Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  Galicia’s torn multi-ethnic social fabric and anger at the regime were especially dramatic and violent, but they were not unique. Conditions in Croatia and Slavonia, another multi-ethnic shatter zone, were similar: armed bands stalked the countryside and within influential parts of the population ideas of separation and a universal wish for peace had become overwhelming during the spring and summer of 1918. Even in Bohemia and the Austrian heartlands, there were plentiful, if somewhat less totally anarchic, signs of social and political disintegration.52 The Empire’s major cities were again shaken by protests against food shortages and spiralling prices. Anti-Semitism was widespread, both because of the shortages and because many associated traditionally pro-Habsburg Jews with the now hated regime. In Bohemia, all that still united Czechs and Germans was what one report termed the ‘anti-Jewish attitude in all classes’. Prague had a small anti-Semitic demonstration in May 1918.53 In the Empire’s capital, Vienna, anti-Semitic agitation by German nationalists and the Christian Social Party in parliament, public meetings and newspapers had been on the rise since the relaxation of censorship in mid-1917 and reached its peak in the summer of 1918. Not only the Galician refugees but all Jews had become their target. So bloodcurdling and frequent were the pogrom threats that at the end of July 1918 the city’s Jewish representative body together with another 439 Jewish community councils from across the western half of the Empire finally broke their long silence and publicly protested. It made no difference. In Vienna, and across east-central Europe, the broken ethnic relations and virulent anti-Semitism that had formed through hunger and suffering would outlast the wartime ordeal and become more intense and radicalized in defeat.54

  THE HABSBURG MILITARY

  On the face of it, the Treaties of Brest-Litovsk should have been good for the Habsburg army. The force had sixty-three divisions at the start of 1918. Thirty-two infantry and twelve cavalry divisions were stationed on the Russian Front. Although mostly set marching eastward to secure Ukraine rather than being relieved and transferred, they were finished with heavy fighting. Whether the cessation of hostilities did much to raise morale is uncertain; Czechs at least feared that their soldier relatives would simply be sent to the Italian Front.55 However, it did hold out the welcome chance to solve at a stroke the force’s manpower problems, which had grown acute by the end of 1917. Some 2.1 million Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war in Russian hands would now be released and returned to their homeland. Conrad von Hötzendorff, who since his dismissal as Chief of the General Staff had been serving as Commander of the South Tyrol Army Group, now bombarded Habsburg military headquarters in Baden with new, grandiose schemes to vanquish the Italians.56

  General Arthur Arz von Straussenburg, the man who replaced Conrad as Chief of the Habsburg General Staff in February 1917, had worked hard to renew the army since its catastrophe in the summer of 1916. The force’s organization had been standardized, so that each infantry division had four regiments, each of three battalions. The regiments had been restructured to be more ethnically mixed, a measure intended to obstruct mass desertions. New equipment had become available. Each division now had twenty-four heavy and seventy-two light artillery pieces. Mortar and anti-aircraft batteries had been added. Infantry companies had received light machine guns and grenades.57 Attention had also been given to morale and training. The army had sent officers to the Western Front to learn the new combined arms and initiative-led way of warfare. In March 1918 it had also emulated Ludendorff in establishing a propaganda organization, the Enemy Propaganda Defence Agency (Feindespropaganda-Abwehrstelle). The new organization was intended to combat war-weariness and Bolshevik and Western efforts to undermine troops’ loyalty and performance. As in the German army, each division was ordered to appoint an education officer. The message was to be positive. Troops were encouraged to be grateful for the ‘freedom and equality’ guaranteed under the Habsburgs. The nationality disputes that the government in Vienna was incapable of solving were not to be mentioned. Instead, discipline, duty, and a vague state patriotism and dynastic loyalty were to be cultivated.58

  While the Enemy Propaganda Defence Agency was set up too late and lacked personnel, funding and the genuine ideological appeal necessary to guide minds successfully, not all the army’s efforts to reform were in vain. There were Habsburg formations in which ‘best practice’ in training and troop management equated to that found in their German ally. The 9th Mountain Brigade offers a good example. Its commander, the Pole Jan Romer, found a general malaise when he arrived at the unit in March 1918. In one regiment, Infantry Regiment 104, many of the soldiers were stunted products of starving Vienna. The other regiment, Infantry Regiment 117, was composed of Slovenes who were fitter but included in their ranks disaffected men and officers. All personnel were in urgent need of rest and many had developed frostbite or bronchitis from service in the Italian Alps. Romer set about raising their military value through a mix of traditional paternalism and a thoroughly modern training regime. He set for his officers a personal example of paternalistic care by inspecting the men’s facilities and getting to know their wishes and problems, organizing extra food for them and improving their rest areas. Singing, games, pep talks and close attention by leaders to their troops’ needs were all encouraged in order ‘to awake in the soldier contentment and self-confidence’. The field instruction that Romer organized for his men was a world away from the clumsy, unsupported charges of the war’s opening months or the misguided reliance on static fortifications found in 1916. The soldiers of 9th Mountain Brigade undertook combined-arms exercises with mortars, artillery and even aeroplanes. Romer, like Ludendorff, focused on developing the individual’s fieldcraft and self-confidence. Tactical training was ‘based as far as possible on concrete combat experiences’, and live ammunition was used. Troops practised shooting, grenade throwing, bayonet fighting and negotiating obstacle courses.59

  Even if the Habsburg army, or at least parts of it, was more capable of learning than has been recognized, it still faced very serious problems. As on the home front, there were materiel shortages. Munitions and arms production were plummeting. The attempt to participate in the Hindenburg Programme at the start of 1917 proved a huge error, for to meet the targets, steel and iron had to be diverted from maintaining the transport system. This exacerbated an already severe shortage of rolling stock and led to lowered train speeds and haulage capacity and congestion. Coal could not be delivered to the armaments factories. Added to this, the efficiency of exhausted and starving blast-furnace workers had dropped by a third. Building up ammunition stocks was therefore an impossibility.60 Clothing troops was also becoming more difficult. The practice of giving soldiers a spare pair of boots had to be stopped. Tunics, trousers and greatcoats were all in short supply. As for troops’ rations, the best that could be said was that they were only marginally less meagre than those of civilians. The army’s daily individual flour ration stood at 283 grams in April 1918, down from 500 grams a year earlier. While the supply system would totally break down only in the second half of the year, the troops were already threadbare and hungry.61

  In part as a consequence of these miserable conditions, the army had been battling a desertion epidemic since the autumn of 1917. Conrad, who reported in September that desertions to the enemy had nearly tripled, blamed agitation on the home front and the poor example for discipline set by Emperor Karl’s amnesty for political prisoners of July 1917. Conrad also regarded military reforms in discipline and organization as part of the problem. Harsh discipline had always been a key pillar supporting the motivation of Habsburg troops. The force executed 754 of its own soldiers during the war, more than the French (600 executions), the British (346 executions), and far more than the Germans, who enacted the death penalty on a mere forty-eight men.62 Moreover, the Habsburg army not only punished minor crimes by leaving men tied for hours to a tree or post – like the British and, up to 1917, the Germans – but also went a step further in manacling petty offenders ha
nd and foot. However, in July 1917, Habsburg military courts and commanders had lost their right to confirm death sentences.63 Tying up and manacling had also been abandoned at Karl’s express order, withdrawing, in Conrad’s somewhat exaggerated phrasing, ‘every reliably effective means of punishment’. The former Chief of the General Staff was on firmer ground when he complained about the counter-productive consequences of mixing men from unreliable ethnicities into loyal regiments. While this strategy permitted the close supervision by loyal troops of distrusted Czechs, Serbs, Ruthenes and Romanians, it risked worsening their alienation: ‘In the midst of foreign-speaking soldiers, where in many cases the officer is also not capable of speaking their language, such elements naturally soon feel isolated, embittered and flee at the first opportunity to the enemy.’64 Conrad’s deep concern was entirely justified. In the first quarter of 1918, the Hungarians alone were searching for 200,000 absconded soldiers.65

  The return of Austro-Hungarian prisoners from Russian captivity further damaged the army’s discipline. These men had been exposed to extensive propaganda throughout their captivity. The Tsarist regime had resolved in August 1914 to separate prisoners by ethnicity, keeping Slavs, who were regarded as potentially friendly, in European Russia while banishing irredeemably hostile Germans and Hungarians to Siberia. Later years saw illegal and largely ineffectual attempts to recruit national units from prisoners or, in the case of Serbs and Italians, to transfer them abroad for service in ‘their’ national armies. Only in the case of the Czechs was there some success; the Tsarist army had used a small number of Czech prisoners of war for intelligence tasks, and after the first revolution the Russian Provisional Government had expanded recruitment, fielding in July 1917 a three-regiment Czech Legion in eastern Galicia. This ultimately reached a strength of 40,000 men, and deepened the distrust of Habsburg authorities for their Czech population and soldiers.66

  However, in early 1918 what preoccupied the Habsburg military was the fear that returning prisoners might bring back with them not national ideals (of which plenty were already circulating in the Empire) but Bolshevism. Lenin had the same expectation: ‘Hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war,’ he later gloated, ‘returned to Hungary, Germany and Austria, and made it possible for the bacilli of Bolshevism to deeply penetrate into these countries.’67 The Bolsheviks had been agitating among foreign prisoners of war since the second half of 1916. Worryingly for the Habsburg army, Hungarian and German prisoners, ethnic groups it usually regarded as dependable, had proven to be particularly receptive, in part because the miserable conditions in which the Tsarist army kept them spawned resentment. The propaganda had become especially intense once the Bolsheviks seized power. Leaflets and journals published in their own languages introduced prisoners to Lenin’s ideas. Leftist captives collaborated in the agitation, and formed in January 1918 the All-Russian Prisoners of War Committee. The Hungarian Béla Kun, who would lead a short-lived Communist regime in Hungary in 1919, was one of the leading prisoner-agitators, urging each comrade returning home to ‘be the master teacher of revolution in your divisions. Tell your brethren . . . that only the revolution can save us all from destruction.’68

  Habsburg military commanders were determined to prevent this message from reaching their demoralized soldiers and weary and angry populations on the home front. The flow of returning prisoners began in December 1917, soon after the Bolshevik coup, and had already reached half a million by the time a final agreement on prisoner exchange had been signed at the end of June. To receive them, the Austro-Hungarian army established a quarantine system. After ex-prisoners were liberated in Ukraine, where a third were imprisoned, or met at the border, they were given a medical inspection and deloused. They were then held in a camp for between ten days and three weeks, where they restarted drill and military training. Ideally, they would have been fed well and issued new uniforms, but dearth meant that rations were poor and the ambition to give each returnee a new tunic was soon lowered to a new cap and then dropped further to the point where military authorities were issuing an armband or cockade on civilian clothing. Once confirmed to be physically and ideologically sound, prisoners were transferred to training units, where the circumstances surrounding their captivity were checked and deserters filtered out. Only after the men had passed through this ordeal were they finally given what all longed for after often years away: four weeks of home leave.69

  The army’s fear of Bolshevism was understandable but its reaction was counter-productive; as with its arrests and imprisonments without trial across the Empire in 1914, unjustified blanket suspicion led to coercion that alienated previously loyal men. Letter censorship reports had in fact uncovered little radical socialism. Czech and Polish prisoners were most disgruntled with the Empire, but they tended to express their grievances in national terms. Most other captives just felt miserable and abandoned.70 The army’s treatment of them accentuated these feelings. There was no welcome home; instead, the men found themselves thrown into an impersonal and mechanistic processing procedure. The army disregarded their suffering and, by incarcerating them once again in camps, did nothing to help them adjust. Some had developed what contemporaries called ‘Barbed Wire Disease’ during their long years of imprisonment, a psychiatric illness whose symptoms included irritability and problems with concentration.71 Others had been through extraordinarily traumatic experiences. Returnees captured in 1914 had been fortunate to survive a typhus epidemic that had raged through Russian camps in the war’s first winter. Others, mostly Hungarians and Austrian Germans, had been set to work on the Tsar’s own death railway, built to carry Entente supplies from Murmansk to the interior. Around 25,000 prisoners, 40 per cent of the men who laboured on this project, had died through exposure and exhaustion in temperatures as low as − 35°C.72 Finally, former prisoners were not prepared for the deprivation in Austria-Hungary. With dreams of home fixed in the pre-war world, many were shocked and demoralized by the impoverishment and exhaustion of their families. The intense suspicion and blithe expectation that they would soon return to combat also alienated the returnees. To be so ‘distrusted, bullied and scoffed at’ was, observed one ex-prisoner angrily, a ‘disappointment and bitter awakening’.73

  The trouble that swept through the Habsburg training units in the first half of 1918 actually owed far more to the army’s insensitivity and the unwillingness of exhausted ex-prisoners to be sent back into combat than to Bolshevik indoctrination. Between the end of April and mid-June, there were thirty mutinies by returning prisoners.74 Mostly, these were small spontaneous actions provoked by poor food, grievances over leave, or reluctance to join march battalions destined for the front. However, there were also larger-scale incidents, starting with complaints about the army but soon manifesting national or social grievances and racial antagonisms. Slovenian soldiers, long regarded as the most loyal of all the Empire’s South Slavs, were responsible for three major outbreaks of violence. Among the most violent was that which took place in Judenburg, Styria, where returned prisoners led 1,200 men in the draft battalion of Infantry Regiment 17 on a night of plunder and destruction. The officers’ mess and local barracks were vandalized, shops looted, and the town’s railway station was attacked and its priest intimidated. Two mutineers, four other soldiers and a female civilian were killed. Hunger, anger towards officers and drunkenness all contributed to the disorder. The men also had poorly thought-out but genuine political wishes. One of the ringleaders articulated their motivations at the start of the mutiny. ‘Come on lads, get dressed,’ he had appealed to his comrades in barracks. ‘We’re going home. We’re doing it not just for us but as a favour to the comrades at the front. The war has to be ended now . . . Whoever’s a Slovene should come with.’75

  The Habsburg Empire should have stood triumphant in the early summer of 1918. It had outlasted the autocratic regime of the Tsar that in peacetime had so publicly hoped for its collapse and dismemberment. Moreover, the external irredentist threats that had so frig
htened Austro-Hungarian leaders before the war had been eliminated. Serbia and the south of Poland were under occupation, a favourable treaty had been signed with Romania in May 1918 and the Italians were in abeyance after their heavy losses the previous autumn in their rout at Caporetto. There was no reason to continue fighting. Yet neither Emperor Karl nor Czernin ever considered a separate peace. The Habsburg Foreign Minister argued later that any such action would have led to German troops in Tyrol turning on the Empire and civil war at home.76 Whether the Germans could really have afforded the men in 1918 for an occupation of Austria-Hungary is doubtful. However, by sticking to their ally, Habsburg leaders guaranteed that any victory by the Central Powers would leave their Empire as nothing more than a German satellite. Another step along this course was taken in May when, after the French publicly revealed his secret peace approach through Prince Sixtus a year earlier, Karl had to pacify his angry allies and indignant Austrian German elites. A humiliating trip to prostrate himself at German army headquarters at Spa and the signing of a provisional agreement on a long-term military, economic and political alliance laid bare to the world the subjection of the Habsburg state.77