The Sleepwalkers (18 page)

The annexation crisis also further poisoned relations between Vienna and Belgrade. As so often, the situation was exacerbated by political conditions inside the dual monarchy. For several years, the Austro-Hungarian authorities had been observing the activities of the Serbo-Croat coalition, a political faction that emerged within the Croatian Diet at Agram (today, Zagreb), capital of Hungarian-ruled Croatia-Slavonia, in 1905. After the diet elections of 1906, the coalition secured control of the Agram administration, embraced a ‘Yugoslav' agenda seeking a closer union of the South Slav peoples within the empire, and fought long battles with the Hungarian authorities over such ticklish issues as the requirement that all state railway officials should be able to speak Magyar. There was nothing especially unusual about this constellation; what worried the Austrians was the suspicion that some or all of the deputies of the coalition might be operating as a fifth column for Belgrade.
⁷⁰

During the crisis of 1908–9, these apprehensions escalated to the point of paranoia. In March 1909, just as Russia was backing down from a confrontation over Bosnia, the Habsburg administration launched an astonishingly inept judicial assault on the Serbo-Croat coalition, charging fifty-three mainly Serb activists with treason for plotting to detach the South Slav lands from Austria-Hungary and join them to Serbia. At around the same time, the Vienna-based historian and writer Dr Heinrich Friedjung published an article in the
Neue Freie Presse
accusing three prominent coalition politicians of receiving subsidies from Belgrade in return for treasonous activity on behalf of the Kingdom of Serbia. Friedjung claimed to have been shown confidential government documents demonstrating beyond doubt the truth of these charges.

The treason trial at Agram dragged on from 3 March until 5 November 1909 and quickly collapsed into an unmitigated public relations disaster for the government. The court heard 276 witnesses for the prosecution, but none who had been nominated by the defence. All thirty-one convictions handed down in Agram were subsequently quashed on appeal in Vienna. At the same time, a chain of libel trials against Friedjung and the editor of the
Reichspost
, which had reprinted his claims, revealed further embarrassing manipulations. The ‘secret documents' on which the good doctor had based his charges turned out to be forgeries passed to the Austrian legation in Belgrade by a shady Serbian double agent, and supplied in turn to Friedjung by the foreign ministry in Vienna. The unfortunate Friedjung, whose excellent reputation as an historian had been shamefully misused, apologized and withdrew his accusations. But the tireless Czech national activist and advocate for the accused, Tomáš Masaryk, continued to pursue the matter at the highest level, searching far and wide (including in Belgrade) for new evidence and claiming in various public forums that the Austrian ambassador in Belgrade had knowingly procured the forgeries on Count Aehrenthal's behalf.
⁷¹

It is highly unlikely that the authorities in Vienna knew from the outset that the documents were inauthentic. Paranoia probably engendered credulity; the Austrians were primed to believe what they feared to find. But the Agram and Friedjung trials imposed a lasting burden on relations between Vienna and Belgrade. Particularly awkward was the fact that the scandal soon began to focus on the Austrian representative in Serbia, Johann Count Forgách von Ghymes and Gács, with far-reaching consequences for the diplomatic relationship between the two countries. Throughout 1910 and 1911, the Masaryk campaign continued to produce new and embarrassing ‘revelations' of Austrian perfidy (not all of which were true). The Serbian press rejoiced and there were loud demands for Forgách's recall from Belgrade.
⁷²
But Forgách, who had long since ceased to take any pleasure whatsoever in his posting, vigorously (and probably truthfully) denied all charges and Aehrenthal, who was himself under attack, felt unable to remove the embattled envoy for as long as this might imply an acknowledgement from Vienna that the Austrian authorities had deliberately deceived the public. ‘The situation is not pleasant for me,' Forgách wrote in a private letter to the Foreign Office section chief in Vienna in November 1910, ‘but I will survive the Belgrade newspaper storms – as I have survived so much else – provided the government here behaves in a halfway decent fashion.'
⁷³

What especially infuriated Forgách was the continuing involvement of senior Serbian officials – foremost among them the Foreign Office section chief Miroslav Spalajković – in the campaign to discredit him. Spalajković provided Masaryk with evidence against the Austrian government; he was even called as an expert witness on behalf of the Serbo-Croat coalition during the Friedjung trials. Having helped to explode the credibility of the forged documents, Spalajković went a step further and asserted that Forgách had
deliberately
secured them, in the hope of trumping up charges against the Serbo-Croat coalition. In the winter of 1910–11, the Dutch envoy in Belgrade, Vredenburch, reported that Spalajković continued to disseminate rumours against the Austrian representative across the diplomatic community.
⁷⁴
To make matters worse, Spalajković and his wife were constantly to be seen in the company of Hartwig, the new Russian minister; indeed it was said that the couple virtually lived at the Russian mission.
⁷⁵
Forgách became unhealthily obsessed with the man he called ‘our deadly enemy'; an exchange of curt letters between the envoy and the official further poisoned relations between them, and by April 1911 Forgách had ordered all personnel at the Austrian legation in Belgrade to avoid contact of any kind with Spalajković. ‘This constantly overwrought man,' he informed Aehrenthal, ‘is in some respects not entirely sane. Since the annexation, his hatred for the [Austro-Hungarian] Monarchy has developed almost into a mental illness.'
⁷⁶

Forgách's position in Belgrade had clearly become untenable, and he was recalled in the summer of 1911. But the scandal of the Agram– Friedjung trials and their aftermath in the Serbian capital are worth recalling, because they involved individuals who would figure prominently in the events of 1914. Miroslav Spalajković was a very senior foreign policy official with a long-standing interest in Bosnia-Herzegovina – his wife was a Bosnian and he had composed a doctoral thesis at the University of Paris in 1897 arguing that, as the two provinces remained autonomous legal entities under Ottoman suzerainty, their annexation by Austria-Hungary could never be legitimate.
⁷⁷
He subsequently served as the Serbian minister in Sofia, where he played an important role – in collusion with the Russians – in forging the Serbian-Bulgarian alliance at the centre of the Balkan League that launched the First Balkan War in 1912. During his posting at Sofia he remained Nikolai Hartwig's most intimate friend, visiting him in Belgrade ‘up to twenty times a month'.
⁷⁸
He was subsequently transferred to the even more important legation in St Petersburg. Here his task would be to interpret the intentions of the Tsar and his ministers to the Serbian government in Belgrade as the crisis of July 1914 unfolded. Forgách, too, who left his posting as a staunch Serbophobe, remained on the scene as one of the leading figures in a cohort of officials who helped shape the policies of the Austro-Hungarian foreign ministry after the sudden death of Aehrenthal from leukaemia in 1912.
⁷⁹
And we should not forget the bitter personal animosity between Izvolsky and Aehrenthal, which was rightly identified by the Vienna quality press in the aftermath of the Bosnian crisis as an impediment to the improvement of relations between Austria-Hungary and Russia.
⁸⁰
It is a curious feature of the July Crisis of 1914 that so many of the key actors in it had known each other for so long. Beneath the surface of many of the key transactions lurked personal antipathies and long-remembered injuries.

The Serbian problem was not a matter that the Austrians could handle in isolation. It was embedded within a complex of interlocked questions. First there was the pressing issue of Serbia's relationship with Russia, which was closer after the annexation crisis than it had been before. Vienna was deeply suspicious of the Russian minister Hartwig, whose Austrophobia, pan-Slavism and growing influence in Belgrade augured ill for the future. Hartwig, the French minister in Sofia reported, was ‘the archetype of the true Muzhik', a partisan of the ‘old Russian Turkish policy' who was prepared to ‘sacrifice the Far East for the Balkans'.
⁸¹
Hartwig established relations of extraordinary intimacy with Prime Minister Nikola Pašić. The two men met almost daily – ‘your beard is consulting with our beard', the officials of the Serbian foreign ministry would comment to the junior diplomats of the Russian mission. ‘No one,' a Russian staffer commented, ‘believed that secrets were possible in relation to the political goals shared by [Russia and Serbia].'
⁸²
The Russian minister was greeted everywhere in Belgrade like a conquering hero: ‘people just needed to see his characteristic head and he would get standing ovations'.
⁸³

Vienna could in theory offset Serbian hostility by seeking better relations with Bulgaria. But pursuing this option also entailed difficulties. Since there was still a bitter dispute over the border between Bulgaria and Romania, cosying up to Sofia brought the risk of alienating Bucharest. A hostile Bucharest was extremely undesirable because of the huge Romanian minority in Hungarian Transylvania. If Romania were to turn away from Vienna towards St Petersburg, the minority issue might well become a question of regional security. Hungarian diplomats and political leaders in particular warned that ‘Greater Romania' posed as serious a threat to the dual monarchy as ‘Greater Serbia'.

A further concern was the little principality of Montenegro on the Adriatic coast. This picturesque, impoverished kingdom provided the backdrop for Franz Lehár's
The Merry Widow
, where it appeared thinly disguised as the ‘Grand Duchy of Pontevedro' (the German libretto gave the game away by explicitly stating that the singers should wear ‘Montenegrin national costume').
⁸⁴
Montenegro was the smallest of the Balkan states, with a population of only 250,000 scattered across a beautiful but unforgiving terrain of black peaks and plunging ravines. This was a country where the king, dressed in a splendid uniform of gold, silver, red and blue, could be seen smoking at dusk in front of his palace, hoping to chat with a passer-by. When the Prague journalist Egon Erwin Kisch travelled by foot from Cetinje, then the capital of Montenegro, to the beautiful port city of Rijeka (now in Croatia) in the summer of 1913, he was disconcerted to hear gunshots ringing out across the valleys. He wondered at first whether a Balkan war had broken out, but his guard assured him that it was just the Montenegrin youth with their Russian rifles shooting small fish in the fast-flowing mountain streams.
⁸⁵

Though poor and tiny, Montenegro was not unimportant. Its mountain guns on the Lovčen heights overlooked the indefensible Austrian harbour facilities at Cattaro on the Adriatic, to the vexation of Habsburg naval planners. Nikola, the reigning prince since 1861 and thus the third-longest-serving European monarch after Queen Victoria and Franz Joseph, was extraordinarily ambitious. He had succeeded in doubling the territory of his kingdom at the Berlin Congress of 1878, expanded it again during the annexation crisis of 1908, and thereafter had his eye on a piece of northern Albania. He elevated himself to the status of king in 1910. He also married off his female offspring with quite extraordinary skill. King Petar Karadjordjević of Serbia was his son-in-law (though his Montenegrin wife had died by the time Petar was crowned); another of Nikola's daughters, Elena, married Victor Emmanuel III of Italy (king from 1900); two others married Russian archdukes in St Petersburg, where they became prominent figures in Russian high society. Nikola exploited his strategically sensitive position in order to attract funding from powerful foreign sponsors, most importantly Russia. In 1904, he demonstrated his solidarity with the great Slav ally by solemnly declaring war on Japan. The Russians reciprocated with military subsidies and a military mission whose task was the ‘reorganisation of the Montenegrin army'.
⁸⁶

Italy, linked through its royal house with Montenegro, was a further complication. Italy had been a member of the Triple Alliance with Austria and Germany since May 1882 and renewed its membership in 1891, 1902 and 1912. But public sentiment on the question of relations with Austria was deeply divided. Broadly speaking, liberal, secular, nationalist Italy tended to favour a policy of confrontation with Austrians, especially in the Adriatic, which Italian nationalists regarded as a natural avenue for the consolidation of Italian influence. Catholic, clerical, conservative Italy tended by contrast to favour a policy of rapprochement and collaboration with Vienna. Reflecting these divided loyalties, Rome operated an elaborate, multi-layered and often contradictory diplomacy. In 1900 and 1902, the Italian government signed secret agreements with France that cancelled out most of its treaty obligations to Vienna and Berlin. From 1904, moreover, the Italians made it increasingly clear that they viewed Austro-Hungarian policy in the Balkans as impinging on their interests in the area. Montenegro was seen as a promising field for the expansion of Italian commercial and cultural influence in the Balkans and Foreign Minister Tomaso Tittoni cultivated very friendly relations with Belgrade and Sofia.
⁸⁷

The Italians reacted sharply to the annexation of Bosnia in 1908, less because they objected in principle to the Austrian move than because Aehrenthal refused to compensate Rome with the foundation of an Italian university in the mainly Italian-speaking Habsburg port of Trieste.
⁸⁸
In October 1909, King Victor Emmanuel III broke ranks with the Triple Alliance to sign a secret agreement with Tsar Nicholas II. The ‘Racconigi Bargain', as it later became known, stipulated that Italy and Russia would not conclude agreements on the ‘European East' without each other's consent and that the two powers pledged ‘to regard with benevolence, the one Russia's interests in the matter of the Straits, the other Italian interests in Tripoli and Cyrenaica'.
⁸⁹
The agreement was less momentous than it seemed, for the Italians soon after signed an understanding with Vienna that largely cancelled out the pledges of Racconigi, but it signalled Rome's determination to pursue a more assertive and independent policy.