Page - 288 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

288 The First Winter of the War ister, Alexander Izvolsky, the man who had concocted the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina with Baron Aehrenthal, but since resented Austria-Hungary, wanted the French Foreign Minister Théophile Delcassé to fix the most ambitious war aims pos- sible. He assumed that France still held hidden sympathies for the Danube Monarchy, to which he retorted ‘that the Habsburg Monarchy must come to an end, that it was a complete anachronism and that its nations, with the exception of Poland, would have to be educated to lead an independent political life’. In the south, a Serbo-Croat state with Istria and Dalmatia was to form a counterbalance to Italy, Hungary and Roma- nia.690 In this point, he did not obtain the complete approval of the French but at least that of a handful of Croat emigrants around Frano Supilo. The Russian ambassador in London, Alexei Benckendorff, formulated similar thoughts and was supported therein, at least regarding the future of Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia, by Professor Tomáš G. Masaryk, who had initially immigrated to the neutral Netherlands. Masaryk could be certain not only of Russian interest, however, but also the attention of his French and, above all, his English friends. This served not least to provide information (and disinformation) beyond the discussion of war aims. What Masaryk told the university lecturer and writer Robert Seton-Watson in October 1914 about conditions in his homeland and, above all, his hometown of Prague, turned very quickly into a discussion of war objectives, since Masaryk ultimately already sketched out a Czecho-Slovakian state with Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia and Slovakia. He furthermore noted that a few border corrections in favour of this state would naturally be necessary in the regions of České Budějovice (Budweis), Znojmo (Znaim) and Gmünd. He moreover described conditions in Prague and thereby evidently forgottenthat some of what he said was very far-fetched. He reduced the situation to such an extent that he spoke of a Czech pop- ulation on one side and the Germans, who were predominantly Jews, on the other. The hatred of the Czechs was allegedly directed primarily against the Jews and a pogrom could be expected shortly ; but that would only be the beginning.691 What Seton-Wat- son and the foreign affairs editor of The Times, Henry Wickham-Steed, above all had confirmed for them by Masaryk, however, was the view that any Czecho-Slovakian independence would be predicated on a German defeat. This was certainly a bold claim for the time being, in spite of the failure of the German offensive in France, and even in the case of Austria-Hungary the discussion of ambitious war aims and the disintegra- tion of the Empire seemed not only untimely but downright preposterous. One thing, however, had become evident : wherever Austria had enjoyed sympathy before the war, for example in England, in France or in the USA, this had vanished. Wherever the Dual Monarchy had barely been respected but not enjoyed any sympathy, in Russia or Serbia, a will to annihilate Austria-Hungary was now present. Of the two moods, the first was essentially the more alarming because here the ground was being laid on which the radical opponents of the Monarchy could conduct their propaganda for the oblit-