Vienna, Tuesday

I dined tonight with Admiral Hohnel; General Margutti was also his guest, but how different were the circumstances and the temper of the party from that evening in March 1915 when they dined with me at the Bristol. Then the Russians were being driven back over the Carpathians, according to War Office reports, and the war would be over in a few weeks! Now the war was over, and the government that had displaced the Empire had told them that as they had both been appointed to their respective services from Trieste, now annexed to Italy, they had better apply to Rome for their pensions. Hohnel was living on the sale of his stamp collection and the general, I understood, was living very much from hand to mouth.

For seventeen years Margutti had been the personal aide and adjutant to the Emperor Francis Joseph, and certainly no one was closer to him and deeper in his confidence than he. Naturally in these circumstances I gave a wide berth to war topics, but Margutti was not to be denied; with him the responsibility for the war was an obsession. Every few minutes he insisted: “I live over and over again every day those tragic hours when the ultimatum to Belgrade was being fashioned. Even then all might have been well. The Emperor knew that Francis Ferdinand could not have been brought to life again. That was not a practical demand on the Serbians and he was asking himself why thousands should die to avenge him? That was the thought of my imperial master, and I was hopeful that with a little good will in Belgrade peace could be preserved. Then, however, almost daily the telephone would ring and Budapest was on the wire, the Chancellery of the Minister President, and I was told that Count Tisza had started for Vienna on a special train, that he had matters of vital importance to lay before the Emperor-King and that I should arrange an audience. I did arrange it in the great study, and I was present at it, as I was expected to be, but of course, as was proper, I kept my distance. While Count Tisza spoke in a loud voice, in a voice that was unseemly and with an emphasis that shocked me, I could not understand, I could not gather the meaning of his words, but the import of his coming was clear. He wanted war! In all the years I had served His Majesty no one had ever addressed him in such outrageous tones. At times he bellowed, and the condescension of my imperial master in trying to calm him was of but little avail. The Emperor was visibly affected and was very upset after the Count left, but he said nothing, keeping his own counsel and bearing his own heavy burdens —as was his custom. It was Tisza who drove us into war,” concluded Margutti. “May God forgive him—I cannot!”

Truly a wonderful inside story of undoubted authenticity, and had I been in my usual and normal role of a news correspondent a very few minutes would have elapsed before I had placed it on the wire and what a world sensation would have resulted and from what an unimpeachable source! But now I was dealing with the aftermath of the great catastrophe and this, the true story though it was of its initiation and origin, could wait.

I waited, meaning perhaps only to make a verbal report upon my return to Paris, and how fortunate it was that I did. Within a few days, under orders from Bauer and Renner, competent historians explored the secret archives, and among the many illuminating disclosures was one in regard to these interviews in which Count Tisza had presumed to raise his voice. His tempestuous words had been a plea not to enter a war which was unnecessary and one in which, in his judgment, whoever won Austria-Hungary would be the loser. Further, a memorandum was brought to light in which Tisza had marshaled all his very cogent arguments against the Serbian adventure.

Tisza was murdered in the presence of his wife by a group of cowardly soldiers who made him responsible for all their sufferings. And yet in killing him they wreaked their vengeance on the man of all others who was least responsible for the hostilities, although when the batde was engaged he, too, fought stubbornly. The incident has given me a realizing sense of the dangers of special cabled correspondence even when the most authentic sources are tapped. Those (Ambassadors and Ministers and such) whose dispatches are filed away in the secret archives have much the best of it. They do not come to light for years, and by that time no one cares—truth or fiction? “Es ist alles eins” as they say in Viennese.