A Mad Catastrophe

by Geoffrey Wawro

  Conrad in 1916 set the insouciant tone of the high command in one of his blimpish communiqués: assure the men that as long as they “dig in three meters underground, they will be safe. Even a direct hit on such a trench will hardly affect the men, only some concussion and shaking, but the troops will be fine.”29 He and Archduke Friedrich were not nearly so complacent when it came to finding bombproof quarters for themselves and salvaging their tattered reputations. Conrad and Fritzl fought like dogs through 1916 to quash an inquiry into their leadership of the two Battles of Lemberg requested by the disgraced General Brudermann, a Hofburg favorite. “AOK,” Conrad nervously harrumphed in July 1916, “is not in the position to respond to every grievance, memorandum, battle report, etc. submitted by generals relieved of their command in war.”

  Though he loathed the Germans, Conrad now insisted that Brudermann observe “the guiding principle of the German army: that a general once relieved of command will never get another, and will never remonstrate against his removal.” Such omertà certainly suited Conrad, whose entire postwar career, scribbling tendentious memoirs, was an act of self-justifying remonstrance. His 1916 backstabbing of Brudermann would run to twenty-five typed, single-spaced pages, and it was like the first draft of his memoir, portraying himself as the innocent victim of a foolhardy subordinate. “In the interest of discipline, I must urge His Majesty’s Military Chancery to reject this inquiry along with Brudermann’s request for rehabilitation,” he wrote. In August, after some thought, General Bolfras and the emperor folded again, rejecting both inquiry and rehabilitation.30

  The troops were never appeased by Conrad’s assurance that they’d be fine in the trenches. They weren’t—the whole army was shaken and concussed. It wanted no more. By the end of the war, the Habsburg army had been divided into two factions: a small “assault mass” (young, motivated men) and a large “defense mass” (the bulk of the army). The assault mass—well fed, well paid, well equipped storm troops on the German model—undertook all attacks, and the defense mass took on an entirely passive role for the duration of the war, digging and repairing trenches and defending them.31

  Scenes from the Brusilov Offensive in 1916 shocked even jaded Austrians and showed just how little stomach most of the monarchy’s soldiers had for the war. General Karl von Pflanzer-Baltin spoke of his “ruined army,” and eyewitnesses watched in wonderment as a vast (and unexpected) Austro-Hungarian counterattack proved, in actual fact, to be a mass surrender, as thousands of Habsburg troops cast away their rifles and ran at the Russian lines with their hands in the air.32 No fewer than 350,000 Austrians surrendered to the Russians in this way, and Brusilov recovered everything lost in 1915, marching all the way back to the Carpathian passes. The Brusilov Offensive destroyed what little offensive capability the Austrians retained, and forced them to accept German commanders for the duration of the war.33

  Conrad’s headquarters underwent a paroxysm of vindictive activity in 1916, as every Austrian corps and division was ordered to get to the bottom of the problem (again) and solve it. General Tersztyánszky, who had passed from one disaster to the next since his defeat at Sabac two years earlier, accosted his army thus: “The fact that Fourth Army was turned out of its strong positions by an enemy, whose strength was not overwhelming, and driven far back with enormous losses of troops and matériel, and that the painstakingly constructed bridgehead and Styr position was not defended, demands an explanation!” Officers were ordered to investigate their units and discover who had organized the mass desertions and who had acceded to the surrender of so many cannon and machine guns, and to punish “pitilessly” any miscreants who remained.34

  But what could constitute a more pitiless punishment than continued service in this army and this misguided war? By 1917, the Habsburg army was hardly an army at all. As many men had been killed, wounded, or captured—3.5 million—as remained under arms.35 With the Entente armies doggedly increasing their quantities of artillery, shell, and machine guns, no Habsburg trooper doubted that he would soon pass from the second category (the quick) to the first (the dead), and thus many began to vote with their feet. A shocking 1.7 million Austro-Hungarian troops were in Russian captivity at the beginning of 1917 (compared with a tenth as many Germans).36 The Russian Kerensky Offensive in June 1917 rather too easily ripped a thirty-mile gap between the corps of the Austro-Hungarian Third Army and took thousands more prisoners. Had the Russian army itself not been so rotted by disappointment and Bolshevik propaganda, the end for Austria-Hungary almost certainly would have come that year.37

  On the Italian front, in the Val Sugana, a storied gash in the Alps that had connected the Holy Roman Empire to the Adriatic for centuries, the entire leadership of an Austrian regiment—a Slovenian colonel, four Czech officers, and three Czech NCOs—crossed to the Italian trenches at Carzano and led enemy troops back through their wire and into their trenches to take everyone prisoner. The Austro-Hungarian authorities professed to be scandalized, but this problem had been bubbling since 1914 and was only getting worse.38 Mass desertions became commonplace; on a single day in October 1918, 1,451 men of the Hungarian 65th Regiment deserted. By then the monarchy was shoveling skilled war workers, boys, and pensioners into its war machine. Graybeards born in the years between Solferino and Königgrätz were called up in 1916 and forced to serve until the end of the war.39

  From beginning to end, the war lacked logic for Austria-Hungary, nowhere better highlighted than in the sensational defeat and dismemberment of Russia in 1917. Having seized power in November 1917, Lenin’s Bolsheviks had abruptly exited the war, granting the Germans the Baltics, Belarus, Poland, and Ukraine at the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918. Russia’s collapse, which ought to have solidified the Central Powers, deepened their differences instead. German commentators spoke of feeling “swindled” by Austria-Hungary. The Habsburgs fought badly, relied throughout the war on German support, and then, as Russia sank, attempted to secure a share of the massive annexations in Poland and Ukraine. Yet had the Habsburgs actually managed to take Poland and place it under an archduke, as they tried to do, the imbalance of Slavs to Germans in the monarchy would have increased ruinously. “The 10 million Germans of Austria will drown in a sea of seventy million or more Slavs,” an analyst wrote in late 1917. Fattened on Poland, Austria-Hungary would have doubled in size and become even more Slavic and Catholic in outlook, all but ensuring a future rift with its ally Germany. That prognostication was anything but far-fetched, the Germans viewing Poland in 1917 not as a land to annex outright, but as a space (Raum) first to empty of its Polish inhabitants and then to resettle with Germans. That vision, made possible by Russia’s withdrawal from the Great War, would lead to a German campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide during the next world war.40

  Russia’s defeat gave the Austro-German war effort a second wind, but the Austrians had never solved the problem of Russian manpower, beautifully summarized by the American author (and Russia hand) John Reed: “the paradox of a beaten army that gathers strength, a retreating host whose very withdrawal is fatal to the conquerors.” After watching endless columns of Russian infantry marching off to their field kitchens in Lemberg in 1915, Reed wrote: “Now through all the streets poured rivers of soldiers singing. . . . This was the inexhaustible strength of Russia, the powerful blood of her veins spilled carelessly from her bottomless fountains of manhood, wasted, lavished.”41 Reed loved his Russians and romanticized them. In truth, the Russians killed their men as callously as the Austrians did, and the Russian muzhiks, no fools, took precautions, either by surrendering to the Austrians without a struggle or deserting. They had mobilized willingly in 1914 but a year later were deserting in large numbers.

  Throughout the war, ordinary Russians were struck by the number of soldiers who could be seen, as the tsar’s minister of agriculture put it in 1915, “wandering about in the cities, villages, on the railroads and all over Russia.” Few of them were on leave—a privilege rarely extended to enlisted m
en. Russian troop trains carrying reinforcements to the front sometimes arrived at their destination to discover that every soldier on the train had jumped off and run away. Russian march battalions suffered an average 25 percent desertion rate.42 Whereas by 1916 the French had gotten their monthly casualties down to half the rate of 1914, the casualty rate was undiminished or even rising in Russia. The Russians ran through all of their territorial reserves of the first class in 1914, and had exhausted the entire second class by 1916. Like the Austrians, they began drafting everyone they could lay their hands on, and a Duma committee in 1916 blasted the army for its profligacy: without enough “lead, steel, and explosives,” Russian generals thought nothing of “opening the road to victory with human blood.” By 1917, the Russians were contemplating the exhaustion of everything, a situation they were grappling with when the revolution began to flare in February. The Provisional Government’s determination to continue the war to “final victory” doomed them in the eyes of a people that had become convinced of the war’s suicidal futility. The casualties were just too hard to bear: 1.3 million killed, 4.2 million wounded, 2.4 million captured, for a total of nearly 8 million.43 The Bolsheviks would oust the Provisional Government in November with no more concrete platform than this: Lenin would end the war.

  But even the collapse of the Russian bear couldn’t save Austria. The Habsburg monarchy divided into “national committees” succored by the Entente that were invited to make their various claims for national independence at the Paris Peace Conference. While Germany was famously punished with the Treaty of Versailles, the Austro-Hungarians learned their fate in the Treaties of St. Germain and Trianon, which formally broke up the Habsburg Empire in 1919 and created the new states of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary and beefed up the borders of existing ones like Rumania. Serbia absorbed Vienna’s old South Slavic lands into a new state called Yugoslavia. The little scrap of Habsburg territory that remained when all of the other peoples had bolted—the German region between Vienna and Innsbruck—sourly grouped itself into a Republic of Austria that was forbidden by treaty to join itself to the much larger German state to the north.

  The legacy of the Austro-Hungarian downfall was no small one. Germany was only superficially weakened by the Treaty of Versailles, which detached territory and reparations and imposed strict limitations on the German army and navy. Practically speaking, Germany was strengthened by the new order created at Paris in 1919. Soviet Russia had retreated into civil war and isolation, and the “successor states” carved from Austria-Hungary in central Europe would prove too weak to defend themselves against German (or Soviet) encroachments. They thus allied with the French and British in the interwar period. Paris and London viewed the new states as potential makeweights against a resurgent Germany or Russia. These defense pacts—invoked to fill the vacuum left by the Habsburgs—eventually triggered the Second World War, when the Germans, having bluffly absorbed Austria and helped themselves to Czechoslovakia in 1938, tried encroaching on Poland in 1939. As in 1914, the western powers reluctantly trooped off to war to settle disputes emanating from east-central Europe.

  Our historical picture of the lone figure who presided over this unfolding human catastrophe has never been substantially revised. Emperor Franz Joseph remains the bewhiskered old father of the empire whose heart was in the right place. How can this be? As a supreme commander, he was a butcher. As a strategist, he was a knight errant. As a statesman, whose longevity might have allowed him to fix or temper Austria-Hungary’s enfeebling problems, he was absent. If the story is true that, when given the news that Italy had declared war on Austria in 1915, the old emperor smiled fondly and whispered, “Finally, war with Italy, now I can be happy,” then we must conclude that this man became something in old age that he had never been in his unassertive youth: ferocious.44

  Overall, we must reconsider the origins of the First World War and carve out a new place for the Austrians. Austria-Hungary wasn’t the essentially decent but charmingly slipshod power that muddled into and through the war. It was a desperately conflicted power that thought nothing of throwing all of Europe into the flames to preserve its ancient rights to lands like Bohemia and Hungary—lands that had lost all interest in the Habsburg connection and were trying to break away. Austria’s Great War was built on the reckless gamble that the monarchy’s internal problems could be fixed by war. They couldn’t.45 This wasn’t exactly a postwar revelation. Well before the events of 1914, Prime Minister Casimir Badeni had made the obvious connection between Austria-Hungary’s frustrated peoples and the military security of the empire: “A country of nationalities cannot wage war without danger to itself.”46 And yet it did, the empire’s last foreign minister, Count Ottokar Czernin, rather too blithely observing that “we were bound to die; we were at liberty to choose the manner of our death and we chose the most terrible.”47 The troops at the front, exposed to the most terrible conditions in a terrible war, would certainly have agreed with Czernin—author of the stillborn Sixtus Affair—and regretted his inability to forestall or terminate the war.

  In July 1914, the old emperor drew his sword for the last time, only to watch, horrified, as the blade was parried, reversed, and driven back into his own gut. The Habsburgs had no business going to war in 1914, yet they did, killing off their own people in poorly prepared offensives before settling into a war of attrition that ensured the already weak monarchy’s collapse. Of the many errors and miscalculations in this uniquely catastrophic war, Austro-Hungarian decision-making in 1914 was arguably the most senseless—and the most reprehensible. The Great War has justly earned a dark place on our historical map, and Vienna, no less than Berlin, was the heart of darkness.

  Notes

  Foreword

  1. Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis: The Eastern Front (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1931), 32.

  2. Ibid., 32.

  Introduction

  1. Service Historique de l’Armée de Terre, Vincennes (SHAT), EMA, 7N 1128, Autriche, June 2, 1902, 2ème Bureau, “Magyarisme et pangermanisme.”

  2. A. J. P. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy 1809–1918 (London: Penguin, 1948), 140.

  3. Ibid., 142.

  4. SHAT, AAT, 7N 1129, Vienna, March 29, 1905, “La langue de commandement dans les troupes hongroises.”

  5. SHAT, AAT, 7N 1129, Vienna, Feb. 8, 1905, “La politique hongroise et l’Armée.”

  6. Norman Stone, World War One: A Short History (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 50.

  7. James Stone, The War Scare of 1875 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2010), 184–185.

  8. Taylor, Habsburg Monarchy, 140–141.

  9. SHAT, AAT, EMA, 7N 1128, Vienna, April 22, 1902, “Le Ministère des Affaires Etrangères Austro-Hongrois”; Taylor, Habsburg Monarchy, 137.

  10. David G. Herrmann, The Arming of Europe and the Making of the First World War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 178.

  11. Österreichische Rundschau, June 15, 1914, Politicus, “Imperialismus.”

  Chapter 1: The Sick Man of Europe

  1. “Der Schlemihl,” Die Zeit, Feb. 6, 1913; R. J. W. Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy 1550–1700: An Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).

  2. Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis: The Eastern Front (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1931), 24.

  3. Arthur Ruhl, Antwerp to Gallipoli: A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them (New York: Scribner’s, 1916), 232.

  4. Service Historique de l’Armée de Terre, Vincennes (SHAT), 7N 1127, Vienna, Oct. 1, 1889, “La question des nationalités dans l’armée Austro-Hongroise.”

  5. Geoffrey Wawro, The Franco-Prussian War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 305–306.

  6. Geoffrey Wawro, The Austro-Prussian War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 281.

  7. SHAT, 7N 1124, Vienna, Aug. 20, 1878, Cdt. Tour de Pin, “Aperçu politique.”

  8. SHAT, 7N 1124, Vienna, Mar. 1878, Capt. de Berghes, “Composit
ion et recrutement du corps d’officiers dans l’Armée Austro-Hongroise.”

  9. Kriegsarchiv, Vienna (KA), Militärkanzlei Franz Ferdinand (MKFF) 206, Sarajevo, Feb. 7, 1914, FZM Potiorek to Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

  10. SHAT, 7N 1123, Vienna, July 15, 1875, Capt. Brunet, “Voyage tactique de l’infanterie en Bohème.”

  11. SHAT, 7N 1123, Vienna, May 28, 1873, Col. de Valzy.

  12. SHAT, AAT, EMA, 7N 851, Vienna, Jan. 1923, Gaston Bodart, “Etude sur organisation générale, politique et administrative.”

  13. Gunther E. Rothenberg, The Army of Francis Joseph (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1976), 109.

  14. Ibid., 141–142.

  15. SHAT, AAT, EMA, 7N 1129, Austria, Feb. 8, 1904, “Les scandales de la Cour de Vienne.”

  16. SHAT, EMA, 7N 1128, Vienna, Oct. 14, 1897, Cdt. Berckheim, “Notes sur le haut commandement en Autriche.”

  17. Otto Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany, vol. 2, The Period of Consolidation, 1871–1880, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 376.

  18. Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (New York: Harper, 2013), 66–73; Lothar Höbelt, “‘Well-Tempered Discontent’: Austrian Domestic Politics,” in Mark Cornwall, ed., The Last Years of Austria-Hungary (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2002), 48; A. J. P. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy 1809–1918 (London: Penguin, 1948), 157.