Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  The year 1914 was not the first time the Habsburg army had faced guerrillas. Counter-insurgency operations had been conducted in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1882 when the army had hunted rebels mercilessly but abstained from retributive measures against civilians.137 Hranilović’s exhortation to employ terror against the wider population was thus new. In part, the change may have been a product of the officer corps’ growing aggression, as it tried to compensate for its army’s material inadequacies through ruthless willpower and the ‘most energetic’ actionism.138 However, and in this regard it differed from its German ally, it was also a reflection of a growing tendency to think of enemies as racial collectives. In 1914 the army felt itself to be in what historian Oscar Jászi termed a ‘double war’, waged not only against external states but also ethnic groups inside the Empire’s boundaries.139 In the Balkans, the army attacked not only the Serbian kingdom’s military and population but also the Serb population on its own side of the border, who it believed was participating in hostilities. ‘The entire population in the areas of deployment was unreliable because they were Serb’ was the revealing opinion of Brigadier General Aurel le Beau, commander of the 61st Infantry Brigade, a Second Army formation.140 As already recounted, arrests had begun in Serb communities in south Hungary even before war broke out. This repression expanded when the invasion began. To deter insurgent attacks, Habsburg Serb community leaders were held as human shields at railway stations, gendarmerie buildings and military headquarters. Some were even tied to stakes next to government offices or reservoirs.141 Once no longer needed, they were not released. Instead, by the middle of September 1914, 2,584 ‘politically suspicious’ Habsburg subjects from these areas had been interned in eastern Hungary.142

  Habsburg officers considered such measures wholly legal. The Austro-Hungarian army’s service regulations, laid down long before the war, ordered that civilian uprisings should be met ‘with the greatest severity’. The measures for constraining ‘an enemy or unreliable population’ included summary justice and the taking of hostages.143 Under Kriegsnotwehrrecht, best translated as ‘The Right of Defence in a War Emergency’, officers were permitted to order executions without trial when their units were threatened. The War Supervision Office and AOK (the Army High Command) encouraged the use of this procedure.144 Formation commanders also regarded the situation as justifying its wide employment. The Commander of IX Corps, a formation operating around Šabac, warned his men that the Serb population was ‘inspired by fanatical hatred’ and admonished them to observe ‘an attitude of extreme severity, extreme harshness and extreme distrust . . . towards everybody’. Non-uniformed combatants were to be ‘unconditionally executed’ and hostages killed if shooting broke out in their localities. An assumption of guilt prevailed: ‘every inhabitant encountered in the open, and especially in the woods, is to be considered the member of a band which has concealed its weapons’, the general ordered. ‘These people are to be executed if they appear even slightly suspicious.’145

  These orders, and Habsburg troops’ bloody conduct, have to be seen in the context of both the army’s expectations and the actuality of combat in Serbia. Even before the campaign started, senior officers, as Hranilović’s report makes clear, expected to face a vicious people’s uprising. Before departing for the war theatre, reservists’ training included lessons on how to distinguish clean from poisoned wells and warnings about Komitadjis. The description they were given was worryingly vague: men in peasant clothing and cartridge belts.146 Once combat was joined, the Serbs lived up to some of these expectations. Most obviously, and in contravention of the Hague Convention, to which it was not a signatory, the Serb state deployed many soldiers with no uniforms. While most, although not all, of the first levy, the youngest troops aged twenty-one to thirty-one, had uniforms, many of the men in the second levy, aged thirty-one to thirty-eight, and all the even older third-levy troops went to war in peasant clothing.147 Habsburg soldiers’ confusion about who exactly was the enemy is thus entirely explicable. Civilians and military genuinely blurred in Serbia, to produce a more ‘total’ war than was waged in the west. This combat was extremely stressful. As one Habsburg combatant explained:

  Here, every peasant carried a rifle and the soldiers (presumably slyly) wore peasant clothes and there were stories that even women and children perpetrated hostile and cruel acts against our wounded lying on the battlefield. In every operation surprise blended with betrayal, one had always to expect fire, ambush and assault. There was never a quiet night. This mental tension was more difficult to endure than hunger and thirst.148

  The harsh orders for repression, which in targeting whole communities and dispensing with trials also contravened international and sometimes Habsburg military law, were a primary cause of what one officer termed the theatre’s ‘exorbitant’ cruelty and bitterness.149 The admonitions and warnings from on high, which included unlikely bans on drinking or bathing in the Drina as the Serbs were supposed somehow to have poisoned the entire river, combined with the chaos of combat and shortage of supplies, also fostered a mass hysteria among the troops. From the soldiers’ perspective, fuelled by their own operational plan’s total failure, there appeared no limit to Serbs’ cunning and barbarity. Serb civilians were firmly believed to be signalling to their own side with lights and smoke. One particularly imaginative fantasy had it that geese herders were betraying Habsburg strength, each goose herded to a river representing one Austro-Hungarian battalion.150 Officers’ brutal orders and troops’ readiness to kill may also have prompted a Serb reaction and spiralling violence. Stories, some possibly truthful, others clearly exaggerated, abounded in Habsburg ranks of Serb soldiers castrating and disembowelling prisoners and corpses, cutting out their eyes and skinning them.151

  The invasion lasted less than two weeks because, unlike the Habsburg forces, the Serbs had a sensible leadership. They also demonstrated considerable skill, endurance and ruthlessness that more than compensated for their poor equipment. Their commander, Vojvoda Radomir Putnik, had at first adopted a defensive stance, leaving only light forces along the frontier. His three armies were mobilized in the central north of Serbia. Once he recognized the direction of attack, he marched them to the border, concentrating particularly on the Habsburg Fifth Army, the key point in the invasion, against which he achieved a 3:2 superiority.152 The decisive battle took place on the night of 16 August, when divisions of the Serb Second Army ambushed the 21 Landwehr Division (LITD) on the Čer Plateau. The Serb veterans fought dirty, placing Czech sentries off guard by claiming to be Croatian Honvéd and then opening fire at point-blank range. In the ensuing melee, the Habsburg unit lost nearly one-third of its infantry and half of its field artillery. A chaotic retreat ensued. Not just the 21 LITD but also the 9 Infantry Division (ITD), its sister unit in the VIII Corps, vacated their positions. The Fifth Army’s other Corps, the XIII, also withdrew. An attempted intervention by Second Army’s IV Corps served only to delay its departure for Galicia. The Sixth Army, whose advance in the south had stalled, was withdrawn. By the night of 24 August, no Habsburg units remained in Serbia. In thirteen days, Potiorek had lost 28,000 men, thirty machine guns and forty-six artillery pieces. Serb military losses came to 16,000.153

  The defeat was a spectacular humiliation for the Austro-Hungarian army. Any possibility that Romania or Bulgaria might enter the war early on the side of the Central Powers was dashed. A second invasion in November, which briefly captured Belgrade but ended in mid-December with another retreat simply underlined Habsburg shame.154 For the soldiers, the defeat was deeply demoralizing. In Fiedler’s unit, back behind the Drina, rumours of winter quarters circulated already at the end of August. Other officers prayed ‘Please God let us have a better leadership at the top or more luck!’ Starting a trend that would continue through the war and prove deeply divisive at home, the command unfairly shifted the blame for the disaster onto Czech troops.155 The best that could be said of the operation was that it was brief. As it ended,
an even worse disaster was just starting to unfold for the main Habsburg force in Galicia.

  While failure in Serbia was humiliating, Habsburg defeat in Galicia was a catastrophe. The bulk of the Empire’s army, 1,200,000 troops, including most of the cavalry and around 2,000 guns, was deployed in this theatre.156 It was arrayed against Russian armies that were a third larger. Conrad’s indecision and errors during mobilization, which had unnecessarily weakened his force, were compounded by an unrealistic and ill-conceived battle plan. His army was routed within a month. For Galicia’s inhabitants too the campaign was a tragedy. Habsburg officers’ fears and prejudices, and the strain and confusion of a traumatic retreat, combined with a bitter nationality struggle in the multi-ethnic area of operations to produce the bloodiest massacre of civilians perpetrated within Europe during 1914.

  Galicia, the territory in which the army was to operate, was a centre of seething national ambition and conflict. The struggle for power between the Polish-dominated administration and Ruthenian nationalist intelligentsia was, despite recent concessions, still fresh and bitter in 1914. The stakes in the political competition had in fact become even higher once war broke out, and both peoples’ representatives tried to curry favour with the Emperor and win political leverage by raising armed forces, the Polish Legions and Sič riflemen. Both peoples were mostly loyal to the Habsburg state, in good part because they needed its support in their conflict. Among the Poles, even Ignacy Daszyński and his Socialist comrades had approached the government in Vienna at the start of August and optimistically promised an uprising in Russian-held Congress Poland, claiming to have tens of thousands of revolutionaries prepared and waiting for the moment to attack the Tsarist oppressor.157 Only the National Democrats, who had their base in eastern Galicia, were tactically pro-Russian, but even they were quiescent in the summer of 1914. The Ruthenes, as the weaker people, were even more reliant than the Poles on Vienna’s support. The majority Ukrainophiles – the nationalists – fervently proclaimed their allegiance to the Empire’s war effort in 1914. However, this people’s public image had been tarnished by the pre-war spy scandals and accusations, unjust for all but a small part of the population, of Russophilia.158 The Polish civil administration introduced repressive measures as war with Russia neared. At the beginning of August, the Statthalter, the chief of the Galician administration, had warned police and district administrators that as the Russophile movement could ‘have a disastrous influence in a serious situation on the action of our armed forces’, they must ‘crush this movement energetically with all means available’. The language was violent: officials were ordered ‘to act ruthlessly against the guilty’.159 By the middle of the month, 147 ‘politically suspicious’ people had been arrested and the administration intended to transport a further 800 Russophile political prisoners from the Crownland.160

  The Habsburg army completed its concentration in Galicia between 19 and 23 August. Conrad planned to attack from the Crownland north-east with two armies. The First Army, covered by a small ‘army group’ on its left, was stationed to the west, at the confluence of the Vistula and San rivers, and Fourth Army gathered in the centre of Galicia, at the fortress city of Przemyśl. These armies, with three and four corps respectively, were smaller than expected but faced an enemy of similar strength. Covering their eastern flank were Third Army and, below it, the core of what would become Second Army when B-Echelon arrived from the Balkans, Army Group Kövess. Together, this eastern guard comprised four corps. Conrad’s scheme was ill-conceived and failure virtually guaranteed. Two key problems doomed the plan. First, Conrad simply did not have the troops to cover a frontier extending 280 kilometres. In the absence of the B-Echelon units, his eastern guard was confronted by Russian forces nearly double its strength. Second, it was entirely unclear what the thrust of First and Fourth Armies north-east was supposed to achieve. In pre-war years, there had been vague talk of a joint concentric offensive, in which German troops attacking south-east from East Prussia and Habsburg forces advancing from Galicia would cut off Russian Poland. However, German weakness in the east had always made this implausible and it had been firmly ruled out by Moltke on 3 August 1914. Conrad’s decision to go ahead nonetheless meant that the Habsburg offensive was a strike into thin air.161

  The plan’s chances were further diminished even before the main operation began. Conrad spent his cavalry at the outset by sending all ten divisions on a reconnaissance mission 100 kilometres into Russian territory. Some units made round trips of 400 kilometres, as due to the premature unloading of troops in the centre of Galicia they had first to ride great distances in order just to reach the frontier. The mission failed totally. The cavalrymen were unable to penetrate behind Russian screening troops. Even worse, a new, ill-fitting saddle designed to give troopers a stiff posture on parade turned out to rub the skin off the horses’ backs, and by the third week of August half of the animals were out of action.162 When the main offensive opened on 22 August, Habsburg forces thus stumbled blindly forwards. The First and Fourth Armies committed themselves well, and at the end of the month the latter almost succeeded in encircling the Russian Fifth Army at Komarów and took 20,000 prisoners and nearly 100 guns. Yet the advance north-east extended Conrad’s eastern flank, making the task of his weak Third Army, which temporarily gave up three divisions to assist Fourth Army, even more impossible. Once the vastly superior Russian forces opposite began to move westwards, Third Army lacked the strength to stop them. By 30 August it had been routed.163

  These early clashes exposed the over-ambition of Conrad’s plan but also the flaws in the tactical doctrine in which he had trained his army. The greatest deficiency was in combined arms tactics: the commander of 32nd Lwów Field Artillery Regiment was not unusual in conceding that ‘the cooperation of the artillery with the infantry was weak on our side’. Officers at all levels failed to coordinate, different arms did not communicate, and the gunners selected their own targets.164 The infantry, although its intensive training in route marching paid off, was also often outclassed by the Russians, who had learned much from their defeat nine years earlier in the Russo-Japanese War. By the end of September, the AOK was urging its soldiers to imitate the enemy’s trench-building and stressing the need to reconnoitre before attacking and to deploy into ‘very loose skirmisher lines’ in the advance in order to limit losses from shellfire.165 The diary of Josef Gamst, a platoon commander in Moravian Landwehr Regiment 9, a unit in Fourth Army, gives a good sense of how chaotic and frightening was this early combat. Gamst’s regiment came into action in a potato field around 50 kilometres south of Komarów on 29 August. The Russians had positioned themselves 800 paces away on the edge of a wood and were difficult to see, let alone kill. Shells flew over the soldiers’ heads and, once an enemy battery on the right opened up, in their midst too. Small arms fire crescendoed: ‘particularly unpleasant is the machine-gun fire’. Bullets whistled in from behind, as Austro-Hungarian reserves in the rear, unaware of the Landwehr men hidden among the potato plants, began shooting. The unit took casualties: ‘The cries of those hit and the groaning and whimpering of the wounded are nerve-shattering.’ Gamst was one of the unlucky ones. A bullet grazed him, ripping his cap from his head. Blood ran down his face and he lost consciousness. Several hours later, he awoke to find his unit gone, a dead man slumped over him, and a Russian patrol pointing their rifles at him.166

  Fantasies of civilian resistance were no less pronounced in this eastern theatre than on any other front. There was a grain of truth in the Habsburg army’s conviction that it faced treachery and hostility. The Russians had built up a small spy network in the province.167 Even their defenders admitted that in the Russophile north-east of Galicia, some Ruthenian peasants may have shot at Habsburg troops.168 Nonetheless, the fears were overblown for the Russians had no history of organizing units like the Serb Komitadjis, and the mass of the minority peoples on either side of the border had no wish to risk themselves for the oppressive Tsarist regim
e. Ruthenes, who were the subjects of most suspicion, were found by investigations after the Russian occupation to have been overwhelmingly loyal to the Habsburg dynasty and state.169 Austro-Hungarian rules of engagement when facing a population believed to be hostile were, however, extraordinarily harsh. On 19 August, Army Group Kövess operating in the south-east of Galicia issued a typical warning to its soldiers:

  In our troops’ operations up to now, it has been repeatedly the case that they have been shot at by the population or also by Russian soldiers in male or female civilian clothing . . . It has also been ascertained that the Russophile population of various places in our own land is working in cooperation with the enemy and by informing the enemy (frequently through signals) is betraying its own troops.