October 24, 1918 
LAND &> WATER 
11 
one and all, from Berlin. The young EJmperor Charles 
visiblj' fretted at times under the Kaiser's over-lordship. 
Now and again rumours were put into circulation from 
neutral countries that the Dual Monarchy would willingly 
get out of the war and make a separate peace with the Allies ; 
and, curiously enough, they sometimes gained credence in 
this country, and even in circles that might have been 
expected to know better. For so long as Germany was not 
prepared to confess herself beaten, Austria-Hungary was 
no longer in a position, an' she would, to shake off the 
German yoke, and as the war aims of the Allies steadily 
expanded towards the liberation of all oppressed nationali- 
ties, the only terms on which she could be granted peace 
were more and mOre clearly such as must shatter the whole 
fabric of the Dual Monarchy. 
By a strange and very appropriate nemesis, whilst it was 
the Russian debacle that enabled the Dual Monarchy to 
prolong its huge game 'of bluff and tempted it at the same 
time to betray by its participation in the iniquitous treaties 
of Brest-Litovsk and Bukarest the full measure of its com- 
:|)licity with German ruthlessness, it was the Russian debacle 
ilso that gave the oppressed nationalities of Austria-Hun- 
^ary their first opportunity to strike an open and resounding 
blow for freedom. But for the appalling chaos produced 
in Russia by Germany's Bolshevist hirelings, it would have 
been almost impossible for the Czecho-Slovak prisoners of 
war to organise themselves'into an independent and effective 
armv which, by its successful action in Siberia and Southern 
Russia, has won its recognition as a belligerent force from 
the Allies, and it would have been scarcely less difficult for 
another remnant of the old Austro-Hungarian armies, the 
Serbo-Croats, to escape in sufficient numbers to reinforce 
substantiaUy the new Serbian contiiigent which has played 
so heroic a part in the recent offensive in the Balkans, and 
thus to lend irresistible weight to the just claims of Jugo- 
slavia for union with liberated Serbia. Nor must one over- 
look the fresh impetus which the Polish movement for com- 
plete emancipation from Austrian and Prussian, as well as 
Russian, domination has derived from these splendid ex- 
amples of Czecho-Slovak and Serbo-Croat effort. The 
weapon forged by the rulers of Austria-Hungary to drill 
their alien peoples jnto subjection has disastrously recoiled 
upon themselves, for it produced at first the military dis- 
integration of their armies, and it is now hastening the political 
dissolution of the Monarchy. 
» 
The Final Revelation 
Not, however, till the abject surrender of Bulgaria and 
the establishment of the Allies' military supremacy in both 
the Western and the Eastern fields of war has the desperate 
plight of the Dual Monarchy stood finally revealed. Whilst 
the northward sweep of the Allied forces through Serbia 
to the Danube, and through Albania towards Bosnia and 
Herzegovina, confronts the Dual Monarchy with new dangers 
. of invasion and severs the vital nerve of its communications 
with Turkey, the dearth of food-stuffs and 'raw materials, 
. aggravated by reckless profiteering and administrative in- 
competency, has attained almost intolerable proportions. 
The moneyed classes in the towns and the big landlords 
in the rural districts laugh to scorn the maximum prices 
fixed by the authorities, whilst starvation drives the poor 
to lawlessness and violence. Corn itself was being sold some 
time ago for sixteen times the price officially allowed. All 
but munition and other protected war industries are at a 
standstill. The rolling stock and the permanent' ways of 
the railroads can barely be patched up to meet the essential 
requirements of military transportation. Ministers have 
confessed to imp<^nc}ing bankruptcy, and the Austrian krone, 
which had sunk at the end of August to over 6o per cent, 
discount in neutral money markets, fetched even in Berlin 
only two-thirds of its nominal value in the depreciated 
■ currency of the German Empire. But whilst hunger has 
provoked bitter recriminations' between class and class, 
between town and country, between the two halves of the 
Monarchy, and even between Austria-Hungary and her 
German ally, the sense of impending catastrophe has now 
■ exalted the hearts of all the subject peopPes, and the censor- 
ship itself has lost the power or the will to suppress the voice 
of open revolt amongst them. The correspondents of German 
papers have reluctantly admitted that in Polish, Czech, and 
Southern Slav provinces something like a general insurrec- 
tion is imminent, and Dr. Kramarsh's Czech "National 
Council" has been adopted as a model by all the other Slav 
nationalities, and even by the Rumanes of Transylvania. 
Popular demonstrations in support of absolute independence 
have taken place in all the principal non-(jerman and non- 
Magyar centres, and notably at Agram and at Laibach and 
at Praz. The panic-stricken riifefS at Vienna and Pesth, 
feeling the ground giving way everywhere under their feet, 
have suddenly professed a death-bed repentance, and declared 
themselves converted to a federal ".solution" on the basis of 
national autonomy. As if there were any " solution " for an 
earthquake ! Dr. Stanck, the Chairman of the Czech Party 
in the Austrian Reichsrath, flung his defiant answer at the 
Prime Minister, von Hussarek. A free Jugo-Slavia, an 
independent Great Poland, and a Czecho-Slovak State are 
already, he said, being born into a new world of law and 
justice, and the front of these three Slav States shall extend 
from the Baltic to the Adriatic. One of the Polish leaders 
followed in the same strain. It is no longer a question of a 
Prussian or an Austrian ' settlement of Polish autonomy. 
The Poles would stand for their full national rights and for 
the union of the three parts, of Poland into one independent . 
and indivisible whole. In Hungary, Count Tisza, the chief 
apostle of the German doctrine of force, has bluntly admitted 
that the Central Powers have lost the war, and must accept 
the consequences. The glib, thin-lipped Burian, the soul- 
less hybrid product of Magyar arrogance and of the Vienna 
Ballplatz diplomacy, has already been swept away with the 
poHshed formulas on which he thought to ride the whirlwind. 
Finally, the Emperor Charles made his surrender in a mani- 
festo promising to "my loyal Austrian peoples" the recon- 
struction of the Monarchy as "a federal State in which each 
race within its national 'domain shall form its own national 
State." 
President Wilson's Reply 
Too late ! Too late by four years, if not by fotu" decades, 
as far as his own "loyal" peoples are concerned. Too late, 
also, as far as the verdict of the Allied Powers is concerned, 
for, by a fateful coincidence, on the very day on which His 
Apostolic Majesty issued that manifesto, President Wilson 
penned his reply to the Austro-Hungarian Peace Note. In 
cold, judicial terms he reminded the Austro-Hungarian 
Government that since the delivery of his address of 
January 8th, with the famous fourteen points, "certain 
events of the utmost importance" had occurred. The United 
States had recognised the Czecho-Slovak National Council 
"as a de facto belligerent Government clothed with proper 
authority to conduct the political and military affairs of 
the Czecho-Slovaks," and it had equally recognised the 
justice of the nationalistic "aspirations of the Jugo-Slavs for 
freedom." The President was therefore "no longer at 
liberty to accept a mere autonomy of these peoples as a 
basis of peace." They themselves "must be the judges of 
what action on the part of the Austro-Hungarian Government 
wijl satisfy their aspirations and their conception of their 
rights and destiny as members of the family of nations." 
This is the doom of the "ramshackle" empire, for we 
know what the judgment of those peoples must necessarily 
be ; and by the time it has been carried into effect under 
the guarantee of the Alhed Powers, there will be nothing 
left of Austria but a German rump which will probably 
gravitate towards whatever form of German State emerges 
from the ruins of the Hohenzollern edifice ; and, even if the 
Hapsburg dynasty survives the cataclysm, Hungary, shorn 
of all its alien fringes, will scarcely care to retain even the 
fragile tie of personal union to which the Magyars already 
threaten to reduce their connection with a diminished and" 
humiliated .Austria, whose malignant influence has been 
equally disastrous to them in false friendship and in open 
enmitv. 
I918 
Over the sullen thunder of the guns 
The earth is shaken by the rhymed tread 
Of countless fresh battahons, and there runs 
A murmur through the ranks of eager deac}, 
Who stir uneasy in their shallow bed. 
Each, to his neighbour whispers'. "Not in 'vain. 
The struggle and the anguish : we have bled, 
Suffered, and died ; but now will burn again, — 
More bright the torch we kindled ! We — the slain, 
The shattered, the unconquered ! In our stead 
Will these, our brothers, hold the reehng line. 
And through long nights our weary watches keep. 
All will be well, and we may now resign 
To them our ward, and turn again to sleep. 
