Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  Habsburg Jews shared Poles’ liberationist ideals. Their co-religionists had suffered more than most under Tsarist oppression. In the Pale of Settlement, Jews had been impoverished by legal discrimination and subjected to bouts of extreme violence. There had been pogroms in the south of the Pale in 1881 and across the Russian Empire’s western regions in 1903–6. The most famous, at Kishinev, had resulted in 47 Jews murdered and 424 wounded, attracting international condemnation.131 The Russian army’s anti-Semitism in Galicia in 1914–15 reinforced hatred, although whether that emotion made Jews more willing to fight was controversial. Austrian anti-Semites insisted that, as in peacetime, Jews were avoiding service.132 Senior army officers also suspected that Jewish men were using falsified medical papers, deliberate self-starvation, and even altering their birth dates in locally kept records to dodge the draft. The Chief of Staff in I Corps, Brigadier General Demus-Moran, advocated, fortunately without result, singling out Galician Jews, forcing them to undergo medical checks regardless of their paperwork, and impressing those too weak for combat into new ‘Galician Jewish Civil Worker Battalions’.133 On the other hand, many Jews clearly served with distinction on all fronts. Loyalty to Franz Joseph, gratefully misremembered as the cause of their emancipation, or a vain desire to shut the anti-Semites up with a display of loyalty and bravery, motivated Jewish soldiers. So too did an understanding of the conflict in the east as nothing less than a struggle between good and evil. Rabbis elevated it to a ‘holy war’.134

  The Habsburg Empire came closest to a genuinely imperial war, attracting the commitment of all its peoples, in its conflict with Italy. The former ally’s declaration of war on 23 May 1915 was condemned by Franz Joseph in widely publicized words as a ‘perfidy of which history knows not the like’. It is difficult not to sympathize, for the Italian government’s cynicism and aggression were breathtaking. The Prime Minister, Antonio Salandra, was frank about a policy he called ‘sacred egoism’. He had sold his country’s services to the Entente. By the Treaty of London, signed on 26 April 1915, the Italians agreed to open hostilities within a month, and in return were secretly promised the lands of South Tyrol, Trieste and its hinterland, Gorizia, the northern half of Dalmatia, islands in the Adriatic, northern Albania and Valona. Some of these territories had been Habsburg for over half a millennium. By annexing them, the Italians would not only complete the Risorgimento, the unification of Italian speakers into a single nation state, but would also absorb lands with an overwhelmingly South Slav population and achieve Italian hegemony over the Adriatic.135

  No one beyond Entente leaders was privy to this agreement in 1915, but Habsburg commentators had justified suspicions about Italian greed. The Emperor’s indignation at what was a blatant land-grab by a country that for thirty-three years had been an ally reverberated across his realms. Vienna’s Neue Freie Presse condemned the Italian attacker as ‘worse than a thief’.136 As far away as Cracow, the reaction was aggrieved. How could it be, the city’s leading liberal paper Nowa Reforma wondered, that ‘Italy and France stand shoulder to shoulder with the ancient enemy of Poland and western European civilization; with that Russia which has still not washed itself of the fresh blood of its own sons.’ Italy was sacred ground for Poles, for it was where Dąbrowski’s Legions had fought a hundred years earlier. The Italian unification struggle had also inspired Liberals hoping to resurrect independent Poland. To find this much-admired country in the enemy camp was thus disillusioning: ‘We Poles, whose state lost its political independence through the greed and avarice of its neighbours, in spite of all the services that we did for western European culture and for the idea of freedom, must feel this insidious coup more deeply than anyone.’137

  Predictably, however, the strongest reaction was among peoples directly exposed to Italian attack. Slovenes and German- and Italian-speaking Tyroleans had already fought on the Serbian and Galician fronts. The majority being conservative Catholic peasants, they had gone obediently to defend the Emperor’s honour, but neither people had really felt that these were their fights.138 The conflict with Italy was different. The Slovenian Catholic weekly Domoljub caught the popular mood with its headline ‘Our War’ and called for the defence of ‘Slovenian soil and faith’ against the ‘avaricious hand’ of the liberal and anti-Catholic Italian state. Prince-Bishop Jeglič, the Slovenes’ foremost spiritual leader, also grasped for the language of holy war to mobilize fellow believers. Austria, he asserted, had won Liberal and godless Italy’s enmity as ‘the only still strong defence of the Holy Father and of the holy Catholic Church’.139 The response to Italian hostilities was even more impressive in Tyrol, where local and imperial loyalties combined in a remarkable defensive effort. The southern frontier was virtually defenceless in May 1915. With the Habsburg army heavily committed in Galicia, all that could be spared to defend Tyrol’s 350-kilometre border were a measly twenty-one battalions. In desperation, the Emperor summoned to protect their homeland the Schieβstände, the venerable shooting associations of Tyrol and neighbouring Vorarlberg, some of which could trace their roots back to medieval militia.

  Most youthful Standschützen, as Schieβstände members were known, had been drafted into the regular army. The heavy casualties in Galicia had necessitated a rise in the age of service to fifty, which meant that many older men had also left for the Eastern Front. What remained to answer the Emperor’s anguished call in May 1915 were thus 18,000 riflemen, many positively geriatric and with barely any combat training. Uniforms and military rifles had been delivered only in April. The units the Standschützen formed were highly unorthodox. Everyone knew each other, and their officers, two-thirds of whom were over forty, were elected. This was less progressive than it appears, for the region’s strong conservatism ensured that local notables were generally chosen to occupy the leadership positions. Still, it meant that the units genuinely embodied communities at war, and the transference of peacetime hierarchies into their structure ensured the instant authority of their commanders. The men were highly motivated, knew the border areas intimately and were practised shots. Their units comprised more than half of the manpower initially available to defend the frontier. Regular army formations took over the more dangerous sectors, while the Standschützen gave invaluable service guarding the mountain peaks. Many patrolled at altitudes of 3,000 metres or more, enduring extreme cold, rain and snow, and, lacking artillery, engaged in pushing rocks onto Italian troops below.140

  In 1915, Austria-Hungary had so many enemies that for most peoples and regions in the Empire it was easy to find some self-interest in fighting, whether from national idealism, parochial loyalties or historic enmities, as well as allegiance to Emperor or faith. Nonetheless, the absence of a dominant and universally accepted imperial war narrative mattered. First, as Galician and later Italian and Slovene refugees found, it exacerbated the lack of common feeling among the Empire’s peoples. It was partially responsible for the hostility they encountered in distant lands from populations who, although of a different ethnicity, were also Habsburg subjects like them. Second, the peoples’ greater commitment to local wars rather than the overall imperial conflict affected military operations. The AOK, unlike other High Commands, had to consider ethnicity alongside military needs when deploying its soldiers. Although Poles and Jews fought best on the Eastern Front, Croats and Bosnian Muslims were motivated by long historical enmities to fight hardest against Serbia. Slovenes and Dalmatians, intent on defending their homelands, were most effective on the Italian Front. Conversely, Italian-speaking Habsburg troops attracted suspicion, often unjustly, when serving in their own locality, but when transferred en masse to the Eastern Front they were praised as ‘brave and reliable’.141 A few minorities were not trusted anywhere. Habsburg Serbs were usually formed into labour battalions. Regional, not merely ethnic, identity was also recognized as important, however. Serbs from the Upper Danube, who were considered loyal, were posted to Bosnian combat units.142

  Third, and most importantly, fa
ilure to inspire commitment to the greater imperial war effort and hatred of its enemies hamstrung the Habsburg authorities in dealing with nationalities that had no ‘local war’ to fight. Among Hungary’s Transylvanian Romanian minority, there was little interest in the Habsburg cause: a report found that, instead, ‘aspiration to a Greater Romania is very strong among the population, and especially among the intelligentsia’. Draft dodging and desertion were mounting already from the start of 1915.143 In Austria, the prime example of a people without a cause was the Czechs. This nationality was far from the alienation of Transylvanian Romanians, but many felt with justice that the Empire’s dualist structure discriminated against them, and in influential parts of the population pan-Slavic feeling produced some sympathy for the Russians. In wartime, the distance of the Czech homeland from any battlefield made it difficult to feel that the fate of the nation was at stake. In July 1914, Czech men had responded obediently to the call to arms against Serbia, taking the Habsburg army by surprise, but they were never mobilized effectively to fight a long conflict for the Monarchy. The mood in Bohemia began to sour in the second half of September 1914, when wounded soldiers, a source of information against which the military censor was impotent, returned home with stories of the fiascos on the Serbian and Galician fronts. Soon, men were scrambling to avoid service. Doctors complained that in some towns three-quarters of Czechs mustered suddenly developed debilitating ailments.144

  Even more worrying for the military was the rise of insubordination and protest in Bohemian units leaving for the front. The first incident took place on 22 and 23 September 1915, when battalions of Infantry Regiments 8 and 28 departed wearing national colours in their caps and carrying three flags in the red-white-blue of pan-Slavism and a red flag on which was written ‘We are marching against the Russians and we do not know why.’145 The slogan was repeated by soldiers of other regiments in the following month. Drunk Czech soldiers of the 60th Landsturm from Písek chanted it when they marched to the town’s railway station on 20 October.146 Troops belonging to Infantry Regiments 21, 36 and 98 travelling to Galicia at around the same time daubed their railway wagons with ‘Meat Export Abroad’ and, once again, ‘I’m going against the Russians and don’t know why.’147 These signs of discontent were soon followed by military collapse at the front. In the autumn of 1914, Czech soldiers from Königgratz’s Infantry Regiment 36 and Jungbunzlau’s Landwehr Infantry Regiment 30 were accused of going over to the enemy in Galicia. In April 1915 the most notorious military disaster of the war took place, when Infantry Regiment 28, the unit that had caused the first trouble in Prague in September, capitulated to the Russians in the Carpathians.148

  The AOK, already distrustful of Czech troops after their language protests and strikes in 1898, 1908 and 1912, was encouraged by home army district commanders to see the roots of the indiscipline in political agitation.149 A small but well-known group of Czech politicians were indeed seeking to bring down the Empire. Václav Klofáč, the leader of the radically anti-Habsburg Czech National Socialists, had already in peacetime offered his services to the Tsarist General Staff. He had been thrown into jail in September 1914, but other anti-Habsburg politicians remained at large. The most important were Tomáš G. Masaryk, leader and sole Reichsrat deputy of the Realist Party, and Karel Kramář, head of the far more influential Young Czechs. Masaryk is one of the most attractive early twentieth-century figures from central Europe. A professor of philosophy at Charles University in Prague and later the first president of independent Czechoslovakia, he had been on the Bohemian political scene since his election to the Austrian Reichsrat in 1891. He was a man of conviction: he prized tolerance, freedom of conscience and civic education, and he saw democracy as the best way to institutionalize these qualities in a society. His despair at Habsburg inertia and refusal to recognize Czech sovereignty had moved him to advocate an independent Czechoslovak monarchy, a form of government that he thought would receive the widest support. However, he lacked any mass following, and went into exile in December 1914 with the purpose of convincing the western Entente to support his plans.150 Kramář, a committed Russophile, stayed on, convinced that at any moment the Tsar’s army might break through and end the war victoriously in Prague. His vision of the Czech future was very different: he wished naively for a Slav confederation under Tsarist leadership. In early 1915 he and several other Young Czechs joined a conspiratorial group, known to the initiated as the Maffie (Mafia), established by Masaryk’s successor as chairman of the Realists, Přemysl Šámal, and his associate Eduard Beneš. The tiny cell, comprising at its core just five activists, possessed neither the resources nor the support to incite resistance in the army or revolution at home. Even in its primary aim, the support of exiles trying to influence foreign opinion for the Czech national cause, it was of doubtful effectiveness.151

  Czech politicians and parties in fact were united, with only these exceptions, in their attitude to independence plans as lunatic schemes likely to provoke repression. The approaches of the Maffie were everywhere rebuffed. Political agitation played no part in turning troops into traitors. Habsburg military ineptitude in fact bore much of the blame for the collapse of the Czech units. In the case of the notorious surrender by Infantry Regiment 28 in April 1915, poor training, exhaustion, a supply shortage, and attack in indefensible positions by a greatly superior Russian force all offer sufficient explanation for its capitulation.152 Nonetheless, even if political disaffection was not a problem, the protests and riots in regiments departing for the front indicate incomprehension among Czech soldiers about why fighting was necessary. The troops were quite open about this: repeatedly in their protests they appealed ‘We are marching against the Russians and we do not know why.’ That they should wonder is not surprising, for wider Czech society had begun to ask the same question as news of defeats and heavy casualties had spread. As a children’s nursery rhyme circulating in Bohemia in early 1915 put it:

  Little red apple

  Round and round you go

  The Emperor fights

  Why? He doesn’t know

  Maria Theresia staked Silesia and lost

  The Emperor stakes everything, oh that’s going to cost!153

  In these circumstances, where a deficit in ideological motivation rather than outright disaffection was responsible for the protests, a propaganda campaign might have raised support for the Empire’s cause. Yet neither the Habsburg high command nor the Austrian Minister President Stürgkh considered persuasion. The state and army’s knee-jerk response, as at the start of the war in South Slav lands, was repression. In Bohemia, 950 people were arrested, and eighteen who had voiced sympathy for Russia were condemned to death by the end of 1914. In neighbouring Moravia, a further 500 people were tried for so-called political crimes and seven sentenced to death by the summer of 1915.154 In a Czech population numbering six and a half million, these figures were small, but they had a disproportionate impact. In part, this was because anybody, even minors, could be punished for trivialities: seventy-five Czech-speaking children between six and sixteen years old were among those who had been arrested for treason, lese-majesty, or unpatriotic conduct in Bohemia by mid-1917, some for just singing nursery rhymes like ‘Little Red Apple’.155 Above all, it was because political elites were targeted. In the small Czech town of Radnice, sixteen members of the local council were taken into investigative military custody simply because they missed Masses celebrating Franz Joseph’s birthday or name day in August and October 1914.156 Thanks to the military’s readiness to exceed its authority and disregard more politically attuned civil authorities, national figures were also imprisoned. The army arrested Kramář in March 1915 on suspicion of high treason. He was found guilty and condemned to death in June 1916 but was later granted an amnesty. The charge was justified, as Kramář had been plotting with the Russians, but the long legal process and draconian sentence turned him into a martyr. After the persecution of Slovene and Croat representatives in 1914 and later
Italian-speaking deputies, Kramář’s arrest, wrote one astute political observer, exerted a negative impact ‘impossible to exaggerate’.157

  The slights, humiliations and obvious distrust in which authorities held the Czechs prompted their attitude to shift from doubt to anger. The army’s treatment of Czech soldiers was characterized by a distinct lack of even-handedness: while other nationalities were permitted to march to war waving national flags, a Czech carrying Bohemia’s standard was regarded as traitorous.158 Even a very dubious denunciation could prompt commanders to search through the personal belongings of Czech troops for evidence of treason.159 The 60th Landsturm illustrates well the alienation provoked by the mistrust of their superiors. The soldiers’ protest was provoked when gendarmes were sent to escort them to Písek’s railway station. To this point they had been obedient, but they regarded the gendarmerie’s presence as unwarranted, demeaning and provocative. When the gendarmerie officer who defused the tension asked them to raise a cheer for the Kaiser, they and the family members alongside them responded enthusiastically.160 Czech civil society was also humiliated. Already by the end of 1914, forty-six newspapers had been closed down in Bohemia and many Sokol branches, feared by the army as centres of nationalism, had been forcibly dissolved. Symbolic, yet hurtful, measures were also imposed. Prague’s street signs were repainted, for example, because their red-white-blue colours carried associations of pan-Slavism. Czech-speaking bureaucrats suffered more tangible discrimination, when moves were made by local officials, with some support from the Bohemian Statthalter, to insist on a policy of the German language only being used in the workplace. Rather than attempt to invest the war with meaning for the Czechs, the army and administration made them pariahs, attacked their cultural symbols, and in consequence refocused the population’s discontent as resentment against the state.161