Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (90 page)

In the course of 1914, Constantin Schneider’s division, which reached the battlefield 15,000 strong, suffered twice that number of casualties, including 9,000 men missing, most of them taken prisoner. The formation’s Christmas strength fell to 4,000. Overall in the first five months of the conflict, Conrad’s armies suffered a million casualties. ‘War becomes the scourge of mankind,’ lamented Lt. Col. Theodor Zeynek, ‘not because of the human lives forfeited, but because of the collapse of moral values.’ But the ‘human lives forfeited’ seemed a sufficient cause for mourning to hundreds of thousands of families.

One December day, Aleksandr Trushnovich led a half-company of Austrian reinforcements to take up positions above the Prut river. Before dawn, in the rear areas they were fed and even given some beer. A general harangued them on their glorious role in the forthcoming battle and victory. Then they travelled for some six hours in a column of peasant
carts, before taking to their feet. They found themselves traversing dense woodland, in a silence suddenly shattered by shellfire that tore branches, ‘as if a giant deer had careered past. Then there was roaring and moaning, and the noises echoed through the vaults of the forest, such a cacophony that one could not hear oneself speak.’

Reaching the edge of the trees, the bewildered soldiers glimpsed ahead the trenches they were to occupy, and dashed to embrace their shelter. But the positions were shallow and unfinished, and the Russian shelling frighteningly accurate. With frenetic energy, men worked to deepen their holes. Trushnovich risked a glance over the parapet at the grey-green ribbon of the Prut river below. Russian soldiers were visible, dashing across it under Austrian fire: ‘A Hungarian machine-gunner was firing from a breastwork ten paces from me. Missed. One could see his rounds hitting the water. Earth cascaded over me – a shell had exploded right by the parapet. I felt terribly reluctant to die.’

When the shelling finally ceased, the newly arrived Austrians were bemused to hear a deep murmur from the valley. Somebody said: ‘The Russians are praying!’ Darkness fell, broken by spasmodic exchanges of fire, flares, false alarms. At dawn, a new Russian barrage began, causing the forest above and below the Austrian line once more to crack and creak as branches broke. Trushnovich’s soldiers ‘huddled deeper into their foxholes, each one sharing his refuge with his personal God, praying to be spared’. Wounded men moaned, for no one was willing to expose himself to assist them.

As the fire intensified, ‘soon one could no longer hear anything above the roaring of the steel Bacchanalia, which drowned out cries for help. Suddenly the Russian batteries fell silent and a chorus of “
Ura!
” rose in the forest on the left. All went quiet, only the echo of human voices resonated … Deep in the forest we could see people whose tunics were the colour of bushes and grass. They were coming closer, dashing from one tree to the next while we advanced to meet them. Now we could clearly see their faces, and even teeth when they shouted “
Ura!
” There was a fog before one’s eyes: what if we had to repel a bayonet attack? … They are almost here …

‘I saw the Russians rolling forward something on wheels. My God, that’s a machine-gun! God save us from this evil! The sound of its fire burst into the discordant shouts of “
Ura!
” and “
Hurra!
”, and all around falling men began moaning and screaming in pain. I barely had time to throw myself into a shallow trench. The firing grew more and more
ferocious, then suddenly died away as the [Austrian] grey uniforms began running back …’

But next day the Russians, in their turn, retired a little way. The Austrians descended cautiously to the river: ‘The smell of Russian leather and
makhorka
– shag tobacco – was so strong in the trenches that one knew at once who had been occupying them.’ A lot of dead lay there, with nearby a scattered heap of letters. Silence descended on the hills for a time, so that the Austrians could hear dogs barking and field kitchens arriving in the Russian lines. They imagined the invisible enemy walking about, eating, drinking. And as they listened, a man said, with a curious affectionate fellow-feeling in his words, ‘Can you hear? The Russkies have brought in their kitchens. What are they cooking up there?’ Next day, the killing resumed. Trushnovich later deserted to the Russians, in whose ranks he served for years.

On 16 December, after one of the last significant clashes of the year, at Limanowa, Theodor Zeynek rode across the battlefield:

The scene was fantastic: a maze of trenches stretching in all directions, all full of spent cases, broken rifles, bent bayonets, fragments of wood, decayed straw, groundwater, debris. There were prayer books, Austrian caps, Prussian
Pickelhauben
, Russian caps … Whole villages were smashed to pieces, telegraph poles cast down, bridges destroyed, groups of moaning and weeping peasants who came forward with their children because they did not know where to go; here was a heap of dead soldiers, there a row of freshly dug graves; many horse carcasses. In the villages, there were endless manifestations of devastation, most of the inhabitants deported or fled, the fields trampled, while in the skies flocks of screaming ravens cried for prey … Overhead the winter sun shone as brightly as if nothing was amiss with a world of peace and happiness.

The year ended in Galicia, as elsewhere, without decision. The German victory at Tannenberg obscured, for a season, what historian Gerhard Gross has described as ‘the strategic defeat of the
Kaiserreich
’ in the East in 1914. Whether or not the transfer of two corps from the West at the end of August decisively weakened Moltke’s campaign in France, the transcendent reality was that the German armies failed to achieve conclusive success on either front. While Ludendorff was an able and energetic officer, he was certainly not the genius he supposed himself. No more than any other director of war on either side could he overcome fundamental
difficulties of resources, logistics, enemy mass and distances. On the Western Front, there were six rifles for every yard of front; in the East, only one for every two yards.

Russia’s forces lacked strength, and were too ill-led, to overcome the Germans. Their successes laid bare the rottenness of the Hapsburg Empire’s armies, but their own failures imposed critical strains upon those of the Romanovs. Russia’s enemies were awed by the capacity of the Tsar’s soldiers to endure suffering, but already perceptive Russians recognised the intolerable burden war was imposing upon millions of hapless imperial subjects, swept into its maw with vastly less understanding of or sympathy for the cause than most of their counterparts in the West. The Russian economy was suffering grievously from the consequences of the closure of the Dardanelles to the Empire’s shipping: Russian grain could not be exported to the West, nor vital supplies brought in. Nicholas’s people were being invited to suffer and die, so far as they themselves could see, not for any grand ideal, but merely because their emperor willed it. A government agent reported peasants saying, ‘Is not all the same, what[ever] Tsar we live under?’ They suggested that their government should pay Germany’s enemies to end the war.

Alexei Tolstoy described an NCO barking orders at peasant reservists, a tiny portion of the nine million conscripted in the war’s first year, in a lice-ridden barracks, its walls dripping with tubercular damp: ‘Right dress! Everyone at attention! Heels together, toes the width of a rifle butt apart, no gap between your knees! Heads properly straight … Then everyone can see that you are a soldier willing to give your life for your faith, the Tsar and the Motherland. You – why are you making faces? Keep your head straight!’

The man stared bitterly at the NCO and cried out, ‘I can’t, I can’t, I can’t!’

‘Why not?!’

‘I have muscle damage. I was beaten as a child!’

The NCO gave up, venting his feelings about being obliged to make soldiers of cripples. Another man began to splutter aloud, then others, in Tolstoy’s words ‘shaking with incessant wet, deep, sobbing coughs’. The sergeant shouted, ‘Why are you breeding consumption here? Silence! Keep still! Now, salute: the arm must move as if it was a spring, while the palm of the hand is stiff as a plank. Saluting is serious business!’ Yet Tolstoy already sensed a weariness in the soldiers’ conduct. These men were ‘unable any longer to see any beauty in military service and were
merely succumbing to discipline … They have already been attacked by their first pangs of anxiety, inner doubt: “What is all this about, God help us?”’ The writer perceived men recoiling from the ‘monstrous dysfunctionality’ of their new lives, wrenched out of shape by the war, which displaced millions from their proper and familiar existences. Years of misery and slaughter lay ahead for all the combatants in the East before their rulers faced a decisive reckoning, which took place far from the battlefields.

2 THE SERBS’ LAST TRIUMPH

The Serbian front was much the least important in the big picture of the war, but it contributed mightily to the Hapsburg Empire’s descent towards collapse. There, as in Galicia and Western Europe, winter weather intensified all the combatants’ miseries. Austrian Lt. Roland Wüster recoiled from the sight of dead Serbs whose entrails had been devoured by animals. Alex Pallavicini described difficulties with his automobiles, constantly bogged in mud from which they could be extricated only by horses – a humiliation for twentieth-century technology. Repairs were difficult for lack of parts, and fuel was often in short supply. As for the Serbians, whatever the successes of their army, civilians suffered dreadfully. The assistant head of Belgrade’s psychiatric hospital, Dr Šajnović, said despairingly on 2 November: ‘If we do not get peace soon, I shall join my patients instead of treating them. I smoke like a lunatic and swill
tinktura energika
[a mixture of
rakija
and cognac], but it does nothing to give me energy any more!’ When cigarettes were no longer obtainable, some people resorted to smoking dried leaves.

Gen. Oskar Potiorek had failed disastrously in his August and September offensives. In early November, however, overwhelmingly superior strength enabled him to inflict a severe reverse on the Serbian army. He was honoured by the Kaiser, and a street was renamed for him in Sarajevo. But Potiorek’s conceit, incompetence and insensitivity remained undiminished. He sought to sustain his army’s Serbian advance into the winter, though his men were exhausted and ill-equipped. A divisional commander protested in vain that ‘extreme weather affects the fitness of troops still clad in summer tunics’. Potiorek dismissed as ‘bleating’ all requests for boots, winter clothing, more ammunition or equipment. When told that some of his men were starving, he responded: ‘Making war means going hungry.’ An Austrian soldier wrote of gossip in the ranks about the general: ‘
They say that he shows no interest at all in the course of battles, forgets everything that happened the previous day and issues the most pointless orders.’

On 6 November, Potiorek launched a new offensive, which drove deep into Serbia. Half a million Austrian troops, advancing on three fronts, fell upon half that number of defenders. ‘News that the brave Serbian army has been defeated prompted an indescribable panic in the capital,’ wrote Dr Slavka Mihajlović. ‘The few people who remain here are preparing to flee.’ A few days later she added: ‘Incredible cold sets in and working conditions at the hospital are unbearable. The food is terrible and supplies are nearly exhausted. Because of constant shelling, all road links to the countryside are cut.’ As the Austrians pushed further into Serbia, they were chiefly impressed by its poverty. Peasant homes were neat enough, but pitifully sparsely furnished, with only embroidered blankets and cloth – sewing machines were the only ubiquitous manifestations of technology. On the walls there were a few icons, and cheap coloured prints depicting heroic images of the Balkan war against the Turks. Austrians despised their enemies as barbarians, and briefly also as losers.

Belgrade fell. On 3 December, Austrian troops staged a triumphal parade through the city, and were soon reported to have advanced within forty-five miles of the Serbian army headquarters at Kraguijevatz. Serb ammunition stocks were almost exhausted. Hundreds of thousands of civilian refugees, terrorised by their earlier experience of Austrian occupation, fled for their lives with the retreating army. Serbia’s fortunes seemed irretrievable, and Gen. Putnik, the commander-in-chief, urged his country’s politicians to open negotiations with Vienna for an armistice. He was astonished when the Pašić government responded by declaring its determination to fight on. The sufferings intensified of both Serbs who clung to their native land and those who fled as refugees. Russian diplomat Nikolai Charykov’s wife was appalled by the conditions she found at a hospital over the border in Niš, Bulgaria, whence hundreds of wounded Serbs had been evacuated, and lay untended for lack of chloroform, antiseptics, dressings – even warm water to wash wounds.

Yet the victors were in no better case. By mid-November, the woes of the Austrian columns trudging towards their next objective, Draginje-Bosnak, were very great. Rations often failed to reach units because supply wagons bogged down. Men slept in mud. One soldier wrote: ‘All those chaps suffering only coughs and colds were in better shape than the poor fellows enduring toothache, or scarcely able to move their legs because of
rheumatism. Packs and blankets grew so heavy with the wet that one’s shoulders acquired bloody stripes, and men struggled to avoid falling over backwards. Guns kept getting stuck so deep in the mud that their wheels vanished. Even with six oxen and three pairs of horses hitched to the carriage, it sometimes took over an hour’s hard labour to get one artillery piece free.’

They met many refugees – old people, women and children attempting to return to villages they had fled a few weeks or months ago – suffering as much from the mud as the Austrians. At the sight of these tragic columns, in the words of Corporal Egon Kisch, ‘our own troubles receded. Quite often a villager’s cart became irretrievably bogged down or the draught animal collapsed: dead cattle lay on the road and sometimes an overturned carriage, its contents scattered about. The owners stood gazing in bewilderment, and their despair cut into our hearts. But we could not help them.’ Roland Wüster wrote despairingly: ‘We no longer have any decent boots or clothing; rations are gone and the men exhausted – the consequence of our hasty advance and fierce fighting. Half the baggage animals have saddle sores which stink so horribly that it is intolerable to march behind them.’