'December snow.' Hand-painted watercolor calendar for December 1917 by Schima Martos. Particulates from a smoking kerosene lamp overspread the days of December, and are labeled 'December höra,' 'December snow.' The first five days or nights of the month show a couple at, sitting down to, or rising from a lamp-lit table. The rest of the month the nights are dark, other than four in which the quarter of the moon shows through a window, or Christmas, when the couple stands in the light of a Christmas tree.
December höraDecember snow2½ liter petroleum.
"[Austro-Hungarian Emperor] Karl on 4 December [1917] called a meeting of military leaders. Szurmay reiterated the demand for a separate Hungarian army and informed those present that 'all groups' in Budapest were 'united on the issue of a Hungarian army'. General Sarkotić, the Croat wartime leader of Bosnia-Herzegovina, countered that Szurmay's demands were inadmissible and instead argued for a 'small unitary army' designed to 'repress revolutionary subversions and coups'. . . . War Minister Stöger-Steiner defused a potentially explosive situation by suggesting that Karl bow to the inevitable on the issue of a separate Hungarian army, but that he do so in such a manner as to turn its creation into a 'genuine coronation of dualism'. In any case, Stöger-Steiner lectured the council, such a step would have to wait until the end of the war. General Dankl, colonel of the Leibgarden, closed the meeting on a true Habsburg note by muttering 'later, much later' in support of the War Minister's decision to delay the issue."
Karl, Emperor of Austria and Apostolic King of Hungary, inherited his thrones from Franz Joseph after the latter's death in November, 1916. Incompetent leadership on the battlefield, an inability to produce adequate materiel for war or adequate food for civilians and soldiers alike, and increasing national aspirations in its ethnic groups were driving the Empire to its dissolution. The two nations of the Empire, Austria and Hungary, shared a head of state and ministries of foreign affairs, finance, and defense. The countries had separate parliaments (in Vienna and Budapest) and prime ministers. Szurmay was Minister for the Honvéd, the equivalent of Austria's Landwehr, the territorial or national guard.
The First World War: Germany and Austria Hungary 1914-1918 by Holger H. Herwig, page 353, copyright © 1997 Holger H. Herwig, publisher: Arnold, publication date: 1997
1917-12-04, 1917, December, Kaiser Karl, Budapest, rationing, December snow,
