A Mad Catastrophe

by Geoffrey Wawro

  With many regiments completely wiped out, the Habsburg army was increasingly reliant on very young and very old conscripts.100 The Austrian draft brought in eight hundred thousand new recruits in late 1914, and the 2.3 million men who had been deemed unfit for service in the decade before the war were called back for another look. Training was perfunctory at best—just shooting, digging, attacking, and exposure to platitudes like this one: “Victorious men become brave men; a happy soldier is worth double” (Leute siegen, mutizieren lassen; ein lustiger Soldat ist doppelwert).101 Now only the physically disabled, war industry workers, priests, and civil servants were exempted from service. So many howitzers, field guns, shells, and rifles had been left on the battlefields in Galicia and Serbia that Austria’s industry could hardly fill the gaps. But with just 303,000 effectives left on the Eastern Front and fewer than 100,000 around Serbia, Austria-Hungary’s material needs were far lighter than normal. Some of Austria’s cavalry regiments had to be dismounted and reclassified as “foot cavalry” for the duration of the war because the loss of 150,000 horses in 1914 could not be made good. German officers at Teschen remarked on Conrad’s paranoia, “fatalism,” and “loss of confidence.” He was now blaming everything on the Germans, whom he called Austria’s “secret enemy.”102

  While Potiorek had been losing on the Balkan Front, the situation on the Eastern Front had only gotten worse. Russia had by now built to a breathtaking strength of 170 divisions, which were spread across fifty-three corps and sixteen armies of a quarter million men each.103 Against this eastern horde, the Central Powers had just sixty divisions in twenty-eight corps. Limply, Stuttgart’s Neue Tagblatt pretended that the defeat in Serbia didn’t matter all that much because the ruin of yet another Habsburg army merely meant that what remained would finally be turned against Russia: “The episode in Serbia conforms to the highest principle of strategy: concentrate all forces on that spot where you wish to seek a decision.”104 Unfortunately for the survivors of this blundering campaign, who would shortly be packed off to the Eastern Front, the “spot” chosen by Conrad for a decision in the east would be even more desolate and hopeless than the one they were leaving.

  chapter14

  Snowmen

  The scandal of the latest Austrian defeat rippled across Europe. Serbia had somehow repulsed a third Austro-Hungarian invasion. The German plan to “win on the Bug by winning on the Seine” lay in ruins, and indeed the armies of the Central Powers had failed to reach either the Seine or the Bug. The Habsburg Empire looked fatally weakened by its relentless defeats and million casualties. Outnumbered on the Russian front and crushed in Serbia, the Austrians were plainly on their last legs. If the Dual Monarchy collapsed, the Germans would probably go under too. Unable thus far to win in the west, how would Berlin wage a two-front war without Austro-Hungarian manpower? The Germans would have to defend their western and eastern borders alone, break the tightening British naval blockade, and fend off yet another great-power army, which—taking stock of the Austrian defeats—was poised to enter the fray.

  The Italians now began preparing in earnest for war, and the Germans rushed the sixty-five-year-old Prince Bernhard von Bülow, who’d been the kaiser’s chancellor until 1909, to Rome as their new ambassador to twist arms and forestall Italian intervention. In Vienna, Berchtold took for granted that Bülow would try to trade Austro-Hungarian territory to Rome in return for continued Italian neutrality. In Teschen, Conrad spoke the obvious: Austria-Hungary could not bear the addition of an Italian front to its Russian and Serbian fronts. It may have been his only sensible observation in the entire war.

  Count István Burián, Tisza’s candidate to replace an increasingly distraught Berchtold at the Foreign Ministry, traveled to German great headquarters in Mézières to quash arguments from the kaiser and Falkenhayn that Austria immediately cede Trieste, South Tyrol, or Dalmatia to the Italians to keep them out of the war. It was a sad predicament for a monarchy that still liked to call itself the “Wall of the Germans” (Vormauer des Germantums) in the east.1 “Austria-Hungary has often been humbled, but never like this,” the Times of London observed. “Beaten in Serbia, all Galicia lost, Austria’s political and military future is in Germany’s hands and Austria’s generals may soon be replaced with Germans.”2 In fact, by the beginning of 1915 Austria-Hungary had been reduced to German vassalage by the defeats of 1914. The emperor sent Archduke Karl to Falkenhayn’s headquarters in France in January to reassure the Germans that the Habsburg army was not really falling apart.3 The Germans thought otherwise. “When,” the German foreign secretary wrote his ambassador in Austria, “will Vienna awaken to the fact that its arrogance and pretensions are not sustainable at a time when even the lowly Serbs can inflict such awful blows?”4

  The Russians too took heart from the latest Austrian defeat. With little to fear from the Habsburg army, the Russians planned to attack the Germans in 1915—to invade Silesia, occupy Breslau, aim again for Berlin, and take pressure off the Western Front. To secure both flanks for the push, Grand Duke Nikolai advanced his right toward East Prussia, and with his left pushed into the Carpathians, striving to secure the passes and drive the Austrians down into the Hungarian plain, where they would be helpless to interfere with a Russian invasion of Germany. Falkenhayn had hoped to shift eight to ten corps from east to west in 1915 to break the stalemate there, but now he realized that he couldn’t, because of the Austro-Hungarian defeats in Serbia, Galicia, and Poland. The Germans were trapped in an increasingly hopeless war of attrition.5

  Conrad, who was taking delivery of the shattered remnants of Potiorek’s South Army, pleaded for real (i.e., German) reinforcements but was rebuffed. Falkenhayn—who met in Berlin with Conrad on New Year’s Day 1915—protested that nothing could be spared for the east because already he “was outnumbered two to one in the west.” The meeting, in the German War Ministry, exposed all of the rancor dividing the two allies. “Your Third Army,” Falkenhayn said, “it advanced well to begin the war, but now keeps retreating, it’s gone back another 50 kilometers.” Falkenhayn and his staff insisted that Conrad “hold his current positions, face east,” and stop giving ground. “There just can’t be that many Russians facing you,” Falkenhayn added, to which Conrad replied that indeed there were.

  Even worse, Conrad added, the Russians had replaced their casualties and brought units back to full strength with fresh reserves. “You need to do what we do,” Falkenhayn said, “bring your units back up to full strength with sick and lightly wounded men.” That’s “our practice too,” Conrad countered, “but we’ve been fighting for five months with enormous casualties: the number of badly wounded, dead and severely sick troops has ripped huge holes in our army.”

  Falkenhayn was unsympathetic; the retreating, he repeated, had to stop, to which Conrad peevishly replied: “Didn’t your army begin the war in the west with its own great retreat, all the way back to the Meuse?” That, Falkenhayn objected, was an error ordered by his predecessor. “But a retreat is a retreat,” Conrad jeered. “If you really could have held, then you wouldn’t have retreated!” They parted in a foul mood. “Nothing came of the meeting,” Conrad recorded. “We both stuck to our original positions; I have a feeling that they’ve got nothing to give us. He said he’s going to speak with Ludendorff before making a final decision.”6

  That afternoon, Conrad and Falkenhayn met again for two and a half hours. This time Ludendorff joined them. Falkenhayn reiterated that he had no troops to spare for the Austrians or anyone else; he had already dispatched critical replacements to the east, and was only holding off an enemy “twice as large” in the west by “every sort of finesse, including a wall of barbed wire and other obstacles that were keeping the French at bay.” Germany’s first new trained formations, four corps, would be available in February. The generals argued over the best use for them, Ludendorff and Falkenhayn agreeing that the Central Powers were far more vulnerable to a long war of attrition than the maritime Entente. “Because of
the power of the neutrals and England, we have to break out; we cannot lie passively behind barbed wire. We have to strike a blow somewhere,” Falkenhayn insisted.

  But Conrad, Ludendorff, and Falkenhayn couldn’t agree on where to land the blow. France and Flanders were killing grounds. East Prussia was too remote from the Galician front. Poland lacked roads and a reliable path across the heavily defended Vistula. The Carpathians were too steep, cold, and snowy. “We’ve already spilled so much German blood,” Ludendorff grumbled, “and still no breakthroughs.” Conrad seethed; “I felt like saying,” he later complained, “that our blood is worth just as much as yours.” After much haggling, Ludendorff offered three divisions to aid Conrad. Ludendorff then used that small concession to Conrad to justify a demand to Falkenhayn for Germany’s four new corps, proposing a joint Austro-German offensive in the east to make use of the manpower. Falkenhayn countered that nothing substantial could be gained in the winter snows; however, having failed to win the war in France, his clout with the kaiser was waning. Thus, Ludendorff’s Ostheer successfully wrung the four corps from the Western Front with the argument—unassailable in view of Austrian rottenness—that Conrad’s last-ditch counteroffensive in the Carpathians needed support on its northern flank.

  Hindenburg and Ludendorff vowed to finish off the Russians before the spring thaw unfroze the White Sea and permitted the delivery of American supplies and munitions to Russia. With the Baltic and Black Sea ports blockaded, Russia had to rely on what little matériel it could import through Archangel, which was never ice-free for more than half the year. “Russia,” General Nikolai Golovine observed, “became a sort of barred house, which could be entered only through the chimney.”7 Everything was in ludicrously short supply. The British military attaché reported from Petrograd in 1915 the incredible fact that the entire Russian army—five million men, deployed from Estonia to Ukraine—possessed just 650,000 rifles. Others estimated the number of Russian rifles at just over 1 million. Whatever the actual number, millions of Russian troops were standing around more or less uselessly, waiting for comrades to be struck down by wounds or disease in order to have their rifles.

  Golovine, quartermaster general of the Russian Ninth Army, recalled that rifles were so scarce that Southwest Front headquarters had directed him to arm his infantry with long-handled axes and call them “halberdiers.”8 The halberdiers wouldn’t even have the benefit of artillery. A Russian artillery officer in the Carpathians reported that divisional headquarters had sent his battery the following command: “Report immediately upon whose authority you fired twelve shrapnel rounds the other day.”9 Russia’s dire shortage of everything explains the survival of Austria-Hungary into 1915 more than any other single factor. Had the Russians ever been fully armed and supplied, they would easily have knocked Austria out of the war. But they weren’t, and Ludendorff glimpsed hope—not in Austria’s powers but in Russia’s weaknesses. Just as the Germans had brought on the war to “save” Austria-Hungary, they now intensified it to revive the monarchy, Ludendorff warning Falkenhayn in January 1915 that “Austria’s emergency is our great incalculable.”10 It had to be fixed.

  Conrad mixed the German divisions loaned by Ludendorff with an equal number of Austrians and formed the deutsche Südarmee, or German South Army, in the middle Carpathians. Austro-Hungarian ineptitude having been amply demonstrated, the Südarmee was placed under a German commander, General Alexander von Linsingen. With big Austrian armies on either flank, it would drive out of the mountains to the relief of Przemysl. Ludendorff would support the operation by striking out of East Prussia with the four new corps brought from France (General Hermann von Eichhorn’s Tenth Army) as well as the Eighth Army (now entrusted to General Otto von Below) and Mackensen’s Ninth Army.

  The Russians had eighteen corps on the Vistula, but their plans were divided as usual. Ivanov and Alekseev continued to insist that the shortest road to Berlin lay on the Southwest Front, over the carcass of Austria-Hungary. Przemysl could be taken, the neutral states won for the Entente, and Hungary invaded, wrenching it and its food supplies away from Austria and collapsing the Central Powers from the flank. Ruzski’s Northwest Front, buttressed by Danilov in the Stavka, pushed back, insisting that truly decisive results could only be attained against the Germans in East Prussia. Central Poland, the Northwest Front advocates asserted, was barred by German fortifications, and the Carpathians in winter were a natural fortress. Ruzski’s new chief of staff, General Gulevich, added little to the debates, according to the British military attaché. He “was a gross, fat man, who had put on much flesh since the war started, for he rested in bed daily from two till five p.m.”11

  Once more, Grand Duke Nikolai permitted his own gross, fat strength to be frittered away by the opposing commands. Ivanov got thirty-one divisions in the Carpathians and eighteen more divisions—the Fourth and Ninth Armies—in the central plains along the Vistula. Ruzski got fifteen and a half divisions in East Prussia and twenty-three and a half divisions (the First, Second, and Fifth Armies) around Lodz.12

  None of these armies had the resources to deal a fatal blow. Russian troops were still hungry and poorly equipped, and ammunition remained a constant worry. The chief of the War Ministry’s Artillery Department, General Kuzmin Karavaev, had broken down and wept in a meeting with Sukhomlinov, begging the influential war minister “to make peace, owing to the shortage of artillery ammunition.” The grand duke, who was in only theoretical command of the army, knew none of this; the byzantine regulations of the Russian army meant that requests for equipment, ordnance, and other supply went directly from the fronts to the sixty-six-year-old Sukhomlinov in Petrograd, and Sukhomlinov shared none of this information. He was notoriously venal, increasing his personal fortune tenfold as minister of war, and was taking a cut from every army contract, or just sequestering public funds for future embezzlement. As the ammunition crisis bit, Sukhomlinov was sitting—unbeknownst to anyone outside his entourage—on two hundred million unspent gold rubles that had been appropriated for shells and bullets.13

  If the ill-equipped Russians could batter their way through the Carpathians and into the Hungarian plain, they would seize the granary of the Central Powers at the very moment that food shortages caused by the Entente blockade were beginning to be felt in Germany and Austria-Hungary. It was, however, a big if. With the large detachments to East Prussia and Central Poland, the Russians arrayed just forty-five divisions along the Carpathians, against fifty-two reconstituted Austrian and German divisions.14

  Russian efforts to punch through the Carpathians were slowed by terrain and weather, a Russian artillery officer recalling a night in December 1914 when his battery had required four hours to climb a half mile, and that was with twelve horses pulling each gun and a dozen men pushing. With the Austrians entrenched, the Russians attacked as witlessly in the Carpathians as the Austrians had in Galicia. Giving fire support to one such attack, a Russian artillery officer wonderingly recorded the scene: “The gray-haired regimental commander sat on a stump in the trench with the telephone in his hand and delivered his orders: one company was to attack ‘frontal.’ He said this knowing full well that within twenty-five minutes every man in the company would be dead or mutilated; he ordered the other companies to go forward in reserve, which merely meant that they would be killed later, not immediately.”

  From his battery position on a cliff overhead, the Russian officer watched the attack. The first company was shot down, then a second: “We saw 500 men killed in less than an hour on the green-brown slopes.” By late December, the Russians were pulling back, retreating over the same difficult ground they had so recently conquered. “The retreat was tough,” Lieutenant Fedor Stepun recalled. “Austrians all around us and two other terrible enemies: the utter incompetence of our generals and the weather—icy roads and muddy quagmires wore out our horses; they would just stop in their tracks and refuse to go on.” Pausing in a mountain village to rest, Stepun’s column was taken under ac
curate fire by an Austrian battery. Looking up, they saw an Austrian soldier and a civilian directing fire from the church steeple. As the civilian was led away, Stepun looked him over: “He was an old Jew, ancient old, and he knew that he was about to die; as he passed I glanced at his face and had to look away immediately—I have never in my life seen such an expression of terror and despair in the eyes of a man.” Arriving on the San River, having retreated for five days out of the mountains, Stepun’s battery was crossing back to the east bank on a pontoon bridge when an iceberg struck the bridge and heaved the entire unit—men, horses, guns, and ammunition wagons—into the frigid water below. “Even the weather,” Stepun remarked, “seems to have turned against us.”15

  The Russians attacked as witlessly in the Carpathians as the Austrians had in Galicia. Here entrenched Austrian infantry shoot down a Russian assault in December 1914.

  Credit: Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, Wien

  To throw the Russian army out of the Carpathians and reestablish a solid foothold in Galicia, Conrad counterattacked, sending three armies forward on January 23. One Austro-Hungarian army, Boroevic’s Third, would take the passes of the western Carpathians; Linsingen’s Südarmee would seize the central passes, and further east General Karl von Pflanzer-Baltin’s Army Group (which would shortly be renamed the Seventh Army) would attack through the Bukovina to strike the Russian flank. As Falkenhayn had predicted, nothing substantial could be expected in this ice-bound wilderness, even the usually exculpatory Austrian general staff history judging the counteroffensive toward Przemysl—directed by Conrad from his comfortable headquarters in Teschen—“a cruel folly.” Without Franz Ferdinand to boss him around, Conrad was finally coming into his own as a Wallenstein, Bolfras bitterly complaining in early 1915 that “we are being ruled by the AOK.”16