A Mad Catastrophe

by Geoffrey Wawro

  Potiorek was trying to re-create the conditions of August, with Krauss’ “Combined Corps” on the Sava filling the role of the Second Army, while the Fifth and Sixth Armies hammered across the Drina to unite with Krauss. But only the Serbs were hammering. They permitted elements of the Fifth Army to cross at Ljesnica on September 13 and then destroyed them in a whirlwind of shells and bullets. The rest of the Fifth Army watched the slaughter from the left bank.28 With nowhere to go on the Drina, Colonel Felix Schwarzenberg took his dragoon regiment over to Mitrovica, dismounted, and crossed the Sava. The dragoons waited on the opposite bank for their horses, which never arrived. There were not enough boats to ferry both men and horses, so the prince and the dragoons stood down. “None of us had trained in peacetime to fight dismounted, nor were we properly outfitted for the task; we had only about 50 rounds for our carbines, no spades to entrench with, and we were clad in red trousers and red caps that glowed like wildflowers, and tall riding boots and spurs that made marching impossible.”29 A cavalry that had been procured for the parade ground was proving useless in war.

  Even in the first days of this renewed push, the Austrian troops displayed remarkable apathy. A general staff captain touring the trenches of the 53rd and 96th Regiments found them filthy, unimproved, and littered with discarded equipment—backpacks, coats, belts of ammunition, rifles, and even unexploded artillery shells. Men sat sullenly in the dirt, ignoring their tongue-tied officers, who did well in German or Hungarian but not the ten other languages of the monarchy. The captain observed that the trenches and traverses were all collapsed from shelling, yet no one bothered to repair them. When he summoned military police to make the men work, “the gendarme evinced neither understanding nor interest in what I was ordering.”30

  Supplies were as scarce in September as they had been in August, and the Serbs made them even scarcer by infiltrating parties of two or three men into the Austrian supply lines at night and heaving grenades into their midst to cause a stampede. Without a regular food supply, the men plundered, provoking more rebukes from the generals: “Henceforth every plunderer shall be shot by a firing squad on the spot.” Austrian generals puzzled over a paradox of the campaign; their troops would plunder Serbian civilians out of house and home and then promptly round up the dispossessed families and escort them far to the rear on “humanitarian” grounds. “No more escorts of old folks out of the battle area!” General Krauss admonished on September 19. “Too many troops are doing this, and weakening the battle front.”

  Krauss also noted an alarming increase in self-wounding, Austro-Hungarian troops shooting themselves in the left hand to remove themselves from battle. Eighteen men had presented themselves in a single day at a field hospital in his sector with bullet wounds in their left hand. “Each one told the same story: ‘I was accidentally shot by comrades in the night while working in the trench.’” Krauss judged the explanations “not credible” and ordered that every hand injury be immediately examined by a doctor. Self-wounders would be hung, to encourage their fellows.31

  Whereas thousands of Austrians surrendered more or less willingly to the Serbs, providing the Serbian general staff with much useful information, few Serbs gave themselves up for capture. “The Serbs don’t hold up their hands, as the big childlike Russians [do]. They fight as long as they can stand,” a war correspondent noted.32 Those Serbs who did yield were found to be in deplorable condition, poorly armed and equipped, some with as few as four days of military instruction.33 Still, they held on, and the intelligence-starved Austrian generals began offering bounties for the capture of Serbian personnel: two hundred crowns for an enlisted man, a thousand crowns for an officer.34 The rewards were necessary, for Serbs had a disincentive to surrender: Austrians executed many of the Serbian prisoners they took because they weren’t wearing uniforms. The Serbs weren’t trying to deceive anyone, as Putnik’s despairing cable to the War Ministry in Nis in mid-September made plain: “A high percentage of my men are fighting barefoot, in just underwear and shirts, without any military insignia; the enemy are shooting them as insurgents. We urgently need uniforms and 200,000 pairs of shoes.”35

  The foreign press caught wind of the renewed Austrian difficulties here and in Galicia and predicted the monarchy’s early collapse. Many in the Dual Empire attributed the dire prognostications to the tsar’s propaganda mill, rather than to actual events on the ground, which, of course, were the direst propaganda of all. Tisza in Budapest phoned Berchtold in Vienna on September 15 and demanded that he set the record straight: “You must correct the Russian lies in the foreign press and point out that we’ve been standing alone against the Russian main force and have even inflicted some major defeats on them, and that on the Drina our troops are conducting a victorious offensive deep into the heart of Serbia.”36

  Serbs rarely surrendered; those who did—like these men—were found to be in deplorable condition, poorly armed and equipped, some with as few as four days of military instruction.

  Credit: Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, Wien

  That would have been news to the troops still stuck on the Drina. On the front, Austro-Hungarian generals struggled to communicate or even equip themselves. Staff cars flying black-and-yellow pennants were driven across the Drina and Sava to speed the flow of orders between units. No one reckoned with the likely reaction of Austro-Hungarian sentries, few of whom had ever seen or even heard of an automobile. When the cars approached, the terrified bumpkins opened fire. Even Austrian troops who knew a car when they saw one opened fire, greedily crediting rumors that French bankers were sending cars stuffed with cash to support the Serbian war effort. “No more firing on military automobiles,” Krauss’ supply chief fulminated. “The drivers can’t hear you over the sound of their engine when you tell them to stop.” He also ordered an end to the “rumors about money-bearing automobiles from France.” Sentries were abusing the drivers and pawing through their classified dispatch cases in search of the rumored cash.37

  Supply problems only exacerbated the failure to communicate. Austro-Hungarian march battalions that arrived to replace casualties had to scrounge for everything, including backpacks and rifles. Sick and wounded troops were stripped of their gear to clothe and arm the newcomers. Even lightly wounded men were immediately relieved of their arms and uniforms, the War Ministry in Vienna ordering commanders on all fronts to “disarm and disrobe—down to their underwear—all casualties.”38 Although ordered to improve their infantry assaults by “cutting ‘storm lanes’ through the Serbian wire and securing the breaches with sandbags on the flanks,” the entire force ran out of shovels, sandbags, picks, and wire cutters, “not,” as General Othmar Panesch put it, “because they’ve worn out, but because the men throw them away so as not to have to carry them!”39

  This second invasion of Serbia bogged down in the twelve-hundred-foot hills around Jagodna at the end of September. The 1st and 6th Mountain Brigades repeatedly attacked the Jagodna heights on September 20, 21, and 22. Blinded by rain and fog and engulfed by mud, they stumbled up steep, wooded slopes into Serbian fire in massed columns and were cut to pieces, the 1st Mountain Brigade alone losing 372 dead, 1,445 wounded, and 712 missing. The Croatian battalions of the 6th Regiment struggled day and night, their officers recalling the difficulty of directing the battle when the opposing officers were shouting similar orders in the same language to contending groups of lethally armed men. The first battalion lost two-thirds of its strength in the fighting, about 800 men, and buried 1,300 Serbs. Like the Russians in Galicia, the Serbs practiced defense in depth, with parallel lines of trenches, one behind the other, that made Austrian breakthroughs nearly impossible.40

  Potiorek had finally shifted his headquarters from the comforts of Sarajevo on September 24, but only as far as Tuzla, which was still inside Bosnia and a hundred miles from the nearest fighting. Perhaps Potiorek needed the respite, for he was battling Conrad at least as hard as he was fighting the Serbs. He still enjoyed direct access to the empero
r via Bolfras, but Conrad was laboring to block that access and divert Balkan munitions (and influence) to the east. When Bolfras released a shipment of shells and bullets to Potiorek on September 20, Conrad began a weeklong battle that ended with Bolfras sheepishly dumping Potiorek—“here there’s no court camarilla”—and agreeing that Potiorek would make no more direct communications with Vienna, but would submit his reports and requests through Conrad instead.41 Conrad had finally severed the Balkan commander’s direct access to the emperor, ensuring (at last) that the fight with Russia, not the one with Serbia, would receive priority in Austro-Hungarian military planning.

  Beyond Tuzla, things were looking up. The Germans reported good news in the west: they were flanking the French and British on the Oise, had the French on their heels at Verdun, and had begun to reduce the French forts on the eastern frontier.42 Stalled at the Marne, the Germans were trying to restart their failed August offensive and carry operations through to the elusive victory on the Seine that would theoretically unlock victory in the east as well. Potiorek’s Sixth Army had less thrilling news to report: they finally wrested control of the Jagodna heights, but at a cost of twenty-five thousand new casualties. Fatigued, demoralized and all but disarmed by shortages of ammunition, the Sixth Army could do no better than the Fifth. Taking stock of the Pyrrhic victory at Jagodna, Bolfras and the emperor expressed their usual belated dismay: “Wer hat diesen Unsinn befohlen? Who ordered this insanity?”43 Potiorek had, and his flaccid September campaign left behind a poison legacy. After this second defeat, the emperor couldn’t simply walk away from the southern front without walking away from his Balkan dreams as well. The loss of prestige would be too great. This was an empire, after all, that had bid for Balkan supremacy and still had visions of Salonika. And yet every gun in Austria-Hungary was needed for the wobbling Eastern Front. That left the Habsburg army in a dangerous predicament: too weak to reinvade Serbia, and too weak to counterattack Russia with any hope of success.

  Austro-Hungarian ministers in the neutral capitals clamored for information. From the Austrian minister in Bucharest: “Serbian communiqués here speak of the annihilation of our regiments, a ‘panicky’ Austrian flight across the Drina and the Serbian reconquest of Loznica and Ljesnica. Shall I deny this?” From the Austrian minister in Athens: “I need details on the battles on the Drina; the Serbs are portraying them as great Serbian victories.” From Sofia, the Austrian minister warned that the pro-Austrian government there would probably fall if new defeats in Serbia were confirmed: “Bulgaria was shattered by news of the Austrian retreat in the northern theater, but events in Serbia weigh even more heavily on the local situation.”44

  In all, forty thousand more Austro-Hungarians were lost in the September fighting in Serbia, without any gains.45 Archduke Friedrich released a jaunty statement on October 1 from his headquarters near Cracow, pronouncing the “overall situation favorable.” Russian power was “breaking,” German troops were “deep in France,” and “Serbian resistance [was] faltering.” This, Fritzl concluded, “is the truth of the matter—explain it all to the men in their mother tongues.”46

  Potiorek had a great deal of explaining to do, and he officially terminated the offensive on October 4, blaming the halt not on his own fumbling but on the shell shortage: “We can’t attack without first destroying the enemy trenches, but for that we need prolonged heavy bombardments.” General Krauss agreed, assuring Potiorek that he did not lack “offensive spirit,” but considered it “a crime to continue running headfirst into a wall and sacrificing thousands of our brave troops so uselessly.”47

  These may have been the wisest words uttered on the Austro-Hungarian side thus far, but they were not yet the view of the army commanders, who still worshiped at the altar of the offensive. Behind the scenes, Potiorek began agitating at the Hofburg for a third invasion, improbably asserting that Serbia—which kept beating Potiorek—was finally on the ropes: “What’s left of Serbia’s army is concentrated at Valjevo, scarcely 180,000 effectives.” Serbian casualties—estimated at 600 officers and 60,000 men since the start of the war—could no longer be replaced. Belgrade’s court and government would shortly move even further south, this time from Nis to Skopje. Morale, Potiorek reported, was “bad,” even worse among the Serbian population, which was racked by cholera and typhus and which had begun to resist conscription and the military authorities. “Just one more attack,” Potiorek pleaded on October 1. “Just one more attack will prove decisive.”48

  chapter11

  Warsaw

  Austro-Hungarian floundering in Galicia and the tumultuous retreat nearly to the Carpathians struck the Germans dumb with amazement. At German great headquarters on the Western Front, Austria’s military liaison noted that Conrad’s swift, artless defeat had finally gotten Germany’s attention: “They’d always considered the war against Russia ‘our thing,’ but our defeat at Lemberg and retreat from Galicia suddenly made the war in the east as vital for them as for us.” Now the Germans no less than the Austrians could feel the shuddering approach of the Russian steamroller. After the repulse on the Marne, Moltke had been fired and replaced with General Erich von Falkenhayn, who noted the obvious: a Russian advance through the Carpathians would be “catastrophic for the overall war situation,” wrapping Russian armies around Silesia, a prime German industrial region, and thrusting them into the heart of Hungary.1

  The war was barely a month old, yet Vienna seemed to have reached the breaking point. Potiorek had twice been beaten in Serbia, and all three of Conrad’s offensive thrusts—at Krásnik, Komarów, and Lemberg—had been crushed, his troops driven all the way back to Cracow. Conrad’s four armies had suffered so many casualties that burial parties could not keep up, and the corpses were simply stacked like firewood, where they swelled, rotted, and burst.2 In Galicia alone, the Habsburg army had lost 100,000 dead, 220,000 wounded, and 120,000 POWs, as well as 216 guns and thousands of rail cars and locomotives.3 When Potiorek’s 81,000 casualties were added in, it was clear that the whole army—reduced by half a million troops—was hanging by a thread. Men in their forties were already being called up and sent to replace the monstrous casualties.4 Survivors of the August battles were crowding the eastern rail stations trying to hitch rides home on trains for the sick and wounded, while newcomers, many of whom had never even fired a rifle, stepped off their trains, many dressed in gaudy surplus uniforms from the Victorian era and without rifles, shovels, blankets, or medical supplies. In the Austrian army’s palmiest days before the war, the French had judged it “two or three generations behind the west.” Now it looked even more backward.5

  The Schlieffen Plan had pledged big German reinforcements for the Eastern Front after six weeks, but there was no sign of them. Embarrassed by their defeat on the Marne in September, German great headquarters told Conrad as little about it as possible. They did not even bother to tell him that Moltke had been fired and replaced as general staff chief by Falkenhayn. A week after Falkenhayn’s appointment, Conrad was still addressing his letters and cables to Moltke.6

  Moltke, Falkenhayn . . . it hardly mattered anymore to Conrad. He blamed them both for the Austrian rout. He attributed the failure of the Germans to cooperate with his thrust into Poland not to their massive battles in France and Belgium but to Kaiser Wilhelm II’s desire to protect his “stud farms and stag hunts” in East Prussia. Conrad had known in early August that the Germans, with seven armies engaged in France, would not be taking the offensive in the east as well, but he still acted as if he had been betrayed. It seemed the best way to exonerate himself for his terrible opening act. He increasingly viewed himself as a blameless scapegoat, “an outlaw.” In love with another man’s wife, he mooned and blubbered over his loneliness: “I have no home, no woman. Who will be at my side in my later years?” The German attachés in AOK headquarters at Neu Sandez reported that Conrad had “lost all confidence in his army.”7 He was even mooting the idea of a separate peace. “Why,” Conrad wrote Foreign Mini
ster Berchtold, “should Austria-Hungary bleed needlessly?”8

  Fifty-three-year-old General Erich von Falkenhayn, who had replaced Moltke on September 14, heard Conrad’s complaints with no small degree of wonderment. Germany was well on its way to losing two million dead or wounded in the first six months of the war. The proud Prusso-German army was increasingly taking on the appearance of a motley Volksheer or people’s army, as reserve and Landsturm forces were called in to replace the soaring casualties. Whole cohorts of professional officers and NCOs had been wiped out. German infantry companies were commanded by corporals. Pensioned generals (including Paul von Hindenburg and Remus von Woyrsch) had been recalled from their retirements to take up new challenges.9 France’s successful stand on the Marne meant that the war in the west would not be over by October. The Germans would not be able to deliver the “overwhelming force” to the Eastern Front that Moltke had promised Conrad at Karlsbad in May 1914; victory on the Seine would not unlock victory on the Bug. Instead, as an Austrian diplomat jotted, “Russia’s massive superiority in troop numbers has become the dominating factor in this war.”10