Page - 267 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

In the Shadow of the Gallows 267 On 3 November 1914, Trakl killed himself with an overdose of cocaine. The war had broken him. On the journey to the headquarters of the 4th Army Command in Nisko, Major Ronge, the Deputy Commander of the Evidenzbüro (the military intelligence service), drove past a row of trees on which a dozen bodies still hung. ‘At this sight, he shuddered at the rages of the military justice’, wrote Heinrich Benedikt, the Second Lieutenant of the Reserve who would later become an important Austrian historian. He substan- tiated his sense of horror with the observation that some of the reserve officers who were serving as auditors hoped ‘to earn an award by making sweeping convictions’.644 In Galicia and Bukovina, the terror, which was designed to act as a deterrent, was pri- marily directed against the Monarchy’s own people. Ruthenians were deported and in some cases brought to the detention camp at Graz-Thalerhof. In localities designated as Russophile, hostages were conscripted as they were in Serbia. The numerous, random arrests were an even greater cause for resentment among those who refused to accept this barbarisation of the war, and led to a further inter- vention by Tisza to Emperor Franz Joseph.645 This led to the written order by the Em- peror of 17 September 1914, which at its core contained the following passage : ‘Many complaints have been received that recently, numerous arrests have again been made of alleged political suspects or those who are unreliable in all parts of the Monarchy, arrests that were made almost solely at the instigation or behest of military commands and authorities. I order that all military posts be instructed in the most stringent terms to authorise such measures only on the basis of highly suspicious circumstances. I do not want elements that are also loyal to be driven in a direction damaging to the state through unjustified arrests […].’ The written order failed to have any effect. The accusation of arbitrariness directed at military posts was particularly justified where the measures were directed against Czechs, Ruthenians, and in some cases the southern Slavs. The process also ran up against barriers, however, when the political authorities put themselves in the way. In Bohemia, for example, the Czech-friendly Governor, Prince Franz Thun-Hohenstein, made every effort to underline the loy- alty of the Czechs and to improve the German-Czech relationship. He did so with a method that was effective although not uncontentious, which was described by the former Trade Minister Josef Maria Baernreither as follows : ‘The Czechs are bearing the war with a deep sense of resentment. It cannot be otherwise […]. Thun [however] makes great allowances for the Czechs, endlessly praises them for their patriotism in his reports and ignores everything else so that it at all costs appears on the outside that here in Austria everything is in order. One can rebus sic stantibus have no quarrel with this method. The concealment of the real disposition of the Slavs in Austria is an extremely important matter. The success of this measure is dependent on the successes in the war.’646