The Eastern Front 1914-1917

by Norman Stone

  The weakness of Austria-Hungary was no great surprise to anyone, but it ought not to have reached such dimensions: Austria-Hungary contained over fifty million inhabitants, and her war-industry, with Skoda and Steyr, should have been able to produce a more respectable war-effort. To start with, too, there was not even such sign of dissidence on the part of potentially rebellious peoples, such as the Czechs: rather the contrary. But the Habsburg Monarchy had become incapable of harnessing its peoples’ energies. A hopeless muddle was made of conscription. Before the war, not more than a fifth of the liable young men were ever conscripted, and less than a fifth received full training, because there was no money to keep more than that, and because the army leaders shrank from the creative effort of turning hundreds of thousands of peasant youths, with fifteen different languages, into serious soldiers. In 1914, 3,500,000 men were called up—virtually the whole of the trained reserve, and a section of the untrained territorial army. Losses knocked out a substantial proportion of these—to the end of 1914, 1,250,000, and a further 800,000 to March 1915. Services in the rear took up the activities of most of the rest, and in the early months of 1915 Austria-Hungary was really relying on the 1914 class of conscripts, together with some untrained territorials. The army at the front therefore ran down—not much above 250,000 in December 1914, and not 500,000 in April 1915. Anticipated conscription of the class of 1915, and hasty conscription of classes of territorial troops, made up some of the gap, but in spring 1915 there was a severe man-power crisis.1

  In matters of war-economy, too, there was a crisis, owing mainly to slipshod pre-war arrangements, No provision had been made for a war lasting more than a few weeks, and manufacture of munitions was woefully low. When the Allies set up their blockade, the foreign trade on which the authorities had calculated naturally came to an end. But the authorities had little idea as to what might take its place, and went on counting on the Germans’ sending them what they needed—although of course the Germans needed every scrap of shell they produced. Austrian production had even been cut back, because of cartel-agreements with German firms. In this way, prices would rise, and the Austrian firms would profit because they held shares in the German ones. Moreover, it was difficult for the Austrians to produce munitions by mass-production, because a large part of their artillery was old-fashioned. The army against Russia had had less than 2,000 guns to the Russians’ 3,000; even so, there were forty-five different types of gun, each needing different munitions; and a further problem was that many guns were made of bronze which, though much less efficient than steel, lasted longer and therefore suited the exiguous pre-war army budgets. The authorities blundered about in a fog: imagining at one moment that they could modernise the whole of their artillery at a stroke, and then finding that their resources had to be frittered away on endless separate artillery and munitions-programmes. The tone of their summaries of their own activities is one of unshakable self-satisfaction. Just the same, their performance was woeful—116,000 rounds produced in the whole of December 1914, as against a minimal demand of 240,000 per week. Austrian shell-output never reached more than one million rounds per month, even in 1916, when the Germans produced seven million, and even the Russians more than four. However, low shell-output was made at least supportable, because the out-put of artillery, for allied reasons, remained low also. The artillery section of the Vienna war ministry was the most characteristically Viennese of them all: more and more complicated, for less and less return. Problems of labour and raw materials were serious, as in other countries, but the authorities, lacking the pressure of an energetic régime demanding results, whatever the cost in orthodoxy, behaved in their pre-war fashion, and failed to cut corners. The army lost 1,000 guns in the first six months of war—excluding those of Przemyśl—and had 278 replacements.2

  The chief difficulty of administration was that nothing could ever be really centralised. In theory, the Common Council of Ministers was the central authority, containing the Prime Ministers of Austria and Hungary, and the three common ministers—War, Finance, Foreign Affairs. But real authority had slipped to the two separate Austrian and Hungarian governments, and the only way of making sure that even correct information reached the Council of Ministers was to invite separate cabinet ministers to attend its deliberations—a procedure that increased the body far beyond manageable size, the more so as there was, in Austria-Hungary, an indirect relationship between power and garrulity. The Council met infrequently in the course of the war—about forty times—and the efforts of the new Emperor, Karl, to breathe some life into it led to complaints that men were wasting their time in useless chatter.3 In reality, Habsburg administration suffered from a degree of fragmentation that makes even its records difficult to deal with, since at all levels the centres of decision were not well mapped-out.*

  One centre of decision was, however, very well-established: Budapest. Fanaticism and racketeering distinguished the Hungarian war-effort. Most war-goods were produced in Vienna and Bohemia, the largest industrial region of the Monarchy. The inhabitants of these were dependent on Hungarian food. Hungarian producers took advantage of scarcities to increase their prices, allegedly to combat the fall of exports, and forbade imports that might have lowered prices. A concurrent fall in the prosperity of the Austrian towns meant real hardship for the populace, but protests met a barrage of obstruction from the Hungarians: the figures must be wrong; it was only natural for farmers to profit in wartime; in any case, it was really Hungary that was fighting the war. This last point was best-developed, as usual, by Tisza, the Hungarian Prime Minister: ‘Unless one is quite blinded by prejudice, it is impossible not to see from the experience of this war that not only the natural energies of the Hungarian race, but also the strong structure of the Hungarian national state form the greatest force in the Monarchy, the stoutest pillar of its European position’.4 That they were all so well-fed no doubt helped. Hungarian land-owners went on to complain that they were lacking labour, and, by an ingenious trick, made the army authorities, at their own expense, commandeer troops to help with the Hungarian harvest. Throughout the summer months of 1915, there were never less than half a million soldiers thus occupied.5 Austrian functionaries were dazzled by such virtuosity in egoism; and to any grumble, the Hungarian government could always stir up a display of chauvinist antics on the part of its own opposition, so as to convince the Austrians how moderate the Hungarian government was being. It was a simple enough construction: the Austrian army might mis-use Hungarian peasants, so long as Hungarian land-lords could misuse Austrian towns. Heavy doses of Hungarian chauvinism could anaesthetise at least the Hungarian victims of it all.

  The Czechs could be forgiven for concluding that, whatever Austria had achieved against the Turks, she had failed to save western civilisation from the Hungarians. A combination of nationalist and social restiveness, on the one side, and military mismanagement, on the other, led to the Slav troops’ becoming increasingly less reliable. The structure of the army broke down. It had always been supra-national, and professional officers made an effort to learn the languages of their men (Conrad himself, for instance, spoke seven languages). Recruits were expected to learn only a few hundred German words—the ‘language of service’—so that they would know what was meant when ‘sights’, ‘barrel’, ‘sabre’ and the rest came up; and for other purposes, the language of the men was used, even if, as happened, a single regiment had three different languages. 1914 changed this. The professional officers were speedily wiped out, victims of their own virtues. The new officers were men of a different stamp—products of the middle-classes of Prague, Budapest, Vienna or Cracow, who had neither the will nor the chance to learn their men’s languages. In any case, most officers’ posts went to Germans or Hungarians, and Czech or Slovene reserve-officers frequently found their accents mimicked and their cultures mocked by arrogant sprigs of the German or Hungarian universities. The language-problem became ungovernable, in time; there was even a Slovak regiment commanded i
n English, since the men—with a view to emigration—had learned it, and the officers spoke it from their high-school days. Behind the Carpathian disasters, there was a real collapse of the structure of the Austro-Hungarian army. Men froze, resented injustices at home, did not know what their officers were saying, had not much artillery to help them in the field, and sometimes understood Russian better than any other language.

  Desertion began. It would no doubt be wrong to conclude that this was a consequence of initial disloyalty on the part of the Slavs, although this was subsequently asserted by both sides—military leaders, to show that desertion was a consequence of politicians’ blundering, Czech apologists, to explain that the Habsburg Monarchy was a tyrannical place, and that revolt was just round the corner. In reality, the peoples’ enthusiasm for the Monarchy, when war broke out, took the authorities themselves by surprise. IV Army command reported of its journey through Bohemia in August 1914 that ‘the behaviour of the populace, of all nationalities, was the best conceivable throughout our journey. Patriotic feeling was everywhere in evidence, and at the larger stations the troops were given bread, tea, cigarettes etc. by women of all classes’.6 Men of all nationalities hoped—in accordance with official pronouncements—that now at last they would be regarded as equals by the German and Hungarian establishment, not just as tolerable minorities. But ‘equality before supreme sacrifice’ had a way of becoming equality before supreme incompetence. Czech soldiers, largely urban, literate and questioning, were bewildered at the army’s treatment of them as half-witted peasants; at the other end of the scale, Ruthene peasants resented having to fight Russians whose language they understood and whose religion they shared. Red Prague produced a series of incidents, stimulated in particular by grain-shortages, and feelings ran high in the army as well. The high command over-reacted. Its own displays at the front were not such as to foster notions of military efficiency; but if Conrad could not defeat the Russians, at least he could make short work of the Bohemian bureaucracy. The army interfered more and more in its affairs, and cramped, blundering army officers ruined the Habsburg Monarchy’s hitherto, in the main, deserved reputation for fairness of treatment. The Kriegsüberwachungsamt was established to control ‘disloyal’ elements, and there following a uniquely Austrian combination of tyranny and comedy. Czech washerwomen were imprisoned because they threw notes over the barbed-wire of Russian prisoner-of-war camps, ‘for the purposes of initiating a carnal relationship’;7 shop-keepers were molested because they had failed to put up enough flags to celebrate the re-capture of Przemyśl; schoolboys were arrested for hiding their patriotic double-eagle badge behind their lapel;8 school-teachers were inspected to make sure that they had their charges sing four verses of the Gott Erhalte every morning—a huge machinery that would have been much better-employed against Hungarian land-lords.

  The disaffection that all of this brought about was not confined to the civilian population. The army could not be isolated. No doubt, if the officers had been Czech or Ruthene, Czech and Ruthene troops would have fought better. But the structure of the army was against this. Two-thirds of the officers were German, most of the rest Hungarian; and a Ruthene who became an officer almost ceased, by definition, to be a Ruthene. Furthermore, the army was not ruthlessly tyrannical, in the Prussian style. The Austrians did not have the Prussian knack of making anybody and everybody fight for Prussia, by virtue of a ruthless authoritarianism. By 1917 it had become clear that the Czechs would fight in the Russian army, or under German command; but they were quite ineffective, at least on the eastern front, under Austrian command. By the spring of 1915, tales of Czech desertion had become quite frequent, and although many or them were without substance—there was never, for instance, any case of a Czech unit’s marching over to the Russian lines, flags flying and music playing—there could be no doubting that Czechs were unwilling soldiers, and that Romanians and Ruthenes were not far behind them.9 More serious than formal desertion to the Russians was these soldiers’ unwillingness to take risks even in their own defence. By spring 1915, the Austrian army seemed to be on the verge of disintegration, and the process could seemingly only be halted if the Germans intervened.

  The threat of Italian intervention against the Habsburg Monarchy made German help all the more urgent. When war began, Italy had declared neutrality, but as Austrian defeat succeeded Austrian defeat, the temptation to her to come into the war, and seize Austrian territory, was very strong. Moreover, if she stayed out, the Russians and their south Slav allies might re-make Central Europe without reference to an Italy that coveted much of the Adriatic coast. Finally, when the western Powers attacked Turkey, it opened up huge possibilities for partition of the Turkish Empire, which would naturally be closed to Italy if she failed to participate in the war at the right time. The matter was dragged out, partly to increase the terms Italy would get from the Entente, partly from domestic disputes, since the socialists and clericals were, on the whole, against joining in the war, but a coup d’état, with semi-Fascist methods, finally prompted Italian intervention on 23rd May.

  , Falkenhayn had always been reluctant to help the Austrians. Both he and Conrad thought that Italian intervention, especially if, as both felt likely, it came together with Romanian intervention, would mean the end of the war—the Italian army in Zagreb within three weeks, in Vienna in six. They disagreed altogether as to what should be done.10 Conrad wanted the Germans to send troops, to brow-beat the Italians. Falkenhayn thought that he could not spare them, and that Austria should concede bits of land the Italians coveted—they could, after all, be taken back at the end of a victorious war. Conrad replied that this would only whet Italian appetites still more, and the government shrank from the extreme unpopularity that such cessions would have involved in the Germanic heartland of the Monarchy. Perhaps a generous offer would have taken the wind from Italian interventionists’ sails; perhaps it would merely have made them increase their demands. At all events, Vienna conceded ungenerously and slowly; and Falkenhayn would not send support to Austria-Hungary for her eastern front in case it stiffened her will not to give way to Italy. By March, the Austrians were exasperated, and they hit upon the one argument that a weak ally always has against a stronger. If the Germans withheld support, then they would collapse. There were persistent rumours that Austria-Hungary would make a separate peace;11 Conrad—usually the soul of honour—complained to Bolfras, Franz Joseph’s military secretary, that the Germans were ‘unscrupulous, brutally selfish’ and added, ‘We can always threaten a separate peace with Russia, as a counter-weight’. On 1st April he told Falkenhayn that he would rather lose Galicia, in separate peace with Russia, than Trieste to Italy.

  Falkenhayn’s position was difficult. If he sent help to the Austrians, they might turn round and refuse to concede anything to Italy; if he failed to send help, they would disintegrate. Gradually, as the Carpathian disasters went ahead, he came round to Conrad’s plan of limited attack on the Russian front. Characteristically, he proceeded with extreme stealth: for he had little faith in Austrian generals, and none at all in their ability to keep secrets. As early as 31st March he commissioned Groener to study the railways of Silesia and western Galicia; on 5th April, ostensibly as a private gesture, Cramon, the German liaison officer, asked the Austro-Hungarian railway-chief, Straub, what railway-facilities would exist south of Cracow for transport of German troops.12 But it was not until 13th April that Falkenhayn officially asked for the Kaiser’s permission to go ahead with an offensive in the east. After some discussion with the chiefs of the western front, eight divisions were made free for an offensive in the east, to be commanded by Mackensen, with Seeckt as his chief of staff. After some futile warring over prestige-questions, Mackensen’s force was established as XI Army, and Mackensen, while commanding the Austro-Hungarian IV Army, himself took orders from the Austro-Hungarian high command, ‘after due consultation’ with the German one. This, to make sure that consultation went on. was moved from its western headquarte
rs in Mézières to new ones in the east, in Pless, only a few hours’ journey from Austrian headquarters in Teschen.

  Afterwards, a quarrel developed as to whether Conrad or Falkenhayn had first put forward the scheme for an offensive in western Galicia, south of Cracow. But it was not a very original scheme. An attack from south of Cracow could proceed along the northern slopes of the Carpathians, dislodging Russian troops in the mountains, until the river San was reached. Conrad had attempted the operation in March, when his IV Army had failed to break-through to relieve Przemyśl. Falkenhayn had certainly been first to propose the operation as a joint offensive, and, as Conrad later said, the whole thing had been dependent on his willingness to supply German troops. Both men had in mind a limited success: maybe the Russians would be forced back to the San, and the Austrians’ position in the Carpathians would correspondingly be easier, so that they could, if need be, divert troops to the south if Italy intervened or a Balkan campaign—which Falkenhayn always sought—became necessary. Troops were moved between 21st April and the end of the month to the Austrian lines south of Cracow.