labelled the Czech nation as suspect. As Emperor Franz Joseph told Stu

rgkh

on 22 November 1914, the behaviour of Czech soldiers could be traced back

directly to `unhealthy political conditions' at home. This supposed link pro-

vided the

AOK with ample substance to demand repeatedly that the Czech

lands as a whole should be militarized. On most levels between 1914 and late

1916, Stu

rgkh

was successful in arguing that the existing emergency laws were

adequate to counter any unrest. But if this was something of a minor victory for

Austria's political regime in the face of the KU

it seems unlikely that ordinary

Czechs made much distinction between the bureaucratic and military protagon-

ists who

seemed to be in control of their everyday lives. After all, in May 1915

the military gave a clear example of their ability to intervene arbitrarily. They

arrested Karel Krama

ÂÏ

r, the leading Czech politician, put him on trial and

sentenced him to death; Krama

ÂÏ

r thereby gained the status of a martyr, both

22 The Undermining of Austria-Hungary

at home and abroad, one who seemed to personify a Czech idealistic cause

which was increasingly at variance with that of the Habsburg elite.

Before turning to assess how the Habsburg authorities tried more positively to

harness wartime morale, we need to be aware of the regime which prevailed

from 1914 in the Hungarian half of the Empire. In Hungary, in contrast to

Austria, Parliament continued in session throughout the war, with all the

political parties agreeing to maintain a truce (Treuga Dei) as long as the interests

of the homeland were in danger. Count Istva

n Tisza, the Prime Minister, noted

accordingly in one debate in November 1914 that the war had `given rise to

splendid manifestations of unity and mutual love both at home and on the

battlefield'.

Yet such rhetoric belied deep fissures in Hungarian society which

slowly expanded as hostilities continued. Despite the appearance of a represen-

tative forum

in Budapest, the Parliament was wholly unrepresentative of broad

masses of the population. Due to the restrictive franchise it contained no Social

Democratic or Radical deputies, while non-Magyar minority nationalities such

as the Slovaks and Romanians possessed only 2 per cent of the seats, although

they amounted to 40 per cent of the registered electorate.

In August 1914

many of these elements might appear to be loyal, with even the Social Demo-

crats agreeing

to toe the line in a defensive war against autocratic Russia. By

early 1915 a social crisis was already evident. Hungary, like the rest of the

Monarchy, did not adjust well to the wartime economy, an immediate result

being that the government was forced early on to introduce flour rationing; by

June 1915 there were the first major food riots, and Tisza was privately warning

that the war could only safely be continued for another eight months. How-

ever, Tisza

publicly kept silent about any idea of peace and refused to expand

his government into a national coalition. The result was that by mid-1916 the

facËade of any Treuga Dei had been shattered: Miha

ly Ka

rolyi proceeded to leave

the Party of Independence and set up his own party, dedicated to peace and a

preservation of Hungary's `true interests'. Although Tisza and the bulk of the

Magyar elite would continue to keep hold of Hungary's political strings for the

rest of the war, the stage was set for an increasingly conspicuous diversification

of Hungarian public opinion in the years 1916±18.

From July

1914, the principal way in which the Magyar regime had main-

tained a

semblance of unity in Hungary was through its own version of emer-

gency legislation.

Unity was coerced as much as it was spontaneous. As in

Austria, the emergency laws of 1912 invested the civil authorities with special

powers of censorship, prohibition and arrest, with the addition of internment

by November 1914.

The major contrast to Austria was that Tisza's regime,

ever protective of Hungary's national sovereignty, excluded the military from

exercising such powers on Hungarian soil. The KU

had no authority in Hun-

gary, nor

could the AOK secure those inroads into civilian jurisdiction which

were possible in the regions of Austria or Bosnia which became their `war

Austria-Hungary and the Control of Wartime Morale 23

zones'. The one exception at first was the autonomous region of Croatia. In

view of the Serbian army's success against Habsburg forces in August 1914, the

eastern part of Croatia had temporarily become a war zone under military

jurisdiction. When the Serbians were forced to retreat in September, the milit-

ary wreaked

vengeance upon those local Serb `collaborators', executing more

than 120 and deporting hundreds for resettlement in the Croatian hinterland.

If the Croatian civil authorities led by the Governor, Ivan Skerlecz, were furious

at the military's arbitrary behaviour, it reflected a deeper tussle in Croatia where

the military from the start of the war had been anxious to assert their authority.

As in Bosnia and Dalmatia, they had singled out key individuals for detention ±

in this case, Serb politicians such as the Pribic

evic

brothers and Srdjan Budi-

savljevic

± and for the first six months of the war endeavoured to undermine

civilian rule even further. Only in June 1915 was it clear that Skerlecz and the

politicians had won. The repressive atmosphere was then lightened because the

Croatian Diet (Sabor), which had been closed on the eve of war, was allowed to

reopen. The existence of this forum would ensure that a certain social stability

was introduced in Croatia of a kind which was increasingly lacking elsewhere in

the Monarchy (in Austria, for example); the deputies who came together now

provided some Croatian legitimization for a continuation of the war. What was

also clear, however, from the Sabor's common statement of June 1915, was

that the Croatian leaders' support for a Habsburg war was not unconditional.

Loyalty to the Habsburg cause was now matched by an open demand for Croat

unity within the Empire, an indication that the Croats, like other nationalities,

had a dual allegiance to dynasty and nationality which the Habsburg authorit-

ies could

not afford to ignore if they were to achieve a long-term mobilization

of the population.

Many Croatian politicians would maintain an opportunistic stance until the

last weeks of the war. They sensed correctly that unless a more favourable

option emerged, they were wholly dependent on the Magyar authorities for

the continued functioning of the Sabor or any chance of securing Croatia's

rights in the future. In contrast, for other nationalities in `Hungary proper' the

choices were more restricted. Under its emergency powers, the Hungarian

government had acted speedily, imposing martial law in Serb and Romanian

regions, and then extending it to Ruthene communities in the north-east (who

by the winter would share the invidious fate of the Serbs of eastern Croatia by

falling into a `war zone' and under temporary military jurisdiction). If in the

eyes of the regime, the reputation of Hungary's Serbs and Ruthenes could not

be salvaged, its attitude towards the Slovak and Romanian populations was for a

time ambiguous. It reflected a dilemma which the authorities faced in many

corners of the Empire, whether in the interests of the state it was best to harness

or to repress local sentiment. The normal reflex in wartime Hungary might well

be to repress anything which did not fit the Magyar chauvinist mood of 1914.