Page - 60 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

60 Two Million Men for the War man countries primarily for the suppression of political parties and their supporters. In this form of altercation, the dispute with the Social Democrats was the most common occurrence. However, conflicts were by no means only staged in the streets, where it was also expected that suffrage demonstrations be neutralised or violently broken up, but also within troop formations and in barracks. From 1910 onwards, anti-military leaflets appeared ever more frequently in the gar- rison towns. The soldiers were called on to engage in passive resistance ; military train- ing operations should be impeded, if not made completely impossible. The reaction to this agitation consisted of the military authorities ordering severe measures to be taken against the distributors of such leaflets. This was the case, for example, in Graz and Villach. This was, however, very clearly a case of overreaction, as there was ultimately no cause to intervene. Nevertheless, the conflict between the Social Democrats and the military escalated.114 On the part of the Social Democrats, the military was castigated and the establishment of a people’s militia was demanded in accordance with the party manifesto. On the other side, the newspaper Danzers Armee-Zeitung organised in 1913 a competition to debunk the ‘Social Democratic heresy’. The prizes were awarded by a jury chaired by the former Imperial and Royal envoy in Bucharest, Count Ottokar von Czernin.115 It would certainly be wrong to furnish the army before 1914 merely with the dic- tum ‘the great silent one’. It was not this at all ! Admittedly, the soldiers did not, as a rule, express their views, and up to the level of the subalterns comments coming from military circles did not carry a great deal of weight. Still, among the higher ranks and above all at the top, no room was left for doubt regarding their intentions. The army lost the epithet of ‘the great silent one’ above all, however, when ever more officers put pen to paper and the semiofficial organ of the officer corps, Danzers Armee-Zeitung, increasingly stood out with its political comments. One only has to look at the issues of the army newspaper for 1912, 1913 and 1914 in order to see how anti-parliamentary, anti-socialist and pre-emptive war thoughts were being circulated. Especially the latter was actively popularised.116 Certainly, one must be careful when using the term ‘militarism’ in relation to the pre-war history of Austria-Hungary.117 Yet the criteria regarded as mandatory for a customised notion of militarism find a whole series of equivalents in the case of the Danube Monarchy and for the period before 1914 ; the social primacy of the military was assumed. The army had undoubtedly taken control of a series of powerbases and insisted that it was the only instrument of the state that could guarantee the existing order. Moreover, the army repeatedly brought itself into play as the only option open to the Habsburg Monarchy if it did not want to allow itself to disintegrate. With this version of militarism, Austria-Hungary admittedly distinguished itself from the militarism of other countries, yet the application of the term seems to be per-