A Mad Catastrophe

by Geoffrey Wawro

  The Austrians were pummeled backward, losing ground and touch with neighboring units. “No contact with the 22nd Landwehr Division since early this morning,” General Colerus reported late on the twenty-eighth.13 In Przemysl, Conrad phoned Brudermann’s staff chief, General Rudolf Pfeffer, and refused to credit Pfeffer’s explanation of what was happening at the front. “But where is the XI Corps fighting?” Conrad sputtered. “What’s III Corps doing?” Pfeffer told him that their attacks had been shredded and that they needed to retreat behind the Gnila Lipa. “But if you’d only followed my instructions,” Conrad retorted, “then you wouldn’t be talking about a retreat.” He slammed down the phone and turned to his adjutant, Major Rudolf Kundmann, snarling, “Es ist geschlagen! They’re beaten.” He began to compose a new narrative for posterity: “He’s retreating! Because of this insubordination, things are going wrong.”14

  Conrad, the “château general” par excellence, ordered more attacks on the Gnila Lipa for August 29–30, while the Austrian divisions there looked for any cover they could find from plunging Russian fire and the sun. General Alfred Krauss, who liked Conrad, was reminded now that the chief was “at heart always a tactician, with no interest in strategic and operational questions, such as how to deploy a mass army in fighting condition, and how to move, feed and supply it, and furnish it with real plans.”15 Conrad was now confirming that verdict, with his heedless yammering about attacks when all was so obviously lost in the strategic sense. Kolossváry reported that most of XI Corps could march and fight no longer; the marches and battles of August 25–27 had exhausted them. “Our fighting fitness has plummeted; we cannot be regarded as full-strength for some time,” he noted, adding that “employing lightly trained march brigades as ‘operative units’ equivalent to trained field troops is plainly not working. We’ll do our best.”16

  Most of Brudermann’s Third Army was crammed in a space barely five miles long, and it made an excellent target and was easily flanked. The Second Army’s VII Corps jabbed daily at the Russians on their front, but when they discovered Russians crossing the Dniester from the south behind them, they stopped jabbing and retreated instead.17 Conrad howled in frustration. Why weren’t the men of the Second and Third Armies attacking? General Pfeffer asked Conrad to come to the front to see for himself what was happening, but Conrad replied that he was too busy in Przemysl. “Too bad,” Pfeffer later wrote. “One glimpse of the Russian ring of fire would have cured his delusions.”18 To appease Conrad’s offensive spirit, Pfeffer proposed thrusts that could not even be attempted.19 With two heavy howitzer batteries per division—the Austrians had none—the Russians simply pulverized the Austrians from long range.

  In this First Battle of Lemberg, twenty thousand Austro-Hungarian troops were captured, along with seventy guns. Brusilov, sweeping around Brudermann’s right flank, was surprised at the number of cannon, machine guns, wagons, and prisoners abandoned by the retreating Austrians. The thousands of wounded on both sides were surprised at the lack of attention paid to them. Brusilov had been assured by his medical director that he had beds for three thousand wounded at Berezany; thirty-five hundred wounded men and officers were sent there, only to find that there were beds for just four hundred and the rest had to be laid on the ground in the open.20

  Brudermann was sounding less Napoleonic on August 30, when he finally grasped the facts of the matter: “After a multiday battle against an overwhelming enemy, the army must retreat and regroup at a new line.” He indicated the Wereszyca River, which lay west of Lemberg.21 The war was barely a week old, and Conrad was on the verge of losing the fourth-largest city of Austria-Hungary and the capital of Galicia. His armies were being hammered apart in distant, unconnected actions—Dankl and Auffenberg around Krásnik and Komarów, Brudermann and Böhm-Ermolli at Lemberg. Had the Russians been better organized, they might have destroyed the entire Austrian North Army, but they were still moving slowly, and Ivanov, who had shifted his headquarters back to Kiev, still refused to believe that the armies of Dankl and Auffenberg represented Conrad’s main striking force. Like Ruzski, he took them for a mere flank guard and kept peering toward Lemberg, looking for the armed hordes he assumed were coming up to reinforce Brudermann and carry the war into Russia.

  If the Russians couldn’t comprehend the extent of Conrad’s bungling, his own soldiers could. By now, the Austro-Hungarian troops recognized the stupidity of their commanders, who persisted in sending them into the teeth of Russian trenches and battery positions with fatuous explanations like this: “The Russians rarely fire shells, because theirs don’t explode.”22 That was news to these scarified men. In fact, it was the Austrian artillery that was proving harmless, the AOK learning from Russian POWs that the Austrian gunners were setting their shrapnel fuses to burst too high, permitting the Russians to run safely under the falling debris.23 Austrian runs at the Russians, meanwhile, were anything but safe. An Austrian colonel explained how this happened: although in peacetime studies and maneuvers, officers had been trained “always to seek the flank and go around the enemy,” in the heat of battle the macho watchword was gradaus, “straight up the gut”—no feints, no flanks, just “a hearty, crisp attack that fitted better with the Austrian tradition ‘always to attack.’” This instinct killed monstrous numbers of Habsburg officers, “who felt compelled to sacrifice themselves pointlessly, to inspire the men.”

  Within a few days, even such obviously heroic inspiration had worn thin: the platoon leader would race toward the Russians and be killed, while the platoon itself would hang back. This prompted a subtle change in Austrian tactics. Now the lieutenant would delegate the hero’s role to an NCO and follow in the second line, “spade and rifle in hand, employing lethal force against any of the men who hung back and refused to attack.”24 Many Austrians surrendered to the nearest Russian to escape certain death, but this did not always end well either. One Austrian prisoner described his capture: “We were disarmed, robbed of our valuables—watches, money, knives etc.—and we were shut in a pigsty for three nights with nothing to eat but raw potatoes. On the fourth day, we were released only to be forced to go forward in the Russian skirmish line and point out our positions to the enemy.”25

  While Ruzski picked his way over the Gnila Lipa, Brusilov—who had taken Tarnopol on the twenty-seventh and then Halicz, the old Galician capital on the Dniester, on the twenty-ninth—turned north toward Lemberg and into Brudermann’s unguarded flank. In its prewar study of Russian generals, Conrad’s staff had been especially leery of Brusilov, noting, “He’s tough, smart, and dynamic.” Now Brusilov proved them right, shrewdly taking Brudermann between two fires, his own and Conrad’s. From the calm of his chancery in Przemysl, Conrad ordered on August 31 that Lemberg be held at all costs “for political and military reasons.” Brudermann despondently complied, ordering his units and Böhm-Ermolli’s to group themselves in an arc around Lemberg, using every little brook and hill for cover, but to “retreat to the west if pressed hard.” Austro-Hungarian cavalry divisions were ordered to close up with the infantry on the flanks, dismount, and entrench. It was like Custer’s Last Stand.26 The Russians pressed hard, rolling up the flank, and the Austrians were soon retreating, Brusilov’s aircraft spying masses of Austro-Hungarian troops boarding westbound trains at Lemberg station and other masses retreating on the roads toward the San River.27

  Reeling backward, Brudermann yielded Lemberg on September 2 and retreated to the Grodek position, a line of heights behind the Wereszyca River. He placed III Corps in the center at Grodek, XI Corps on the left, and XII Corps and the 34th Division on the right. Brudermann tried to buck up his demoralized army: “The Third and Second Army have slowed a numerically superior enemy in his march west. . . . Now Fourth Army is turning to support us in a combined attack on the enemy—the hour for our revenge on this overconfident foe has come!” But his words fell on ears deafened by Russian artillery and by the lies and hyperbole emanating from the Austrian high command.28

 
With Austria’s eastern capital—which had been regarded as the springboard for operations into Russia—now in Russian hands, all levels of the Austro-Hungarian army had to question the competency of their leadership and even the ultimate purpose of their efforts. Brudermann’s staff chief later blamed the disaster on Conrad’s Schlamperei (sloppiness): “The reason for the defeat was simply AOK’s error-prone mobilization and total misreading of the Russians. . . . It was only now—during the battles for Lemberg—that AOK discovered that the main body of the Russian army was here.”29 Trailing the retreating Austrians, Stanley Washburn, an American war correspondent for the Times of London, visited wounded Austrians in the hospitals of Lemberg and was surprised to discover that “the ordinary enlisted man in the Austrian army had no idea whatsoever what the war was about.” The Austro-Hungarian casualties knew nothing about Russia, even less about Serbia, and none even knew that Britain and France were in the war.30

  Hungarians of the late-arriving Austrian Second Army hurrying to the front near Lemberg in August 1914.

  Credit: Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, Wien

  Ever mindful of his image, Conrad knew that scapegoats would be needed for the loss of Lemberg. He fired Brudermann’s general staff chief, General Rudolf Pfeffer, along with several corps, division, and brigade commanders. In his memoirs, Conrad would blame the defeat on the “passivity” of Brudermann, who had failed to implement the chief’s otherwise winning plan of campaign.31 But there was no winning plan, and Brudermann would have had a hard time executing such a plan even if it did exist, for the Austrians found themselves all but immobilized by Russian fire and their own creaky logistics. As in Serbia, the whole Habsburg army was limping along at a snail’s pace thanks to its overlarge corps (forty-five battalions each) and its superfluous supply trains.

  These Austro-Hungarian armies contained one horse-drawn wagon for every three combatants. Efforts before the war to create lighter, more mobile corps had stalled in the irreducible face of Habsburg bureaucracy, and so the army marched with gargantuan impediments. One disgruntled general noted that whereas Japanese officers had fought the Russians for a year and a half without baggage—two Japanese officers sharing a single suitcase for the entire campaign in Manchuria—Austro-Hungarian generals in 1914 were each allotted two entire “personal wagons” for clothing and other effects as well as three additional wagons for their divisional or brigade headquarters. Each of those headquarters was, in turn, allotted sufficient wagons to carry fifty-three hundred pounds of additional baggage—twice the luggage carried by an entire five-hundred-man battalion—for just three men, the general and his two aides. Overall, an Austro-Hungarian division trailed about 105 of these wagons as well as 45 for the troops, 45 more for their ammunition, 7 for food, and then field kitchens, bakeries, and ambulances. It was a wonder the generals could even locate their guns among the trunks of clothing, books, crates of wine, and canned delicacies.32

  With impediments like these, it was hardly surprising that Archduke Friedrich now cabled the German kaiser urgently demanding a German relief offensive and “loyal fulfillment” of Berlin’s alliance obligations, whatever that meant in this vast, fluctuating war. Conrad wired Moltke four times in the last week of August demanding that a dozen German divisions—four corps—be detached from the Western Front and committed to operations here in the east.33 The Germans, fully engaged on the Marne against a million French troops and having already shattered two Russian armies at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes (northwest of Conrad’s Russian front), were thunderstruck.

  At German great headquarters in Koblenz, the Austro-Hungarian military liaison, General Joseph von Stürgkh, noted a sharp deterioration in relations with his ally. The operation Conrad proposed was impossible; with the unsubdued armies of the Russian Northwest Front on his flank, Moltke could not very well order Hindenburg’s Eighth Army to plunge southeast to aid the Austrians. This was the view even of Austrians in German headquarters, who now spoke of conflicting “party lines”: Conrad’s, and everyone else’s. Looking over the maps, Stürgkh and General Alexander von Üxküll—the graying captain of Emperor Franz Joseph’s horse guards—judged Conrad’s plan “ein Ding der Unmöglichkeit,” an impossible thing. The kaiser took Stürgkh aside and heatedly said: “Our little army in East Prussia has diverted twelve enemy corps, and destroyed or defeated them; hasn’t that made your Austrian offensive any easier?”34

  Apparently not. While Austro-Hungarian engineers poured gasoline over mountains of food around Lemberg (as starving troops shuffled past), Conrad sat down to a hearty breakfast in Przemysl, jauntily remarking to his companions that were Archduke Franz Ferdinand still alive, “he would have me shot” for the loss of Austria’s eastern capital and its massive railway facilities. No fewer than one thousand locomotives and fifteen thousand railcars were left to the Russians. Arriving in the magnificent city, the Times’ war correspondent surveyed its parks, boulevards, and grand hotels and judged it “the greatest prize taken by any of the belligerents in this conflict so far.”35

  The archduke had warned Conrad before the war about the danger of loading peripheral fronts with too many troops and the main one with too few, yet Conrad, in his determination to crush the Serbs, had ignored the warning.36 Galicia’s Ukrainians were now paying the price for the gulf between Conrad’s aspirations and reality. Although Ukrainians formed the majority of Galicia’s population, the Austrian leadership began to view them—as they had judged the Serbs of Bosnia—as unreliable, ordering Ukrainian officials, teachers, and priests to leave the province and relocate to Moravia, along with their Greek Catholic bishop. In western Galicia, a thousand Ukrainian notables were interned for possible Russian sympathies. Austrian staffs were given a map, the Nationalitäten Galiziens, that depicted the expansive “Russophile” sections of the vast province: the entire southern fringe from Neu Sandez to Lemberg, and the eastern border from Rawa-Ruska around to Tarnopol, with large pockets in the interior as well.37

  To restore Austrophilia, Archduke Friedrich ordered atrocities: “individuals and even whole communities guilty of treasonous behavior should be struck down with maximum ruthlessness.”38 With a bloodthirsty archduke on one flank, knout-swinging Russians on the other, and cholera blooming everywhere Austrian troops appeared, the Jews of Galicia—the monarchy’s densest Jewish area—gathered up what portable property they had and fled to Vienna, where they settled in the Leopoldstadt quarter and began to perfect the mechanisms of the black market in state-rationed goods such as bread, flour, meat, fat, milk, and coal. Even as they purchased from Galician Jews, the Viennese deplored their Schleichhandel, black market, and began to speak darkly of a “Jewish question.”39

  To strike blows against the enemy, as opposed to his own population, Conrad changed course again. Reports from Austrian pilots revealed that Ruzski’s Third Army was turning northwest, away from Brudermann, presumably to hit Auffenberg in the flank. Confident that Brudermann could hold Brusilov on a river line west of Lemberg, Conrad had agreed that the Third and Second Armies should evacuate Lemberg and retreat to the Wereszyca River, pulling the Russians after them. Why Conrad thought that an army smaller than the one that had deployed on the Gnila Lipa would do better behind this river than behind that one—against an even larger Russian army—was just one of the many mysteries of this campaign.

  Conrad directed Brudermann and Böhm-Ermolli to hold the Russians on the Wereszyca while Auffenberg wheeled southeast with the Fourth Army through Rawa-Ruska to strike the Russian flank. The Third and Second Armies would hold the Russians long enough for the pincer to bite. Conrad’s remote manipulation of his battered army like pins on a staff map would have been comical had so many men not been worn out, maimed, or killed by his cascade of errors. Like Potiorek, Conrad gave no indication that he understood real war at all.40 After the exertions of the past week, Auffenberg could hardly move, let alone fight, so many of his horses having perished from wounds, hunger, and fatigue. “Take horses from th
e supply service for the ammunition columns; take horses from the ammunition columns for the field batteries,” Boroevic counseled his generals. When not fighting, the men were ordered to capture as many stray animals as they could and put them back in harness. Soldiers whose rifles had been lost or damaged were told to scour the ground for a replacement.41

  Ukrainian civilians hung by the Austrian army in Galicia. “Individuals and whole communities guilty of treasonous behavior should be struck down with maximum ruthlessness,” Archduke Friedrich ordered in August 1914. These are Ukrainians executed for suspected Russian sympathies.