Page - 500 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

500 South Tyrol : The End of an Illusion (I) more caution was being taken in the way people were used, it was in fact during 1916 that care in planning the use of armed forces was abandoned in favour of forcing an out- come. After all, what use was it to achieve a limited success on one front, or even the un- conditional surrender of an enemy such as Montenegro, when one was being starved out and one’s own resources were coming to an end ? And so, everything was to be thrown  – indeed had to be thrown  – into the battle, and every enemy systematically destroyed. The maxim that applied was to exhaust the enemy to an increasing degree, and at the same time to beat the weakest opponent off the field. In this, almost all belligerents threat- ened to lose the connection between the front and the hinterland, and the needs of the front and those of the hinterland became almost impossible to reconcile. In Russia, clear symptoms of the crisis had already appeared, symptoms that were combated using the country’s own forces and with the aid of the Allies. From the summer of 1915 onwards, the Tsar assumed the supreme command in person, and the first steps towards democ- ratisation were taken. However, this was only intended to help overcome the setbacks of the summer of 1915. The most severe shortages of armaments were compensated for by Allied supplies. The British organised delivery to Russia of Allied replenishment goods via the Arctic Sea ports, and even took on the port administration themselves in order to ensure that unloading and further transportation ran smoothly. Even so, Russia remained the problem child of the Entente. For the Central Powers, the problem child was the Danube Monarchy, the same Danube Monarchy that was the next top-ranking power to show symptoms of crisis and signs of an emerging radicalisation as a result. The pattern that this radicalisation took on was not the same everywhere, however. All that was left now of the highly idealised Central Europe movement of 1915, which had still reflected a certain degree of optimism and something akin to a shared European future, was the will to attain a peace with victory. The nationalist elements stifled the liberal political and economic approaches until only radicalism was left. Most of these were founded on relatively vague goals, although they were all concerned with the purpose of the war. The answers differed in Austria-Hungary in particular, since as soon as the nationalists began to independently formulate their goals or even only their wishes for the period following the war, the uniformity disintegrated. Each attempted to follow his own egoistic goal, and in order to define himself more clearly and make himself stand out, opted for radicalisation. The Easter Demands What had become clear in the Central Europe movement, and had been expressed in petitions such as those produced by college professors towards the end of 1915, now continued in the form of the demands made by the German National League