Page - 760 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

760 Kerensky Offensive and Peace Efforts praise the troops. He entered the city before Emperor Karl, who did not arrive until a little later. At this point the Imperial and Royal War Press Bureau was instructed to portray the victories south of the Dniester exclusively as Austro-Hungarian military feats. Emperor Karl once again decorated officers and enlisted men in his army osten- tatiously and in excess. East Galicia and Bukovina had been occupied by the Russians since 1914. Now they came under Austrian administration again. Was this to the credit of the Germans or an independent Austrian achievement ? For Austria-Hungary, in any case, one war aim had been taken care of, since from this point on there was nothing left in the east to reconquer. For the German Empire, however, this was by all accounts not the case. There were other objectives in the east, which the German Plenipotentiary General attached to the Imperial and Royal Army High Command, General Cramon, summarised as follows : Germany and Prussia ‘stood at the end of a victorious struggle and could not simply forego aspirations that, furthermore, overlapped with the desires of the Russian border population’. Vienna, however, had accepted the formula of a peace without annexations or contributions. The fact that Vienna ‘would be prepared to yield to this formula could be expected ; the unaltered retention of the eastern border constitutes for Austria in itself a very favourable conclusion ; especially as it had already been inwardly determined to sacrifice East Galicia for the sake of peace’.1781 The Russians still boasted considerable numerical forces, but they demonstrated such overt signs of collapse that the internal process of decay was visible. When the Kerensky Offensive had already passed its peak, a Bolshevik coup attempt was made in Petrograd. It was unsuccessful, but the Lvov government resigned and Kerensky assumed power. Russia was heading for the second phase of its revolution. A German General on the Danube Monarchy When the summer battle of 1917 ended and the military situation no longer gave any cause for alarm, Hans von Seeckt wrote another report to the Chief of the German General Staff, Field Marshal von Hindenburg.1782 In this report he addressed not so much the field army as political conditions in the Danube Monarchy. For a long time, and increasingly for the previous three months, according to Seeckt, in both halves of the Monarchy ‘attempts [had been] underway that ultimately in part aim at, and must in part result in, the loosening or the dissolution of the alliance with Germany’. These endeavours had a direct impact on the conduct of the war. ‘With a strength that is suspected by only few departments, forces have dared to emerge in Austria itself that declare as their aim the application of the principle of nationality and, with it, the foundation of a federalist state. […] It may be noted that in the Austrian House of Representatives it has been openly stated on the Czech side that they are