Galician Jews fleeing before the Russian advance in late 1914. Jews were persecuted in the Russian Empire and routinely mistreated by Russian troops, hence their flight away from the oncoming Russians with whatever they could carry. “The shadow of pogroms fell everywhere we operated,” a Russian officer noted.
Credit: Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, Wien
While the Austro-Hungarian army suffered at the front, Archduke Friedrich (l.) and Conrad (r.) maintained a luxurious headquarters in Friedrich’s own Silesian palace in Teschen. Officers noted the essentially civilian routines of the two commanders (naps, long lunches, walks, hours spent reading the newspapers) while the Habsburg army crumbled seventy-five miles to the east.
Credit: Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, Wien
Conrad had assiduously avoided the privations of the front, and now he shifted his headquarters from Neu Sandez further west to Teschen in Austrian Silesia, where he settled into Archduke Friedrich’s family palace and the neighboring Albrecht High School. This complex would remain his plush headquarters, with stables, tennis courts, coffeehouses, and lavish meals, until his dismissal in March 1917. Conrad used the geography classroom as his office, studied the maps, and gave Fritzl two briefings a day; otherwise the archduke had no role. The heir apparent, Archduke Karl, had even less to do.58 Officers at the front noted these essentially civilian routines at the AOK: “Our army commanders know how to administer, but not how to lead,” a major with the Fourth Army wrote. “An army commander has to exhibit will and character, his chief of staff brains.” Both were lacking at Teschen.59
There was no shortage of good food or wines in Teschen, where Fritzl was rather unpatriotically billing everything, including Conrad’s use of his palace, to the War Ministry. But in the land Fritzl and Conrad abandoned, food had become so scarce that Austro-Hungarian officers reporting to units in Galicia and the Carpathians were bringing their own food. Conrad created a “war press headquarters” in Teschen, whose job was to burnish his reputation with puff pieces like Unser Conrad (Our Conrad) and Unsere Dynastie im Felde (Our Dynasty in the Field). Writers including Rilke and Zweig, photographers, filmmakers, and sculptors were put on the payroll to create the impression of resurgence, with paintings like Russenjagd (Russian Hunt) or hopeful pamphlets like Vom Dunajec zum San (From the Dunajec to the San).60 No one was fooled. Conrad’s German liaison, General Hugo von Freytag-Loringhoven, reported to Falkenhayn that Conrad’s army would most charitably be described as a “brittle instrument.” Austrian divisions were down to five thousand men or less, companies to just fifty. The mass slaughter of experienced Austrian officers was a “calamity.” The Russians boasted that they held tens of thousands of Austro-Hungarian prisoners (compared with only two thousand Germans). Taking stock of this broken army, Hindenburg complained to the kaiser that he was being compelled to rely on “an indecisive, inferior Austrian army.”61
In Vienna, Bolfras heard from Conrad that nothing more could be expected in the east. In a Red Cross hospital nearby, a journalist sadly watched the demise of an Austrian soldier just returned from Poland. With green pus weeping from a thigh wound, the soldier lay helplessly as the surgeon slit the infected area and drained it: “The patient first pants, then moans, then a hoarse cry, and then, as he lost hold of himself completely, he began a hideous sort of sharp yelping, like a dog.”62 Jaded army surgeons were now referring to troops as “pus tanks,” and the Russians had a three-to-one advantage in this indispensable commodity, with 120 Russian divisions—each consisting of sixteen battalions—against 60 Austro-Hungarian and German divisions of just a dozen battalions each.
Shuttered in his villa in Teschen, Conrad became weirdly obsessed with protocol. He refused to enter any situation in which he might appear subordinate to a German. Invited to Berlin by Falkenhayn to discuss strategy, Conrad begged off, citing his duties in Teschen, and sent a major in his place, a pointed insult that was taken as such by the Germans. At German great headquarters in Mézières, the Austrian liaison, Stürgkh, was aghast: “I began to see in this behavior of Conrad’s a great danger to the good relations that were needed to maintain the German alliance as well as the interests of the monarchy.” Stürgkh wrote Bolfras, who promised to undertake the damage control that was now becoming necessary each time Conrad expressed himself. When Conrad had journeyed to Breslau to meet the kaiser during his ten-day visit to the Eastern Front, he had refused to talk shop with Falkenhayn there too, explaining to the disbelieving Germans that he was there merely to function as a part of the archduke’s entourage, not as Austro-Hungarian chief of staff.63
Conrad shouldn’t have hidden himself in Fritzl’s Hoflager when he should have been firming up plans with the Germans, but it was hard to see how better relations between the two headquarters were going to do much to improve the combat effectiveness of the Austro-Hungarian army. Berchtold worried that there was no more common cause for the Germans and Austrians anyway. Vienna was fighting the Russians and Berlin was fighting the British, pouring disproportionate resources into the Ypres salient and even contemplating a naval and air invasion of England. The Germans had killed, wounded, or captured a third of the three-hundred-thousand-man British Expeditionary Force by November 1914, and calculated that London would soon break under the pressure.64 Austrian diplomats were not so sure, and spoke of an irrational Britenhass (hatred of Britain) in German headquarters and a Tirpitz-Krieg (a land and naval war structured by Grand Admiral Alfred Tirpitz) that would divert scarce reserves from the Eastern Front to the west.65 The monstrous war the Germans and Austrians had welcomed in July was spinning out of control, and the Central Powers, hardly on speaking terms, were in grave danger of losing it.
chapter13
Serbian Jubilee
It was hard to say what was worse: the strategic impact of Austria-Hungary’s string of defeats or the political humiliation. Strategically, the Habsburg monarchy was a shambles, gouged open and bleeding everywhere it had engaged an enemy. Thanks to the continued activity of the Serbian army, Austria-Hungary’s southeastern border remained embattled and its land connection to the allied Ottoman Empire stopped on the opposite bank of the Danube. Vienna’s continuing fecklessness made it harder to coax neutrals into the German camp. If Serbia remained in play, Italy would be tempted to open a third front against Austria. Rumania and Greece, tilting toward the Entente, would tilt even further. Why would Bulgaria, a natural Austrian ally because of its losses to Serbia in the Second Balkan War, risk joining the Central Powers if big Austria could not even beat little Serbia?1
A map discovered by Austrian troops in an abandoned Semlin (Zemun) bookshop during Potiorek’s September invasion of Serbia hinted at the fate that awaited Austria-Hungary if it did not find ways to strike down Russia and Serbia. The map, titled “The New Division of Europe,” had been reproduced from a Russian newspaper and widely sold in Serbia; it depicted Germany broken into northern and southern confederations and Austria-Hungary abolished, its eastern provinces given to Russia, Rumania, the Czechs, and the Hungarians and its southern provinces to the Serbs and the Italians, the Serbs harvesting the lion’s share: everything from the Greek border north to southern Hungary and westward to the Adriatic.2
To avert this fate, Emperor Franz Joseph had wearily authorized a third invasion of Serbia. In mid-October, the Austrians gathered another two hundred thousand troops at the now familiar bend of the Sava and Drina and thrust again into Serbia. Potiorek brimmed with confidence: “Soldiers of the Fifth and Sixth Armies,” he proclaimed, “the goal of this war is nearly attained—the complete defeat of the enemy.” He deftly elided the bungled invasions of August and September into this more promising one, and predicted that “the three-month campaign is almost over; we must only break the enemy’s last resistance before the onset of winter.”3
This was a serious invasion, if only because the Serbs—fighting their third war in as many years—had finally exhausted their shell stocks and had little hope of resupply from their
allies, who could find no easy way to ship munitions or anything else to landlocked Serbia. All of Serbia’s combat units had been halved by the nonstop fighting. On October 27, the commander of the Serbian Second Army looked helplessly at the advancing Austrians and wired Putnik: “We have yet to receive shells; the enemy is bombarding our trenches and we have nothing to fire back; my men are dying under this fire and I have no reserves to replace them with, and no shells to limit the casualties; I thus feel incapable and powerless, and request removal from this command.” Putnik denied the request but ordered all of his units to hold as long as they could and then retreat, a process that was far harder now than it would have been in summer because the autumn rains had turned the dirt roads to quagmires that would swallow up any guns and wagons.4
In Vienna and Sarajevo, Austro-Hungarian officials took victory for granted and planned major changes. Belgrade would be occupied, and Serbia would be used as plunder to expand Austria and bribe the Balkan neutrals. The Rumanians would get northeastern Serbia around Timok; the Bulgarians would get the southeast corner of the kingdom, while the Austrians would absorb everything west of the Morava as well as Scutari (Shkodër) and Durazzo (Durrës), taking care to break up “all compact masses of the Serbian element.” Those “compact masses”—the Serbian population—would be removed or thinned by Austrian “colonists” (Colonisten), who would “change the psychology” of the region, “making Serbia more Habsburg” and less Serbian in outlook. Ludwig Thallóczy, the Finance Ministry section chief who effectively ran Bosnia-Herzegovina, wrote Potiorek in late October to recommend “the West Europeanization of the Serbs with a strong hand” the moment the kingdom was defeated in battle.5
Potiorek’s plan to defeat the kingdom in battle was the usual: converging attacks from north and west aimed at the city of Nis, which had been Serbia’s capital since July and a crucial transportation hub for the army. Potiorek’s left-hand group, the Fifth Army, would drive for Valjevo and the line of the Kolubara River, while his right-hand group, the Sixth Army, would thrust again into the Jagodna heights and outflank the Kolubara line from the south. Sited in the Morava Valley, Nis was a principal station on the Orient Express to Constantinople and a vital intersection for Serbian units moving north and south. Nis also served as a clearinghouse for Serbian munitions from the nearby arsenal at Kragujevac. If it fell, the Austrians would cut the kingdom in two and effectively disarm the scattered Serbian army. “Educate the troops about the goal of this campaign,” Austrian general Claudius Czibulka told his officers on November 9. “And educate them before they go into battle.”6 The Austrians were trying to keep morale up despite the repeated failures and worsening weather. Interrogations of Serbian POWs taken in the September offensive suggested that Serbian morale was also slipping. Serbian enlisted men complained that they had not been fed or paid adequately, and that tax collectors had “taken the last cow from their stalls at home.” They ridiculed Prime Minister Pasic for leading the country into war, and spoke of regular abuse by their “brutal officers.”7 This was music to Potiorek’s ears and seemed to confirm his optimism.
Rain had swamped the valleys and covered the mountains in snow since early October. Waiting in reserve on the north bank of the Sava, Prince Felix Schwarzenberg pitied the troops on the other side. “At least we get to sleep under a roof; the poor troops in Serbia are sleeping in the open, sitting in the cold and muck, in wet uniforms. It must be awful.”8 It was perhaps most awful for the wounded, who could not be evacuated to hospitals on the muddy roads. They were left on straw in peasant huts, writhing in pain, thousands of them, all over the backroads of Serbia, wherever a battle had flared. Typhus, carried into Serbia in the belly of some Austro-Hungarian trooper, would end up killing one-third of the population of Serbia. For now, it bloomed through the army, and these casualties were also left behind. Even when space on wagons was available, the typhoid cases were not loaded, for fear that they’d infect the healthy men and supplies.9
Running low on everything—troops, guns, ammunition, and food—General Putnik now disclosed that “all of my strategy consists in placing the Serbian national mud between the enemy’s fighting line and his supplies.”10 The Austrians plunged eagerly into the morass, making the kind of early progress that they had only dreamed of in August and September. Sabac fell, as did Ljesnica and Loznica. None of it was easy, not least because Austrian commanders were ordered to be “extremely frugal with shells so that all supplies of this commodity can be sent to the North Army.”11 The 29th Division had to fight its way into Sabac and then through the town, absorbing hundreds of casualties as they drove with the bayonet at Serbs lying prone and firing from behind the town’s railway embankment. Habsburg infantry officers were strictly forbidden to order artillery fire: “Because of the shell shortage, only artillery officers are empowered to decide whether or not to fire.”12 But the Fifth Army did at least get across the Sava and Drina and begin tramping south and east.
The Hofburg was pleased, Bolfras writing Potiorek that he expected the Serbs to break once they came “beak to beak” with the Austrians again.13 When the largely Croatian 16th Regiment did come beak to beak with a Serbian unit on November 1, the Serbian infantry were ordered to attack, and refused. “Why don’t you attack?” mutinous Serbs were overheard calling to their officers.14 Austro-Hungarian intelligence brimmed with these good tidings: the Serbs were down to their last two hundred thousand men; Serbian troops had mutinied in Nis; units had embodied their last reserves; the army was out of rifle ammunition; sixty-year-olds were being called to the colors; all the younger Serbs had been killed or wounded.15
Frank’s VIII Corps pushed into Serbia from the elbow of the Sava and the Drina. His XIII Corps crossed the Drina at Loznica and took Mount Cer and its commanding plateau from a Serbian rearguard, while the XV and XVI Corps of the Sixth Army crossed the Drina further south and ascended the Jagodna heights. Here the fighting was as desperate and vicious as in September. Determined to attrite the Austrians as much as possible, the Serbs defended good trenches with artillery and machine guns, and then, when the fighting climaxed on November 8, they rolled down logs and boulders as well, flung rocks and grenades, and even fired their flare pistols at the Austrians.16 The attacking Austrian troops suffered as many wounds from blasted shards of rock as from shell splinters.
Krupanj and Rozhan, which had taken a terrible toll earlier, fell in the first week of November. The Austrian 78th Regiment took the heavily defended Gucevo heights on November 6. It was the key point of Putnik’s defense line, and the Serbs had held the Austrians there for forty-nine days. Employing tactical surprise, an Austrian “storm company” of two hundred men infiltrated the Serbian trenches in the predawn darkness, subdued them with grenades, then called up the line infantry, which beat the Serbian reserves in a race to the trenches and then drove them off the height, taking a rare bag of prisoners as well: six officers, six hundred men, a cannon, and three machine guns. A grateful Emperor Franz Joseph, relieved to have something to celebrate, showered the unit with 334 medals for bravery, and paid each of the storm company survivors a fifty-crown bonus.17
At long last, the war with Serbia seemed to be turning in Austria’s favor. Meeting with Regent Alexander and Prime Minister Pasic, General Putnik described the Serbian army’s situation as dire, and even mentioned the possibility of a separate peace with the Austrians.18 The Serbs yielded Valjevo, the main communications hub of western Serbia, on November 15. Potiorek, who had planned to trap and annihilate the Serbs there, nevertheless celebrated in a communiqué that was broadcast across the empire: “After a violent nine-day battle that followed nine days of marching through mountains, swamps, rain, snow and cold, the brave troops of the Fifth and Sixth Armies have taken the line of the Kolubara and put the enemy to flight.”19
With the Serbs retreating toward Kragujevac, Potiorek straddled the Kolubara River at Valjevo and attributed the South Army’s surprising success to his own “relentless pursuit.” He fa
ncied himself a modern-day Murat, riding the Serbs into the ground with his saber in their back. Potiorek now invited the press corps, which he’d prudently confined to Austrian territory, to enter Serbia and “bear witness to the decisive battle.” Crossing the Macva to reach the fronts around Valjevo and Belgrade, the journalists were shocked by what they saw. William Shepheard of New York’s Evening Sun reported eighteen scorched, abandoned towns overseen by pitiless Habsburg officers: “They do not admit that they have killed women, but they do admit that they have killed hundreds of civilians. One Hungarian officer proudly showed me a six-foot rake that he used to perform the executions.”20 Quibbles from Austro-Hungarian officers seemed to confirm the worst: “Our goal,” General Franz Daniel reminded his troops in late October, “is the destruction of the enemy armed forces, not the destruction of the entire enemy population.” He called for an end to rapes, plunder, the desecration of enemy corpses, and the mistreatment of enemy wounded.21
A Mad Catastrophe Page 35