Page - 78 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

78 Two Million Men for the War quired considerable effort to obtain his agreement to the threat of violence. The reasons for this stance were certainly not pacifistic,163 but lay rather in the clear recognition that Serbia would be so blatantly supported by Russia that any attack on Serbia was bound to bring Russia into play. If, however, there was an attempt to achieve conciliation with Russia and a renewal of the League of the Three Emperors, a violent attack on Serbia was not the way to go about it. In the case of Franz Ferdinand, there were also clear signs that he did not want ties to the German Empire to become too close. Again, Russia must have played a role here, for she did not want to see herself confronted by a ‘phalanx’ of the Germans. During the course of 1913 frictions increased between the heir to the throne and Conrad von Hötzendorf, whom the former had for a long time sponsored. There were both personal and professional reasons for this, expressed in the Archduke’s hurtful criticism of the Chief of the General Staff during the autumn manoeuvres of 1913. Conrad subsequently tendered his resignation. Yet Franz Ferdinand did not accept it, though not because he wanted to retract his remarks but rather because he claimed that it would not be a good thing if the occupant of the post of chief of the general staff changed three times in the space of two years. It was generally assumed, however, that Conrad would be otherwise employed by the end of 1914.164 It is worth asking whether following Conrad’s departure many other thoughts would have flowed into the military-strategic conceptions. Conrad was not alone in his de- mand for a pre-emptive war, but instead a ‘child of his time’. And many, if not most, of the Imperial and Royal generals in senior positions were advocates of Clausewitz’s interpretation that a pre-emptive war should be waged if the state is able to resist a deterioration of its future prospects only by means of a military offensive.165 A change in the post of chief of the general staff for the entire armed force of Austria-Hungary, therefore, could indeed have resulted in a man succeeding Conrad who would have incorporated the political dimension in his thinking far less than his predecessor had done. Conrad certainly only made allowance for partial aspects, but his ministerial colleague Blasius Schemua as well as Conrad’s successor from 1917, General Arz von Straußenburg, embodied the deeply apolitical, narrow-minded type of officer who only attempted to apply technified theories of war, described so emphatically by Hans-Ul- rich Wehler in relation to the German army.166 As most politicians shied away from interfering in the innermost concerns of the military, such as operational planning, and there was moreover no attempt at such an intervention because the military resorted to the Emperor as the ‘Supreme Commander’, communication problems emerged be- tween the senior politicians and the senior military leadership. The Chief of the Gen- eral Staff undoubtedly wanted war, albeit limited to certain military scenarios. The state governors and the foreign ministers of the decades prior to 1914, on the other hand, had sought to avoid war. However, as they did not live in isolation from a mood of ‘war