What men the Austrians had would have to be armed at tremendous expense. In the hotly competitive European military arena, artillery had been massively upgraded. New steel casting and rifling techniques meant that cannon and howitzers could hurl shells farther and more accurately than ever before. Whereas guns had fired a maximum range of two thousand yards (a little over a mile) during the American Civil War, standard pieces (such as the British eighteen-pounder) were now firing shells out to seven thousand yards (four miles). They were also firing more quickly thanks to spring and hydraulic recoil systems that absorbed the kick of the gun and held it in position for the next round. France’s legendary 75 mm cannon could fire fifteen to thirty aimed rounds of shell or shrapnel every sixty seconds. Chemical high explosives like trinitrotoluene (TNT) replaced the old black-powder shells of the 1860s, with devastating results. Armed with better fuses, these rounds killed masses of men with splinters, balls, and shock waves.
Lighter weapons too had undergone massive improvements in recent decades. Magazine-fed repeating rifles, firing a dozen aimed rounds a minute, saturated the field with fire and forced all riflemen to become “walking arsenals,” as the Austrian army’s handbook put it, lugging up to two hundred cartridges in their haversacks at all times. Machine guns, self-loaded by the action of gas pressure, followed in the 1880s, spewing six hundred rounds per minute. They were a terrific force multiplier. A single six-man machine gun team could deliver a division’s worth of rifle fire, and with two machine guns per battalion and twelve battalions to a division, the impact on rate of fire was astonishing.
Investment in these new quick-firing weapons (rifles, machine guns, and field artillery) required unprecedented investment in supply services as well. Prussian musketeers at Leipzig in 1813 had fired an average of twenty rounds in the battle; in the battles of the Russo-Japanese War, infantrymen were routinely firing two hundred rounds or more. Since a soldier could carry no more than two hundred rounds—and since even this number of cartridges would not last longer than fifteen minutes in a hot fight—armies needed expanded supply services. Battalion and company ammunition wagons, bearing an additional three hundred rounds per man, now had to push into the firing line to feed the slaughter.12 Every infantry division had to be followed into battle by 120 of these ammunition wagons, carrying six hundred thousand additional rifle rounds and fifty thousand machine gun rounds.
The new quick-firing artillery, which shot shells as fast as riflemen shot bullets, posed identical cost and logistical problems. Whereas nineteenth-century armies had manufactured no more than seven thousand shells a week in times of war, the armies in World War I would have to manufacture ten or even twenty times that number every day. It was easy to see why: a Prussian cannon at Leipzig in 1813 fired an average of 61 rounds per day, but a Russian cannon at Mukden in 1905 fired 504 rounds per day, causing the French to allot 600 rounds per gun per day by 1914. Had all of these shells been carried to the front, the guns would have disappeared under a stack of crates, so every artillery battery—there were fourteen batteries of six guns in a typical field artillery regiment—required a dozen ammunition wagons, half of which crowded around the guns themselves, the other half trailing behind in the ever-lengthening train that threatened to swallow up the twentieth-century army.13 Nor were ammunition wagons the only piece of the modern military’s new entourage; devastating fire from the new guns forced divisions to add yet more wagons for countermeasures, which included sandbags (seven thousand per division), lumber, ladders, and shovels.14
In order to compete with these fearsome new technologies, perennially improvident Austria-Hungary would have to replace its outmoded equipment—black-powder rifles and bronze-barreled artillery from the 1870s—and buy more of everything, at terrific cost. Vienna would also have to upgrade its railways and roads to move troops faster to the front. Mobilization of a relatively small army in Austria’s last major war (in 1866) had taken an agonizing fifty-five days.15 In the next war, Germany planned to mobilize, deploy, smash France and Britain, and then move its entire army east to defeat Russia in a mere forty-two days. Austria was expected to move just as briskly.
Emperor Franz Joseph feared the size and cost of everything. Whereas General Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf exulted over all of the new inventions—“Napoleon wouldn’t recognize this world of railways, turnpikes, telegraphs, telephones, automobiles, balloons and canned food”—Franz Joseph loathed them. When an experimental armored car sputtered past his suite at maneuvers in 1906, the emperor, a man of the Victorian age, reacted angrily, vowing that “such a thing would never be of any military value.”16
In 1908, Franz Joseph, prodded by the hyperactive Aerenthal, wobbled uncertainly toward annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Even clad in Aerenthal’s new strategy of Balkan and Mediterranean dominance, the task seemed thankless; there were now 674,000 Serbs, 548,000 Muslims, and 334,000 Croats in the territories, all administered by an eye-popping 9,500 Austrian bureaucrats. (The Turks had made do with 180 officials.) Few of these people saw much gain for themselves under Austrian rule, for the simple reason that the Hungarians had insisted that no common Austro-Hungarian funds could be disbursed for the development of the backward provinces. All funds for the upkeep of the region would have to be raised locally, on the backs of the already poor populace, virtually ensuring their hostility to Vienna. The Austrians were also slow to introduce land reform in the new provinces; Muslim landlords essentially imprisoned Christian serfs (kmets) on their big estates, but the Austrians hesitated to reform the system lest they alienate the wealthy Muslims and empower the Serbian kmets, whom they assumed would gravitate to Belgrade, not Vienna. Vienna’s refusal to help the kmets ensured that they would do just that.17
The Young Turk revolution in Constantinople in July 1908 made some Austro-Hungarian reply essential. Faced with an aggressive new Turkish regime, not the slack sultanate of the past, Vienna knew that its continued hold on the occupied area and any future grabs at Macedonia and Salonika would be contested by the Young Turks. The reform party was led by a pair of twenty-nine-year-old Turkish army officers, Mustafa Kemal and Enver Pasha. Kemal (the future Atatürk) had been born in Salonika; Enver’s father had worked in Macedonia, and his mother was Albanian. Neither officer regarded the Balkans as anything other than a Turkish space, and both were committed to the consolidation of Turkey, not its withering away. This new Turkey, the American diplomat Robert Lansing observed, was “reborn and tingling with national ambition.” It could be expected to demand the immediate return of Bosnia-Herzegovina with its half a million Muslims (who were already calling for the Young Turk constitution) as well as its other European vilayets, not let them fall to a Christian power like Austria.18 To Aerenthal, annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina seemed the best “palliative” not just against the Turkish threat but also against sharpening Serbian attacks on the legitimacy of Austro-Hungarian rule in Sarajevo and elsewhere.19 Still, the proposed Palliativmittel harmed relations with Great Britain, which wanted no weakening of the promising Young Turk regime. It also threatened war with Russia, which now firmly backed the Great Serbian program of King Peter Karageorgevic.20
As they pondered annexation, Austro-Hungarian leaders took another nervous glance at their somnolent military. In a major war, Austria-Hungary would be able to eke out just forty-eight infantry divisions against ninety-three Russian divisions, eighty-eight French, forty-six Italian, and eleven Serbian. A Habsburg army of four hundred thousand men, a French officer drawled in 1913, “is really not much at all for an empire of 50 million.” A German officer agreed: “Adequate for a campaign against Serbia, but inadequate for a major European war.”21
Austria-Hungary’s artillery establishment was even more inadequate, with just forty-two guns per division, compared with forty-eight in a Russian division and eighty in a German one. When General Moritz von Auffenberg became war minister in 1911, he discovered that Austria had the lowest proportion of artillery to infantry among the great powe
rs. Auffenberg called artillery the army’s “Achilles’ heel,” and he would shrink from intervention in the looming Balkan Wars because of this and other shortcomings.22 Although the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 had furnished conclusive proof of the superiority of steel to bronze cannon, the Austrians were still procuring bronze guns in 1914 because they lasted longer, which suited Hungarian accountants more than Austrian generals.
With new artillery regiments priced at a quarter million dollars for sixteen new field guns, the straitened Austro-Hungarians clung to the old ones, which meant that their gun batteries blended forty-five different gun types, requiring dozens of different munitions. This made the mass production of shell even more difficult than usual and virtually guaranteed a “shell crisis” in the event of a long war.23 In terms of heavy artillery, the entire Habsburg army possessed just fifty-six heavy howitzers. “The army’s undergunned,” the British military attaché wrote from Vienna in 1913, “but guns are expensive.” Everyone, by then, being so familiar with Austrian penury, no further explanation was required. At the most recent Austrian maneuvers, the British attaché had been struck by “the low proportion of artillery,” concluding prophetically, “If they are going to attempt to do in real war what they often attempted to do in these maneuvers, they are going to suffer very severely indeed.” Taking it all in, Auffenberg commented: “Favorable is not a word you would use to describe our state of affairs.”24
Nor did the Austrians do their best with what they had. Conrad paid lip service to the new fire tactics—“moderne Kampf ist Feuerkampf,” modern battle is fire battle—but his operational art remained stubbornly pre-fire. As in all things, Conrad in this area was a dilettante. He analyzed the Anglo-Boer War in 1903, which had featured quick-firing Boers decimating their British attackers from trenches, and decided that such modern tactics could not reasonably be taught to the “schoolboys, peasants, shopkeepers, factory and office workers and artisans” likely to fill the Austro-Hungarian ranks in a general mobilization. Conrad preferred older tactics—the very ones that would result in the slaughter of the entire Austro-Hungarian army in just four months of combat once war broke out. The fact that these tactics probably wouldn’t work didn’t trouble him. He was looking for a way to present the increasingly undergunned and undertrained Austro-Hungarian army as an army. Foreign attachés were beginning to comment on its feebleness.
Shock tactics approximating those that had destroyed the Habsburg army in 1866 seemed to offer a solution of sorts.25 Austrian troops, Conrad argued, must be forced to attack. Camouflage, new pike-gray uniforms to replace the old blue ones, would provide some security against fire, but to really achieve it, the men would have to maneuver briskly (despite the clutter of wagons and other impediments), achieve numerical superiority at the critical point (despite the enemy’s defensive fire), and turn the enemy’s flank (despite the difficulty of even finding the flank of a million-man army). It was that simple, or so it seemed to Conrad. Foreign attachés were not so sure. Attending Austro-Hungarian maneuvers in 1905—after the carnage of the Boer and Russo-Japanese Wars—Prince Karl Schwarzenberg had been surprised to witness an attack by massed Austrian “red” troops on standing Austrian “blue” troops, neither making any use of the shovel. The red troops charged with the bayonet; the blue troops stood erect in neatly dressed lines. Schwarzenberg turned to the Japanese military attaché beside him, who was a veteran of the recent war with Russia, and asked: “What do you make of this?” The Japanese pondered for a moment, then said: “Wer nicht grabt, ist tot” (he who doesn’t dig in is dead).26
One Austrian general ascribed these failings to Austria’s lack of military experience. The monarchy had not fought a real war since 1866 and had essentially lost touch with reality. Habsburg maneuvers never tested the ability of officers to combine cavalry, infantry, and artillery to take positions by fire and movement. Rather, they involved identifying key points on a map—heights, woods, villages—and then attempting to take them first, which invariably meant a wild steeplechase by gaily adorned squadrons of cavalry and sprinting columns of infantry, without any pause to reconnoiter and fire.27 In 1912, the British attaché confirmed this total lack of “war conditions.” Skirmishes were choreographed, with troops delivered to each unfolding “scene.” A bridgehead was taken by Austrian cavalry in a “shock attack”—a wall of horsemen swinging their sabers as if this were 1812, not 1912. The Austrian infantry attacked in massed company columns, running 150 yards with fixed bayonets at an enemy who, in the real world, would have annihilated them before they covered half that distance.
“The underlying principle in the Austrian army appears to be to get as close to the enemy as possible without firing at all,” the British attaché marveled. The Austrian artillery committed the opposite sin, “blazing off rounds without waiting for range or even for targets,” and was unable to cooperate with friendly infantry without accidentally killing them. The two arms fought a parallel, disconnected battle, not least because the army simply did not have enough guns to bombard the enemy from long range and then take him under fire from closer range to support the infantry assault “without running the risk of depriving the infantry of support during the process of movement of the guns,” as the British officer put it. Nor was any effort made to simulate the friction of battle and the trade-offs it imposed. In real war, officers would have to choose between various objectives and ration the energy of their troops to attain them.28
In the fall of 1908, with their military still stagnating, the Austro-Hungarians finally annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Turks were paid off with $11 million and the return of the Sanjak, but the ensuing crisis with Russia, which objected to the absence of compensations for itself and Serbia, nearly led to war.29 Aerenthal had promised to help secure Russian naval access to the Dardanelles—closed to the Russians since the Crimean War—in return for Russian acceptance of the annexation, but then he reneged, inflicting a brutal diplomatic double cross and defeat on the Russians. Aerenthal inflicted a similar defeat on the Serbs, asserting that the 1878 Treaty of Berlin, which had authorized nothing more than Austrian occupation of Bosnia, was a dead letter, Greece and Bulgaria having already violated the treaty by annexing Crete and declaring independence, respectively. Now, Aerenthal insisted, outright annexation was necessary to “suppress political unrest in Bosnia-Herzegovina.”30 For Austria to achieve its “high cultural and political purposes,” Belgrade was forced to disband the regular troops and irregulars (komitadjis) it had mobilized for operations in Bosnia and—adding insult to injury—avow “friendly relations” with Vienna “without compensation or reserve.”31 Following the crisis from Bucharest, an American diplomat judged it “a remarkable political game.” The Serbs had imagined that a Habsburg annexation, violating the treaty of 1878, would so outrage the international community that Austria would, as the American put it, “lose all sympathy of the powers” and even find itself at war with a coalition eager to defend the rights of “weak yet valiant Serbia.”32
Aerenthal had squirmed out of the trap, but not without cost. Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, deplored Aerenthal’s “disruptive course,” and the American embassy in Vienna worriedly noted that in his personal quest for “greatness,” Aerenthal was “playing with fire to run so close to plunging Europe in a war, the final spread of which cannot be foreseen.”33 Seeking that wider war, Serbia had appealed to Russia for help. But Russia was still rebuilding after its defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, and Russia’s principal ally, France, had no stomach for a great war over the Balkans.34
A German note to Russia in March 1909 insisting that St. Petersburg give Vienna a free hand against Serbia “or matters would have to take their course” sufficed to terminate the crisis.35 The Russians were again deeply humiliated as a great power, but also as the standard-bearer of pan-Slavism, which seemed to have lost a test of wills with the German powers. Conrad foolishly believed that it was his partial mobilization, not German interve
ntion, that had turned the tide. “He represented,” Churchill drawled, “that most dangerous of combinations, a Chief of the General Staff absorbed in Foreign Policy.”36 In Sarajevo, General Michael Appel—as fervent a war-monger as Conrad—insisted that a punitive campaign against Serbia and Montenegro would pay a double dividend, removing Austria’s most pressing external threat and then permitting an invigorating crackdown on the internal one: “Once we’ve defeated and disarmed the gentlemen in Belgrade, Nis and Cetinje, we’ll march on Budapest and Prague, and make them obey too.”37 But Appel, like Conrad, was overreaching. Vigor required resources, and Auffenberg judged the army too weak in every department to fight a war. Government accountants gaped at the cost of just the partial mobilization in 1908: 180 million crowns ($36 million), a sum that amounted to half the year’s military budget and was equal to the cost of four new dreadnought battleships.
Conrad, for his part, merely gaped at Aerenthal’s failure to use the cover of the German ultimatum to invade and partition Serbia without the risk of a Russian second front. But Aerenthal—who was made a count by a grateful emperor for his hand in the venture—was wise enough to grasp the one signal fact that emerged from this crisis: that the Russians had backed down only because of German threats, not Austrian ones. They would accept Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina (under German duress) but would not permit an invasion of Serbia. As an American diplomat put it, Aerenthal “owed his success primarily to bluffing and to the favor and influence of Germany.” But the Germans would not write a blank check for Austrian adventures in the Balkans yet.38
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