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Roads, railways, public buildings had been created out of nothing, capital had been sunk, a new machine of government had been constructed. Austria had come to stay, and Aehrenthal, in annexing the provinces, felt himself to be merely setting the seal to a document which had been signed a generation earlier.
Aehrenthal remained unmoved by their cries of impotent fury and settled down to a trial of strength with his rival Izvolsky, the Russian Foreign Minister, who encouraged the sister Slavonic States in their resistance. At length in March 1909 Germany stepped forward in "shining armour" to support her Austrian ally, and Russia, to avoid European war, gave way and abandoned the Serbs to their fate.
He was particularly sensitive in this respect. When Aehrenthal fell ill the Archduke made unkind remarks about the dying man, and there was great and general indignation at the want of feeling shown by him. He represented the Emperor at the first part of the funeral service, and afterwards received me at the Belvedere.
Russia demanded that the Dardanelles should now be opened to her warships. It came out that when Baron von Aehrenthal met Izvolsky Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs at Buchlau in September 1908, Izvolsky had agreed to the Austrian annexation of Bosnia in exchange for the opening of the Dardanelles. He may have believed this would automatically follow any violation of the Berlin Treaty.
The change in April 1909 favoured German influence. The Bosnian Question sprang out of a conflict of racial claims, which two masterful men, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and the Austrian Foreign Minister, Aehrenthal, were resolved to decide in favour of Austria. The Archduke disliked, and was disliked by, the Germans and Magyars on account of his pro-Slav tendencies.
From the moment when Baron Aehrenthal announced his chimerical scheme of an Austrian railway through the Sandjak of Novi Pazar in January 1908 everybody knows that the railway already built through Serbia along the Morava valley is the only commercially remunerative and strategically practicable road from Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest to Salonika and Constantinople Russia realized that the days of the Mürzsteg programme were over, that henceforward it was to be a struggle between Slav and Teuton for the ownership of Constantinople and the dominion of the Near East, and that something must be done to retrieve the position in the Balkans which it was losing.
For a Reuter telegram had reported: "August 12, Vienna. . . . it was agreed at the conference between Baron Aehrenthal and Sir Charles Hardinge at Ischl to-day that any developments arising in Bosnia and the Herzegovina from the constitutional changes in Turkey should be considered as purely internal matters affecting Austria-Hungary and not involving any question of international policy."
The Aehrenthal policy, contrary to what we were accustomed to on the Ballplatz, pursued ambitious plans for expansion with the greatest strength and energy, thereby adding to the suspicions of the world regarding us.
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