Page - 72 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

72 Two Million Men for the War that regardless of whether a war threatened in the west or in the east, the second front would have to be opened, so the only existing plan should be implemented immediately and to its full extent. As has been repeatedly established since, it was a gamble with relatively meagre chances of success.148 By comparison, Austrian planning appears not only more flexible but also much more political. Here there were at least three major war scenarios and combinations of these, as well as a series of further elaborations. And the aim was always to adapt the plans to the changing circumstances or to do what the Chief of the General Staff Conrad recommended : to remove one of the smaller potential opponents by means of a pre-emptive war. Conrad attempted to second guess the two main war scenarios  – involving Serbia and Russia  – by mentally dissecting the Austro-Hungarian armed forces. He defined three parts : the first part, by and large three armies, should be available in all events for war scenario ‘R’ (= Russia). Part two, the so-called ‘Balkan Minimal Group’, should be deployed against Serbia and Montenegro. And then there was a third part, the so-called ‘B Echelon’, as a strategic reserve. It comprised approximately one army and, depending on whether there was a war against Russia or only against Serbia, should be sent to the Russian or the Balkan theatre.149 Naturally, Conrad wanted to avoid a war on multi- ple fronts, which is why he insisted on a pre-emptive war, first against Italy, and with increasing force against Serbia. Between 1908 and 1912, he felt he had to champion a pre-emptive attack even more because he regarded Russia as not yet sufficiently ready for war to be able to intervene on the side of Serbia, but anticipated that the Russian Empire would soon catch up thanks to extensive reforms of its military and an acceler- ated construction of its railways. Still, Conrad was not able to force through his arguments. Subsequently, a funda- mental attitude emerged on his part that lay between resignation and last-ditch rebel- lion. He saw the chances of success in a war dwindling rapidly and thought he could only predict that the monarchy had a chance of survival if it embarked on a struggle of life and death. In this conviction, which had become an idée Fixe, social Darwinist thoughts crept in, according to which the state could only survive if it accepted the struggle, proved itself to be the stronger and excluded the weaker state from political decision-making. Nonetheless, Conrad portrayed himself later in his memoirs as more far-sighted but also more pessimistic, and was depicted in the historiography far more as the embodiment of a person who accepts his own fate than reality in fact suggests.150 He undeniably and repeatedly applied pressure and he certainly saw the chances for Austria-Hungary’s army dwindling. Thanks to the attitude of Berlin and the German General Staff, however, even in 1914 he still was still playing with the possibility that the Dual Monarchy might be victorious in a war on multiple fronts. German confi- dence was evidently contagious and tempting. The German historian Gerhard Ritter