HOETZENDORFF DEAD.

Auckland Star, Volume LVI, Issue 232, 1 October 1925, Page 11

HOETZENDORFF DEAD.

A PRICKED BUBBLE. SERBIA'S INVETERATE FOE. (From Our Own Correspondent.) LONDON, August 27. One by one the men who moved in high places in the Great War are joining the great majority. The death on August 25 of Field Marshal Conrad yon Hoetzendorff removes certainly one of those to whose door must be. laid responsibility for the militarism which was touched into flames in July, 1914. Conrad yon Hoetzendorff died unrepentant; to the last he was convinced that the Hapsburg Monarchy, to which he was sincerely devoted, had perished because opportunities for war had been missed between 1906 and 1913, and not because the European War was gratuitously provoked in 1914.

The last years of his life he spent in writing his memoirs, a work of stupendous size and very considerable value, as it reproduces in full masses of documentary material, both political and military. It is absolutely outspoken and in no way tries to change or explain away the past.

Only last week "The Times Literary Supplement," in a review of Baron Musulin's Memoirs, discusses F. M. Conrad's part, distinguishing it from that of Musulin—who admits drafting the ultimatum to Serbia—whom the reviewer classes as among those average, personally honest, well-meaning men whom a dark fate had chosen for pawns in the game that was in result the greatest disaster of European history. The reviewer goes on to say, "Yet without their collective help even that malignant and so thoroughly narrow and purblind military politician, Field Marshal Conrad yon Hoetzendorff, would not have had his war, for which he had worked and agitated since 1506." Hoetzendorff, swashbuckler though he was, was bc3ieve"d to have considerable military skill. But the Great War as it did many another. He was a consistent advocate of the annexation of Serbia, and, indeed, resigned because of his difference of opinion on this point with Franz Josef and Aeranthal. But his return to power in 1912 brought many tributes to his efficiency, not only in Austria, where it was never doubted, but throughout Europe, where he was generally regarded as a man of great strategic ability and of quick, unerring decision. Sarajevo gave him his chance at last, and the bubble of his reputation was soon pricked. His push for Warsaw, in the opening mobths of the war, was rolled back by the great, semicircular movement of Russia and Brussilov, which culminated in the taking m/W.-? 1 over-running of Galicit and the disordered retreat of the whole Austrian arniy. His prestige never recovered and the direction of the AusSl a T T 8 + ? EBSed t0 the Germans. Reduced to the command of an army corps, he tried, on the Italian front, to imitate Ludendorff's tactics with _,__. endorff s inspiration. The failure to break through in 1917 on to the Italian plain >yas the end of him as a soldier. His allies despaired of a decision on that ftont, and without thdm he was £7f IT' *T£ c man at whose half the Balkans had trembled was proved as incompetent at his own work fi! *■ %T? S , P MW Mtly meddlesome in that of the statesmen. The pity oi it is that i n a career wholly lacking in military genius or political judgment he should have been able to contribute so forcibly 'with his bombast to the atmosphere of mistrust and apprehension which precipitated , catastrophe, says the "Manchester Guardian."