Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchivs 46. (1998)

GODSEY, William D. Jr.: Officers vs. Diplomats: Bureaucracy and Foreign Policy in Austria-Hungary 1906–1914

Officers versus Diplomats

Eduard Otto, who oversaw the legation there.124 Hubka additionally intervened brazenly in political affairs, subsequent denials notwithstanding.125 Even Hubka’s oft- expressed disdain could not match that of Julius Vidalé in Paris who believed that he understood the disastrous state of Austrian politics better after getting to know the aristocrats stationed at the local embassy. In London, Ambassador Mensdorff distrusted Conrad’s representative, Major Koloman Horváth, and refused him access to information without a promise that it would not be used in reports to the Chief of the General Staff.126 Horváth gave the desired pledge, which he immediately and secretly broke, claiming that it had been made under duress. Significantly, Conrad personally let Horváth know that he approved of his deceitful modus operandi.127 Comparable difficulties marked the situation in Belgrade, where Stephan von Ugrón shared only material of purely military interest with Major Otto Gellinek.128 Later, Ugrón also stopped letting him see political reports from the consulates or communications of similar import from the foreign ministry.129 During the war, discord likewise emerged in Stockholm and in Berne between the envoys and the military atta- chés, Eugen Straub and William von Einem, who had taken up their posts at the behest of Conrad in 1913 and 1914 respectively.130

The military attachés, even those with at least an outwardly good personal rapport with their envoys, tended to portray the diplomats as effete and their policies as dangerously weak and tractable. In this appraisal, they accurately mirrored the sentiments of General Conrad. Gustav Hubka’s description of an interview with an ill Foreign Minister Berchtold, in which the latter languidly listened to him from under a mound of „silken coverlets,“ conveys somewhat the general attitude.131 In one report to the Chief of the General Staff, the attaché in Paris gleefully quoted from an article in the French press describing „the dandified diplomats in kid gloves and sporting whiskers in the style of half-century ago who direct policy on the Ball- platz.“132 From London, Koloman Horváth sharply criticized what he called the

See Hubka’s „Tagebuch,“ for 1914, p. 62-3, 65, 69-71, 73 f. For Hubka’s later statement, which is also belied by other remarks by him elsewhere, see Hubka: Diplomatische und militärische Wechselbeziehungen, p. 173.

125 See KA, Nachlaß Conrad, B/1450: 76: Hubka to Conrad, December 23, 1912, in which Hubka admits to mixing in matters that normally would not fall in his area of responsibility.

126 KA, Conrad Nachlaß, B/1450: 80: Horváth to Conrad, January 12, 1913.

127 Ibidem: Conrad to Horváth, draft letter, January 16, 1913.

128 See, for example, ibidem, B/1450: 81: Gellinek to Conrad, February 6 and 20, 1913.

129 lb i d e m, B/1450: 86: Gellinek to August Urbanksi, June 24, 1913.

130 Interview with Baron Konstantin Gagem (son of the diplomat), fall 1992. For a harbinger of this discord, see HHStA, AR, F 4, carton 49, folder Militär-Attaché 1/1: Gagem to the foreign office, April 15, 1915. Wanner: Die Bedeutung der k. u. k. Gesandtschaft und des Militärattachements in Stockholm, p. 19; Schubert, Peter: Die Tätigkeit des k. u. k. Militárattachés in Bem während des Ersten Weltkrieges. Osnabrück: Biblio, 1980 (Studien zur Militärgeschichte, Militärwissenschaft und Konfliktforschung 26) contains nothing about the Gagem-Einem dispute. Almost unbelievably, Schubert’s sources for this study include none of the reports of Gagem to the foreign office in Vienna.

131 Hubka: Tagebuch 1913, p. 15.

132 KA, Nachlaß Conrad, B/1450: 83: Vidalé to Conrad, April 6, 1913. In another letter (ibidem, B/1450: 76: Vidalé to (?) August von Urbanski, February 27, 1913) Vidalé described his diplomatic colleagues thus:

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