To the left of these men, VIII Corps’ better-equipped 9th Division also crossed and went into action on August 14. General Giesl, who had hoped to expunge the shame of his long patronage of Colonel Redl, now saw that he wouldn’t. He summarized the plight of his army: “non-stop battle, no water, searing heat, extreme exhaustion.”28 The brigades of Giesl’s 9th Division were immediately set upon by Serbian partisans and regulars, who shot them up day and night. Inexperienced in modern warfare, the Austro-Hungarians moved at night with railroad lanterns in hand and on their wagons to light the way, and professed astonishment when the Serbs began shooting at the illuminated targets. The Austrians subsequently discovered that the Serbs heard their units coming from miles away because they were so noisy—the troops and teamsters bawling at one another, and unsecured gear rattling and banging around.
When the Fifth Army’s 9th Division did engage the Serbs, the men fired wildly. Orders went out to collect all ammunition from the dead and wounded because the living were firing so promiscuously, usually without hitting anything. Even spent cartridges were to be swept off the ground and returned to Austria for recycling.29 Reports from officers deplored the planlose Herausschiesserei, aimless firing in all directions, and the tendency to fire into the blue without first registering a target. Yet unless they could actually hear them blazing away, neither Potiorek—still in his office in Sarajevo—nor his corps and divisional commanders even knew where their units were much of the time. If the officers were off the telegraph grid, which they usually were, they tended not to report, provoking an outcry from General Giesl: “If you have no telegraph connection, use messengers instead, but get through! It must not happen that the high command spends the entire day searching for a single column of troops!” Even messengers, however, would lose their way in the wilderness beyond the Drina. “I’m here with the horses of the general staff,” one galloper wrote from Kozjak on August 15, “but the telegraph here is not working and I have no orders. There is gunfire all around us. Please tell us what to do.”30
Although Conrad met that day, August 15, with the Bulgarian military attaché in Vienna to assure him that “all Austro-Hungarian troops are inside Serbia and holding all of the key heights,” the reality was less inspiring.31 The fire- and logistics-intensive modern age had certainly slowed marches down, from a peak of fourteen miles a day under Napoleon to about eight or nine miles a day under the Elder Moltke in 1870, but the men under Potiorek were hardly moving at all. These ugly clashes along the riverbanks between Ljesnica and Loznica augured badly for the brusque attack strategy of Conrad and Potiorek. One officer noted that “tough resistance from small Serbian units—vastly inferior to us in numbers—made us realize that Valjevo was a lot farther away than just five marches.”32 The encircler, in short, was fast becoming the encircled.
But Potiorek still assumed that he had the upper hand. Far from the depressing realities of the front, he took for granted that Putnik would pull back and split his army into purely defensive cordons to guard the main Serbian towns. On the contrary, the Serbian commander was taking stock of Potiorek’s blundering and beginning to take some calculated risks.33 With little to worry about at Sabac, where the broad Sava was a natural brake on what little activity Conrad had authorized, Putnik could mass nine divisions in the space between Sabac and Valjevo and turn the bulk of that force against the Fifth Army on the Drina. The fact that most of the Second Army remained on the left bank of the Sava instead of crossing into action on the right confirmed to Putnik that it was headed to Galicia.34 This was the signal for Putnik to launch the next phase of Serbia’s long-standing war plan: the counterattack that would follow any reduction or redeployment of an attacking Austrian army. Putnik now linked the fighting at Sabac (to hold off the rump of Second Army) and at Krupanj (to fend off the Sixth Army) with the fighting on the Cer Planina to destroy as much of the isolated Fifth Army as he could.
Putnik’s intuition gave him a vital advantage against the Austrian Fifth Army. Conceptually, Putnik viewed Sabac-Tekeris-Krupanj as a single space; he grouped the three fields of battle into a single “Battle for the Cer Mountains,” and hustled his troops into those forbidding hills by forced marches.35 Thus it was that the Austro-Hungarian 9th Division discovered large numbers of Serbian infantry and artillery in trenches around Tekeris on the Cer Planina when it pushed inland on August 16. With their numbers fleshed out with so many untrained reservists, who had never been taught to fight in open skirmish order with their rifles, the Austro-Hungarian officers packed the men into storm columns and sent them up the steep slopes raked by machine guns and shrapnel. Unfortunately, the Austro-Hungarians had not been trained to entrench either, that being interpreted by their officers as cowardice. So most of the Austro-Hungarian infantry had simply discarded their entrenching equipment on the march and were now forced to scrape out shallow rifle pits with their fingers.36
Still, Potiorek reported to Emperor Franz Joseph that he was making progress—probably because the South Army commander remained in Sarajevo, following operations with pins on a map. Before the war, the French had judged Potiorek an armchair general, “an erudite, office-bound theoretician,” and he was proving them right. “We’ve thrown the Serbs back on the lower Drina at Ljesnica; they are retreating in disorder. Prisoners tell us that they will make a last stand at Valjevo,” Potiorek scribbled confidently from his palace.37 Putnik had confirmed in the meantime that the Habsburg Second Army was indeed bound for Galicia, and now grasped that the Austrian Fifth Army’s unsupported push over the Drina toward Valjevo was the main effort. He wheeled his three armies forward in echelon.38 The First Army, on the right, could strike toward the Sava or Drina as needed. The Second Army, in the center, could mass everything it had against Frank’s Fifth Army around Ljesnica and Loznica. And the Third Army moved into line around Krupanj, to hit Frank in the flank while keeping an eye peeled for the Sixth Army.
Serbian colonels and generals were twelve to fifteen years younger than their Austrian peers, and they all had recent battlefield experience.39 They thrust forward hungrily, scenting a well-armed (by Balkan standards) but clumsy adversary. The three Serbian armies could detach strength as needed to smash back any Austrian advance anywhere on the arc.40 Putnik had been unable to do much in the Macva because the Sava and Drina protected the Austrian flanks once they were across and made it difficult for Putnik to slide in behind either the Fifth or the Second Army. The Serbian staff chief identified the Cer Planina, the chain of two-thousand-foot hills overlooking the Drina crossings at Ljesnica and Loznica, as the key point. The Austrians would have to take the heights to move east and protect their supply lines and flanks.
Marching day and night to reach the hilltop village of Tekeris before the Austrians could arrive in force, two divisions of General Stepan Stepanovic’s Second Army destroyed the Austrian 21st Landwehr Division as it struggled to ascend Mount Cer and take Tekeris on August 16. This was no easy achievement considering that some Serbian regiments—awaiting continually postponed arms shipments from Russia—had fewer than two thousand rifles for twice that number of men.41 No matter: for the men of the 21st Landwehr Division, mainly Czechs recruited in Bohemia, it was an infernal baptism of fire. They had crossed the Drina on August 14 after five days on the train from Prague and marched up to the Cer Planina that day and the next under a blazing sun with full packs and no drinking water. They had passed the night not resting but shooting at their own patrols and Serbian attacks, the latter delivered in the dark from the tall corn. They finally contacted the Serbs on a fifteen-hundred-foot height at eleven o’clock in the morning on the sixteenth. Pulled by their officers, they swarmed uphill, the Germans among them crying, “Hoch das Sieg! Hoch Seine Majestät Kaiser Franz Joseph!” The Czechs advanced far less enthusiastically, feigning wounds and going to ground in alarming numbers.42
With the 21st Landwehr pinned on the slopes, the Serbs counterattacked the division all day and night, severing their connection to the 9
th Division and shooting down their officers, until the division’s two headless, unconnected brigades dissolved and slid backward toward the Drina. Survivors recalled the Serbs pushing in under cover of darkness, screaming in German, “Don’t shoot, we’re Croatian infantry!” and then opening up with their Mausers. Each time General Frank approached the front to take stock of his army, he noticed ammunition wagons and field kitchens swarming with Austrian troops trying to hitch a ride to the rear; each time an Austrian was struck by enemy fire, a dozen unwounded comrades would volunteer to walk him to the rear. The rare Serbian prisoner would attract a crowd of escorts back to headquarters as well. “Iron discipline!” Frank roared. “There are far too many shirkers and malingerers!”43
“The army of His Majesty the Emperor Franz Joseph covers itself in ridicule,” the French paper Figaro hooted from Paris.44 One of the Austrian generals was not surprised in the least. The Serbs were hardened peasants, he wrote; the Austro-Hungarians were “factory workers, artisans and clerks, men used to an easy life of beer, mild weather and a roof over their heads.” With all of these things lacking in Serbia, the fight simply went out of them.45
In Sarajevo, Potiorek seemed oblivious to the disaster on the Drina. He was spending his time winnowing out more conspirators in the assassination plot, proudly telegraphing Finance Minister Bilinksi on August 16 that a witness had “incriminated three more conspirators in the archduke’s murder—a Belgrade theologian, a Bosnian lawyer, and a waiter from Banja Luka.”46 While Potiorek made his case in Sarajevo, the battle for the Cer plateau was itself dissolving into a sort of military tribunal, as some Austrians fought, but large numbers tried every means to desert. When one of the 9th Division’s brigades was ordered to launch an attack to win breathing room for the other, only a single battalion answered the call, and it was immediately destroyed by artillery and machine guns. The general in charge of this donnybrook put the tragedy down to yet more “misunderstandings,” and noted that each defeat on this front involved an isolated, abandoned Austro-Hungarian unit surrounded and taken in cross fires by the better-organized Serbs.47
The Austro-Hungarian 9th Division never got going. The men had exhausted themselves crossing the Drina, first under blistering sun, then under a day or two of heavy rain; they had been stalled on the riverbank for three entire days, sleeping in the open on their sodden coats and cursing their officers and supply service. When they finally went into action on Mount Cer, they were decimated by Serbian fire. They retreated under “hailstones the size of hazelnuts” on August 18, the men crawling under supply wagons to shelter from the weather and Serbian shells. A measure of warmth was achieved only when the quartermasters were ordered to burn everything they had carried over to the Serbian side of the river.48 Field reports brimmed with incidents of Austro-Hungarian malingering, particularly the wounded terrifying the unwounded with “alarming accounts of the enemy.” General Frank—characterized by a colleague as “a senile old pedant”—was not the optimal commander anyway, with or without help on his flanks. He ordered men and officers to swap “heroic stories instead of these dreadful ones.” If the dreadful stories continued, he growled, troops would be executed on the spot “for the Crime of Cowardice.”49
The rare Serbian POW gave the Austrians glimmers of hope. Interviewing one, an Austro-Hungarian officer concluded: “The Serbs are exhausted and badly supplied; the officers add to their confusion; they have just one machine gun per battalion.” But at least half of Putnik’s troops on any sector of this front were veterans of the Balkan Wars, and despite deficient artillery and an already emerging shell shortage, they stood their ground, patiently mowing down the Austrian attacks.50 One victim of this dauntless Serbian fire was the commander of Austria’s 21st Landwehr Division, General Arthur Przyborski, who was anything but a battle-hardened veteran. His colleagues called him a “Ringstrasse general”—a soldier-bureaucrat who had married War Minister Schönaich’s daughter and cut his teeth on paperwork, not battles. Przyborski never caught up with the pace of this chaotic, fast-moving fight.51
Repulsed at Jadar and the Cer Planina, the Fifth Army wavered. Famished Austrian troops scrounged along the banks of the Drina for anything edible, eating green corn and unripe melons. There was little to drink either; wells appeared to be poisoned, the water green, sour, and causing cholera symptoms after two or three days. “We never even saw our distant [supply] trains,” one officer scoffed.52 Much of the Austrian supply business had been bid to civilian subcontractors, and Frank now ordered his officers to “shoot their horses, destroy their wagons, and kill the drivers on the spot” if they didn’t work harder and exhibit more courage. The Austrians troops, meanwhile, would simply have to go hungry, their (well-fed) division commander lecturing them that “the non-delivery of supplies is no excuse to consume your field rations. . . . Supply in war cannot be first-class all of the time.”53
With the air rushing out of his little war, Potiorek pleaded for more help from the Second Army on August 16, but Conrad amended the request: “Do only as much as can be done without slowing your departure” to Galicia, he ordered.54 The Second Army’s 29th Division accordingly crossed the Sava at Sabac on August 16, fought a tentative battle with a Serbian division, and then retreated in the afternoon. Potiorek fumed, scoring Conrad for wasting the units of the Second Army “like drops of water,” instead of sending them in one great wave. Had Potiorek actually been at the front instead of in his office in Sarajevo (where he was now pressing an investigation of thirty Serbian teenagers), he would have noticed the hopelessness of the Austrian attacks, whether in droplets or waves.55
Throughout this initial invasion, the Austro-Hungarians had failed to adapt to modern firepower. Whereas German infantry companies were already employing open-order tactics—one platoon spearheading any attack in a widely spaced skirmish line followed by two platoons in open-order echelons—Austro-Hungarian companies were simply rushing forward in an easily targeted huddle of men. “Neither troops nor officers know how to attack with any cohesion,” General Alfred Krauss wrote in his diary after assuming command of the 29th Division. “They just launch disorganized bayonet charges under any and all circumstances; the Serbs recognize this, lure us into these attacks, and then gun us down.” Colonel Felix Schwarzenberg, who commanded a dragoon regiment in the gap between the Fifth and Second Armies, overheard infantry officers assuring their men “in the most scornful tones, ‘Don’t worry, the Serbs dig themselves in, but trenches won’t save them when we go in with the bayonet.’” Schwarzenberg also noted the tendency of the Austrian field artillery to fight in the open, where it was easily shattered by entrenched Serbian guns, and to rain shrapnel uselessly over Serbian trenches because no high-explosive shells were available to uproot them. Shells were more expensive than shrapnel and so had simply not been procured, in the inimitable Austro-Hungarian way. This was an army fighting not the last war (1913) but its last war (1866). “Pray for Austria,” an already demoralized Prince Schwarzenberg wrote his wife.56
With the Second Army slated to move to Galicia on August 18, Conrad agreed only to the temporary loan of General Karl Tersztyánszky’s IV Corps, which, it was hoped, would do something to throw back the Serbs on the Sava and take pressure off the Fifth Army on the Drina. Tersztyánszky decided to attack elements of the Serbian Second Army on August 19 at Sabac. The plan was for the general’s two divisions to seize the town of fourteen thousand with its important railway terminus and riverboat wharves and then work their way south on three parallel roads. The drive south was critical, for if it failed, Putnik would be free to turn his entire force against Frank’s Fifth Army to envelop it from all sides. But the omens were not good: the Austrian generals had little precise information on Serbian movements and no definite plan beyond “pushing the Sabac bridgehead south.”57 Officers compared the terrain around Sabac to Italy, with high cornfields, fences, hedges, and dense little woods that blotted out overviews and made fire control difficult.
T
he Austrians took Sabac with little difficulty but made little progress on the roads south. An Austrian corporal in the 92nd Regiment recalled the march out of Sabac in the humid summer heat: “corn so high it swallowed up even men on horseback; everything got harder; we felt that we hadn’t slept for days; we burned with thirst; sweat poured down our faces; we mopped it away with muddy hands and then licked our hands, to have something to drink.” The men of the 92nd marched along their narrow road in broad columns that spilled into the fields on either side; they had to break trail, cutting through cornstalks, vines, clods of earth, waves of wheat, and patches of pumpkins and melons; row after row of men would stumble over the obstacles, and half the unit was diagnosed with blistered feet after a single march. Memoirs spoke mainly of the heat, thirst, and fatigue—and, on nearly every page, “the pitiless sun.”58
Harassed by Serbian units nesting in the corn and trees, the Austrians blazed away in their usual fashion and quickly ran out of ammunition. The Serbs were brilliant at sowing confusion: “They place their caps and backpacks on the ground to draw our fire, and then slither away to new positions,” an Austro-Hungarian officer dolefully reported. The Serbs used the corn like a fifth element, stringing themselves out in long, invisible skirmish lines and firing rapidly and accurately into the bunched Austrian units. Having emptied their pouches firing at knapsacks, caps, and other phantoms, the largely Hungarian 31st Division staggered toward Jevremovac with just their bayonets for protection; then they were hit in the flank by their own artillery. With men being shredded by friendly fire, they also came under attack from Serbian infantry, but didn’t return fire because they were out of ammo and thought the Serbs were so close in on their flank that they must be fellow Austrians anyway. An entire Austrian regiment, Slovaks and Hungarians, broke into two shuddering groups and fled back up the road to Sabac. The rest of Archduke Joseph’s division followed, enemy and friendly shells cracking and splintering among them and causing a panicky rush to the rear that effectively disarmed the division. The 3rd Bosnians were first decapitated and then wiped out, losing the colonel, his adjutant, and a battalion commander in a single spray of shrapnel, then two company commanders and fifteen lieutenants, along with 332 men, as they struggled to push the Serbs out of a wood commanding their road.59
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