Page - 56 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

56 Two Million Men for the War mittedly came from others. Still, they were by no means in the focus of interest to the same degree and opinions were divided over them. The attitude to the army was certainly not uniform and varied above all in place and time. Those living in the Austrian half of the Empire were almost never confronted with a problem that in the Hungarian half of the Empire was a repeated source of con- siderable agitation, namely the question of its own territorial army. In Hungary, in fact, the struggle over the configuration of the Honvéd into a national Hungarian army tem- porarily suppressed all other issues. Thus, it was not the Landwehr but the Common Army that played the most important role for the self-image of the army in Austria. A superficial conclusion about the relationship between the army and society can be drawn from the statement of the German ambassador in Vienna, Heinrich von Tschirschky, who said in 1913 that the army was not only ‘in great health’ in spite of the convulsions triggered by the espionage case of Colonel Alfred Redl, but in fact the ‘only healthy element of the monarchy’.108 By this, von Tschirschky evidently meant that the army had not been affected by any of the short-term political developments, a claim that is very questionable. Yet the deployability of the military was not in question and the presence of the military was palpable : soldiers were part of the look and feel of most of the bigger urban locations in the Dual Monarchy. Officers enjoyed extraordinary social prestige. Every subaltern could say about himself that he wore the Emperor’s uniform and had a special relationship of loyalty with the Monarch. A colonel and reg- imental commander already represented real power and a field marshal and corps com- mander, who had to be addressed as ‘Your Excellency’, was even accorded respect from state governors. Wherever there was no garrison, the citizenry and tradespeople often attempted to finance the treasury in advance for the construction of barracks in order to partake of the economic benefits of a garrison. Such pains were by no means taken over civil servants. The comparison with civil servants is not arbitrary because, as mentioned above, the civil service apparatus developed a similarly integrative power to the army. And for another thing, it was considerably larger. In peacetime, the Austro-Hungarian army had around 415,000 men, calculated from field marshals to raw recruits. The civil service apparatus of the monarchy, on the other hand, counted around 550,000 peo- ple.109 Admittedly, it did not have the potential to mobilise further manpower. That which was taken for granted in the German lands of the monarchy, though noted critically outside of them, was the German character of the Imperial and Royal Army. Responsible for this, however, was least of all a systematic personnel policy and much more the circumstance that the level of education of Germans in the Dual Monarchy was higher than those other  – though not all other  – nationalities, and that significantly more Germans therefore fulfilled the requirements for acceptance to the cadet schools and the military and naval academies. Added to this was the fact that more German Austrians strove for reserve officer training than members of other na-