Foreign Minister Berchtold

Chief of Staff Conrad

In October's edition of Over the Top, we covered the Austrian-Serbian confrontation over Albania. Eventually, Serbia withdrew its occupying forces, but there was an important follow-up. The crisis led to a shift in the thinking of key leaders of the Empire — particularly Foreign Minister Count Leopold Berchtold.

Up to the October events, Berchtold had resisted buying into Chief of Staff Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf's relentless entreaties for a punitive war against Serbia (25 appeals in 1913 alone). However, the Foreign Minister began to apprehend that the multi-culture empire was dissolving. For instance, a plan to grant some autonomy to Croats was bitterly opposed by Hungary's Magyars, and the Croats and Serbians within the empire were now supporting each other's list of grievances and separatist impulses. Constant expansionist pressure by Serbia, Berchtold became convinced, encouraged and now seemed to be accelerating such disorderly movements. He concluded that some sort of control over Serbia was essential for the survival of his state, that punitive action against Serbia (this sounds somewhat illogical in hindsight) was the only way to solve the problem of the Slav nationalities within the Empire. From November 1913, Berchtold and Conrad began waiting for the right moment to attack Serbia.

The last remaining obstacle to this "War Party" was the heir apparent, Franz Ferdinand, who understood the threat posed by Serbian activism, but wanted to avert confronting the Russians. His hope was that the upcoming military maneuvers in Bosnia Herzegovina, , scheduled for June 1914, would awe and impress the Empire's own southern Slavs and arrest the crumbling. That event, however, would lead to his death, eliminating the last substantial opponent to the war party.

Sources: J. Joll, The Origins of the First World War

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William Lawrence Bragg
(1890-1971)
Nobel Prize, Physics, 1915

Bragg Was the Youngest Nobel Laureate Ever William Lawrence Bragg, son of William Henry Bragg, was born in Adelaide, South Australia, on 31March 1890. He received his early education at St. Peter's College in his birthplace, proceeding to Adelaide University to take his degree in mathematics with first-class honors in 1908. He came to England with his father in 1909 and entered Trinity College, Cambridge, as an Allen Scholar, taking first class honors in the Natural Science Tripos in 1912. In 1914 he was appointed as Fellow and Lecturer in Natural Sciences at Trinity College. From 1912 to 1914 he had been working with his father, and the results of their work were published in an abridged form in X-rays and Crystal Structure (1915). It was this work which earned them jointly the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1915. From this year to 1919, Bragg served as Technical Advisor on Sound Ranging to the Map Section, G.H.Q., France, receiving the O.B.E. and the M.C. in 1918. Sound ranging allowed the detection of the type and location of enemy artillery. After the war, he was appointed Langworthy Professor of Physics at Manchester University in 1919, and held this post till 1937, when he moved back to Cambridge, where he soon became the head of the prestigious Cavendish Laboratory. Mary Pickford ( 1892-1979) America's Sweetheart Mary Pickford was the most popular woman of her day. She was "America's Sweetheart," and millions of fans around the world called her "our Mary." Her rise to unprecedented global fame coincided with the rise of popular cinema, and during those early years of film, Mary Pickford was its most adored and dynamic star. in 1913, she made a deal with Adolph Zukor, joining his Famous Players Film Company for the grand salary of $500 a week (over $9000 in today's dollars). Mary Pickford in Johanna Enlists When her first marriage began to fail Pickford met and fell in love with the handsome film actor Douglas Fairbanks. But they were both married and feared catastrophic consequences for their careers if they divorced. They appeared before huge crowds together on tours promoting war bonds for World War I, but they always managed to hide their relationship from the public. She made many of her best movies during the war years. Her notable war films in this period included C.B. DeMille's The Little American in which her character has her ship torpedoed by a German U-boat but makes it back to ancestral home in France, where she witnesses German brutality firsthand, and Johanna Enlists in which a young girl, stifling on her father's backwoods farm, is reinvigorated by the arrival of an army regiment, come to train in the area. She also made a short feature to help promote the Liberty Bond program, One Hundred Percent American. Finally, Pickford and Fairbanks decided to risk everything: they divorced their spouses and were married privately in 1920. The advent of the "talkies" were not kind to her and she spent the rest of her life in show business but out of the spotlight she once dominated. Her storybook marriage to Fairbanks ended in 1936.