Page - 865 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

The Negotiations in Brest 865 conduct a major offensive in the west. Austria-Hungary would have no choice but to support them. The First Quartermaster General of the German Army, Erich Luden- dorff, had already informed the Army High Command that a decisive military success was being planned for the spring of 1918 on the German western front, and that the participation of Imperial and Royal divisions and the provision of Austro-Hungarian heavy artillery in advance would be welcome. The request was again made on 15 and 23 December, and was met with the approval of Emperor Karl in principle on 26 De- cember.2056 If the Germans were to take Paris, their demands would, in Czernin’s view, become extortionate. The Entente must quite simply make efforts to continue the war. And what would happen then ? Even an appeal to the peoples of the Central Powers would be of no use, since in light of such a victory, they would no longer be amenable to sen- sible arguments.2057 The noticeable military successes of the Central Powers naturally caused the Allies to hold hectic consultations and to re-think their situation. However, they saw no rea- son to feel beaten. Great Britain felt that its will to resist had been strengthened, since it had withstood the toughest phase of the submarine war, and the troops under General Haig, for example at Cambrai, had at least proved themselves to be an equal match for the enemy. In France, there had been a change of government, and Prime Minister Painlevé had been replaced by Georges Clemenceau, who was even more decisively geared towards victory than his predecessor. In Italy, the former prime minister, Giolitti, who in his time had done all he could to keep Italy out of the war, had sided with the Orlando Cabinet. Reactions to the victory of the Central Powers at the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo such as those of the Chief of the Italian General Staff, Cadorna, who had underhandedly made Austria-Hungary the offer that if Austria-Hungary were to forfeit Trento (Trient), it could retain Trieste and Dalmatia, had been made with- out the knowledge of the relevant Cabinet members and had in the interim become redundant.2058 For the immediate future, there was only one single concrete source of hope in Rome, and that was the arrival of the Americans. For this reason, everything possible had to be done to survive the period of time before the American divisions in- tervened. With regard to Russia, the British and French agreed to plan the deployment of intervention troops in the former Tsarist Empire in precisely specified zones, less in order to de-stabilise the Lenin government than to consolidate the ‘White’ forces and, in this way, to retain both anti-German and anti-Bolshevik troops who would be able to continue the war against the Central Powers. This began with the mission by Berthelot in Romania, which attempted to continue the war in eastern Romania and in southern Russia with Romanian, Czech and Russian troops. The British took over responsibility of the Caucasus, Armenia, Georgia and Kurdistan. In order to broaden the scope of the war, and to gain new forces, the Allies granted the Czechs the status