Seite - 776 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

776 The Pyrrhic Victory : The Breakthrough Battle of Flitsch-Tolmein Karl informed that he would rather forfeit the alliance with Austria than Liège. He would also be prepared to continue the war against the will of the German people for the sake of retaining Liège.1813 The German plenipotentiary at the Imperial and Royal Army High Command, Cramon, had something else to add. He was to demand of the Chief of the Austro-Hungarian General Staff, General Arz, to provide written assurance to Ludendorff that the Danube Monarchy identified itself with the German war aims ; otherwise, the German Empire would refuse to support Austria-Hungary in the offensive that was already being planned against Italy. This was blatant blackmail. However, General Cramon only told Emperor Karl half the truth just as he, conversely, forwarded the Austrian response to Berlin in a more palliative form. In this way, the affair was set to one side. However, aversion and suspicion remained on both sides. Czernin, who had predicted in a memorandum in April 1917 that the Monarchy would meet its end in the autumn of the same year, had lost credibility to the extent that the Monarchy, as could be seen, had not come to an end during the autumn of 1917, that there were still enough soldiers to continue to wage the war, that the output of the armaments industry was sufficient to produce the weapons needed, and that there was just enough to eat to ensure that most of the population would survive. And there was one thing more : there was also just enough hope left in order to continue fighting the war. Finally, there was also a curious coalition of proponents of the war : those who were interested in the survival of the Monarchy, and who regarded the continuation of the war as the only possibility of ensuring this survival, had found new allies in the form of the radical representatives of the national groups. The radical nationalists had to assume, after all, that only the continuation of the war until victory was won by the Entente would so weaken the Habsburg Monarchy that it would no longer be able to prevent the internal process of dissolution. When it came to the issue of the war, therefore, the aims of those such as Kramář and Arz, Beneš and Czernin were by all means identical. The upward and downward swings of mood were also reflected by Masaryk : if there were signs that peace talks might take place, or if Emperor Karl took a spectacular step towards conciliation among the nationalities, Masaryk and the political émigrés in Great Britain, France, Italy, the USA and Russia became alarmed. When the war continued, and the attempts failed to initiate negotiations on the possible exit by the Monarchy from the war, or even on a general peace, and the war regime was again tightened in Austria-Hungary, this conformed entirely to the long-term goals of the émigrés. They needed the war, and it was of almost no importance to them how the events of the war unfolded in detail, as long as the battles could be continued somehow and resulted in the unstoppable weakening of Austria-Hungary. Sometimes, however, one might think that history was following the narrative pat- tern of Gustav Freytag. When the action appears to have long passed its culmination