by Max Hastings
The Serbian government, having gained a respite, struggled to procure aid of all kinds from its allies, which posed severe practical difficulties for a landlocked country with poor communications. On 7 September, Britain’s foreign secretary wrote with the elaborate formality of the times: ‘Sir E. Grey presents his compliments to the Serbian Minister and … has the honour to inform him that a telegram has been received from His Majesty’s Chargé d’Affaires at Cairo reporting that instructions have been given to allow the exportation of 3,000 sacks of rice to Serbia.’ But the hapless Serbs were in need of far more than a few days’ supply of rice. Their war, far from being won, had scarcely started.
Early in September, the Austrians launched a second invasion. Reinforcements arrived to fill the depleted ranks of Potiorek’s regiments. Every unit was provided with a Slovak guide. One battalion’s officers, unable to speak the language of their own appointed man, sought to explain to him by dumb show that he was now subject to military justice, and would face execution if he deserted. The wretched peasant misinterpreted this as a warning that he was to be hanged out of hand, and collapsed into a sobbing heap, shrieking his innocence.
As Egon Kisch marched back towards the Drina with his comrades, he tried to persuade himself that being shot at would be less disagreeable the second time. ‘Water doesn’t feel so cold once you are in it,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘It is surely the same with gunfire. But before you dive in, you shiver and your teeth chatter.’ Yet the Austrians’ renewed invasion of Serbia began as disastrously as the first. On 8 September near Velino Selo, men began to board assault boats to cross the Drina, under heavy small-arms fire. Of Kisch’s platoon of twenty men, only ten were aboard when the boat pushed off, the others having prudently melted away. Their paddle seemed interminable as Serbian bullets whipped the water. When they reached the east bank, the boat was beset by men already wounded, desperate for a passage back to safety. Thousands of Austrians of three regiments milled around the bridgehead in confusion, unable to advance in the face of fire from the Serbians’ concrete emplacements.
Night fell. All through the hours of darkness the bedraggled Austrians huddled by the water. Early on the morning of 9 September, a withdrawal was ordered. Only twelve boats, each holding forty men, remained undamaged to carry back the survivors, and thus the evacuation continued for hours. Most men discarded their arms and equipment. As Austrians impatient for passage yelled in rage and despair at the boatmen, Serb infantry ran forward to the river bank and emptied their rifles into the fugitives. Some boats sank under artillery fire, while many men drowned because they could not swim, or were crippled by wounds. Fugitives mobbed the overloaded craft, and were repulsed with increasing ruthlessness by their crews. Egon Kisch escaped by crossing in the water, clinging unnoticed to the thwart of a boat being paddled to the Bosnian shore.
For a week after the disaster, Austrian corpses drifted in the Sava and Drina rivers. Elsewhere, some units advanced into Serbia with less initial difficulty, but for no greater military advantage. NCO Matija Malešič wrote despairingly on 16 September: ‘How hungry I am and full of thoughts about home and what life will be like when I return … There are lots of things I could write about but I must take care not to fill up too much paper, since God knows how long this struggle will continue, and paper is scarce. I must focus on the most important thing – and God knows who may get this diary if I fall. It is better if one keeps a lot to oneself. What will happen to me? … I am all sickness; I have no sensation in my feet due to frostbite, only where the skin has been broken; the hearing in my right ear has gone. I doubt that I am still the same human being that once I was.’
Even as this new disaster was unfolding, other Austrian forces renewed their assault across the Sava. In darkness on 14 September, troops forded the river just north of its junction with the Drina. Once established on the eastern bank, they repulsed a Serb counter-attack. But during the days that followed, they found it impossible to make further progress, and lay hemmed into a narrow perimeter. There were scores of cases of self-inflicted wounds. Potiorek contemptuously ordered his soldiers to try harder, ‘without timidity about casualties’, but they proved unable to advance beyond the Paranica peninsula. After weeks of inconclusive fighting, once more the Austrians retired across the Drina into Bosnia.
Neither side was strong enough to force a decisive outcome. Further south, the Serbs and Montenegrins were forced to relinquish their footholds in Bosnia. After their withdrawal, in accordance with the spirit in which war was being waged in this region of liquid loyalties, the Austrians hanged or shot out of hand local people who had been rash enough to show sympathy for their temporary occupiers. Gen. Potiorek complained: ‘Our Serbs fight on Serbia’s side not only in Herzegovina but also at Visegrad, where the population worked covertly against our troops when they were withdrawing.’ A Bosnian priest named Vid Parežanin, hanged by the Austrians for allegedly signalling information to the enemy, shouted as the noose was put around his neck, ‘Long live Serbia. Long live the Serbian army. Long live great Russia!’
Austrian Dr Jochan Bachmann recorded several occasions on which ‘Serbian-sympathising Bosnian trash’ allegedly spied for the Serbian army. He mentioned an old peasant couple suspected of such behaviour: the husband was hanged, the wife shot, their home looted and burned. But even Bachmann was appalled by the fate of a Serbian prisoner wounded in the head. Having tended him overnight and laid him in a barn near the Visegrad road, the doctor looked for the man at daybreak, to change his dressings before the regiment marched out. He learned that the prisoner had been hanged, having earned the displeasure of the regiment’s colonel by shouting denunciations of Austria through the night. ‘Such an order was beyond my understanding, and reflected gross insensitivity,’ wrote Bachmann. ‘The poor wretch had contracted meningitis from his wound, and his ravings were the result of feverish delirium.’
The same fate was meted out to substantial numbers of Serb residents of the Hapsburg Empire who crossed the border to enlist in the Serbian army, wherever they fell into Austrian hands. This did not deter 452 of 70,000 Austro-Hungarian prisoners now held by Belgrade from joining the Serbian ranks. Vienna imposed a further spate of repressive measures in its Bosnian colony, designed to strengthen the inhabitants’ loyalties. The use of Cyrillic script in schools was banned. Austro-Hungarian troops were given draconian orders about the treatment of terrorist suspects. They were warned about Serb komitadji guerrillas, and instructed to fire at the slightest provocation, even at women and children, ‘because they too can throw bombs and grenades’. The struggle lapsed into a protracted two-front war: almost a million Serbs and Austrians fought in the north on the Sava river, and in the mountains east of the Drina.
It was a minor grotesquerie of the time, that even as they did so, in neighbouring Bosnia the trial of the men whose actions had started it all dragged wretchedly on. An Austro-Hungarian officer posted to Sarajevo watched the twice-daily procession of the accused conspirators in the assassination of Franz Ferdinand between the barracks in which they were confined and the courthouse where proceedings were held: ‘first came a strong guard, then the felons, flanked by more guards, with a further detail bringing up the rear. All the criminals were bound by chains and chained to each other, so that escape was impossible. Princip was always at their centre. He looked pretty unimpressive, with his dark hair, pale features, and small, slight figure … The transfer was usually accompanied by booing and Tyrolean invective from watching soldiers, which Princip met with a cynical grin.’
Only slowly did the leaders of Serbia and Austria come to understand that they were locked in an embrace which was imposing disaster upon both. War reduced the former country to a wasteland and cost the lives of three-quarters of a million people – one in six Serbs, by far the highest proportion of the population of any belligerent nation to perish in the conflict. In this respect only, the Austrians achieved their purpose: Serbia suffered a dreadful punishment for the role of
some of its people in the killing of the Archduke. Meanwhile, however, Conrad’s army endured humiliations such as no later success could erase. Here, the world heard the bell toll for the looming collapse of the Hapsburg Empire. But Balkan chimes were swiftly drowned out by vast, deafening concussions across other battlefields of both western and eastern Europe.
5
Death with Flags and Trumpets
1 THE EXECUTION OF PLAN XVII
Throughout the first fortnight of August, under brilliant skies the armies of France, Germany, Belgium and Britain marched from their detrainment points towards collisions with the enemy amid golden cornfields and wondering peasant spectators. Millions of men traversed many miles each day, some on foot, others on horses or carts, a few in primitive motor vehicles. ‘The dust clung to our hair, eyebrows and beards,’ wrote Paul Lintier on the 14th, ‘and by the time a column of Paris motor buses had gone by us, we were as white as the road itself,’ for relatively few of France’s highways were metalled. Each German corps, accompanied by 2,400 wagons and 14,000 horses, filled twelve miles of road.
While the German and British armies had adopted uniforms of grey-green and khaki respectively, the French and Belgians retained the brilliant hues of the nineteenth century. Fantastically, the soldiers of France advanced towards the enemy’s fire beneath regimental colours, to the music of drums and trumpets. More than a few French headstones of 1914 bear the succinct inscription after a man’s name, ‘clarion’ – ‘trumpeter’. Many units deployed in action full bands, and some officers affected white gloves. All the belligerents were led into action by commanders armed with swords and mounted on chargers.
From September onwards, the armies burrowed deep into the earth, but the dominant characteristic of the August battles in France and Belgium was that the motions of infantry, cavalry and artillery were alike readily visible. Masses of men advanced against devastatingly powerful modern armaments in the same fashion as warriors since ancient times. The consequences were unsurprising, save to some generals. On 22 August 1914 the French army suffered casualties on a scale never thereafter in the war surpassed by any nation in a single day. Its commander-in-chief, Gen. Joseph Joffre, orchestrated a series of battles which, to a spectator, resembled those of the nineteenth century in all respects save the dearth of military genius. The conviction of French senior soldiers that spirit alone – ‘cran’ – could overcome firepower was responsible for rendering more than a quarter of a million of their young countrymen casualties inside three weeks. The Germans lost almost one-third as many – their own dying time came later.
One day in 1909, a tourist wandered through the streets of the great fortress of Liège, the gateway to Belgium astride the Meuse. A joyless figure, his jowly features set in a perpetual frown, he gazed keenly not upon architectural gems, but instead towards the ring of modern forts protecting the city’s approaches. This was Col. Erich Ludendorff, forty-four years old, an obsessive warrior deemed one of the most brilliant stars of the German army. He was inspecting its designated future battlefield, knowing that seizure of Liège and a subsequent sweep through neutral Belgium were crucial elements in Germany’s plan for the destruction of the French army. This had been conceived in the first years of the century by chief of staff Count Alfred von Schlieffen, who envisaged thrusting across Dutch territory. Moltke adopted instead a line of march through Liège, because it was decided that Holland should be quarantined as a neutral conduit to the outside world – a ‘windpipe’ for Germany – in which role it indeed proved serviceable.
No precisely ordered ‘Schlieffen plan’ ever existed, and it seems more appropriate to speak of an indisputable ‘Schlieffen concept’, which identified two fundamentals: the need quickly to smash France before turning on Russia, and the intent to do so through a vast outflanking movement, making the right wing the focus of German strength and hopes. In 1913, Ludendorff was removed from the post of chief of operations on the General Staff, allegedly because of his dogged, wearisome insistence that more manpower would be indispensable if Germany’s fabulous war vision was to be fulfilled. But a year later he found himself back before Liège, playing a prominent personal role amid the thunder and rattle of gunfire.
Falkenhayn said at the beginning of August: ‘It is critical that we use the prevailing euphoria before it goes up in smoke.’ This Moltke sought to do, unleashing against Liège the first big assault of the western war. The city was defended by a garrison of 40,000 reinforced by a field division – far more men than the attackers had anticipated meeting. The local German corps commander, Gen. Otto von Emmich, issued a proclamation to Belgians: ‘we want a clear road to attack those who wish to attack us. I give my assurance that the Belgian population will not have to suffer the horrors of war.’
But instead of ‘a clear road’, on 5 August the first waves of his Westphalian and Hanoverian soldiers met ferocious artillery and small-arms fire. These green troops, who had never heard a shot fired in anger, were thrown back with heavy loss. A Belgian officer wrote: ‘As line after line of German infantry advanced, we simply mowed them down … They made no attempt at deploying but came on … almost shoulder to shoulder, until, as we shot them down, the fallen were heaped one on top of the other, in an awful barricade of dead and wounded men that threatened to mask our guns and cause us trouble.’ The German army started its war in a fashion the rest of Europe would emulate in the weeks that followed, and at Liège Moltke harvested a first crop of grieving widows and mothers.
The Belgian government was rash enough to issue a triumphalist communiqué: ‘We are completely victorious. All the German attacks have been repulsed.’ But Emmich had hardly started: in the days that followed, his men pressed successive attacks supported by fierce bombardments. Casualties mounted: one brigade lost over half its men, including the commander and a regimental colonel; in another attack at Vise, thirty officers and 1,150 men became casualties. On 6 August an unwelcome novelty was introduced, when a Zeppelin airship staged the first-ever bombing raid on a European city, killing nine Liègeois.
Before war came, Henry Wilson had vainly begged the Belgians to strengthen Liège and Namur. Now they discovered the vulnerability of their fortresses to sustained assault. Gen. Gérard Leman, Liège’s garrison commander, abandoned efforts to hold a continuous perimeter. He dispatched almost half his men to join the Belgian field army, thereafter relying upon interlocking fire from the bastions to check a German breakthrough. The forts at Liège, like those defending France’s eastern frontier, were constructed of concrete strengthened by vast earth banks. Ditches covered by machine-guns – though insufficient of them – held enemy infantry at bay. Each fort’s defences were dominated by guns mounted on tracks in casemates and steel cupolas which, though weighing over a hundred tons apiece, could be hand-cranked and trained.
Five German corps, 150,000 men, pressed in upon the city. A growing number of attackers exploited darkness to infiltrate between the forts. They were ordered to advance with unloaded weapons, to prevent careless soldiers shooting each other, but muddle persisted, redeemed only by some purposeful leadership. In a notably theatrical gesture, on the morning of 7 August Ludendorff hastened forward, rallied some despondent units wilting under Belgian fire, and personally led them into Liège’s abandoned citadel. For this action he won – pretty easily – Germany’s highest decoration, the Pour le Mérite. The nation was informed that the city was taken: ‘Lüttich ist gefallen.’ A week earlier, few of the Kaiser’s subjects were as enthusiastic about war as had been the Prussians in 1870, but now the capture of Liège launched a wave of popular enthusiasm which persisted into September. The Germans, like most peoples, recoiled from carnage but loved victories, especially when these came quickly. Towns and cities exulted, with singing and dancing in the streets. Next day schoolchildren were assembled to share the rejoicing, then granted a holiday.
Celebration was premature. Despite the citadel’s fall, the Belgians held out stubbornly in most of the surroundi
ng forts. On 8 August, Gen. Karl von Einem took over responsibility for the siege. He abandoned frontal attacks and deployed 60,000 troops in an encircling ‘ring of steel’ pending the arrival of heavy artillery. The Belgians kept firing: the first casualties suffered by Dr Lorenz Treplin’s regiment were three men who rashly left their posts in the captured fort of Barchon to bathe in the Meuse, where an exploding shell severely cut and bruised them. Otherwise, wrote the surgeon on 11 August, his life was boring – ‘stupor and tranquillity’; he asked his wife to send him a book to pass the time. She told their children Papa was in a place where he was obliged to speak in French. Four-year-old Ingeborg wailed, ‘But then I shan’t be able to understand him when he comes home!’
Civilians in the path of the armies wearied of war very swiftly. ‘You cannot think how miserable life is here,’ Ghent doctor’s wife Madame Jeanne van Bleyenberghe wrote to a friend. ‘Many people are ruined. Pierre had thought to send me to England … but I don’t want to be so far away and not be able to come back when I want and besides it is too late.’ Worse, much worse, now befell her country. The assault on Liège provoked the first manifestations of a month-long German frenzy about supposed francs-tireurs opposing their advance. This prompted the Kaiser’s army to behave with extraordinary savagery. On the night of 4 August, troops in the village of Bernau panicked amid unexplained shooting which cost the lives of eleven Germans. Next day, ten villagers were murdered in retaliation, including a family of five hiding in a cellar. The following night, a Belgian shell landed in the hamlet of Saint-Hadelin, wounding some Germans posted there. A local teacher was accused of betraying their position by signalling to the fort of Fléron, and was promptly shot along with several of his family. The first mass executions also took place that day. A hysterical officer, Maj. Gen. von Kraewel, explained the repulse of his troops’ attacks by claiming that ‘the entire population in Liège and the suburbs participated in the fighting’. Between the 4th and 7th, Kraewel’s brigade shot 117 civilians, whom he claimed had engaged in ‘mass resistance’.
