A Mad Catastrophe

by Geoffrey Wawro

  At 2:00 p.m. on August 30, Archduke Peter Ferdinand learned that the divisions on his wings had been hit by overwhelming enemy force and driven back. The archduke and every commander along the front of the Fourth Army now understood that the envelopment of the Russians at Komarów that Auffenberg, Conrad, and the army’s press bureau were clamoring for was impossible. In fact, the Russians were bidding to encircle Auffenberg. At 4:00 p.m. that day, Archduke Peter Ferdinand wrote Schemua: “We’re faced with a choice—either retreat toward Zamosc, yielding the great gains we’ve made thus far, or, by throwing in the last man this afternoon in one last attack, strike toward Dub for victory.” Auffenberg, desperate to pluck victory from the jaws of defeat, sent Major Prince Auersperg galloping from headquarters to Peter Ferdinand’s command post with orders to “continue the advance and finish the encirclement of the enemy at Dub.”50

  By now, however, even an Auersperg prince couldn’t move the Austro-Hungarian 25th Division; it had shot its bolt. Auffenberg’s own memoir of the battle confirmed that the Austro-Hungarian troops no longer believed in the Dub gambit: “Complaints by troops in the front lines were getting louder and louder.” They could feel Russians all around them, and they wouldn’t hold. To the archduke’s left, the 4th Division hadn’t appeared, and the 13th Landwehr Division—Germans, Czechs, and Ukrainians—had dissolved into panicked clumps of men who refused to stand their ground. Looking to his right, Archduke Peter Ferdinand appealed to the 10th Division to add its weight to a last push. Citing exhaustion of everything—men, beasts, guns, and munitions—the 10th demurred. Everyone was worn out from the marches up from the frontier, the battles, the lack of sleep, and the frequent panics.

  Still, the archduke took a last stab at it. Using his Habsburg aura—and his status as the most senior divisional commander on the spot—he ordered the 10th Division to give its “Bestes und Letztes,” its best and last effort, and join a concentric attack with his division toward Dub. Hours later, as darkness fell, the division commander’s answer to that dynastic order came back, carried through the woods and swamps by a courier: “1,500 paces east of me are Russian positions—trenches with eight machine guns and artillery. Attacks on this position all day by my 36th Regiment and 12th Jäger Battalion have been repulsed with heavy casualties. Until these positions are destroyed by our own artillery, any renewal of the attack would be futile.”

  The Austrians retreated, clinging to the boast that they’d won great victories at Krásnik and Komarów. But they were victories only in the sense that a boxer who wins the first round on points but gets knocked out in the second can claim to have won the bout. With soaring immodesty, Auffenberg called Komarów “the greatest maneuver battle of the war and indeed of all the wars of the monarchy,” which was to say the greatest victory in five hundred years. He judged his performance at Komarów at least as impressive as the Elder Moltke’s at Königgrätz, commenting that “the war booty of the victor was about the same in both battles: 1866—18,000 prisoners, 182 guns; 1914—20,000 prisoners, 200 guns.”51 Of course, relatively speaking, this was nothing like Königgrätz, for the twentieth-century Russians would easily replace twenty thousand men in a way that the nineteenth- (or even twentieth-) century Austrians could not. Still, Auffenberg was hastily given the noble predicate “von Komarów” and a cash gift of eight thousand crowns by a grateful emperor. Partial victories were better than none at all.

  chapter9

  Lemberg and Rawa-Ruska

  Depleting Brudermann to strengthen Auffenberg produced nothing at Komarów and catastrophe at Lemberg. Yet Conrad, characteristically, now attempted to fall back on the very commander he had so recently undercut. With Auffenberg and Dankl all but beaten, Conrad ordered Brudermann and the rump of Böhm-Ermolli’s Second Army to salvage the disaster on the Eastern Front. March east, Conrad ordered Brudermann on August 25, and “drive back the enemy forces, thus securing the flank and rear of the whole army.”1 The Nordstoss, in other words, was dead and buried. Ever the apostle of the offensive, Conrad was attempting to replace it with an improvised Südstoss from Lemberg. Needless to say (Krásnik and Komarów had said all that needed to be said about the prospects for Austro-Hungarian offensives), this offensive, by a small army with small artillery, would probably not go well. Otto Laserz, a reservist with III Corps’ 4th Regiment, was roused with his fellows from a deep sleep at midnight on the twenty-sixth and ordered to march to the train station at Lemberg. Groggy with sleep, the Deutschmeister filed through the dark streets of the city and into the vast Art Nouveau station, which had been finished only ten years earlier at great cost to carry Austrian trade east and symbolize the permanence of Habsburg rule in Galicia.

  Packed into boxcars, the troops rolled east toward Przemyslany. Two streams blocked the approach to Lemberg from the east: the Gnila Lipa (rotten lime) and the Zlota Lipa (golden lime). Brudermann hoped to entrench behind the streams and drive the Russians off. Arriving on the Gnila Lipa, the sleepy men were ordered out: “Everyone out, grab your gear, line up, move!” Laserz recalled the confusion and the excitement, for none of the Austrian troops had ever been in battle: “Where was the enemy? Where were the Cossacks?” Nowhere, actually. The troops filed back to the station and saw their first wounded men, rolling back from the Zlota Lipa in carts. “How’s it going at the front?” the troops called excitedly. The wounded just stared blankly at them or waved feebly. Laserz’ unit got back in their boxcars and rolled toward the Zlota Lipa with the doors open, hearing the thunder of the guns. They piled out at Dunajov and formed into a skirmish line.

  On the hill before them, the men of the 4th Regiment watched a battery of Austrian guns deploy; within minutes it was bracketed by Russian shells and shrapnel. One burst followed another, red flame and black smoke, geysers of earth, or the white overhead puffs of shrapnel, all aimed at the artillery. The Austrian gun crews began to dodge desperately between their guns, and one gunner broke free and ran screaming down the hill toward Laserz’ platoon until he too was obliterated by a shell. While Laserz distributed ammunition to his men, he saw General Hermann Kövess, who was commanding fragments of the Second Army until Böhm-Ermolli’s arrival from Serbia, standing on the Dunajov railway embankment, looking this way and that, trying to make sense of the noisy battle.

  Laserz’ group tramped through a lumberyard and saw a group of hussars—“exhausted, sleepy, their faces worn by fatigue and fear”—sprawled on the ground. The infantry, Germans from Vienna, saluted them eagerly as they marched past, calling, “Österreichs Heer, Austria’s army!” but the hussars, Hungarians all, regarded them sullenly. Laserz’ platoon came to a meadow and had begun crossing it when a Hungarian marching band broke from a wood on the far side and ran right past them, dragging their horns behind them: “Granat! Granat! Shells, Shells!” Finally the infantry arrived at the Zlota Lipa, “a deep narrow muddy stream.” They tore up a fence, threw it over the stream as a makeshift bridge, and crossed. The fence broke, and they fell in, the men flailing to the far bank and crawling up it through the slime. “Our beautiful new pike gray uniforms, ruined, sopping wet and black with mud,” Laserz grumbled.

  Austro-Hungarian dressing station near Lemberg in August 1914. “How’s it going at the front?” passing troops called excitedly. The wounded just stared blankly at them, or waved feebly.

  Credit: Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, Wien

  Trails of black mud through the flattened grass showed the men the way forward, and they slithered ahead on their bellies in a skirmish line, most of the men muttering that their cigarettes and chocolate had been ruined by the water and the muck. They crawled into a wheat field, Russian rifle fire hissing overhead, and came upon “our first dead soldier: a Hungarian in uniform with all of his equipment, lying on his right side, arm outstretched, deathly pale, staring at us with dead open eyes, blood trickling from his nose and mouth.” Soon the Austrians were crawling past more casualties; they rose to a crouch and ran forward in rushes, finally locating the Rus
sians in a wood six hundred yards away. The battalion let off a salvo, “1,000 rifles firing at a stroke,” and then charged. Here was all the madness of Austro-Hungarian tactics in 1914: the Russians were six hundred yards away, concealed in a wood, and the Austrians rose—the whistles screaming in their ears—and began running in Laufschritt, a sprint. Now the Russian machine guns opened up. Laserz saw men fall away shattered and bleeding as well as a cyclone of dirt and dust exploding from the ground as bullets struck all around him. They came abreast of a Hungarian unit and crowded in beside them, running and firing toward the Russians, who remained invisible except for the flashes of their rifles.

  Resting on their bellies, the Austrians resolved on another rush forward to shorten the range, but the Hungarians were firing “like madmen” and wouldn’t stop, preventing the Austrian unit from going forward. While one lieutenant ran across to silence the Hungarian rifles, another rose to lead his platoon forward. Laserz never forgot the face: “frightened, white as chalk, gripping the pistol in his right hand with white-knuckled fingers, looking first at us and then at the wood” occupied by the Russians. The lieutenant was killed instantly; in fact, he had already been shot when Laserz noticed him and began yelling, “Niederlegen! Lie down!”

  The buglers blew the storm signal and the whole company rose to its feet, into a withering fire. Another lieutenant led the charge, “waving his saber, screaming and yelling.” He was overtaken by the company commander, “Captain Beyrer, who sped forward like a white cloud, in his white linen pants.” The Honvéds also stormed forward; Laserz remembered one stumbling up beside him, utterly blind because he was holding his trenching tool in front of his face as a shield. As they neared the wood—men falling left and right, the air filled with roars, screams, and shouted prayers—a group of Hungarians entered the wood, then burst back out of it in panicky retreat. Laserz reached the wood and found it abandoned. As was their custom, the Russians had held it long enough to inflict maximal casualties on the Austrian bayonet charges, then retired. Laserz saw his first badly wounded soldiers—“half naked, covered in blood, screaming in agony.”

  Coming face-to-face with some Russians who had lost their way in the trees, Laserz jerked his rifle to his shoulder, and the Russians, “big blond-bearded chickens,” threw their hands in the air and surrendered. The Austrians studied these prisoners and were most impressed by the simple peasant smocks the Russians wore for battle dress: “Du, die haben keine Knöpfe! Hey, they have no buttons! Can you believe it? These guys have no buttons!” Then they took their first souvenirs, mainly Russian caps and bandoliers. Strolling back to the edge of the wood, Laserz saw the casualties—dead Austrians and Hungarians strewn across the meadow, and wounded ones “moaning and wailing” as the sun set and the wood darkened.2

  Laserz’ unit was a small piece of Brudermann’s much-reduced Third Army. Several divisions had been sent to Auffenberg, and three more were still on the rails from Serbia. But, ordered by Conrad to attack, Brudermann—like Laserz—collided with the Russians at the Zlota Lipa. Weaving through the green, lush land, III Corps’ 6th Division slammed into the same obstacles as Laserz’ 4th Regiment on their right. “We’d walk right into Russian positions that we hadn’t even seen,” a staff officer noted, “and be hit at point-blank range with shrapnel and rifles.” Instead of retreating, the Austrians attacked, their officers dully intoning (to mollify Conrad), “despite heroic efforts, very heavy losses, and repeated storm attacks, the men made no progress.” When units did push into the Russian line and call for flanking attacks, they were told that the flanking attack could not be delivered because every Austro-Hungarian unit was already fully engaged by “vastly superior Russian forces.”3 In this sloppy action—what historians would name the First Battle of Lemberg—Brudermann had sallied against what he took for an isolated Russian corps. Fooled by Ruzski’s lethargic advance, he only now grasped that he was attacking not a corps but an entire army, the four corps of Brusilov’s Eighth Army, and was outnumbered three to one.

  On Brudermann’s left, General Desiderius Kolossváry led the Austro-Hungarian XI Corps to an uncertain fate, his instructions reflecting Conrad’s continuing incuriosity about Russian strength: “Advance on the left of our III and XII Corps to cover their attack on the enemy, who has crossed our border at Brody and Tarnopol.”4 That was it: “the enemy.” Conrad said nothing about the Russians’ strength or location. Kolossváry accordingly marched east from Lemberg, planning to occupy the Bug crossing at Busk and assail the flank of whatever Russian forces were engaged by the two corps on his right. The march alone, with tenderfoots on dusty roads in steaming heat, left Kolossváry’s corps prostrate for a day. They rested on August 26, while Brudermann disposed his other units as if he were Napoleon at Austerlitz, planning to fix the Russians in place and then smash in their flanks with the corps (like Kolossváry’s) on his wings. Easy meat during Habsburg maneuvers in 1913, where Brudermann had been decisively beaten by Auffenberg, Brudermann was faring no better in real war. Oddly, he anticipated no threat to his flanks, believing that a division detached to either side would secure him against envelopment and that “the battle will be decided in the center by the unified attack of the two divisions of our XII Corps against whatever enemy units are facing our III Corps.” The imprecision of his plans—“whatever enemy units,” in an age of telephones, airplanes, and automobiles—was as striking as the onslaught of the Russians, who at that very moment were closing on Brudermann.5

  One hundred and ninety-two Russian battalions tramped toward the ninety-one Austro-Hungarian battalions of XI, III, and XII Corps. Resuming his weary march from Lemberg, a still unsuspecting Kolossváry found Busk already in Russian hands; he faced south to aid the two corps to his right, requesting that the 44th Landwehr Division and 11th Honvéd Cavalry Division of Archduke Joseph Ferdinand’s XIV Corps “attack the flank and rear” of the Russian forces in his path. The result was not the one he expected: “The 44th Landwehr Division refused, and the Honvéd Cavalry Division never replied.” Having been sent up to Komarów and then recalled to Lemberg (a third time), the archduke’s corps had been marched into the ground and was effectively hors de combat. “In view of these unforeseen circumstances,” Kolossváry reported, “my corps was unable to intervene effectively in the battle.” He had a go at ineffectively sending his brigades without the flank protection that XIV Corps would have provided toward the Russian positions at Krasne and suffering—as he delicately put it—“rather large” casualties, “quite large” among the officers. Half of his guns were destroyed by Russian artillery fire.6 The Austrian 80th Regiment fired at the Russians at Krasne with even less effect than usual. They discovered after the battle that they’d been mistakenly supplied with the blank cartridges used in peacetime maneuvers instead of live bullets.7

  Once considered Austria’s “boy wonder” and “hope of the future” and a court favorite of the emperor and the archduke, General Rudolf Brudermann was crushed at Lemberg and Rawa-Ruska. The boy wonder was relieved of command and sent back to Vienna.

  Credit: National Archives

  The Russians, meanwhile, flooded the Austrian center and flanks. Austro-Hungarian staff officers—who were getting information on Russian movements not from their cavalry but from Galician refugees who were streaming back through their lines—scribbled worried messages in blue pencil and sent them galloping back to Lemberg: “Division forced to retreat by very numerous enemy forces; our casualties very heavy.”8 Having loaned XIV Corps to Auffenberg, Brudermann had only nine divisions of his own and two of the Second Army’s to hold the entire right flank of the Austrian position in Galicia. His losses were appalling, many units losing two-thirds of their effectives. In the center, east of Przemyslany, which was a big, prosperous market town, General Emil Colerus’ III Corps tried repeatedly to drive the Russians back . . . with bayonet charges. This was entirely the wrong approach, and every brigade reported “very heavy casualties.” Invisible and immune to shrapnel in
their deep, narrow trenches, the Russians awaited every Austrian attack, then rose as one and flattened it with salvo fire. As the Austrians fled from these Russian fusillades, the Russians counterattacked into the openings and hit the Austrian flanks.9

  As Brudermann and Kövess retired ten miles to the next river line, the Gnila Lipa—just twenty-five miles from Lemberg—the arrival of more units of the Second Army from Serbia on the right increased the Austrian strength in this critical sector to fifteen weak infantry divisions (for a total of 145,000 men) and 828 guns. But it was like a finger in the dike against Brusilov and now Ruzski, who was dividing his strength between this fight and the one against Auffenberg, yielding a total of sixteen strong Russian infantry divisions, comprising nearly three hundred thousand men, with 1,304 guns.

  Brudermann stubbornly ordered more attacks on August 27. Still sounding like Napoleon, he assured his generals that the “Fourth Army is driving victoriously into Russia” and that all that remained was for his Lemberg army to “deliver the blow that will decide the entire war.” He ordered his three corps to attack again from Rohatyn and the other villages along the Gnila Lipa, with cavalry to guard the flanks. The Second Army, with General Eduard von Böhm-Ermolli finally on the scene, would wheel forward on the right to engulf the Russians. Indeed, every night during the last week of August the disbelieving generals of the Third and Second Armies would receive orders from Archduke Friedrich and Conrad to “resume the attack” at first light.10 But every Austrian attack ended the same way, shot to a standstill by Russian defensive fire and then enveloped from the flanks by Russian counterattacks.11 Panic shot down the roads behind every Austro-Hungarian unit, the supply trains running off—as they always did—but even well-disciplined units firing at each other. “A battery of our 44th Field Artillery Regiment mistook our Bosnians for Cossacks and shelled them for five minutes—32 were killed and many wounded,” the 6th Division dolefully reported. The division commander and his staff were in a farmhouse studying their maps, the Bosnians resting outside, when the guns opened fire, nearly exterminating the headquarters as well.12