Page - 987 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

The Emperor’s Manifesto 987 von Kövess. In the event that this line could also not be held, the troops would have to withdraw to their pre-war borders of the Drina, the Sava and the Danube.2420 When Kövess arrived at his new headquarters in Belgrade on 4 October, Bulgaria had already concluded the armistice, the Allied main force had grown to 28 divisions, to which were added two Italian divisions in Albania, and Kövess’s own forces were still only en route. Now Hungary was directly threatened in a way it had no longer been since 1914. However, the mass of the Hungarian troops was located in Italy. It was a hopeless situ- ation, in which Kövess drafted an armistice agreement after only a few days.2421 Whilst the front in the Balkans began to collapse, final attempts were made in the interior of the Habsburg multi-national empire to rescue the union and to reach a mo- dus vivendi that was also acceptable to the peoples of the Empire. The Emperor’s Manifesto With the session of the Joint Council of Ministers on 27 September 1918, the final stage was initiated. Emperor Karl opened it with a challenge to the governments of both halves of the Empire. ‘In connection with the foreign policy situation, the neces- sity of an internal reconstruction forces itself upon us, namely in respect of the southern Slav question, which has to constitute the subject of discussions.’ Minister Burián went even further : swift action had to be taken to avoid ‘that the peoples take their fate in their own hands’.2422 Instead of now acting decisively and appropriately in the spirit of the common ideals, the common history and the enormous problems, time was spent merely tweaking the details. We should be careful not to prematurely condemn the people who could not find a solution and were, in part, viewing the events with bewilderment, since given the will of the nationalities of the Habsburg Monarchy to detach themselves and the destructive will of its enemies, it was no longer possible for anyone to find a solution that would have been suitable even for a confederation. Even a man like the former Hungarian Prime Minister Count Tisza was clueless and perplexed when he travelled to Sarajevo to discuss the future with the political leaders of Bosnia and Herzegovina.2423 Šola, Jokić, Dimović and others ultimately handed him a memorandum that Tisza regarded as nothing less than outrageous. He attempted to give them a dressing-down : ‘I really cannot say what should surprise me more in this position paper, the inappropriate and unseemly tone, since, gentlemen, this is not the way one writes, or the absurdity of the contents. I do not want to dwell on the matter here, but I must emphasise individual aspects. The gentlemen say that the idea of national unity of Croats, Serbs and Slovenes has become a dogma of their national character. […]. These are words that sound very good in a popular assembly [or] in an editorial, [they are] words that are suited to