Page - 430 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

430 Factory War and Domestic Front, 1915 in no way to the expectations of the Army High Command. The charge of high treason against Scheiner had to be dropped in July. Kramář was not placed on trial until the beginning of 1916, at which he was then sentenced on several counts. A plea for annul- ment then led to a deferral until he was fully amnestied by Emperor Karl. A long time after the war, however, it turned out that the Army High Command had indeed been on the right scent with both Kramář and Scheiner. Both had contact to the so-called ‘Maffia’, namely the radical Czech resistance movement, as well as to Masaryk and Beneš, the leaders of the movement of Czech emigrants. At the time of their arrest, however, these links could not be proven. Furthermore, the arrest of the two prominent Czechs was full-blown political idiocy, and this weighed most heavily. Yet the Army High Com- mand did not want to let up. When there was a mass desertion from Infantry Regiment No. 36 (‘Jungbunzlau’), the Army High Command demanded not only the dissolution of the regiment but also the appointment of a military governor in Bohemia.1026 Conrad attempted to incorporate everything in his proposals that seemed necessary in order to rescue the Monarchy. With his demand to the Military Chancellery of the Emperor to immediately bring about a negotiated peace with Serbia in order to have calm in the Balkans, he not only had the freeing up of forces against Italy in mind, as with his suggestion for a special peace with Russia, but he also aimed at imperial reform. The annexation of Serbia by the Dual Monarchy was ‘to be pursued by peaceful means’, wrote the Chief of the General Staff to Bolfras ; ‘any half measures would be a kind of evil and in comparison all arguments that might be raised against it on the part of the Magyars would have to retreat into the background. The same applies to Romania […]. The method of meanly victimising neighbours and the gagging of the non-Magyar nationalities must be broken with, and the question of the incorporation or affiliation of the southern Slaves to the Monarchy must be heard, and indeed accompanied by an increase in the rights of the Croats and the creation of a central parliament for the entire Monarchy’.1027 Only after Conrad had an audience with Emperor Franz Joseph on 18 June 1915, during which the Chief of the General Staff was evidently advised to show more control, did the requests of the Army High Command lose some of their edge and eventually end completely. Something else must be kept in mind here, though : from November 1914 to June 1915 it was for the Army High Command not only a question of holding down a country partout with the means of a military dictatorship, as in the case of Bohemia ; far-reaching steps were also suggested to defuse the conflict of nationalities, including full and legally regulated bilingualism. In this way, the Bohemian settlement, which repeatedly failed to be achieved, would have been enforced by military force and against the German ethnic group. The Army High Command believed all the more that it could do this, since its other proposals for state reform were centralistic and it adopted many demands of the Germans in the Dual Monarchy as its own.