Conrad ordered more attacks for September 8. He seemed finally to be grasping the tactical reasons for his defeat. “The Russian way of fighting seems to be this,” he wrote his by-now frantic generals: “Defensive in trenches with strong artillery behind and on the flanks, usually well hidden, so as to achieve surprise once our infantry attacks have already been launched. They usually keep these positions for a day, inflict maximal casualties on us, and then retire to a new position to repeat the game.”72 This “game” was not exactly a Russian innovation; it was precisely the technique that had been used by the Prussians to destroy the Austrian army in 1866: the operational offensive married to a tactical defensive. That is to say, the enemy army would march offensively into Austro-Hungarian territory, then stake out formidable defensive positions to shatter the inevitable Austrian counterattacks—“inevitable” because Austrian army traditions, forged in the days of muskets, foolishly continued to vaunt the tactical offensive (gradaus) despite the supervening invention of machine guns and quick-firing artillery. Conrad’s belated discovery that he and his pike-gray columns were being duped again, though dispatched in all directions on September 7, would not discover most of the scattered and beaten Austro-Hungarian generals until September 10, when they wearily glanced at it, scribbled the obligatory gelesen (read) in the margin, and filed it.
By now, everyone in the Austrian camp had tired of the game. Conrad ordered the Fourth Army to attack alongside the Third Army, but no one moved.73 Wheelhorses were too tired to pull, troops too tired to march. The Austrians dug in behind the Wereszyca, but officers worried that even in trenches behind the river, the men would not hold. The entire Austro-Hungarian II Corps began retreating when rumors of Cossacks in their rear alarmed the men. The 3rd and 8th Divisions also began retiring, their wagon trains crowding together and causing panic. From Przemysl on September 9, Conrad fantastically complained that these “spontaneous retreats” were “ruining the otherwise successful attack of my army.” As usual, he was more concerned to protect his dissolving reputation than to fight the war he had before him.74
On September 10, Conrad and Archduke Friedrich made their first of just three wartime visits to the front. Conrad, Fritzl, and Archduke Karl motored up from Przemysl to the Grodek position behind the Wereszyca, visited with Boroevic, ordered a last effort, and then hustled back to the safety of the San.75 In his usual passive-aggressive manner, Conrad scolded Auffenberg that “since he’d rested in his positions yesterday while the other armies advanced victoriously,” now he’d have to “redeem himself by attacking and subduing the Russians” at Rawa-Ruska and joining the “concentric attack on Lemberg.” In fact, “the concentric attack on Lemberg” was another of Conrad’s fictions; it was more like a desperate fight for survival by four bedraggled armies, all of which were marching west to the safety of Przemysl, not east to the relief of Lemberg. Dankl’s First Army had been chased back to the San, pursued by the Russian Ninth and Fourth Armies. Auffenberg was being savaged by the Russian Fifth and Third Armies, Boroevic and Böhm-Ermolli by Brusilov’s Eighth.
Having ripped Dankl and Auffenberg apart, Plehve was poised to thrust into the gap between them to reach the San. If Plehve reached the river crossings first, he’d be positioned to envelop the entire Austrian North Army, including the Third Army at Grodek and the Second Army on its right, which were themselves on the verge of being enveloped by Brusilov’s Eighth Army. On September 11—the sixth day of the Battle of Rawa-Ruska, with flyer reports describing a vast Russian encirclement—Conrad ceased bloviating and ordered the Austrians to retreat toward the San River and the ring of forts around Przemysl, which they were already doing anyway.
On September 10, Conrad (l.) and Archduke Friedrich (r.) made the first of only three visits to the front in the entire war. Here they stand uncertainly in the Grodek position, hearing the sounds of battle. Their German attachés stand at a discreet distance behind them.
Credit: Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, Wien
“Tactically,” Conrad later wrote, “the situation wasn’t bad, but the operational situation was untenable.” With the Russians hanging around the necks of the four Austrian armies, only a man in a quiet office in the fortress of Przemysl could distinguish operations from tactics at this hour. Moreover, as Auffenberg protested, “who placed the army in this operationally unfavorable predicament, so that all tactical exertions and successes were bound to fail?”76 The fourteen-day Austrian retreat intensified, under the worst conditions—a thirty-mile-long convex bow from Grodek to Rawa-Ruska, with all of the armies and their roiling supply trains crowded onto a single hardened road and sandy tracks on either side. The Russians did not miss the opportunity to undertake a classic parallel pursuit, jogging along the flanks of this disordered Austrian retreat and charging in to sow yet more chaos and make off with Austrian prisoners, guns, and supplies.
Auffenberg later described the difficulty of evacuating the Austrian armies through this space, their paths blocked everywhere by artillery, field hospitals, ammunition and supply columns, telegraph and aviation units, and bridging equipment, much of which had to be abandoned to the Russians to make room for the fleeing troops.77 The Fourth Army was ordered to burn all of the food and ammunition that had been dumped in Rawa-Ruska, and then destroy the town as well. Austro-Hungarian troops retreating in the vicinity of Galicia’s railway were ordered to pull up the rails as they went.78 Archduke Joseph Ferdinand’s XIV Corps, which had already spent itself in the attack on Plehve, was all that Auffenberg had to secure his rear. These men had been marching and fighting for two weeks without rest. Ordered by Conrad to fight and open the line of retreat west to Jaroslau, which was already in Russian hands, the archduke simply ignored him and went south, conduct that only a Habsburg prince could get away with.
On September 11, threatened with total encirclement, Auffenberg retreated to the southwest. In the line for three weeks without a rest, Auffenberg’s combat strength had plummeted to just ten thousand rifles.79 The American correspondent Stanley Washburn goggled at the casualties at Rawa-Ruska, which seemed inconceivable to a man freshly arrived from Minneapolis: “The casualties on both sides were nearly 150,000—almost as many as the combined armies of Lee and Meade at the Battle of Gettysburg.”80
In the bloodbath, Auffenberg’s Fourth Army had lost half of its officers and most of its men. The Galicians—Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews—were killed in large numbers too; those who had survived thus far huddled in the cellars of their huts while the war thundered overhead. Touring the field in the wake of the Austrian retreat, Washburn expressed shock that roughly a million men had been engaged on little more than “a ten-acre lot.” The fighting had been desperate; he saw evidence that “the Austrians had even tried to dig shallow trenches with their hands.” He walked across the little salient, “stepping from shell hole to shell hole, each surrounded by strips of blue uniform, bones and bits of humanity blown to pieces by high explosive shell.” About 120,000 of the 150,000 casualties mentioned by Washburn had been Austro-Hungarians, herded onto the ten-acre lot and butchered by Russian artillery fire. “War,” Washburn sourly concluded, “is the survival of the unfit. It is always the best of the officers and the men who stay and are killed.”81 Conrad now set about sacking the unfit survivors. He had already fired Brudermann, Pfeffer, and Huyn; he now fired Schemua too. Boroevic vacated Grodek, leaving a rearguard of excuses: “Overwhelming attack on [Fourth] Army prevents us from exploiting the victories we have won here at Lemberg; AOK has ordered the entire army back to the San.”82
By the middle of September, the Austro-Hungarian North Army was safely behind the San River, where the forts of Przemysl offered a measure of protection. Conrad’s four armies, the First, Fourth, Third, and Second, were so jumbled that several days passed while the thousands of Versprengten (stragglers) were sorted out and dispatched down various roads to their units. Auffenberg recalled long columns of Jewish refugees trying to extricate themselves from the war zone and
the barbarous Russians.83 Having tasted victory—or a semblance of it—at Komarów, Conrad now looked disaster in the face. The Russians had taken ninety square miles of Habsburg territory and threatened his lines of communication to the monarchy and Germany. Russian losses of 230,000 men in the campaign could be borne far more easily than the Austrian loss of 440,000.84
Having earlier taken credit for Auffenberg’s exertions at Komarów, Conrad now unkindly blamed them for the defeat: “Auffenberg struck in a direction at Komarów that made it impossible for him to assist quickly in the Battle of Lemberg.”85 As was increasingly his habit, Conrad blamed the Germans too: “The Germans have won their greatest victories at our expense, and left us in the lurch; they have sent troops not to join us in the great struggle around Lublin, but to defend the stud farms and hunting lodges of [East Prussia].”86 Austria-Hungary’s ambassador in Berlin joined the fracas: “The Germans are blinded by their delusions of victory and always underrate our achievements. . . . We have held off the entire Russian army, permitting the Germans to accomplish great and relatively easy victories on the fine roads and railways of France.” These complaints, of course, utterly disregarded the fact that the Germans had been pulling their weight on two fronts and—despite the stalemate in the west—were continuing to send troops eastward from France’s “fine roads and railways” to the rutted paths of Ukraine and Poland.87
While the Central Powers quarreled, the left wing of Brusilov’s army was overrunning the heaths and hunting lodges of Bukovina and its pretty capital, Czernowitz, which would change hands fifteen times during the war. Brusilov’s vanguard rode all the way to the easternmost passes of the Carpathians, which opened into Hungary. With his left collapsing and his right outflanked, Conrad reassembled his forces around the fortress of Przemysl under pouring rain. The Austrian generals feebly exhorted their men and officers to pull themselves together. Auffenberg sounded like a management consultant: “A precondition of success and good spirits,” he wrote his officers on September 15, “is the willingness of everyone to commit themselves wholeheartedly to the task at hand (marches, battles) so that everyone understands that there is purpose to what we are doing. . . . Nothing is more dangerous than apathy and despair.”88 But apathy and despair were all that was left. The Habsburg army had come unglued; if it had ever descried a “purpose” in the AOK’s gawky arrangements, it certainly didn’t anymore. Austro-Hungarian POWs in Russian captivity were observed to be “sickly and delicate, weak and undersized,” appearing not “to know anything about the war.”89 Those still in the Austro-Hungarian ranks were shirking in record numbers. “Why is it that after every clash with the enemy thousands of stragglers circulate in the rear of our army, far from the fighting?” the AOK furiously queried. “You must discover the cause of this phenomenon and correct it.”90
Everyone knew the cause: unending defeat. Large numbers of NCOs—a rare species to begin with—were being demoted (degradieren) for refusing to implement orders. Troop morale had hit rock bottom, and with the technology and leadership Austria-Hungary had, everyone knew that no corrections were coming. The Austrians had lost scores of guns in the retreat, and many of those they had extricated lacked gunsights, the crews having removed and buried them in obedience to earlier instructions. Too late, Conrad ordered the gunners to bring the laying devices with them, not leave them in the black earth of Galicia. There would not be much fire anyway, as he also ordered his generals to “stop wasting shells; shell use must in every case be proportioned to the relative importance of each moment in a battle,” a truly bewildering directive.91
Boroevic didn’t bother “proportioning” anything other than retreat and the minimum rest required to facilitate it. He ordered his generals to avoid even rearguard actions with the pursuing Russians—“to speed the marches west”—and to search the ground around them for rifles of any make or caliber, the Austrians who preceded them having thrown away so many of theirs in the retreat. Panic had cratered Boroevic’s Third Army; late on September 16, he warned the armies retreating on either side of him to beware of his force, telling them, “Whole regiments are streaming into Przemysl; they are famished; they are looting shops and committing excesses.”92 He also distributed a memo that expressed astonishment at the tactics employed thus far, including frontal attacks with the bayonet, inadequate trenching, and no suppressing fire with machine guns and artillery. It was as if the Habsburg army wanted to kill itself.93
With Brusilov’s Eighth Army tickling one flank and Lichitski’s Ninth Army the other, the Austro-Hungarian North Army resumed its weary retreat on September 17. The Russians had already thrown seven bridges across the Lower San, which rendered it useless as a defensive moat and opened up the possibility that Przemysl and its outlying forts might be encircled and besieged with the entire North Army trapped inside. Leaving a big garrison at Przemysl, Conrad and Fritzl retreated with the rest of the North Army in the direction of Cracow and the barrier of the Wisloka River.94 By the third week of September, Conrad estimated that there were sixty-four or more strong Russian divisions pressing hard against his forty-one weak ones.95 The Austrians expressed astonishment at Russian troop numbers; they were outnumbered everywhere, Brusilov’s single army having as many men as the Austrian Second and Third Armies combined. Just a year earlier, Franz Ferdinand’s military cabinet had mocked the Russian army in an op-ed titled “A Bankruptcy.” The acid description of the Russian retreat from Mukden in 1905 would have served this beaten Habsburg army just as well: “Something invisible and intangible now afflicted this army; the power of suggestion was broken; a dirty little secret exposed itself.”96
On September 21, Conrad ordered a further retreat—to the Dunajec River, a tributary of the Vistula. The Second, Third, and Fourth Armies would dig in there. After a meeting in Neu Sandez with Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who commanded German troops in the east, Conrad agreed to detach the First Army for service with the German Ninth Army north of the Vistula. A worsening shell shortage was on everyone’s mind; so much ammo had been fired off or surrendered, and there were no stockpiles in the rear.97 Even with German assistance, Austrian defeat seemed inevitable. Auffenberg had abandoned so many guns and supply wagons in his retreat that the derelict vehicles would be visible from the air for months. He now excused himself with recondite analogies: “Didn’t Blücher abandon his entire train before Leipzig in order to change his line of operations? And yet Blücher he remained.”98
General Svetozar Boroevic took over the Austro-Hungarian Third Army after Brudermann’s defeat at Lemberg and immediately noted its demoralization: “My troops are streaming back, famished; they are looting shops and committing excesses.” The war was only a month old.
Credit: National Archives
Auffenberg would not be so lucky. On September 29, Conrad and Archdukes Friedrich and Karl arrived in Auffenberg’s camp at Zaklycin and presented him with the Grand Cross of the Leopold Order and the thanks of the old emperor. The next morning, preparing to resume his retreat with the red enameled Grand Cross pinned to his breast, Auffenberg was met by a general staff courier sent up from the AOK with this letter from Archduke Friedrich: “Your Excellency, during my visit yesterday I came to the conclusion that your nerves have suffered badly from the recent events, and that you no longer trust in the power and potential of your army.” Auffenberg was ordered to report himself “ill,” transfer command of his army to Archduke Joseph Ferdinand, and return to Vienna. Auffenberg was aghast: “Here I was, the Victor of Komarów, being relieved of command by the Loser of Lemberg.” Conrad wrote Auffenberg to soften the blow but—in his usual way—ended up dwelling on his own travails: “The entire blame for this infelicitous war is going to be laid at my doorstep, and I’ll have no choice but to seek a quiet corner to escape the scorn of my fellows.”99
On October 2, Auffenberg took leave of his army, pronouncing himself ill (with arthritis) as agreed, and handing command over to Archduke Joseph Ferdinand.100 The whole army was suffer
ing aches and pains much more serious than Auffenberg’s. North Army had suffered 50 percent casualties, for a total of 100,000 dead and 220,000 wounded; many divisions had lost two-thirds of their effectives. Even the French—in their red trousers, dark blue tunics, and dense assault columns—had lost only one in three in the first month of the war.101 Mass surrenders by disloyal Austro-Hungarian units augmented the casualties, delivering about 120,000 unwounded Austrian troops into Russian hands, along with three hundred guns.
The war in the east was barely three weeks old and Conrad had already lost over a third of the Austro-Hungarian army, as well as the best part of its officers and NCOs. “Our normal tactical units have been so ripped apart in the fighting thus far that command is extremely difficult,” Boroevic reported in October. “I have far more strangers under my command than familiar old comrades.”102 The old comrades were dead or in Russian captivity; in Vienna’s 4th Regiment, only seven officers came out of Galicia alive.103 “If war was once a chivalrous duel,” General Arthur Bolfras commented from the Hofburg, “it is now a dastardly slaughter.” More cannon fodder was urgently needed, Bolfras jotted. “Mars has become voracious.”104 The Habsburg War Ministry nervously placarded the monarchy with appeals for donations to a new fund for the unexpectedly large and unbudgeted numbers of widows and orphans left behind by the troops who had already been sacrificed.105
Boroevic urged Conrad to abandon Przemysl entirely so that its 150,000-man garrison would not also be lost, but Conrad—who had tried to cut off funding for the fortress before the war—now poured in funds to prepare it for a siege. He rushed 27,000 workers to the San to build out Przemysl’s fortifications. They strung 650 miles of barbed wire, dug 31 miles of trenches, and constructed 7 belts of strong points, with 200 battery positions and 24 forts. Twenty-one villages and 2,500 acres of forest were razed to clear fields of fire, time-consuming work that was completed thanks to the slow Russian advance. Six Russian divisions finally settled in for a siege in late September.106
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