Page - 332 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

332 Under Surveillance it could still be hoped for a longer period of time that ultimately, it would enter the war on the side of Austria-Hungary. It therefore also made little sense to flee to Romania. This notwithstanding, several dozens of conscripts broke away who were not willing to fight for Austria, and certainly not for Hungary. As a precautionary measure, the surveillance measures for the passes and transit points leading to Romania had been in- tensified, since the Austro-Hungarian envoy in Romania, Count Ottokar Czernin, had after all reported the arrival of deserters in September 1914 : ‘In Sinaia, small groups of Austro-Hungarian deserters have been arriving for some time. Yesterday, for example, I saw 20 men, two of whom were in uniform, who were apparently from Brașov (Kro- nstadt)’. Three of them were officers. Most of them were Romanians living in Hungary, although they were members of the Hungarian-Slovakian Infantry Regiment No. 12, which was garrisoned in Komárno (Komorn).774 Away from the border regions, a picture emerged that was also familiar from Po- land and above all from the Bohemian crown lands : numerous teachers, lawyers and members of the intelligentsia attracted attention with nationalistic statements, and in some cases were directly agitating, so that finally, at the end of 1914, according to a report on conditions in Transylvania : ‘Should Romania collapse, we cannot count on the loyalty of the population.’775 The military commander of Sibiu, Major General Ernst Mattanović, gave the order at the end of November that military discipline was to be ‘rigorously’ maintained, and that in particular, no further care at home was to be granted for the numerous cases of illness, since it had emerged that the convalescing soldiers had attempted to flee to Romania in increasing numbers. During the following month, Mattanović began to proceed against shirkers with the full severity of the law, and to search for them with military patrols. However, the order achieved little. Finally, on 20 December, martial law was declared for deserters. This produced a result. Equally effective  – and perhaps far more so  – were measures that should in fact have been taken as a matter of course, namely to take more care to use officers who spoke Romanian and to emphasise particular achievements such as the bravery of Infantry Regiment No. 31, which consisted mainly of Romanians, in the fighting in the Przedbórz area on 17 December 1914. The Romanians in Bukovina were particularly loyal, and in 1914 even demanded from King Carol I of Romania that he enter the war on the side of Austria against the ‘true enemy of the Romanian people’, the Russians.776 In a similar way to the Romanians living in the Habsburg Monarchy, the Italians were regarded with a mixture of disappointment and hope. When Italy declared its neutrality in July 1914, the news was greeted with disappointment, and sometimes  – and here, Conrad von Hötzendorf was an excellent example  – with restrained fury. It would remain to be seen whether the position taken by the Kingdom of Italy would also affect the Italians in the Habsburg Monarchy. The sceptics certainly felt vindicated