Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires (67 page)

Alexandra was just as aghast at the news. For her, it amounted to nothing short of treason. “What infamy!” she exclaimed, “that the Lord God should give peace to Russia, yes, but not by way of treason to the Germans.” And she later wrote to Anna Viroubova, “What a nightmare it is that it is Germans who are saving Russia (from Communism).… What could be more humiliating for us? With one hand the Germans give, and with the other they take away. Already they have seized an enormous territory. God help and save this unhappy country. Probably He wills us to endure these insults, but that we must take them from the Germans almost kills me.”
⁹⁹¹

The war’s unpopularity in Vienna took a meteoric rise as food became scarce. “Many workers seemed to be living mainly off sour cucumbers,” one eyewitness said. A meager flour ration of 165 grams per day was instituted. Elderly women waited in line for hours to board trains to take them to the provinces to trade clothes and shoes for bread and potatoes. The Austrian economy crumbled under the weight of sustaining total warfare. Money soon became worthless. Austria-Hungary—like Russia in the last days of the Romanov monarchy—was engulfed in waves of paralyzing strikes, demonstrations, and work stoppages. Factory workers in Wiener-Neustadt, twenty-five miles from Vienna, walked off the job and laid siege to the nearby town hall. According to one estimate, within “forty-eight hours, nearly 100,000 men were out on strike in Lower Austria alone.” By the end of January 1918, a poisonous cloud of unrest had consumed provinces across Austria-Hungary. Fueled by starvation, Upper Austria, Styria, the Tyrol, Moravia, and western sections of Hungary rose up against the monarchy.
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Unrest was not confined solely to the empire’s core territories. In February, the flagship of the Imperial Fifth Fleet, anchored in the Gulf of Kotor off the coast of Montenegro, began flying the red flag of revolution. At midday, the sailors sang “La Marseillaise.” Within an hour, the entire fleet—comprised mainly of Croatian and Czech sailors—had mutinied. “The Emperor was not really surprised by the Kotor mutiny,” Zita admitted. “He told me that he had for a long time feared that something of the sort might happen. Our navy had been forced into idleness by the
Entente
blockade of the high seas and the Fifth Fleet, who were relatively well fed, had been cooped up for months in the same harbour.”
⁹⁹³
Things were just as bad in the east. After Austro-Hungarian forces overran and occupied Ukraine, a state of anarchy ensued. Desperate to feed the empire’s starving population, the government ordered Ukraine to produce more than a million tons of food by the summer. The Ukrainian peasants, who themselves were starving, hid as much of their grain as possible. When quotas were not met, whole villages were burned to the ground. As a result, the Ukrainians began launching a guerilla warfare campaign against the Austro-Hungarians. When they succeeded in assassinating two officers, imperial troops retaliated by executing thirteen villagers. According to an Austrian intelligence report, by August 1918, the “murder of landowners, policemen, and officials and other enemy acts of terrorism against the troops of the Central Powers were the order of the day.”
⁹⁹⁴
Over the course of the summer, the violence escalated to horrific proportions.

As Austria-Hungary’s fortunes took a turn for the worse, Empress Zita’s close association with her family in Italy and France laid her open to more accusations of treachery. The German ambassador to Austria wrote in a telegram sent to Berlin that the “Empress is descended from an Italian princely house … People do not entirely trust the
Italian
[author’s italics] and her brood of relatives.”
⁹⁹⁵
The German government began its own campaign to discredit Zita, whom they perceived as a threat to German influence in Austrian domestic affairs. “It was difficult for them to attack the Emperor directly,” wrote one historian. “They thus chose another target: Zita. Her French ancestry, in the bellicose speeches of the pan-Germanists, would serve as the pretext for a campaign of disparagement of the Empress. In Germany, she was called ‘
the Frenchwoman
,’ and in Austria, ‘
the Italian woman
.’ Within a few months, some would be accusing her of treason.”
⁹⁹⁶

The way that Zita was slanderously referred to as “the Italian woman” mirrored the way Alexandra of Russia was labeled “the German woman.” No one seemed to notice, or chose not to notice, that because of Zita’s position as the Austrian empress, her family’s homes in Italy were confiscated by the government. Villa Pianore and several other homes were turned into naval hospitals. The
New York Times
reported on the rising anti-Austrian sentiment in Italy: “After the last discussion in the [Italian] Parliament Premier Orlando initiated a stricter policy against subjects of the Central Powers. Several arrests were made, many Austro-Germans were interned, and hotels managed by Germans were closed. The public, however, has been complaining that nothing was being done to sequestrate the beautiful villas and palaces belonging to German and Austrian royalties.”
⁹⁹⁷

One British newspaper could not help but notice the parallels between the way Tsarina Alexandra and Empress Zita were depredated.

The latest instance is the agitation now being made in Vienna against the Austrian Empress, who is declared to be responsible for the Piave disasters owing to her protest against [the] destruction of Italian towns, and against other forms. Her masculine critics are also adopting another old device, where women are concerned, by making imputations against her character.… The Empress Zita is not the first Royal consort to be blamed for a country’s ills. The ex-Czar’s wife was said to be mainly responsible for her husband’s downfall … Queens are rarely, if ever credited by men with their countries’ triumphs.
⁹⁹⁸

Zita tried not to dwell on the problems that plagued her and her husband. One bright spot in the midst of all the turmoil surrounding the empress’s life was her family. On March 10, 1918, she delivered a son named Carl Ludwig. To celebrate, Charles offered amnesty to a number of people charged with political crimes, reinforcing his sobriquet as “the Peace Emperor.” He believed that the happiness experienced by the pardoned prisoners would mirror the “joyous event of the delivery by my wife the Empress and Queen.”
⁹⁹⁹
This was not the first time the emperor had shown clemency to enemies of his government. On July 2, 1917, some two thousand political prisoners—mostly Czechs—were set free in a broad amnesty. But the happiness Zita and Charles enjoyed over this latest addition to their family was short lived. The war’s climactic final stage was set to begin and would shatter the lives of not only Zita and her family but of Dona of Germany and the Hohenzollerns as well.

Ground zero for this theatrical endgame was the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister, Count Ottokar Czernin, who had represented the empire at the Brest-Litovsk negotiations. At the conference, when he was asked about the greatest obstacle to lasting peace, he replied that it was none other than Georges Clemenceau, the French prime minister. According to the count, “I was willing [to negotiate over peace] and that, as regards to France, I could see no obstacle to peace apart from the French desire for Alsace-Lorraine. The response from Paris was that negotiation on this basis was not possible.”
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Czernin “blamed France for failing to grasp the opportunity to prevent the slaughter on the Western front, and in particular pointed to Clemenceau … as an obstacle in the way of peace.”
¹⁰⁰¹
Czernin later declared that the emperor had been fully aware of his remarks and supported them, but in her diary, the empress painted a very different picture: “H.M. received it [notification of Czernin’s remarks] so late that he could not deal with it in time.”
¹⁰⁰²

Czernin’s statements were followed by a scurrilous exchange of attacks that flew back and forth between Czernin and Clemenceau. The day after the controversial remarks were made, Clemenceau barked with rage, “Count Czernin is lying.”
¹⁰⁰³
Angry beyond words, Clemenceau focused his ire squarely at Czernin and Austria. “For it was actually the Emperor Karl who, in an autographed letter of March, 1917, gave his definite support to the just claims of France relative to Alsace-Lorraine,” Clemenceau said. “The only thing left for Count Czernin to do is to make a full admission of his guilt.”
¹⁰⁰⁴
Attempting to protect his own interests, Czernin forged a number of low-level documents supporting his claims, which he made available to the public and included the letter Charles had sent to Sixtus in March 1917. Zita remembered her and Charles’s reaction to the release of the letter: “As events were now more than a year old and had anyway been written off, we could not reconstruct them exactly from memory.… we had no means of proving or disproving the exact words quoted by Clemenceau.”
¹⁰⁰⁵
Realizing he did not have the support of the emperor and empress, Czernin went into a mad frenzy, forging and reforging documents that made him appear innocent.

The backlash was immediate and dangerous. Propaganda painted Zita as an intriguing harlot who was using her brother to fuel her quest for power. Allied planes dropped leaflets on Czech, Hungarian, and Slovenian troops claiming Zita was giving away their military secrets. Like Nicholas II, Charles was portrayed as docile, weak willed, and dominated by his wife. Some of the more hurtful rumors included Charles being a secret alcoholic who was on the verge of divorcing his wife. The campaign of vilification against them was an undeniable mirror of the same sad circumstances that faced Nicholas and Alexandra. In a letter to the British statesman Arthur Balfour, the foreign secretary Sir Horace Rumbold empathized with the imperial couple. “No one could blame the Emperor, that is, to say, the Empress, for trying to make peace after her own fashion: she could not be expected to realise that the days are long gone by, when women and priests could sway the destinies of nations,” he wrote in May 1918. “It seems strange however, that the Entente, one of the planks whose democratic platform is the abolition of secret diplomacy, should have availed themselves readily for her services.”
¹⁰⁰⁶

The Austrian monarchs now faced a political crisis. Wilhelm II felt betrayed by Charles, who had no choice but to send an emergency telegram to Wilhelm denying the letter’s authenticity, saying, “At a time when Austro-Hungarian cannon [
sic
] are thundering alongside German guns on the Western Front proof is scarcely needed that I am fighting and will continue to fight for your provinces as though I were defending my own.”
¹⁰⁰⁷
Wilhelm warily accepted Charles’s explanation, but not before the latter was forced to travel immediately to German military headquarters at Spa for an emergency meeting face-to-face. After an audience that lasted hours, Charles regained Wilhelm’s support—but at the cost of “the closest military, political and economic union which the two empires had hitherto concluded.”
¹⁰⁰⁸
The cost of Ottokar Czernin’s irresponsible remarks was Austria-Hungary’s now total dependence on Germany. The famed Habsburg historian Edward Crankshaw summarized the calamity of the situation this way: