Vienna, April

In the following days Herr Renner called upon me several times at the Bristol. It was evident he wished to discuss further the Anschluss, but as I had delivered my message and had no further instructions I kept off the subject. Our purpose had been achieved, at least for the present, and Allize, the French agent, told me that, in high dudgeon, the German Minister, Botho Wedel, had gone back to Berlin. The secondary purpose of his visits was to renew his plea and to induce me to take up my residence in the Hofburg, but I was not tempted. He evidently feared that some of the mobs and the riotous demonstrations that emerge almost every day from the working quarters of the city would brush aside the few police who were guarding it and set the old palace, from which the Hapsburgs now have fled, on fire. My presence and the American flag would safeguard the edifice, but I declined the opportunity to dwell in the abode of emperors and kings and remained in my democratic quarters at the hotel.

But on other matters I liked to talk with Renner. He was, in my judgment, the most intelligent of the Austrian postwar leaders. I found him surprisingly fair to his political opponents. Like all the other actors in the tragic days, he was inclined to talk about the lost opportunities for peace and to point out who was responsible for losing them. Of Count Czernin’s activities he took a very lenient view. It is so different from the popular, the almost universal judgment of the “sporting” Minister of Foreign Affairs that it seems to me worthy of record.

“Czernin went halfway toward a separate peace and then stopped midstream and all unite in blaming him, but the blame should be placed squarely on the shoulders of his predecessors where it belongs,” said Renner.

“Ballplatz had excellent information about the Balkan situation but did not act upon it. There was the report of the Markgraf Pallavicini, our Ambassador in Constantinople in 1913.¹ This able man had spent his whole life in the Balkans and he was as familiar with its currents and its crosscurrents as he was with the lines in the palm of his hand. Well, months before the war came he wrote officially to his chief that the monarchy was headed for war and if it was the desire in Vienna to avoid it there was only one way and that was to give Russia a free hand and to abandon the drang nach Osten. This report has since vanished from the archives but I have talked with many, and very responsible people they are, who read it. Curiously enough, it is also a matter of record that the report was turned over to the Archduke Francis Ferdinand for his examination only a few days before he went to Sarajevo and met with his tragic end. . . .

“Now about Czernin being blamed for stopping midstream—for not driving on with his plan of a separate peace with the Western Powers, I do not think this is quite fair. Obviously his idea was to intimidate Berlin, to make Ludendorff and those madmen see that Austria was finished, and also that without Austria, Germany was lost. It didn’t work, and we stayed on to the end. Now let us see what would have happened had Czernin pulled out of the war. Well, right off the Germans would have overpowered Austria before any assistance could have reached us from the Entente. Long before the Allied armies could have put in an appearance in Bavaria or Bohemia, as was planned, or rather hoped, we would have been snug in the Prussian military straitjacket. As a matter of fact, throughout the war the Germans had a large force in and around Vienna, and when they began to suspect that Czernin wanted to quit, they moved many divisions of second-line troops into the Tyrol to prepare for all possible contingencies. In the end Germany would have been defeated and she would have been compelled to hoist the white flag, as she did in October 1918. The war might have been ended perhaps a month or two sooner if Czernin had had his way, but the price? Austria and Bohemia would have been devastated, as Belgium and northern France and Serbia had been. Not even the Czechs would have liked that. As a matter of fact, I think Czernin was wise to desist from his project when he did. The evil wind was sown when his predecessors ignored the storm signals. Infelix, not Felix Austria, was to meet the whirlwind these old men had sown, and her complete destruction was inevitable.”

When he came to speak of the greatest of the lost opportunities for peace, Renner’s thoughts centered around the International Socialist Congress in July 1917, in Stockholm, and he admitted that responsibility for failure rested squarely on the shoulders of some of the Social Democrats.

“Czernin was not hopeful, but he helped us as much as he could and he also persuaded Tisza to give the Hungarian delegates passports that permitted them to reach Sweden but, alas! we came there empty-handed. We were forced to admit that the monarchy could not give up Trieste. Tisza said he would deserve to be shot if he gave up Transylvania and not merely the people in power in Berlin, but the very German Socialist delegates announced that they regarded Alsace-Lorraine as a German province and that German it must remain.

Would they consent to a plebiscite? Most definitely they would not. How wise Vandervelde was in speaking for his devastated Fatherland, when he said: ‘What chance can there be for international action to further the peace movement when the German Socialist party remains silent in the face of the crimes of the German Army and excuses the barbarities of submarine warfare?’

“I and my colleagues went to the Congress in good faith but very soon we saw that it was a plan to trap us all into a Hohenzollern peace. Soon I doubted even the good faith of the Dutch Socialists who had called the Congress. They went to Berlin and conferred there with Zimmerman too often. How Branting, an honest man and a convinced Socialist, could ever have been induced to preside, I have no idea. Doubtless he was hoodwinked like the rest of us.”

“I gather then,” I said, “that you are of the opinion that the Socialist delegates to the International Congress for Peace were as far apart and no more open to reason than were the militants of the predatory powers? ”

“I am afraid that is so,” admitted Renner sadly. An admission which I think should be recorded for the guidance of generations to come who may in their time be involved in the horrors of a world war.

“What do you think of Mr. Wilson’s leadership in Paris?” I inquired. Renner shook his head sadly. “I am not so sure of his leadership,” he answered. “Your President might have imposed his program on the predatory powers in 1917, but today I doubt it.”

“I see some of your papers suggest that our President wash his hands of Europe and go home to happy America. What do you think of that suggestion? ”

“I think nothing of it,” replied Renner. “Wilson will not get what he wants, the wild animals of many countries are on the rampage now, but he must stick to his guns and make the best peace he can. If not, the law of the jungle will reign in Europe.”