10 
LAND 5? WATER 
October 24, 1918 
The Ramshackle Empire: By Sir Valentine Chirol 
Austria Hungary in Fxtremis 
THE great gateway leading into the Burg at 
Mcnna bears a noble inscription : " Justitia 
ftindamentmn regnorum." Have the sins of the 
rulers ever turned a prouder motto to more 
bitter derision? The old "ramshackle" Empire 
of the Hapsburgs — to borrow the picturesque description 
applied to it by Mr. Lloyd George in one of his earliest war 
speeches — is groaning and cre.iking and cracking at every . 
joint. Its very existence has been for generations past a 
flagrant denial of all the laws of justice which are truly the 
only sure foundation of kingdoms. For half a century after 
the Treaty of Vienna set it on its feet again, it flouted the 
laws of justice not only in Italy, where the very word Austrian 
became a curse, but even in the old Germanic confederacy, 
where its feeble primacy was rooted in obscurantism and 
reaction. Driven out of Italy by the wars of 1859 and 
1866, and ignoryiniously ejected from the Germanic con- 
federacy by the rising power of Prussia, it continued with 
the same incorrigible blindness to ride roughshod over the 
Slav and other alien peoples within and beyond its frontiers 
to whose subjection it turned for compensation for all that 
it had lost elsewhere. And, strangely and most lamentably, 
in this new orientation of her policy towards tfie East, 
Austria found willing partners and accomplices in the Magyars, 
who but a few years before had won the sympathy and 
admiration of the Western nations by their gallant uprising 
against Austrian tyranny. The, tlual Monarchy which 
emerged from the Austro- Hungarian Settlement of 1867, 
was based upon an unwritten compact to maintain German 
ascendancy in Austria and Magyar ascendancy in Hungary. 
The Magyars, indeed, soon began to dominate Austria, and 
it was under the influence of Magyar statesmen, such as 
Count Andrassy, the author of the Dual Alliance with the 
German Empire, that Vienna finally turned its cheek to 
the Prussian smiter, and the Dual Monarchy, swallowing 
the bait of territorial aggrandisement in Eastern Europe, 
gradually adapted itself to the part for which it was ulti- 
mately cast in William II. 's scheme of German world- 
dominion as the steam-plough which he required to break up 
the Balkan States that blocked his way to his Turkish 
"bridge-head." 
Tne annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovira in 1908 and' the 
simultaneous proclamation of p-erdinand as independent 
Tsar of the Bulgarians were stages in - the joint 
operation for "pinching out" the little kingdom of Serbia, 
who had the audacity to play in the Balkan Peninsula a 
part analogous to that which the little kingdom of Piedmont 
had played in the old days in Italy, and to become the rally- 
ing point of Slav nationalism and Slav liberty against German- 
Austrian and Magyar ascendancy. But, after the total 
miscarriage of Germanic policy in the two Balkan wars of 
1912 and 1913, which resulted, the first in the defeat of 
Turkej', and the second in the consolidation of Serbia's 
position athwart the Kaiser's road to world-dominion, it 
' had to be admitted in Vienna and in Pesth, as well as in 
Berlin, that Serbia was not to be "pinched out," but must 
therefore, once and for all' be crushed out of existence. Once 
more it was a Magyar, Count Tisza, who, in collusion with 
Berlin, loaded the dice and flung at Serbia the Austro-Hun- 
garian ultimatum bv which Germany's "brilliant second" 
brought her mailed fist into play "according to plan." 
The HapsburgI Gamble 
Yet for the Dual Monarchy, even more than for Germany, 
it .was a desperate gamble. Save for her Polish provinces 
and Alsace-Lorraine, Gei;many was a homogeneous whole, 
and the German nation, drilled, disciplined, and educated 
for a whole generation at least to the great adventure, stood 
as one man behind the Hohenzollern war-lord. In the Dual 
Monarchy, on the contrar\-, the gamesters of Vienna and 
Pe.sth, though in control of the rickety machinery of govern- 
ment, had behind them only a minority of the peoples whom 
they ruled, but even in peace time could scarcely be said to 
govern. According to their own official statistics, both the 
German element in Austria and the Magyar element in 
Hungary were numerically, no doubt, considerably superior 
to any one of the half-dozen other nationalities over which 
they respectively lorded it in either half of the Monarchy ; 
but the roughly ten million Germans of Austria were in an 
even more marked minority to the Slav races, Czechs, Slovaks, 
Poles, Ruthenians, Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs, who, to the 
number of altogether seventeen millions, without mentioning 
three-quarters of a million of Italians, formed the bulk of 
the population of every province outside Upper and Lower 
Austria and the Tyrol, than the ten million Magyars of 
Hungary were to the non-Magyar populations under the 
Crown of St. Stephen. For, if there were two million Slovaks 
and three and a half million other Slavs, Croats, Serbs, and 
Ruthenians, and three million Rumanes, all united at least in 
common hostility' to Magyar. ascendancy, there were also a 
couple of million Germans scattered about Hungary, who held, 
not, indeed, from love, but from community of interests, with 
the Magyars. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, which were not 
annexed either to Austria or to Hungary, but placed \mdcr 
the direct sovereignty of the House of Hapsburg, the whole 
population, estimated at two millions, was Serbo-Croat, 
though the large Mohammedan element, amounting to over 
600,000, whilst it resented the severance of its lost political 
ties with Constantinople, was naturally less disposed to be 
drawn into any Slav national movement. 
Add to all these discordant elements the latent rivalry 
and antagonism which the compact of 1867 had only super- 
ficially composed between Vienna and Pesth, and which, 
whenever they threatened to break out afresh, had almost 
invariably to be mitigated by further concessions to the 
predomhiant Magyar partner at the expense of Austria. 
Even during the years of external peace, the Dual Monarchy 
had never known any long respite from internal friction. 
The Diet of Croatia and Slavonia had often given Hungary 
just as much trouble as the feuds between Czechs and Ger- 
mans in Bohemia had given Austria, and, since 1908 especi- 
alh', the Serb population under Hapsburg rule had made no 
secret of its hopes for ultimate reunion with its brethren of 
the Serbian kingdom. A fabric which could barely stand 
the strain of all the disintegrating forces at \york even in 
peace time was not likely to stand the tremendous strain of 
war. A frischer unci frohlicher Krieg such as William II. 
promised his dupes might have helped for the time being to 
rivet German and Magyar domination on the various recal- 
citrant nationalities of the Dual Monarchy. But for the 
Austro-Hungarian armies the war proved from the very 
outset anything but easy and merry. Even the Serbian 
David more than held his own for a whole year against the 
Austro-Hungarian Goliath, who had boasted of an "execu- 
tion," and had never dreamt of any real resistance from his 
puny and despised antagonist. In Galicia, against the 
Russians, disaster followed upon disaster. It was, in fact, 
in its armies that the dry-rot first showed itself, which has 
since then spread to the very vitals of the Dual Monarchy. 
The strong cohesive force of military discipline might have 
carried them through a short and brilliantly successful cam- 
paign. But as soon as the issue become doubtful the spiritual 
forces embodied in national sentiment broke the bonds of 
mere mechanical discipline. Why should Poles and Czechs, 
Croats and Slovaks, Italians and Rumanes, squander their 
lives in fighting for Austrian and Magyar taskmasters ? 
The wholesale arrests and deportations and shootings of 
influential nationalist leaders by the Austrian and Magyar 
authorities in every centre of potential rebellion merely 
served to quicken the heart-searchings of the troops at the 
front, and the result soon became visible in the large sur- 
renders to the Russians, and even to the Serbians, in the 
first stages of the war — with political consequences later on 
which then could hardly be foreseen. 
Whilst the final outcome of the war seemed often to be 
still hanging in the balance, and the Germanic Powers could 
point triumphantly to' the European war-map. East and 
West, as the pledge of assured victory, the Dual Monarchy 
succeeded in keeping up appearances. Internal conditions 
were known to be growing steadily worse under the pressure 
of our blockade — far worse even than in Germany, as was, 
indeed, inevitable with such a far less efficient administration. 
Disaffection was known to be rife, though we only heard 
faint echoes of the drastic measures of repression which it 
provoked. The stability of the army had been to some 
extent restored, though only by the humiliating surrender of 
the highsr commands into Prussian hands and the stiffening 
of the Austro-Hungarian forces in the field by the loan of 
Prussian divisions. New Prime Ministers and Foreign 
Ministers flitted from time to time across the stage, but 
they were mere marionettes of no importance, wire-pulled, 
