To begin with, the Austrian is a willing and hard working individual, and since industry is the blessing of men, this excellent characteristic has preserved him from downfall. But the Austrian has none of that assiduity which makes the German apply himself with the sole object of making money. No, money-making is the last aim of the Austrian. He has far too much of the artist’s temperament, he works for the work’s sake and possesses the big, generous heart of the true artist. (Countess Landi)
Everything in our almost thousand-year-old Austrian Monarchy seemed based on permanency, and the state itself was the chief guarantor of this stability. The rights which it granted to its citizens were duly confirmed by parliament, the freely elected representatives of the people, and every duty was exactly prescribed ... (Stefan Zweig)
In Dino Buzzati’s 1940 novel The Tartar Steppe,1 the hero Drogo is an officer assigned to a vast decaying fortress on the edge of a nameless desert, the void of anarchy which stretches limitlessly eastwards. This great crumbling bulwark is manned by a forgotten garrison whose whole existence is spent waiting for the barbarian horde to emerge. The themes of the book and the 1976 film adaptation Desert of the Tartars2 are those of the need to serve and desperate yearning for the balm of glory. Alfred Redl has something of this character in him, the need to belong to a particular caste – the officer caste which elevates a man from the ordinary, a civilian into the elite, the brotherhood of arms, a badge of gentility.
Yet Drogo gains nothing from his long vigil, other than a creeping unnamed malady that seems to emanate from the very stones and, when the attack finally comes, he is too ill to stand on the ramparts. Behind the sandstone bulk of the castle, life in the garrison town continues as a civilised norm. This scenario could be an analogy for the last half century of the Austro-Hungarian army, the ragged banners of six centuries of tradition finally being engulfed by the rising certainty of industrial war; a new breed of conflict that turns battle into a firestorm from which none of the old certainties will ever emerge.
Alfred Redl was born on 14 March 1864, three years before the creation of the Dual Monarchy and at a time when Prussia, the new leader of Germany, was already flexing her formidable might against the unprepared Danes. Austria’s nemesis as the dominant force in the Teutonic world came not out of the anonymous steppe but from Bismarck in Berlin. Alfred’s family lived in the ancient fortress city of Lemberg.3 The ‘City of the Lion’ stands in western Ukraine, formerly the capital of the largely forgotten and wonderfully archaic Kingdom of Ruthenia. In 1339 this was subsumed into the rising Polish state, the regional capital of the Ruthenian Voivodeship.4 It was not until 1772, when Poland was sliced apart, that it came into Habsburg hands, becoming the administrative centre of Galicia and Lodomeria.
Lemberg had been an economic and cultural centre for 650 years when Franz Redl moved his family there. Theirs was not a prosperous existence. Franz worked as an Expeditor second class,5 a minor logistics role for his employer, the Carl Ludwig Railway. For this he received a woollen uniform and 700 gulden a year in wages,6 a modest salary for a man with numerous mouths to feed. Despite such a humble post in a distant provincial city, Franz Redl had once been an officer and had served for eleven years as a lieutenant. In the Great War, British territorial officers who served on the Western Front, the ‘Saturday Night Soldiers’ of pre-war derision, would gain the dubious status of ‘temporary gentlemen’; officers during hostilities but with a drop in social standing on their return to Civvy Street.
The army whilst always prestigious was made up of a complex layer cake of hierarchies (see Chapter 4). The cavalry formed the cream and it was said that an aspiring cadet would have to show he’d sixteen generations of gentry ancestors behind him before he stood a chance of selection and even here nobility were distinguished from mere gentry. Franz wasn’t quite a gentleman. He was lower middle class and thus consigned to the infantry where social strata were less rigidly interpreted.
His service marched in time with the glories of Radetzky and he’d left before the blood-garnished humbling of the battles of Magenta and Solferino. Austrian society, like most, established a clear fault line between the soldier and the civilian, der Civilist. Traditionally, the man in uniform was always a cut above and an eligible groom for aspiring young women. And that proved to be the problem. An officer could not marry unless his prospective father-in-law could deposit the necessary funds as a dowry or Kaution. For a junior lieutenant the price of nuptials came rather high and in Franz’s case, it seems his wife Mathilde’s father simply couldn’t come up with the cash.
So Franz had stopped being a gentleman and become a state employee, working for the railroad on 500 gulden per annum. After seven years of marriage and now with four children to feed, he was only 200 gulden a year better off. When the Carl Ludwig Company, a private consortium, came along with a better offer, he couldn’t afford to refuse. For the following five years he and his family moved around Galicia as the company dictated before being finally posted on a more permanent basis to Lemberg.
It might not be Vienna, indeed it was very far from the imperial heartland, a chunk of what had been Poland ruthlessly carved up nearly a century beforehand. The city lies nearly 160 km from the eastern Carpathians, the mountain barrier that separates heartlands from frontier. Yet it wasn’t as though Lemberg (the German spelling) had done badly out of the annexation, quite the opposite, the place had boomed.
The old, medieval core clustered around the base of the castle mound by the banks of the River Poltva, the conduit for trade and growth, had at the time of the acquisition a population of no more than 30,000. By the time Alfred was born this had increased at least sixfold. Bureaucracy creates jobs and the Habsburgs certainly did bureaucracy. Increasingly, the ancient eastern character of the old town was subsumed beneath a gloss of Austrian baroque: opulent squares and a rash of coffee houses, influences which survive today throughout Galicia. Visitors to the beautiful and vast plaza which is Krakow’s historic square can be forgiven for thinking they’re in Vienna or Budapest.
The upheavals of 1848 had, at least in part, halted the enforced Germanisation of Galicia, Ukrainian and Polish were again admitted as the languages of academia and culture. Lemberg was the first imperial city to be illuminated by kerosene street lighting in 1853 and the advent of the Dual Monarchy led to a steadily increasing degree of liberalism and autonomy. The Poles and their votes were needed to balance the Magyar influence so the local authority or Sejm was relatively pampered. This cultural mix was extremely vibrant. Both the opera and ballet houses were built, in florid Viennese style, statements of confidence and artistic expression. Some of the glory that was Vienna travelled out to the provinces and mingled easily with the native style. Probably nobody thought then it might end and that the day may not be that far off. Habsburg rule, even if it was a form of tyranny, was enforced with a lighter touch. After 1914 and the vicissitudes of total war, far worse would follow.
Traditionally, the city housed a substantial Jewish community who comprised some 28 per cent of the population. A majority, just over half, were Catholic. Polish was the dominant language with only 11 per cent speaking Ukrainian. Despite the Habsburg/German dominance and regardless of the sops to national and local identity, Polish nationalism was far from quiescent. Such future lions as Pilsudski,7 Sikorski8 and Sosnkowski9 were, by the early twentieth century, organising Polish paramilitaries. Yet, at the same time Lemberg was a focal point for the Ukrainians. A number of distinguished and popular authors were published there, cultural institutions and groups flourished. Poles and Ukrainians rubbed along with the Jews whose own individual culture was equally lively. Lemberg was a world-class centre for studies of Yiddish and the Lemberger Togblat was the world’s first daily paper printed in the language.
Alfred Redl was born into this cosmopolitan goulash. His family were Austro-Hungarian and his father’s past service offered some level of kudos above the mundane role he now played. The family was poor but they were not paupers. Franz had a secure job and working for the railways had at least some minor cachet. Mathilde seems to have been from Magyar stock, which after 1867 implied a greater level of equality. They were not impoverished gentry; merely impoverished, they lacked position and connection. Life wasn’t desperate but it was without variety, spice or aspiration. For a young man seeking all of these, it had little going for it.
Provincial Lemberg might be doing very well, yet the contrast between those who had position and wealth, many drawn from the old Polish gentry classes, and those who didn’t would be galling to many and perhaps especially to a boy born with wit and ambition.
The Imperial Governor at the time [1869] was Count Goluschowski. He was very rich and felt himself more an Imperial Satrap than Governor – more an assistant king than a high official. Under such auspices the Polish influence became strongly dominant and the German upper-class society as well as the Ruthenian lower-class society was soon completely pushed to the side.10
Despite a persistent undercurrent of nationalism and echoes of anti-Semitism always just beneath the surface, Lemberg was not necessarily the brooding hotbed of conspiracy and discontent that Robert Asprey suggests. For all its contradictions and its many defeats, the Empire appeared to offer permanence. Lemberg might be provincial but it was far from parochial or insular: the arts flourished. What guided Alfred’s childhood was near poverty. He was the fourth of nine children and even though Franz’s wages had gone up to 2,400 gulden, that was a lot of clamouring mouths.11
Like all of his contemporaries, the young Alfred Redl would attend his local Volksschule (literally, ‘people’s school’). This form of combined primary and early stage secondary education was compulsory for all, a long-established German tradition, going back certainly as far as the seventeenth century.12 He was clearly quickwitted and perhaps his daily journey to school past those florid baroque facades of the city’s busy centre fuelled that steel core of ambition which would drive him so relentlessly.
If you or your family weren’t affluent, provincial life was pretty mundane. Summer trips to the hills, mass on Sundays. Robert Asprey suggests that he escaped from the dullness of his overcrowded home life by developing an early sense of dream-fuelled aspiration and that he hid his quickness behind a mask of dull conformity. This may be true, perhaps even likely, but he was certainly quick at school and could take refuge from the teeming, tedious warren of home in fanciful dreams. Whether he regularly fantasised about an opulent, upper middle class lifestyle, one with servants and crystal and carriages, we cannot ever say but it’s by no means impossible. His later fondness for ostentation would certainly suggest that he did.
There was one glimmer, a potent flicker in the drab greyness. Every year Franz took Alfred and his brother Heinrich to watch the annual military manoeuvres. Now here was colour, the dazzling uniforms, officers’ heavy with braid, venerable shot-torn banners that resonated with echoes of Napoleonic glory. Despite their reduced circumstances, the middle-aged Franz, ground down, shabby, insignificant, was still a part of this, some shreds of distant chivalry still clung to his lumpen worker’s outfit, a reminder to Alfred that his father, however temporarily, had been a gentleman. This was the escape route.
At the age of 55, Franz Redl escaped the monotony of his postgentlemanly life. He died of purely natural causes, worn down by the treadmill – although some papers would later claim that he committed suicide. To what extent Alfred was affected by his father’s death we can’t really say. They do not appear to have been close. Perhaps it did affect him to the extent he wanted something better, not the lifedraining monotony of material failure. Franz left his grieving widow and all of his many children to exist on a modest widow’s pension. The railway company did provide – the family weren’t destitute but their poverty just got worse. Whatever modest savings Franz and Mathilde had amassed were gobbled up by funeral expenses. By now there were ten children under 18 and living at home. For Alfred, no escape route had opened up as he moved to secondary or Realschule (usually for ages 11–16/17).
For three years he attended, studied hard, impressed his teachers, chafing at the domestic dominance of bossy older sisters who seemed to rule the household, Ernestine, Helena and Ottilia. In 1877, older sibling Oskar escaped the provincial blues by getting into cadet school. Two years later Alfred followed the same route, even though he was only 14. The entrance exams proved no great hurdle and he got into Karthaus Cadet School situated in his home town in the autumn of 1879. As his father had previously served, there were no fees to pay. His life was about to change.
The military academy is simply an educational establishment dedicated to preparing students for service in their country’s armed forces. The trend had developed during the Age of Reason and it had been Empress Maria Theresa who had established the first such school in 1751. Her Theresan Military Academy is a world-class institution to this day. Frederick the Great and Napoleon had elevated the art of war to a more precise science. Officers in mass armies needed to know their business, rather than muddle through as more or less dedicated amateurs with a family history behind them.
Military schools have perhaps not enjoyed a good press. Maedchen in Uniform, a 1931 screen version of Christa Winsloe’s play portrays the female equivalent in a most unflattering light, Do-the-Boys’ Hall in uniform. Alfred Redl, on the other hand, had no complaints. Wearing uniforms, all cut from the same anonymous broad-cloth, is a great leveller. If the kit doesn’t yet make you a gentleman, it marks you immediately out from the non-uniformed civilian. An elite tradition follows you, trailing clouds of glory, echoes of Thermopylae and Roncesvalles. For him Karthaus was never a prison, more a seminary, where the initiates strove to become worthy. His father had been an officer and that was sufficient cachet for the moment.
Alfred had always been a keen student, the apt pupil hungry for the salve of praise. A military curriculum suited him; there was precision, the mathematics of war, use of ground, calculating ranges, lines of sight and of fire. The army of Austria-Hungary had suffered some telling defeats but it proved both resilient and capable of changing. It was an exciting time. Austria was not the only nation learning how to live with humiliation. France had experienced far worse in 1870–1, her armies humbled and passed beneath the Prussian yoke, Paris besieged, Alsace and Lorraine stripped and appropriated by the conquerors. As a loser you need to learn, only the victor can rest, probably only briefly, on his amassed laurels.
Germany and the Kaiser’s General Staff system provided the new benchmark. Bismarck and von Moltke had revolutionised war in the same way Frederick had done a century earlier. Germany’s military might was fuelled by a rapidly expanding manufacturing economy which was growing at a rate that could challenge the world’s only superpower – the British Empire. Britain at this time was friendly towards Germany. Bashing the French was not something that would ever offend the English. The rich travelled and holidayed on the Rhine, drank Mosel and read Goethe. It would take Kaiser Wilhelm’s bullin-a-china-shop diplomacy to change all that.
Wars of the eighteenth century, the days of Frederick and Maria Theresa, were generally directed by an inner political circle within the framework of the emerging state. In German these wars, often dynastic, are described, aptly, as Kabinettskriege or ‘Cabinet Wars’. These were fought by mainly professional soldiers with limited strategic objectives and, in theory at least, a degree of restraint.13
The growth of nationalism in the later eighteenth century and the lessons of the American War of Independence favoured the rise of mass citizen armies. Although, in terms of loss of life, the long era of Napoleonic conflict (1792–1815) was less bloody than the Thirty Years War (1618–48),14 the social, political and military changes were much more far-reaching. It was the French Revolutionary minister of war the brilliant Lazare Carnot who first introduced the notion of mass conscription – ‘service in the army as part of the patriotic obligations of citizenship, coupled with an attempt to organise the whole of French society for war at the service of the state’.15
This new warfare found little time for restraint; French armies, encouraged to live off the land, stripped countries bare like a biblical plague and showed little mercy towards subject populations. These armies were commanded by a new breed – Napoleon’s marshals were often men of humble beginnings. The need for larger armies with ever more complex logistical needs created opportunities for hungry and ambitious young men like Alfred Redl. Fighting was no longer the sole province of patricians.
Although he would never be tall, never quite meet the cavalier image of the officer class, Alfred was a tryer. He was quick and he was fit. He could master gymnastics and fencing. Though the sword was long obsolete as a weapon, the mystique of cold steel held good. To be competent with épée and sabre was rather more useful than being a good shot. Anyway, most officers from gentry backgrounds would hunt and thus learn to handle firearms. Most would have scrapped with blades from an early age. It was all new to Alfred but he embraced the culture with gusto. The sword was the badge of rank; officers still carried them (as they do at passing out and ceremonial parades today). Alfred needed to be an officer.
Writing just on the cusp of industrial warfare, Clausewitz in his magisterial work On War spelled out the ground rules for the nation wanting to embark on a successful interstate war. He referred to this as his ‘trinity’: the executive who decided policy, the military who put it into effect and the people in general whose taxes would be paying for the war and whose sons might be expected to put on uniform. His lodestar was the concept of ‘primacy of policy’ – war could only be successful if the outcome was dictated by a realisable and sustainable political objective.
Alfred Redl was, in many ways, the perfect tool for the age of Clausewitz, the professional and highly focused officer, driven by the need to impress and to excel, someone who had something to prove rather than a status he’d inherited. In fact, he’d arrived just at the right time. Clausewitz didn’t specifically include this but military intelligence was another essential prop. You needed to know what the other fellow was up to. This demanded a very skilled breed of officer, those who were good at it were very few and far apart. Alfred would become the best.
Industry changed the face of war. From the 1840s, railways played an increasingly vital role. Until then, the army moved only as fast as the infantryman could march and the cavalryman could ride. Logistical tails stretched back for miles, vulnerable, unwieldy and unreliable. In 1859, Napoleon III’s army relied on trains, moving troops at undreamed of speeds into Northern Italy. Von Moltke’s whole blitzkrieg against Austria seven years later was predicated on the strategic use of railways. The outcome led to a whole generation of military planners working on how best to use the tracks. By 1914 Germany had over 40,000 miles of it; national railways were laid out as much for military as civilian use.16
Although all armies would remain heavily dependent on horsepower until the outbreak of the Great War and indeed up till 1939, motor vehicles became increasingly common after the end of the nineteenth century. Alfred Redl would cause quite a stir when he acquired a sleek and very fashionable automobile. Balloons had been used for observation during earlier wars but the advent of the aircraft would be another game-changer. Armies of the First World War would be badly hampered by lack of short wave radios but communications generally, not just for war itself but as tools in the wider game of espionage, also underwent a revolution during the second half of the nineteenth century. Samuel Morse had perfected his ‘Morse Code’ in 1837. By 1901 wireless telegraph could send signals across the Atlantic.
Industry didn’t just revolutionise the movement of armies or their supply chain. The humble tin can now meant food could be stored for very long periods, avoiding seasonal campaigning. At the same time population levels in the sprawling, insanitary warrens of the great industrial cities grew dramatically. Through the course of the nineteenth century, the peoples of Europe multiplied four-fold. Mass armies need large numbers of recruits, these were now to hand. Getting them into uniform, equipped, mustered, officered, trained and supplied was a major business undertaking in itself
During the war of 1866, Prussia demonstrated that she’d moved on from basic wartime conscription, the mass levy of Bonaparte’s day, to a far more sophisticated method of harnessing the nation’s youth. Prussia maintained a system of peacetime conscription. Most young men, if physically fit enough, would serve for a couple of years beneath the colours before getting back into civvies. Even then they remained liable for the reserves and a decade’s worth of those reserves would be mobilised for war. For the conflict of 1870–1, Prussia was able to field a million soldiers. Nothing on this scale had ever been seen before. A new age needs new men, the rise of a meritocracy, ‘temporary gentlemen’, would be much in demand and, through hard work and demonstrable zeal, could rise far higher than before.
So the art of war was now an industry and industries need managers. This meant the creation of a highly professional, thoroughly trained and forward-looking General Staff. Their job was to oversee the mobilisation, concentration and supply of the new armies. The battlefield was becoming dominated by firepower. Getting your forces where they needed to be to deliver the firepower at their disposal was becoming key.17
Germany led the way, Austria was bound to follow and Alfred Redl intended to be the perfect candidate for this new elite. This was the dazzling prospect history had thrown up. Alfred had neither the lineage nor the means to posture as a beau sabreur of the old school; he would have been found out, marked as a fraudster. The new army of mass conscription with a byzantine administrative and technical General Staff at its core was just the stage this actor required. His performance would be sublime.
He would be an officer. His father had attained the status but failed miserably to capitalise on it; Alfred wouldn’t make the same mistake. He was only partly a dreamer, underpinning his hopes was a wide enough streak of ruthless pragmatism and unbridled ambition. For him, the officer corps was the surest route to success. As his father had served, the door was partly open. He could never aspire to an elite cavalry regiment but the infantry was less exclusive.
Besides, there was something about being an officer. The beautifully cut uniforms flaunted their elite wearers, the chasm between soldier and civilian. The Empire had over six hundred years of warrior tradition. An officer could claim cultural and social descent from Hector and Achilles, through the medieval knights of romantic legend, those glorious winged hussars who had seen of the might of the Ottoman hordes before the gates of Vienna. Alfred craved show, he loved to stand out. He yearned to wear the soft doeskin of an officer’s tunic, rather than the patched and darned remnants and handme-downs of his childhood. An officer had automatic respect, he was someone.
Rags of glory have clung to officer status since the Plains of Troy, even in the cynical, post-imperial austerity of the present century:
Sandhurst had an air of grandeur about it, a certain elegance and even, beyond the shouting and marching, a certain gentility to its stables and polo pitches and black-and-white photographs of back in the day when cadets sporting preposterous moustaches practised bicycle drill.18
As well as establishing a clear position in society where inherited wealth, landed or business interest need not be essential, an officer’s lifestyle was also his own business. Quite where his resources came from above the fairly meagre salary he might expect wouldn’t necessarily excite much comment. If he was discreet, his private life might also be his own affair.
At cadet school Redl strives single-mindedly towards gaining officer status, living a dedicated almost monkish existence like an initiate of one of the knightly orders from the Crusades. Robert Asprey injects some highly speculative comments on the nature of Alfred’s homosexuality at this point. Whilst institutions like Karthaus are natural hotbeds for sexual activity, it cannot be said for definite that Alfred necessarily enjoyed his first liaisons here. It may be he did but clearly this was not something that could ever be discussed openly. Homosexual activity was condemned by church and society so inevitably carried out in the shadows. The army was well aware of such occurrences and not necessarily disapproving. Most senior officers realised that their youthful charges required sexual outlets and slaking their desires with each other certainly reduced the high incidence of venereal disease that came in large doses via the brothels.
The fact that he contracted syphilis in 1891 clearly proves that he had sufficient energy for sex of one kind or another though. The illness forced him to take considerable time off school. Still, his track record in academic and sporting studies remained impeccable. After four years hard slog he graduated in 1883, his final assessment came up as ‘very good’ – not quite excellent but pretty near. He’d already signed up for the regulars over a year before and committed to additional stints in the reserve and home guard echelons. His bounty was 3 gulden, hardly a king’s ransom but deemed sufficient for the recruit to buy the basics – a custom that dated back to the Thirty Years War.19 From then on till he graduated, he was paid the footslogger’s meagre rate of 6 kreuzer per day. Having passed out from Karthaus, he was promoted to acting NCO and assigned to the 9th Infantry based in Lemberg.
Robert Asprey interprets Redl’s character in a Manichaean, dualist way: ‘His evil was forever present in his thoughts. It provided the challenge that his surface existence had to meet. It formed the essence of the life-game that he had to win in order to survive.’20 This is both simplistic and overly censorious. Alfred Redl was not inherently evil. The consequences of his treachery brought evil upon his nation but to him this was not the intended result. He was reckless of consequences rather than calculating. He was the hub of his own world. His life was his own supreme artistic creation. He was an actor and the murky world of spies and espionage was the absolutely perfect stage.
He was born in Poland but was not Polish. The child of economic migrants might adopt the nationality of domicile but the children of occupiers do not choose, as a rule, to identify with the helots. It is unlikely that any son or daughter of Roman parents born along the length of Hadrian’s Wall ever thought of him or herself as one of the despised locals, Britunculi. Even where one parent was native, the result was defined by Roman citizenship. Franz and Mathilde as Austrian and Magyar, despite their circumstances, undoubtedly thought of themselves as a significant cut above native Poles or Ukrainians.
Redl would, as an adult, live a parallel existence, not fully in the sense of Descartes, Leibniz or even Jung but his absolute dedication to building the Potemkin village of his life almost precluded the intrusion of reality. He was not only the actor, he was the impresario who built or certainly ingeniously extended the stage he strutted. And he did strut, gleaming, impeccable, inscrutable, known but not known, a generous host, dedicated colleague, one who lived with dash and style and whose means were never seriously questioned.
Perhaps in no time previously could he have hoped to have succeeded. It was the nature of emerging industrial war, the scale and anonymity which provided the base. Alfred consistently worked without respite to master his profession, to shine, to come to the notice of his superiors and to earn good reviews. An actor cannot play to an empty house. His hunger for plaudits craves an audience, one that is prepared readily to applaud and perhaps not look too closely at the props. From his days at school, Alfred liked to earn the praise of his teachers. He needed it, this was fuel and proof the show was working.
By attaining his much coveted position within the General Staff he overcame the lack of blue blood in a single bound. The General Staff formed the ultimate inner circle of the new meritocracy. In 1904, they were no more than four hundred strong out of an officer corps strength of 28,000.21 As Wellington would have remarked, ‘a clique within a caste’.22 This elevated Redl from mere actor to ‘A’ list celebrity. Nobody would question him, nobody could scrutinise him. He was above the normal hubbub and intimacies of the traditional mess. He could open doors and then close them behind him, leaving nothing but good opinions.
Like all good fantasy, much was built on solid foundations. He was gifted and bright. He worked unceasingly and showed great intuition. His work in developing the role of military intelligence was revolutionary. His treachery was so well concealed behind a rampart of lies that he escaped detection for as long as he did. It wasn’t just success, the constant applause that he sought; he needed the lifestyle to go with it.
Alfred’s timing was right not just in terms of the expansion of a professional officer corps but also, even at this twilight stage, in terms of expansion of Empire. This was the age of the ‘Scramble for Africa’ – Britain, France, Belgium and even Germany, the latecomer, were painting vast national canvases in Africa but not the Dual Monarchy. Her attentions were focused closer to home. Austria bestrode the east– west axis in Europe, partly she faced towards Germany and France but equally she looked east over and towards the Balkans. From the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Sublime Porte had been the major power in the region, the ancient kingdoms of Serbia and Bulgaria had been swallowed up. By the latter part of the nineteenth century, the Turkish grip had weakened to the point of senility. Bulgaria and Serbia had reasserted themselves as independent Slavic states. Common blood didn’t make them friends.
The Russian bear had spread its very sharp claws across Central Asia and now the Tsar saw himself as the natural patriarch of a pan-Slavic brotherhood of lesser nations. This was not to Franz Joseph’s liking but after 1905 Russia encountered plenty problems of her own. Defeat at the hands of Japan and internal unrest were more than minor difficulties. There was, for Austria, also the problem of Italy. Nationhood had come at a price for the Empire, stripped of the twin jewels of Lombardy and Venetia. On paper, Italy, Austria and Germany formed the Triple Alliance. Though continually renewed after 1882, this outward show of amity did not decrease suspicion. Italy coveted Trentino and Istria and looked greedily across the Adriatic towards Albania. Her own attempt at African conquest in Ethiopia had ended in humiliation at Adowa. Conrad von Hoetzendorf, the brilliant and bullish commander-in-chief of Austrian armies, was all for preemptive strikes against both Italy and Serbia.
Having collided in such a disastrous and bruising war with Japan, Russia, weakened and humiliated, began to contract her ambitions and focus back towards the Balkans. It was only in 1878 that the last Turkish garrisons left Serbia, though she’d been semi-autonomous for decades before. It was the Russian victory over the tottering Ottoman state that won full independence for Serbia. Yet at the outset and for quarter of a century Belgrade looked more towards Vienna than St Petersburg. The disparate and rival mafias which struggled for dominance in Serbia hoped to recover both Macedonia and Albania. Aside from murdering each other, they fixed their general enmity on Bulgaria, itself a client of the Tsar.
Even as late as 1897, Vienna and St Petersburg seemed to be in accord. Both powers agreed to consult over the Balkans and not to go land-grabbing unilaterally – Austria did reserve the right to occupy Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Sanjak of Novibazar.23 This rapprochement effectively barred the path to any single Balkan state becoming powerful enough to dominate the region. It couldn’t last however because the wider battle lines were already being drawn. Germany and Austria, nominally with Italy, were in opposition to France and Russia. Britain was uneasily neutral but ‘Kaiser Bill’, with his crass championing of the Boers and his rash starting of a naval arms race, alienated Britain and opened the door for the Entente of 1904.
Of the two great central powers, the world viewed Austria as the poor relation. This wasn’t necessarily so. As the Kaiser had succeeded in undoing all that Bismarck had achieved, Franz Joseph was left as his only friend. Austria could afford to flex her muscles and her Foreign Minister Count Aehrenthal, appointed in 1906, was determined to do just that. He saw that Austria could expand her influence in the Balkans. Inconveniently, his Russian counterpart Alexander Izvolsky rather thought that Russia might do the same. Rapprochement had just gone out of season.
Aehrenthal was determined to resurrect an imperial alliance between Berlin, Vienna and St Petersburg, ‘which would attract France into its orbit and put England and Italy in their places’.24 He wanted to avoid any sudden resurgence in Ottoman power after the Young Turks had deposed the Sultan.25 He tried to win over the Serbs and defuse tension between Austrians and Magyars. It was bold and, on the surface, brilliant, but in reality naive and doomed. There was no hope of sidelining Britain, especially once the Russians had leaked the whole plan.26 The Kaiser was no Bismarck, a silly, preening bully with no interest in the finesse of diplomacy. Internal tensions within the Empire between Teuton and Magyar were nearly at boiling point. Aehrenthal was steadfast in resisting Conrad’s call for pre-emptive strikes against both Italy and Serbia at a time when these might actually have worked.
He sought at a summit with Edward VII and Foreign Secretary Charles Hardinge to maintain cordial relations with England whilst stressing Austria’s ties with Germany. This was optimism indeed at a time when Britain was increasingly alarmed at the rise of the Kaiser’s mighty navy.27 Aehrenthal’s efforts to placate Serbia were strewn along a very rocky path. Austria had frequently tried to bully her Balkan neighbour into an increasing dependency, much of this focused around the intriguingly named ‘Pig Wars’.28
In 1908 he blundered, announcing rather blandly that he intended, with the quiescent consent of the Turks, to construct a railway across the Sanjak of Novibazar. On the one hand this was nothing startling but it did worry the Serbs. Izvolsky in St Petersburg, no great fanatic for pan-Slavism, couldn’t get all that excited. The international press however did. The popular outrage placed Berlin behind the idea, (wrongly, the Kaiser had no interest in the project). Izvolsky was forced to backtrack and make threatening noises. He made capital from the fury of the Serbs by promoting the concept of an alternative railway line from Belgrade to the Adriatic, not a proposal Austria would wish to entertain. Aehrenthal had seemingly grabbed space for Austria at the heart of European politics and diplomacy but at some cost and general opinion saw him as little more than Berlin’s stooge.
Despite the furore, both ministers had separate priorities and were not (yet) at each other’s throats. The Russian was dusting off the old question of control of the Dardanelles. This might have enabled the Black Sea fleet to intervene in 1905 and avoided disaster at the hands of the Japanese. The Austrian wanted to get his hands fully on Bosnia-Herzegovina to build up an imperial balcony to counter the uncertain pull of Serbia.29 The dispute of the railway proposal was soon set aside and both men met in September 1908 at Buchlau, Aehrenthal’s country house.
Neither man kept or certainly never published any notes but on 6 October Franz Joseph offhandedly announced the formal annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina. An international outcry arose. Aehrenthal asserted that his opposite number had agreed to this in return for Austrian acquiescence in the Dardanelles question. This was stridently denied. Izvolsky seems to have misread the runes and his apparent or possible connivance reaped a whirlwind. Aehrenthal, who emerges as the cannier of the two, deftly riposted that he had not agreed to Russian ships passing south through the straits on a unilateral basis. All he was prepared to agree to was free passage for all naval vessels. The Russian huffed and puffed but was evidently outsmarted.
The opening of the Dardanelles was very much a personal project; public opinion in Russia wasn’t interested; the navy had taken such a pounding its prospects were greatly dimmed. If it was a victory for Austria, it was a pyrrhic one. Had Aehrenthal been more willing to carefully nurture relations with Serbia, now broken beyond fixing, and played on their fears over Bulgaria, he could have defused the whole ticking bomb of pan-Slavism and secured the Empire’s volatile Balkan frontier. Instead he chose to score points and look clever, another Bismarck, but those days were long gone.
The folly of politicians has always provided business for spies, the murkier the waters the greater the imperative for sound and manipulative use of intelligence. In a world of such duplicity, duplicitous men will always be the beneficiaries. The Aehrenthals and Izvolskys keep the Redls in work and provide platforms for still greater duplicity. Alfred Redl had always been a quick learner.
In Barry Unsworth’s evocative Pascali’s Island30 the protagonist, Pascali, a lowly agent in the uncertain pay of the Sublime Porte on some nameless and largely overlooked Aegean island, sends in his regular reports to an unseen and vast bureaucratic labyrinth which remains as the surviving shadow of the once great empire. The state is all seeing but much goes unseen, every timbre and shade of human vice and weakness is understood and often ignored. In a world of such multi-layered shadows, Pascali plays out his role unnoticed, weak, duplicitous and sly. Only when he makes the mistake of becoming infatuated with an enigmatic Englishwoman do his emotions lead him into danger and for her, tragedy.
Something of this decadence had seeped into the Balkans in the years of Ottoman rule. This was so deeply embedded that independence and, in the case of Greece say, the savage wars which accompanied the struggle, could not erase it, the scars only becoming deeper with the overlays of local factionalism. The Austrians became heirs to the Turkish hegemony but could not escape being drawn into the mix. The fictional Pascali is no match for the real-life Alfred Redl but the two have much in common. They are not bad men, however evil is defined, merely the men of their times. History is the stage manager and they provide the drama. By the time he graduated, the young Alfred was set to rise. He wouldn’t just fly, he would soar but, like Icarus, he would get too close to the sun.