Page - 46 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

46 On the Eve for the better. Factory employees worked 57-hour weeks to produce tank cupolas, artil- lery, gun carriages and other armaments. Here, Škoda had the advantage of ultimately also receiving large orders from the Imperial and Royal Army. In terms of its deliveries to the Navy, the company even achieved a type of monopoly for armouring and artil- lery, and precisely this was the decisive factor when Škoda was selected for collabo- ration with the French armaments giant Schneider-Creuzot with an order to expand the largest Russian armaments company, the Putilov Works  – and this in competition against the German Krupp group. Perhaps this decision was influenced by the fact that to a large extent the banks, which were shareholders of Škoda, had French and Eng- lish owners. The confusing picture therefore arose, which was highly characteristic of the pre-war period, of an extraordinary intermeshing of capital and industry, whereby those who had more money and the more aggressive export policy dominated. This was only very rarely the case with Austria-Hungary, which could ultimately only share the market with others. However, it is easy to assume that the belligerents in the First World War  – as is a common characteristic of globalisation  – had interests on both sides of the front. French money was working for Škoda, which did not prevent the artillery produced there, particularly the 30.5 cm mortar, from being fired against Bel- gian and French forts on the Western Front. The Putilov Works, which were expanded by Škoda, produced the armaments used against Austro-Hungarian troops in Gali- cia. The Whitehead company in Rijeka (Fiume), which built warships for the Imperial and Royal Navy and produced torpedoes, was closely linked to the English armaments company Vickers, and so on. They all had wide-ranging interests, and sought and found markets for their products. For every large armaments company, and for nearly every large-scale industrial company, there were one or more representatives in the Austrian Reichsrat or in the Hungarian Reichstag. And when a company’s interests were not directly represented by a company member, it was easy to find someone else who was prepared to do the job. Lobbying was the order of the day. It would be wrong to succumb to the temptation of interpreting this web of inter- relationships as a group of capitalists who could be held responsible for the decision either to go to war or maintain the peace, or who at least had significant influence due to their view of war as a major potential business opportunity. However, it was clear that their opinions counted when it came to deciding whether their own industry would be able to survive a longer war. Even so, the major industrialists had very little leverage over events outside of their sphere of influence, or over chance occurrences. Rather, the July Crisis of 1914 and the war that followed is better summarised by the pessimistic words of the British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, in reaction to a report that the outbreak of war was imminent : ‘Wenn etwa vier europäische Großmächte, sagen wir Österreich, Frankreich, Russland und Deutschland, zu Kriegführenden würden, müsste dies meiner Ansicht nach die Ausgabe so gewaltiger Summen nach sich ziehen und