Austria-Hungary asks for an armistice

On 27 October 1918 Austria-Hungary broke the alliance with Germany that had been the axis of its policy since 1879. The new foreign minister, Count Gyula Andrássy, son of one of the alliance’s architects, instructed the ambassador in Stockholm to pass to President Woodrow Wilson, through the Swedish government, a note requesting an immediate armistice and peace negotiations, without regard for Germany. The next day, as the army on the Italian front began to disintegrate, the Emperor sent a military armistice commission to the Italian supreme command. Both routes were meant to lead to the same goal: getting out of the war as quickly as possible.

The note to Wilson

The President had answered the first request for an armistice, made jointly with Germany, with a separate note of 18 October. In it he wrote that autonomy for the peoples of the monarchy was no longer enough and that they must decide their own fate, above all the Czechoslovaks and the Yugoslavs. Andrássy, who had just taken over from István Burián, concluded that only a quick and separate peace could save the monarchy from revolution. According to his memoirs, when he told the Emperor that they were negotiating “under irresistible compulsion”, Karl I quietly corrected him: “out of very bitter necessity”.

The note, prepared with the help of the future Austrian prime minister Heinrich Lammasch, was short. The Austro-Hungarian government declared that it accepted the President’s earlier statements and his view of the rights of the peoples of the monarchy, “in particular of the Czechoslovaks and the Yugoslavs”. Since it had thereby met all the conditions set by Wilson, nothing now stood in the way of negotiations. Austria-Hungary was therefore ready, “without awaiting the outcome of other negotiations”, to open talks on peace and on an immediate cessation of hostilities on all its fronts. Those few words meant a separate peace, without Germany, with which Wilson was still exchanging notes.

The Swedish minister in Washington handed the note to Secretary of State Robert Lansing on the afternoon of 29 October. A day later Andrássy addressed a separate letter to Lansing asking him to persuade the President to act as quickly as possible. Vienna also asked for the Pope’s intercession and, through its ambassadors in Bern and Stockholm, sought the support of London, Paris, Rome and Tokyo. According to the Austrian official history, the coalition did not respond to this last appeal. The fate of the armistice was to be decided not in Washington but at the front and at Versailles, where the Supreme War Council was settling its terms.

A telegram to Kaiser Wilhelm

The step was a painful one. As early as 26 October Karl I had informed Kaiser Wilhelm II that the peoples of the monarchy did not want to go on fighting and that he himself did not believe in a favourable outcome of the war. “Even the most sincere feelings of brotherhood and comradeship,” he wrote, “must give way to responsibility for the state that fate has entrusted to me.” He announced his “unalterable decision” to ask within 24 hours for a separate peace and an immediate armistice. Wilhelm begged him by telegram not to do so, since the break-up of the alliance would only harden the terms imposed on both empires. The chief of the general staff, Arthur Arz von Straußenburg, learned of the contents of the note only from the press. In Germany, where Erich Ludendorff had gone the day before, the news from Vienna hastened the dispatch of another note to Wilson.

Andrássy’s note, published on 28 October, had the opposite effect to the one intended. The Czechs and the Yugoslavs read it as recognition of their freedom. The Austrian official history writes that the Ballhausplatz’s last diplomatic initiative, instead of halting the national revolutions, convinced the peoples of the monarchy of the old state’s helplessness.

General Weber’s commission

At the same time a direct route was being desperately sought. The Italian offensive on the Piave and on Monte Grappa had been under way since 24 October, and from 27 October the Allies were crossing the river while one Austrian regiment after another refused to fight. On the morning of 28 October Arz asked the Emperor for permission to negotiate with the Italian supreme command. An armistice commission under General of Infantry Viktor Weber von Webenau had been set up at the beginning of October and assembled in Trento. Now, on the afternoon of 28 October, it was ordered to begin talks. It was to accept any terms that did not violate the honour of the army and did not amount to complete capitulation.

During the night of 28 to 29 October Captain Ruggera of the general staff set out under a white flag in the Adige valley south of Rovereto. On the morning of 29 October he handed the Italians a letter from Weber asking for an immediate armistice on land and sea to put an end to “useless bloodshed”. Diaz, whose armies were just breaking through the front, was in no hurry. He replied that he would receive only plenipotentiaries with proper credentials and would not halt operations. The commission reached the Villa Giusti near Padua only on the evening of 31 October, and the armistice was signed on 3 November.