Page - 268 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

268 Adjusting to a Longer War The reports of a worsening mood increased, and the War Surveillance Office finally compiled all the reports for October from the military command in Prague and con- cluded that while the pan-Slav elements remained quiet, March Battalions II and III from Prague had already been wearing numerous pan-Slav emblems while marching out. Parts of Infantry Regiment No. 36 (‘Jungbunzlau’) and Landwehr Infantry Reg- iment No. 30 (‘Kolomea’) surrendered to the Russians without much resistance. This led the Army High Command to question what value at all the Czech replacement formations still had, and what precautionary measures would have to be taken in order to prevent Russophile agitation. This issue again caused the antagonism between the Army High Command and the government to flare up. The Governor of Bohemia had a very different opinion of the matter and was of the view that individual incidents could not be used to draw conclusions about the population of an entire kingdom. The Imperial and Royal Interior Minister, Heinold, declared in no uncertain terms that a general suspicion of the entire Czech nation would be unfair. However, before any clarification could be made as to what had caused the incidents, an application from the Army High Command arrived in Vienna on 26 November, in which it was proposed that the area of validity of the imperial ordinance on emergency decrees from July be extended to include all of Bohemia and those parts of Moravia and Silesia that had not yet been covered ; in short, military jurisdiction was to be introduced in the Bohemian crown lands, and in the Sudeten lands, the powers held by the civilian regional author- ities were also to be partially transferred to the Army High Command.647 The Prime Minister, Count Stürgkh, immediately rejected this application. While he could not discount the claim that a part of the Czech intelligentsia was Russophile, their behaviour was passive. Furthermore, the accusations made by the Army High Command did not apply to everyone. Stürgkh therefore replied entirely in accordance with the views held by Prince Thun-Hohenstein and saw no benefit in granting the military posts even greater authority for taking crackdown measures. It would surely not be right to treat Bohemia as a region that should fall into the sphere of influence of the army, since the country had continued to be spared entirely from war action. The Emperor ultimately refused the applications made by the Army High Command. However, it was clear that this was by no means the end of the matter, and that the antagonism between the Army High Command and the Austrian government would only be exacerbated whenever a case of high treason or the desertion of troops became known. As it was, by the end of the year, 950 people were arrested in Bohemia due to political offences. 704 of them were transferred to the military courts  – even though the military jurisdiction only applied to those operations that had been placed under military control. In Galicia, the Army High Command naturally continued to implement its meas- ures, since Galicia was indeed a war zone. After the setbacks in September and the