In the World War Part 24

"'You have thereby given me the happiest day of my hitherto far from happy reign, and I pray G.o.d Almighty that He may further continue to aid you on your difficult path--to the benefit of the Monarchy and of our peoples.

KARL.'

"_February 11, 1918._--Trotski declines to sign. The war is over, but there is no peace.

"The disastrous effects of the troubles in Vienna will be seen clearly from the following message from Herr von Skrzynski, dated Montreux, February 12, 1918. Skrzynski writes:

"'I learn from a reliable source that France has issued the following notification: We were already quite disposed to enter into discussion with Austria. Now we are asking ourselves whether Austria is still sound enough for the part it was intended to give her. One is afraid of basing an entire policy upon a state which is perhaps already threatened with the fate of Russia.' And Skrzynski adds: 'During the last few days I have heard as follows: It has been decided to wait for a while.'"

Our position, then, during the negotiations with Petersburg was as follows: We could not induce Germany to resign the idea of Courland and Lithuania. We had not the physical force to do so. The pressure exerted by the Supreme Army Command on the one hand and the shifty tactics of the Russians made this impossible. We had then to choose between leaving Germany to itself, and signing a separate peace, or acting together with our three Allies and finishing with a peace including the covert annexation of the Russian outer provinces.

The former alternative involved the serious risk of making a breach in the Quadruple Alliance, where some dissension was already apparent.

The Alliance could no longer stand such experiments. We were faced with the final military efforts now, and the unity of the Allies must not in any case be further shaken. On the other hand, the danger that Wilson, the only statesman in the world ready to consider the idea of a peace on mutual understanding, might from the conclusion of such a peace obtain an erroneous impression as to our intentions. I hoped then, and I was not deceived, that this eminently clever man would see through the situation and recognise that we were forced to act under pressure of circ.u.mstances. His speeches delivered after the peace at Brest confirmed my antic.i.p.ation.

The peace with Ukraine was made under pressure of imminent famine. And it bears the characteristic marks of such a birth. That is true. But it is no less true that despite the fact of our having obtained far less from Ukraine than we had hoped, we should, without these supplies, have been unable to carry on at all until the new harvest.

Statistics show that during the spring and summer of 1918 42,000 wagon-loads were received from the Ukraine. It would have been impossible to procure these supplies from anywhere else. Millions of human beings were thus saved from death by starvation--and let those who sit in judgment on the peace terms bear this in mind.

It is also beyond doubt that with the great stocks available in Ukraine, an incomparably greater quant.i.ty could have been brought into Austria if the collecting and transport apparatus had worked differently.

The Secretary of State for Food Supplies has, at my request, in May, 1919, furnished me with the following statistical data for publication:

Brief survey of the organisation of corn imports from Ukraine (on terms of the Brest-Litovsk Peace) and the results of same:

When, after great efforts, a suitable agreement had been arrived at with Germany as to the apportionment of the Ukrainian supplies, a mission was dispatched to Kieff, in which not only Government officials but also the best qualified and most experienced experts which the Government could procure were represented.

Germany and Hungary had also sent experts, among them being persons with many years of experience in the Russian grain business, and had been in the employ of both German and Entente grain houses (as, for instance, the former representative of the leading French corn merchants, the house of Louis Dreyfuss).

The official mission arrived at Kieff by the middle of March, and commenced work at once. A comparatively short time sufficed to show that the work would present quite extraordinary difficulties.

The Ukrainian Government, which had declared at Brest-Litovsk that very great quant.i.ties, probably about one million tons, of surplus foodstuffs were ready for export, had in the meantime been replaced by another Ministry. The Cabinet then in power evinced no particular inclination, or at any rate no hurry, to fulfil obligations on this scale, but was more disposed to point out that it would be altogether impossible, for various reasons, to do so.

Moreover, the Peace of Brest had provided for a regular exchange system, bartering load by load of one article against another. But neither Germany nor Austria-Hungary was even approximately in a position to furnish the goods (textiles especially were demanded) required in exchange.

We had then to endeavour to obtain the supplies on credit, and the Ukrainian Government agreed, after long and far from easy negotiations, to provide _credit valuta_ (against vouchers for mark and krone in Berlin and Vienna). The arrangements for this were finally made, and the two Central Powers drew in all 643 million karbowanez.

The Rouble Syndicate, however, which had been formed under the leadership of the princ.i.p.al banks in Berlin, Vienna and Budapest, was during the first few months only able to exert a very slight activity. Even the formation of this syndicate was a matter of great difficulty, and in particular a great deal of time was lost; and even then the apparatus proved very awkward to work with.

Anyhow, it had only procured comparatively small sums of roubles, so that the purchasing organisation in Ukraine, especially at first, suffered from a chronic lack of means of payment.

But, in any case, a better arrangement of the money question would only have improved matters in a few of the best supplied districts, for the princ.i.p.al obstacle was simply _the lack of supplies_. The fact that Kieff and Odessa were themselves continually in danger of a food crisis is the best indication as to the state of things.

In the Ukraine, the effects of four years of war, with the resulting confusion, and of the destruction wrought by the Bolsheviks (November, 1917, to March, 1918) were conspicuously apparent; cultivation and harvesting had suffered everywhere, but where supplies had existed they had been partly destroyed, partly carried off by the Bolsheviks on their way northward. Still, the harvest had given certain stocks available in the country, though these were not extensive, and the organisation of a purchasing system was now commenced. The free buying in Ukraine which we and Germany had originally contemplated could not be carried out in fact, since the Ukrainian Government declared that it would itself set up this organisation, and maintained this intention with the greatest stubbornness. But the authority in the country had been destroyed by the Revolution, and then by the Bolshevist invasion; the peasantry turned Radical, and the estates were occupied by revolutionaries and cut up. The power of the Government, then, in respect of collecting supplies of grain, was altogether inadequate; on the other hand, however, it was still sufficient (as some actual instances proved) to place serious, indeed insuperable, obstacles in our way. It was necessary, therefore, to co-operate with the Government--that is, to come to a compromise with it. After weeks of negotiation this was at last achieved, by strong diplomatic pressure, and, accordingly, the agreement of April 23, 1918, was signed.

This provided for the establishment of a German-Austro-Hungarian Economical Central Commission; practically speaking, a great firm of corn merchants, in which the Central Powers appointed a number of their most experienced men, familiar, through years of activity in the business, with Russian grain affairs.

But while this establishment was still in progress the people in Vienna (influenced by the occurrences on the Emperor's journey to North Bohemia) had lost patience; military leaders thought it no longer advisable to continue watching the operations of a _civil_ commercial undertaking in Ukraine while that country was occupied by the military, and so finally the General Staff elicited a decree from the Emperor providing that the procuring of grain should be entrusted to Austro-Hungarian army units in the districts occupied by them. To carry out this plan a general, who had up to that time been occupied in Roumania, was dispatched to Odessa, and now commenced independent military proceedings from there. For payment kronen were used, drawn from Vienna. The War Grain Transactions department was empowered, by Imperial instructions to the Government, to place 100 million kronen at the disposal of the War Ministry, and this amount was actually set aside by the finance section of that department.

This military action and its execution very seriously affected the civil action during its establishment, and also greatly impaired the value of our credit in the Ukraine by offering kronen notes to such an extent at the time. Moreover, the kronen notes thus set in circulation in Ukraine were smuggled into Sweden, and coming thus into the Scandinavian and Dutch markets undoubtedly contributed to the well-known fall in the value of the krone which took place there some months later.

The Austro-Hungarian military action was received with great disapproval by the _Germans_, and when in a time of the greatest scarcity among ourselves (mid-May) we were obliged to ask Germany for temporary a.s.sistance, this was granted only on condition that independent military action on the part of Austria-Hungary should be suppressed and the whole leadership in Ukraine be entrusted to Germany.

It was then hoped that increased supplies might be procured, especially from Bessarabia, where the Germans have established a collecting organisation, to the demand of which the Roumanian Government had agreed. This hope, however, also proved vain, and in June and July the Ukraine was still further engaged. The country was, in fact, almost devoid of any considerable supplies, and in addition to this the collecting system never really worked properly at all, as the arrangement for maximum prices was frequently upset by overbidding on the part of our own military section.

Meantime everything had been made ready for getting in the harvest of 1918. The collecting organisation had become more firmly established and extended, the necessary personal requirements were fully complied with, and _it would doubtless have been possible to bring great quant.i.ties out of the country_. But first of all the demands of the Ukrainian cities had to be met, and there was in many cases a state of real famine there; then came the Ukrainian and finally the very considerable contingents of German and Austro-Hungarian armies of occupation. Not until supplies for these groups had been a.s.sured would the Ukrainian Government allow any export of grain, and to this we were forced to agree.

It was at once evident that the degree of cultivation throughout the whole country had seriously declined--owing to the entire uncertainty of property and rights after the agrarian revolution.

The local authorities, affected by this state of things, were little inclined to agree to export, and it actually came to local embargoes, one district prohibiting the transfer of its stocks to any other, exactly as we had experienced with ourselves.

In particular, however, the agitation of the Entente agents (which had been frequently perceptible before), under the impression of the German military defeats, was most seriously felt. The position of the Government which the Germans had set up at Kieff was unusually weak. Moreover, the ever-active Bolshevik elements throughout the whole country were now working with increasing success against our organisation. All this rendered the work more difficult in September and October--and then came the collapse.

The difficulties of transport, too, were enormous; supplies had either to be sent to the Black Sea, across it and up the Danube, or straight through Galicia. For this we often lacked sufficient wagons, and in the Ukraine also coal; there were, in addition, often instances of resistance on the part of the local railways, incited by the Bolsheviks, and much more of the same sort.

However great the lack of supplies in Ukraine itself, however much the limitations of our Russian means of payment may have contributed to the fact that the hopes entertained on the signing of peace at Brest-Litovsk were far from being realised, we may nevertheless maintain that _all that was humanly possible_ was done to overcome the unprecedented difficulties encountered. And in particular, by calling in the aid of the most capable and experienced firms of grain merchants, the forces available were utilised to the utmost degree.

Finally it should perhaps be pointed out that the import organisation--apart from the before-mentioned interference of the military department and consequent fluctuations of the system--was largely upset by very extensive smuggling operations, carried on more particularly from Galicia. As such smuggling avoided the high export duty, the maximum prices appointed by the Ukrainian Government were constantly being overbid. This smuggling was also in many cases a.s.sisted by elements from Vienna; altogether the nervousness prevailing in many leading circles in Vienna, and frequently criticising our own organisation in public, or upsetting arrangements before they could come into operation, did a great deal of damage. It should also be mentioned that Germany likewise carried on a great deal of unofficially a.s.sisted smuggling, with ill effects on the official import organisation, and led to similar conditions on our own side.

Despite all obstacles, the machinery established, as will be seen from the following survey, nevertheless succeeded in getting not inconsiderable quant.i.ties of foodstuffs into the states concerned, amounting in all to about 42,000 wagons, though unfortunately the quant.i.ties delivered did not come up to the original expectations.

SURVEY OF THE IMPORTS FROM UKRAINE DATING FROM COMMENCEMENT OF IMPORTATION (SPRING, 1918) TO NOVEMBER, 1918.

I. Foodstuffs obtained by the War Grain Transactions Department (corn, cereal products, leguminous fruits, fodder, seeds):

Total imported for the contracting states (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey) 113,421 tons Of which Austria-Hungary received 57,382 "

Grain and flour amounting to 46,225 "

II. Articles obtained by the Austrian Central Purchasing Company:

Of which Austria-Hungary Total received:

b.u.t.ter, fat, bacon 3,329,403 kg. 2,170,437 kg.

Oil, edible oils 1,802,847 " 977,105 "

Cheese, curds 420,818 " 325,103 "

Fish, preserved fish, herrings 1,213,961 " 473,561 "

Cattle 105,542 head 55,421 head (36,834,885 kg.) (19,505,760 kg.) Horses 98,976 head 40,027 head (31,625,172 kg.) (13,165,725 kg.) Salted meat 2,927,439 " 1,571,569 "

Eggs 75,200 boxes 32,433 boxes Sugar 66,809,969 kg. 24,973,443 kg.

Various foodstuffs 27,385,095 " 7,836,287 "

------------- ------------- Total 172,349,556 " 61,528,220 "

and 75,200 boxes and 32,433 boxes eggs eggs (Total, 30,757 wagons) (Total, 13,037 wagons)

The goods imported under II. represent a value of roughly 450 _million kronen_.

The quant.i.ties _smuggled_ unofficially into the states concerned are estimated at about 15,000 wagons (about half the official imports).

So ended this phase, a phase which seemed important while we were living through it, but which was yet nothing but a phase of no great importance after all, since it produced no lasting effect.

The waves of war have pa.s.sed over the Peace of Brest-Litovsk, washing it away as completely as a castle of sand on the sh.o.r.e is destroyed by the incoming tide.

Long after I was reproached by the Polish element in the Herrenhaus, who a.s.serted that I had proved my incapability by my own confession that the Peace of Brest had not withstood the test of subsequent events. But should I have shown more capability by a.s.serting, after the collapse of the Central Powers, that the peace still existed?