Putnik, meanwhile, was raking together his last reserves and still giving ground, hoping to overstretch the Austrians. For once the Austrians gathered in enemy prisoners, hundreds of them, many dressed in civilian clothes, “the better to sneak off to their homes,” as Potiorek jeered in a letter to Bolfras.22 Putnik instructed Serbian officers to keep their men in trenches as much as possible; once on the move, they would desert.23 Potiorek spent the next dozen days bringing units across the Kolubara and fighting around Ljig. New Austrian shells showed a distressing tendency not to explode—sometimes as many as half of them—but that problem remained manageable because by now the Serbs had so little effective artillery themselves.24 Potiorek’s pontoon bridges lagged far behind and needed to be manhandled through the mud and slush to the front. The Serbs took advantage of the respite to withdraw toward Kragujevac and Arangjelovac, digging new defensive positions in the hills between the Kolubara and Morava valleys.
As the Austrians pushed their trenches closer, they began to notice that Serbian peasants were marking their positions for the Serbian artillery. To indicate infantry, Serbian shepherds would herd sheep and goats onto the open ground before the Austro-Hungarian trenches. To indicate artillery, they would drive cattle into the space. Others would indicate the Austrian strength with flags, waved side to side to indicate infantry (one wave per battalion) or up and down to indicate artillery (one wave per battery). Observing this from their trenches, Austro-Hungarian troops hollowed out the tips of their bullets to create dum-dums whose hideous wounds might deter where warnings hadn’t.25
The Habsburg army continued to struggle with the question of civilians. Units were ordered to “drive all Serbs before the front; not a single Serb can be allowed to remain behind the lines.” If any village signaled the approach of Austrians, troops were ordered “to burn the whole village down.” Komitadjis were to be shot on sight. Yet virtually every Serbian regular could by now be judged a komitadji because none of them had proper uniforms. An American journalist who had just arrived in Austrian-occupied Serbia from Przemysl described the “bestiality” of the Serbian war. Compared with the Russian front, atrocities were common here, and far worse than the ones committed by the Germans in Belgium, which he had also witnessed. The American ascribed it to “the unique Austrian hatred of Serbia.” He was particularly struck by the Austrian treatment of Serbian civilians and dead combatants: the former were routinely harassed and murdered, while the latter were heaved without burial or ceremony into open ditches and left to rot.26
Sweeping in on the right, the Austrian 4th Mountain Brigade took Uzice without resistance and captured three hundred cases of rifle ammunition, stacks of shells, and hundreds of rifles.27 When a Serbian runner blundered into an Austrian trench in the fog, he expressed relief: “Thank God, I was late anyway, and they’re shooting us for being late.”28 Other Serbian prisoners expressed pessimism about the kingdom’s chances: men, guns, and food were running out. Artillery batteries were down to six shells per gun. Serbian troops had been ordered to plunder their own villages to feed themselves and deny provisions to the oncoming Austrians. In those settlements, every second house was decked in mourning, and two-thirds of the women were dressed in widow’s weeds. It seemed that in the course of three Austrian invasions nearly the entire nation had been killed.29
“Austro-Hungarian troops are landing heavy blows; they have pushed the Serbs off the Drina and deep into the interior,” Berlin’s Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung exulted on November 21. “Our Austrian brothers are winning everywhere,” the Lokalanzeiger crowed; “one-third of the Serbian army has been destroyed.”30 The rare Austrian aviator who appeared over these battlefields in late November would have seen a continuous line of muddy pike gray from Obrenovac in the north all the way south to Uzice, as the Austrians pressed forward. Arangjelovac was the hinge between the Austrian armies, as it was between the Serbian forces: the Austrian Fifth Army and the Serbian Second Army north of the city, the Austrian Sixth Army and Serbian Third and First Armies south of it. The Russians, French, and British, having moved their legations from Belgrade to Nis, now moved them out of Serbia altogether, to Sofia. There Russian diplomats begged the Bulgarians to join the war against Austria, to which the Bulgarians marvelously replied: “But we fought the Turks for you in 1912, and our reward was to see Macedonia given to Serbia and Greece.”31
Serbia was utterly isolated; thinking the campaign all but over, Emperor Franz Joseph named General Stefan Sarkotic governor of Serbia on November 24.32 The general, formerly the Croatian commandant of Zagreb’s military district, could be counted on to repress Serbian nationalism with an iron hand: arrest nationalists, ban the Serbian flag, end the religious autonomy of the Orthodox Church, close the monasteries, and secularize (verstaatlichen) the Orthodox schools (but certainly not the Catholic ones).33 Berchtold rejoiced that the capture of Valjevo meant that “a major turning-point had been reached in our war with Serbia.”34 Enjoying his success, Potiorek called for a great Austro-Hungarian summit conference to decide how to divide and administer his “Serbian conquests.”35 Needless to say, the South Army commander was taking his eye off the ball at the worst possible moment. Already planning to encircle the Serbs on the Kolubara, he foolishly swung the already overextended left wing of the Fifth Army wide to seize the Serbian capital as well. Potiorek yearned to “lay the town and fortress of Belgrade at His Majesty’s feet” on December 2, the sixty-sixth anniversary of the old emperor’s coronation. “My intention is to seize Belgrade with Fifth Army while Sixth Army binds the enemy main force,” Potiorek wrote his generals on November 19.36
Potiorek should have heeded his Clausewitz, concentrated his entire army against the Serbian “main force,” and left Belgrade alone. His units were being ground down by disease and battle, battalions reporting their progress through the mountains thus: “We began the assault with 424 men; after three days we took the hill, but lost half our troops doing so.”37 But Potiorek was always a prickly, insecure man, and he now craved the plaudits that only Belgrade could provide. Potiorek described “panic” in the exiled Serbian government, and rising resistance to Pasic and the Radicals. The roads were full of refugees, and demoralized Serbian troops were deserting in growing numbers, or so Potiorek claimed. An Austrian agent in Nis reported that Serbian troops were cold and miserable, their only winter uniforms “bloodstained German and Austrian rags collected on the Eastern Front” and forwarded to the Serbs by the Russians.38
The first Austrian troops into Belgrade, Croats of the 6th Regiment, were shelled by their own artillery, which had not expected Austrian troops so soon. The Croats sent a squad into the Kalemegdan citadel to snatch down the Serbian flag and—an Austrian banner not being available—run up a white one. In this less-than-thrilling way the conquest was complete, the officers of the 6th rather dubiously assuring their superiors that “the streets rang with shouts of ‘Zivio Franjo Joszepo!’”—“Hail Franz Joseph!”39 Vienna celebrated the capture of Belgrade with flags, concerts, parades, illuminations, and a great placard in the city center that read: “The capital of enemy Serbia is in our hands!”
The cities of Germany celebrated too, Austria’s minister in Munich reporting jubilant crowds in front of the Habsburg legation and the appearance beneath his window of groups of Bavarian schoolchildren sweetly singing Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden. “For the fourth time in history Habsburg’s victorious banner flies over Belgrade,” the Austrian diplomat cheered. “Military circles and the press here are most impressed by the strategic significance of this: Belgrade as Austria’s Antwerp—as both a defensive bastion and a base for future operations by an entire army.” The door to Salonika and Constantinople, closed by Serbian resistance, was finally swinging open.40 Indeed, Vienna envisioned permanent control of Belgrade after the war: a modern fort, command of the Danube, an Austrian-run Orient Express to the Middle East, and a rebuilt city. This last aim was essential because Belgrade lay in ruins, its quays on the Danube burn
ed out and its principal buildings reduced to rubble by Austrian shelling.41
Potiorek basked in the attention. He boasted that he had killed at least thirty thousand Serbs and that there could be “no more than 80,000 left.”42 His troops were not only killing the combatants but were slaughtering noncombatants as well, the German-born Serbian general Paul Jurisic-Sturm registering Austro-Hungarian atrocities everywhere he went: men, women, and children roped together, disfigured, and then “horribly massacred,” women skinned alive or with their breasts lopped off. “Peasants say such sights are to be seen everywhere,” a shocked Jurisic-Sturm wrote to headquarters. Serbian officers in Ljesnica reported little boys hanged or shot, and women raped and dragged into slavery.43 In Britain, R. W. Seton-Watson, who had exposed the evils of Magyarization before the war, now began a collection for the Serbian people, his agents roaming the streets and trams of British towns to collect coins for a Serbian Relief Fund amid all the other horrors of this war.44
Potiorek’s rise to fame coincided with Conrad’s fall from grace, and the Balkan commander was relishing every minute of it. The emperor sent Potiorek a personal letter of thanks and a medal; the city fathers of Sarajevo named a street for him, and even the unfailingly fractious Budapest parliament proclaimed him Hungary’s savior. Bolfras’ deputy, General Ferdinand Marterer, was dispatched from the Hofburg to note down Potiorek’s soaring plans with a new deference. “We must decide now,” Potiorek lectured Marterer, “which pieces of Serbia the monarchy will annex when peace is dictated.” Potiorek wanted to take “Belgrade, Sabac, all of the Macva, as well as the commanding heights on the Serbian banks of the Drina, the lower Sava and the Danube from Belgrade to Orsova.” Marterer took down Potiorek’s thoughts and carried them back to the Hofburg.45
But Putnik was toying with Potiorek, who after the conquest of Belgrade continued to press into Serbia with an already overextended force. His men stumbled ahead in their threadbare uniforms through deepening fog, mud, and snow. Potiorek’s “relentless pursuit,” fliessendes Vormarsch, meant that his men never had time to rest, dry their boots, or even eat a hot meal.46 “Our count of sick men is rising,” the 9th Division reported. “We urgently need coats and Baschliks,” the last a reference to the felt hoods introduced by the Cossacks one hundred years earlier while chasing Napoleon’s invaders through the Russian snows. There would be no Baschliks, however, or even many coats. The monarchy was running out of textiles along with everything else, and could only provide the troops paper undershirts and paper socks—“service life two days to one week.” Austrian officers were unchivalrously ordered to strip Serbian prisoners of their coats and give them to the shivering Habsburg troops. Soldiers were told to wrap their shoes in straw or burlap sacks to keep the cold out. Many Austrian units complained that they were marching barefoot (their shoes had disintegrated), sleeping in the rough, and unable even to light fires to cook or warm up.47
“Situation unchanged,” the Hungarians of the 69th Regiment reported on November 24 from their trenches east of Bajna Basha. “We fired all night and they fired back; it keeps raining hard; it is very cold.”48 Some units had to be marched off the hills and into the valleys to warm up. Austrian rear echelons, stumbling along in their straw-wrapped shoes, found that men in front were abandoning machine guns, shells, and ammunition so as not to have to lug them through the mud and snow. An Austrian private in VIII Corps described despair in the ranks: “The terrain is horrible; we have no reserves; the soldiers are contemplating suicide.”49 Mud in the valleys and snow on the heights meant that critical supplies were not arriving. Horses died as the fodder ran out, which made it even harder to haul food, ammunition, and guns to the front lines. “There are no supplies and there is nothing to buy,” one officer after another lamented from their hilltop deserts. “The situation [of the 9th Division] is appalling,” a general wrote on November 25. “One encounters a parade of horribles: wounded men covered in blood, stinking carcasses, broken-down wagons, mud-encrusted troops. How much longer can this continue?” Half of the Austro-Hungarian cavalry fought on foot because their horses had perished.50
A new category appeared on Austrian casualty lists: marod, dienstuntauglich (broken, unusable). Soon this category began to outnumber killed, wounded, and missing. Austrian prisoners interviewed by an American diplomat in Nis revealed that they had eaten nothing but plums and water in the days before their capture. “The army leadership is killing us,” one Austrian officer scribbled. “We’ve been in nonstop action for a month, barefoot, without bread, living on horsemeat.”51 With their wagons and caissons stuck in the mud, troops were being forced to carry their usual loads plus shells and other supplies on their backs.
Potiorek was unfazed. He had moved closer to the front—to the five-star hotel in the Koviljaca spa near Loznica—and taken the stirring code name “Max-Olymp” for the end game. He had no patience with troop commanders requesting rest or blankets. He now sketched a war-ending stroke in the comfort of his office by a warm stove. He would send the XV and XIII Corps across the upper Ljig, seize Lazarevac, and trap what remained of the Serbian army. When Krauss explained that his men could not go on because they were sick, exhausted, and hungry, Potiorek coldly shot back: “Da sind sie immer! Aren’t they always?”52
Max-Olymp finally conceded the Sixth Army four rest days on November 30, but only because he wanted to pause to complete the occupation of Belgrade in time for the emperor’s jubilee. That simple task had turned into a grinding, vicious two-week battle. From Vienna, Berchtold congratulated Potiorek for his “outstanding achievements and glittering results,” but from faraway Teschen, Conrad and Archduke Friedrich criticized the pace of Potiorek’s operations: “Higher commanders are not displaying sufficient energy and courage, which is weakening our overall situation.”53
Nested in warm winter quarters like Potiorek’s, Conrad shared the South Army commander’s ignorance as to the real condition of the Austro-Hungarian army, which was exhibiting as little “energy” in Serbia as it was on its last little patch of Galicia. Indeed, Potiorek’s victory was about to unravel. As the Sixth Army gratefully stacked its rifles on the Kolubara and scrounged for food, firewood, and ammunition, King Peter Karageorgevic mounted the heights of Rudnik to inspire the army, and Putnik began a vast counterattack with two hundred thousand troops on December 2. The three divisions of the Serbian First Army converged with the three divisions of the Serbian Third Army on Valjevo, hammering the Austrian Sixth Army and the Fifth Army’s XIII Corps out of Razana and Valjevo. The four divisions of the Serbian Second Army closed from Obrenovac on the right and Lazarevac on the left around the Fifth Army’s VIII Corps. Putnik had finally been resupplied with shells and bullets and had brought up all of the reserves that were left in the kingdom: police, gendarmes, and troops that had been detached to the Bulgarian and Greek borders. He also knew, from indiscreet Austrian prisoners, the extent of Austria’s suffering and demoralization.54 Austro-Hungarian POWs had volunteered far more information on Potiorek’s order of battle than was necessary in their chats with Serbian interrogators. They described the near collapse of the Habsburg army: Austrian companies were at half strength or less, and there were few officers left to manage the men. They described Potiorek’s haste and how it had spread his men on a broad front, without reserves, to widen the pursuit and add Belgrade to the list of trophies. The Austrians, in short, were vulnerable everywhere to counterattacks; if the Serbs punched through anywhere, they might rout the entire exhausted, frozen army.55
The morale of the Serbs, meanwhile, remained surprisingly solid despite the long retreat and the dire prognostications of the Austro-Hungarian general staff. They had just been resupplied with Russian and French munitions—lugged across the Greek and Montenegrin borders—and were operating on shorter supply lines than the Austrians, close to their principal railway and depots. Hatred of Austria-Hungary was the glue that held them together. Serbian babies were famously greeted by their mothers with the words
“Hail, little avenger of Kosovo”—a reference to the defeat of 1389 that had only properly been avenged in 1912—and, as truant boys, were scolded thus: “You won’t liberate Macedonia that way!”56 As men, they continued this patriotic education. Sifting through captured papers in late October, Austrian staff officers found a Serbian Soldier’s Primer, which amounted to “a catechism of hate against Austria-Hungary.” The booklet contained a dozen injunctions, including: “You should hate no one so much as the Austrian,” “Bosnia-Herzegovina lives under slavery and must be liberated from Austrian rule,” “Dedicate your life to raising the Serbian flag in Sarajevo and Mostar,” and “We must hate the Austrians the way our fathers hated the Turks.”57
The fortitude of wounded Serbs treated in Austro-Hungarian hospitals astonished everyone. “They came in covered with mud and with fractures done up with twigs—just as they’d been dressed on the field. Sometimes a fractured hip would be bound with a limb from a tree, reaching from a man’s feet to his waist.”58 On the field, Serbian cold-bloodedness was no less remarkable; they entrenched everywhere in beautifully wrought trench lines with flanking positions and they lay in them perfectly still, without noise, light, or movement, until the Austrians walked right into them, to be mown down at point-blank range.59
Stunned by Putnik’s counteroffensive, Potiorek planned at the very least to hold the line of the Kolubara as Conrad’s army in the east was holding the Dunajec, but even that diminished ambition proved too much. Serbia’s First and Third Armies struck toward Valjevo and the Second Army toward Belgrade, their combined might crashing into the Austrian positions all at once. The battle would last for ten days, but it was effectively decided in the first day or two. “Forward, heroes!” Serbian officers cried as they scrambled over the top. “With faith in God!” The attack commenced all along the front at 7:00 a.m. on the third as the Serbs appeared like ghosts out of the fog, first startling the Austrians, then panicking them.60 The First Army pushed the Austrians out of strong positions with surprising ease, taking 410 prisoners, four howitzers, a machine gun, and a thousand shells.61 Having knocked the Austrians over the Lim on the third, the Serbians received orders to drive them over the Kolubara on the fourth, which they did.
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