Page - 666 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

666 The Writing on the Wall black-clad, Calvinist Prime Minister Count Tisza as the palatine in the middle of the ceremonial group. If Tisza had felt any satisfaction, he showed no outward signs of doing so. He could not least have felt displeased to have been given the role of palatine, although Karl had initially considered installing a Habsburg archduke for this function. However, the Monarch had failed to secure any agreement to this suggestion on the part of the Hungarian Prime Minister. Even so, Tisza’s days as the most powerful man in Hungary were also numbered. Baron Koerber already knew on the day before the coronation that Tisza would soon be gone. In January and February 1917, Karl made his doubts about Tisza known in the Imperial Cabinet Office and Military Chancellery. However, he did not yet know whom he could name as Tisza’s successor.1516 The Czech delegation, which had travelled to Budapest to take part in the corona- tion celebrations, had no opportunity to declare the testimony of loyalty that it had pre- pared, since it was not even allowed an audience with the Emperor and King. The dis- appointed members of the parties that had joined together in September 1916 to form the Czech Union then assumed that Karl would not wish to have himself crowned in Prague  – at least not in the foreseeable future. And they drew their own conclusions. The coronation of King Karl IV did achieve the desired result, however, in that the Hungarian efforts to resist a somewhat more centralised structure of the Empire, at least for the duration of the war, had lessened to a certain degree. This was the case particularly whenever feeding the population of the two halves of the Empire was at issue. After months of delays, the Hungarian Prime Minister declared himself willing to agree to a committee to which representatives of the Hungarian and Austrian Food Agency, the Army High Command and the War Ministry were to be sent in order to collect the necessary data, compare it and if necessary to render it consistent.1517 Since this represented the lowest common denominator, finally, everyone agreed. General Ottokar Landwehr von Pragenau was installed as the chief of this joint food committee. His book written after the war, Hunger was intended as an eloquent por- trayal of the almost hopeless battle that he had to wage. He regarded his task as being ‘to bridge the period of time in which the war would still of necessity have to be waged without a major famine’.1518 It was Tisza’s wish that the Chief of the Joint Food Com- mittee should be directly subordinate to the Emperor, and Landwehr also expressly requested the same. After all, an official body without executive powers only had a chance of successfully asserting its aims if it could call on the authority of the Emperor. On the other hand, this was one further step, which was being energetically pursued by Karl, towards autocratic rule. It was anyway already evident that this was the direction he was taking, in which he would assume control of all important functions. At the time of the coronation in Budapest, Karl could still allow himself to hope that he would go down in history as a prince of peace. This hope was founded in the fact that it was considered a possibility that after the setbacks and crises of 1916 had been over-