Page:The Jail, Experiences in 1916.pdf/16

 known our impressions for the purpose of supplying reliable material for the history of these two years. Yes, provisions must be made for our historians.

The frame-work is something like this: At the outbreak of war the late Emperor surrendered a part of his authority as a ruler to the military staff, whose main representatives, in addition to the commander-in-chief, Archduke Friedrich, were Conrad von Hötzendorf, Marshal Metzger and Colonels Slameczka and Gregori. The general staff applied its watchful eye not only to the enemy outside, but, as is of course natural, also to the mischief-makers within. And then was made that tragic error which had far-reaching results. On the erroneous assumption that, when war was declared against the only three foreign Slav states, Austria-Hungary, a group of States with a majority of Slav races, would not meet with assent to, and appropriate enthusiasm for war among its Slav majority,—when war was declared against the only three foreign Slav States, although that majority, as the mobilisation showed, loyally rendered unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, the general staff began to look with mistrust upon the Slav nationalities, later also upon its Italian subjects and later still upon the Roumanians, and blaming the former civilian administration,—it existed only in name, having become the obedient helper of the military authorities during the war,—for lax patriotic training, defectively inculcated Austrianism, tolerated particularism, careless lenience in dynastic and religious affairs, blindness towards all kinds of centrifugal tendencies, it undertook this training itself, and desired to carry it out in the military manner,—quickly and thoroughly. Certainly, one other circumstance was very significant in its eyes. In the German Reichstag, Bethmann-Hollweg made a speech in which he referred to "the reckoning between the Germanic and Slavonic race", a phrase to which