A Mad Catastrophe

by Geoffrey Wawro

  Russia’s Fourth and Fifth Armies moved south on their wide roads, directly toward the Austro-Hungarian First and Fourth Armies moving north. With the Russian Third and Eighth Armies slowed by the poor roads in eastern Galicia, a series of rivers coursing north and south into the Dniester, and quarrels between Ruzski and his staff, the Austrians enjoyed a respite from the Russian steamroller. Supply and communications remained the Achilles’ heel of the Russians. They were even less motorized than the Austrians, with just ten cars and four motorcycles for an army of 150,000, and fewer than seven hundred vehicles for the entire army of several million men.40 Russia’s supply service was a scandal, defeated at every turn by sloth and corruption. Touring the Warsaw headquarters of the Russian Line of Communications Command in mid-September, the British military attaché reported what he saw: “The whole place was in an indescribable state of filth; everyone was waiting . . . and all seemed content to wait.” There appeared to be no actual system of supply; available horses were “dreadful scarecrows”; prisoners, deserters, and convalescents wandered around unsupervised.41

  In no apparent hurry to develop their awesome power, which lay scattered on the fringes, the Russians were conceding the Austrians even odds in the Polish salient, for the moment. Three hundred and fifty thousand Austrians ranged themselves there against the same number of Russians. Anticipating victory, Conrad even appointed a military governor for soon-to-be-conquered Warsaw.42

  A week of skirmishing preceded the first great battles, revealing crucial differences in Austrian and Russian tactics. The Russians had a healthy respect for firepower; the Austrians didn’t. Skirmishing for control of Belzec in Russian Poland on August 15, an Austrian cavalry division leading the Fourth Army into battle summoned a nearby battalion of Vienna’s 4th Deutschmeister Regiment, and the battalion appeared, led not by a major or a captain but by the regimental commander—Colonel Ludwig Holzhausen—and his entire staff. “A man’s first taste of battle is like a boy’s first kiss,” soldiers liked to say, a mystery that held them all in thrall as they surged toward their baptism of fire.

  The Russians—Cossacks and some infantry—had prudently dismounted and taken cover in buildings, behind walls, and in trees; they watched in disbelief as Holzhausen strolled to the front of the Austrian skirmish line, drew his saber, and walked the battalion forward. The official Austrian report of the colonel’s inevitable demise spoke of his “crazy-brave, death-defying attitude,” which “fired the men and drove them forward.” Whether it was Holzhausen’s attitude or the Cossack bullets nipping at their flanks that drove the men forward is hard to determine, but in a firefight that lasted ninety minutes, Holzhausen perished immediately. “A bullet cut his carotid artery; he died in seconds,” one of the colonel’s battalion commanders noted. Thirty-eight Deutschmeister died with him, and fifty-one were wounded—12 percent casualties in a minor skirmish.43 This foolhardy machismo—incomprehensible in view of all the ink that had been spilled on the dangers of modern firepower—would decapitate one Austrian unit after another in the days ahead.

  On the left wing of the spread-eagled Austrian armies, the 6th Cavalry Division entered Zamosc on August 22 and was surprised to discover strong Russian forces there. Austria’s 3rd Cavalry Division was driven back on Krásnik, but not before spotting big Russian columns advancing from Radom and Ivangorod (Deblin), in other words toward the rear of the Austrian First and Fourth Armies.44 A lone Austrian airplane, puttering up from the mouth of the San on the twenty-second, spotted at least five Russian corps hurrying southeast from Chelm and Lublin. Southeast! This suggested that the Russians were turning everything against Brudermann at Lemberg, exposing their flank to an Austrian Nordstoss or “northern blow” by the armies of Dankl and Auffenberg.

  With a careless disregard for the Russian reserve armies behind the armies he had before him, Conrad ordered the Nordstoss. Dankl agreed that the “northern blow” presented the opportunity—on paper at least—to “smash in the enemy left and drive the Russians off to the East.”45 But the whole enterprise seemed far-fetched. There were assuredly huge reserves behind this already large Russian force, and Conrad really had only the vaguest idea where the Russians were in the vast space between the Dniester and the Bug. On August 23 he told his armies only this: “We estimate eight to ten Russian divisions deploying between the Bug and the Vistula, none of them operational before September 1.”46 In fact, there were at least thirty-four divisions in that space, and they were all operational. But there was no restraining Conrad; as the Austrian staff history put it, “the wish was the father of the thought,” and Conrad wished for a great war-winning stroke. Such was his reckless enthusiasm that he even ordered the Third Army—all that remained to defend Lemberg and North Army’s right flank—to prepare to march north and join the “general offensive.” With Brudermann now committed to the Nordstoss, Kövess was to cross the Dniester and deploy defensively in the space between Lemberg and the village of Przemyslsany, and there await the rest of Bohm-Ermolli’s Second Army, which was trickling into Stanislau.47

  Already things were falling apart. Even as the Third Army began to move north, alarming reports of big Russian forces to the east arrived in Conrad’s headquarters in Przemysl: infantry masses closing from Zbaraz, Brody, and Tarnopol, and cavalry and infantry at Husiatyn. Kasper Blond, an Austrian officer attached to the army hospital in Czernowitz, described what it felt like to have masses of Russian forces closing around him: “Our army had already left; now there was a river of fleeing civilians—men and women, children and seniors, some on foot, some in wagons, all headed south, or trying to head south. People were paying exorbitant prices for a cart. People were milling about holding a few possessions in their hands. You saw girls and women walking in their nightgowns; now and then a droshky crammed with people and furniture would break through the mass of pedestrians.” Jews crowded into the hospital seeking protection from mobs that had already sacked their shops.48

  Desperate to strike the Russian flank, Conrad had exposed his own. But he persisted, repeating the order for the “general offensive” on August 22. He doubled down everywhere he could, ordering the Second Army’s III Corps—one of the few units east of Lemberg—to defend the city against any Russian forces coming from the east, but to stand ready at all times to march off to join the Nordstoss. All that remained to defend Lemberg was XII Corps, the 11th Division and three cavalry divisions that had been so worn down by their exertions since mid-August that they could hardly be counted as combat units. “I must remind you that the 1st Cavalry Division has been in nonstop combat since the first days of the war and has been reduced from 3,800 sabers to barely 2,000,” General Arthur Peteani reported. “We urgently need rest.”49 The troops arriving from the Balkans were to cross the Dniester at Stanislau and face north.

  With the Nordstoss cocked and ready to launch, Conrad anticlimactically ordered the armies to rest on August 22. With so many reservists in the ranks, the men were tired and lame. Dankl remained sanguine, jotting in his diary on the twenty-third that “the Russians posed a danger, but a small one.” Ignorance of Russia’s real strength fostered the delusion that “they will have no choice but to yield to our superior forces.” Although Dankl felt some nervousness, he didn’t worry too much. He was feeling in a victorious mood as his army headed for a collision with Salza’s: “It’s just a shame that things aren’t going this well in Serbia.”50

  The war in Serbia, of course, was two weeks old, and AOK worriedly transmitted some early lessons learned to the generals of the North Army. One was, “We must take care not to depress the good spirits and energy of the troops with unnecessary exertions.” Of course, the whole deployment of the North Army, which had begun a hundred miles west of Lemberg, was an unnecessary exertion, but there was worse to come. “Officers must take care not to launch frontal attacks, know the terrain, know what the enemy is doing, go around the enemy flank, and never attack into unsuppressed enemy rifle and artillery fire.”51 Yet Auf
fenberg’s army, which had just staggered through the woods, sand, and marshes of the Upper Tanew River and come to rest on the line Narew-Tereszpol, was even then girding to charge into unsuppressed enemy rifle and artillery fire. One officer recalled the approach to battle as a battle itself—waist-deep bogs, soft sandy tracks that swallowed the men up to their knees, then dusty roads, blistering heat, muddy water, and no food or drink because supply wagons were even less able to negotiate this terrain than the men.52

  Dankl too blundered into battle on August 23, when his First Army collided with General Anton Salza’s Russian Fourth Army east of the San River at Krásnik. Ivanov had directed Salza to advance to the line of the San and hold it from its mouth to Jaroslau. Dankl had arrayed his army to envelop this Russian thrust, with X Corps pushing forward on the right, V Corps in the center, and I Corps trailing on the left. Dankl had just written in his diary that he hoped to meet the Russians on the line of heights west of Krásnik, and now he did.53 Salza had sent his XIV, XVI, and Grenadier Corps forward on a broad front, threading through the villages of Zaklikow, Janow, and Frampol. Sweating under the August sun and floundering in the deep sand and marshes, Dankl’s left wing units, the 5th Division and 46th Landwehr Division, struck the Russian 18th Division north of Zaklikow.

  “Thank God, it’s war,” General Viktor Dankl exulted when Austria declared war on Serbia in July 1914. “The Russians pose a danger,” he hazarded, “but a small one.” Little more than a month later, Dankl’s Austro-Hungarian First Army lay in ruins, crushed by the Russian steamroller.

  Credit: National Archives

  In the center, the 37th Honvéd Division struggled with linguistic problems as much as with the Russians on the wooded heights above Janow. Orders arrived in German, yet because of Hungarian punctiliousness they had to be distributed in Magyar, often to units that couldn’t speak or even read Magyar.54 On the right, Dankl was able to concentrate five divisions against the two of Voyshin’s XIV Corps, which found themselves sprawled across twenty miles of swampy, rolling, wooded ground south of Lublin. It was a rare instance of Austro-Hungarian superiority in men and guns, and Dankl surged ahead to exploit it.

  Dankl believed that he was linked to a vast Europe-spanning victory. “The Germans in France are also making great gains!” he scribbled excitedly in his diary.55 Here on the western edge of Russian Poland, however, the fighting was cruder than anything seen in France. With V Corps in the lead, the Austrian 76th Regiment lost six hundred killed, wounded, or missing in three frontal assaults to seize the hilltop village of Polichna. Moving in masses up a long bare slope, the troops were scythed down by artillery and machine guns, and then stumbled into the village in clumsy columns, where they fought hand to hand and house to house in what would most charitably be described as a Pyrrhic victory.

  Common sense suggested that Austria-Hungary could not afford a war of attrition with the Russian Empire, yet that was exactly what the Austrians had embarked on with ruinous tactics like these. No one seemed to notice; Austrian officers on the scene wrote daft after-action reports to put a gloss on the lamentable slaughter. “Jeder Mann ein Held” (every man a hero), the commander of the 76th proudly asserted. The poor wretches would have to be heroes with tactical direction like this.56

  “A man’s first taste of battle is like a boy’s first kiss,” Austrian officers liked to say. It was anything but. Brutally sacrificed in bayonet charges, the Austro-Hungarian infantry died in droves.

  Credit: Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, Wien

  The 33rd Division, joining the attack on Polichna from the right, climbed toward the village as if this were a war of the eighteenth century: two battalions arrayed wing to wing, a third in a second rank behind them, and the fourth in reserve. The 14th Division attacked in the same fashion, with its four battalions in thousand-man clumps, sweating up the hill to Polichna. Most of its battle had to do with recovering survivors of the 76th Regiment, a job made more difficult, an Austrian colonel wrote, “by our own artillery, whose shrapnel missed the enemy and struck us.”57 Battling for the villages of Frampol and Goraj to place a Russian pincer on the San, Salza sent his XVI and Grenadier Corps against the Austrian V and X Corps on the right. Firing from elevated positions, the Austrians drove them off, then counterattacked, capturing hundreds of prisoners and nineteen Russian guns. Salza ordered a retreat to the northeast, a few kilometers back to the next line of heights on the road to Lublin.58

  Austria’s pike-gray uniform, which did not camouflage troops in Serbia, was not concealing them here either. “We were always visible in our pike gray, the Russians, in their dirt-colored uniforms, far less so,” an officer wrote.59 Explaining the ghastly casualties to a German officer at AOK, Conrad blamed more than just the uniform. He faulted the legacy of the Austro-Prussian War, noting that the Habsburg army’s “ill-timed bravado stems from 1866,” a war in which the Austrian infantry had attacked just like this. Perhaps Conrad was right; low budgets, peace, and slow promotion since 1866 meant that Austria-Hungary’s regular officers in 1914 were old (most captains were over forty, and many of them were approaching sixty), fat, and incapable of new tricks. Senior officers who couldn’t mount a horse were placed in cars, but they quickly broke down, the monarchy lacking the rubber imports to manufacture spare tires. “Drive more slowly and carefully on these bad roads,” Conrad’s supply director hissed. “There’s nothing wrong with our tires, it’s the way you drive.”60

  Despite gruesome casualties, the Austrians carried the day. They chased the Russians out of key villages like Polichna, occupied Krásnik, dug trenches, and settled in for a night that shook men and officers alike. For most, it was their first taste of battle, and it was horrid. “Sleeping in the open on a battlefield strewn with corpses and wounded men, who cried and pleaded through the night, was an experience that most of us will never forget,” the commander of the Austrian 83rd Regiment wrote.61 As a delighted Kaiser Wilhelm II awarded Conrad the Iron Cross, Conrad ordered Dankl to close up with Auffenberg’s army, which was now reinforced with three divisions from Brudermann’s. This assembly—Dankl, Auffenberg, and Archduke Joseph Ferdinand’s XIV Corps—was now ordered to press the attack toward Lublin. Dankl’s left wing was still “in the air,” without flank support, but the Germans promised a corps of Landwehr troops to reinforce it. Though speed was everything at this point, Dankl wasted considerable time on the twenty-fifth exchanging formalities with one of Fritzl’s adjutants, who had been dispatched from Przemysl to offer the archduke’s congratulations for the victory at Krásnik, for which Dankl had to prepare his own elaborate reply.

  Although Dankl was at the end of his logistical rope—his nine divisions had outrun their supplies and were pressing into the gut of at least eighteen Russian divisions—he didn’t seem to know it. Dankl wrote on August 25 that he and Auffenberg could now proceed to “hurl the Russians back to Lublin and beyond.” Taking stock of his own victories, he boasted that “the Russians are giving up everything—prisoners, guns, flags—and fleeing the area.” But a flyer report confirmed that large Russian forces continued to stream along the Vistula toward Dankl’s left flank and rear. “He who flanks is himself flanked” was an old Napoleonic bromide, and it was true here: the further Dankl advanced, the more Russians appeared behind him. Conrad had redirected Dankl’s X Corps to guard the right flank of Auffenberg’s II Corps, leaving Dankl more exposed than ever. With no troops to spare anywhere, Conrad was playing a shell game, switching corps here and there to plug holes, but opening new ones with every move.62 Both Dankl and Salza now looked south for relief: the Austrian to the four corps of Auffenberg’s Fourth Army, the Russian to the four corps of Plehve’s Fifth Army. Like wrestlers circling each other on a mat, the Austrians and Russians drew closer, both preparing to lunge at the other with as much strength as they could muster.63

  chapter8

  Komarów

  Still thinking that he could win the Great War in the east with a bold maneuver, Conrad now added a
southern stroke to the fading Nordstoss. He detached Archduke Joseph Ferdinand’s XIV Corps from the Third Army and ordered it to attack Plehve’s left flank in a potato field near the soon-to-be-notorious town of Rawa-Ruska. The Austrian corps was led in by Colonel Alexander Brosch’s 2nd Kaiserjäger Regiment on August 26; they were getting their first whiff of battle, one soldier remarking to another when their (bronze) cannon opened fire for the first time: “Brother, those guns are going to fire all the way to Kiev! Now the Russians are really done for.” Of course they weren’t. In this action, as in most others, the old Austrian cannon were largely ineffective, failing to hit or even locate Russian howitzers that were firing indirectly from behind a distant chain of hills.

  The Jäger Alpine infantry—still encumbered with their ropes, picks, ice axes, and crampons—stumbled through the potato field in two long skirmish lines. Undergoing their baptism of fire, the men were immediately disabused of the glories of war. Dozens of white and red clouds cracked overhead, and the troops felt shrapnel for the first time. One Jäger named Johann Komaromi described the reaction of the Austrians: “We fell out of our lines and cringed into little groups, trying to get as far from the raining darts as we could.” But the nature of shrapnel was to land everywhere, “behind us, in front of us, to the left, to the right.” Six shells cracked immediately over them, causing panic, the men “running confusedly in every direction” to escape the barrage. Komaromi crawled on his belly to the top of a hill and saw . . . nothing. “Not an enemy to be seen,” he wrote. A curiosity of war on the Eastern Front was that the Russians, unschooled in Western trench art, simply dug deep slit trenches without breastworks or parapets and vanished inside them. The Austrians wouldn’t notice Russians in their path until the muzhiks stood up and fired.1