Right, Tore’s Tuesday once more.
This time we will be visiting the Austro-Hungarian empire, and have a tiny peek at one of the many consequences of WWI. Many tend to think that it all ended on the eleventh day of the eleventh month… Needless to say, it did not. The Great War ended, but empires toppled and different peoples with different interests scrambled to create realities on the ground in anticipation of the final peace treaty at Versailles.
So, this Kepi was originally on the head of an officer of the Tiroler Kaiserjäger during WWI. But, it has more history to it.
It still has the emperors monogram in the cockade, but an enameled Badge has been put over it, in the Austrian colors, red, white, red. So, the Kaiserjäger officer still served while the A-H empire crumbled and fell, and Austria’s first republic was formed.
Then, in the center of the Jäger trumpet a small silver cross has been inserted with the legend “1918 Kärnten 1919”
When the A-H empire fell to pieces, the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later to become Yugoslavia), invaded The southeastern part of Kärnten. Here there was a Slovenian speaking population, as well as Austrian German speaking people. Needless to say, the kingdom wanted to move their northern border to include the Slovenes.
There was armed fighting and a referendum ending in favor of most of Kärnten becoming part of Austria, but with some areas ceded to the new kingdom.
I will not write a detailed account of all that went on, that is already available from several sources and in several languages, but I wanted to show this one as proof that WWI did not really end with the armistice. A lot happened in the aftermath, not least the little known allied invasion in Russia. There was the Finnish civil war, the battles In the Baltic countries… The struggle to gain territories in the power vacuum left by the fallen empires was quite dramatic, and with the treaty of Versailles, Europe was changed forever, and today’s borders are roughly what was made then. Indeed, the world was changed forever after the first of the world wars…