A Mad Catastrophe

by Geoffrey Wawro

  But Conrad was never decisive. He hated making decisions because they committed him to a single course for which he might be held responsible. And he had never been prudent—not in his politics, not in his personal life, and not in war. Just as he would later attempt to recast every one of his defeats as the fault of incompetent diplomats or subordinates, he tried to recast the bungled mobilization of 1914 as the fault of Straub and Ratzenhofer. But as with the battles, it was his fault. He vacillated all through the July Crisis and then leaned hesitantly toward Serbia until he realized too late that he was making a terrible mistake, at which point he leaned back in the direction of Russia, but too late to undo the damage he’d already done on that front.

  Ultimately, Conrad was more showman than strategist, and he now made a show of sticking with his Serbian plan even as he scrambled to undo it. Conrad had planned to lead the invasion of Serbia; with his presence required on the Russian front, he reluctantly conferred command of the Serbian operation on his old rival Potiorek. In August, he offered Potiorek an extra army to crush Serbia, but it came with strings attached; Conrad told Potiorek that the Second Army could be used only “for demonstrative purposes” during its transitional week on the Danube. The Second Army’s staff merely raised a sardonic eyebrow at Conrad’s bumbling: “One hoped to knock Serbia out quickly and then turn all forces against Russia—only this can explain the peculiar conduct of the high command.” To Moltke, Conrad’s general headquarters (Armeeoberkommando or AOK) pledged a prompt offensive against Russia with only temporarily diminished deutsche Treue (Germanic loyalty).21 Meeting with the three generals he was placing in command of the armies in Galicia at the war ministry on Sunday August 2, Conrad ordered them to deploy their armies as fast as possible. Things that were lacking—reservists, guns, ammunition, supplies—would follow.

  The astonished army commanders were handed notebooks from Conrad’s Operations Bureau with their marching orders: a deployment from the mouth of the San southeast to Lemberg and the Dniester, Dankl’s First Army on the left, Auffenberg’s Fourth in the center, Brudermann’s Third on the right. The Second Army—which was supposed to nudge up on Brudermann’s right, defending his southern flank at Lemberg and resting its own right flank on the Dniester, thus ensuring a measure of protection for the army against the Russian steamroller—was nowhere to be seen, for it was still chugging toward Serbia, against all expectations. That left Brudermann’s Third Army in the air, without flank protection, ripe for envelopment by the numerically superior Russians.22

  The Great War on the Eastern Front had not even begun, yet a glance at the map suggested that the Austro-Hungarians were going to lose it, thanks to Conrad’s floundering. Auffenberg was troubled by the meeting with Conrad on August 2, remarking that the chief was importing into the field army the same staff culture of secrecy and opacity—officers called it Conrad’s “Japanese style”—that had nourished the Redl Affair. Expecting a detailed exploration of the monarchy’s military objectives, the relationship with the German army, and the balance between the Austrian armies aimed at Russia and Serbia, the Austrian generals bound for Russia (those destined for the Balkans were not present) got nothing of the sort. Conrad kept the meeting brief and spoke only of the “deployment areas” where each army would assemble. Beyond that, he offered nothing—not what they’d do once deployed, and nothing on the Russians or on Austrian plans in the event of success or failure.

  What the generals immediately noticed were the revised deployment areas. Plan R + B had always pushed the Austrian army as far east as it could travel on the rails, to eastern Galicia, where it would be positioned to strike an early blow against the Russians. Conrad had quietly amended the plan in March 1914, pulling the whole army back in a Rückverlegung or “backward movement” to western Galicia. Why he thought this was a good idea is a mystery; the Austrians’ only advantage in a war with the Russian colossus was a hasty attack. Moving the Austrian army all the way back to Cracow and the San River meant that it would either concede Russia time to complete its mobilization or have to march needlessly over ground that it could have crossed in trains.23

  Clearly Conrad had bungled everything; to fight the war he wanted against beatable Serbia, he had simply ignored the war he didn’t want against unbeatable Russia, and prevaricated throughout to confuse everyone. Instead of having thirteen corps against Russia, he found himself with eight. Straub and Ratzenhofer had assured him that they could get the five missing corps—the four of the Second Army as well as Echelon A’s III Corps—out to Galicia by August 23, but in fact, only two of the five corps had staggered into place on the Eastern Front by September 8, too late and too tired to intervene effectively in any of the pivotal battles.24

  Unaware of Conrad’s flip-flopping, Potiorek was stunned by the chief’s admission on August 6 that the Second Army would not be lingering in the Balkans after all, but would instead make for the Russian front as soon as the railways were clear. Still, Potiorek was hopeful. Publicly, he promised “tactical success”: he would envelop the Serbs with the two armies left to him.25 Privately, Potiorek raged at Conrad’s treachery: “How the supreme command could arrive at such a radical change in its decisions is a mystery to me,” Potiorek grumbled. “It reveals much as to the functioning of the machine.”26

  The machine was already falling apart under the strain of a mobilization that assembled and equipped nearly two million men—the active-duty establishment, the trained reserve, and the untrained Ersatzreservisten—and then shipped them off to various, shifting points. And the Austro-Hungarian army took more work to assemble, outfit, and deploy than most. Because the army had been kept so lamentably small in peacetime, 75 percent of it was not even in uniform when Emperor Franz Joseph declared war. More than 1.5 million reservists had to be found, equipped, and formed into units that could be moved to the front.27 No places could be found initially for the untrained reserves in the 106 standing regiments, which meant that in garrison towns all over the monarchy tens of thousands of men milled around for days and even weeks awaiting uniforms, arms and orders. A typical division—like the 9th, assembling in Prague and destined for Serbia—reported chaos by the third mobilization day: “All saddles had to be replaced, and we’re short 25,000 coffee rations, 40,000 salt-meat portions, and 1,700 kilos of zwieback.” At every halt between Prague and the Drina River crossings, troops went missing “because they confused the departure time,” or so they said.28 Had they wanted to, the troops could have walked to overtake the trains that had left them behind. With exaggerated military caution forbidding any one train to travel at a speed greater than that of the slowest train traversing the worst track in the monarchy, the average speed of Austro-Hungarian mobilization trains was not much faster than a bicycle’s. Overall, the Habsburg army took a month to deploy its strength to Galicia and Serbia, hardly the Germanic efficiency envisioned in Plan R + B.29

  Conrad was still in Vienna, oblivious to the spreading shambles. On August 15, he had an audience with the old emperor at Schönbrunn. “God willing, all will go well, but even if it all goes wrong, I’ll see it through,” was the emperor’s less than stirring farewell. The next morning, Conrad and Archduke Friedrich boarded an early train at Vienna’s North Station and began rolling east toward the San River fortress of Przemysl, where the AOK would establish its headquarters. Conrad had lingered long on the platform with his mistress, Gina, before boarding; he had clasped her hands in his and demanded that she promise to secure a divorce and marry him “after the war.”30 As they traveled east, Joseph Redlich, Conrad’s political advisor, noted the graffiti scribbled on the walls and railroad cars that they passed: a crude drawing of a gorilla with the caption “The Czar in civilian dress”; a gallows, with the tsar swinging from the noose above the words “The Russians and the Serbs, we’ll beat ’em all.”31 Despite decades of decline, the Austrians still fancied themselves superior in every way to the Russian bear.

  Trying to supervise the Eastern and Balkan f
ronts from Przemysl on the San, Conrad exhorted Potiorek to put aside his daily cavils about missing beef portions, bridging equipment, medicine, and telephones and focus instead on defeating the Serbs. He assumed that the Serbs would attack through Uzice toward Sarajevo and the Montenegrins toward Mostar, making some preemptive Austrian attack desirable. On August 9, he wrote that “under no circumstances can we afford a defeat in the Balkans.” It would be humiliating and would convince the “wavering states”—Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, and Rumania—to remain neutral, or even enter the war against Austria. (“I’ve just had the Bulgarian military attaché in my office,” Conrad added, “and I told him that Bulgaria will be committing suicide if it doesn’t attack Serbia at once.”)

  While the Serbs mobilized and twenty Austrian divisions marched up to the Drina and the Sava, Potiorek wrote long letters to the director of the war archive in Vienna, like this one on August 8: “I am going to be sending you daily evidence of my leadership methods, so that you can use them in the official history that you will be writing this winter.” Potiorek’s vanity was one of the only things not pricked by Conrad’s flailing mobilization. Potiorek assumed that the war would be short and victorious and that he would play a hero’s role. Each day he wrote the war archive director twenty pages of “daily events” for a future official history, including bluff Radetzkyan bromides such as this one: “The only difference between an Army Commander in war and peace is that in war the Commander spends even more time behind his desk and speaking on the phone!”32 How would this commander know? Potiorek had never experienced war or combat.

  When no Serbian attack came, Conrad, who was unaware of Potiorek’s daily correspondence with posterity, wrote the Balkan commander on August 14 to urge an attack across the Drina with the Fifth and Sixth Armies, before the Second Army withdrew entirely: “Make some use of its presence and ability to demonstrate on the Sava-Danube.” At first glance, the task that Conrad was setting Potiorek seemed simple enough. The Serbs—who drafted men in three classes, two “levies” of young men and a third of older ones—could mobilize three hundred thousand men in the first and second levies, and adding the third levy yielded a total of four hundred thousand men. But while their numbers were impressive, their armaments told a different story: there were just 381 rapid-fire field guns for the entire force, and crippling shortages of munitions, machine guns, and rifles in all three classes. In many Serbian units, one-third of the troops would have no rifle at all. Second-levy divisions had just half the field artillery of the first levy, the third levy even less.33 Here was cause for some Austrian optimism, even if war with Russia was a certainty. Potiorek’s force alone in August 1914 was equal to the entire Serbian army, had an empire of fifty-three million behind it, and had more guns and ammo.34 Everyone in Vienna was confident of victory, at least on the Serbian front.

  Reports of the first battles in France arrived as the Austrians struggled to deploy Conrad’s North Army to Galicia and Potiorek’s South Army to Serbia. General Viktor Dankl only arrived in Tarnow in southeastern Poland on August 10, where he halted briefly, and then continued on to Rzeszow, where he noted that his First Army lacked everything.35 Joining his Fourth Army on the San River, General Auffenberg complained of the unexpected hostility of the Austrian population: “At Jaroslau, Dobromil, Rawa-Ruska, etc., not enough is being done to repress unreliable elements,” chiefly Ukrainian priests and schoolteachers—Moskalophilen, Moscowphiles—who were betraying the location and strength of Austrian units to the Russians. Conrad ordered a brutal crackdown against all of these “hostile elements.” Agitators and traitors were to be summarily shot or hanged. This must have been sobering, for the Ukrainians of this region had historically been the monarchy’s most loyal people.36

  Moving more briskly than Conrad, the Germans were stunned by the casualties sustained by their seven armies in France. The German forces there were divided into two groups, one operating between Metz and the Vosges, the other driving on Paris through the Meuse defile. The ferocity of the fighting in all sectors had left them reeling. Entire units had been wiped out by French artillery firing from covered positions, a result that the Germans reciprocated each time the French attacked. Both armies had assumed that this war would play out like the Franco-Prussian War, with large but manageable casualties and sharp flanking maneuvers, but this time the killing was on an industrial scale and the troops, who were too numerous on both sides to be flanked, were driven into trenches. German officers complained that there was no glory to be had in this artillery-driven Maschinenkrieg, or “war of machines.”37 A German cavalry officer mourned the new era: “In these fields, where Roman-Gothic legions once clashed with the riders of Attila, there is today only deadly battery fire, delivered invisibly and anonymously from miles away.”38

  At the as-yet-unblooded Russian headquarters in Belarus, optimism still reigned. Grand Duke Nikolai, the tsar’s uncle, who had been cavalry inspector before the war and now found himself supreme commander at the Russian Stavka or general headquarters, spoke breezily of annexing Habsburg Galicia and grinding Bismarck’s Reich down to its original harmless parts: “The German Empire must cease to exist and be divided up into a group of states, each of which will be happy with its own little court.” A foreign ministry official at Stavka joked to the gathered generals, “You soldiers should be pleased that we’ve arranged such a nice war for you.” One of the generals replied: “Let’s wait and see whether it’ll be such a nice war after all.”39

  chapter6

  Misfits

  It was not looking to be a nice war in Austro-Hungarian headquarters, where Conrad was the proverbial one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind. The emperor had appointed Archduke Friedrich (Fritzl) commander in chief of all Habsburg troops in the field. The post had been reserved for Franz Ferdinand, but he lay dead and the new crown prince, Franz Ferdinand’s twenty-six-year-old nephew Archduke Karl, only a major when war broke out, was judged too callow. Although the ruddy, mustachioed fifty-eight-year-old Fritzl looked the part of army commander and had excellent genes—he was the grandson of an earlier Archduke Karl, who had defeated Napoleon at Aspern in 1809, and the nephew of Archduke Albrecht, who had defeated the Italians at Custoza in 1866—Friedrich himself was a run-of-the-mill Habsburg, bluff but diffident, and unlikely to curb any of Conrad’s wild impulses. Friedrich had only soldiered in maneuvers, and there badly, managing to lose in all scenarios, a French report of summer maneuvers near Budapest remarking that “he allowed himself to be taken in the rear so maladroitly by his adversary that the referees had to intervene to rescue him; his corps was annihilated.”1 Auffenberg was stunned by Friedrich’s appointment, remarking that “his big responsibilities as high commander far exceeded his small abilities.”2

  Conrad had seized the opportunity presented by the assassination to begin the process of strategic “dynamization” he had been advocating for years. No fewer than eight corps—a puzzling detachment in view of the now certain war with Russia—would strike into Serbia and destroy the royal army. On July 29, Austro-Hungarian monitors floating in the Sava and the Danube had opened preliminary fire on Belgrade, inflicting little damage on the Serbs, not least because the Serbian government had long since decamped to Nis and declared the capital an “open city.”3 Ground troops would be needed to complete the mission, which had been hopefully characterized in Vienna as a mere “punitive expedition,” yet just as Austria’s Second Army detrained and deployed on the frontiers of Serbia, Conrad announced that it would shortly be moved along to the Russian Front.

  Archduke Friedrich preceded the sweaty men of General Eduard von Böhm-Ermolli’s Second Army, who were crammed into stifling railway cars—forty-two men or eight horses per car—as they wended their way around the monarchy. Conrad had planned to locate general headquarters (AOK) on the Serbian front, but Russia’s entirely predictable mobilization necessitated its immediate transfer to Galicia. Thus, Fritzl moved his headquarters to Przemysl just six days after scouting
the Serbian frontier. The Good Soldier Svejk described the jumble of conflicting orders: “They never knew in which hole on what battlefield they wanted us in.”4

  “They,” of course, were the Austrian brass, Fritzl and Conrad in Galicia and Potiorek in Sarajevo. With the Second Army, Potiorek would have 400,000 troops. Without it, he would have 290,000, not nearly enough to inflict a ruinous defeat on Serbia. The Serbs, after all, deployed 400,000 men when fully mobilized, plus 40,000 Montenegrins and whatever komitadjis turned out. Austria’s Fifth and Sixth Armies, already in place, were “weak” armies, each counting just two corps, not the customary four. Until August 6, Potiorek had believed that he would have eight corps to work with. On that day, Conrad informed him that he would have the four corps of the Second Army only for “local cooperation” along the Sava, and only until August 18, when they would be moved to Galicia. Potiorek was furious, all the more so as he looked closely at the troops he did have for the long haul. The hot, tired men of the Fifth Army were malingering and taking liberties with the civilians they encountered near the Serbian border, provoking furious rebukes from headquarters: “The beating and imprisoning of innocent Austrian civilians must stop; the k.u.k. army must inspire fear and respect, but must be chivalrous and must not descend into evil and inhuman acts.”5

  Potiorek and Conrad seemed more interested in scoring victories against each other than against the Serbs. They had been rivals for years, both bidding for the post of general staff chief in 1906, and each acutely distrustful of the other ever since. Potiorek had toiled for years in Beck’s back offices, doing the hard work of the general staff while Beck chased money, decorations, and women, and he had fully expected to be rewarded with the top job, only to see it given to Conrad.6 His resentment of the injustice never faded, and in August 1914, Potiorek took Conrad’s decision to shift the Second Army to Galicia as a personal attack, not a strategic one. He interpreted it as sabotage of his own Balkan war effort, and immediately began lobbying the Hofburg—where Potiorek had warm relations with General Bolfras—for independence from Conrad’s AOK, which he secured on August 21. The seventy-six-year-old Bolfras, who had been decorated in Bosnia in 1878 and made a Hofburg adjutant ten years later, wielded considerable power in the army. He was the emperor’s agent and well liked for his mild, conciliatory manner.7 He also had a clear favorite in the Conrad-Potiorek feud: he viewed Conrad with suspicion and considered Potiorek a useful brake on the general staff chief. A Hofburg that had unfailingly chosen badly chose badly again. For all of his faults, Conrad was the overall army commander. The Hofburg had no business barging between him and his field generals, but it did. Rescued by the emperor, at least for now, Potiorek set to work figuring out how to accomplish the “punitive expedition” against Serbia along a four-hundred-mile border with poor communications and just a quarter of a million troops.