The Eastern Front 1914-1917 (44 page)

What is much more evident in the records of the defeated Austrian forces than concern for morale is the almost Spanish-Habsburg combination of serenity and incompetence they reveal. There were of course innumerable reports of impending Russian action—the arrival of troops was noted perfectly accurately on the Austrian side, despite Brusilov’s precautions. Deserters announced, for instance, two days before the attack that clean underclothing had been issued—the event that had made them desert. Austrian pilots noted the construction of Russian dug-outs, the famous
platsdarmy
for reserves. In particular, the units reported continual Russian sapping-forward, as, following Brusilov’s instructions, Russian trenches were being brought to within seventy-five paces of the Austrian front line. What is curious is the Austrian units’ failure to stop this sapping, which, evidently, would give the attacker an advantage. Commanders seem to have reported when they stopped it, not when it continued—no doubt for fear they would be driven into troublesome minor actions. Indeed, IV Army command and the command of
Heeresgruppe Linsingen
seem to have learned of one or two quite large-scale events from the Russian press—which called down a severe reprimand from Linsingen, and subsequently also IV Army command, that ‘reports should be accurate and detailed’. It is no doubt this failure to stop Russian sapping that brought losses to such trivial figures in May—not 500 men killed and wounded in a force of over 100,000 men that should have been stopping Russian night-work and patrolling. Perhaps, too, this holiday-camp atmosphere had something to do with the drop in desertions.

Certainly, the affairs of the Austro-Hungarian IV Army command were conducted in a spirit of wonderful frivolity. The chief of staff, Berndt, left a diary that is very revealing.
¹¹
He had been put in this command, under Archduke Joseph Ferdinand—godson of Emperor Franz Joseph—much
against his will. After the catastrophe before Rovno in September 1915, Conrad had wanted to dismiss Archduke Joseph Ferdinand.
¹²
But he had—for obvious reasons—been given such prominence in army communiqués that Conrad would have lost some credibility had he dismissed the Archduke. Instead, he dismissed Paić, the chief of staff, and moved in Berndt, in whom he had faith. The Archduke subjected poor Berndt, to continual slights—would not use the same automobile as Berndt, preferring to drive with the automobile-officer, ‘the Jew, Strauss’, gossiped and joked with subalterns at the expense of senior officers, treated horses with savagery, making low conversation at table before a prudish Berndt and still more disapproving German officers. He surrounded himself with aristocratic playboys—his brother Heinrich, Prince René of Bourbon-Parma and
Kommandant
Graf Berchtold, son of the foreign minister—of whom Berndt pertinently observed, ‘That the foreign minister who began this war has got his son taken out of its dangers, is painful’. The Archduke’s relations with his German superior officer, Linsingen, were extremely tense. He resented Linsingen’s position. On 26th February he was gazetted ‘Colonel-General’—hence superior to Linsingen, no longer subject to the army group commander’s orders, and likely to take over the group himself. ‘Like lightning’ there came back a German response—Linsingen also promoted Colonel-General (
Generaloberst
), the appointment pre-dated to 20th February. Linsingen’s chief of staff, Stolzmann, turned up to inspect IV Army. Archduke Joseph Ferdinand objected to his ‘snuffling around’ and took him, through heavy rain, in an open motor-car. Then he went on a three-day hunting trip, in a boat along the river Styr, with his brother. All this reflected vast confidence in the strength of the defences built up since autumn 1915. There were three positions, each with three trenches. The dug-outs were buttressed with concrete, the officers’ quarters even had windows. There were concrete enfilading-points for machine-guns. Stolzmann turned up in Teschen to report to Conrad just before the Russian attack opened. The Russians had no numerical superiority; ‘they attack quite stupidly in thick masses, and they can’t possibly succeed this time’. Linsingen similarly explained to the German Kaiser that ‘our formidable positions’ would ‘automatically hold’ against an enemy ‘of the present strength’. Even an ‘Anfangserfolg’ was ‘impossible’.
¹³

The truth was that the Austrians had passed into a mood of almost grandiose confidence. By the middle of 1916, old tunes were being played in Vienna; in Teschen, Conrad’s headquarters, the voices of Prince Eugene and Radetzky were once more heard—the Prussians snubbed, the Balkans ruled, the Poles about to join the Habsburg Empire. An expedition against northern Italy was almost automatically the outcome of this mood, and it was towards this that Austrian efforts were now bent. It
produced a fatal diversion of the Central Powers’ war-effort, from which Brusilov could greatly profit.

The Central Powers’ alliance had begun to weaken towards the end of the Serbian campaign, late in 1915. Conrad had been irritated that Germany took such preponderance in the area; he resented depending on Bulgaria, feared Bulgarian ambitions in Albania and elsewhere, and even considered making a separate peace with the Serbians in order to contain these ambitions. Falkenhayn was not concerned, and also rejected a plan of Conrad’s for invading Greece, capturing Salonica. All he wanted to achieve, from the military viewpoint, was some kind of passable situation in the Balkans; while indirect German control over Bulgaria, perhaps even of Albania through Bulgaria, suited him politically much better than direct Austrian control of anything. The two powers also quarrelled over matters of peace. The Germans hoped to win the war outright. This meant an offensive in the west. The Austrians were not nearly so pledged to this end—on the contrary, an outright German victory would worry them almost as much as an outright allied victory. They were in much the same position as Italy in 1942, ‘if England wins, we lose; if Germany wins, we are lost’. They took a quite different view of the military situation. Conrad and Tisza agreed, at the turn of the year, that ‘There can be no question of destroying the Russian war-machine; England cannot be defeated; peace must be made in not too long a space, or we shall be fatally weakened, if not destroyed’.
¹⁴

But when the Austrians charged off in the direction of peace, as they frequently did throughout the war, they were always brought up short on the Italian rope. Italy was the major enemy as far as almost all the peoples of the Habsburg Empire were concerned. Czechs, Germans, Slovenes, Croats were alike enthusiastic to fight Italian pretensions—indeed, the popular enthusiasm among Slav peoples such as the Slovenes for war with Italy was such that even the army authorities were on occasion embarrassed, fearing that the formation, for instance of Slovene volunteer groups using Slovene national colours, was a hidden prelude to some challenge to the German character of much of the army. The heroic defence of the frontier against Italy had given the peoples of the Monarchy a cause that united them as no other did; as in 1848, an Italian campaign could do much to settle internal discontents, to make the Austrian army genuinely popular. It was not surprising that Conrad should have profited from the long months of inactivity in winter 1915–16 to plan an attack on Italy, intending it no doubt as prelude to some acceptable peace. He could not hope for superiority of numbers, but he could assemble sufficient force in the north-western sector of the front for some break-through to be thinkable: Austrian troops would emerge
from the mountains of the north-west, and cut off much of the Italian army on the northern and north-eastern sectors of the Italian front, particularly the attackers of the Isonzo. Contrary to legend, he did not detach for the Italian offensive significant numbers of men and guns from the eastern front. But he did remove a few of his better-class brigades and some heavy artillery; in particular, he diverted much shell to the Italian front, where each gun now had to have over a thousand rounds in its immediate reserve. He neglected to strengthen the eastern front as the Russians were strengthening it.

But what mattered more than this was the almost complete diversion of Germany from the Austro-Hungarian part of the Russian front. Late in 1915, Falkenhayn had decided to resume German attacks in the west. He knew that Germany could not win the three-front war; there was only one way of making an acceptable peace, to weaken England’s will to win, which he regarded as the motor of the enemy coalition. This could be achieved if he could knock out ‘the sword of England on the continent’—the French army. But a straight-forward break-through operation in the west would not work. Falkenhayn adopted the plan he had used with such effect in the east, in summer 1915. He would attack a point where the French army could not afford retreat—in this case, Verdun—and assemble a huge force of heavy artillery that would bleed the French army white. German attacks would be designed merely to force the French to bring up more and more reserves, to be pulverised by the heavy artillery, perhaps also forced into costly counter-attacks. It was a method that owed much to German experience of summer 1915 on the Russian front. Falkenhayn’s analysis was also perceptive. The French would not carry out the retreat the situation demanded of them: they behaved as Falkenhayn had predicted, and lost much more heavily, in the first six weeks of the Verdun campaign, than the Germans did—almost the only case in the First World War where the ostensible defenders lost more heavily than the attackers. But the analysis went wrong in so far as Falkenhayn under-rated French capacity to resist, for the French army brilliantly survived the bleeding-white that Falkenhayn had prepared; moreover, the British, far from having their will to win weakened, merely brought in armies of their own for the summer offensive of 1916. The offensive had begun on 21st February; by early April, it was clear that, while Falkenhayn might cause the French high losses, Germany would lose very greatly in terms of prestige, since Verdun had held out so well. Falkenhayn allowed himself to be dragged by the local army commanders into attempting a break-through operation at Verdun, again and again, such that German losses began to exceed French ones—and still Verdun held. Falkenhayn was drawn into a costly blunder, not unlike the pattern of late summer 1915,
when he had also been drawn into the Sventsiany-Vilna affair against his better judgment. This was not a war in which generals with limited aims could, in the end, make the pace.

The diversion of Germany s effort to the western front was much more important, in the eastern context, than Conrad’s Italian venture. There was an almost complete withdrawal of German support for the Austrian front against Russia,
¹⁵
and the front against Russia, overall, was weakened greatly. In August 1915 there had been as many as twenty German divisions (to around forty Austrian) on the front south of the Pripyat. After August, Falkenhayn demanded most of them back, and left only a token force—82. reserve and 48. reserve. But at the same time German commanders still controlled much more of the front than these numbers warranted—Linsingen’s Army Group accounted for the Austrian IV Army and troops to the north (including 82. reserve division) and
Südarmee
still controlled, with the German Bothmer as commander, a section of eastern Galicia. Falkenhayn would probably have removed such German forces as he left on the Austro-Hungarian front, had it not been for his interest in maintaining these German commands. Even so, he successfully demanded that Conrad should leave equivalent forces on the German side of the front—the two divisions of the Austro-Hungarian 12. Corps, operating under Woyrsch’s command to the north of Linsingen’s army group. There was even a suggestion that Austrian troops should go to the Vosges—a suggestion not taken up until the summer of 1918, when Austro-Hungarian forces did arrive in the west, having to be given boots by the German command in Metz. These removals mattered more than the removal of six Austro-Hungarian divisions from the Russian front. The Austrians would be deprived of the vital German support, and there was only a vague agreement, late in May, that troops from the other parts of the eastern front might be sent to Linsingen’s front if required. Relations between Conrad and Falkenhayn were very tense. Conrad complained, as ever, that the Germans were ‘brutal, shameless, ruthless’.
¹⁶
He resented being told so little of Verdun, and resented even more the little he was told. Falkenhayn’s disapproval of the Austrian offensive against Italy annoyed him, and for some time there had been such coolness in relations that Conrad was driven to send a letter of apology—the text of which has never been seen again. At bottom, the Austrians did not want to face the total war Germany now prepared to fight; at the same time, they could see no alternative to it—they too could now see that a ‘neutral’ peace would mean the end of the Monarchy. For better or worse this meant alliance to the bitter end with imperial Germany.

Neither Conrad nor Falkenhayn worried very much over the Austrian front in the east. It was known that two-thirds of the Russian army had
concentrated against the German front, and that forces in the southern sector were roughly in balance. Overall, Conrad reckoned there were eighty-eight German and Austrian divisions to between 127 and 130 (with six others in the interior of Russia), with forty-nine German and Austrian divisions on the German front, to eighty-five Russian, and thirty-nine Austrian ones on the front south of the Pripyat—that controlled by Conrad—to thirty-nine or so Russian divisions. Correctly enough, no great change was noted in Russian dispositions before June 1916. Conrad went on with confidence. He set great hopes in his Italian offensive. His troops were groomed for a great victory. But the snow caused some postponement, and the offensive did not get under way until mid-May. Once it did get under way, results were impressive. The Italians laid out their defences mistakenly—they held the mountains, while the Austrians resolutely went forward in the valleys, causing one mountain position after another to collapse from inanition. By the end of May, 380 guns and 40,000 prisoners had been taken, and the Austrians had reached the plateau of Arsiero-Asiago, almost on the edge of the mountains—about, it seemed, to emerge and cut off the retreat of huge Italian forces on the Isonzo to the north-east.