Such illegal conduct, stressed Kövess, demanded that officers and men respond ‘most energetically’. Any individual found carrying a weapon, or even keeping one at home, was to be immediately shot if on enemy territory or court-martialled and condemned if on Habsburg land. Villages and farms from where shots were fired were to be surrounded, set ablaze, and the guilty executed. When troops were to be quartered in a village inhabited by suspected ‘Russophile elements’, their advance guard should take the most influential inhabitants hostage and announce that ‘the slightest hostile act’ would result in them being ‘publicly and immediately executed’. Villages were also to be held responsible for the telegraph lines in their vicinity. The hostages would also be executed if these were cut. It was not enough for Kövess that this order should be read to the troops. Rather, the men were ‘to be told most forcefully to shed the habits of peace as soon as possible and to realize that we are dealing with a cruel and treacherous enemy, against whom careful and ruthless action is urgently necessary’.170
Civilians of all ethnicities living in both the Austrian and Russian borderlands fell victim to Habsburg violence. In predominantly Polish western Galicia, at least a peremptory legality was usually observed. Offenders, if they were lucky, might get a trial at one of the permanent, professionally staffed Landwehr divisional courts. The sentences handed down were extremely harsh because the Crownland was part of the ‘Area of the Army in the Field’ and therefore subject to martial law. How hard these courts could be is illustrated by the case of Michał Św., a decorator from the mountain village of Lachowice who in September 1914 was condemned to death for making insulting remarks about the Emperor. He was executed within two hours and posters announcing his fate were put up in nearby Cracow as a public warning.171 Front units, however, conducted short trials at best and could skip troublesome lengthy investigations to prove guilt. They also took hostages in the border areas of western Galicia. Jan Słomka, the long-serving Polish mayor of Dzików, a village in First Army’s concentration area, was arrested after a soldier’s cigarette started a fire in nearby stables, killing two army horses. Officers immediately assumed deliberate sabotage, rather than accept that one of their men was to blame, and they held seventy-two-year-old Słomka and four others hostage for eight days, promising in the event of a repetition to shoot them and burn the village. Other Polish mayors were arbitrarily interned or condemned to be hanged.172
In Russian territory, legal niceties were, as Kövess’s order indicated, considered less necessary. The Habsburg army’s innate suspicion of civilians, its harsh procedures for responding to non-military resistance, and the shock of battle, rather than racism, were sufficient to drive much of the violence. The 12 ITD demonstrates this well. This division was stationed in Cracow in peacetime and Poles formed the largest single contingent in its regiments, yet at the opening of the war it murdered and burned its way through Congress Poland.173 The First Army, the force to which the division belonged, was gripped by a belief that signals and even secret telephones were being used to inform on Habsburg troop movements – highly improbable in economically backward Poland. Orders were issued that civilians who cooperated with the enemy or even just tolerated enemy observation points or telephone lines in their homes were to be ‘ruthlessly killed on the spot’.174 The 12 ITD, despite its Polish composition, had no scruples in so acting. When people in Kłodnica, a small village about 60 kilometres west of Lublin, were suspected of guiding enemy artillery by fire signals, Major General Paul Kestřanek, the 12 ITD’s commander, ordered that the mayor and another community official be arrested and, if they could not identify the fire-raiser, shot.175 A report that the population of nearby Chodel had ambushed troops provoked a similarly brutal response: ‘Pull out the mayor, priest, assistant priest [all of who would have been Catholics] and a few others, principally Jews, and shoot them immediately. Then burn the place and try to knock down the church steeple.’ While the mayor and priest had sensibly already fled before the 12 ITD’s troops attempted to carry out this order, they did catch and hang the parish assistant and selected five Jews for execution. Only three houses in the village were spared, on the grounds that they were sheltering Habsburg wounded.176 Other formations even turned their men’s shared ethnicity with enemy civilians to their advantage. One unit equipped a soldier, presumably a Pole, with peasant clothes and roubles and sent him out among the population as an agent provocateur.177
Racism nonetheless did play a role in exacerbating some of the violence. First, the most brutal part of the Habsburg army was, significantly, also its most nationalistic: the Hungarian Honvéd. Within days of its arrival in Galicia, the force acquired an ugly reputation. Peasants complained that ‘the Russians are bad, the Germans are bad, but Honvéd soldiers are the worst beasts’.178 The Magyars came from a society that had long regarded Slavs with contempt and pursued obtrusive assimilationist policies. Anti-Semitism was on the rise and the political disputes in the decade before hostilities had sharpened Hungarian nationalism.179 Honvéd troops were thus likely to look down on Poles, Ruthenes and Jews. Exacerbating the violence was the force’s poor discipline. Regular Habsburg officers in Galicia condemned the Magyars as ‘cowardly and without discipline’ and cursed the Honvéd, especially its cavalry, as ‘the greatest evil of all’.180 There was also a third factor making Magyar troops especially likely to attack civilians. Modern neuroscientific research stresses the importance of ‘otherization’ in the perpetration of atrocities. Stereotyping, ingroup and outgroup dynamics, a sense of threat and disorientation in a new environment all contribute to producing crucial distance between the perpetrator and his victim.181 Magyar troops were particularly likely to be reliant on prejudices and stereotypes and to misinterpret their environment because they were so ill-equipped to communicate with the population. Slavic troops had at least a chance of understanding something of what local Poles or Ruthenes were saying. German could also act as a lingua franca; it was the Common Army’s language of command and was sufficiently widely known in towns linked by rail to the outside world to ensure that someone able to translate could usually be found. Beyond the railways, Yiddish-speaking Jews might act as intermediaries. By contrast, nobody spoke Magyar in Galicia. Once Hungarians decided or were told that inhabitants were hostile, their linguistic isolation limited their ability better to understand their environment and revise the opinion.182
The other way in which race was important was in the particularly vicious targeting of one group, Galicia’s Ruthenian population. The conviction that the whole people, not merely individuals within it, were traitorous was fixed at all levels within the Habsburg army. Conrad was open about the killing that resulted: ‘we fight on our own territory as in hostile land,’ he told the politician and jurist Josef Redlich. ‘Everywhere Ruthenes are being executed under martial law.’183 The small intelligentsia, including many Uniate priests, suffered especially badly. As one outraged parliamentarian complained: ‘The most loyal people, respected, worthy persons, were put in chains and mishandled on the streets and in railway stations, beaten with rifle butts, truncheons and sticks until they bled, held for days without food in rain, cold and filth, cursed and spat at, threatened with revolvers and with the noose, treated like the most despicable spy.’184 Peasants and priests were strung up at the side of the road on the orders of Habsburg officers keen, as ever, to produce a visible deterrent against disloyalty. The full extent of death and suffering will never be wholly clear. By November 1914 over 7,000 Ruthenes had been confined in grim conditions in Thalerhof and Theresienstadt internment camps within the interior of the Habsburg Empire. Many others, members of villages condemned as unreliable by army officers, had been forcibly evacuated.185 A large number of Ruthenes were simply executed on the spot. The most plausible estimates give a total of 25,000–30,000 Galician Ruthenes slaughtered.186
Galicia’s Ruthenes became the focus of military violence for three reasons, two of which had a racial or racist component. First,
spy trials and conversion scandals had already tarred the entire people with the suspicion of treason and Russophilia, even though the numbers involved were tiny and the support at elections for pro-Austrian Ukrainian nationalist parties overwhelming.187 This ethnic group was thus prejudged: on their arrival, one officer recalled, troops were warned to be ‘extremely careful and uncommunicative, as the population of Galicia was not friendly and spies swarmed everywhere’.188 Second, the pre-war nationality struggle between Polish Crownland authorities and Ukrainian nationalist intellectuals played a part in raising the body count. Polish civilian officials were responsible for drawing up lists of unreliable people to be interned, and subsequent investigation by the army and Foreign Ministry found that many used the opportunity to rid themselves of rivals. Baron Leopold von Andrian-Werburg, the Habsburg Foreign Office’s expert on the Polish-Ukrainian territories, stressed the part played by ‘personal motives, and above all the rancour of influential local Polish agents’ in the deportation of loyal Uniate priests.189 Ruthenian representatives too blamed the ‘extremely partisan Galician civil authorities’ for duping officers into believing that all Ruthenes were traitors. All too often, they claimed, dangerous Russophiles had been ignored while Ukrainian nationalists loyal to the Empire but opposed to Polish control of Galicia had been denounced or deported.190
The third factor making Ruthenian civilians’ experiences of invasion particularly bloody was the Habsburg army’s retreat, which began among them in eastern Galicia. On 26 August, Third Army guarding Conrad’s right flank had clumsily attacked Tsarist forces double its size and was driven back. Although new defensive positions were prepared on the next river, the Gniła Lipa, Russian forces routed the army on 30 August and on 3 September captured Galicia’s unfortified capital, Lwów. The Second Army arrived from the Balkans just in time to participate in but not avert the disaster. Conrad’s response to the threat in the east, an attempted encirclement of the Russian attackers, demonstrated his total detachment from reality. His soldiers were exhausted after weeks of marching, and having frittered away his cavalry at the start of the campaign he had only a hazy notion of Russian movements.191 At the front, there was chaos. Captain Karl Lauer, a General Staff officer with the 17 ITD, Second Army, described how already since 26 August an ‘indescribable and incomprehensible’ fear of the Russians had gripped the troops. He heard of officers jumping out of first-floor windows to escape imaginary Tsarist attackers and on the Gniła Lipa saw Habsburg cavalry assaulting their own panicking transport units in an attempt to stop them fleeing rearwards.192 ‘There is a great lack of discipline’, worried another Second Army officer, Major Artur Hausner, at the start of September. ‘Officers and men return to Stryj [a city south of Lwów], supposedly separated from their units, all very run down and wretched and telling terrible stories about the fighting. The town is crawling with marauders . . . Every wagon brings fleeing inhabitants mixed with soldiers without weapons, without equipment.’193 In the disorder, looting increased. Outrages against Ruthenes were exacerbated by indiscipline and defeat, as officers and soldiers concluded that inhabitants’ treachery had brought about the catastrophe. The violence against civilians peaked during the retreat that autumn, but lasted up until the early summer of 1915.194
On 11 September, Conrad ordered a general retreat, first to the Dniester River, which divided the north and south of eastern Galicia, and then to the San River, which separated the west from the east of the Crownland. In the event, the Russians pushed his forces back much further, to the gates of Cracow in the west and the Carpathians in the south. His opening campaign had nearly destroyed the Habsburg army. The losses of professional officers were so heavy that in October those retired or unfit had to be re-examined and certified for service at the front.195 Some 100,000 soldiers and officers had been killed, 220,000 wounded, 100,000 lost as prisoners and 216 artillery pieces abandoned; all told, about one-third of the force.196 A cholera epidemic that accompanied the Russians added to the horror and loss of the retreat; from the second half of September, the sight of cramped-up soldiers dying in ditches along the roadside was common.197 No less serious was the shattered morale left by the calamity. As the front crumbled in September, healthy troops deserted on hospital and postal trains.198 There was a rash of self-inflicted wounds, especially among Romanian troops.199 A ‘remarkable number of units’ had simply fled, conceded the Austro-Hungarian army’s official history of the war, a volume written specifically to glorify its exploits.200 Total dissolution was staved off by draconian discipline. Officers were reminded of their duty to shoot shirking or deserting soldiers immediately.201 The mood, however, was miserable. With what Captain Lauer called a ‘bleeding heart’, the Emperor’s troops started a long march westwards.202
The Central Powers’ offensive plans failed in 1914. There would be no short war. For each General Staff Chief the campaign was a personal tragedy. Moltke had a nervous breakdown and lost his job. Conrad lost his officer son Herbert, killed in September on the Eastern Front. For the states that they served, the failure had far-reaching consequences. General Erich von Falkenhayn, Moltke’s successor as Chief of Staff de facto from 14 September (but, in order to hide the defeat on the Marne and avoid unsettling the public, only officially from 1 November), attempted to redeem the situation. A series of battles, shifting ever northwards, began on the Western Front, as both sides tried in vain to outflank the other before the sea was reached. This ended with a German offensive at Ypres in October and November 1914, in which many of the volunteers who had come forward in August were committed. The German army suffered a further 80,000 casualties for no real gain before exhaustion and shell shortage forced an end to the battle. With trench lines hardening along the entire front, it was now impossible to ignore the fact that the Central Powers were committed to a very long war against enemies whose will and morale had been underestimated and who were materially far superior. Falkenhayn doubted that the war could be won against all three Entente powers and wanted a separate peace with France or Russia by promising no annexations. As he astutely told the Chancellor, ‘if Russia, France, and England hold together, we cannot defeat them in such a way as to achieve acceptable peace terms. We are more likely to be slowly exhausted.’203
The campaigns of 1914 not only led into a long war of exhaustion but also set the conditions under which this gruelling struggle was to be fought. Austria-Hungary’s defeats weakened its international prestige, denied it for the following year potential Balkan allies, and were ruinous for its army. The Empire’s slide under German domination, which became ever clearer during hostilities, had begun. Domestically too, the campaign heralded the rising ethnic conflict and disillusionment with the state that would gradually come to dominate the wartime home front. The army alienated the Ruthenes through its brutal treatment. Conrad also aggrieved Polish elites by insisting on the replacement, in July 1915, of the traditionally Polish Statthalter of Galicia with a ‘neutral’ general. In Galicia, relations between the two ethnicities and the Jews were further soured.204 Nonetheless, although the campaign had suffered a major and mostly unnecessary blow caused by Conrad’s odd mix of indecision and unrealistic ambition, it revealed, like the popular response to the outbreak of war, the venerable Empire’s reserves of strength. Despite disastrous leadership and horrendous casualties, the army did not collapse. Instead, it went on to fight a determined retreat and then endure awful winter battles in western Galicia and the Carpathians, sustaining total losses of 189,000 dead, 490,000 wounded and 278,000 prisoners of war by the end of 1914.205
For the Germans, the balance of the opening campaign in the west was more favourable. Moltke had not won his short war, but his army had succeeded in ensuring that for the next four years it would be French and Belgian territory, not German, which would be devastated by the fighting. In the south, the army notched up a usually forgotten achievement in fighting off a French invasion. Quite what would have happened if the Republic’s army had invaded with greater
success is unclear. Certainly, once regained, Alsace-Lorraine would not have been relinquished. Some in the French military set their war aims higher by the autumn of 1914, demanding that the Reich be pushed back to its ‘natural frontiers’ east of the Rhine and the left bank placed under French military control.206 Even more importantly, in the north the Germans’ own invasion had dealt a catastrophic blow to France’s ability to wage a total war. The country’s heavy industrial heartland, as well as some very fertile agricultural land, had fallen under German control. At a stroke, France’s capacity to produce cast steel fell to 42 per cent and cast iron to 36 per cent of what they had been in peacetime. A sixth of the entire manufacturing industry was forfeit.207 The agricultural losses were also not negligible. Some 8,239,000 acres had been captured by the Germans, three-quarters of which had been under cultivation and contained some of the most fertile soil in France, supplying in 1913 more than a tenth of the Republic’s potatoes, a fifth of its wheat, a quarter of all oats and half the national sugar-beet crop.208
Whether German conquest and Habsburg resilience would be enough to triumph in the coming war of exhaustion was, however, far from clear. The German opening campaign, as well as the ‘race to the sea’ and the fighting at Ypres, had cost 500,000 officers and men dead or permanently wounded.209 The invasion and atrocities in Belgium had severely damaged the Reich’s reputation among neutrals. It had also fatefully ensured Britain’s early entry into hostilities. In the longer term, this would pose the most serious threat to both Central Powers. In 1914, however, there was an even more pressing menace. The German failure to grasp decisive victory in the west and the disaster suffered by the Habsburg army in Galicia left both powers very vulnerable. In 1914 and well into 1915, Austria-Hungary and Germany faced a Russian invasion in the east.
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