A Mad Catastrophe

by Geoffrey Wawro

  One Austrian company found itself pinned down and out of ammunition; they were out of officers too, all of them having been killed, so the surviving NCOs bellowed for their reserves, a fresh company lying prone in a skirmish line behind them. But the reserves wouldn’t come forward. “We screamed at them furiously—‘cowards, c’mon!’” one of the survivors recalled. “But they wouldn’t even lift their faces out of the dirt.” As the advance company retreated over the frightened men behind them, they discovered that they were not so much frightened as dead, mowed down in a tidy row by a Serbian machine gun.60

  Dispatched to Sabac by Archduke Joseph to obtain an explanation for the rout of the Austro-Hungarian 31st Division, a general staff major found “parts of the Hungarian 44th Regiment in the church square, dead tired. The unit had literally dissolved in panic.” They had lost thirty officers, 487 wounded, and an untold number of dead; army surgeons estimated that three-quarters of these casualties were self-inflicted, the men in the rear accidentally shooting the men in the front in their panic. Shouted commands, horn signals, and the waving of flags had not stemmed the rout, with the Hungarians having fled into Sabac crying, “The Serbs are coming!” They weren’t, just yet. That evening General Putnik learned from the French general staff that the Second Army was definitely headed for Galicia. “Attack now,” the French advised, “a large part of their army is leaving.” The French—being buffeted on the Marne, and desperate to relieve themselves of this pressure—guaranteed free deliveries of shells if the Serbs would only attack.61

  General Andreas Griessler’s 32nd Division crossed the Sava to the left of the 31st and fared even worse. Wheeling south, the division marched toward Vukosic through trees and cornfields that broke up their march order and hid them from their own artillery, bringing down so much friendly fire from the flank and rear that the division had to retreat from the fire of its own guns. “We must stop shooting at our own infantry and start shooting at theirs,” Frank expostulated.62 Serbian shells also fell with deadly precision because Serbian peasants ignited haystacks along both sides of the road to mark the Austrian advance.63 Casualties lay everywhere, and the troops fired excitedly in all directions. If a cow or a child blundered into the high corn and rustled, the Austrians would unleash salvos of fire at it. Most of these troops were untrained reservists, and they had marched thirty-six miles over the past two days and nights and were on the edge of collapse.

  Several hours passed as officers of the 32nd Division tried to douse the haystacks, calm the panicked units, and summon new troops and ammunition to replace the morning’s losses. Eight guns were lost along with twenty ammunition wagons. Amazed Habsburg auditors later totaled the material discarded by a single regiment of this division: 886 backpacks, 1,200 tents, 400 cartridge pouches, 90 shovels, 280 haversacks, 400 coats, 1,250 pairs of shoes, and 40 wire cutters.64 Whole field hospitals, with their patients still tucked in bed, were abandoned to the advancing Serbs.65 After repeated orders from corps headquarters to resume the attack, General Griessler rode through hordes of stragglers and heaps of abandoned equipment to Jelenica, and reported that an attack was still impossible: the men continued to retreat, ignoring their officers, and so many units had broken up and mingled that they couldn’t be reassembled anyway, nor had the men been fed since daybreak. It didn’t help that this division combined men of four different nationalities—Hungarians, Germans, Serbs, and Rumanians—who often could not be made to comprehend even the simplest orders. But the corps headquarters kept demanding an offensive, and finally at seven-thirty in the evening Griessler reported that sufficient order had been restored to attempt one. Night was falling, however, so the men were ordered to camp instead. As they filed toward Cerovac, the Serbs mocked them from the darkness with animal cries: dogs barking, hens clucking, and owls hooting.66

  Tersztyánszky later blamed his defeat not on the first-levy division from Sumadija that had decimated him but on Potiorek, who he asserted had prematurely called back his march beyond Sabac: “We had advanced 10 kilometers inland from Sabac when we were ordered back to the north bank.” But Tersztyánszky, who had been considered a coming man before the war, was snipping off his account at the moment when crushing defeat ensued. Whatever directions Potiorek had given him, they almost certainly would have proved useless in the face of this furious Serbian opposition.67

  Nothing was achieved at Sabac other than atrocities. “We did have to institute sharp, repressive measures against the inhabitants of Sabac and its environs,” Tersztyánszky sniffed. “They poisoned wells and shot at our backs, and I even heard that a twelve-year-old girl threw a grenade at us.” Archduke Joseph, commanding the 31st Division, admitted that one of his Hungarian regiments rounded up and slaughtered an entire village after komitadjis fired into their flank.68 When they weren’t marauding, the Austro-Hungarians were sleeping: “The men were so exhausted by these exertions that they fell asleep at every opportunity, even on the briefest halts. They obeyed, but they had lost their verve.”69 Who could blame them? This draggletailed retreat of the Second Army across the Sava left the Fifth Army vulnerable to Potiorek’s fantasies. With most of the Second Army rolling east to Russia, Potiorek now imagined that Frank’s exhausted, riddled army—initially conceived of as the anvil—could now perform the role of hammer, striking southeast to crush the Serbs against the anvil of the Sixth Army.

  Potiorek’s Sixth Army was finally completing its halting deployment along the upper Drina on August 18, the emperor’s birthday. Potiorek had hoped to lay conquered Serbia at Franz Joseph’s feet as an eighty-fourth-birthday present, but he was instead looking at almost certain defeat. Even as Potiorek planned the next phase of the campaign—a majestic advance by the Fifth and Sixth Armies toward the Kolubara River, which flowed between Belgrade and Valjevo—shattering news arrived from the front. Putnik had massed five divisions on August 19 and punched a six-mile gap between the two corps of the Fifth Army. Ordered to counterattack, the Austro-Hungarian troops refused. Frank’s men were streaming across the Drina, ignoring Potiorek’s telegraphed commands “to hold the line at all costs.”70

  Meanwhile, IV Corps yielded Sabac in the military sense. In the literary sense, General Tersztyánszky held the line, insisting (from the comfort of his saloon car to Galicia) that his divisions had actually triumphed on the Sava: “I never had the feeling that we’d been defeated . . . but since my troops may not understand this, I’m having a sketch of the battle prepared so that the officers can show it to the men.”71 There was no fooling Potiorek, however; he knew that the Serbs had delivered the first clear-cut Entente victory in the war. “This day of joy has turned to a day of mourning,” he scribbled in his diary. To Frank he wrote, “Keep fighting at all costs; help is on the way!”72 But it wasn’t: the troops in the north were bound for Russia, and the troops in the south were blundering through high mountains and had no idea what was happening, because Potiorek had never told them. “Of the overall situation we knew next to nothing,” a colonel in the Sixth Army wrote, “and what we did know we learned quite by accident, when someone else’s orders were mistakenly delivered to us.”73

  Potiorek was overwhelmed by his responsibilities. He had advanced his armies so ponderously that the Serbs were able to achieve local superiority in every clash with the Austrians. The Serbs also equipped themselves with cast-off Austro-Hungarian equipment, one Habsburg officer observing an entire Serbian division wearing pike-gray Austrian coats. With each Austrian reverse, the Serbs appeared to gather strength.74

  Potiorek now imagined that he might still save the day by bringing his as yet unblooded Sixth Army into action. After some embarrassing incidents inside Bosnia, when Sixth Army columns shot large numbers of Bosnian gendarmes, mistaking them for Serbian komitadjis, the entire force marched slowly up to the Drina at Visegrad.75 It was clear to everyone on this mountainous front that the Sixth Army would never catch up with the Fifth Army, or make much progress into Serbia at all. The mountain brigades, jogging a
longside mules carrying wicker hampers filled with ammunition, wrested fortified outposts from the Serbs slowly and with difficulty. “Nothing much known of the enemy here,” the 4th Mountain Brigade reported from Cigla on the Lim River. “We took a trench on August 22, but there’s another behind it.” Each step forward—even against no resistance—took forever, officers noting that the unconditioned men would stop at “even insignificant obstacles” and pause for long rests. At night the men hardly slept because of “ceaseless shooting; the men imagine enemies behind every rock, and fire nervously all night long, ruining everyone’s rest and wasting ammo.”76

  The left-hand units of the Sixth Army crossed the Drina at Visegrad and began a hopefully dubbed “general advance to the east” that immediately bogged down in the time-consuming mountain warfare that Putnik had counted on to slow the advance of Potiorek and permit the destruction of Frank. The 7th Mountain Brigade passed through Visegrad and then spent the entire day on August 20 trying to break through Serbian positions on a nearby mountain. Austrian casualties multiplied so quickly that stretcher-bearers couldn’t keep up with the torrent and simply administered first aid among the rocks and trees. As the Austrians pushed toward the summit—the officers congratulating themselves that they were loosing Sturm um Sturm (charge after charge) despite withering defensive fire—growing numbers of Austrian infantry were shot in the back by their own comrades, who were so panicked by Serbian artillery, machine guns, and grenades that they fired wildly uphill, killing friendly troops.

  Dismaying numbers of Austro-Hungarian officers were also shot trying to herd their men forward. Taught to lead from the front and keep their heads up to direct and observe fire, officers were easy marks for Serbian sharpshooters (or their own frightened troops). A battle that had begun at dawn did not end until dusk, when the Serbs retreated to their next defensive line, leaving the Austrians to count their casualties: 23 dead, 128 wounded, and 26 missing. Casualties were particularly heavy among the officers.77 Clearly the Sixth Army—theoretically supposed to curve northward to meet the Fifth Army in a great envelopment of the Serbs at Valjevo—was not going to make the rendezvous. The Sixth Army vented its frustration in the same manner as the Fifth Army, burning Serbian huts, plundering, stealing livestock, picking the fields bare, and shooting hostages to cow the local population. “This is conduct unbecoming of a civilized army,” one Austrian general sputtered to his troops, but no one listened. Potiorek’s classical plan of campaign was proving totally unsuited to Balkan realities.

  On the main front, the Fifth Army’s VIII Corps had already retreated across the Drina, abandoning General Adolf von Rhemen’s XIII Corps on the east bank. Rhemen’s corps never succeeded in lashing together its constituent parts, the 36th Division complaining from start to finish that it had been doomed by the non-arrival of its sister formation, the 42nd Honvéd Division. The Honvéds—Croats recruited around Zagreb—felt doomed in their every brush with the Serbs: “They laid their coats on the ground and then climbed trees to fire at us.” The Honvéds fired at the coats while the Serbs fired at the Croats.78 The already beaten Austrian 21st Landwehr Division, meanwhile, completely dissolved, littering the field with its equipment. “Unfortunately our armed forces are not all stamped from the same press,” was the Hofburg’s icy comment on the largely Czech division’s “odious conduct.”79

  Even more odious conduct was going on behind the lines. Terrified by komitadji attacks and furious at their own humiliation, the Austro-Hungarian army savaged the civilian population of the Macva in a wave of atrocities. The irregularities of this Balkan war made them feel justified. Troops reported booby traps buried in the roads and Serbian civilians poisoning their drinking water. They reported that Serbian infantry were putting on Austrian uniforms and shouting commands in German to confuse Austro-Hungarian troops, or raising white flags and then shooting any Austrians who came across to accept their surrender. They reported Serbian wounded shooting Austrians in the back. They reported Serbian front-line troops yelling, “Mi smo vasi” (we are your friends) to demoralize Slavic units, or fooling everyone by yelling, “Nazdar, Domobranzen” (hey there, we’re Croatian Honvéds) and pretending to be Croats (or Serbs from Austria-Hungary) until the Austrians closed in and were greeted with lead. For their part, the Austrians—trying to replace their heavy casualties with march battalions from the monarchy—confused themselves. The new-model army introduced after 1866 contained so many German, Hungarian, or Croatian-speaking Landwehr units that orders regularly went out in the wrong language, causing endless “friction and hostility,” as one officer put it.80

  Ultimately, it was easier just to blame the Serbs. “What else can we do?” General Rhemen thundered. “They are a culturally backward people. How can we cling to our European culture and remain within the laws of war against them?”81 Although Rhemen cautioned troops to distinguish between Serbian perpetrators and innocents, the troops generally didn’t bother. One reason the invasion force contained so many Croats—from the Dubrovnik, Sarajevo, and Zagreb corps districts—was that Vienna recognized that this was its last chance to wield Catholic Croats against Orthodox Serbs in an excoriating war of religion and culture.82 In Krupanj, men of the 42nd Honvéd Division bashed a group of old men and boys to the ground with their rifle butts and then hanged any who were still breathing. Near Loznica, Austrian troops took civilian hostages and then executed them in reprisal for an attack on their supply lines. When an Austrian infantryman was found with his throat cut, sixty hostages were killed and nearby villages burned to the ground. In Ljesnica, the Austrian VIII Corps conducted mass executions with firing squads. The largely German 73rd Regiment plundered the town for two hours, killing and raping, and then hung Serbian civilians alive. Orders from division to “cease all of this unwarranted plundering and destruction”—“for we are soldiers of a Kulturarmee, after all”—were largely ignored, not least because Potiorek had explicitly ordered the taking of hostages, reprisal hangings, and arson by all units on August 13.83 Sixty-eight Serbs were subsequently discovered with their eyes gouged out and thirty-four with their noses cut off. A soldier of Austria-Hungary’s largely Slovenian 97th Regiment reported that his unit had been authorized to “burn and kill everywhere” to quell Serbian resistance.84

  Austrian troops shoot Serbian villagers. “This is conduct unbecoming of a civilized army,” an Austro-Hungarian general wrote disgustedly after witnessing repeated atrocities against Serbian civilians in 1914.

  Credit: Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, Wien

  None of these atrocities, however, stemmed the Austrian rout. With its flank exposed by the collapse of the 21st Landwehr Division, the 9th Division also was savaged. They had the misfortune to be attacking toward Tekeris on ground that the Serbs had graphed in peacetime for artillery practice; the shells thus landed with astonishing accuracy. The division fell back, yielding a dozen guns to the pursuing Serbs.85 Standing on Mount Cer, the Serbs watched the rout of the hated Schwabas: “You could see their columns retreating in all directions; we sent small pursuit detachments of infantry and guns to keep contact.”86 Some of those pursuit detachments, two battalions and a battery, overtook the Austrians and attacked them. The Serbs cornered elements of the 42nd Honvéds and the 36th Division in a gully east of Mramor and poured in rifle and artillery fire. Within minutes the Czech 28th Regiment had lost “hundreds of dead and wounded.” Those strong enough to flee clawed their way up the sides of the gully like spiders, looking for a way out. Thousands of them would huddle alone or in small groups in the hills for two entire days before finding their way back to their units.87

  Austrian officers were reminded of their duty: “During mass panics or demoralizing speeches, you are required to shoot the criminals on the spot.”88 But there were too many criminals and not enough officers, so many of the officers having already succumbed to wounds or illness, and no amount of capital punishment would fortify this army anyway. The Fifth Army had crossed the Drina with eighty thousand tro
ops; it retreated back across the river having lost a stunning six hundred officers and twenty-three thousand men. Virtually every unit had lost its best officers and 20 percent of its ration strength. “A normal military campaign is not possible with our troops and our equipment in this country,” an Austrian officer harrumphed as Frank’s division fled across the Drina.89 Obviously the Austrians should have thought of that beforehand.

  The abandonment would be nearly complete on August 20, when the third of the Second Army’s four corps began rolling east from Sabac to Galicia. Böhm-Ermolli’s army would be caught between two stools—leaving Serbia too early to affect the fighting there, and arriving in Galicia too late to be of any help there. Count István Burián, the Hungarian minister to the Court of Vienna, expressed the growing frustration of Austria and Hungary: “What horrible effect in the Balkan states, in Italy and Rumania. When will we have some the victories?”90 The IV Corps had a last stab at victory on August 23, when the men were ordered to cross the Sava with “only their backpacks” (implying a rapid, pitiless attack unencumbered by supply trains), but became so disorganized crossing the river in the dark—some on steamers, some on bridges—that the attack had to be called off, and the men dispatched first to bed and then to the east. “The men are shattered,” Archduke Joseph concluded. “At every opportunity they throw themselves on the ground and fall asleep.”91