A Mad Catastrophe

by Geoffrey Wawro

  As in most things, Potiorek and Conrad had contrasting views on the question of how to deal with Serbia. Whereas Conrad envisioned a brisk operation in the second week of August, with Potiorek leading the Fifth Army across the lower Drina toward Valjevo, where it would encircle and destroy the Serbs fixed in place between Belgrade and the Macva by the Second Army, Potiorek had an entirely different conception of the unfolding campaign. Conrad saw the Fifth Army as the hammer crushing the Serbs on the anvil of the Second Army; Potiorek saw the Fifth Army, untrained in mountain warfare and unlikely to make much headway on the lower Drina, as the anvil against which the Serbs might be hammered by the Sixth Army, which would cross the upper Drina around Visegrad and then knife into the flank of the Serbian forces lured by the Fifth Army.

  A more muddled plan of campaign couldn’t be imagined. Conrad was demanding “a thrust into the Serbian heartland,” while Potiorek was for lying on the ropes along the lower Drina until the Serbs descended and offered an unguarded flank to a Sixth Army that would require weeks to traverse friendly but undeveloped Bosnia and then get through the mountain wastes on the Lim and upper Drina.8 Both plans were built on illusions and a deep ignorance of terrain and enemy movements. The Habsburg army hadn’t prioritized aircraft before the war—procuring a fifth as many as the Germans, a third as many as the French, and half as many as the Russians—and so they lacked the surest way to track Serbian marches.9 Conrad’s plan assumed that the Second Army would draw off large numbers of Serbian troops, even though the Serbs knew (from Russian intelligence) that it was departing. Potiorek’s plan assumed that the Fifth Army would survive despite the departure of the Second Army on its left and the slow arrival of the Sixth Army on its mountainous right. Most of the Second Army would be departing for Galicia on August 18, yet the Sixth Army would not complete its mobilization around Sarajevo until August 13 and would not arrive on the Drina before August 20. The Hofburg, which might have imposed a single direction on the army commanders, was lost in its own romantic reveries: “We are living through the lull before the storm,” Bolfras wrote Potiorek. “I still cry: ‘more enemies, more honor!’”10

  The Fifth Army began crossing the Drina on August 12. Potiorek lamented the “difficult terrain” of the Macva region, made all the more difficult by a lack of bridging equipment, but told Conrad that he couldn’t simply “sit and wait.” He’d have less than a week to exploit the reciprocal action of the Second Army, and a week was not much time on ground like this: wooded, hilly, and buried in tall rows of corn, perfect ground not only for Serbian infantry but for Serbian guerrillas as well, the komitadji partisans, who had played a big role in the Balkan Wars and were thirsting for a part in this one as well.

  Through it all, Potiorek remained weirdly sanguine. “The desk is his favored terrain,” colleagues said of the sixty-one-year-old Potiorek, and it was true. The career Schreibtischmensch (desk jockey) remained in Sarajevo with his adjutant Merizzi, making no effort to familiarize himself with the Drina front. Potiorek had never been regarded as a leader of men. As the jovial Beck’s deputy, he had been noted for his social awkwardness. Fellow officers noted his weakness at riding and with women. They called him a Weiberfeind, an enemy of women, either because he didn’t like them or because he loved the office too much. Some whispered that he and Merizzi, twenty years younger and the son of an old friend, were a couple. Potiorek had made Merizzi his wing adjutant in 1903 and they had been together ever since. In Appel’s judgment, both of them were misfits and afraid of their own troops, “weltfremd und truppenscheu,” tending to hole up in their offices instead of acquainting themselves with their units. They created, as Appel said before the war, an “ivory tower” in the Sarajevo governor’s palace that took no interest in the world outside. Everyone regarded Potiorek as a pompous ass, famous for his cold silence—broken only by mirthless laughter and vicious sarcasm—and his pretensions. He was easily caricatured in the popular press as having perfected the Moltkeangesicht, the mien of a Moltke. Grave and somber, Potiorek would be “a god of war only so long as ink, not blood, was flowing.” In 1898, at the age of forty-five, Potiorek had commanded a brigade at Budapest, and a junior officer had said of him, “He bore the stigma of coming greatness on his forehead; everything he said was clear and true, and no criticism could penetrate his laconic, closed, unapproachable self.” He lived in a “self-constructed world.” This was most certainly not the man to command a messy war in the Balkans, and yet somehow, in its inimitable way, the Habsburg army had chosen him.11

  Potiorek had perfected the image of a brilliant staff officer, and was taken as such by everyone except his rival Conrad, but he was vain and militarily inexperienced. As Karl Kraus accurately predicted, “Potiorek would be a god of war only so long as ink, not blood, was flowing.”

  Credit: National Archives

  Potiorek assumed that the guerrilla war against the komitadjis would be easy enough to stamp out with atrocities. Since 1878, Austria-Hungary had never shrunk from terror in policing the Balkans, and this war would be no exception. From the comfort of his former Ottoman palace, the Konak, Potiorek encouraged his corps and division commanders to proceed viciously: “The best method against the komitadjis is to kill them all, no quarter; kill the whole band down to the last man, then wipe out the village that harbored them and publicize the event widely.”12

  Potiorek was no less confident that he could crush the Serbian regulars too. Even if he missed his rendezvous with the Second Army—now a certainty—he continued to believe that the Serbs could be drawn down on the Fifth Army around Valjevo in large numbers and rolled up from the right flank by the late-arriving Sixth Army. He should have asked himself how the Fifth Army would even reach Valjevo. It would struggle just to cross the Drina, enjoyed no flank protection from the slow-moving Sixth Army, and would probably encounter entrenched Serbian guns and infantry in the hills between the Drina and the Serbian interior.

  The Serbs, meanwhile, were not passively awaiting the Austro-Hungarian invasion. They had been actively planning for it since the Annexation Crisis of 1908. Serbia’s commander in chief was the young regent, Crown Prince Alexander Karageorgevic, but the real decisions in army headquarters at Kragujevac were made by the army chief of staff, General Radomir Putnik, who had run the Serbian general staff and War Ministry since 1903. Although crippled by emphysema—Putnik would direct much of the war from a stretcher—the sixty-seven-year-old general was a shrewd strategist and a popular hero.

  Taking the waters at the Austrian spa of Bad Gleichenberg in Styria when war broke out, Putnik was fortunate to have made it back to Serbia at all. Wheezing from his illness, he was detained while changing trains in Budapest on July 25, and released only after the quixotic intervention of Emperor Franz Joseph. Auffenberg was speechless: “Diplomatic relations had already been broken; we had captured the commander of the enemy army—a capable and iconic figure—and we let him go! Here was yet another proof of our political and military stupidity.”13 While Putnik’s release was negotiated in Budapest, his aides dynamited his office safe in Belgrade to get hold of the only copy of Serbia’s war plan with Austria-Hungary. Serbian officers, meanwhile, rushed to deploy their army for its third war in as many years.

  Though the Austrians tended to sneer at Serbian “backwardness,” the Serbs mobilized efficiently. Serbian recruits reported to the nearest of five “division districts,” each of which could raise as many as four divisions: a first-levy division (men ages twenty-one to thirty-one), a second-levy division (ages thirty-two to thirty-eight), a third levy (those thirty-nine to forty-five), and a “final defense” division of boys eighteen to twenty and men over forty-five. Serbia was so poor that only the first-levy divisions received complete uniforms and modern rifles. The second, third, and fourth levies wore their own clothing and more often than not got single-shot black-powder rifles from the 1870s. After two wars in quick succession, everyone and everything was worn out or in short supply: officers, NCOs, techn
ical troops, artillery, machine guns, shells, bullets, guns, horses, wagons, uniforms, tents, and kitchens. Plus, an ill-timed transition from the German 7 mm Mauser rifle to the Russian 7.62 mm Mosin-Nagant meant that even the first-levy divisions would not have a standard rifle or cartridge. Indeed, the Serbian army found itself with several different rifles and calibers in 1914, the Mauser and the Mosin-Nagant plus older Mausers captured from Turkey in the First Balkan War and 8 mm Männlichers captured from the Bulgarians in the Second Balkan War. Putnik, sent home by the Austrians the long way via Rumania, where he contracted pneumonia atop his emphysema, alighted finally at Serbian headquarters in Kragujevac on August 5.14

  Putnik’s deputy, General Zivojin Misic, had completed the deployment of the Serbian army in the chief’s absence. This was no mean feat, as much of the army had to be brought north from the newly annexed Turkish areas of Macedonia and Kosovo, which had Europe’s worst railways, having been constructed and maintained by the notoriously shoddy and corrupt Oriental Railway Society. Serbian locomotives and rolling stock, inadequate within the smaller borders of 1912, were thoroughly overstretched in the enlarged nation of 1914, all the more so because Serbia’s coal had to be imported and was in short supply like everything else. Serbian combat divisions lacked everything: A third to half of the men in even the first levy’s divisions had no rifle. Half of the army’s battalions had no machine guns. The army’s cavalry, artillery, and supply trains lacked horses. Only a fraction of the men received uniforms; the rest had to make do with an army cap and a tunic. Boots were unavailable. Instead, the troops were given opanci, the leather (in some cases) or cardboard (in most cases) curled-toe moccasin worn by the Balkan peasant.15

  Prime Minister Pasic, having acceded reluctantly to war, was stunned by the appearance of this armed mob: “without clothes, shoes or tents.” The Serbian officers were less worried. They would have agreed with the British military attaché in Belgrade, who noted that these poorly shod Serbs were “brave, enduring . . . and can live on next to nothing under conditions which would appall the average Britisher.” The American minister was no less admiring: “Give the Serbian soldier bread and an onion, and he is satisfied.”16 Knowing this, Serbian officers had been rehearsing a war with the better-equipped Austrians since Vienna’s occupation of Bosnia in 1878, with staff rides and exercises along the Drina, Sava, and Danube fronts every year. After the annexation crisis of 1908, the Serbs had settled on a firm plan: defend the kingdom until the broader European situation clarified, then take the offensive when Austria diverted troops to other fronts.17

  Knowing that Russian intervention ensured just a narrow window, if any, for Austrian offensive operations in Serbia, General Misic deployed the three Serbian armies to counter all possible Austrian attack scenarios. His poverty of arms made the task especially difficult. Although every Serbian division was supposed to have forty-eight guns, the first-levy divisions rarely mustered more than thirty and second-levy divisions were lucky to scrounge a dozen, many of them obsolete French cannon from the 1880s with no crew shield or recoil mechanism.18 Against this force, even Potiorek’s South Army looked formidable.

  Putnik and Misic placed the Serbian armies in northern Serbia along the lateral railway line from Valjevo to Palanka. The Second Army (four divisions), with the four divisions of the Third Army on its left, was assigned the heaviest task: to absorb and then counterattack the main Austrian blow. If the main blow descended from the north across the Sava, the Second Army would hit its right flank. If it came from the west across the Drina, the Second Army would knife into its left flank. The Third Army would join these counterattacks, or stand guard against Potiorek’s Sixth Army if it arrived sooner than expected. The Serbian First Army—four infantry divisions and a cavalry division at Arangjelovac—would function as a general reserve for use against any of the encroaching Austrian armies.

  Potiorek began the war on August 12, or tried to. Lacking most of its bridging equipment, General Liborius Frank’s Fifth Army straggled up to the broad, fast-flowing Drina and . . . stopped. The summer heat was stupefying. Most of the men were reservists and were thirsty and overloaded with sixty pounds of gear, much of it (brushes, boot polish, and songbooks) superfluous. The area was a tactical nightmare: swampy, overlooked by high river banks on the Serbian side, and cluttered with woods, bushes, and cornfields. A brigade of the Austro-Hungarian 36th Division sent half battalions across the Drina in boats to establish a bridgehead of sorts, but each boatload was greeted with withering fire from Serbian regulars and komitadjis on the riverbank. Still, a few Austrian companies clung to the east bank and even deployed a regimental band, which played the “Prinz Eugenmarsch” to keep spirits up as Serbian shells plunged in and machine guns chattered from nearby woods and cornfields that grew right down to the water’s edge.19

  The Austro-Hungarian Second Army was supposed to build its own bridgehead at Sabac on the Sava to draw off large numbers of Serbs, but it discovered that it had left behind its bridging equipment in the haste to mobilize. Frank’s Fifth Army thus began crossing the Drina between Zvornik and Bijelina—where the river was broad and eighteen feet deep in some places—without any protection on either flank. General Arthur Giesl’s VIII Corps required two entire days to clap together pontoon bridges and cross the river, against light Serbian resistance. Aviators overhead and officers on the ground described utter confusion on the Austrian side, as every stray Serbian shot from across the river ignited panic in the green Austrian ranks, with troops wildly returning fire (at nothing) and “horses breaking loose and galloping round and round the camp.” When bridges were opened, the inexperienced Austro-Hungarian troops rushed onto them all at the same time, shutting down the bridges until order could be restored.20 Smelling weakness, General Paul Jurisic-Sturm’s Serbian Third Army stole closer to the Drina River crossings and deployed its guns.

  The Austrian Second Army did push elements of the 29th Division across the Sava at Mitrovica on August 12, and more units crossed a hastily arranged pontoon bridge at Klenak on August 13. Vienna was briefly delirious with joy, newsboys bawling “Great victory at Sabac!” and Austrians eagerly snapping up the afternoon papers to read about it.21 But with the VIII Corps still fussing with its Drina bridges, General Adolf von Rhemen’s XIII Corps attacked on August 14 with only a smattering of Giesl’s troops on its flank. Troops and officers immediately discovered that their camouflage “pike gray” (hechtgrau) uniforms were not very camouflage at all. Blue-gray instead of the more serviceable green-gray used by the Germans, they were too bright for any theater outside the boulder-strewn Italian Alps (for which they had been procured in 1908) and made fine targets in the lush green Macva.22

  General Heinrich Haustein, commander of Austria’s 72nd Brigade, noted that his men were “immediately demoralized by Serbian rifle fire as well as the lacerating impact of the enemy’s 12-centimeter shells.” In their mixed bag of old and new artillery, the Serbs had fifty-four 12 cm Schneider quick-firing howitzers, a battery of which appeared here to take Haustein under fire. Ordered to clear the road east from Ljesnica, Haustein’s frightened brigade wilted. “Because of the poor physical conditioning of my men,” Haustein wrote, “I had to rest them.” While the units around them surged up and down their tracks, Haustein’s brigade sat panting in the summer heat. When they finally began to move in the late afternoon, mounting toward the fortified village of Dobric, they discovered that they had no bullets. Their ammunition wagons had vanished.23

  The 71st Brigade, moving into line beside the 72nd, had ammunition, but no hope against the thousand-foot heights around Plec; as the Austro-Hungarian troops struggled toward their objective, they were cut down by Serbian enfilading fire from entrenched machine guns as well as artillery from front, flank, and rear. The Serbs had even thought to hang hand grenades from the trees along the cart tracks, which they would explode with a rifle shot as the Austrians passed. “Wenig gemütlich, pretty uncomfortable,” was one officer’s recollection:
“My men quickly lost all self-confidence.”24 Another Austrian officer noted that his men had been “worn down even before the fighting by tales of the komitadji, hunger, thirst, fatigue, lack of sleep and the unfamiliar noises of battle.” The 16th Regiment pronounced itself “wiped out—only rabble made it off the hill.”25 The 72nd Brigade was terrified by the fall of heavy shell, the rattle of machine guns, and the rifle fire, which was so much more demoralizing because the Austrians felt its impact but saw nothing but bare slopes. “The enemy were so well entrenched that we couldn’t even see them,” Haustein reported.26

  The 42nd Honvéd Division crossed the Drina at Zvornik with orders to push up onto the high ground at Krupanj to facilitate an eventual junction with the Sixth Army on its right and to cover the right flank of the VIII Corps troops engaged on the Cer Planina at Tekeris. With a well-armed division coming at them, the Serbs—first-levy troops from the Drina district—initially gave ground, falling back to Zavlaka. But as they interrogated their Honvéd prisoners, they began to understand that this was a rotten army. “We took five prisoners, three Hungarians and two Croats; they said they came from the 27th, 28th, and 32nd Regiments. Of the battle-worthiness of the 32nd, a Hungarian said they had poor morale, because the troops were city boys from Budapest, and that only peasants fight well. The officers,” he added, “have to drive the troops into battle with their pistols. They spend their whole time menacing their own men, not fighting ours.” The Hungarian unit had come from Osijek, and just the twelve-mile march to the trains that took them to Serbia had knocked out a third of the regiment with heat exhaustion.27