With Russian shrapnel spraying overhead and head-fused shells landing and hurling the sod forty feet in the air, the Jäger platoons descended the height in rushes, sprinting a hundred yards, then kneeling to cover the approach of the following group. They found the Russians in the next wood and returned the Russian salvos with individual fire. As the other regiment of their brigade advanced into line, they turned the Russians out of the wood with a flank attack. The Russians retired to another wood and kept up their fire.
After several hours the Austrians took that wood too, but still the Russian artillery thundered from invisible positions far away, landing shells with astonishing accuracy in their midst. In this little episode from the emerging Battle of Komarów, all of the defects of Austrian tactics and strategy were revealed. The Austrians had entered the war with the essentially nineteenth-century view that grit and determination would overcome firepower and manpower on the battlefield. “Entrenched and hiding in woods, the Russians offered very small targets for our rifles, forcing us to storm ahead with the bayonet,” Brosch’s regiment reported.2 This, of course, was the Russian plan: to goad the Austrians into the open and kill them. The Russian infantry, no match individually for the Jäger, had inflicted heavy casualties with their salvo fire, and the Russian artillery, well situated a couple of miles behind the infantry, had never ceased killing Austrians. After taking the second wood, the Austrians should have entrenched or withdrawn out of range of the Russian guns; instead, they were bluffly rallied by their officers—“Kaiserjäger Ihr weicht?” (you’re not scared, are you?)—and told to attack again toward the faraway gun line, a last charge that killed yet more crack troops for no apparent gain. The Austrians were also gratuitously exposing their officers to certain death; Komaromi’s battalion and company commander were both killed on this first day of the war. His platoon leader, who grimly laughed off the casualties with “Heute rot, Morgen tot” (here today, gone tomorrow), would be killed a week later.3
The war was not going particularly well for the Russians either. In every clash with the Russians the Austrians noted poor fire discipline. Russian infantry were not allowed to fire singly, only in volleys commanded by their officers. Even then, they invariably fired high, killing and wounding more unsuspecting Austrian troops in the rear echelons than in the front. Everywhere the Russians had been, the ground was littered with little black cartridge clips, evidence of their profligacy. These trigger-happy muzhiks were threatening to disarm the Russian infantry; a single Russian division could easily fire off 4 million rounds in a single day of fighting at a time when monthly Russian production for the entire army of 115 divisions was 59 million rounds. Put another way, the three cartridge factories in Russia were producing 700 million rifle rounds a year for an army that was firing that quantity every month.4
The Russian artillery was already experiencing the shell shortage that would afflict it for the entire war. Russian planners had focused on mobilizing their vast army but given little thought to maintaining it in the field. “The immensity of the requirements,” General Danilov recalled, “surpassed the wildest expectations.” The Russian general staff had assumed that shell production of three hundred thousand units a month—which amounted to one or two shells per day per gun—would suffice, and it clearly wasn’t. Gunners were firing hundreds of shells a day, and at a rate of two million a month they were rapidly exhausting stocks that simply could not be replenished because Sukhomlinov’s War Ministry had actually closed the Russian shell factories and packed their workers off to the front when war began. Imports were hard to come by too, for Russia’s ports were inaccessible—the Black Sea closed by the Turks, the Baltic by the Germans.5
To exploit the recent victory at Krásnik and pursue the beaten enemy, Dankl ordered the two corps still under his control to advance on August 26. They hadn’t gone far when they found the Russians not in retreat but in strong positions on the next row of heights around Rudnik, trenches dug and artillery deployed. This, in a nutshell, showed why the Austrians would never win this war. The Russians had more men and even more artillery. Auffenberg had jauntily asserted that the “traditional excellence” of Austria’s artillery would overcome Russia’s advantage in batteries and caliber, but it wasn’t overcoming anything. The Russian artillery was hitting the Austrians effectively at a range of five miles, whereas the Austrians with their old bronze guns needed to close to two miles or less to make their guns accurate. The Russians also had more artillery everywhere, which meant, as a despairing Austrian report put it, that “the enemy was always able to dedicate a fraction of his artillery to destroying our attacking infantry,” while the rest destroyed the Austrian artillery, causing “enormous casualties.”6
Artillery, however, was only one of the many reasons the war was going badly for Austria-Hungary. What few Austrian machine guns there were broke down because the crews had decided to smear them with lard to prevent rusting, which caused the guns to jam. (“Clean every trace of lard from every machine gun immediately,” Conrad’s AOK bellowed from the sidelines.)7 The Austrians lacked the means to move quickly, leverage their infantry with artillery and machine gun fire, or deal any kind of decisive blow. At best, they were like a small Russian army without the benefit of Russian artillery. Russian rifle fire was notoriously inaccurate, but, as one Austrian officer put it, its sheer volume—“they opened up with huge, uninterrupted, rolling salvos from long range”—terrified the Austrian line, not least because the Austrians were generally forbidden to return fire, being “under strictest orders to conserve what little ammunition they had.” This poverty of arms and ideas had been apparent before the war, yet Conrad had glossed over it for years.
Standing around in the August heat, contemplating the Russian trenches at Rudnik, Dankl’s generals discussed how to proceed. They put off the attack for a day, then struck into the wooded heights on August 27. Every unit took heavy casualties, the Austrian artillery doing nothing to disturb Russians in defilade. The colonel of the Austrian 83rd Regiment overran a Russian trench and took the surrender of a Russian colonel and several hundred men of his regiment. As the Russian emerged from the trench, waving a white handkerchief, he congratulated the Austrian on the “bravura” of his men. “Mine,” he declared, “would never attack like that,” which, in view of all of the dead, irreplaceable Austrians lying around, was not really a compliment. The Russian was sent to the rear with the other prisoners, his parting words to the Austrian colonel: “Take off those yellow officer leggings you wear; we see them from far away and we fire at them.”8
Both armies were still groping in the dark, merely guessing at the other’s location, but Ivanov, characterized by the Austrian general staff as a “smart, methodical, outstanding leader,” now began to connect the dots.9 He guessed that the left wing of Dankl’s army was the left wing of the entire Austrian North Army; he located it on the road from Tomaszow to Zamosc, then ordered Plehve’s Fifth Army to hurry southwest and hit it in flank and rear. Salza was to halt on the heights of Goraj, hold the Austrians, and let Plehve bite into their flank. Ruzski was to plow straight ahead with the Russian Third Army. Using the roads to Lemberg and Rawa-Ruska, he’d be positioned to attack the Austrian Third Army at Lemberg or roll up the Austrian Fourth and First Armies from the south.
Unaware that he was in danger of being engulfed from both flanks, Dankl pressed his attack, herding his weary troops toward the Wiznica stream and then across it. Dankl’s I Corps—the 5th and 46th Divisions—struggled toward Wilkolaz. The seventy-one-year-old Salza, ordered to hold at Goraj, instead retreated toward Lublin. Ivanov fired him on the spot, promoting General Aleksei Evert to take his place.
Dankl’s X Corps advanced into Goraj and found the field littered with Russian rifles and other equipment.10 In the crude three-day battle of Krásnik, 144 Austro-Hungarian infantry battalions, 71 cavalry squadrons, and 354 guns had ranged themselves against a roughly equal Russian force, and the Russians had had the worst of it, losing twenty thou
sand men and twenty-eight guns. Though he had lost fifteen thousand troops of his own, Dankl was awarded the Maria Theresa Cross for valor, so great was the emperor’s relief at having finally scored a victory in the war. In Vienna, Das Lied vom General Dankl (The Song of General Dankl) was hastily composed, eight stanzas depicting the “Russian hordes, flooding across the steppes from the north,” as “countless as grains of sand on the beach,” and bent on “murder, pillage, and arson.” Dankl, the hymn sang, drove the “Russian dogs” all the way back to Lublin, his troops “eagerly pursuing with lusty war cries,” Dankl in their midst, hacking the dogs back with his sword until “there were no more Russians to be killed.”11
For a moment, Conrad’s aggressiveness seemed to have paid off. His heady prewar predictions that he would split the Russians like a chisel and drive them into the Black Sea and the Pripet marshes seemed within reach.12 Dankl had dealt a heavy blow to Salza’s army, and Auffenberg was coiled to hit Plehve’s. The Russian situation was all the more disturbing when viewed alongside the news from East Prussia, where the German Eighth Army—reinforced with two corps and a cavalry division from France—was embroiled in the Battle of Tannenberg in the last days of August, crushing two Russian armies of the Northwest Front, inflicting 300,000 casualties, capturing 650 guns, and threatening to push into Poland and join hands with the advancing Austrians. “Thousands of Russian prisoners, and Hindenburg is still counting them!” the newswomen in Berlin called to passersby (the newsboys all being at the front).13
But German victories did not ensure Austrian ones. Das Lied vom General Dankl notwithstanding, there actually was no end to the Russenhunde, or “Russian dogs.” They had just briefly receded, and certainly not as far as Lublin. Every night, the few Austrian units able to rest were invariably awakened by Cossacks (or rumors of them), and the “wild firing in all directions” that ensued killed and wounded far more Austrians than the Cossacks ever did.14 Still, the German Kaiser awarded old Franz Joseph the Pour le Mérite—Prussia’s highest decoration, the coveted “Blue Max”—on the twenty-eighth, as thanks for these early victories, if you could call them that.
Dankl attacked again on the twenty-ninth into the next line of hills and absorbed devastating casualties. Evert’s Fourth Army was concentrating more troops and pushing them west to find Dankl’s flank. In the center, Dankl’s 33rd Division wrested the village of Piotrkow from the Russians, but not before losing thousands more men to artillery and infantry fire. The 83rd Regiment alone lost four hundred men and six officers on the twenty-ninth. Austrian officers were still dumbly advancing in battalion columns to Sturmdistanz, storm distance, and then ordering their frightened men to fix bayonets and lope that last Distanz into Russian rifle, machine gun, and shrapnel fire.
The Russians had a survival instinct lacking in the Austrians. They would lie up against the lip of their trenches pouring fire into the Austrian bayonet charges until the first wild-eyed Austrians arrived at the edge of the trench. At that precise moment, every Russian in the trench would throw his hands in the air and surrender as one. “I mention this fact,” an Austrian colonel later wrote, “only to confirm that our enormous casualties were not the result of Russian attacks, but rather Russian defensive fire.” Whereas Austrian officers led from the front and died in droves, Russian officers preferred the rear; “only in the rarest cases did we ever see Russian officers near the front line; most were well back and well covered.” With peasant cunning, the Russians were fighting more intelligently than the Austrians. The next day the depleted Austrian 83rd took delivery of its first “march battalion”—raw recruits and reservists—who had been sent from the regiment’s Transylvanian depot to replace the dead and wounded active-duty troops. The war of attrition had begun.15
Thanks to Russian floundering, Conrad had—against all odds—advanced into the space between the Bug and the Vistula, frustrating Russian attempts to cross the San, encircle him, and separate the German and Austro-Hungarian armies. For the moment, he held the initiative. But the moment was passing. The Stavka was redirecting Plehve’s Fifth Army as well as General Platon Lichitski’s Ninth Army to surround and pinch off Conrad’s left. Lemberg, on Conrad’s right, was about to be crushed under the Russian steamroller. Although Conrad later claimed to have estimated the Russian armies threatening Lemberg at just ten divisions, that was merely another of his whitewashes. In fact, he had ample warning of the approach of two entire armies, the Russian Third and Eighth, with sixteen divisions.16 But Conrad yearned for a great victory and hoped that if he only pressed the Nordstoss harder, the Russians would crumple. But pressing the Nordstoss harder—and taking more troops from his right to bolster his left—merely ensured that his right wing at Lemberg was even more vulnerable to attack. If the Russians smashed it in or crabbed around behind it, Conrad would lose every inch of conquered ground in the north, and probably the armies there as well.17
Blind to these considerations, Conrad ordered Auffenberg to press the attack with Dankl toward Lublin. Auffenberg, spread over a sixty-mile-wide front, stumbled on August 26 into the flank of the sixty-four-year-old Plehve’s Fifth Army, which was itself stumbling toward Dankl’s right flank.18 Throughout, Conrad was engrossed in his romantic envelopments, spending valuable time on the twenty-sixth chatting with his political advisor, Joseph Redlich, about Gina. With the guns of August booming around them, Redlich pronounced himself disgusted; he liked Conrad but deplored the general’s “pessimistic-sentimental outlook” and his obsession with his married mistress. Redlich was most struck by Conrad’s melancholy and “boundless naivete.” The chief was “like a child in his judgment of life and the world . . . in no way distinguishing himself from the average general staff officer” in his thinking. Bound by office routines and his “senile” doting on Gina, Conrad was incapable of the deep thought and decisive action needed to put the Austro-Hungarian army on solid ground.19
With little direction from Conrad, Auffenberg took the opportunity to hit Plehve hard, hoping that he could envelop him with Dankl from the left and Archduke Joseph Ferdinand from the right. Here was another rare instance of the Austro-Hungarians enjoying even odds with the Russian steamroller, Auffenberg’s 156 battalions and 470 guns against Plehve’s 144 battalions and 526 guns. Auffenberg marched his II Corps toward the lovely Renaissance town of Zamosc and wheeled his IX and VI Corps forward in the direction of Komarów, an elevated market town surmounted by a brick church that commanded the surrounding fields. Archduke Joseph Ferdinand’s XIV Corps, beating its way up from Lemberg, would sweep in to the right of VI Corps, brushing the Bug with its sleeve to complete the encirclement of Plehve.
On August 26, four Austrian divisions of the II and IX Corps battled along the old imperial road of Zamosc against the Russian XXV Corps. Archduke Joseph Ferdinand, who was wearying of his ever-changing orders, rested his men at Wielkie. It was well he did, for Conrad now changed his mind again and ordered the archduke not to cooperate with Auffenberg after all but to turn around and march back to Lemberg to support Brudermann. Auffenberg would have to make do with his own forces. He extended his VI Corps far to the right to take the place of Archduke Joseph Ferdinand’s departing corps. The VI Corps’ 15th Division now found itself in the unenviable position of having to do with one division what had been planned for five.
Dankl’s army rested on the twenty-sixth, rising only to reply to Russian artillery fire from north of Krásnik. For August 27, Dankl planned a renewed advance; despite exhaustion and casualties, Conrad still regarded the First Army as the left pincer of the Nordstoss. Evert’s army seemed to be retiring on Lublin. On the twenty-seventh, Dankl attacked with two corps and wrested some villages from the Russians, absorbing more heavy casualties. The omens were nevertheless good, as three Russian corps were observed retreating before the onslaught. Dankl—who moved his headquarters into Krásnik on the twenty-seventh, to a building that had served until the previous day as the headquarters of a Don Cossack regiment—now planned to move to
Duza and Belyce. But his army was nearly broken by several days of fighting and marching. His I and VI Corps were devastated and urgently needed march brigades to replace their casualties. Dankl ordered rest for the twenty-eighth.
Despite the slowing of Dankl’s pincer, Auffenberg glimpsed victory. Evert—brought in to stiffen Salza’s wilting army—was still retreating to the north, leaving Plehve’s Fifth Army exposed. On August 27, the second day of battle, Auffenberg ordered General Svetozar Boroevic’s VI Corps to attack the flank of Plehve’s XIX Corps at Rachanie; Boroevic made early gains but then foundered, his 39th Honvéd Division losing half its strength to Russian fire. Pacing back and forth in the garden of the palace in Oleszyce hearing the distant thunder of the guns, Auffenberg was handed an early casualty list and goggled in disbelief: “It said that the 39th Honvéds had taken 50 percent casualties. I refused to believe it, but more precise information arrived later confirming that some units had lost even more than that.”20
On the right, General Friedrich Wodniansky’s 15th Division attacked Pukarczow, but already his men were “wilting from heat, thirst and sleeplessness.” Like Dankl’s men at Krásnik, these largely Hungarian troops humped up the high ridges chosen by the Russians for their trenches and into withering fire. Wodniansky’s 5th Regiment alone lost eight officers and three hundred men in these attacks, in part because no one could be found to operate the unit’s machine guns.21 One of Wodniansky’s brigades, fighting for a wooded crest around the village of Maloniz, arrived at the top to find “our entire skirmish line—230 men—lying dead.” The Russians had killed them all, and then withdrawn a hundred yards to slaughter the next wave, a battalion of Bosnians: “The Russians were too well concealed; each time we sent a skirmish line forward it was immediately mowed down.” One officer after another—the major, the captains, the lieutenants—were all cut down trying to lead the men forward in desperate scrambles. The major died in the front rank, roaring: “Men, now show your loved ones at home what heroes you are!” Eleven officers were killed and seven wounded, including the author of the report, a captain who had run past a Russian machine gun and been raked with bullets: left cheek (grazed), belly (grazed), saber (disintegrated), and left shoulder (shot through).22 The other company commander was literally blown into a swamp by a shellburst, where he lay dazed, concussed, and unable to move.23
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