Seite - 590 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

590 The Nameless to Captain Godwin von Brumowski in the Austro-Hungarian list of flying aces in the First World War, could only become a warrant officer.1363 The changes within the officer corps also resulted in reserve officers being divided into their individual nationalities, above all in the troop bodies, since there would otherwise have been no way of communicating. Thus, the troop bodies were in a national sense more homogenous, but also more susceptible to nationalistic slogans. This was all the more the case when the reserve officers were in pre-university or university education and came from secondary schools or colleges, which were very often strongholds of nationalistic tendencies. It also occurred, however, that regi- ments were located adjacently to one another whose members could barely exchange a sentence with each other. This circumstance should not be completely ignoted because in critical situations, where it was not just a matter of issuing an order that was comprehensible to all, the failure to understand could lead to uncertainty and panic reactions. Ultimately, officers and soldiers had one thing in common : in the conduct of war, they were actually only statistical values. It was a war of the nameless. The Peace Campaign of the Central Powers Romania’s declaration of war on 27 August 1916 was initially regarded by Austria-Hun- gary as threatening in a double sense : for one thing, a new opponent had appeared who was estimated as having 620,000 soldiers, and even if one subtracted a third of those as not fit for the front, a great many still needed to be offset. For another thing  – and this was felt to be far more depressing  – Romania’s entry into the war meant the loss of the deliveries of foodstuffs and cereal crops from this country, too. This fact weighed particularly heavily. The realisation that the Central Powers had reached their limits in this war led to politics being reformulated and restructured. And at this moment it was revealed that whilst Austria-Hungary still gave the impression of pursuing independent policies, it had in fact become completely dependent on Germany. The reason for this was certainly not the result of only one event ; instead, a development reached its conclusion : in its political and military deliberations, the Habsburg Monarchy had always only acted as a European power. The German Empire, but also France and Great Britain, had based their strategies on the extra-European realms of the globe, which was made possible by their maritime presence. As soon as a decision that was crucial for the war imposed itself in the area of global strategy, Austria-Hungary could not make its own contribu- tion. It was tied to German considerations and, ultimately, German decisions, and had to concur with them. As mentioned above, a development reached its conclusion here,