Page - 885 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

Mutiny 885 came an empty platitude. In this way, Karl became for a short time ‘augmentor of the Empire’. Until the peace treaty came into effect, troops of the Quadruple Alliance were to remain in Wallachia.2119 Railway, telegraph and post were administrated by Germans, Austrians and Hungarians. Romania was also to pay war reparations. What was more important, however, was the fact that foodstuffs were to be immediately transferred from Romania to the Central Powers. For their part, the Central Powers wanted to deliver industrial surplus goods and coal to Romania. Neither of these even remotely reached the quantities stated in the treaty. It soon became clear that even the peace in the east could not solve the problem of survival for Austria-Hungary. Since the peace furthermore threatened to remain a scrap of paper, the Imperial and Royal Foreign Minister did not submit the peace treaties for ratification to the Reichsrat (Imperial Assembly) or the Reichstag (Imperial Diet). Also, Austria did not undertake anything to make a crown land out of Ruthenia and the question of Chełm was addressed even less. The ‘Bread Peace’, the Treaty of Bucharest and above all the treaty with Russia could thus be reduced to the fact that a front  – and by far the longest one in terms of expanse  – had ceased to exist for the Central Powers. In spite of the peace settlement, however, peace did not reign. Around a million German and Austro-Hungarian soldiers remained in the east and the south-east. Nonetheless, three times as many had been freed up. All efforts by the Allies and also by T. G. Masaryk that aimed to at least partially ‘reconstruct’ and acti- vate the eastern front, even with the help of a Czecho-Slovakian army corps, failed.2120 The Germans were brought to the western front from December 1917. However, the Imperial and Royal troops, whose total number in January 1918 amounted to 4.41 mil- lion men, only partially came to Italy  – provided that they were freed up in the east. An additional and eminent need for soldiers had suddenly emerged in the interior of the two halves of the Empire. A revolution threatened to accelerate the disintegration of the Danube Monarchy far more so than had been the case in January. Mutiny The Russian February and October Revolutions had made practically no discernible impact on the morale of the Austro-Hungarian troops. For a time, the feeling of having achieved one of the most important war aims, namely victory over Russia, assuredly masked all other sensations. This triumphant feeling and the prospect of an imminent end to the war made it easier for the troops on the eastern front to remain there, and this was also granted to the soldiers of the south-west with victory in the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo. They had also triumphed, overcome themselves and forced their enemy to the verge of collapse, or at least to a visible catastrophe.