Page - 754 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

754 Kerensky Offensive and Peace Efforts army’. Hungary had been repeatedly snubbed and discriminated against, for which reason it had ‘not even remotely achieved for the army what was to be demanded from its physical and moral strength’. A consequence of the anti-Hungarian current had been the permissiveness towards Czech propaganda. Even the Poles had been favoured by Vienna, which had manifested itself in turn in an ‘unbridled oppression’ of the Ru- thenians. Seeckt also observed that the ‘self-confidence and the deep aversion of the Hungarians, soon increasing to hatred, soon increasing to contempt, against the current Army Command [had] grown strongly’. He argued the case, under the influence of the army group commander Archduke Joseph, who was conspicuously Hungarophile, for a national Hungarian army. However, the concessions were not to be extended to other nationalities in the army. Seeckt was in this way in line with other spoken and written statements when he emphasised Hungary and the Honvéd (Hungarian standing army) as stable elements and wanted particular consideration given to them. It was more the secondary points, however, that deserve our attention : Austria’s Germans, who no longer had any ‘recruit- ing power’, the permissiveness towards the Czechs, who were particularly in Hungary neither understood nor approved of, and the oppression of the Ruthenians. The sentence about the concessions that could be made to Hungary but not to other nationalities was particularly significant, however, since it assumed that the existing division of the Em- pire and rule would remain constant. The army was to also look like this. If there was one thing that had been clear since 30 May 1917, however, it was that the Dual Monarchy was not only to be understood as the orbit of two nationalities, who still encountered each other with some respect and consideration, but whose status and also whose rela- tionship to one another could ultimately be maintained only at the expense of the other nine nationalities. Both the Germans of the Monarchy and the Hungarians had to acknowledge this. Seeckt himself was lacking not least in understanding for Czechs and Poles, but also for the fact that the soldiers from Bohemia and Moravia, as well as the Slovaks, no longer simply let themselves be disciplined and ‘punched down’ into other troop bodies. In some cases, they still tended to desert. The Russians also did everything to propagandistically promote this latent inclination to desert.1763 In Russia, there were by now hundreds of thousands of Czech and Slovak prisoners of war, whilst the number in Serbia was 30,000 and in Italy more than 10,000. They constituted a potential that could not remain without consequences for the Imperial and Royal Army.1764 And this was not only in true in the sense that these people left their own ranks. In view of the brisk activities of the Czech émigrés and the effective Russian propaganda, which took care to refer to the democratic changes in Russia, a considerable factor of uncertainty crept in that could not be dealt with using the classic methods of leadership within the Imperial and Royal Army. What would happen if the Russians were to deploy Czechs against their own compatriots ? Who would then describe whom as ‘traitors’ ?