Potiorek had hoped to find victory on the thinly defended upper Drina, but here too he was beaten. The Sixth Army, which was supposed to have worked in concert with the Fifth and Second Armies, arrived too late and too distant to cooperate. Potiorek finally left Sarajevo and arrived on the upper Drina in time to lead the isolated Sixth Army to its river crossings and win minor engagements at Visegrad and Priboj on August 20 and 21. But sixty-five miles still separated him from the battered Fifth Army, which had lost more than a quarter of its strength and an eye-popping forty-two guns in the battles on Mount Cer.92 On August 24, Potiorek sounded the retreat all along the line—“further offensives would be pointless”—and pulled the Sixth Army back across the Drina. As IV Corps abandoned Sabac, it visited the same atrocities on the population there that Sixth and Fifth Armies had inflicted on the towns and villages along the Drina: scores of Serbian men, women, and children were locked in a church for several days and then shot by firing squad as the Austrians retreated, bringing the rough total of Serbian civilians killed in this Austrian attempt to “West Europeanize” Serbia to thirty-five hundred.93 Just ten days earlier, Potiorek had exhorted the Sixth Army to “teach the Serbs to submit respectfully to Austria-Hungary, as in the days of Prince Eugen and Radetzky.”94 There was nothing Radetzkyan about this retreat. The Austrians, sickened by their defeats and random acts of wickedness, pulled back into filthy camps littered with their own excrement. “The men must be taught to use latrines and to stop fulfilling the demands of nature in the open,” an VIII Corps general fumed. “They must also be required to salute superiors at all times.”95
Potiorek blamed everything on Conrad, saying, “I never knew with any certainty whether the units of Second Army would remain for me . . . I must be given untrammeled command of my theater . . . AOK must stop communicating with my subordinates.” But the defeat was unquestionably his. He had remained too long in Sarajevo and then drifted from one remote rear-area headquarters to another, never grasping the hard facts of this war.96
Alerted by Hungarian officers to Potiorek’s fecklessness, Tisza wrote the emperor a letter on August 23 that summarized the Balkan commander’s folly: “Frontal attacks are being launched against fortified positions without any proper reconnaissance or even artillery preparation, which has led to monstrous casualties . . . among the widely separated columns that the Serbs overpowered separately at Sabac-Loznica, while the entire Sixth Army, too far to the south, could never even be employed.”97 Tisza heaped scorn on the idea that Austria-Hungary could defeat Serbia with the bulk of its troops deployed against Russia, and urged the emperor and Berchtold to face facts, forget about Serbia, and mass everything against Russia.
But the Hofburg was not ready to give up on Potiorek and his Balkan dreams just yet. The South Army commander at least had the virtue of writing the emperor letters, and Conrad didn’t. “Oh well,” Bolfras consoled Potiorek on August 24, “things will start to go better for you; after all, the world is round and has to keep spinning!”98 It was not spinning any longer for the seven thousand Austro-Hungarians lying dead in the hills, woods, and villages along the Drina. Thirty thousand more Austro-Hungarians had been wounded, and four thousand captured along with forty-six guns and thirty machine guns. Serbian losses were low by comparison—three thousand dead and fifteen thousand wounded—and their morale remained solid. The Serbs jeered the Austro-Hungarian defeat, calling the Habsburg army “rabble,” Tisza “a snake,” and the monarchy “a criminal against humanity.”99 As thousands of wounded Austro-Hungarian troops dispersed to hospitals and homes in both halves of the monarchy, they spoke freely about the disaster in Serbia, drawing rebukes from the high command: “Men and officers alike must be told in their mother languages to stop alarming the civilian population with all of this bad news. Having stood in the heat of battle, none of them have the necessary overview or calm to describe the situation accurately.” With his usual obtuseness, General Frank recommended “sharp punishment” for all.100
Externally, Vienna tried to hush up the defeat, assuring the neutral states in late August that Austria was winning. Italy was not buying it; there newsboys chanted, “Great Austrian defeat,” crowds demonstrated for war with Austria-Hungary, and troops marched past the Austrian embassy and consulates whistling the Garibaldi hymn and the Marseillaise. The Italians looked increasingly warlike.101 Internally, Austro-Hungarian towns were placarded with official bulletins attempting to explain the defeat: with Russian intervention in the war, the invasion of Serbia had been nothing more than a “sideshow” (Nebenaktion) and “jab” (kurzer Vorstoss) to “weaken and repulse” the “immensely more numerous Serbian army,” and those Austrian measures had succeeded, permitting an “orderly withdrawal from Serbian soil.”102 Inside the Hofburg, Bolfras labored under no such illusions. He reminded Potiorek that victories in Serbia were needed “to create the political constellation that will make our mission in the Balkans easier.” “Was nun—what’s next?” Bolfras queried anxiously.103
chapter7
Krásnik
Conrad was asking the same question: “What’s next?” He’d always prided himself on his military acumen, but he’d begun the war on Austria-Hungary’s Eastern Front in the most confused way imaginable. He had little contact with the Germans, who liked him even less than he liked them, and he had left behind a foundering campaign in Serbia that remained a drain on scarce resources. Potiorek retained his hold on two weak armies—more troops than were needed to defend Austro-Hungarian territory, but not enough for a second invasion of Serbia. Here on the Eastern Front, the Germans and Austrians had talked before the war about thrusting from north and south, respectively—the Germans from East Prussia, the Austrians from Galicia—to pinch off Russian Poland, which bulged westward from the body of the Russian Empire. They’d even talked about crowning such a campaign by detaching Poland and Ukraine from Russia and forming them into an Austrian-run buffer state between Russia and the West.1 But to contemplate an invasion of Russia, Conrad needed his entire army and needed to be on the Russian frontier. Instead, he’d deployed his diminished forces a hundred miles west of his easternmost railheads, hoping to buy a little more time for the defeat of the Serbs.
All of Conrad’s conflicting strategic notions and occult faith in his own “war luck” (Kriegsglück) came to naught. Fearing even a symbolic defeat in the east while they were so heavily concentrated in the west, the Germans held their small number of eastern troops back for the defense of East Prussia, not a converging attack with the Austrians into Russian Poland.2 Conrad’s own dithering in Serbia meant that Austria-Hungary built to a strength of just thirty-one divisions on August 28, and thirty-seven divisions by September 4, when a third corps from the Second Army—the fourth lagged behind as a sop to Potiorek—finally rolled in from Sabac. One of these late-arriving Austrian officers would complain to a journalist that the war in Serbia had sickened him: “Our orders were to kill and destroy everything. That is not humanity.” He would call the senior Austrian generals “brigands.”3 They were also dawdlers, and the Germans did not bother to hide their contempt, the Austro-Hungarian ambassador reporting from Berlin the resentment felt in German military and government circles at “the lack of pressure and speed on our part, the failure to divert Russian troops from Germany” while the Germans battled in France.4
Berlin’s complaints were loud enough that Franz Joseph’s new ambassador there, Prince Gottfried von Hohenlohe, urgently advised “a prompt offensive against Russia to prove that the two empires are sharing the burdens of this war equally.”5 By M+30, the Russians had already mobilized forty-five infantry divisions and eighteen cavalry divisions in Galicia, as well as the eleven infantry divisions of the Russian Ninth Army, which were gathering at Warsaw to join an invasion of Germany or Austria-Hungary. The speed of the Russian deployment mocked prewar Austrian calculations, which had predicted just twenty-four Russian divisions by M+30, not the fifty-plus that were now hunkering on the Austrian and German
borders.6
Austria-Hungary’s only chance in a Russian war had been to strike quickly, before the Russians could mobilize in depth; Conrad had squandered that chance. Though the first shot in the campaign had not even been fired, defeat seemed inevitable, not least because the Austrians were already running out of shots. They had conscripted most of their munitions workers, which meant that the big arsenals at Vienna, Steyr, Pilsen, Budapest, and Pressburg were not producing at anywhere near full capacity. By mid-September, they were making just 3.5 million rifle bullets and 9,500 shells daily, and were having trouble shipping even these small quantities to troops at the front.7 A pathetic cable from the Austro-Hungarian minister in Munich to Berchtold on September 8 conveyed the news that the Germans would send Austria 2.5 million rifle and machine gun cartridges previously dismissed as “past their sale date” (veraltet) and “suitable only for the Chinese army.”8
Deployed on the San and the Dniester, behind adequate fortifications, Conrad at this late date should not even have contemplated an offensive. Using the bridgehead at Przemysl—an ancient crossroads ringed by modern forts, earning it the nickname “Verdun of the East”—Conrad could have defended Austria-Hungary against the looming Russian steamroller: three million Russians against fewer than half that number of Austrians. Six Russian armies (the Third, Fourth, Fifth, Eighth, Ninth, and Eleventh) were descending on a three-hundred-mile front to envelop just three Austro-Hungarian armies (the First, Third, and Fourth), as well as General Hermann Kövess’ fluctuating group around Lemberg, which comprised whatever troops straggled in from Böhm-Ermolli’s Second Army in Serbia. The Russians had spent a $500 million French loan in 1913 improving their roads and railways into this theater and had completely reversed Austria’s logistical advantage. Now they could move more trains and troops into the Galician border region than the Austrians.9
True to his breakneck nature, Conrad elected to attack anyway, even against these hopeless odds and without German cooperation. “We cannot find any suitable sphere for a chief of staff with such soaring plans,” Franz Joseph would later say of Conrad, but, characteristically, the emperor did nothing to arrest Conrad’s soaring plans in August 1914.10 With his right flank resting on unfortified Lemberg, Conrad gambled that he could thrust northeast with his left—the eighteen divisions of his First and Fourth Armies—and envelop and destroy the two Russian armies assembling around Lublin and Chelm. If Conrad smashed them both, he would find himself victorious on the Bug, without even having to await the (German) decision on the Seine promised by Moltke.
For a peevish man like Conrad, it was hard to resist such a prospect, but he should have. Even if he defeated the two Russian armies around Lublin, there were two more armies behind them in reserve, the Eleventh and Ninth, and it was inconceivable that he would defeat them as well, for he lacked reserves, transport, and ammunition. In his prewar planning, Conrad had projected this Habsburg offensive with a strength of more than thirty divisions on his left wing, which would curl around and envelop the Russian units mobilizing in Poland and Galicia. Now he found himself with just eighteen divisions on his left, not nearly enough to overawe the Russians, whose fifty-two divisions (thus far) were deploying at a faster clip than anticipated and in greater strength: Russian divisions had more battalions and machine guns than Austrian ones and so were, on average, 60 to 70 percent stronger. They also enjoyed crushing artillery superiority, having twice as many field guns and three times as much heavy artillery. Decisively outgunned by the Germans, the Russians were far superior to the Austrians.11
Conrad’s gamble was all the more reckless because his divisions would now have to walk a hundred miles just to reach their points of attack. Conrad must have known that the marches alone would destroy his largely civilian army. Conrad’s memoir of his youth recalled his only experience of war, in Bosnia in 1878, and how the summer heat then had inflicted “unspeakable agonies” on the men, causing mass straggling and even suicides.12 Had Conrad stuck to the original deployment plan, his troops would have crossed those hundred hot miles in rail cars. Instead, they stumbled along on foot, eating the dust of their supply trains, cavalry, and artillery under a scorching sun. Livestock—the seventy oxen, two hundred pigs, and three hundred sheep that would be butchered in stages to feed each Austrian corps—added to the misery, lowing, bleating, and egesting all over the march routes.
Otto Laserz, a Kaiserjäger from Tyrol, never forgot the marches in “steaming heat”; the men were let off their trains from Vienna at a tiny village called Lubien Welki and then ordered to march ninety miles to Lemberg, a three-day struggle that would have been accomplished in a couple of hours on the rails. By the second march day, every man was stricken with lice and thirst. They’d guzzle the contents of their canteens in the first hour and go miles between wells, where the men would line up by rank and wait for a drink of warm, brackish water that inevitably brought diarrhea. These Kaiserschützen—Landwehr troops from the recruiting districts of Vienna, Styria, and Tyrol—also wondered why they were campaigning in flat Galicia with ropes, crampons, and ice axes, as well as hobnailed mountain boots that sank deeper into the Galician sand than the normal army shoe. Bureaucracy was a religion in Austria, and so no one—not even Laserz’ commandant—had dared leave the unsuitable items behind without exculpatory paperwork, which, of course, no bureaucrat had thought to do. And so the men were already wilting, “feet burning, back and shoulders aching.” One of Laserz’ men fell far behind the march column on the first day and reappeared in the afternoon; Laserz noted that “he’d thrown everything away—the mountain gear and even his backpack and haversack, and now he was finally smiling. This is what it’s like to march fifty kilometers in a day in Galicia in the summer.”13
Nor did Conrad bother to secure his right flank as he moved his thirsty, staggering army north through the still Galician landscape—dusty villages of steep-roofed thatched houses and three-domed churches alternating with a limitless, empty plain. (“We knew nothing about this Austrian province, only that it produced oil, salt, filth, lice and lots of Jews,” one curious Austrian trooper noted in his diary.)14 Neither Austria-Hungary’s cavalry, which crossed into Russia on August 15 to reconnoiter, nor the monarchy’s aviation noticed two entire Russian armies, the Third and the Eighth, gathering around Proskurov and Tarnopol and advancing from the east. Austria-Hungary’s fledgling air corps had been all but grounded in August by friendly fire, the excited peasant troops firing on their own airplanes whenever they passed overhead.15 Initially briefed on the different markings and silhouettes of Austrian, German, and Russian planes and instructed to fire only at the Russian ones, undiscerning Austrian troops were shortly told not to fire at any of them.16
Austrian troops enter a Galician village in August 1914. “We knew nothing about this province,” one Austrian infantryman wrote. “Only that it produced oil, salt, filth, lice, and lots of Jews.”
Credit: Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, Wien
In theory, the new weapon of aircraft, with its ability to reconnoiter at long range (two hundred miles, out and back), was supposed to shorten the period of deployment and accelerate the onset of battle by providing precise, real-time knowledge of the enemy, but it was having as little impact here as in Serbia. The miserly Austrians had just five planes at Lemberg; three of them didn’t work, and one of the two that did crashed inside the Russian border on August 12.17 In his usual way, converting hindsight to foresight, Conrad blamed others: “They called me a fool when I recommended 1,200 airplanes for the army; now they see that I was right.”18 Of course as chief of the general staff, he could have insisted on airplanes, but he hadn’t. Thus, his North and South Armies were still blundering around the old-fashioned way.
The resolutely old-fashioned Austro-Hungarian cavalry proved hapless in their border skirmishes with the Cossacks, driven back on all points with heavy casualties and complaining of their loads and armament. “Everything was lacking,” Auffenberg scribbled after learning of th
e rout of his 6th Cavalry Division in fighting around Tomasow.19 Many of the Austrian cavalry had been all but unhorsed by the choice of a heavy parade-ground saddle that rubbed their unseasoned mounts raw and sent thousands of troopers limping back to their bases on foot, leading their wincing horses behind them. Those that went forward, scouring a 250-mile-wide front and penetrating as far as 100 miles, were greeted with unexpectedly ferocious fusillades, a Russian lieutenant recalling that in these early days of the war his overwrought bumpkins would fire “twenty rounds each at a single Austrian cavalryman,” effectively disarming entire units until the next ammunition supply arrived.20
The Austrians had overinvested in cavalry before the war and these uhlans—like the rest of the Austrian horse—failed to locate the Russian armies in August 1914, despite scouring a 250-mile front and penetrating 100 miles into Russia. Airplanes were a better choice for reconnaissance.
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