But Austria’s imperial dreams had been extinguished, all of them. No one believed these fictions, least of all their authors. The Austro-Hungarian war ministry waged a parallel campaign to try to understand the reasons—besides the lack of artillery—for the military’s poor performance. Another questionnaire was sent to commanders in early 1915, this one marked Verschluss, top secret. “Were national-chauvinistic or other destructive tendencies apparent in our officers? Did our officers really speak the languages of their men well enough to lead and inspire them? Do we need to make sure that officers are of the same nationality as the men under their command?” As for the troops, “why so many examples on all fronts of insufficient toughness or total collapse?” Was the seed of “ethnic and anti-military agitation” inside the Austro-Hungarian regiments planted by the active-duty troops present before the war even started, or was it imported by the reservists summoned in the mobilization?
The romantic nonsense of a happy empire of united peoples that had undergirded the army in peacetime had dissolved entirely under the stress of war. Potiorek had warned in 1912 that a third of Austria-Hungary’s soldiers would refuse to fight in a great war, and events were proving him right. The fact that troops reported for duty was less important than their lack of engagement once in uniform.2 The army was falling apart, in large part because no one believed any longer in the multinational “Austrian mission,” which, to Austria’s Slavs at least, seemed to be nothing more than shoveling poorly equipped Austro-Hungarians into the German war machine.3
The Germans briskly and contemptuously took over the Austrian war effort. The Austrian liaison on the Western Front noted in mid-1915 that Conrad had already been reduced to insignificance by “German staffs and commands” at Mézières and Pless, the German great headquarters in west and east, respectively.4 For the remainder of the war, every time the Austrians were hard pressed, the Germans would ride to the rescue. They intervened in Galicia in 1914–1915, in Serbia in 1915, in Bukovina and Galicia again (after the shattering Brusilov Offensive) in 1916, and again in Galicia in 1917 after the first Kerensky Offensive. Caporetto in 1917, a feat of German and Austrian arms, was undertaken, as Ludendorff put it, as much “to prevent the collapse of Austria-Hungary”—weakened by eleven fruitless battles on the Isonzo River—as to knock out the Italians.5
By 1915, the Germans had taken over the Austro-Hungarian war effort. Here VII Corps commander Archduke Joseph poses with German general Hans von Seeckt and their staffs in the Carpathians.
Credit: Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, Wien
Some of these German rescues, to be sure, gave fleeting cause for hope. In the Gorlice-Tarnów Offensive in May 1915, the Germans and Austrians took back in a week what the Russians had required six months to take. They killed and wounded 1.4 million Russians and captured a million more. It was shocking what a little artillery could do. The German Eleventh Army deployed four hundred guns—nearly half of them heavy trench busters—with a stockpile of three hundred thousand shells.6 Strung out in the rather relaxed way they had become accustomed to against the low-caliber Austrians, the Russians were stunned by the apparition of the Germans on the flank of their Carpathian positions. It was Russia’s Caporetto—“this severe trial would have been fatal to most armies,” Britain’s attaché wrote from the Stavka—and the Russians survived only because the Germans were so distracted by other threats and the Austrians so unrelievedly weak.7
With their center ruptured and their army broken in two halves—one in Galicia, the other in Poland—the Russians ran so fast in the spring of 1915 that some units retreated forty-five miles a day.8 But all of the problems revealed by the guns of August remained. General August von Mackensen’s vaunted Durchbruchsschlacht (breakthrough battle), fortuitously timed for the moment when Russia’s “shell crisis” all but disarmed the Russian artillery, was entirely a German victory. Its key methods could not even be attempted by the low-tech Austrians absent an industrial and military revolution.
General Nikolai Golovine compared the German methods at Gorlice-Tarnów to the approach of “some huge beast” that would sneak its infantry close to the Russian trenches, then “draw its tail, the heavy artillery, toward the trenches,” but just beyond the range of the inferior Russian guns. The beast would then shatter the Russian trenches with “drumfire” (Trommelfeuer), artillery fire so thick and fast that it sounded like the continuous beating of a drum. The Germans—or their Austro-Hungarian auxiliaries—would then lope forward to occupy the desolated Russian trenches. If Russian reserves counterattacked, the German artillery would kill them too; any survivors would be shot down by German infantry opportunistically sheltering in captured trenches or shell holes. “The beast would then draw up its tail again, and its heavy guns would start their methodical hammering of the next Russian line of defense.”9
Better organized, armed, and led than the Austrians, the Germans—seen resting here on the march in May 1915—routed the Russians again in the Gorlice-Tarnów offensive.
Credit: National Archives
The Germans tempered the cruelty of war by shielding their troops with expensive technology; the Austro-Hungarians economized—before and during the war—and threw their infantry away like trash. “The Germans expend metal, we expend life,” a Russian general confessed in 1915, and the same could be said of the Austrians. Speeding through Poland with his German unit in June 1915, Lieutenant Harry Kessler paused to examine the wreckage of an Austro-Hungarian attack: “millions of flies and a thick, humid atmosphere . . . the forest thickly sown with corpses. All Austrian. The faces all completely black, like Negroes, already half rotted, covered with filth and dirt. There’s one at almost every tree. . . . It was one of the bloodiest affairs of this war and completely without point or consequence.”10 As Kessler’s anecdote suggested, Gorlice-Tarnów was more of a breakthrough for the Germans than for the Austrians. Despite the fact that whole Russian artillery regiments were limited to just ten shells a day by this date, Austro-Hungarian battle reports spoke of yet more fruitless and costly attacks and limited gains.11
Serbia was finally beaten in October 1915. Fresh from his Gorlice success, Mackensen was entrusted with an army group comprising Max von Gallwitz’ German Eleventh Army and Hermann von Kövess’ Austrian Third Army. They attacked south across the Danube while two Bulgarian armies attacked west, and Serbia—out of men and ammunition—succumbed. A Habsburg diplomat vowed that this campaign would “tip the balance in the war in the east.” It would open a line of supply to Asia and infuse the Central Powers with much-needed oil, metals, and other materials. “The collapse of the Serbian barrier will finally give us control of this vital strategic line, as well as the path of the Danube,” the Austrian diplomat wrote Foreign Minister Burián in late October.12 The Bulgarians took Nis on November 8 and Bitola (Monastir) on November 24. Gallwitz thrust down the Morava valley against light resistance, splitting Serbia from the inside out. By mid-December, Gallwitz had advanced all the way to Kumanova in Macedonia, just a hundred miles from Salonika. Aerenthal and Franz Ferdinand had only dreamed of Salonika; now the Germans were poised to live the dream, as part of a larger strategy to take Salonika, known as “Britain’s second Gibraltar,” and then Suez, “the gateway to three worlds.” Mackensen would lead the charge.13
But the Germans were capable only of prolonging the war, not of winning it. They destroyed the British Expeditionary Force at Mons and Ypres only to discover the twenty-five corps of Kitchener’s “new armies” forming behind the dead men and the five-hundred-ship Royal Navy strangling the German people. The Germans killed, wounded, or captured hordes of Russians in 1914, only to confront an even bigger army the next year. General Erich Ludendorff, who took over the German war effort from 1916 to the end, made a statement that encapsulated his strategic failings. “Tactics,” he wrote, “have to be considered before purely strategic objects, which are futile to pursue unless tactical success is possible.” That much was true—the strategic plans of th
e Entente and Central Powers generally failed because assaulting trenches could not achieve them—but Ludendorff’s conceit was to believe that by refining his tactics he could overcome the insuperable strategic challenge of the war: how would an Austro-German alliance of 120 million defeat an Entente alliance of 260 million that wielded more troops, more ships, and 60 percent more national income than the Central Powers?14 Superb at tactics, the Germans were appalling at strategy, avoiding the frank net assessments of themselves and the Austrians that would have led them to seek a diplomatic solution, not war, in July 1914.
Instead of distancing themselves from the increasingly reckless Germans, the Austro-Hungarians squirmed into their embrace. This was not a foregone conclusion. After eighty-six-year-old Emperor Franz Joseph finally gave up the ghost at Schönbrunn Palace in November 1916, Archduke Karl (now Emperor Karl I) sought conditions for a separate peace with the French and Russians through his brother-in-law Prince Sixtus, an officer in the Belgian army. The ensuing Sixtus Affair came to a head in March 1917 and was Austria’s last chance to escape the German-directed war with a hope of survival. The Allied terms conveyed to Austria by Sixtus demanded the surrender of Alsace-Lorraine, the restoration of Serbian and Belgian independence, and Austrian “disinterest” in Russian claims to Constantinople.
In view of all of the disasters that had already afflicted Austria-Hungary, Emperor Karl was pleasantly surprised by the mildness of the terms, and expressed himself eager to proceed.15 Unfortunately, he expressed himself eager in writing, and proceeded slowly. When the Germans got wind of the affair a year later, after Karl’s letters were published by Clemenceau to divide the Central Powers, Ludendorff summoned Karl to German great headquarters in May 1918 and jerked him back into line. Emperor Karl first lied (the letters were “forgeries”), then blamed his foreign minister (who threatened suicide if the emperor persisted), and finally threw himself upon the mercy of the Germans, declaring himself “as innocent as a newborn child.” The terms the Germans demanded of the prodigal son were harsh: strict military and economic subservience to Berlin for the duration of the war.
It was a pivotal moment. Woodrow Wilson’s outline of America’s goals in Europe—summarized in his Fourteen Points of January 1918, ten months after America entered the war—had called only for the reorganization of Austria-Hungary, not its dissolution. France and Britain were still keen to see a reformed Austria-Hungary installed as a barrier against German or Soviet expansion after the war. If Emperor Karl was going to bolt, he had to bolt now; the Russians had been knocked out of the war and the Italians nearly so at Caporetto. He would never have as much leverage as he briefly enjoyed at the start of 1918. The Germans were readying a massive offensive on the Western Front with troops pulled from Russia. Conrad, in his last turn as a general, was about to give back (in June 1918) most of what had been gained at Caporetto by losing another three hundred thousand soldiers in the witless Battle of the Piave. The Hungarians, who enfranchised only 7 percent of their citizens and rejected American-style “autonomous development” for their Slavs and Rumanians, were not the sort of partner likely to survive a second look from Woodrow Wilson.16
The Sixtus Affair of March 1917 was Austria’s last chance to escape the war. When the German kaiser (l.) got wind of it, he summoned Austria’s new emperor, Karl I (r.), to German great headquarters and jerked him back into line. Karl declared himself “as innocent as a newborn child” and meekly succumbed to all German demands.
Credit: National Archives
Time, in other words, was of the essence, but instead of defecting from the Central Powers, which would have bought him some support from the war-weary Entente, Karl weakly bowed to German pressure, accepting German command of everything in Austria-Hungary—troops, roads, railways, munitions, and factories—and going so far as to vow that henceforth Austria-Hungary would fight as doggedly for Strasbourg as for Trieste.17 President Wilson, initially willing to work with the Austrians, now turned disgustedly away from that “vassal of the German government” and recognized in September 1918 the Czechoslovak and Yugoslav “national committees” that would commence the dismemberment of Austria-Hungary.18
The war began with Austria-Hungary dependent on German arms, and that’s how it ended. The Germans planned a great spring and summer offensive on the Western Front in 1918 with the troops that they had extracted from Russia, and when the offensive failed, the German and Austrian Empires failed with it. Too late, Emperor Karl issued a manifesto to his peoples in October 1918 promising change and a new “ministry of nationalities,” but by then the monarchy’s Czechs, Poles, and Hungarians had already declared independence and Karl could do little else but go into exile. The monarchy that had come in with a bang—vanquishing the Turks and saving Christendom—went out with a whimper.
Historians often cite the Habsburg monarchy’s survival until 1918 as evidence of its essential toughness or legitimacy, but this is a hard claim to credit. The monarchy was a cruel, bone-crushing machine. It ran through its prime draft classes in 1914 in the most careless fashion, and thereafter relied on “poorly nourished children and aging men,” as Archduke Friedrich wearily put it in 1915.19 Using records submitted by the Russians, Italians, and Serbs, the French estimated in 1916 that—thanks to the near annihilation of the Habsburg army in 1914 and the average monthly loss of 120,000 men since—Austria-Hungary had already “consumed” most of the men available to it.20 The estimated 650,000 Austrians still unconsumed would have looked queasily at a future in the service of this army. Their numbers were fleshed out with “third-revision men,” conscripts who had already been evaluated and rejected twice as being physically or mentally unfit to bear arms. What kind of army was this?21 An anonymous letter delivered to the doors of the Hofburg in 1916 drilled through the nostalgia to the truth: “Majesty, if you want to experience the reality of this war, you don’t need to send your war minister all the way to the front, just send him to the reserve depots, where men with severe tuberculosis are being conscripted, where fifty-year-old men with heart problems are being marched around till they collapse, where men who declare themselves ill are locked up in jail for fourteen days.”22 Men like this had no place on the battlefield, where they died in droves. On the Eastern Front alone, one million Austrians died, half of them from infection and diseases. When the war switched from maneuver to trench warfare in the fall of 1914, the Habsburg army didn’t get any better; it just got easier to police. But whenever Austro-Hungarian troops found themselves in the open, committed to new attacks, they usually fought badly or deserted. Thus, the AOK sent a withering top-secret memo to corps and divisional commanders in October 1915 wanting to know why the Russians fought so much better “despite having even lower-quality reserve troops and officers than us, and even less ammunition”; how two hundred thousand Austro-Hungarians had been able to “vanish so quickly and completely” during operations in Galicia; and why “so many attacks—even those against a numerically inferior enemy—had fallen apart.”
Everyone who had been anywhere near the front knew the answers: the Austrian troops didn’t care, and they had lost the will to endure life on the march and in the trenches. They were civilians through and through. When released from their trenches and ordered to march, legions of them simply sat down by the side of the road and waited to be captured. Archduke Friedrich called for a triage—the “relative best material” to the front, old men and other weaklings to the rear. It was a testimony to just how thoroughly shirking had penetrated the Habsburg army, with the best men using what connections they had to get a safe billet in the rear, that the archduke had to accompany this suggestion with the threat of an audit, “to make sure that this instruction is being strictly enforced to raise our combat power.”23
Regimental pride was becoming a thing of the past already in 1914. The conversion of men from soldiers to cannon fodder was palpable, as the regiment—traditional repository of history, pomp, and circumstance—was withering away in the hea
t of war. Brünn (Brno) was the scene of scandal in December 1914, when a company of the 8th Regiment was entrained and departing for the front. As the train gathered speed, an infantryman leaped out of his wagon in full battle dress, landed on the platform, and ran for his life; cornered in the station square, he was clubbed to the ground by MPs, while three hundred onlookers stared in amazement.24 Poles of the Habsburg 30th Regiment, picking up replacements from Graz in April 1915, beat them savagely, called them “German pigs,” ripped open their packs, and stole their food.25 Those Polish bullies in Graz would have drawn some corporate pride from the fact that they belonged to a regiment founded in Lemberg in 1725, but none from their new fate: independent battalions randomly slotted into ad hoc Gruppen that were used to sweep up the viable residue of shattered units and get them back to the front, where they too could be killed.26
Everywhere the trench war was hellish. A war correspondent reported the sight of frostbite cases and amputees from the Carpathians in a Budapest hospital in 1915, “the doctors boasting of their facility at finding a good flap of healthy tissue and making a proper stump while their peasant victims grinned and scowled by turns.”27 Another correspondent watched in horror as the mingled corpses of Austrians and Russians were dumped in open ditches like so many “bits of pig iron.” This was not the fate, as he put it, imagined “by the girls in Vienna, when they cheered these strong youths in the flush of early manhood.” It was not even the fate imagined by the Austro-Hungarian war ministry, which had pledged to “bury the men—six to a coffin—on heights easily viewed from afar, to show the heroic soldiers the piety and gratitude felt by the Fatherland.” Instead the anonymous men were dumped in mass graves and strewn with quicklime.28
A Mad Catastrophe Page 41