A Mad Catastrophe
Page 39
With Przemysl well into its second siege and projected to exhaust its supplies by mid-March, Boroevic battered against the Russian trenches. Having lost control of the Uzsok Pass and its mile-long railroad tunnel to the Russians on New Year’s Day, Boroevic now lost half his strength in the struggle to recover it, which he accomplished on January 23. On January 26, the Südarmee attacked, but barely advanced the length of a football field that day, and each successive one. As one German officer put it: “Hannibal, it’s true, in the end crossed the Alps, but the Romans were not sitting there. We, on the other hand, must not only cross the mountains but drive the Russians out at the same time.”17
The whole operation was flawed, the Austrians and Germans massing just 175,000 troops with a thousand artillery pieces for a sequence of suicidal assaults on entrenched Russian positions.18 Officers in the Austro-Hungarian 19th Division tried to interest the men in the slaughter by charging them with the “defense of Hungary,” but most of these troops cared even less for Hungary than they did for Austria. Wallowing uphill through knee-deep snow, they launched daily attacks against Russian infantry and artillery on the high ground at Ökörmezö. They battled successively for tactical key points with fanciful names like Hohe Gorgon and Zalom, and took them only to be repulsed. They resumed the attack five days later, assaulting the same three-thousand-foot Russian-held heights they had stormed, taken, and lost the previous week. Snow that had been knee deep a few days earlier was waist deep now. Companies were down to a handful of men. By the end of January, the 6th Jäger Battalion, which had numbered 1,069 men on New Year’s Eve, had only 100 left. Even the fabled Jägergeist—the Spirit of the Huntsman—could not bear this blood, snow, ice, wind, and death forever. An alarming number of officers broke under the strain, sent home with only this explanation: zusammengebrochen, “shattered.”19
March companies of recruits and reservists arrived to flesh out the devastated Austro-Hungarian formations and looked in horror at the battlefield and their unimaginative officers, who continued to attack the heavily defended ridges. The Südarmee took the Kalinowce after three days of vicious battle in mid-February, but then lost it to Russian counterattacks on the fourth day. Efforts to attack under cover of darkness went no better; crossing snow, ice and frozen tarns, the troops made too much noise. “The sound of cracking ice betrayed us as we advanced toward the Russian wire,” a battalion of the Austrian 5th Division reported. “The enemy illuminated us as we got near and hit us from three sides,” killing or wounding fifty-one and generating seventy-four more “missing,” which the division—concerned for its reputation—assured corps were the honorably dead, but were probably just cold, tired men who lay up in the Russian wire until the shooting stopped, then surrendered.20 “The most puzzling thing about this war,” a Russian officer wrote his mother on January 21, “is that we don’t come to hate the enemy . . . I think it’s because we’re united by a common bond; we’ve all been forced to do the thing most alien to human nature: kill our fellow man.”21
General Joseph von Stürgkh, Austria’s military liaison on the Western Front, traveled to Teschen in February to visit the AOK, and was stunned by his reception. “So,” Conrad drawled, “what’s going on with our in-house enemy—the Germans—and what’s the latest thinking of the Comedian—the German kaiser?” Conrad then treated Stürgkh to a long tirade about the sins of German officers attached to the AOK: they “sniffed around,” meddled in his affairs, spied on him, denounced him in the press, spread malicious rumors, and threw a bureaucratic net over him to cramp his activity. Stürgkh left the meeting doubting Conrad’s sanity, writing, “He hated the Germans, and was nervous and overwrought, suffering from paranoia.” He was also a roaring hypocrite, writing Bolfras that he couldn’t understand why the contest between Falkenhayn and Ludendorff for the kaiser’s ear was so ferocious: “I personally believe that in times as serious as these, all personal ambitions must be put aside.”22
Conrad’s adjutant, Major Rudolf Kundmann, increasingly did the work of a babysitter. When Bolfras wrote Conrad requesting a report on the general staff chief’s visit to Berlin, Conrad ignored the request. Kundmann told him that he had to comply—it was the emperor asking, after all—and Conrad still refused. “He always says no first,” Kundmann wrote in his diary, “and only later realizes that others are right.” Conrad’s adjutant was suffering pangs of guilt at the predicament of their men in the mountains. “More cold and rain, we’ve deployed the troops in this filth for fourteen days at a time—they must be at the end of their resistance.” Conrad was too; he had the flu and assured Kundmann that he was “at death’s door.” Kundmann was nauseated by the spectacle: “He’s always exaggerating; others around here have had the flu; he’s not the only one, but of course whatever afflicts him is always an emergency; nothing else matters to him.” He paused, then added in English: “Egoist.”23
Buffeted in the Carpathians, Boroevic had far more than the flu to worry about. Having expressed doubts about the wisdom of Conrad’s attacks, he had half his front taken and given to General Eduard von Böhm-Ermolli, who had missed much of the war thanks to his wanderings between Serbia and Galicia and could be counted on to be less leery of reality on this front than the long-suffering Boroevic.24 Reality soon intruded. Böhm-Ermolli’s renewed push with the Second Army jumped off on February 17 and went nowhere in the snow and ice. Austrian shells would fall in the soft snow and fail to detonate. The infantry gained no ground and lost half its strength, forty thousand men, to cold and wounds. “You must imagine snow waist deep, the heights furrowed with trenches, the frosty balsam stillness split with screaming shells and shrapnel and the rat-tat-tat of machine guns,” a correspondent wrote.25
Generals would awake to discover that hundreds of their men and officers had frozen to death in their sleep. Hundreds more deserted, the German representative at Teschen worriedly noting that thousands of Austrians were “going into Russian captivity without firing a shot.” The worst offenders were the Czechs and Rumanians. One Czech regiment lost 1,850 of 2,000 men to desertion in a single night. Rumanian march battalions had their oath to the emperor covertly revoked by priests, who would urge them to desert to the Russians at the first opportunity.26
“You must imagine snow waist deep, the heights furrowed with trenches, the frosty balsam stillness split with screaming shells and shrapnel.” Here cold Austrian troops stand to in the Carpathians, awaiting a Russian attack.
Credit: Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, Wien
The object of the campaign—to seize the Carpathian passes, liberate the fortress of Przemysl, and deter Italian and Rumanian intervention in the war—seemed a cruel joke. Weapons had to be thawed before every operation.27 Troops simply stopped fighting. Officers could not locate them on horseback, because horses could not traverse the ice and drifted snow, and the apathetic, frozen men refused to march or fight anyway. A German officer sent to the headquarters of the Austrian 19th Division to request sketches of projected Austrian operations was unimpressed: “The operation sketches give a picture of great dissipation and splintering of forces . . . weak little pushes that lead nowhere. . . . The entire division has dissolved into bands of guerrillas.”28
Habsburg officer reports were at least as gloomy, because the men would not do anything without physical coercion. Troops passing a stuck wagon would refuse to push it out of the snow; asked directions by a mounted courier, they would gape silently. Ordered to help load wounded comrades into ambulances, they would shrug and walk on. Ordered to unload supply or ammunition wagons, they would vanish. Directed to clear a path of obstacles, they would slouch away. So many officers and NCOs had fallen dead or ill that control of any sort became difficult.29
The winter campaign in hilly country seemed even more futile than usual, for the moment trenches were finished they came under flanking fire from the ridges to right and left. A German liaison officer found the Austrian troops “exhausted and rotten,” the Slavic units “unreliable.”30 An
Austrian general deplored the “prowling and creeping around of his men,” who “no longer saluted, cleaned their rifles, shaved or cut their hair. . . . They wear dirty, ripped and mismatched uniforms. Don’t bother teaching them to fight,” he instructed his officers, “they learn that in battle; teach them to obey.”31
With their deep reservoirs of manpower, the Russians kept attacking, and the shriveling Habsburg army struggled to mount a defense. The 42nd Honvéd Division, which had experienced the worst of Serbia in the three invasions of 1914, now found itself moved with the XIII Corps to this front. General Johann Salis’ evaluation of the 42nd Honvéd on March 3 was calculated to lower expectations: “Only the divisional artillery and cavalry can be described as battle-capable. The value of the infantry has plummeted to a level where they’re good for nothing.” The men had been killed and replaced too many times; the march companies of newcomers were scattered around as needed, ruining what little ésprit de corps remained. Two of the division’s regiments, the 27th (Germans) and 28th (Czechs), had already been decimated (every tenth man shot) for yielding their positions without a fight—and they, not surprisingly, were no better after the experience than before it. “Really just a mob of demoralized men,” their commander noted.32 At Kobila in March and April 1915, the Czechs of the Austrian 81st Regiment described relentless attacks by “massed, howling Russian storm columns.” Entrenched on heights, the 81st recalled that “there wasn’t a day or night when the Russians didn’t try to surround us with their superior numbers. There were always more of them, and each attack was stronger than the last.”33
The butcher’s bill mounted, with no deterrent effect on the Russians. “The Russian soldier is stupid and spineless,” an Austrian manual reminded the troops, “which makes him excellent material in the hands of his despotic officers. Human life means nothing to them.”34 One Russian lieutenant, who stopped to chat with his platoon in the Carpathians, was struck not by their stupidity but by their by their complexity. “Children,” he said in the paternal way of the Russian officer, “why don’t you dig yourselves in?” “Your Honor,” the troops replied, “why should we? If we want trenches, we beat the Austrians and take theirs, because they’re so good at digging. And anyway, it’s hard to attack from a deep trench; from our shallow ones it’s so much easier.” Gauging their tone, which was half serious and half mocking, the Russian officer concluded: “Here you see just how these men combine irony, laziness and piety.”35 Such a blasé approach to battle surely helped to offset its horror. On March 31, after a typical Russian onslaught, the officers of the Austrian 81st Regiment counted four hundred dead Russians on the ground in front of their trenches. The Russians were carelessly losing this many men every day in this single sector, among hundreds like it—yet they kept coming.
The misery of Austrian units in the Carpathians was clearly only exceeded by that of Russian units, who were being driven into the Austrian guns like cattle. “Don’t worry about flanks and the rear, just worry about the front, that’s where the enemy will be,” Brusilov liked to intone, and the Russian officers seemed to have followed this advice literally, as one Austrian battalion commander’s record of the fighting confirmed: “March 18: Repelled frontal attack by two Russian companies, counted 50 Russian corpses on the parapet. March 19: Repelled strong enemy frontal attack, about 200 corpses on the parapet.”36
When the ground began to thaw, both sides pushed their trenches forward; this furious digging brought the front lines to within thirty feet of each other in some sectors. Clashes ensued: “For two hours we fired and threw grenades at each other from a range of [15 feet].” Issued hand grenades for the first time, many Austro-Hungarians accidentally blew themselves up, necessitating a redesign of the grenade in March.37 Men slunk away from this madness; in the minor engagement with hand grenades, four hundred unwounded Russians and five of their officers surrendered, and seventy-eight Austrians did too.38
Now and then the Russians would break through and tear apart neighboring Austrian units, forcing them out of their trenches and into the open. On one such day, April 2, an Austrian regiment was forced back on a village behind it. They lost fourteen officers and 802 men in the retreat, a third of their dwindling strength.39 Behind the lines, the Russians were devouring the occupied territory of Austria-Hungary. “Lately I’ve been requisitioning,” a Russian officer wrote on April 15, “which means taking the last cow from Galicians in trade for paper scrip, which is really just stealing. The Galician wife weeps, screams and kisses my hand, and when my men lead her cow away, she bites theirs.”40
The agony of Galicia seems not to have affected Conrad. His calendar at Teschen was peppered with entries like “The chief’s in the coffeehouse” or “The chief spent the morning reading the newspapers.”41 His mistress, Gina, came for a four-day visit in January, which drew hoots of abhorrence from Vienna and the army. The Austrian media, guided by the army’s press headquarters in the bucolic Vienna suburb of Rodaun, also carried on as if nothing were amiss. Jaunty stories of Austrian and German heroism and resourcefulness alternated with tales of Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian haplessness. There were cartoons of frightened Russian soldiers dressed in diapers trying to crawl past grinning Austrian infantry, with the caption “Masters of disguise.” There were cartoons of fish leaping out of the lakes and rivers of Poland and Galicia because of all the Russians who had fled and drowned in the water: “We’re pulling out,” one jolly fish says to its fellow as it alights on dry land, “because this water has become too polluted.”
The cartoonists made light of the horrors at the front. “Internal enemy, reports from the northern theater of war” showed a poor Austrian soldier scratching at lice in three frames and then stripping to his shorts and flinging his uniform away in the fourth: “our energetic attack finally forced the defender to yield his position.” But the reality was that these Habsburg troops were not only lousy; they were nasty. The Austrian press bureau reported the following story as light comedy: An Austrian and German patrol was looking for food “somewhere in southern Poland.” Every peasant turned them away with the same doleful explanation: “Njima panje! Njima! Moskal schätzko sabralle!” “Nothing, nothing at all, sir. The Russians have eaten everything.” This being southern Poland, the German was suddenly overcome with diarrhea, and he asked to use the toilet. The peasant stared, uncomprehending, and then answered, “No, sir! The Russians have eaten that too!” These eastern peasants were, in short, nearly as oafish as the shit-eating Russians: dim-witted, wide-eyed, unhygienic, so unlike the clean, orderly Germans and Austrians in their midst.42
Russian propaganda was no better. It exhorted the troops and the home front to keep going in “the War for the Hagia Sophia”—the great Orthodox basilica-turned-mosque in Constantinople, which must have seemed as remote from these blasted places as the moon. Reading Russian papers delivered to his dugout in Galicia in early 1915, a Russian officer was struck by the headline: “This war has indissolubly joined Russian, Pole, and Jew in a common struggle.” Laying the paper aside, the Russian pondered: “Let me tell you how it really is; we’re in Galicia, the first spring day, gorgeous weather, and clumping along the dirt track comes a battered old sleigh. Reclining in the sleigh is a young Cossack, his ponytail neatly arranged under his fur cap. Dragging the sleigh over the rocks and dirt is a mare so starved and skinny that her ribs are sticking out like busted springs from a mattress; astride the mare—face frozen with fear—is an old ‘Jew boy.’ Every now and then the Cossack lazily hits the Jew across the back with his knout, which is the signal for the Jew to whip the horse.”43
Having lost a million troops in Galicia and Serbia in the first four months of fighting, the Austrians lost another eight hundred thousand in the Carpathians—three-quarters of them from illnesses that would have been avoided in winter quarters. A winter war that had been justified in Vienna and Teschen by the need to relieve the garrison at Przemysl was about to lose that garrison along with the manpower equivalent of
a half dozen additional Przemysl garrisons trying (and failing) to rescue them.44
The Second Army alone lost forty thousand men to frostbite in the first days of March. Indeed, on daily casualty reports, losses from freezing (Erfrierung) far outnumbered battle casualties.45 The Südarmee had lost two-thirds of its strength. The Third Army was a wreck, and all of this at a time when Italy was on the verge of adding its weight to the war against Austria-Hungary.46 Russian probes into the passes in March and April were hardly resisted, forcing Conrad to appeal again for German troops.
Conrad’s position was becoming preposterous. “His awareness that our weaknesses could not be fixed without lavish German aid gnawed at his heart like a worm,” Stürgkh observed on a visit to the AOK. “He knew that Germany—providing this aid—would demand influence over Austrian leadership in return, and this fact demoralized him, and made him unsympathetic as an ally.” Conrad spent his days asserting “parity” with the Germans in his headquarters, snubbing them, sending their routine coalition paperwork back for revision, and insisting on an increasingly illusory Austrian independence.47 Ludendorff, who by now had developed a robust contempt for Conrad and the Austrians, nevertheless rode to the rescue again, dispatching the Beskidenkorps—troops from Ludendorff’s front as well as two and a half divisions from the Südarmee—to stem the Russian advance.