by Max Hastings
Austria had plunged Europe into a great war to punish – indeed, destroy – Serbia. But the Central Powers now faced much larger and more dangerous opponents. Close cooperation was essential, to deal with the allies on the battlefield. On 30 July Lt. Col. Karl von Kageneck, the German military attaché in Vienna, pleaded with Moltke’s deputy ‘to play with absolutely open cards in order not to repeat the [negative] experience of all coalition wars’. In absolute contradiction of this, however, nothing was done to make collaboration effective. Reason should have persuaded Conrad to dispatch only a small force to frustrate any initiative by the Serbs, while the overwhelming bulk of the Austrian army met the threat from the Russians, northwards in Polish Galicia. The Serbs should have been addressed only if and when the Russians were beaten.
The Kaiser wrote to Vienna on 31 July: ‘in this hard struggle it is of the highest importance that Austria should direct her principal strength against Russia and not divide it by launching a simultaneous offensive against Serbia. This is all the more important as a large part of my army will be tied down by France. In this gigantic struggle which we are embarking upon shoulder to shoulder, Serbia plays a quite subordinate role, which demands only the most absolutely necessary defensive measures.’ This was common sense, but Conrad ignored it. Passion and muddled thinking, in this as in much else, persuaded the Austrian chief of staff to divide his forces. He committed nineteen divisions to fight Serbia’s eleven, and sent another thirty to meet fifty Russian formations in Galicia. The Germans and Austrians shared blame for failure to coordinate a strategy; each nation merely did as seemed best to its own commanders. Conrad tasked two armies in Bosnia, initially separated by seventy miles, to invade Serbia and its junior ally Montenegro from the west. A third army in Hungary was made available for three August weeks only – as if for a limited theatre run – before it was redeployed to Galicia. This force was to strike south across the Sava river west of Belgrade.
Operations against Serbia were commanded by Gen. Oskar Potiorek, governor of Bosnia. The man who had bungled Franz Ferdinand’s security arrangements in Sarajevo was invited a month later to direct a crucial military operation. Potiorek was a bachelor who had devoted his life monastically to his profession, while remaining ignorant of every aspect of it that was either modern or important; he had never seen a day’s action. The Austrian army was poorly trained and equipped, and its Slav soldiers were disaffected. Commanders neglected such tiresome details as artillery ballistics; Potiorek was personally responsible for frustrating the purchase of modern mountain guns, which would have been invaluable in Serbian terrain. Infantry–artillery coordination was non-existent. At a 1906 strategy conference, Potiorek cut short staff speculation about supply problems: ‘waging war means going hungry! If I start an operation today with 200,000 men, I know I can attain my objectives with just 100,000 of them.’
Any delusion that Conrad and his subordinates were chivalrous cavaliers, adorned with the graces of a Vienna ballroom, vanished in the face of their brutish conduct of the war. Even before invading Serbia, they opened a second front against their own minorities suspected of disloyalty: on 26 July military rule was imposed on Bosnia and Herzegovina. Hundreds of Serbs were arrested, including three members of the Austrian parliament. In Slovenia martial law was introduced, proclaimed by local officials borne from district to district in horse-drawn carriages. At each crossroads a little procession halted, a drummer beat a roll to summon attention, then a dignitary clad in black coat and top hat read the proclamation.
Passers-by scarcely heeded the ceremony because, in the words of Slovenian Valentin Oblak, ‘they did not realise the full implications’ of the decree, which were draconian indeed. Opposition newspapers were shut down; fifty executions were carried out in Dubrovnik and more elsewhere. In Austria some Czechs were badly beaten up – one such victim died in Linz – for allegedly shouting ‘Up with Serbia!’ A consequence of such actions was to provoke some thousands of the Empire’s two million Serb subjects to cross the border and enlist in Belgrade’s army.
The people of Serbia, meanwhile, were not merely fiercely nationalistic; they also knew the business of soldiering. In the recent Balkan wars, they had gained experience such as the Hapsburg armies lacked. They were unafraid of sacrifice: foreign visitors often remarked upon the popularity of Coriolanus, bloodiest of Shakespeare’s plays, with Serbian theatre audiences. They saw conflict with Austria as offering a unique opportunity to advance the pan-Slav cause. Out of a population of less than four million, they mobilised an astonishing half a million men, of whom four-fifths were now deployed on the western frontier, while their Montenegrin allies, 45,000 strong, took up positions further south.
They would be fighting in their own mountains, with aid from local partisans – komitadji, as they were known. The Times’s military correspondent wrote that the Serbian army was ‘not to be despised’, and would give the Austrians ‘much trouble’, which proved prescient. There was a classless comradeship among Serb soldiers, who acknowledged few distinctions of rank: a private might salute an officer, then shake hands with him if they knew each other back at home, in a fashion implausible in any other warring army. ‘We are all peasants in Serbia – that is our pride,’ a Serbian colonel told an American correspondent. They were short of weapons, however – a third of the men mobilised in 1914 lacked rifles, and local ammunition production was sluggish. At the end of July, so desperate was the country’s need that police conducted a house-to-house search for rifles. Uniforms were threadbare leftovers from the Balkan wars; many conscripts could only be provided with tunics and hats – šajkače – and some did not even get those. The chief of staff told the War Ministry that new recruits should be instructed to bring from home their own clothing and boots, because ‘there would be no uniforms, at least initially’. But the Serbs liked fighting, and were good at it. At first, they approached the war as a romantic adventure: every regiment advanced towards the front led by two or three gypsies, playing bagpipes or their national style of fiddle, singing love songs, paeans to victory, epic chants.
Živan Živanović, brother-in-law of Apis, described the febrile optimism: ‘The people of Živkovci were saying: “We have beaten the Turks, we have seen off the Bulgarians, now it’s the [Austrians’] turn; if God wills we shall show them who are the better men.”’ Geologist Tadija Pejović marvelled at the spirit of soldiers whom he saw marching towards the front from the army’s rear base at Kragujevac, armed only with spades and mattocks. They joked exuberantly: ‘These are to bury all the dead Germans!’ – ‘Schwaben’, Serbs’ generic term alike for the subjects of Franz Joseph and Wilhelm II. And while the Austrians fielded only 10cm guns and lacked heavy artillery, the Serbs had modern 15cm howitzers, and soon showed that they knew how to use them.
Their chief of staff, Marshal Radomir Putnik, was a competent soldier, though sixty-seven years old; few Serbs were troubled by his close association with the Black Hand. The July crisis caught the tough veteran taking the waters at a Hungarian spa, having left his country’s war plans locked in a Belgrade safe to which only he had a key. Subordinates had to use guncotton to gain access to the documents; the Austrians, in the last courteous gesture of the war, allowed the general to return home across their territory. After a brief brush with pneumonia, by 5 August Putnik was at his post, directing operations.
The Serb government knew that Belgrade, on the country’s Danube frontier with Hungary, was immediately vulnerable, and evacuated east to Niš its archives and personnel, together with such key envoys as Russia’s Vasily Strandman. Amid the chaos of mobilisation, the trains crawled, taking twice the normal time to complete the journey. Once ensconced in their new quarters, Serbian ministers besieged the Russian mission with demands for arms and equipment – their first request was for 200,000 uniforms and four wireless transmitters.
A fundamental insouciance nonetheless persisted, described by Finance Ministry civil servant Milan Stojadinović. ‘We were still obl
ivious of what we and our country were getting into … We were convinced: Serbia is going to win. I could not understand then and I cannot understand now: whence this optimism? Whence this insane belief in victory? There were four million of us against forty-five [million]. And yet this faith in assured victory made us embrace the war contented, merry, happy, singing songs. Throughout my own ministry, for the two days and nights needed to prepare for the move [to Niš], one song was constantly repeated with glowing eyes and full hearts, sung by one group in their room, as another rested next door:
‘Bulgaria, traitor,
Came to fight at Bregalnica [a battle in the Second Balkan War].
Go, go Austria!
To await the same fate!’
But when the Austrians began to shell the Serbian capital from their Danube gunboats and batteries on the Hungarian shore opposite, Belgrade’s citizens suffered terribly. Policemen hurried from street to street through rubble and broken glass, dust and bleeding people, thunderous detonations; they warned citizens to take refuge or fly. Many seized what possessions they could carry, then trudged towards the precarious safety of the countryside, or paid small fortunes for a cart or carriage to drive them there. When Živan Živanović first glimpsed Belgrade under bombardment, ‘I felt how much the Old Town deserved the name it was given by the Turks: “the home of wars”. From every side shells were exploding upon the city.’
Slavka Mihajlović, a doctor who had served in her country’s earlier conflicts, marvelled at the fashion in which those who lingered in the capital adjusted to the new reality: ‘As soon as the gunfire paused for a time, coffee houses reopened and people hastened back to them. Over a glass of wine and rakija they gathered the latest news before hurrying home, anticipating a new outbreak of shelling. Enemy fire ranged constantly over different parts of the city, seeking to spread terror as widely as possible … There were lots of problems with food. At every lull in the firing one saw women, children and old people hurrying hither and thither with baskets, trying to fulfil their needs as quickly as possible.’
Jovan Žujović of the Foreign Ministry spent 6 August helping staff at Belgrade’s Geological Institute pack up its precious collection of meteorites. But having done so, they could find no means to remove the crates before the Austrians recommenced shelling. Next day Žujović laboured among a crowd of citizens trying to save the French Association’s library, set ablaze by shells. It nonetheless burned to the ground, followed that night by much of the city university. It became obvious, wrote the diarist bitterly, that the Austrians were targeting cultural institutions. He removed the meteorite collection to his own home for safekeeping.
Meanwhile, further south and west, shrouded in dust clouds, two Austrian armies tramped across Bosnia towards the Serb and Montenegrin frontiers at the Drina river. Infantrymen, bent under sixty-pound packs, sweated prodigiously in the summer heat. They had been issued with extra rations of canned meat, which most now discarded rather than carry – to their later regret, because the army’s field kitchens and supply carts lagged far behind its soldiers. ‘On Monday we marched through Jablanica to Rama,’ wrote Matija Malešič of Graf von Lacy’s regiment. ‘The heat was terrible. Thirsty, thirsty, thirsty, our kit heavy as lead, unbearable heat and yet we must keep going, keep going. It is so hard that a man instinctively asks himself why he was brought into this world. Was it just to suffer?’
Austrian drivers battered the army’s few precious motor vehicles at reckless speed along rough, unmetalled Balkan tracks. Volunteer chauffeur Alex Pallavicini wrote despairingly on 6 August: ‘If we go on like this our cars will soon be wrecked. People seem to think an automobile is indestructible.’ Crowds of men, interminable columns of carts and gun batteries, clogged every Bosnian approach route to the front, making it difficult to get rations to the vanguards. ‘It is hard to believe this logjam will ever break,’ wrote Pallavicini after a day spent amidst the traffic chaos. ‘It took me over nine hours to cover 40 km.’ Some soldiers told Cpl. Egon Kisch that they had found the body of a comrade whose head and arms had been cut off by the Serbs, the skin flayed from his legs. Kisch wrote with sensible caution: ‘If this story is true – which I doubt – then the Serbs mutilated this poor guy not out of delight in bestiality, but to frighten us before we meet them in action.’
As they approached the Drina river, men were bemused by what Kisch described as ‘big, buzzing flies’ filling the air. Then these innocents grasped that they were hearing their first passing bullets. On 10 August, Potiorek’s troops began operations to cross the river at three points between fifty and a hundred miles west and south of Belgrade. At Batar, one formation advanced across a newly built pontoon bridge linking Bosnia and Serbia, led by a band playing martial airs. A Serb shell fell in its midst, killing some musicians, blasting others into the water. Their music stopped.
The bulk of the Austro-Hungarian troops gathered in darkness on the west bank, preparing to cross at dawn, covered by a bombardment. Suddenly their own shells started falling short, exploding in the water or among waiting infantrymen. Cpl. Kisch saw one round detonate atop a tree beneath which a divisional commander and his staff were gathered in their finery. ‘Herrgott!’ expostulated the shaken general. ‘That could have done for us. We’d better get back.’ At daybreak, however, the Serb defenders retreated from the far bank, conceding the passage of the Drina to the invaders.
Potiorek seemed untroubled by these embarrassments, which bordered on farce. He wrote in his diary with some complacency on 12 August: ‘Today my war has begun.’ Only on the 15th were the Austrians firmly established on the eastern shore, and moving sluggishly forward. Alex Pallavicini wrote: ‘The whole horizon is filled with pillars of smoke which mark our troops’ advance. New fires keep appearing: the ubiquitous straw stacks seem to be put there for that purpose. Heavy firing from enemy artillery. The spectacle resembled a splendid field exercise.’ By contrast, Cpl. Kisch’s narrative is a tale of woe: incessant marching interrupted only by snatched dozes in open fields; clothing and kit soaked by river crossings. ‘Though the enemy was in front of us, we faced other and more terrible foes: the packs on our backs; exhaustion; rough scrub that tore clothes and skin to shreds; stinging nettles; hunger; frost at night after the heat of the afternoons – thus, we advanced to Leśnica. Occasionally we passed a kutja [wooden house] or a pillaged village. Chickens provided the only sign of life.’
The invasion of Serbia provoked widespread resistance by armed civilians. The French had employed such tactics in their 1870–71 war with Prussia, and they would be widely used in World War II. But in 1914 Serbia was the only front where they became commonplace – to the fury of the Austrians. Alex Pallavicini reported being shot at by guerrillas who exploited the cover of huge cornfields, several miles behind the front. As one Austrian unit was advancing through a wood, a komitadji suddenly appeared and fired point-blank at Lt. Hugo Schulz, who fell dead. The Serb, in his turn, was riddled with bullets, but the Austrians gazing down on his corpse noted that his eyes were still open, his features set in a grin, ‘apparently contented that he had exchanged his own life for that of an enemy officer’. Most partisans adopted a subtler approach, waiting until enemy troops had passed before firing into their backs, prompting chaos and wild outbreaks of shooting.
‘[Our men] scattered like startled chickens,’ wrote Egon Kisch, ‘firing right and left, ahead and behind without an enemy in sight or any order given. Thus they wounded our own people in large numbers … Only a few men fired, but they did a lot of mischief. Beside me a corporal constantly blew his whistle in an effort to stop the shooting. Suddenly I heard a body fall, turned and saw him lying on the ground, blood gushing from his forehead. A moment later, he became still. It took ten minutes before whistles and shouted orders caused the firing to stop, so that we could resume the advance. There were awful sights in our path: an occasional dead Serb, and many more wounded comrades from our own regiment. This was our first skirmish.’
The
Austrians were determined that their war should be waged according to their rules. They deemed guerrilla activity an affront, and moreover feared that any Serb success would rouse sympathetic Slav minorities within the Empire. Inside Hapsburg Bosnia, they adopted a policy of pre-emptive repression: groups of Franz Joseph’s Serb subjects were herded aboard trains as hostages, threatened with summary execution in the event of any komitadji sabotage attack. Meanwhile, in Serbia, a corps commander told his officers to ensure that their men were aware of ‘our moral and numerical superiority to the point of fanaticism’. The chief of Austrian intelligence, Col. Oskar von Hranilović, had warned that the army was likely to meet guerrillas. It was agreed that resistance would be met by ruthless application of Kriegsnotwehrrecht, the martial law of self-defence.
Thus thousands of Serb civilians, most of them innocent, were summarily shot or hanged. On 16 August, for instance, five ‘Tschuzen’ – Slovene or Croatian peasants – were dragged in front of the colonel of the 11th Infantry, denounced as alleged partisans. The regimental adjutant demanded: ‘Who saw them fire?’ Some voices answered promptly: ‘The captain and ten men.’ The hapless peasants were led before an embankment, ordered to kneel, and shot. Alex Pallavicini’s account of other such incidents is rich in circumstantial detail, but it seems rash to accept at face value his allegations against the Serb victims. He described how, on 17 August, his column was fired upon from a cornfield behind the front. Austrian patrols sent to investigate returned with sixty-three prisoners; they claimed that some women and children among them were caught carrying rifles, and that they had found a priest in possession of grenades.
