A Mad Catastrophe
Page 40
Przemysl fell back into Russian hands on March 22, 1915.48 This capped the fatuity of the Carpathian winter campaign, in which 800,000 men had been sacrificed to rescue the 150,000 famished inhabitants of a fortress, who now ran up the white flag and went into Russian captivity. A British witness to the Austrian surrender wrote that the garrison looked “half-starved . . . a more hopeless, dejected crowd I have never seen.” Their officers had clearly not shared the privations of the enlisted men; they had “a prosperous and well-fed look, and, according to the inhabitants, had lived in every luxury.”49 American correspondent Stanley Washburn crossed the ninety miles from Lemberg to Przemysl—“the road deep in mud and blocked with prisoners being evacuated”—and was also struck by the contrasts inside the fortress. The officers looked healthy and untroubled by defeat. “To observe them chatting gaily on streets . . . it was hard to realize that their horses were eaten or their troopers were Russian prisoners.”
Those troopers were faint with hunger. In the course of the siege, the Austro-Hungarians had eaten up the food stocks, then begun on the transport horses, then eaten the cavalry horses, and finally every dog and cat in the city. Austrian officers had withheld (and fed) their personal horses until just ten hours before the surrender, when they too were all slaughtered, not to feed the starving enlisted men, but to keep the horses out of Russian hands. One of the first Russian officers to enter Przemysl after the capitulation described “the most horrible sight I’ve ever seen in war . . . the Hungarian soldiers, crazed for want of food, their hands and faces smeared with blood as they devoured the raw and dripping bits of flesh, gouged with their knives and fingers from the dead bodies of newly-killed horses.”50
An even greater scandal played out in Vienna, where one of the monarchy’s ancient regiments—the 28th, recruited in the region of Prague—was formally dissolved in April 1915 by order of the emperor. The entire regiment, which was largely Czech, had left its place in the line in the Carpathians to surrender to the Russians, only to discover that the trench they thought was full of Russians was actually full of German infantry. Fifty officers and men were put on trial for high treason; eight were hung, the rest sentenced to hard labor. The troops of the line were first decimated, with every tenth man shot, and then dispersed to other units.51
Here was the crisis of the monarchy. The Austro-Hungarian army had suffered two million casualties and achieved nothing. Four Habsburg armies of forty-two divisions had been transported into the Carpathians and destroyed, more by Austria’s own inept hand than anyone else’s.52 There were no more than a quarter of a million intact troops anywhere in the Habsburg monarchy. Russia had absorbed 1.9 million casualties in the war thus far, yet still had 6.3 million troops in the field. “Mother Russia has sons enough,” the proverb went. The tsar’s reserves appeared infinite, an appearance ruthlessly confirmed by Russia’s general staff chief in March 1915: “Even if we continue for two more years at the present rate of ‘wastage,’ we will have no difficulty finding the men.”
There were difficulties, of course. Russian wastage in the first year of the war was so high—three hundred to four hundred thousand men a month—that the army actually exhausted the supply of men who could legally be called to arms. But that just meant that the tsar began drafting men illegally: youngsters who had not yet reached military age, police, men with deferments that had once seemed ironclad, and the twenty million non-Russian peoples of the empire, who had not been liable for military service before the war but now abruptly were. The Duma, which might have been expected to protest the slaughter and crimp the supply of cannon fodder, fed it instead, offering the army all the exempt and non-exempt peoples it wanted.53 And so, by fair means and foul, the Russian brown overcoats were filled with beating hearts and sent shuffling into the Austrian guns.
Passing a line of Russian prisoners in May 1915, General Stürgkh was surprised at how well they looked; while Austria was already scraping up its dregs, these Russians looked “strong, healthy, well-fed, of optimal age, very well-dressed and shod. They looked in no way defeated . . . just happy to be out of the trenches.”54 Only the inability of the Russians to tap their full potential (a notional army of seventeen million) and capitalize on their successes (“they do not get effectively driven back, but they cannot get forward either,” as one contemporary put it) bought the Austrians a respite. The dueling Russian generals—Ruzski in the north versus Ivanov in the south—could not agree on which front to emphasize, and Ruzski eventually simply ignored the grand duke’s order to emphasize the south. Thus, two-thirds of Russia’s strength remained north of the Pripet marshes when Ivanov struck into the Carpathians in April, taking the Dukla Pass. Russia’s industrial base and infrastructure remained woefully inadequate, producing too few shells and only seventy thousand rifles for the 1.4 million recruits who entered service in 1915.55
But what could the hapless Austrians conceivably do with these advantages? The veteran Habsburg army was gone, replaced with an unseasoned militia army. Even the veterans were not particularly formidable. Conrad circulated a questionnaire to his troop commanders in March 1915, asking for their impressions of the fighting thus far, and the submissions were discouraging, to say the least. The men were demoralized; they hated their uniforms (too bright) and their backpacks (too heavy, and “crammed with useless things”). Massive casualties had still not cured the officers of their preference for “deep formations and broad fronts,” which, by massing clumps of bright blue-gray uniforms, attracted enemy fire. But those company columns in closed platoons seemed to be the only way to move these refractory men forward, “to retain maneuverability,” as one officer put it. They were also the only way to make the men shoot, because they would not actually fire their weapons without an officer or NCO standing over them. They would just bury their faces in the dirt and pray for deliverance. “The addiction of the men to their spades must be broken,” a Jäger officer submitted. “When the men are ordered to attack, they take a few steps forward and then start digging in immediately, so far away from the enemy that they cannot even reach him with their rifles.” Their trenches reflected this (justified) pessimism. “The men spend all of their time improving their dugouts, parapets and shrapnel protection and no time fashioning ways to shoot out of the trench.” An apparently formidable Austro-Hungarian trench line was thus anything but, instead merely “isolated groups of blind, covered, walled-in men.”
Shirking (Drückebergerei) had become the Austrian rule, not the exception. Even ancient ethnically German regiments reported “heightened shirking and indiscipline.” Troops in every regiment would attempt to desert, and when captured they would claim that they had been among the “missing” in a recent skirmish or battle. When a man was struck during an attack, everyone around him would stop attacking, gather him up, and carry him back to an aid station. Conrad was advised to form “mounted military police” to patrol ceaselessly wherever Austro-Hungarian units were deployed, to stop straggling and desertion.
The officer corps had its own morale problems. Auffenberg, who had been hustled off the stage after his victory at Komarów for criticizing Archduke Peter Ferdinand, was arrested at his home in Vienna in April 1915, jailed for thirty-six days, and then put on trial for the scandal that had forced him out of the War Ministry in 1912. A scandal that had seemed unimportant to the emperor then—insider trading on the shares of Skoda just before Auffenberg announced a big purchase of artillery—now seemed hugely important. Auffenberg’s name was deleted from schoolbook accounts of Komarów, and he was accused of endangering national security by selling stock tips to foreign investors. The whole affair—never entirely substantiated—reeked of payback and pettiness.56
Officers less exalted than Auffenberg were bitterly divided between the careerists—Lebenskünstler or survival artists—and the less fortunate new cadres called up at the start of the war. Most of the one-year volunteer officers, students and professionals who had taken reserve officer status to avoid conscript
ion, now found themselves at the front. They lacked Protektion in Vienna and access to what were called “bulletproof assignments” (kugelsicheren Posten). Most bulletproof of all were the Hungarians, for any officer with any connection to the Hungarian Parliament, whether deputy, page, aide or analyst, could take leave for the duration of its legislative sessions. This was just the latest of Franz Joseph’s divisive concessions to the Magyars, but the fact that it had been conceded in November 1914—when the Habsburg army needed every man it could get—was cause for even more frustration in Vienna than usual.57
By early 1915, the Habsburg officer corps was bitterly divided between career officers, who often had the contacts to secure “bulletproof” assignments away from the front, and the hastily mobilized volunteer officers, who toiled in the trenches. This captured group of Austro-Hungarian officers looks relieved to be out of combat.
Credit: Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, Wien
The new arrivals on Austria’s front lines found a situation unlike anything they had (briefly) trained for. The already lightly gunned Austro-Hungarian artillery had lost a thousand cannon in the first six months of the war but had succeeded only in manufacturing 278 replacements. Shell production hovered at around one-eighth of monthly requirements.58 No wonder the troops had lost all faith in their artillery. “They attribute our horrible casualties to the lack of artillery preparation and support . . . and the lack of heavy guns,” one officer wrote.59 They were right. Asked to comment on their cooperation with heavy artillery units in Conrad’s questionnaire, most division commanders answered simply, “This division never had the use of heavy artillery.”60 The old army, in which officers would have attempted to explain this shortcoming to the men in their own languages, was drowned in the mud of Serbia and Galicia and the snow of the Carpathians. So many Austrian field-grade officers were killed or disabled in the first months of the campaign that they had to be hastily replaced with largely German or Hungarian reserve officers who had neither the time nor the inclination to learn the “regimental languages” of their men.
The survivors were inconsolable anyway, in any language. Austrian officers who had scoffed at Freud before the war now developed a psychiatric vocabulary to describe what was happening to their troops. They were nervenzerüttenden (nerve-wrecked) or nervenzersetzenden (nerve-dissolved). They had lost their Selbst-Kontrolle (self-control) and suffered Sinnesverwirrung (confusion of the senses), Nervenstörungen (disturbances of the nerves), or total Nervenzusammenbrechen (nervous collapse). Everyone, it seemed, suffered a degree of Nervenschok (nerve shock). Men were administered sodium bromide as a tranquilizer, but it never dispelled the central horror: the sight of so many of their comrades mashed into a bloody pulp by enemy fire. Observing these stricken men in an army hospital, a war correspondent wrote: “For a week or so after they come in, lots of them are dazed. They just lie there scarcely stirring from the shock to their nerves.”61
The Austro-Hungarian draft, which took men between nineteen and forty-two, was quietly adjusted to take all men between eighteen and fifty. Gypsies, formerly classed as useless, were made liable for military service for the first time in Habsburg history. More than two million men who had been written off as mentally or physically “unfit for service” in prior years were deemed fit by the stroke of a pen.62 With the Italians arming to what was rumored to be a strength of thirty corps and 1.3 million troops along the Trento and the Isonzo, the Austro-Hungarians pondered throwing in the towel altogether.63 Conrad told Bolfras in March 1915 that the jig was up; the Habsburg army was broken and the Germans would have to be blackmailed into rescuing it again. “We can always threaten a separate peace with Russia, as a counterweight,” he darkly minuted. In April, Conrad voiced the same threat to Falkenhayn: Austria-Hungary would sooner part with Galicia (to Russia) than Trieste (to Italy), so take your pick.
Convinced that Austria was on the brink of collapse, Falkenhayn sent Stürgkh first to Teschen and then on to Vienna to persuade Conrad and the emperor to make the concessions that would keep Italy out of the war. In both places, Stürgkh got nowhere. Conrad and Tisza had just succeeded in firing Berchtold (in January 1915) for daring to suggest that Italy be bought off with Habsburg Trentino and Austria’s share of Albania. They had placed Count István Burián in the Foreign Ministry with instructions to concede nothing. “What does Falkenhayn want now?” Conrad sniffed on Stürgkh’s arrival in Teschen. He then sent the general to Vienna, explaining that foreign policy was not his area. It always had been; it just wasn’t anymore.
In Vienna, Stürgkh saw the old emperor for the last time and was drowsily informed that “territorial concessions won’t be made” to the Italians or anyone else. Hundreds of thousands more would be killed and wounded on the Italian front to appease this old man’s idea of honor and empire. In his meeting with Stürgkh, Burián averred that he might push for concessions if he knew the Italians really meant business: “If someone points an unloaded pistol at me, I won’t give him my wallet until I see if the pistol is loaded, and only then make my decision.” But how would a victim know if the pistol was loaded until the thief pulled the trigger? And the process of loading the pistol would increase the risk of violence, as the mobilizations of 1914 had proven. Stürgkh departed unimpressed by Burián or anyone else in official Vienna. The Germans, he wrote, were more alive to the threat of Italian intervention than the more directly threatened Austrians. Prince Bülow relayed another unofficial offer from Rome: Italy would remain neutral in return for the South Tyrol. It was a fair offer, and welcome after the defeats in Serbia and the Carpathians, the fall of Przemysl, and the collapse of the army, but Emperor Franz Joseph rejected it again out of hand. Having already lost on two fronts, he seemed untroubled by the prospect of defeat on a third.64
Vienna’s detachment from the realities of this awful war had never been more painfully apparent. Touring an Austro-Hungarian hospital in Budapest—engulfed in the reek of steam, disinfectant, and putrefying wounds—a war correspondent named Arthur Ruhl was struck by the reality. “Only those who have seen what modern guns can do know how much to fear them,” he wrote. He was sickened by the contrast between these broken men and the troop trains, covered in green branches and flowers for luck, that passed under the windows of the hospital with yet more cannon fodder for the Eastern Front. The men looking down from their hospital beds were not so lucky, gouged as they were by shells and bullets. One had a cut in his neck the width of a hand, so deep that Ruhl could see the carotid artery pulsing behind a thin film of tissue. He studied X-ray pictures of shrapnel and bullet wounds, seeing “bone splintered by rifle bullets and shot through the surrounding flesh as if they had been exploded.” The number of amputees from the Carpathian front was no less striking: many of them were “battle casualties, but also sentries left twenty-four hours or more without relief in winter, their feet frozen and cut off at the ankle.” He walked through the wards, counting (and smelling) “thousands of frozen feet and hands,” most of them “black, and rotting away.”65
For Austria-Hungary, the whole bungled war was rotting away. The rest of it would be a delegation of the Austrian war effort to Germany, a pathetic end to a conflict that decision makers in Vienna had believed might halt the decline of Austria-Hungary and revive the imperial idea. Austria had had its chance in Galicia and Serbia—more chances, on better terms, than it might have expected. But even with German help, the monarchy had squandered every opportunity, until its army lay shattered on a line that wended from Poland along the crests of the Carpathians and all the way south to Bosnia. The very meaning of Austria had been shattered too. Beaten too many times to count, the Dual Monarchy had lost whatever respect it had commanded from its subjects and neighbors, and lost any semblance of cohesion or, for that matter, sovereignty. Its days on the earth were numbered.
Epilogue
In March 1915, as the snow softened in the Carpathians, Conrad ordered the Austro-Hungarian generals to reeducate their troops on the purpose
of the war. The men, it seemed, “had preposterously divergent views of the conflict,” and this state of affairs had to be “clarified and unified.” Conrad’s new narrative was this: after years of careful preparation, the enemies of Austria-Hungary and Germany, “peaceful central Europe,” had lunged at these helpless victims, “from the deepest peace.” The “bandits” of Paris, London, and Petrograd had launched a desolating “war of adventure,” the French to find new fields of investment, the British to rule the world, the Russians to “enslave” yet more peoples with “fire, sword, and Siberia” under the entirely hypocritical banner of pan-Slavism, “as if Russia,” the point paper chuckled, “were a land of freedom.”
Austro-Hungarian troops were to be told by their officers that they were embarked on a new Thirty Years War and must defend central Europe from the ravages of the Entente. If not, the results could only exceed the horrors of the 1600s, when—a nod to the mutinous Czechs—“only a quarter of the population of Bohemia survived the conflict.” In sum, Austrian troops were told that they were fighting because England, France, and Russia had conspired to make Germany and Austria-Hungary “slave peoples.” The greatest slave driver of the three was Russia, “a rich, backward land—ruled by soldiers and bureaucrats, where corruption finds a home everywhere and the masses live in poverty and ignorance.”
The Russians had caused this war, Conrad explained, to distract their revolutionary intelligentsia (dangerous men like Lenin and Trotsky) from Russia’s internal problems and fire them instead with a crusading pan-Slavism. Russia—“hordes of Asiatic and half-Asiatic barbarians, outnumbering us four to one”—sought Constantinople, but also the Balkans, as a market for Russian exports, and to wield the Balkan nations against Austria-Hungary, “a peaceful empire of the peoples.” The choice was plain: fight on, or suffer the “fate of the Balkans,” which was to be defeated, colonized, and left in “hunger and misery.” This, the circular enjoined Austrian troops, “is what you should be thinking about in those hours when you’re thoroughly exhausted: the need for victory. Surely all of your fresh dreams of youth cannot have been extinguished by the travails of this war.”1