Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  When war broke out, Piłsudski ordered his men to mobilize and distributed flyers around Cracow claiming, not very convincingly, that a national government had formed in Warsaw and named him commander of Polish armed forces. The ZWC’s riflemen combined with their National Democrat competitors under his leadership, and on 6 August the first mixed company crossed the border. The men in it were, as other volunteers in 1914, mostly young, between nineteen and twenty-four years old. Gentry and students predominated. The vast majority were not Habsburg subjects but – a term they would have hated – Russian Poles.171 Their mission was a total failure. The Habsburg army had hoped that they would at least cause disruption in its enemy’s rear areas and, at best, trigger insurrection in Tsarist Poland. Instead, the unit, and others that followed it, was shunned by the local populace; ‘no one gives us a glass of water, no one gives us a piece of bread,’ complained one of Piłsudski’s men later.172 The volunteers briefly took the capital of the Kielce region, but within days were forced to retreat. The Austro-Hungarian army, disappointed with the riflemen’s performance, was at this point inclined to disband their units. Instead, however, an agreement was brokered by the Mayor of Cracow and head of the Reichsrat’s Polish ‘Circle’, Dr Juliusz Leo, to incorporate them into new Polish Legions – the name was an inspired reference to the Dąbrowski Legions that fought with Napoleon and were venerated in Polish national mythology – under the supervision of the cross-party Supreme National Committee. Recruitment started immediately and, as in Germany, it was a broad range of young middle-class men brought up on the tales of national heroes like Dąbrowski who were most responsive. In two and a half months, more than 10,000 recruits, many of them members of the nationalist rifle associations so popular in Galicia, had enlisted (see Table 3).

  It must have seemed to Habsburg leaders like a good outcome: the units remained as a symbol of Austro-Hungarian benevolence towards Polish national aspirations, but their extremist leader was neutralized by being granted the relatively lowly post of regimental commander, and the potentially dangerous nationalist project transferred into the hands of a committee dominated by Austro-Polish conservative loyalists. The Legionaries swore an oath to the Emperor, and were placed within the Habsburg military command structure. Conversely, however, the agreement also had the effect of rooting that project much more deeply in Galician society. The Legions became a popular cause célèbre, reaching a strength of over 21,000 men by 1917, and raising Piłsudski’s public profile. This was storing up trouble for the future.173

  Table 3. Social composition of 11,480 Polish Legion volunteers, up to 7 November 1914

  Source: J. Mleczak, Akcja werbunkowa Naczelnego Komitetu Narodowego w Galicji i Królestwie Polskim w latach 1914–1916 (Przemyśl, 1988), p. 150.

  The upsurge of both imperial loyalty and nationalism facilitating the Habsburg mobilization was accompanied by another distinctive, and countervailing, manifestation: the fierce suppression by the state of any sign, real or imagined, of disaffection. Civil and military authorities’ intense nervousness at war’s outbreak was in part incited by the conspiracy theories, spy scares and denunciations that during the whole of the past month had gripped the Empire’s multi-ethnic communities and bureaucracy. However, it also had deeper roots in the leaders’ inherent distrust of their peoples. In Hungary, secret instructions dating from 1912 ordered the gendarmerie that ‘persons under acute suspicion of espionage should be detained on the day of mobilization’.174 In Austria, Minister President Stürgkh demanded an extraordinarily high level of compliance from the population. Crownland heads were told at the end of July 1914 that not only ‘hostile’ elements but even those who displayed an ‘indifferent’ attitude to army and state were to be persecuted ‘with unyielding energy and implacable severity’.175

  The result was a massive wave of arrests across the Empire immediately after mobilization was declared. Even in Vienna, where in 1913 just eighteen arrests were made for so-called ‘political crimes’ like high treason, lese-majesty and disturbing the peace, twelve times this number were detained on suspicion of these offences in 1914.176 In Austrian Crownlands inhabited by Slavs and the non-Magyar populated regions of Hungary, the net was cast much wider. In Styria, for example, the gendarmerie arrested 800 people, mostly Slovenes, up to mid-September 1914.177 Doubtless this neutralized some dissidents, but the majority of those swept up in the paranoid crackdown were individuals from the lowest rung of society whose offences were trivial. A drunken cry of ‘Up Serbia!’ or a disparaging comment about the Emperor, best understood as expressions of frustration and unhappiness by the powerless, not dangerous attempts to undermine the state, frequently landed individuals in jail. Statements of reluctance to fight, occasionally accompanied by insults against other Habsburg nationalities, were prosecuted as disturbances of the public peace. One Moravian mill hand, for example, was sent to prison after he mused ‘I’d instantly go and shoot the Germans, but against the Serbs; with them I’d wait and think about it.’178 Absurdities were also punished. An itinerant worker who, after hearing of medallions showing the Emperor, had pointed to his genitals and remarked ‘I have such things hanging from there’ was sentenced to six months’ hard labour. The military courts tasked with trying such offences, far from being efficient, were overwhelmed. They lacked the personnel to handle the overnight expansion of their jurisdiction from a few hundred thousand soldiers to millions of civilians. Although employing their own procedures, they were obliged to pass sentence using the unfamiliar civil code. Moreover, there was immense confusion about where civilians were to be tried; criminal as well as political offences could, in certain circumstances, fall within the remit of the army courts, and in all cases the illegal action had to have been committed on or after 26 July. Considerable time was wasted as papers were shuffled back and forth between military and civil courts. Instead of the eight days legally permitted, suspects spent weeks or even months in detention while investigations were ongoing. Ultimately, most ended in acquittals due to the poor quality of supporting evidence; anonymous denunciations, gendarmes’ suspicions and drunken witnesses’ statements were all sufficient to prompt an arrest, but not to bring a prosecution.179

  The persecution was really damaging, however, not when it targeted people at society’s margins but when it embraced the nationalities’ community leaders. In the Slovene-inhabited lands of the Monarchy alone 117 priests were arrested. Teachers too were detained, as were several of the minority’s Reichsrat deputies, none of whom had previously been considered untrustworthy by the authorities. As these were precisely the people needed to mobilize national sentiment in the Monarchy’s support, this harassment jeopardized the success in these areas of the Habsburg war effort. In the traditionally loyalist Slovene population, the unjust removal of prominent figures and closure of nationalist, but largely loyal associations left, as Styria’s Statthalter himself acknowledged in mid-September, ‘resentment and ill-feeling’.180 It was civil authorities, not as is usually assumed the military, who implemented the excessive security measures in Styria, Carniola and Carinthia. In these regions designated as the hinterland, the gendarmerie, prompted initially by its civilian superiors and then sometimes on its own initiative, was the principal tool of repression. The army’s main role was to try the suspects delivered to it. In Hungary, where on 25 July Tisza ordered a show of strength against the minorities, civil authorities were even more aggressive. The gendarmes arrested so many non-Magyars there after mobilization was declared that already on 2 August the Interior Minister had to clarify that only the really dangerous should be detained. One month later, however, the Minister President was still demanding in relation to Hungary’s Serb minority ‘relentless severity against the criminals’.181 Slovaks too were caught up in the sweeps despite neither living near a border nor having kinship to any nation that the Empire was fighting. By the start of October 1914, 600 languished in prison.182

  Nonetheless, the military made matters much worse. Its mal
ign influence was manifested in two ways. First, while it quickly dawned on the civil administration in the Austrian hinterland that the repression was exaggerated and counter-productive, many soldiers, and particularly the Army High Command (AOK), remained convinced of its necessity. The view of Conrad, Chief of the General Staff, was ‘better lock up one hundred people than one too few’.183 The War Supervision Office, deeply suspicious of the Slavic population, promoted harsh and arbitrary measures. Only in the autumn did the Emperor finally order it to cease detaining people on the basis of anonymous denunciations.184 Individual commanders, even when unfamiliar with local circumstances, were also not shy of exceeding their authority; already on 27 July, the day before war began, Tisza protested to the Emperor that the officer commanding the Hungarian VII Corps district, the south of which was home to Serbs, had illegally launched mass arrests. Other military abuses, including the arrest of diet deputies, officials and clergy, and the taking of hostages, were committed in Croatia and, in its east, Slavonia.185 On a higher level, the AOK’s obsession with disloyalty in the population and its efforts to intervene in political matters would in the coming years cause constant tension with the Austrian government.

  Second, the AOK and the Balkan Force Commander exercised untrammelled power in the wide territories designated as their areas of operations. In Dalmatia, which had been a focus of South Slav agitation in the years before the war, hundreds, including some prominent politicians, were interned. Military conduct deeper in the war zone, in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Galicia, was, as we shall see, vicious, far exceeding any violence against civilians in western Europe. Suffice it now to note that already, by the early autumn, there was serious alarm in the highest Habsburg circles at the effect of the repression on public mood across the Monarchy. On 24 August the head of the Emperor’s military chancery wrote to Conrad, complaining that many of the measures against inhabitants were ‘positively ludicrous’ and warning that ‘much lamentable ill-feeling is being stirred up’. ‘The baby is being thrown out with the bathwater,’ he wrote. ‘We cannot harass the population, which has shown itself beyond all expectation loyal and willing to make sacrifices, unnecessarily.’186 After a second wave of arrests by military authorities under the AOK in mid-September, the War Minister, Alexander von Krobatin, also intervened, appealing successfully to the Emperor to issue an order urging commanders to detain people only if they had serious grounds for suspicion, as unjustified arrests were ‘capable of driving even loyal elements into the camp of our enemies’.187 By then, however, it was very late. Military units had begun also to behave arbitrarily in northern Hungary, harassing officials and arresting and mistreating Uniate priests. The disastrous consequences of the army’s intervention in delicately balanced multi-ethnic communities had already been foreseen by Tisza in his complaint of 27 July against VII Corps’ mass arrests. ‘Such measures,’ he had warned, ‘if not undertaken after careful consideration by qualified and responsible authorities, provoke the population, alienate peaceful, loyal elements, spread far-flung anxiety and panic and thus can instantaneously have the most damaging consequences and would, in the long term, have disastrous repercussions for the peaceful coexistence and loyal, contented disposition of the nationalities.’188

  The Habsburg Monarchy mobilized far more successfully than any of its leaders had dared hope. Everywhere there was obedience, and in many communities despite intense anxiety triggered by Franz Ferdinand’s murder and raised still further by war’s outbreak, there was a determination to fulfil patriotic duty. As Major Artur Hausner, gratified by what he called the ‘enthusiasm’ of the Hungarians, concluded with satisfaction in his diary, ‘it is a genuine people’s war into which we go.’189 Still, while superficially the mobilization was a demonstration of Habsburg patriotism and unity, a more complex picture is revealed on closer inspection. The state effort was in part successful in 1914 because it was underpinned by national mobilizations, varying in strength in different parts of the Empire, but almost universally loyalist. Yet there were problems. First, this loyalty was not unconditional, and conflict and the sacrifices it entailed could only raise nationalist hopes and expectations. Second, even as national communities drew closer together in the crisis, the government did little to reinforce imperial solidarity. Hungary remained an oligarchy with no promise of change. In Austria, parliament stayed shut, rule continued by decree, and it was made clear that compliance rather than consensus was sought. The heavy-handedness of the gendarmerie and military at the opening of hostilities risked discrediting the regime in loyalist areas and often removed precisely those mediating figures, nationalist clergy and politicians, with the influence to bring their peoples wholeheartedly behind the Emperor’s cause. Impressive though the popular response was in 1914, reflective of state legitimacy to a great degree, it nonetheless obscured unnecessarily weak foundations beneath the Habsburg war effort. These would be exposed by the stresses of the coming conflict.

  3

  War of Illusions

  WAR PLANS

  The German and Habsburg General Staffs confronted a strategic nightmare in the summer of 1914. Each faced war on two fronts. To Germany’s west stood the modern French, Belgian and British armies; opposite Austria-Hungary’s south-eastern border were battle-hardened Serbian and Montenegrin troops; and in the east over both loomed the mighty Russian military. Together these enemies fielded 5,726,000 soldiers organized into 218 infantry and 49 cavalry divisions. Against them, the Central Powers had just 3,485,000 men in 137 infantry and 22 cavalry divisions.1 German and Austro-Hungarian generals knew that if victory were to be won despite their forces’ numerical inferiority, it would have to be quickly, for the odds against them would only lengthen in a prolonged conflict. France and Russia’s combined gross domestic product exceeded that of the Central Powers by one-fifth, and the Tsarist Empire’s population alone outnumbered their inhabitants by one-third. Moreover, German military planners had assumed since 1908 that Britain would inevitably, if not immediately, enter hostilities and place its enormous financial and naval resources at the Entente’s disposal.2 There were sound domestic reasons too to fear a long conflict. Habsburg leaders, already anxious about their peoples’ loyalties in peace, could scarcely welcome the destabilizing hardship and discontents that would accompany extended hostilities. Alfred Graf von Schlieffen, the Chief of the Prussian General Staff from 1891 to 1905, had predicted that any drawn-out war would bring economic ruin and quite probably revolution.3 The Central Powers’ armies thus developed high-risk schemes predicated on the need to crush their opponents rapidly and decisively. Ruthless and peremptory action would characterize their conduct on the battlefield against both enemy military forces and any sign of popular uprising.

  Surprisingly, given how tightly their fates were bound and the difficulty of the task that they faced, the German and Habsburg armies had cooperated only loosely in planning their wars. Under Schlieffen, who was intensely secretive about his plans and contemptuous of Austro-Hungarian military capabilities, contacts between the Chiefs of the General Staff were by 1905 limited to an annual exchange of Christmas cards. The rise of Helmuth von Moltke and Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf to the top of the armies in January and November 1906 respectively, and the international tensions sparked by the Bosnian crisis in 1908, brought more cordial relations and some greater openness about what the allies hoped from each other. To his credit, Conrad pressed for more detailed discussions in the years directly before the First World War, but neither Emperor Franz Joseph and his government nor the Germans were keen. Instead, the agreements reached were personal undertakings between the two Chiefs of Staff.4 In 1909 the Austro-Hungarians were told that in a two-front war, the Germans planned first to deploy the overwhelming majority of their forces in the west. Moltke needed an early Habsburg offensive to distract the Russians from the Reich’s weakly defended eastern border while his army quickly defeated the French; as a sop and reassurance, he promised Conrad that the small forces left there wou
ld attack in order to draw off as much enemy strength from the south as possible. For the Habsburg Chief of the General Staff, the prospect of taking on almost the full might of the Tsarist army alone was daunting already in 1909. Moltke’s promise appeared increasingly unrealistic in the years afterwards, as the eastern enemy rearmed and updated its deployment plans. However, Conrad did not press him hard for any more detailed commitment. After a German victory in the west and a successful Habsburg holding action, the Reich’s army would be transferred eastwards, enabling the Central Powers to overwhelm their Russian enemy. With this assurance, Conrad could risk a confrontation with Serbia, an operation that he passionately wished to undertake.5