Austria-Hungary displayed none of this German brazenness in its own declarations, slouching reluctantly into a war with Russia on August 6—“in view of the menacing attitude of Russia in the Austro-Serbian conflict,” as Berchtold put it. Conrad was overcome with the pessimism that would mar his conduct of the entire war, declaring that “in 1912–13 it would have been a game with decent chances, but now we play va banque.”68 This was anything but reassuring, va banque being a gambler’s term meaning “all or nothing.” As usual, Conrad was acting as if he were the blameless victim of events, not the chief driver of them. Tisza renewed his obstruction, insisting that the “halt in Belgrade” option first floated by the kaiser be pursued and that Berchtold “dispel the fairy tale” of Austrian aggression, but he was too late. In the quiet rooms of Schönbrunn, the elderly emperor had resigned himself to aggression. He sat quietly, secure, as his adjutant put it, “in our legitimate cause.” The adjutant, General Arthur Bolfras, harbored few doubts, bluffly writing to Potiorek in Sarajevo: “One more time I raise my voice to cheer: viel Feind’, viele Ehr’—many enemies, much honor.”69
Bolfras would not be cheering for long.
chapter5
The Steamroller
The night before Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Sophie in the streets of Sarajevo, sixty-two-year-old General Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf sat down to write one of his orotund letters to his mistress, Gina. War was coming, Conrad scribbled, and Austria-Hungary would not survive it; Russia and Serbia would be “the coffin nails of the monarchy.” But Conrad would fight to his last breath anyway, “because such an ancient monarchy and such an ancient army cannot perish ingloriously.”1
Conrad’s bombast masked a darker truth: not only was the empire totally unprepared for the oncoming storm, but so was Conrad himself. Conrad’s career as a writer and a bureaucrat had been brilliant, yet he had not actually heard a shot fired in anger in the modern age. Well known abroad for his tactical writings on the Boer War and other conflicts, his only combat experience had come as a staff captain attached to an infantry division in 1878 in Bosnia. He had rapidly ascended the ladder since his discovery by Franz Ferdinand in 1901, rocketing from a one-star general to a three-star in just five years, but the harsh challenges of modern war and the painful choices they imposed never seemed to darken his glittering career. “Conrad,” Karl Kraus had prophesied before the war, “will remain the greatest commander only as long as the bugles are sounding and not the guns.” Kraus was right, and this was about to become a problem.
Every inch the German hero to his mistress, Gina, Conrad was beginning to exasperate the Germans. With a population of 175 million, which was nearly twice the population of the United States and more than the populations of Austria-Hungary, Germany, and France combined, Russia would drown the Austrians in manpower unless Conrad brought every gun to bear on the Eastern Front immediately upon the outbreak of war.2 Austria’s forty-eight divisions—augmented by, at most, seventeen German ones—would have to hold the line against Serbia and defend Galicia and Poland against Russia’s 114 divisions until the Germans had beaten France’s eighty-eight divisions (in about forty-two days, according to the plan) and sent their army east to beat the Russians too. Russian manpower was so vast that there could be no thought in Vienna of offensive operations against Serbia once Russia entered the conflict.3 From the first day of mobilization, the Austrians would have to roll everything east to beat back the Russian “steamroller,” a term that had been coined by the awed British press to reflect Russia’s seemingly infinite supply of men. The steamroller was the ghost in the machine, tormenting Conrad’s every attempt to adapt the mind of his superficially elegant war plans to the matter of Russian might.
The Austrians would have to increase their own deficient troop numbers and strike an early blow to throw the steamroller—which would be busy augmenting the 1.4-million-man active-duty army with 6 million reservists—out of gear. The Austrians had already taken some measures to expand their available manpower: in 1912, the Austrians had increased the Habsburg army by reducing the term of service from three years to two, while stretching the reserve obligation from seven years to as many as twenty-seven. Troops could now be recalled for service in the reserves until age fifty. This was apparently the only way that a poor empire of 53 million could square off against a poor empire of 175 million.4 The problem, which would shortly reveal itself, was that calling men soldiers on paper was not the same as making them soldiers in the field. Horrified by training costs, the monarchy still trained only a fraction of its eligible twenty-one-year-olds each year, so in the mobilization of 1914, most of the Austro-Hungarian soldiers appeared at their depots with little or no military experience.
Other sleights of hand fostered a reckless optimism in Vienna. By 1914, the Austro-Hungarians had gotten their mobilization time down to sixteen days.5 They had also improved the combat readiness of the eight Landwehr and eight Honvéd divisions to a level where they could now be mobilized, classed as Feldtruppen (field troops), and merged in sixteen army corps alongside the thirty-three regular army divisions. That, of course, was a mixed blessing. Since the Landwehr and Honvéd—one-third of the army’s total strength—had been originally conceived as a reserve army, counting them as first-line strength meant that the Austro-Hungarian army no longer had a trained reserve, whether to replace losses in the first wave or to defend an unexpectedly threatened point.
With no room in the budget for real reserve divisions, Conrad made do with notional ones: retired officers, one-year volunteer officers (educated men who had volunteered to serve just one year to escape conscription), and all of the untrained men that the army had been drafting but not actually inducting since 1900. These blessed holders of high draft numbers—the so-called Nichtaktiven, or non-actives—were the men who had escaped service in both the regular army (which had received the men with the lowest draft numbers) and the Landwehr/Honvéd (those with middle numbers) but would certainly be called to the colors in case of a major war. There was, in fact, nowhere to put these men if they were called up, as the Hungarians naturally had prevented the creation even of hypothetical reserve regiments to accommodate them, so in any general mobilization they would mill around uselessly. Eventually they’d be bundled into Neuformationen (new formations), equipped with uniform oddments and rifles from as far back as the 1870s, and ordered to march and fight after the most perfunctory instruction. The luckiest Nichtaktiven, of course, had long since emigrated to America, where they delightedly ignored the mobilization orders that wended their way across the Atlantic to factories in Connecticut, mines in Pennsylvania, or lumber camps in Michigan. The less fortunate, who had not made their escape before the war, were dignified with the name Landsturm or Ersatsreserve and lumped into undergunned, undersupplied Marschbrigaden (march brigades) that theoretically would furnish eleven reserve divisions but in practice were cannon fodder: “Men and officers alike were much surprised when arms and equipment were issued and everything had to be explained,” one veteran dryly observed.6
With troop problems like these, Conrad might have been expected to adopt a more prudent strategy. If he were to have any hope of winning in the east, Conrad would have to concentrate his three-part army as quickly as possible. He would have to abandon all thought of sending Echelon B down to reinforce the Balkan Minimal Group in the fight against Serbia; instead, the forty divisions of the A and B echelons would have to be combined against Russia and the eight divisions of the Balkan Minimal Group left to deal with Serbia’s dozen divisions.7 By July 1914, only a fantasist could still imagine that an Austro-Serbian war could be localized and the twelve divisions of Echelon B—the four corps of General Eduard von Böhm-Ermolli’s Second Army—safely dispatched to Serbia to join forces with Minimalgruppe Balkan. Austro-Russian relations had deteriorated so sharply after the annexation crisis of 1908 and the Balkan Wars that it was hard to imagine any scenario in which the Russians would permit an unfettered Aus
tro-Hungarian invasion of Serbia. But Conrad proved an imaginative man.
Now that Russia and Austria were at war, swinging Echelon B into line against Serbia invited disaster. The Russians had improved their railways and converted dozens of reserve divisions into first-line divisions that could mobilize and strike swiftly, without having to wait for any reservists. Russia now had nine new railways, five of them double-tracked, running up to the frontiers with Germany and Austria. The tsar now would be able to put ninety-six infantry divisions and thirty-seven cavalry divisions—2.7 million troops in thirty corps—into the field quickly, with 2.3 million slower-moving troops from Siberia and Asia in reserve.8 And everyone assumed that Italy’s twenty-five divisions would eventually enter the fray against Austria. Everything hinged on Austria’s ability to hold long enough in the east for Berlin to win in the west and shift strong forces to the Russian front. But there was no assurance even of this prerequisite; in their last staff talks in May 1914, Moltke had merely said that he hoped to defeat the French and British in six weeks. If he didn’t, Austria-Hungary would be like the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dam.9
Conrad had agreed to put his finger in the dam on the vague, never ratified condition that Moltke would contribute something to the Eastern Front in the first days of the war—perhaps a dozen divisions. Indeed, vagueness had been the keynote of Austro-German military cooperation since Schlieffen’s accession in 1891. His predecessors had cooperated thoroughly with the Austrians; Schlieffen, in contrast, was noted for his wariness. He didn’t trust Austria-Hungary’s ability to guard German secrets and never trusted Austro-Hungarian promises to attack the Russians. Moltke, who succeeded Schlieffen in 1906, absorbed this skepticism about the Austrians and kept his communications with them vague. In May 1914 he had seemed to agree to a joint offensive, pledging offensive operations by a German Eighth Army in loose conjunction with a much larger Austro-Hungarian force operating from Galicia. The Eighth Army would be a down payment, to be followed by strong forces within a reasonable time in the east, after the French and British were beaten in the west.
Conrad, who was at least as wary of the Germans as they were of him—he regularly stamped documents “Not to be shared with the German general staff”—had been delighted with Germany’s nebulous assurances, for entirely the wrong reasons.10 He believed that he could eat his cake and have it too: do his thankless duty against the Russians, sloughing off most of the work to the Germans, and still win a glorious victory against the Serbs. Knowing that the next war would arise in the Balkans, Conrad had no intention of letting the Serbs slip the noose while he trucked the Habsburg army off to an inglorious holding operation in the dust and mud of Poland and Ukraine. He had tipped his hand slightly in January 1913, when he’d remarked to Moltke that the “unpredictable attitude of Russia” in a Balkan crisis might cause him to improvise on a day-to-day basis, durch den Moment.11 When Moltke hadn’t demanded clarification of that alarming proposition, Conrad quietly—without advising the Germans—began improvising in the spring of 1914. Instead of pushing whatever troops he sent to Galicia right up to the Russian border, to relieve pressure on the Germans by threatening an Austro-Hungarian invasion of Russian Poland, Conrad decided to unload the troops far to the south, on the San and Dniester, where they could shelter behind the rivers and inside the fortresses, and buy time for the defeat of Serbia when the long-awaited war finally came.
This, of course, was the exact opposite of what the Germans thought that they had arranged with Conrad. Indeed, when Conrad had proposed something like this to Moltke in 1909, the German chief had reacted indignantly, pointing out that an Austro-German defeat of Russia “will itself solve the Serbian affair.”12 The Austrians, in other words, were supposed to arrange the fate of Serbia on the Bug, not the Drina.
But even as war with Russia crept closer in July 1914, Conrad still wanted to deploy safely and unthreateningly in Galicia to buy time for the destruction of the Serbs. In fact, he was quietly sending 40 percent of the Habsburg army to fight the Serbs.13 On July 30, two days after the Russians began their “partial mobilization” of 1.1 million troops, Conrad told his chief railway planner, Colonel Johann Straub, that even though war with Russia was imminent, he still wanted Echelon B (Second Army) reserved for the Serbian front. Conrad even ordered a last-minute revision of the war plan that day. Whereas Echelon B was supposed to sit in its barracks until its final destination was clarified, freeing up the rails for the prompt movement of Echelon A to Galicia and Balkan Minimal Group to the Serbian frontier, Conrad now ordered a stunned Straub to move the Second Army to Serbia immediately. He even stripped a corps from Echelon A and ordered Straub somehow to move it to Serbia as well.14
Berlin was even more stunned by Conrad’s freelancing. With Russia’s general mobilization under way, the kaiser wired Franz Joseph on July 31 and warned him not to “fragment your main forces with any simultaneous offensive against Serbia.” Moltke had become so wedded to the Schlieffen Plan—the notion of a fast war in France followed by a leisurely destruction of the Russians—that he had announced in April 1913 that German plans for a war with Russia alone would no longer be entertained or even updated. That this was stupid and irresponsible in no way diminished the need now for all Austrian hands on deck in the east. Despite their numbers, the Russians would be deploying with the biggest wetlands in Europe at their back: the Pripet marshes, swamps and floodlands that extended from Belarus to Ukraine. “Assemble your whole force against Russia,” Moltke enjoined Conrad from Berlin. “Drive the [Russians] into the Pripet marshes and drown them there.”15
Colonel Straub also protested the Serbian detour—“technically impossible” was his verdict—and requested “a few days’ grace” to reroute the torrent of trains and horse-drawn wagons.16 Having already squandered a month since the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, Conrad now agreed to squander another week. He announced the Austro-Hungarian mobilization against Russia on July 31 but named August 4 as the first day of mobilization. He would not begin meeting with his army commanders until August 2. The old saw “Austria, always a day late, with an army and an idea” was on everyone’s lips as time ticked by and Austria’s momentum ebbed.
When the Russians and Germans proclaimed general mobilization at midday on July 31, Conrad found himself in the entirely predictable predicament of having routed half of his army to Serbia for a war with a minor Balkan state. As usual, Emperor Franz Joseph had no idea what was really going on. He assured the kaiser that he was sending “the great majority” of his army against Russia, but, as in most things, he was foggy on the details. The Germans weren’t—the Second Army (Echelon B) was supposed to anchor the right wing of the Austrian position in Galicia, not invade Serbia—and the Germans were thunderstruck by the slow-motion revelation of Conrad’s real plan, as opposed to the one he had seemed to agree upon with Moltke in May. It was, of course, partly their fault. Germany’s military attaché in Vienna discovered to his amazement on August 1 that despite the succession of international crises since 1908, Moltke and Conrad had never agreed upon “measures to coordinate operations against Russia.” Indeed, no “intimate arrangements” of any kind had been set down, merely sketchy oral agreements.17
Conrad, who had just blithely told his corps commanders that “all instructions remained in force despite the intervention of Russia,” now phoned an astonished Colonel Straub and asked whether “the prevailing Balkan mobilization could be transformed into a Russian one.” This was an abashed way of asking whether the five corps he’d ordered to Serbia on Thursday could be redirected to Galicia on Friday. Straub recoiled in horror; he had 140 trains a day rolling along seven lines to Galicia and four lines to the Balkans.18 He had toiled through the night to implement Conrad’s revisions and had already put 132 troop trains with the first echelons of the Second Army on the rails to Serbia. To undo the latest operation was nearly impossible; Straub (who had been vacationing in Dalmatia until now) promised that were it to be att
empted, there would be “chaos on the railway lines for which I cannot take responsibility.” Even if the trains could be stopped and reversed back to their depots, Conrad knew that an already demoralized army would become even more so if subjected to such a ludicrous about-face. Major Emil Ratzenhofer, head of the general staff’s Russia Group, noted that the Second Army continued on its way to spare the telegraphs, which were overheating with conflicting orders, but also the fighting spirit of the troops: “we feared moral, political, and disciplinary damage; the men’s confidence in the professional competence of their leaders would have suffered.”19
Conrad, Straub, and Ratzenhofer—already bidding to rescue their postwar reputations—would have been wiser to fear what crushing defeats in Serbia and Russia, caused in part by their unruly mobilization, would do to the men’s confidence. Redirected trains were nothing compared to lost battles. Conrad later professed to be surprised and let down by the rigidity of his railroads, but they were his railroads in times of war, and, in fact, he had known since July 1913—when Plan R + B had last been gamed—that he would have no flexibility. He had told the emperor in March 1913 that Echelon B could be fluidly shifted between the fronts; in July, a full year before the July Crisis, his railway experts had assured him that it really couldn’t. In other words, Conrad would have to take the most prudent course early on, for once embarked, the men could not easily be turned around.20
A Mad Catastrophe Page 15