Page - 339 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

Of Heroes and Cowards 339 British clearly also began to speculate about the fall of the Habsburg Monarchy. The matter had its curious aspects to the extent that ultimately many of those who saw their salvation in Tsarist Russia were obliged to ignore their own convictions. Before the war, Russia had been regarded as a cradle for anti-democratic tendencies, as reaction- ary and precisely in comparison with Austria-Hungary as politically backward. Social Democrats from other countries, including Czech Social Democrats, had found their archetypal enemy par excellence in Russia. And now, it was Russia that was expected to provide if not liberation from what had become known as the Austrian yoke, then at least a political new beginning. Here, something didn’t fit. For the time being, however, the Imperial and Royal Army High Command saw no reason to ascribe the failure of Czech troops to any non-domestic cause. From Decem- ber 1914, the Army High Command demanded that martial law be declared in Bohe- mia. In order to give more weight to its arguments, and not only to constantly present individual cases for the War Ministry and the Military Chancellery of the Emperor, it began to compile a proper dossier : ‘A brief compilation regarding the evidence for subversive tendencies within a part of the population of Czech nationality’.798 Dozens of cases were listed. The dossier claimed that the first evidence that an unexpectedly large number of people among the Czechs had decided ‘to directly betray the father- land, which is currently involved in heavy fighting’ had already emerged on 23 August 1914 in reports published in Russian newspapers. According to these reports, voluntary Czech legions had been created in the Czech colonies in St. Petersburg and Moscow. ‘The Army High Command has naturally ordered that both these individuals and the legionnaires now reported in the French theatre of war be treated in accordance with martial law if seized.’ In September, it had been reported that the establishment of the Czech legions was making progress, and in December, Czechs were first discovered to be among the Russians laying siege to Przemyśl. Subsequently, the notifications from military and police authorities and ‘reports of a confidential nature and relations regarding confidential persons’ multiplied regardung the dissemination of Russian proclamations in Bohemia and Moravia, insults to His Majesty and all other possible manner of offences. The Russians also bragged about the increasing strength of the le- gion formations, which had however been formed for the most part from Czechs living in Russia, and not from prisoners of war or defectors  – a fact about which no-one was aware, either in Nowy Sącz (Neu Sandez) and Cieszyn (Teschen) or in Vienna. The Army High Command naturally also claimed that it had been working since the end of November to make Bohemia subject to military jurisdiction under the Army High Command, and to introduce military court procedures in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, as well as transfer political authority to the Army Supreme Commander Arch- duke Friedrich. Since the reactions they had hoped for failed to materialise and, begin- ning with Prime Minister Stürgkh, all political decision-makers refused to ratify the