Page - 31 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

 The Powder Keg 31 hardly a single day passed in which a new incident was not reported and discussed, in which notes were not exchanged or a certain concentration of interest established. This also partially explains why during the July Crisis of 1914, the European constellation of forces appeared to play no role for the Danube Monarchy. It was simply the Balkans once again that were causing problems and for which a solution was now sought in the form of a type of Gordian knot. When analysing the Austrian role in the Balkans, parallels can not only be drawn with the Crimean War, during which Austria, which was in principle not involved, chose to sit on the fence, as mentioned above. A further similarity was also the issue of funding. Following the measure adopted by Russia in October 1912 not to discharge 375,000 soldiers who were due for transfer into the army reserve, the Danube Monarchy also increased its peacetime troop strength from an original figure of around 415,000 men to 620,000. While for most reservists this was only a short-term measure, those in the two most southern corps areas, the XVth (‘Sarajevo’) and the XVIth (‘Ragusa’) remained in readiness for around nine months. This cost money  – a lot of money. The measure con- sumed 309 million crowns, corresponding to the military budget for the Monarchy for nine months.45 In order to gather the funds needed, a loan had to be taken out in New York in December 1912 for a period of two years and at inflated conditions. The increase in peacetime troop strength during 1912 and 1913, and even more so the mobilisation, was therefore not only a double-edged sword because of the risk of pulling in other powers ; it was also extremely costly. Measures such as these could not be afforded very often, since they were not included in the budget planning and there- fore required separate sources of funding. It was also double-edged because the effec- tiveness of such actions wears off all too quickly. If a ‘war-in-sight’ attitude is adopted at frequent intervals, this type of demonstration of power soon loses substance. However, the Danube Monarchy by no means pursued its Balkan policy in isolation from the other European powers. It sought contact with them and repeatedly reassured them that it had no interest in making territorial gains. However, it cannot justifiably be claimed that the Monarchy took any particular account of the interests of others when it came to its Balkan policy. In the Balkans especially, it felt directly affected and legitimised in keeping its sights on its own goals. For the German Empire, which was allied to Austria-Hungary, this entailed taking the calculated risk of being pulled along by the Danube Monarchy. The fact, cited by the German historian Fritz Fischer as a cause of the precipitation of the war, that Germany was seeking to gain a foothold in the Balkans,46 can therefore also be explained as a result of Berlin’s unwillingness to remain in this position. This raised fundamental questions regarding the relationship between Germany and Austria-Hungary. On 14 June 1914, the Foreign Minister, Count Berchtold, travelled to the chateau of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Konopiště