e
assured. That was the control of the armies and navies and the foreign
policies of these governments. The old Kaiser Franz Josef was a man
who guarded everything he had as jealously as a baby guards his toys.
At one time when it was suggested to the aged monarch that Germany and
Austria-Hungary could establish a great kingdom of Poland as a buffer
nation, if he would only give up Galicia as one of the states of this
kingdom, he replied in his childish fashion:

"What, those Prussians want to take another pearl out of my crown?"

In June the Austro-Hungarian General Staff conducted an offensive
against Italy in the Trentino with more success than the Germans had
anticipated. But the Austrians had not calculated upon Russia. In
July General Brusiloff attacked the Austrian forces in the
neighbourhood of Lusk, succeeded in persuading or bribing a Bohemian
army corps to desert and started through the Austrian positions like a
flood over sloping land. Brusiloff not only took several hundred
thousand prisoners. He not only broke clear through the Austrian lines
but he thoroughly demoralised and destroyed the Austrian army as a unit
in the world war. Von Hindenburg, who had been made Chief of the
German General Staff, was compelled to send thousands of troops to the
Wohlynian battlefields to stop the Russian invasion. But von
Hindenburg did not look with any degree of satisfaction upon the
possibility of such a thing happening again and informed the Kaiser
that he would continue as Chief of the General Staff only upon
condition that he be made chief of all armies allied to Germany. At a
Conference at Great Headquarters at Pless, in Silicia, where offices
were moved from France as soon as the Field Marshal took charge,
Hindenburg was made the leader of all the armed forces in Central
Europe. Thus by one stroke, really by the aid of Russia, Germany
succeeded in conquering Austria-Hungary and in taking away from her
command all of the forces, naval and military, which she had. At the
same time the Bulgarian and Turkish armies were placed at the disposal
of von Hindenburg. So far so good for the Prussians.

But there were still some independent forces left within the Central
Powers. Hungary was not content to do the bidding of Prussia.
Hungarians were not ready to live under orders from Berlin. Even as
late as a few months ago when the German Minister of the Interior
called a conference in Berlin to mobilise all