Page - 101 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

The July Crisis 101 deferred, the highest ranks in the military were no longer to be found in Vienna from 12 July onwards. The foreign press wrote of a ‘jaunty war mood’.217 It became increasingly clear that the positions taken by the Danube Monarchy and the German Empire concurred, and that the citizens of the two states shared identical expectations. The congruence of this attitude with the views held by the elites in Ger- many was blatantly expressed in a letter by the legation councillor at the Imperial and Royal embassy in Berlin, Baron Franz von Haymerle. On 8 July, he wrote to Hoyos : ‘Here at the Foreign Office, we are being pressured from all sides into taking action. The mood is overwhelmingly supportive of us if we get going, otherwise, I would almost say, we are likely to be abandoned as a hopeless case.’218 In his letter, Haymerle also made particular reference to a man on whom in his and others’ view much now depended, the head of the presidial department in the Imperial and Royal Foreign Ministry, Count Forgách. Haymerle wrote : ‘[…] if he wants something very much, the Minister and, above all, Tisza will do it.’ And there certainly was something that Forgách wanted. Perhaps this, together with his determined actions as head of the department, is partly the reason for Tisza’s change of attitude. He had been the only one who had to be completely ‘turned about’. For the younger officials in the Foreign Ministry, as well as for many others, it was at any rate absolutely clear that the Monarchy would have to take a decisive step in order to secure the borders and the existence of the Empire. If this was not done, the Monar- chy would dissolve and Berlin would lose its confidence in Vienna and possibly seek a new alliance partner. Those who held this view failed to understand why Berchtold took such a cautious approach, allowing so much time to pass instead of quickly unleashing the war against Serbia. However, Berchtold wanted to limit the war, and felt that the best way of doing so would be to demonstrate to the European powers the shameful role played by Serbia. Here, there was certainly no small degree of wishful thinking involved, together with the narrowed view of power balances and interests in Europe mentioned above. This isolated view went so far that while Russia was repeatedly named as a potential war enemy, it was felt that it was at the least unlikely to take immediate action, and the chances of its intervening were put at even less than fifty per cent. Russia, France, Great Britain, Italy and whoever else it was felt to be appropriate, were to be informed of Ser- bia’s guilt by means of a dossier, and in this way, kept at bay. The hope at the Ballhaus- platz was that if participation by the Serbian government in the murder of the heir to the throne could be irrefutably proven, hardly anyone could step forward and condemn the Austrian measures as excessive. In this scenario, Russia would perhaps still provide verbal support to Serbia, but would decline to act, since France and Great Britain would of course also regard such support as inappropriate and would have to refrain from of- fering it. The British Empire played no real role in the Austrian deliberations, however,