It is not quite clear whether he had been imposed upon or not, but there can be no doubt that at the moment when he was publicly testifying against Clemenceau he was quite aware of what was going on. The memoirs of Windischgraetz prove this.
Czernin fully realized what this moral catastrophe involved. Victorious Berlin would regard the affair as treachery at the moment when its armies were again approaching Paris. The Germans and Magyars in Austria would use this against him, so that his policy, the policy of the Empire, and the situation within it were all threatened. Czernin, who evidently at that period regarded himself as the protector of the Empire, now opposed all attempts at secret anti-German negotiations or at a downright separation from Germany on the part of Karl and Zita as firmly as he had shared their views in April 1917. It is said that he was now considering the possibility of forcing Karl to abdicate as a sequel to the affair. The matter ended, however, with his resignation on April 14, 1918. The net result of the episode had been to reveal to the Allied countries the deplorable character of Viennese policy. Czernin was the last Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister who had any kind of Austro-Hungarian policy. His fall denoted the end of the Empire, and his successors, Burian and Andrássy, were merely liquidators of a ruined concern.
Austro-Hungarian policy could scarcely have sustained a severer blow than the incidents to which I have just referred. And when Paris, Rome, and London received further reports, concerning the telegram of Karl to Wilhelm on the subject of an indefeasible alliance between the two Empires and Karl’s journey to Spa, followed by a new agreement of alliance by which Vienna entered into fresh commitments to Berlin, all the Allied Governments could only infer that any separation of Austria-Hungary from Germany was now out of the question, and that the war would have to be won by force of arms. As a matter of fact, the agreement at Spa was the closest military, political, and economic union which the two Empires had hitherto concluded. Vienna had up till then avoided such binding commitments, notably in economic matters, but at Spa Karl succumbed in this respect also. The further discussions as to the development of an economic union were carried out in all detail by the appropriate experts at Salzburg between July 9 and October 11, 1918. The fall of the Empire, of course, made these things null and void.
