Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (91 page)

But now, almost miraculously, the wheel of fate turned once more. France shipped to Serbia just sufficient ammunition to refill its ally’s empty artillery limbers. Putnik regrouped his forces. Somehow he persuaded his filthy, exhausted, threadbare, half-starved troops to join a counter-attack. On 3 December, in a battle at Arandjelovac, the Serbs achieved a startling victory. Advancing in its wake, they were astonished to find the Austrian army crumbling: first the centre of the front gave way, then the flanks. Roland Wüster wrote on 4 December that the retreat of Potiorek’s army resembled that of Napoleon’s army from Moscow – a chaos of baggage columns, artillery, siege detachments, pioneers, ‘with infantry dispersed between them along with scavengers and wounded – everybody struggling to escape from this ill-starred land’.
Next day, Wüster himself was hit in the leg. With no help in sight, he crudely bandaged the wound himself, hobbled into a nearby farmstead and lay down. For the next seven hours he struggled in vain to staunch the bleeding. Despairing, the young officer gave a picture of his family to a nearby sentry, and told him how he wished to be buried. The man casually reassured him that his wound did not look too bad, though he added cheerfully that he had not long since buried a comrade with a similar one. ‘Nice words of comfort for me,’ scrawled Wüster wretchedly.

Next day, as gunfire drew closer, he secured a ride on an unsprung cart that carried him fifteen miles to Valjevo. Every yard of the 5½-hour journey was agony to the wounded man. When he reached the military hospital the doctors declined to treat him, because they were pulling out. Wüster lapsed into hysterical sobbing, and somehow got himself carried to the town’s station. He was laid in an open wagon on a train which next morning reached the Bosnian border, and safety. Three days later he arrived at his own home in Linz, emaciated and bearded; his own son did not recognise him. Wüster collapsed into renewed tears as he described his experiences, and suffered for weeks afterwards from nightmares in which he found himself at the mercy of the Serbs.

On 14 December, Austrian eyewitnesses watched in disbelief as the army’s pontoon bridge across the Sava swayed and tottered under the weight of throngs of panic-stricken fugitive soldiers struggling across, desperate to reach the Bosnian shore, while exultant scarecrow Serbs sought to shoot them down. That day, the Serb high command announced: ‘The enemy is beaten, dispersed, defeated and expelled from our territory once and for all.’

On the 16th a cluster of Austrian infantrymen gathered eagerly around a fortnight-old newspaper which had reached them from Vienna. Lips curled in cynicism when they found that this proclaimed Austria’s triumphal occupation of Belgrade. By the time the soldiers saw the old headlines, they had again evacuated the city, amid yet another precipitate Austrian retreat. That day, 16 December, the Serbs once more stood triumphant in the battered and desolate streets of their capital. Gen. Živojin Mišić, who had directed the counter-offensive, became his country’s hero of the hour. He telegraphed proudly: ‘there remain no Austrian soldiers on Serbian soil except prisoners’.

Alex Pallavicini wrote on 17 December, describing the Austrians’ flight to the Danube and Sava bridges: ‘Anger and mistrust against the high command seems justified after this experience, because nothing worse conducted than our leadership and supply system is imaginable. Forty thousand pairs of boots had to be burnt in Valjevo because nobody had got around to issuing them. Our forces literally had to march in shreds of leather and their bare feet.’ Potiorek’s rout left the Serbians in possession of 130 captured guns and 40,000 prisoners, including 270 officers. Dr Johann Bachmann’s infantry regiment fell apart during the December retreat. The doctor had to abandon his most serious casualties, because there was no transport to move them. When at last they crossed the Sava,
Bachmann was found unfit for further service, and sent on extended leave. On reaching home, he fell into an unbroken twelve-hour sleep. Thereafter, however, he found that for many weeks repose escaped him: he was haunted by nightmares of Serbia.

As future events would show, the Hapsburg army’s defeat was not irreversible, and Serbian resources were being drained to the dregs. But the prestige of Franz Joseph’s empire had been brought low by its hated and despised little neighbour. Conrad Hötzendorf conceded the need to adopt the defensive on his southern front for the rest of the winter. Yet even now he made a further botched strategic compromise: the forces that dug into the barren soil, or stood across river barriers confronting the Serbians, were too weak to take the offensive, but much stronger than were necessary to counter an enemy thrust. Conrad’s conduct of the early campaigns against his despised Slav enemies had proved as disastrous as those against the Russians. The Austrians had described their invasion of Serbia as a
Strafexpedition
– punishment mission; now the scornful Serbs renamed it the
bestrafte
expedition – the ‘punished expedition’. They composed a song of triumph which began: ‘The Emperor Nicholas rides a black horse, the Emperor Franz Joseph rides a mule.’

There seemed no end to the shared sufferings of victors and vanquished, soldiers and civilians. If the Austrians behaved barbarously during their 1914 invasions of Serbia, their hapless soldiers paid an almost equally heavy price if they fell into the hands of the enemy. With little food for themselves, the Serbians gave less to their would-be conquerors. The government allowed any citizen to hire an Austrian worker for a pittance, a practice which the PoWs welcomed, because Serb employers fed them better than Serb camp bosses. But disease took a heavy toll: by the end of 1914, one in five of the 60,000 Austrian prisoners in Belgrade’s hands was already dead of typhus, and more would follow. By the year’s end Austria-Hungary had paid for its hubris towards Serbia with 273,804 casualties out of 450,000 men deployed. Vienna felt obliged belatedly to recognise the incompetence of most of its most senior officers by sacking four out of six army commanders, including Oskar Potiorek.

But the Serb people had little to celebrate. A young man blinded in battle sang a song which began: ‘I am sad, for I have lost the sight of the sun and the green fields and the blossoming plum trees.’ The Sava valley west of Belgrade had been devastated. Many small towns and villages had been abandoned by their inhabitants, and grass grew in the streets.
Refugees who trickled back westwards with the army looked in horror at the wreckage of their communities. Belgrade was reduced to a city of beggars, cripples, orphans. The country’s few roads had been ruined by military traffic. Serbia was linked to the outside world only by a single-track railway to Salonika, along which supplies moved sluggishly, with scant help from neutral Greece. Spotted typhus, dysentery and cholera ravaged whole tracts of the country, and any man wounded on the battlefield was fortunate to survive gangrene.

Serbia’s plight became fashionable in Britain: Lady Wimborne, Lady Paget and Sir Thomas Lipton were only the most prominent of those who travelled to join volunteer medical units in the country alongside Countess Trubetskoy, wife of the new Russian minister. But they could do pitifully little for a nation of such poverty and geographical isolation, temporarily victorious to be sure, but shattered and perilously weak. Serbia had already lost 163,557 men, including 69,022 dead. The country would suffer far worse things in the years to come, unredeemed by the joys of any further victories. 62.5 per cent of Serbian males between fifteen and fifty-five would eventually perish in the war; their entire country would be laid waste.

Lt. Djordje Stanojevitch of the Serbian army demanded of American correspondent John Reed, with the furious passion inspired by alcohol: ‘What are these French and English doing? Why do they not beat the Germans? What they need there are a few Serbians to show them how to make war. We Serbians know that all that is needed is the willingness to die – and the war would soon be over …!’ Others, some of them commanders-in-chief, shared the same belief, with dreadful consequences for the youth of Europe.

17

Mudlife

As winter descended on Europe, Gertrud Schädla contemplated the cold rain in her home town of Verden, near Bremen, and thought of her nation’s soldiers at the front, ‘who must face not only such weather, but also deadly peril’. Her concern was not misplaced. A pervasive stench, created by unburied corpses, excrement and seven million sets of waterlogged clothing and boots, unchanged for weeks, overhung the Western Front from Switzerland to the sea. Along five hundred miles of rival defences, some men occupied precarious mountaintops among the blasted pines of the Vosges, while others sheltered behind breastworks along the Yser canal, where it was impossible to entrench. At the end of First Ypres, the French held 430 miles of front, the Belgians fifteen and the BEF twenty-one – the maximum its modest manpower then allowed. In February 1918, by contrast, the British line would extend to 110 miles.

Almost all major operations from September 1914 to the end of the war took place between Verdun and the Channel coast – the terrain further south was recognised as unprofitable attacking ground. Some of the towns of western Belgium were pretty places, at least until they were ravaged by the battles of October and November. But the intervening farmland was unprepossessing: flat fields broken by a few hedges; willow trees; roadside avenues of poplar and plane; occasional beechwoods. During the first weeks of fighting cattle grazed freely among the combatants – the prevalence of animal manure in the soil contributed to that of gas gangrene among the wounded. Once the autumn rains took hold, on low-lying ground it became impossible for vehicles to move off roads. Where variations in land height were slight, even the most marginal advantage became important: the Germans almost invariably adopted higher positions, because as occupiers they felt no embarrassment about withdrawing where this was tactically advantageous, heedless of considerations of
prestige. The allies, by contrast, could cede a few yards of Belgian or French soil only for the most compelling reasons.

When Edouard Cœurdevey was deployed to north-eastern France, he and his comrades were astonished to find themselves posted in deep trenches, which he described as ‘something new for us’. This was the future. Millions of men for months occupied almost unchanging positions within close range of the enemy. ‘In those early days of trench warfare,’ wrote Frank Richards, ‘both sides were pretty reckless, and it was no uncommon sight to see a German pop up and make a dart for the village. He did not always get there, and as time went on both sides respected the marksmanship of each other so much that no one dared to show a finger.’ Correspondent Ashmead Bartlett wrote in the
Daily Telegraph
: ‘Men are not often visible in modern war, because to make any show at all against the infernal machinations of Messrs. Krupp, Schneider, Creusot and Co., they must bury themselves in the earth, and only rise up to shoot if their enemy is sufficiently foolhardy as to show himself.’ Robert Harker noted in November that in his sector the two sides’ positions were only yards apart, but ‘in this kind of fighting one goes for days in the trenches in some parts of the line and never sees a German’.

Colwyn Phillips of the Royal Horse Guards wrote ruefully from Ypres: ‘The first thing we learn here is to forget about “Glory”.’ In attacks, some German officers took to carrying rifles and knapsacks, to escape the particular attentions of enemy riflemen. Soldiers unscrewed the spikes from their Pickelhaube helmets, which could protrude above trench parapets with deadly consequences. Rigorous discipline became necessary, to avoid exposing even an inch of flesh. Lionel Tennyson of the Rifle Brigade deplored the carelessness of his battalion’s neighbours, the Seaforth Highlanders: ‘a most extraordinary lot of men: if a shell has not come over for twenty minutes or so, they get out of their trenches and start exposing themselves as if no battle was on. The consequence is that many get killed unnecessarily.’

The British evolved a routine grinding in its monotony, and unremitting in its discomforts. Stand-to was called before dawn, followed by breakfast at seven, lunch at 12.30, tea at four, dinner at seven, sleep by 9.30 p.m. for those spared duty. But this apparently benign regime was interrupted by alarms throughout the hours of daylight and darkness, along with patrols and fatigue duties, so that most men did not remove their clothes, or even their boots, for days on end. They existed on a diet of bully beef, biscuit, bread and jam, supplemented by whatever little
luxuries they could obtain from home. The postal services created a wonderfully efficient machine for enabling millions of men on the brink of death to receive British newspapers within a day or two of publication, together with assorted domestic comforts. Officers ordered consignments of cigars, biscuits and suchlike from smart London shops. One Grenadier officer placed an order with Fortnum & Mason for two pounds of coffee each week, though he only survived to drink a month’s worth. Some eggs dispatched from Cookstown, Co. Tyrone at 4 p.m. one Tuesday reached Sister Mayne at her Belgian hospital in Furnes by 5 p.m. on Thursday.

Men learned to appreciate occupying positions close to those of the Germans, which spared them from artillery fire: ‘thus they cannot “
marmite
” us’, observed François Mayer with satisfaction, using the French slang word for enemy shelling, just as a ‘
pruneau
’ – a prune – was a bullet. Guards officer Lord Cavan wrote in December: ‘Our chief work of late has been to learn three things. 1st How to make our own charcoal and how to carry it and use it in the trenches when made. 2nd How to throw hand-grenades – curious work for Grenadiers. 3rd How to shoot at aeroplanes, but the trouble here is – birds are scarce and our guns have very long waits between beats.’ In some sectors, such as the Chemin des Dames, both sides mounted searchlights, the better to respond to night attacks. Protective wire entanglements grew in depth, though not yet to the fantastic densities of later years. Some British officers clung to a belief that war should be conducted in accordance with a code of honour which they claimed the Germans breached. Robert Harker complained: ‘They have all sorts of dirty unsportsmanlike tricks and attack our men disguised in khaki and sometimes kilts and shout out sentences in English saying “don’t shoot we are so-and-so” giving the name of some English regiment. They also shout out “Cease fire” in English and give our signals.’