They Were Divided - Miklos Banffy [158]
The war was over in ten days.
On July 1st the Serbian army defeated the Bulgarians. On July 3rd the Romanian army marched south and by July 10th stood before Sofia. Meanwhile the Greeks chased the Bulgarians from the Aegean coast while the Turkish Enver Pasha advanced upon Adrianople, over which much blood had already been spilt, and reconquered it with almost no casualties.
In these ten days Austria-Hungary lost her last vestiges of respect in the Balkans. Something might have been saved, even at the last minute, if she had seen fit to intervene, but the Dual Monarchy made no move. This may have been wise, in that her intervention could well have provoked a war with Russia, but the real reason for this inactivity was that, after all the internal confusions which had obstructed the modernization of the army, Austria-Hungary was then even more unprepared for war than she was to be in 1914.
So, though she could hardly have done anything else, the end result was that in the eyes of Europe these Balkan wars were lost, not by Turkey but by the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.
Up to the last minute the Austrian Foreign Office did its best to camouflage the truth. Firstly the Ballplatz declared that, along with the other great powers, Austria reserved the right to approve the terms of the forthcoming peace treaty. It is probable that she imagined the London Conference would stand firmly behind her and thereby do something to save her good name. Unfortunately the great powers, including Germany, did nothing of the sort: they all approved the peace terms unreservedly.
This produced a new dilemma. Either Austria could pursue her aims unilaterally, which might lead her into war without the support of either Germany or Italy, or she had to renounce her claim to revise the peace terms in the way that best suited her. Faced with this impasse the Dual Monarchy withdrew from the London Conference.
From the beginning Austria had put herself in a false position. Her diplomacy was ill thought-out and badly prepared; and it showed the world how many cracks there were in the Threefold Alliance of Austria, Germany and Italy. Above all it antagonized Romania, who in the end received more from the Bucharest Agreement than she would have been allowed by St Petersburg only a few months previously. Austria’s claim to have the right to approve the peace terms therefore seemed to the Romanians to be an attempt to limit their share of the spoils, though that had never been Berchtold’s intention.
Romania’s revenge was to come in the following year.
The main result of this feckless muddling was that from the moment Austria-Hungary withdrew from the London Conference, the world got on quite well without her. Vienna no longer had any say in Balkan affairs. The Turkish-Bulgarian treaty, and that between Turkey and Greece, had both been settled and signed without anyone even asking the opinion of Austria. It was as if the Dual Monarchy did not exist. She did make one more attempt to retrieve her lost prestige by issuing an ultimatum to Serbia that Albania’s independence must be preserved; but the effect of this was lessened by the fact that it was also the policy of Italy and England – above all of England, who did not relish the possibility