Franz Josef Land

“ Franz Josef is cold, pitiless, and does not hesitate to ruin in a moment his most faithful servitor if he is at any time guilty of failure, or commits a blunder. Even when a minister or general is forced to carry out an order in spite of strong protests, he has relentlessly broken him if any catastrophe has resulted. A notable case is that of the general who commanded the Austrian armies in the battle of Sadowa. ”

“ The Emperor Franz Josef is probably as thoroughly beloved by his subjects as any sovereign in history has ever been. His great misfortunes—fearful defeats in the wars with France and Germany, the suicide of his only son, the assassination of his wife, and family troubles in more recent times—have thrown about him an atmosphere of romantic sympathy; while love for his kindly qualities is mingled with respect for his plain common sense. During his stay in Berlin I met him a second time. At my first presentation at Dresden, two years before, there was little opportunity for extended conversation ”

“ Both Servia and Russia were much annoyed when Austria annexed the two provinces. The anger of Russia and Servia nearly brought about another war.
Such was the state of things at the beginning of June in the year 1914.
Franz Josef, Emperor of Austria. Photo by C. Pietzner.
Here is a portrait of the Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary, Franz Josef. He is an old man, eighty-five years of age—the oldest monarch in [10] Europe. It is impossible not to be sorry for him; his life has been full of trouble, and he has had to rule over the most divided kingdom on earth. ”

“ An annual fête that was regularly celebrated at Marienbad during King Edward’s sojourn there, was the birthday of the late Emperor Franz Josef of Austria. The King made a practice of entertaining the various officials of the neighbourhood, in honour of the occasion. The guests consisted mainly of the officers commanding the troops of the district, any hoch geboren Austrians who might happen to be there, the principal municipal authorities, and last, but by no means least, our friend the Abbot of Tepl. ”

“ Krsto had to leave his revolver behind, and having never in his life been out without one, was as nervous as a cat and saw brigands in every bush. At which I laughed.
Plevlje then was a strange sight. On one side were modern up-to-date Austrian houses with a park, smart barracks and an inn. On the hills behind it in immense letters of white stone were the initials of Franz Josef. The opposite side of the town was occupied by the Turkish Army, wonderfully smart, as if in competition with Austria, and a Crescent marked the hill on that side. Between the two lay the native town and bazar. ”

“ De Lorbe waited, only bending forward a trifle more through the dusk. Josef continued:
"What is an army of strong men to do in a foreign land? Can officers and a few men control a thing like that? My mother in Augsburg writes me. She knows. She is old. She is wise. She has known for years all that was going to happen. She has written me twice of our brave men already lost. But she says: 'There will be a rich harvest in the Fatherland this year, and in Belgium, please God.' I think there will be."
Crayton sat staring ashily at Josef as a man stares at some apparition. ”

“ The dark mountains rising purple to the snow, peak beyond peak of the Southern Alps soaring white against that wondrous blue—so close they seem, so attainable—it is hard to realize they are 10,000 feet above us. And between two mountain walls, filling a mighty gorge, winds down the Franz Josef glacier; an icy chaos of pinnacles and seracs, green-blue and glittering white against the purple-black crags of the gorge. But strangest of all is where the glacier and the forest meet, and the splendid scarlet of the ratas seems almost to touch the ice and snow. ”

“ Hungary has been credited with desiring to cut loose from Austria. The frequent and serious quarrels between the members of the Dual Monarchy have caused many a wiseacre to shake his head and say, "The union will not outlive Franz Josef!" But the Austro-Hungarian Empire has been founded upon sound political and economic principles, which far transcend a single life or a dynasty. Austrians and Hungarians may be unwilling yoke-fellows. But they know that if they do not pull together, they cannot pull at all. They have too many Slavs around them. ”

“ The tale ran round that the Kaiser had intended after the manoeuvres to announce the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina. But that Abdul Hamid, apt at expedients, had learnt this fact, and had sent Franz Josef a polite message regretting that he was unable in person to receive His Majesty on this, his first visit to a Turkish province, but assuring him that his reception should be in every way suitable. Se non vero, ben trovato. ”

“ Franz Josef, the old man of forty haunted
kingdoms, in a tomb with the Hapsburg fathers, moths eating a green uniform to tatters, worms taking all and leaving only bones and gold buttons, bones and iron crosses. ”

“ The Franz Josef is almost free from moraine, though there are a few grey rocks and stones and coarse silt scattered about on the ice above the terminal face, which in the centre of the glacier is a sheer ice-wall, two hundred feet high. The Waiho River rises here, in an amphitheatre of blue and white ice, sometimes at one point, sometimes at another; great blocks of ice are constantly breaking away at the snout, and the river escapes wherever it can force its way. The ice of the Franz Josef has the most beautiful colouring ”

“ He put out the desk light. Before putting out that on the center-table he took another look to make sure everything was safe and to take a survey, as he often did, of the comfort and beauty of the room. He liked beautiful and refined things, did Josef. At his mother's home in Augsburg everything was well scrubbed and clean, but coarse, very coarse. Here what a difference! How his old mother would stare and wipe her lips. Maybe his brothers would stay in America, too, if they were here. He raised his eyes to the portraits. What would Emil and Friedl say to women like that, eh? ”

“ Logically, therefore, Francis Josef is an unlawful ruler of the Bohemian Kingdom. ↑ The elusive paragraph fourteen of the constitution (bearing date December 21, 1867) has been the cause of some of the bitterest fights in parliament. It virtually nullifies constitutionalism in Austria, permitting as it does the emperor and his ministers to rule the land “in case of urgent necessities” without parliament. Past experience has shown that those “necessities” arise quite often. Paragraph fourteen is a bulwark of strength to the German party against which the Bohemians have battled in vain. ”

“ For a brief moment in 1848 the Parliament of Kremsier laid down the fundamental law, “All power proceeds from the people,” and the Czech leader Dr. Rieger expounded this theme in one of his best speeches. But ever since this short-lived child of the revolution was dismissed and its home occupied by Austrian soldiers, each successive constitution in Austria has been not a democratic achievement, but the personal gift of Francis Joseph, designed as a cloak for theocratic monarchism, which claims to possess superhuman and divine rights. ”

“ Joseph as the protector of the whole house of Austria, and the ruler of his kingdom and country, begging at the same time all the other electors and princes of the Roman empire to choose the same saint as their patron, especially in Germany, and to show him special honor. And most of those princes followed his example. " Behold, I have appointed thee over the whole land, "said also one of the first of the archbishops of Treves, Charles Gaspar von der Layen of glorious memory, when he dedicated himself and his whole diocese to St. Joseph and chose him as the father of his country. ”

“ At the same time, and in order to paralyze any desire on the part of Francis Joseph to come to the aid of France, he mobilized both the Hungarian Government and the Austrian Liberals to compel Francis Joseph to dismiss his anti-Prussian Austrian Premier, Count Hohenwart, to break his promises to the Bohemians, and to surrender himself for the rest of his reign to the joint control of the Magyar minority in Hungary and the German minority in Austria. ”

“ Up to 1866 its ambition was to be the head of the entire German nation, of which the Hapsburg territories were to form an integral part. When the Prussian kings supplanted the rulers of Austria in the leadership of Germany, Francis Joseph hesitated for a while and was on the verge of making his empire a federal structure with equal rights for all races, but instead of that he put into effect a compromise by means of which he pacified the Magyars and sacrificed all the rest. He divided his empire into two parts. ”

“ The little city of adobe walls seemed not to have changed a hair's turn in the six years since I had seen it last. Out beyond the sandy arroyo again Father Josef waited for us. The same strong face and dark eyes, full of fire, the same erect form and manly bearing were his. Except for a few streaks of gray in his close-cropped hair the years had wrought no change in him, save that his countenance betokened the greater benediction of a godly life upon it. ”

“ He cries out feebly with his shattered lung: "I won't go to the Dying Room."
"But we are going to the bandaging ward."
"Then what do you want my tunic for?" He can speak no more. Hoarse, agitated, he whispers: "Stopping here!"
They do not answer but wheel him out. At the door he tries to raise himself up. His black curly head sways, his eyes are full of tears. "I will come back again! I will come back again!" he cries.
The door shuts. We are all excited; but we say nothing. At last Josef says: "Many a man has said that. Once a man is in there, he never comes through." ”

“ Joseph began life in the office of the court bankers and army contractors of his family at Vienna. Here it was that he obtained his first ideas of how [Pg 274] money could be raised through lotteries, monopolies,and imposts of all kinds. But though Joseph was put on the road that led to wealth, in the Oppenheim house at Vienna, he missed his chance there, and was dismissed for some misconduct or other, the particulars of which we do not know.
Then, in disgrace and distress, he came to Bavaria, where he served a while as barber's assistant. ”

“ His superior as though discovering a fatal weakness in the completed structure, said in renewed despair: "while you have the right man, it won't do."
"Why, Excellency," asked Josef with no diminution of that glacial smile. It was as though he held his superior in hardly concealed contempt.
"The papers," said Haupt. "They can't be forged. We have no precedents to follow. Those chaps over there will know the thing by rote and probably would recognize the signatures more quickly than their own." ”

“ After the mischief done by Franz Josef's second childhood as displayed in his launching the forty-eight-hour ultimatum to Serbia before the Kaiser could return from Stockholm, the world has the right—indeed the duty—to demand that monarchies shall at least be subject to superannuation as well as to constitutional limitation. ”

“ Strobl and finally into the crooked streets of Bad Ischl, where the old Emperor Franz Josef had spent so many summers. From Bad Ischl our road ribboned through Laufen and Goisern to St. Agatha.
Beyond St. Agatha lay the Pötschen Pass. The road leading up to it was a series of hairpin turns and dangerous grades. As we ground slowly up the last steep stretch to the summit, I wondered what route George was using for his convoys from the mine. Surely not this one. Large trucks couldn’t climb that interminable grade. I found out later that this was the only road to Alt Aussee. ”

“ Crayton was unaware of all three. He bent over the chess-table, absorbed in the next move. The fingers of one hand were grouped intently, consideringly, on one of the pieces. One would have said his hand thought.
Josef went back noiselessly to his butler's sitting-room and to the letters he was writing. His three brothers had joined the colors and his fierce old mother in Augsburg expected him to return to fight for the Fatherland. Of course he had not the slightest idea of returning! Not he! He liked America and meant to stay in it. ”

“ Dollarson:
No. In this land there is no shadow. It gleams with its four-square expanses, it glistens with the wheat which is growing upon it, shimmers with the images of forests, shines with the cities which garb its new life. Ha, ha! Is it not rather this ancient world here which is the land of dead armies and the age-old graveyard of hopes? This soil here, not once but a hundred times, had to be redeemed for life’s sake. For ages past there has been cursing and vain yearning here. Here you walk upon the bones of millions who dreamt of better things and never lived to see them. ”

“ It took an army of 200,000 men, with 480 guns, to pacify that little strip of land; and the occupation, and the subsequent events in the peninsula, [159] have brought Austria up against another problem, uncommonly like the old one which disturbed the beginning of Francis Joseph’s reign. For the inhabitants of Bosnia are of Servian race; and there are many other Servians in other parts of the Austrian dominions; and there is a Kingdom of Servia, full of fiercely patriotic men, from whom the cry of Servia Irredenta is going up. Austria once despised them, as she once despised the Italians ”

“ Emperor Francis Joseph is practically a despotic monarch, for the Austro-Hungarian Constitution exists merely on paper. He alone decides the foreign policy of the country, and determines whether there shall be peace or war. Thus he is in a position to make decisions for his country, without consulting his Ministers. Austria-Hungary had long been quiet, almost to the point of stagnation. ”