Page - 425 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

Being a Soldier and the Burden of Work 425 because their husbands were in the military. The level of their wages remained behind that of the men, however. A first cost-of-living allowance approved in February 1915 was nowhere near able to cover even the increased living costs. Generally, the pressure of the government or the military was required in order to force firms to grant long overdue wage increases. Gradually, however, the trade unions also intervened again. They had agreed to a type of truce, but had in the process increasingly lost their influence. From 1915 they began to commit themselves more strongly again. At the request of the Trade Union Commission, the 1 May 1915 was not celebrated by taking a rest from work. The slo- gan was ‘keep going’ (Durchhalten), and this slogan was also used unchanged in 1916. The efforts made by the government to recognise the stance of the trade unions and to avoid conflicts, however, were exceedingly clear. After the Social Democrat deputy in the Reichsrat (Imperial Assembly) Otto Glöckel, subsequently a prominent school reformer, had spoken at an assembly of the Professional Association of Glove Makers about the guilt of capitalism for the war, he was arrested, but attempts to obtain his release immediately began. Even the Imperial-Royal Ministry of National Defence regarded the treatment of Glöckel as nothing more than ‘embarrassing’. At his trial, he was swiftly acquitted.1015 The truce remained in place. In Austria, like in Hungary, it was checked with suspicion that the efforts made dur- ing this war were equally distributed and that one half of the Empire was not in a better position than the other when it came to costs. However, this mistrust was never entirely eliminated, and just as the view in the Cisleithanian half of the Empire soon became fixed that Hungary was using large amounts of foodstuffs for itself and not contribut- ing the same amount for the provision of the other half of the Empire, and was thus not experiencing the same degree of suffering as Austria, Prime Minister Count Tisza also began in late autumn 1915 to accuse Austria of a more limited exhaustion of its military strength. At regular intervals, Tisza renewed his accusations : Austria had achieved an advantage in its militarisation of the hinterland, which Tisza recognised as necessary in itself, since considerable parts of its available human capacity were used in operating the war economy and in this way withdrawn from the front. Thus, in relative terms, Hungary had incurred greater losses of dead and wounded, in Tisza’s view. The Austrian half of the Empire could only record a considerably higher number of its own soldiers taken into prisoner of war captivity. According to Tisza, however, one could not lump together the dead and the cowardly.1016 This was then contradicted by Stürgkh, who for his part attempted to prove that it was the Austrian half of the Em- pire, on the contrary, that had suffered the higher number of dead and wounded than corresponded to its share in the overall waging of the war, and that Austria only had a poorer balance in the case of the missing. If such a massive militarisation of the war economy had not taken place in Austria, however, it would long since no longer have