A Mad Catastrophe

by Geoffrey Wawro

  Credit: Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, Wien

  Auffenberg’s Fourth Army, which had marched north since the Russian retreat from Komarów on August 30, was now ordered to turn around and march south. “Armies are not chess pieces,” Auffenberg grumbled. The revised plan made no sense, not least because Conrad knew that Ruzski was wheeling north and offering his front—bristling with artillery and machine guns—not his flank.42 Twice the Fourth Army traversed the battlefield of Komarów, the second time gagging from the reek of death. Fourth Army units swerving around to the south in a pouring rain “that turned the roads to slime” stared in horror at the ground around Komarów: “countless corpses, ours and theirs mashed together, dead horses, and all the litter of war.” The troopers naturally began to doubt the probity of a high command that had been urging them on to Lublin and now was driving them with no less urgency in the opposite direction.43

  Turning in such a tight space, the Austro-Hungarians blundered into each other and the Russians, who were closing in all around them. Confused skirmishes tore through the night, everyone firing nervously at everyone else.44 On the Wereszyca, generals received the usual furious telegrams from Conrad criticizing their “passive defense” behind one slender river barrier after the next and the “continual retreating.” Conrad ordered his generals to attack instead, “to improve the overall situation.” But officers actually present at the front found that further attacks, as one senior staff officer put it, were “humanly impossible. The men could not be driven to even one more bayonet attack; they were crushed by the non-stop marching and fighting and lack of sleep.” Ordered to attack at Horyniec, the 8th Regiment went forward a few steps, but “dissolved and began running back when the first shrapnel burst overhead.”45

  General Auffenberg inspected a group of Russian prisoners on August 30. He was tremendously impressed by their drab, dirt-colored uniforms, observing that even at two hundred paces they blended into their surroundings so well that he couldn’t make them out. He chatted with the Russian officers, most of whom spoke German. One of them indicated the corpse-strewn battlefield and said: “And all of this, for what?”46 Auffenberg may have asked himself the same question; he could see that the victory he had claimed at Komarów was about to be dashed. He began concocting an alibi for posterity: “Hardly had the thunder of the guns died out at Komarów than we were directed south to aid our threatened comrades of [Third] Army.” The Russians would “hurl ever larger numbers against our feared Fourth Army in the blood-soaked fields of Rawa-Ruska.” In his diary he added: “I had done all that I could do.”47

  The Russians were deploying ever larger numbers along the line from Krásnik down to Lemberg, and the Austrians were in no condition to hold them back. They were outnumbered, and—thanks to Dankl’s retreat from Krásnik—about to be enveloped from both flanks. Colonel Joseph Paic, the staff chief of the Austrian XIV Corps, recalled finding six Russian divisions on his front, and three more plus an entire Russian cavalry corps on his flank.48 Exhausted and running out of everything, Austrian troops were ordered to collect rifles from their fallen comrades and to grab the contents of their cartridge pouches as well. Gunners were ordered not to destroy their guns if threatened with capture, but merely to “remove and bury the gunsight for later use, if the gun is ever recaptured.”49

  Auffenberg was astonished by his new orders; the only logical course, he believed, was a retreat to the forts of Przemysl and the San River. The broad river and modern forts might halt the Russian pursuit and allow the Austrians to regroup and join themselves wing to wing with the German forces that were beginning to arrive from the west (not because the French were beaten, but because the Austrians kept losing).50 But Conrad was not prepared to retreat just yet. He kept the Hofburg in the dark with vague telegrams that were reproduced for the myopic emperor in large-print editions with coarse-scale maps. General Bolfras, the emperor’s adjutant, abetted the deception with soothing margin notes like this one on August 30: “Your Majesty, the situation is not as bad as it might seem.”51

  But it was. The Third Army was already broken; it would not hold up a corps, let alone Brusilov’s entire Eighth Army. Everyone was summoned to the front and given a rifle, including engineers, teamsters, and the local Polish and Ukrainian militias, who arrived in iridescent peasant blouses, compounding the chaos. On September 4, Brudermann tried to galvanize his weary army, assuring the troops that Auffenberg had won “a complete victory, seizing 20,000 prisoners and 200 guns.”52 He ordered his generals to prepare a march east to retake Lemberg in conjunction with the Fourth Army descending from the north. In the same orders, he mentioned a “gap between our Third and Fourth Armies,” and fretted that the Russians might plunge into it. They did. Brudermann sent three cavalry divisions to seal the gap, but they were brushed aside. Far from blaming himself for the debacle, Conrad blamed Brudermann, pronounced him “ill,” and packed him off to retirement. It was a dismal end for a general described twenty years earlier as Austria’s “boy wonder” and “hope of the future.”53

  There was something ineffably shabby about the way Conrad and Archduke Friedrich created scapegoats for their failures. Fritzl, a mediocre commander at best, had acceded to all of Conrad’s caprices, and now wrote the emperor (who liked Brudermann) a long letter explaining why the general had to go: “In the multi-day battle east of Lemberg and then in the fighting retreat to the Grodek position, General Brudermann exercised too little control over his subordinate generals, who ended up doing whatever they wanted without any unified command.” This was a lie to hide the fact that Brudermann had done everything that Conrad had ordered, and had merely been overwhelmed by the weight of Russian numbers, which Conrad had always underestimated. Brudermann took the fall anyway, the emperor’s only consolation the usual one: a cash gift of six thousand crowns and continued active duty (and full salary) as a “supernumerary officer” instead of retirement.54

  On September 5, an indiscreet—and badly informed—princess yelled out of the window of her coach in Vienna that Auffenberg had retaken Lemberg, a rumor that swirled through the streets of the city and was picked up by the afternoon newspapers. Within a day, the story had to be retracted, further depressing morale in the capital.55 Conrad replaced Brudermann with General Svetozar Boroevic, who immediately noted his new army’s lack of “discipline and obedience. Apathy and lack of confidence,” he reported, “have entered its ranks.”56 Boroevic was struck by the inexorable collapse that followed every heavy Russian barrage: “In every battle so far, large numbers of our troops—even entire units—retreat without authorization when the enemy guns open up.” Sending reserves to relieve those fugitives didn’t help, “because they won’t attack either.”57 Undeterred, Conrad ordered more attacks for September 7–9. The Second Army was finally at full strength, and he was determined to use it.

  But as Conrad drained his left wing to bolster his right, the situation to the north became catastrophic. As Auffenberg marched south, he opened a seventy-mile gap between himself and Dankl, which the Russian Fifth Army poured into. A new Russian army, General Platon Lichitski’s Ninth, began groping for Dankl’s other flank around Krásnik. Ivanov now glimpsed an opportunity to envelop all three corps of Dankl’s army before they could gain the safety of the San. Russian civilians delightedly joined the fight, ringing church bells and igniting smoke and fire signals to alert their army to the presence of Austro-Hungarian troops, who could be pinpointed for Russian artillery with a burning thatch roof.58

  Nearly encircled, Dankl, who had driven almost to Lublin in the last days of August, fled for his life. His divisions were harassed the entire way by emboldened Russians, who left their trenches and tried to cut Dankl off. One of his regiments lost an entire thousand-man battalion on the retreat: dug in for the night on September 5, they were overrun in the morning by a Russian column and captured unscathed.59 Dankl retreated behind the San on September 9, and Viennese musicians shelved their copies of Das Lied vom General Dankl. T
he “Russian dogs” had not been beaten after all.

  Now in command of the Third Army, Boroevic assured his disbelieving men on September 9 that “all of our armies are now beginning to wring significant successes from the enemy.”60 That would have been news to Auffenberg, who was fighting at Rawa-Ruska, thirty miles northwest of Lemberg, without protection on either flank and hounded by Ruzski’s Third Army on his front and left and two of Plehve’s corps behind him and on his right. While his generals struggled against the Russian horde, Conrad in Przemysl wrestled with the problem of Gina. “If I lose [this war],” he blubbered to his political advisor, Redlich, on September 9, “I’ll lose this woman too, a horrifying thought, for then I’ll be alone for the rest of my life.”61 The chief press officer in AOK, Colonel Maximilian von Hoen, spoke of Conrad’s encroaching “senility.” The commander was hardly sleeping, and while his army imploded he sat up half the night writing long letters to Gina and to his ninety-year-old mother. Redlich was stunned by Conrad’s escapism: “He doesn’t believe in his own historical calling to be Austria’s generalissimo against Russia.”62

  With four armies, fifty-two divisions, and half a million men in the field, this Battle of Rawa-Ruska (also known as the Second Battle of Lemberg) was Austria-Hungary’s biggest battle of the war. Conrad’s third and youngest son, Lieutenant Herbert Conrad, died in it. Herbert’s 15th Dragoons were part of Archduke Joseph Ferdinand’s wandering XIV Corps, and on September 8—their mission and direction having been changed by Lieutenant Conrad’s father for the fourth time—they trotted into a mass of Russian artillery and infantry near Rawa-Ruska. Torn by falling shells, they attacked the Russians, who fired shrapnel as the dragoons galloped toward them and then opened up on them from both flanks. Attempting to attack machine guns, artillery, and entrenched infantry on horseback, the dragoons got no closer than three hundred yards before being thrown back with the loss of twenty-four dead and sixty wounded, Conrad’s son among the dead.63

  Crushed by the loss of his favorite child, Conrad later tried to clean this battle up for history as well, suggesting that he had intended Auffenberg to slide like a stiletto into Ruzski’s ribs as the Russian pursued Boroevic west; however, Conrad’s orders at the time revealed that he knew that Ruzski had stopped his pursuit of Boroevic and wheeled north to disengage Plehve instead. This led to an artless head-on collision, which the Austrians had no hope of winning. Auffenberg, with 175 weary, depreciated battalions, stumbled into battle with two entire Russian armies—the 180 battalions of Ruzski’s Third Army and the 180 battalions of Plehve’s Fifth Army.

  Colonel Alexander Brosch von Aarenau, Franz Ferdinand’s military secretary before the war, found himself on the leading edge of this clash on September 6. His 2nd Kaiserjäger Regiment had been pushed and pulled around all week by Conrad, first given to Auffenberg, then sent in pursuit of the Russians after Komarów, then called back toward Lemberg to assist in the defense there. Now they reeled south from Komarów through bogs, woods, hot sun, cold rain, horseflies the size of a man’s thumb by day, mosquitoes and bewildering blackness at night. Ordered to close up with XVII Corps, Brosch repeatedly signaled his whereabouts to them, but no one acknowledged the message.

  Brosch began to grasp that he was being surrounded, which, like the rest of XIV Corps, he was, by the Russian Fifth Army from the north and the Russian Third Army from the south. Archduke Joseph Ferdinand had just wired Auffenberg: “Something is coming at us from the north; still not sure exactly what.” It took this Russian pressure finally to stymie Conrad’s daily mischief. He had just wired Auffenberg from Przemysl, ordering him to summon XIV Corps back to the northwest, this time to support Dankl’s First Army, which had turned about and was retreating from Krásnik toward Tarnow with the Vistula on its right and the Russian Fourth Army feeling for its left. Now, according to Conrad’s latest orders, XIV Corps was supposed to march back to the north to protect that exposed flank.

  It was like a cruel joke, but this time only a regiment of XIV Corps could be dispatched on the fool’s errand: the rest were locked in by the Russian Fifth Army, which now spilled into the yawning gap between Dankl and Auffenberg. Preparing to eat and spend the night in one grubby Galician village, Karow, Brosch’s troops were forced in the evening to leave it and retreat through a dense wood to another grubby Galician village, Hujcze, on the other side to escape encroaching Russian forces, that unknown “something from the north” mentioned by Archduke Joseph Ferdinand. The regiment wearily slouched down to the southern edge of the wood by Hujcze, just a few miles northeast of Rawa-Ruska, in the evening of September 6. “What happened there,” General Joseph Paic wrote in his summary of the battle, “gives us a lesson in the interaction of night, woods, swamps, and indescribable fatigue. Even elite troops and their leaders, in this case the Kaiserjäger, can be undone by these things.”64

  Emerging from the woods, Brosch’s men found not a silent village but a Russian camp. Brosch, in the middle of the Austrian march column—with a company on point, then a battalion, then the regimental command post, with two battalions behind—struggled to deploy his men as the Russians, just as startled as the Austrians, poured ragged volleys into the wood. General Schneider, who was commanding the nearby Austro-Hungarian 5th Brigade, rode over to confer with Brosch, and an officer overheard their exchange: “Bravo! You’ve done well! There’s light at the end of this tunnel!” the general shouted, to which Brosch replied: “We can’t do anything else, we’ve got to keep moving.” Conrad’s hunters were only too aware that they had become the hunted.

  As Brosch and Schneider worked to tie their brigades together and escape the Russian noose, Brosch emerged into a clearing amid Russian tents, wagons, horses, and a motor pool. With the Russians furiously counterattacking to secure their camp and the road to Rawa-Ruska, which was already filling with Russian supply trains and artillery, Brosch swerved off to the right and led his exhausted regiment cross-country on a fighting retreat to the west, with Russians emerging from the woods the Austrians had just exited and from the villages around them. Brosch was killed, along with dozens of his men.65

  Brosch’s fate was the Battle of Rawa-Ruska in a nutshell. General Karl Kritek’s XVII Corps, just south of Brosch, had been in continuous action against the Russians since September 5. Slopping through the rain and bogs, snatching an hour or two of sleep in the open or in lousy peasant huts, they had repeatedly dug in beside their roads and tracks to repel Russian attacks, which arrived without warning from the north, south, or east, and sometimes from all three directions. The 6th Jäger Battalion spent the entire day on September 6 in such a hastily dug position, sprayed with Russian artillery and machine gun fire and unable to eat because food couldn’t be carried to the beleaguered troops. As night fell, the Russians attacked with infantry. The Austrians beat off the last attack, then slept an hour or two; soon September 7 dawned with more Russian attacks. By the end of that day, most of the officers who had not been killed at Komarów were lying dead or wounded, along with 150 more troops. There were also scores of “missing,” which was the official term for men whose bodies had not been recovered, usually because they had surrendered.

  Austro-Hungarian counterattacks all along the Fourth Army front were driven back by Russian fusillades and artillery.66 Archduke Joseph’s XIV Corps, having been ordered up and down Poland by Conrad for seven frustrating days, was now told to strike south at Ruzski’s Third Army. The archduke was disgusted, Paic noting in his diary on September 7: “That which we’d been trying to do, yet had been repeatedly prevented from doing, was now ordered done when it was too late to do.”67 Indeed, Conrad’s planned flank attack on Ruzski was itself being mauled in the flank—by Ruzski. Plehve, meanwhile, was surging down from the north, killing off units like Brosch’s, and encircling Auffenberg from the flank and rear.

  On Auffenberg’s right wing, Archduke Peter Ferdinand, who had failed to grasp the nettle at Dub, struggled now to grasp the sleeve of the retiring Third Army, so th
at the Russians couldn’t split Auffenberg from Boroevic as they’d already split him from Dankl. The fighting here was as savage as it was further north in Brosch’s sector, and equally pointless, from the Austrian perspective. A Russian patrol of just six men blundered into two entire battalions of Austrian infantry sheltering in a wood and threw up their hands in surrender. “No,” one of the Austrian officers said in Czech, “let us surrender to you,” and the disbelieving six-man patrol led their two thousand Austrian captives back to the Russian lines.68 That any of this surprised Conrad was remarkable; in his prewar musings on modern firepower, he had agreed that ever since the Franco-Prussian War, troops could not be exposed to stiff defensive fire without risk of demoralization. On a visit to Austria before the war, Japanese officers had revealed that in their conflict with the Russians they’d had to substitute green troops for veterans in many assaults, for veterans wouldn’t attack machine guns more than once. Conrad’s own study of the Franco-Prussian War had concluded that even the best Prussian units had cracked under sustained pressure.69

  Boroevic’s musings on military history were more immediate; he’d enjoyed a brief respite in the Grodek position behind the Wereszyca. This line of heights, swelling from the confluence of the Dniester and the Wereszyca, would have been a strong position had the Russians not had sufficient forces to outflank it from all sides. Among the disgraced Brudermann’s last communications to his army was this one on September 6: “Russian newspapers are reporting jubilantly that they have routed our Third Army.” The troops’ mission now, Brudermann declared, must be “to make the Russians eat their words.” He continued to chide his officers for their less-than-discerning tactics: “I must remind you of the fundamental difference between casualties acquired in battle and casualties suffered. Casualties acquired in hard fighting do not disturb troop morale and indeed lead to victory; casualties suffered because of poor leadership discourage the troops and lead to ruin.”70 Evincing a total disregard for the distinction, the Russians piled on, Brusilov recalling that “those were troops we had already beaten . . . they were demoralized.”71