Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (30 page)

A fundamental insouciance nonetheless persisted, described by Finance Ministry civil servant Milan Stojadinović. ‘We were still oblivious 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.

‘An hour later,’ Pallavicini wrote, ‘only a mass grave was visible. In order not to upset [our] soldiers by [the sound of] shooting, these people were bayoneted to death. The priest’s beard had supposedly been ripped off – our men were that angry after the atrocities committed [against them]. In the afternoon I motored to Losnitza, where fourteen [Serbs] swung from a gallows. Oberstleutnant Kokotović had given orders to hang them. From rooftops our troops were still being fired upon. The hatred for us is boundless, and everyone is our enemy. The population is so deceitful that I must always anticipate being shot down by a child or an old woman, though to our faces they appear servile … We are not fighting against an army of 300,000 but against a whole nation. This seems a war driven by religious fervour. The priests are the worst agitators and monasteries the main centres of agitation.’

A striking feature of the many executions of civilians carried out on the Eastern Front, especially by the Austro-Hungarians in Serbia, is that they were photographed, and the images published. This was because, far from being a source of embarrassment to Vienna, the punitive killing of alleged
francs-tireurs
or spies was an important aspect of its policy; Conrad wanted as many people as possible to know about them. Hangmen presented bodies for the camera like sportsmen displaying animal trophies. An Austrian officer in Serbia recorded on 24 August:

I met a column of thirty [alleged
francs-tireurs
] assembled for execution. They were accompanied by a crowd of people including Prince Odescalchi and Lieutenant Weiss who could not refrain from boxing the ears of the poor wretches, bound as they were. We tried to restrain them but it was absolutely impossible. The execution place was at the edge of the woods behind the monastery. The [condemned Serbs] had to dig their own graves. Then they were sat down in front of the pit and bayoneted five at a time, three infantrymen stabbed each. A gruesome spectacle. Odescalchi behaved like a wild animal and would have liked to take part. It was terrible to see earth being heaped on the victims while some still lived – and indeed tried to climb out of the grave – and to see some of those rising from the grave. Our men behaved like savages. I could not stand the sight, and left them to it.

Gen. Kasimir Lütgendorf, a divisional commander in Serbia, caused 120 inhabitants of the town of Šabac to be shot on 17 August, allegedly following street fighting. In reality, the Serb army had evacuated Šabac without offering resistance, leaving behind only women, children and old people. It remains a mystery why Lütgendorf ordered these executions, though he was equally merciless to his own men. That same evening of 17 August, the general received a report on three men – Private Josef Ebert and medical orderlies Franz Buzek and Josef Douhlik – who had drunk themselves into a stupor on looted schnapps, then fired their rifles wildly.