Page - 1009 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

Te Deum Laudamus 1009 concluded an armistice ; indeed, it had not even opened negotiations to that effect. The troops of the former ally Austria-Hungary were sent to the rear. In the Balkans, where practically nothing had been heard about the results of nego- tiations in the Villa Giusti, the withdrawal had continued. On 1 November, Imperial and Royal troops detonated the railway bridge near Belgrade, which was thus destroyed for the third time in this war. The next day, no soldier of Army Group ‘Feldmarshall Kövess’, which should have long since been Army Group ‘Erzherzog Joseph’, stood any longer on Serbian soil.2519 Kövess heard on 4 November, or even on the 5th, that he had been appointed Army Supreme Commander. He travelled on the Danube to Vienna. In the meantime, Hungary demanded and received new, separate armistice negotia- tions because it did not feel affected by the treaty signed in the Villa Giusti. In Belgrade, more far-reaching and worse conditions were then dictated to the Magyars.2520 The armistice naturally also extended to the navy. The Emperor had already trans- ferred the High Seas Fleet to the new southern Slav state on 31 October, i.e. before the conclusion of the armistice, and did not intend to deliver the Fleet to Italy. The last Commander of the Imperial and Royal Fleet, Rear Admiral Miklos von Horthy, de- parted with an order to the fleet in which he expressed the hope that the southern Slavs who remained on the ships would exercise a ‘firm protection of the common coast’. Evidently, Horthy did not want to accept that Hungary and Croatia would no longer share a common coast. The southern Slav fleet command had other worries, however, than commenting on this problem. Italy felt duped by the transfer of the Imperial and Royal Fleet.2521 It could not do much about it, but at least the joy of the new state of the Slovenes, Serbs and Croats was to be dulled and the danger of a powerful Yugoslav fleet averted. An Italian com- mand that had already been sent against the Imperial and Royal naval base was dropped off in the harbour of Pula (Pola) took advantage of the dwindling vigilance and on 1 November attached two mines to the fleet’s flagship Viribus Unitis, with which the dreadnought was sunk. Although the crew had been warned, the majority of the men, as well as the first Yugoslav Commander of the Fleet, Janko Vukovič von Podkapelski, went down with the battleship.2522 As a result of this, it had become clearly visible that a conflict had broken out between Italy and Yugoslavia for hegemony in the Adriatic and for the possession of the Adriatic coastal region, which appeared to confirm all pessimistic prognoses on the future of the lands of the Habsburg Monarchy. A member of the task force of the British War Cabinet, Leopold Stennett Amery, who had gathered abundant experiences in Balkan matters since 1915,2523 described the scenario in a powerful memorandum for Foreign Secretary Balfour : if sovereign nation states were to be established in Central Europe, then ‘we transform Central Europe in the blink of an eye into a new Balkans’. His proposal for a solution aimed at a Danube confederation that would also by all means be in a position to resist German