of Bucharest. To this must refer the remark about “the leaning of this lofty personage (William) towards Serbia” in the memorandum handed by Tisza to the Austrian Emperor on July 1st, 1914.[1]
But the rulers of Austria would not be content. They tilted incessantly at the conditions established by the Peace of Bucharest, and at last succeeded in bringing Germany round to their side.
While the two Allies thus shaped the policy which was to end in the world-war, they succeeded most admirably in preluding it not only by alienating the sympathies of the other Governments, but also of the peoples. There were movements towards greater freedom in Croatia and in Bosnia. Austria combated them not merely with a reign of terror, but with prosecutions and with a propaganda which were not only so unscrupulous, but so ineffably stupid in their execution, that she had to submit to have it proved against her (especially in the Friedjung prosecution, 1909) that she was working with forged documents, forged, moreover, in the Austrian Embassy in Belgrade under the ægis of Count Forgach—the same man who in 1914 was to be fatally concerned in the Ultimatum to Serbia, and the unloosing of the world-war. Even worse were the “moral conquests” made in the world by Germany, in the Zabern affair of November, 1913, immediately before the world-war; an affair which showed that in the German Empire the civilian population are outlaws in relation to the military, and that the latter completely dominate the civil Government.
At the close of the previous century, the Dreyfus
affair in France had shown that the French military
- ↑ “Austrian Red Book on the Events that led up to the War,” 1919, I., p. 18.
