A Mad Catastrophe

by Geoffrey Wawro

  Having moved the AOK to Neu Sandez in the Dunajec-Biala position, Conrad found himself trapped in the tight space between the Vistula and the Carpathians, with Russian armies closing in from every side. Conrad found it hard to move or even supply what remained of the North Army because so many of its horses had died. Generals were told to stop asking for ammunition, because it couldn’t be sent.107 Poking around the edges of this broken army, the American correspondent Washburn was struck by the massive casualties and the casual way in which they were discarded. “On the outskirts of a village huge trenches had been dug, beside which the dead were ranged in crowds; peasants drove up with wagon-loads of stiffened corpses, split faces leering gruesomely. Like bits of pig iron, they were dumped out of the carts. Where was the romance of war?”108 It was gone, and cholera and dysentery were now racing through the Austro-Hungarian ranks.109 Only the Germans could save them now.

  chapter10

  Death on the Drina

  If Austria-Hungary’s entire northern army was in need of rescue, so too were its forces in the Balkans—and no one more than the man at their head. General Oskar Potiorek had been the butt of jokes since the August fiasco. People called him “incompetent,” an “imbecile,” and worse.1 Determined to silence his critics, Potiorek planned to invade Serbia again in September. This was risky; with Conrad in full retreat in Galicia, Potiorek would have to make do with even fewer troops than he’d had in August: just the depleted Austro-Hungarian Fifth and Sixth Armies, with no help from the old Echelon B troops, which had finally wended their way to the Eastern Front.

  To close the yawning gap between the Fifth and Sixth Armies, Potiorek moved the Sixth Army northward to the middle Drina. This made matters even worse: instead of threatening the Serbs from two angles, the Austrians were now attacking on a single axis, which made General Putnik’s job that much easier. And this time Austria’s troop numbers—174 battalions—barely equaled Serbia’s.2 This made defeat even more probable than in August, but the Hofburg and Conrad’s AOK seemed not to notice. Bolfras insisted that Potiorek “salvage our military honor at any price.” Conrad, preoccupied with the rout in Galicia, struck a gloomier note, telling Potiorek that he could attack, but he must not expect reinforcements and must “avoid all further defeats at the hands of Serbia.” It certainly sounded like a lose-lose proposition, but Potiorek—desperate to prove himself and as certain as Conrad that “only the offensive will succeed”—vowed to bring the Serbs to their knees before the onset of winter.3

  Never enthusiastic about Potiorek’s bid for redemption, Conrad and Archduke Friedrich authorized it only when the four divisions of the Serbian First Army—responding to Russian demands for a Serbian attack into Austria-Hungary—crossed the Sava near Belgrade on September 6 and began marching into southern Hungary. It was a weak demonstration, more political than military, but Berchtold and Tisza demanded that something be done, and Potiorek still enjoyed considerable indulgence at court, where Bolfras and the old emperor wrote Potiorek warm letters praising him for his detailed reports and contrasting him favorably with the “secretive, laconic” Conrad.

  Emperor Franz Joseph’s headquarters in Vienna increasingly resembled an old folks’ home, with the seventy-five-year-old Bolfras and the eighty-four-year-old emperor gnashing their teeth over Conrad’s willfulness (“It’s intolerable that a k.u.k. army commander and his staff should regard themselves as completely independent of the All Highest Court”) and waywardness (“At least his departure to the North means that he must telegraph us every evening at 9:00 p.m.”) and praising Potiorek for his accessibility (“We appreciate your detailed daily reports, which are so much better than AOK’s, which invariably arrive late in the night”). Berchtold too sided with Potiorek, seeing a determined assault on Serbia as the only way to rope in neutrals like Bulgaria and prevent the formation of an opportunistic new Balkan League against a weakened Austria-Hungary. Conrad, who was trying to reorganize plans for the month of September, discovered that his defeats in August had given hostages to fortune: “Who is directing the overall conduct of Austria-Hungary’s war?” he sputtered to Bolfras. “His Majesty? Or the Military Cabinet? Or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs?”4

  Ever the bureaucratic adept, Potiorek was easing himself into the vacuum opened by Conrad’s blundering. “Potiorek is vain,” Conrad had raged while still in Przemysl. “He can’t stand to see the Serbian campaign put on the back burner.”5 But Potiorek had found that propagating hopeful fiction to the Hofburg was the best way to get the Serbian campaign put back on the front burner. The Balkan commander’s daily reports contained a great deal of rosy nonsense, which partly explained the Hofburg’s willingness to authorize the renewed, quite hopeless invasion. “The Serbs have retreated to Nis. . . . Their regiments have been decimated, and their morale is bad,” Potiorek reported in late August. They were running out of ammunition, guns, and shoes, and half their wounded lay untended in the open for lack of hospital beds, doctors, and medicine. Serbia’s French 75 mm cannon could fire twenty shells a minute, yet Serbian industry produced just 260 shells a day. Surely the Serbian army couldn’t fight yet another campaign. Potiorek reported two days later that King Peter had fled with his treasury and archive to Skopje, and that the Macedonian and Albanian areas that Serbia had annexed in the Balkan Wars were “in a state of insurrection.” The Serbs, to hear Potiorek tell it, were on the brink; just one final shove would send them over the edge.6

  The real insurrection, however, was in the Austro-Hungarian ranks, where, impressed by the incompetence displayed by their generals in August, troops on all fronts stopped saluting and obeying. Officers spoke in the first days of September of a total disappearance of formalities and control. On the Serbian front, General Adolf von Rhemen ordered “draconian measures” to restore discipline, reminding officers to “share the privations of the men” and compel everyone, even the sick and wounded, to rise and salute “higher-ranking personages.”7 Other officers chewed over the tactics of August and recommended changes. Remarkably, the Austro-Hungarians were giving themselves here, as in Galicia, a crash course in tactics that had been standard since 1866. General Rhemen reminded the officers of the 36th Division that they should never attack with massed walls of infantry and reserves, but should instead “wait for the artillery to soften up the enemy” and then “use the terrain to advance in rushes in small groups” after patrolling and scouting the enemy positions.8

  General Giesl admonished his corps to mask their campsites, douse their cook fires, dig trenches and battery positions, and clear the corn and trees around them to have fields of fire.9 General Krauss reminded his units that barbed wire had to be strung in such a way that it would slow attackers, but also permit the defenders to sally on a counterattack. Left to their own devices, Austro-Hungarian infantry were deliberately wiring themselves in so that they couldn’t be expected to attack the Serbs. Krauss also deplored the tendency of Habsburg officers to drive their men into suicidal frontal attacks without artillery support or any coordination with the flanks: “Why are all of our attacks being launched frontally without any effort to envelop the enemy from the flank?”10 Artillery and shells remained in such short supply that the Habsburg infantry were rather ambitiously ordered to take over critical functions of the guns: “All counterbattery fire should henceforth be undertaken by machine guns and infantry alone.”11 Behind the lines, the Austrians directed their fire at Bosnia’s Serbian population. Hundreds of prominent Serbs—priests, teachers, lawyers, and local politicians—were rounded up. Thirteen hundred were sent into internal exile and 844 were taken hostage to deter sabotage in the rear of Potiorek’s invasion.12

  Too late, Bolfras began to have misgivings about Potiorek. The general, who had spoken so dismissively in late August of a severely weakened Serbian army, was now warning of an invincible one: 160,000 troops at Valjevo, 50,000 at Uzice, and 15,000 more at Belgrade. The Serbian Third Army had pushed three divisions up to the river crossings at Loznica and Lj
esnica, just as they had in August. And with no forces on the Sava or the Danube, the Austrians were not exactly putting the Serbs on the horns of a dilemma. Putnik knew exactly how and where the Austrian invasion would proceed, and Potiorek was already lowering expectations in Vienna, describing the “deep depression” (Deprimiertheit) of his Fifth Army and characterizing only his Sixth Army as truly effective. In his usual woolly way, Bolfras wasted time puzzling over the last defeat instead of preventing the next one. “It’s just not clear to me,” Bolfras wrote Conrad on August 31, “why General Potiorek sought a decision on such difficult terrain, crossing rivers and fighting in hills without mountain-equipped troops.” Potiorek, meanwhile, was poised to repeat the August folly under even more adverse circumstances.13

  With two Serbian divisions still north of the Sava, Potiorek improvised a defense of the realm. General Alfred Krauss was given a scratch corps of four new brigades and ordered to throw back the invaders, while Frank’s Fifth Army was ordered to cross the Drina immediately to cut the line of retreat of those Serbian marauders. Krauss drove the Serbs back on September 7–8 and pushed up to the Sava around Sabac in the space previously occupied by the Second Army. The Serbian inhabitants of Syrmia, who had rejoiced at the Serbian invasion and plundered the homes of local Germans and Hungarians, were now plundered themselves, and then burned out by Austrian gendarmes, a vengeful process with a legal name: devastieren. “No, war is definitely not pretty,” Prince Felix Schwarzenberg observed as he trotted through the smoking streets of Surcin and paused at the Orthodox monastery at Fenek. It had been looted and burned by Austrian troops: “a thoroughly depressing and shameful sight.”14

  As in August, Frank’s Fifth Army struggled to get across the Drina on September 8. The Fifth Army covered the front from Sabac south to Loznica, where its right wing met the Sixth Army’s left. Every effort by the Fifth Army’s 9th Division to throw bridges across the river was thwarted by the Serbs, who raked the bridges and engineers with artillery and machine gun fire. The division pushed just two thousand troops across on September 8, and the same number the next day. Three entire regiments ended up huddled on a narrow beachhead under withering Serbian shell and shrapnel fire. Terrified by the barrage and the apparent helplessness of their own officers, men began to wade into the river as if to swim back to the other side. “Ausharren!” their officers angrily shouted. “Hold on! Dig in! There will be no retreat from this spot!” But as the Serbian shells continued to fall and every Austrian effort to get off the muddy bank was driven back, they did retreat, back to the left bank.15 There they found comrades who had not made it across amusing themselves with the local Bosnian women, who complained of sexual assaults and troops forcing their way into their homes.16

  The Austrian response to all of these challenges was, as ever, wrongheaded. While Frank ordered some of his officers to tutor the men “in the religious tenets of Islam,” others led his 36th Division into the by-now typical slaughter, involving ill-equipped, unprepared Austro-Hungarian troops storming Serbian rifle and battery positions that were cleverly integrated into the riverfront villages themselves, wending under hedges and fences and even through buildings, the straw roofs of peasant huts providing shade and cover from aerial detection.

  Many of Frank’s units failed to get across the Drina at all; their boats beached on sandbars, leaving the troops exposed to Serbian fire. Men and officers drowned or were struck down by the fire of their own troops on the left bank. Those who used the bridges had to pummel their way through retreating Austrian troops, one officer noting that as soon as a pontoon bridge was completed on September 8, the largely Croatian 79th Regiment, which had been laboriously ferried across to the right bank in the night on boats, bolted toward it to try to escape back to the left bank. General Johann Salis, on the left bank, had to charge onto the bridge with companies of the 37th Regiment to halt the retreat of the 79th from the right. He found the men of the 79th in a familiar state of panic, with each one swearing that he had been ordered to retreat; it dawned on their officers that enterprising Serbs had crept in close and yelled “retreat” in German, providing all the pretext that was needed. The Fifth Army had lost 143 officers and 4,400 men in a single day, September 8, without even gaining a foothold on the Serbian side of the river.17

  On the Sava, the 21st Landwehr Division tried now to take pressure off of the divisions on the Drina. Elements of the 21st Landwehr crossed the Sava at Poloj on September 8 and immediately ran into the same high corn that had flustered the Second Army. Blundering through it, they came under fire from komitadjis hidden in the fields and trees. Turning in circles, their formations destroyed by ropes of trampled corn, they returned fire and succeeded only in shooting each other in the back. Out of ammo and nearly disbanded by fear, the Czech and German infantry began running back in the direction of the river. Halted by their officers—“There will be no thought of a retreat! This position must be held!”—they briefly dug in, but then came under fire from their own artillery, which uncorked a panicky resumption of the retreat all the way back to the Sava. Pursued most of the way by their own guns, which mistook the Austrians for Serbs and lobbed shells into their midst, they arrived at the river to find no engineering troops to row them across. The 7th Landwehr Regiment lost five officers and 174 men, without even glimpsing a Serb. The wild-eyed survivors were deaf to reason and commandeered any boat they could find to paddle themselves over to the north bank. The VIII Corps commandant, General Arthur Giesl, who would be sacked for this episode, fulminated at his officers the next morning: “Every one of my troop commanders must work harder to repress cowardice, steel the hearts of the troops, and summon our full strength for offensive operations.”18

  Giesl, like every other Austro-Hungarian general in this sad war, was whistling past the graveyard. No offensive operations were working, owing to the now familiar combination of Serbian resolve and Austro-Hungarian blundering. Whereas the Serbs were already implementing changes that every army would introduce in the course of the war—deploying only a skirmish line in the forward trench and leaving the bulk of the infantry in reserve trenches farther back—the Austrians were still massing their troops well forward on narrow fronts, which made them easy targets for the Serbian artillery and infantry, as well as their own artillery, which would regularly hit their own men instead of the enemy’s.19

  Potiorek began to weave excuses for the inevitable defeat. He reported the “scandal at Loznica,” where two entire Austrian corps failed to get across the Drina against light Serbian resistance. He asserted that the unfolding disaster was their fault, not his, and he forbade officers to retreat under any circumstances: “No retreat: any officer who orders one will be court-martialed, any man who does it will be shot.”20 Other generals merely noted the uselessness of Austrian tactics. With their scripted prewar maneuvers against flagged enemies, the Austro-Hungarian artillery had never trained for this fluid kind of warfare. They wasted their fire, scattering random barrages wherever they suspected Serbian troops, instead of focusing on agreed-upon targets and saving ammunition, either for counterbattery fire or to hit Serbian reserves when they moved up to reinforce the front lines.21

  The corps of the Sixth Army were supposed to facilitate the crossing of the Fifth, but they too struggled to get across the Drina. As in August, the hilly terrain slowed progress to a crawl. Well entrenched with their artillery on the mounts overlooking the upper and middle Drina, the Serbs fired down on the ill-equipped Austrians.22 Like the other armies in the war, the Austrians were feeling the effects of an acute shell shortage. Frugal war ministries had not stockpiled shells because their chemical ingredients deteriorated if not used, and none of the armies had expected a great war in 1914. (France would shoot half of its entire inventory of shells in the first month of the war.) Conrad and Potiorek now argued bitterly over the shells remaining to them, each man thinking the other was hoarding or wasting ammunition. “Be very frugal with your fire,” one corps commander jotted. “Soo
n the factories of the monarchy will be unable to send us any more shells.”23

  Kriegsmetalle (war metals) were in such short supply that Emperor Franz Joseph had just appealed to his people for all the metal that they could spare: fire irons, trash cans, doorknobs, candlesticks, belt buckles, church bells, and cutlery. “Our army needs metal,” he pleaded. Indeed it did; now Austrian guns were permitted to fire only when an “obvious target presented itself” and every battery commander agreed that the target was “real and appropriate.” The massed fire of all guns was strictly prohibited.24 With fire support like this, the Austrian infantry was picked apart everywhere. Reports from the 4th Mountain Brigade south of Jagodna confirmed the shocking parsimony of the Austrian artillery: “Under fire all day on September 14, we repeatedly asked for artillery fire on the wooded heights and were told that no ‘suitable target’ existed. We then asked the 5th Mountain Brigade to rake the height with its guns and it too replied: ‘No suitable target presents itself.’”25 Even as the men were ordered to conserve, they were warned that “everything around here that is not promptly used up will be sent to our troops in the Russian theater,” a truly Svejkian paradox.26

  A Landwehr unit of the Sixth Army’s First Division was overrun in the night of September 8 when the Serbs approached in the dark, called, “Landwehr! Feuer einstellen. Hier 84er!”—“Landwehr, stop shooting, we’re the 84th!”—and then charged in, firing and killing. The next day the Serbs battered the division, annihilating their skirmish line and then shooting down every reserve formation that came up. One regimental commander was a Croat, and he briefly rallied the men in Croatian, urging, “Dalmatinei dojte se!” but the effect was ruined by the German brigadier, who appeared behind him bawling (in German), “Men of the Landwehr, hold the line! Reinforcements are coming!” Men who had responded to their Croatian colonel ran from their German general and began flowing in waves to the rear; each time an officer stepped into their path to turn them around, they would flow around him and keep going.27