Page - 140 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

140 Unleashing the War Fournier wrote, that was just ‘and that the great moralist and friend of peace accepts, and we must see it through, because  – no-one should delude himself  – it is a question of our honour, our welfare, our very existence’.327 The Viennese Cardinal Friedrich Gustav Piffl supposedly said : ‘Go and battle the enemies of God.’328 On 28 July 1914, a pastoral letter from the Cardinal was read out in the churches of the archdiocese of Vienna : ‘Much-loved members of the diocese ! These days, severe trials have descended upon our fatherland. […] Our beloved Em- peror […], revered throughout Europe as a pillar of world peace, has had the sword of war forced upon him. […] With complete faith in the righteousness of the cause of our fatherland, our sons and brothers go to war.’ The Cardinal really struck a chord with almost all his listeners, and if one looked on the streets of Vienna, then this feeling of a just war, which had been unleashed by Austria-Hungary, was palpable. Everywhere one must have had the impression of simultaneously taking part in a car- nival and being in a madhouse, because everyone seemed to be deeply satisfied about the war. Enthusiasm blazed up, and it was not only the capital cities that were filled with what was known as ‘salvation through war’ ; the feeling reached the smallest vil- lages. National unity was the slogan of the day. If Kaiser Wilhelm could announce in Germany that ‘I no longer know any parties  – I now only know Germans’, then this was paralleled in Vienna, Budapest or Prague. Suddenly, the workers also felt inspired and took to the streets, but not to demonstrate against the war but rather to express their solidarity. Worries and anxiety about the future seemed to have no place here. The peace movement was almost swept away by the July mood and what was referred to in Germany as the ‘August experience’.329 Bertha von Suttner was dead. Her loyal assistant and the most consistent thinker of Austrian pacifism, Alfred Hermann Fried, surrendered to the difficulties that he was caused in editing the periodical of the Aus- trian and German peace movement, the Friedenswarte, and emigrated to Switzerland. There, however, he was met with the next shock, when he learnt that leading figures of international pacifism no longer even answered his letters. Baron D’Estournelle sent him from time to time newspaper articles in which particularly severe casualties for the Central Powers were marked in pencil. From another acquaintance in the French movement, Fried received a photograph without comment showing the Frenchman in a captain’s uniform.330 The images that are recorded of Vienna, Berlin, Paris, London, St. Petersburg and, not least, Belgrade, correspond with each other to a large extent : the unleashing of the war was regarded as a liberating act, and indeed in more than one sense, for it ended four weeks of waiting and a tension from which almost no-one could escape. This feel- ing of ‘finally the time has come’ was mixed, however, with all the resentment, all the disappointment, all the frustration of years of negotiations and all the false friendliness that was part of political and diplomatic intercourse. Finally, one could give vent to