Scheffer didn’t sleep either. He was awake for seventy-two hours straight while his great escape unfolded in the last days of November, the Germans retreating through heavy snow that compounded the confusion in the Russian command. Lodz was a draw, with the Germans losing thirty-five thousand men—but the exhaustion of Russia’s troops and shell stocks meant that the Stavka could contemplate no more offensive operations. Bullets were running out too, some Russian infantry divisions firing two million rounds in just three days of combat.24
The Russians had also lost an eye-popping 70 percent of the combat strength of their First and Second Armies to death, wounds, sickness, and captivity. Rennenkampf, who had barely clung to command after his failures at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes, did not survive this humiliating episode. Widely suspected of treason because of his German origins, he was relieved of command, and driven out of the army. Grand Duke Nikolai had fifteen Russian officers shot for their hand in the fiasco. Touring the notoriously corrupt army supply office in Warsaw, the grand duke had only four words to say to the officers gathered there: “You steal, I hang.”25
Passing by a field hospital near Lodz, a British correspondent noted thousands of wounded men laid out in the snow, transport to the rear being (as usual) unavailable; “outside one tent a great heap of amputated arms and legs lay on the ground.” He was struck by the number of men who had lost one or both eyes to shrapnel darts.26 In all, the winter battles had cost the Russians another half million troops, as well as 70 percent of their front-line officers. Now Russian conscripts were being sent to the front without any rifles at all, which partly explained the relatively light German losses of a hundred thousand.27 Even though the vast spaces in the east enabled a war of movement—only one and a half German divisions occupied a frontage that would have been held by five German divisions in the west—the Russians lacked the mobility, boots (Ruzski spoke of a five-hundred-thousand-pair deficit), and artillery to polish off the overstretched Germans. Indeed, the Russians would never threaten German territory again in the war.
Austro-Hungarian territory was another matter. The Germans having proven too redoubtable, Ivanov proposed at a war council with Ruzski and the grand duke on November 29 that “the way to Berlin lies through Austria-Hungary.” Ruzski had absorbed 75 percent casualties battling the Germans and was all but hors de combat.28 The Russians would have to reboot yet again, this time focusing on their more vulnerable Austrian opponent. The grand duke agreed and authorized a reorientation from the Northwest back to the Southwest Front. Ivanov would now take the reins, leading a drive on Cracow and then over the Carpathians.
Conrad too wanted a fresh start. With the Russians pressed back to a line just west of Warsaw and four new German corps arriving from the stalemated Western Front for the Ostheer, he was fighting to remain relevant. He took out his frustration on Hindenburg, pronouncing accounts of the heroic German escape from Lodz “naive” and speculation that Hindenburg was preparing a counterstroke with his beefed-up force of nine corps and three cavalry divisions “childish.” Remember, Conrad hissed, “the ‘people’s hero’ has been defeated,” but the Austrian general’s credibility was at the vanishing point.29 On December 6, the reinforced Germans did take Lodz and advanced to within thirty miles of Warsaw. It seemed only a matter of time before Emperor Franz Joseph agreed to subordinate the feckless Conrad to Hindenburg and Ludendorff in a new joint Austro-German Ober-Ost. “How on earth can we pursue even a tolerable foreign policy,” the emperor queried the AOK, “when we fight so badly?”30 Conrad’s answer was the one he was resorting to with depressing regularity of late: the threat of resignation. Once again, an uncertain Franz Joseph backed down.
Desperate to demonstrate his ability after the Lodz fiasco, Conrad ordered Boroevic to attack toward Sanok in southeastern Poland and sent Archduke Joseph Ferdinand’s Fourth Army to attack Evert’s Fourth Army, which was wandering again toward Upper Silesia. Russian shortages of everything—shells, guns, rifles, bullets, uniforms, boots, food—and their inability to mass numbers around Conrad gave some cause for hope. The archduke’s Fourth Army collided with Evert near Cracow, while Boroevic’s Third Army attacked Sanok, which overlooked the San River and was a road and rail hub.31 Evert and the Austrians jabbed ineffectually at each other until Radko-Dimitriev’s Third Army, detained outside Przemysl until mid-November, came up to support Evert, having been replaced at Przemysl by yet another Russian army: Selivanov’s Eleventh.
Now the Austrians were forced back on Cracow again. Thousands of despairing Habsburg troops feigned cholera symptoms to escape combat. The Austrian army commands advertised daily for the return of deserters: “Partyka, born in Matawicz in 1888, black hair, brown eyes, speaks Polish, 1.62 meters tall: if found, arrest and forward to the I Corps tribunal.”32 Archduke Friedrich had just been promoted from general to field marshal, but there was no cause anywhere for celebration; what little he and Conrad could discover about the reality of the front from their cozy headquarters far behind the lines suggested that their armies were not even fighting. On December 2, Conrad instructed his army commanders to decimate (shoot every tenth man) in units that retreated before the enemy.33
Conrad trumpeted some local victories, but they were short-lived. The Russian Ninth Army hurled Archduke Joseph Ferdinand’s Fourth Army back south of Cracow. The Russian Third and Eighth Armies threw Boroevic’s eight divisions back from Sanok and pummeled the seven divisions of General Karl von Pflanzer-Baltin’s Armeegruppe in Bukovina. Green flags with the white half-moon and star hoisted over Austro-Hungarian trenches to announce an Ottoman-sponsored holy war against the tsar and deter attacks by Russian Muslim units did not deter. A yawning seventy-mile gap opened between Boroevic and the eleven divisions of the Fourth Army in the foothills of the Carpathians. The Russians were poised to push through this hole and into the Uzsok, Dukla, Lupkov, and Tylicz passes, which would carry them into Hungary and Moravia—the heart of the Habsburg monarchy.
On the Austrian right, Boroevic struggled weakly against the Russian Eighth and Eleventh Armies. The Austrian position was all the more untenable because of the facility with which Russian operatives—men and officers dressed in peasant clothes or Austro-Hungarian uniforms—drifted in and out of the Austrian camps and trenches, spying and scattering vouchers that promised “Slavic troops” cash rewards and special treatment if they would desert to the Russians. Three thousand miles to the east, working on a road crew with other Austro-Hungarian prisoners in Turkmenistan, a captured Austrian officer could verify that this was so. “The Russians divided us by nationality,” he observed in late 1914. “The Slavs got the best barracks, the Germans, Hungarians, and Jews the worst. We also had to work longer hours than the Slavs, and take all of the dirty jobs.” They all received the same meager rations—beet soup and buckwheat porridge—because the Russian camp commandant pocketed half of the men’s daily food allowance, and the guards and kitchen staff took most of the rest, but the Slavs were always allowed to eat first and were encouraged to mock and kick the Germans and Hungarians in line behind them.34
The Russians also received ample intelligence on Austrian strength and intentions from captured Austrian officers, who, in Archduke Friedrich’s words, displayed “senselessness and garrulousness” in captivity.35 Austro-Hungarian peasants, many of whom sympathized more with the Russians than with their own army, were another fertile source of intelligence. Archduke Joseph Ferdinand, a scion of this tottering House of Austria, ordered his troops to proceed pitilessly against any Austrian village that aided the Russians: “There is no need to consult a magistrate in such matters; simply take and kill hostages, burn villages to the ground, and hang any suspects on the spot.”36 And this was Austrian territory. Clearly the monarchy was at the end of its rope. Only Ludendorff’s loan of some German reserve divisions, combined with Russian sluggishness, sufficed to arrest the Russian onslaught. Ruzski, as usual, was for resting and resupplying, and the Russians were down to about ten shell
s per gun per day.
The Austrians had their backs to the wall and were in danger of being flung through the Carpathians and into the Hungarian plain. They were now deployed in a thin gray line, a weak Second Army on the left, lying along the German border north of Cracow, the First Army northwest of the city (its rear area a place called Auschwitz), the Fourth Army in Cracow, and the Third Army straggling southeast of the city, from Neu Sandez down to Czernowitz.
To save Cracow, Austria’s last foothold east of the Carpathians, Conrad ordered an attack across the Vistula. The Austrian Fourth Army and a German division beat the Russian Third Army to a standstill near Cracow at Limanowa in the first two weeks of December. Southeast of Cracow, facing west, the Russians had made themselves vulnerable to a flanking attack, which Archduke Joseph Ferdinand delivered. Using the rails around Cracow and forced marches, he cut into the Russian flank with the Fourth Army. The two sodden, shivering armies fought savagely for two weeks, like troglodytes. The Austrian cavalry, still outfitted with shakos and sabers according to ancient tradition, were especially vulnerable: “Our cavalry fought hand-to-hand at Limanowa, without bayonets! We found hundreds of them dead with their skulls bashed in. It’s a crime the way we equip our cavalry,” an Austrian general staff colonel morosely recorded.37
Though hitting a Russian flank, the Austrians persisted in attacking frontally in many sectors without adequate artillery support. The artillery failed to prepare the attacks, shoot them through, or cover the inevitable retreats, prompting the by-now predictable scolding from Archduke Friedrich: “Honor and the ancient traditions of the Austrian artillery demand that you stick to your guns without regard for casualties, to facilitate an orderly retreat by the infantry.”38 The Austrian guns responded by shelling their own men.39
The Russians too seemed to be fading, Austria’s 6th Jäger Battalion taking a thousand Russian prisoners—including a relieved-looking general—in a single day of fighting.40 Inspecting two hundred such Russian POWs, a German officer remarked upon their misery: “They pressed against the cage like hungry animals wherever anyone from the street held out a piece of bread. They climbed on top of each other, up the iron bars, screamed with bulging eyes, stretched-out hands, in greedy, hoarse voices, each one seeking to draw attention to his own hunger.” The Russians reminded him of a Goya painting, horrors like The Madhouse or Saturn Devouring His Son.41
After the Battle of Limanowa, which drove the Russians back thirty-five miles, Conrad boasted that his army alone had held back “half of Asia,” broken Russia’s momentum, and “pushed them back along the entire front.”42 This stretched the truth considerably. Limanowa had yielded twenty-three thousand Russian prisoners, saved Cracow, and prevented the Russians from thrusting between the Austrian Third and Fourth Armies and pushing them through the Carpathians, but it could not be converted into anything decisive because of the arrival of ample Russian reinforcements, which marched in from Neu Sandez to threaten the flank and rear of Fourth Army, forcing it to yield the ground it had just won at the cost of another twelve thousand casualties.43 The Russians jogged forward to reoccupy their temporarily abandoned trenches on the east bank of the Dunajec, making Limanowa yet another Pyrrhic Austrian victory, at best.
It was indeed as if Limanowa had never happened. Writing Bolfras from Berlin, Conrad admitted that nothing “decisive” had been achieved at Limanowa or anywhere; “the Russians are able to paralyze our every stroke with fresh forces.” Just as the Russians had used the San to separate the Germans and Austrians, they now used the Dunajec for the same purpose. “They are nailed to one bank and we are nailed to the other,” Conrad grumbled.44 But most of his divisions were now down to a few thousand men or less. The 6th Jäger Battalion discovered that of the nineteen hundred men and officers that it had been infused with since July, eleven hundred had been killed, wounded, or captured by December.45 Touring the battlefield in the rain on December 17, an Austrian staff officer recorded its desolation: “Trenches running off in all directions, filled with water. The field is littered with everything: shell and bullet casings, broken rifles, backpacks, bayonets, caps, helmets, shirts, potatoes, wooden doors that had been torn off their hinges and used as cover, burnt houses, sobbing peasants, corpses floating in the trenches and lying all over the roads, graves marked with wooden crosses, dead horses, fields trampled by thousands of boots, telegraph poles knocked down, barns torn open by shells with the hay sticking out—a picture of misery and chaos.”46
By year’s end the Austrians remained stuck on the line of the Dunajec (just thirty-five miles from Cracow) and, further south, the Carpathians. The war had frozen in place, staff officers scribbling “Wie gestern—the same as yesterday” on their daily situation reports. The men too were freezing in place, provided with nothing but sheets of paper (“tissue paper when available,” Dankl punctiliously minuted) to wrap their frostbitten feet.47 The Second Army’s 32nd Division was so worn down that Conrad had to grant it a two-week break, but the division commander expressed no gratitude on his return to the line. “We spent our leave under canvas,” he noted, “alternately pelted with rain and snow, and afflicted with cholera. Really the leave was illusory; it weakened more than strengthened us.”48
The Russians stared dully across at their tortured enemy. “Our souls were like hedgehogs, rolled in a ball inside us; outwardly nothing shocked us, inwardly we hibernated,” a Russian officer wrote.49 Austria’s best units, like Vienna’s 4th Deutschmeister Regiment, held together and even attacked, but with invariably tragic results. Posted at Wodowice, a Deutschmeister battalion stormed the Russian trenches opposite, the men actually obeying the order to fix bayonets and charge. They crossed two hundred yards of fire-swept ground—“Lieutenant Altrichter mortally wounded, Lieutenant Friedrich shot in the chest,” the battalion commander dolefully reported—and tumbled into the Russian trenches, where they scuffled briefly with the three hundred occupants before grasping that they lay squarely in the sights of another Russian trench, just beyond the one they’d taken at such dreadful cost. “We could neither attack the new one nor remain in the old one, so we withdrew,” their report conceded, “confident that we had done our part to wring some success from that day.”50
But what success, and to what end? Most units behaved more rationally than this. One general replacing another in command of the Austro-Hungarian 19th Division issued a stern divisional order to his officers—“Some Observations”—that described an army that was literally falling apart, with filthy uniforms, rusty rifles, no saluting, malingering at every opportunity, and profound indiscipline and lack of initiative.51 That Austro-Hungarian division would eventually be given to the Germans, to flesh out their Südarmee, a new army authorized by Falkenhayn to stiffen the wilting Austrians. On Christmas Day 1914, Archduke Friedrich received his own a gift—another retreat, which drove the Habsburg army’s back up against the wall of the Carpathians. The First Army and the Fourth Army remained in the Dunajec-Biala position before Cracow and Neu Sandez, but the rest of them fell back to the mountains: the Third Army arrayed on both sides of the Dukla Pass with its headquarters in Kaschau (Kosice), the Second Army around Ungvár (Uzhhorod), Südarmee headquarters at Munkacs (Mukachevo), and Pflanzer-Baltin’s Army Group at Maramaros-Sziget (Sighetu Marmatiei).
The Habsburg army, in other words, was slowly backing into Hungary, which was entirely the wrong direction. They were supposed to be advancing into Russia. Deeply embarrassed by their lengthening string of defeats, Fritzl and Conrad did what they’d done at Lemberg. They blamed their troops for “failing to execute well-planned operations that should have been successful.” Conrad refused even to hear the litany of excuses emanating from the front: “AOK cannot understand how our troops, who for days have been apprised of the exact situation, allowed themselves to be surprised and overrun in the fog by the Russians instead of themselves using the fog to surprise and overrun the enemy.”52 The troops understood; they had had enough. Every Austrian soldier was s
uspect now, whether of cowardice, malingering, or espionage. Regular bulletins from the AOK warned of Russian secret agents circulating freely behind the Austrian lines: “Some have a fish tattooed under their left armpit, others have a Russian cross stamped on their neck, still others have one uniform button with ‘Vasil Sergei’ engraved on the back.” Troops were told to be on the lookout for phantasmal figures: “a captain of the Russian general staff named Lubunoff; he drives around in a car, dark-haired, handsome, well-built, usually in civilian clothes,” or “a Russian who speaks fluent Polish, with a pale intelligent face, blue eyes, blond hair, wears a scarf and a black coat; believed to be in the vicinity of our XI Corps.”53
Archduke Friedrich scored his generals for their inactivity behind the lines while the infantry were being slaughtered at the front. “Divisional commanders must be present on the battlefield . . . not far in the rear using the telephone to communicate with their subordinate officers,” he railed. Austro-Hungarian troops, Fritzl pleaded, “should never feel that they are being left to their fate by commanders residing safely in the rear areas.” He ordered generals to lead from the front, organize flanking attacks, and stop suicidal frontal assaults before they jumped off.54
He ordered in vain: of the thirty-two hundred Austro-Hungarian officers killed in the first five months of the war, only thirty-nine were colonels or generals.55 Neglected by their remote leadership, Austro-Hungarian troops were sometimes succored by the Russians. An Austrian soldier who was shot twice while digging a trench recalled his rescue: “I lay wounded for two hours until found by a Russian infantryman, who hurriedly dressed [my wound] and put me out of firing range on a horse blanket in an old trench.”56 Other Russians were not so kind. Passing a barefoot Russian soldier and a Jewish villager near the Carpathians, a Cossack demanded that the villager remove his “Jew boots” and give them to the soldier. When the villager objected, the Cossack ordered the soldier to lower his trousers, then turned back to the villager: “Kiss his ass now, and consider yourself lucky to be alive.” The villager complied. Moments later, the three separated, the Cossack laughing, the Russian soldier admiring his fine new boots, and the Jewish villager barefoot. “The shadow of pogroms,” a Russian officer who witnessed the episode wrote, fell everywhere the Russians operated. “People might say that these are just ‘anecdotes.’ But they’re much more than that; they are monuments to our modern history.”57
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