Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (31 page)

Lütgendorf without further ado ordered the miscreants’ execution, as an example to others. Disdaining to waste bullets, he decreed that they should be publicly bayoneted. The following night, as the wretched men loudly protested their innocence, they were led before Šabac’s church in front of a large crowd, and absolved by a priest. There was a delay, because the designated bayonet squad declined to do its part, and had to be replaced. Black farce ensued, when the corps commander Gen. Karl Tersztyanzky arrived and ran forward, waving his cap and shouting ‘Stop, stop!’ to the executioners. He was too late: the three soldiers were dead. In 1920, Lütgendorf was tried and convicted for their killing by an Austrian court. He was never, however, indicted for the murder of Šabac’s civilians. It is estimated that around 3,500 civilians were summarily killed by the Austrians during the first two weeks of their August campaign. Conrad was impenitent, claiming that ‘the population, among them women, had taken part in the fighting and committed atrocities against Austrian troops … Anyone who knows the cultural level and mentality of the Balkan peoples will not be surprised about this.’ Hungarians, traditional enemies of the Serbs, are alleged to have been responsible for some of the worst crimes against civilians.

Meanwhile in the forward areas, Austrian soldiers were gnawed by a growing conviction that the enemy knew his business much better than did their own commanders. Serbian gunners had surveyed terrain and registered targets in advance. Their tactics were ingenious and skilful: in the face of one attack on 18 August, the Serbs made a brisk withdrawal, then turned to deliver a hail of fire from a prepared fieldwork. The Austrian pursuit collapsed as soldiers threw themselves behind whatever cover they could find. Their foes began tossing grenades, which alarmed the Hapsburg
troops, who had never seen such weapons. One Serb called out in German, ‘Officers, step forward!’ A captain named Wagner reflexively obeyed – and was shot down. Austrian commanders remained stubbornly unwilling to learn caution. When a headquarters was warned of Serbian field fortifications and concrete bunkers barring the way up a hillside ahead, staff dismissed the warning, because ‘such a way of fighting seemed to them implausible’. Their troops paid the price in casualties.

Austrian soldiers were bewildered by a torrent of confused orders and counter-orders. As Serb volleys and salvoes scoured advancing columns, newcomers to battle strove to find figures of speech to describe its hellish sounds. Austrian doctor Johann Bachmann likened rifle fire to raindrops pattering on a roof during a storm, and artillery to the flat noise made by banging a stick hard on an extended umbrella, followed by a reverberation ‘resembling a strongly-struck bass string. As a music-lover, I tried to judge the weight and decided that it approximated to the “a” of a bass note.’ The Austrian commissariat almost collapsed. Driven to desperation by hunger, soldiers scavenged for food in the packs of dead and wounded comrades.

The invaders attacked Serbians entrenched on high ground at a position designated as Hill 404. After a fierce artillery and small-arms duel the defenders retreated, but the Austrians suffered heavy losses, especially among officers who rode forward on their chargers, sabres flashing in the sunlight, ‘as if they wanted to offer the
komitadji
the most distinctive possible target’, in the words of a wondering soldier. As that little battle died away, the invaders moved on to enter the village of Slatina. Here, for the first time, they met some civilians, who displayed astonishment on discovering that most of the enemy troops ravaging their countryside were Czechs, and thus their own ‘Slav brethren’.

Cpl. Kisch dropped a prized cake of soap into the village pond, where it vanished forever. ‘I looked wistfully after it,’ he wrote, ‘a last fragment of civilisation.’ He was irked by a growing belief that everyone in Europe save himself was making money out of the war. On a captured position, he studied a miscellany of ammunition used by the Serbs. Many bullets, he observed crossly, were of Austrian and German manufacture: Hirtenberger Patronen-, Zündhütchen- und Metallwarenfabrik vorm. Keller & Co., Manfred Weiß Budapest; he picked up Turkish cartridges made by Deutsche Metallpatronenfabrik of Karlsruhe; Russian ammunition overprinted
Niemiezkaja fabrike oruschia I munizii, Berlin
. ‘Other boxes come from Paris or from Liège, or prudently bear no imprint.’

The decisive phase of this first Serbian campaign began on 15 August, when the Austrians set out to assault formations defending Mount Cer, some twenty miles east of the Drina. It was a plateau, twelve miles long by four wide, rising amid mountains as high as 3,000 feet, looking down upon expansive cornfields. Heavily burdened Austrian infantry found the ascent hard going, and their artillery could not accompany them.
Komitadji
guerrillas sniped from surrounding woodland. On the evening of the 15th, in a torrential rainstorm, the invaders reached high ground. At 1 a.m., Serb troops closed in on the Austrian bivouacs, announcing themselves to unsuspecting sentries as Croatian Hapsburgs. Then, in darkness, they poured murderous rifle fire into the slumbering and wholly disorganised enemy. Serb soldiers cried out ‘
Kuku Mayka!
’ – ‘Holy Mother, help me!’ – but their enemies needed divine assistance more.

Most of the Austrians’ officers were killed while attempting to rally their men, including Joseph Fiedler, who became the first of thirty-five Hapsburg colonels to perish in those days. The divisional commander seized a rifle and fought at close quarters alongside his staff. A confused mêlée continued for hours, until at dawn both sides subsided into temporary exhaustion. Thereafter, the Serbs brought up reinforcements and artillery. Watched by their monarch King Peter from a nearby peak, they pounded the demoralised Austrians until at last they fell back.

The Serbs paid dearly for success, losing forty-seven officers and almost 3,000 men; in one regiment all four battalion commanders and all but three of sixteen company commanders were wounded or killed. Cavalry harassing Austrian rearguards suddenly found themselves facing machine-guns, which in a minute or two of firing annihilated two squadrons rash enough to charge them; here was a first earnest of the terrible vulnerability of horse soldiers to modern weapons, which would find conclusive proof in France. But Austrian losses were far heavier. Throughout the battle and in its aftermath, guerrillas harassed them at every turn. Mount Cer entered Serb folklore as a historic triumph. On 20 August, the survivors of the battle stumbled back into Bosnia from where they had started, having suffered 28,000 casualties and presented the Entente with its first victory of the war. The logical Austrian response would have been to sack Potiorek, who had presided over the fiasco. But court influence in Vienna sufficed to save the general’s command, and indeed that of Conrad. Blame was instead laid upon the wretched Czech troops who spearheaded the operation; they were said to have let down their Emperor. An official investigation into the disaster at Mount Cer
concluded that the ethnic German troops had been the only ones present who did their duty.

The Serbs were not strong enough to exploit success by immediately pursuing the retreating enemy westwards. But on the 20th, at Conrad’s insistence the Hapsburg army facing Serbia on the Hungarian border began to leave for Galicia, seriously weakening Potiorek’s forces. Some Austrian troops briefly continued their advance into Serbia, but in a state of demoralisation and privation. Infantryman Matija Malešič wrote on 21 August: ‘amid horrendous heat, our road leads us from Konjice up into the hills. We are not allowed to drink water as we wish, although we are marching right beside [a river]. Everything resembles manoeuvres, and yet is so different.’ He added three days later: ‘Only now have I realised that this is going to be for real; how horrible will be the struggle against a tough, skilled and brave nation which is fighting for its existence – literally, for its “to be or not to be”. It is a beautiful starry night, I am lying on bare soil; I have just prayed and looked up in the sky thinking how much I miss Carniola [his home region of Slovenia], my mother and the idyllic life I failed properly to appreciate. I will probably never be granted the opportunity to enjoy it again.’

Soon, the remaining Austrian columns in Serbia bowed to the inevitable and fell back. Men’s throats were so parched that when a thunderstorm erupted, they held out their mess tins to catch the falling rain. Every unit left in its wake a litter of packs, hats, sabres, rifles. Austrian reserve officer Lt. Roland Wüster used his revolver for the first time, to try to kill a horse that had foundered. After he had fired three times at the beast, however, it struggled to its feet and walked slowly away from him. An exasperated superior ordered the bemused young officer to finish the job with a pickaxe. Wounded men were abandoned at field hospitals, for lack of transport to evacuate them. Egon Kisch wrote despairingly: ‘The army is beaten and indeed routed, now engaged in full-scale headlong retreat.’ He himself purchased a seat on a cart for two cigarettes: ‘A rampaging horde fled back towards the border in mindless terror. Drivers whipped up their horses … officers and soldiers alike weaved paths between columns of carts or tramped along the ditch beside the roadside.’

Alex Pallavicini described panic in the Austrian ranks when a distant dust cloud, and reports that a baggage train was under attack, suggested that the Serbs were at their heels. Generals and staff officers sprang into their cars and drove across the Drina, ignoring the screams of wounded men, desperate not to be abandoned. ‘The road is strewn with people and
horses, dead and wounded. Everybody made a rush for the bridges. The whole migration continued to Brčko [on the Austrian shore]. Many horses drowned in the Drina.’ Serb artillery hastened their flight with salvoes of shrapnel shells, for the fugitives were readily visible. Many Austrian horses, badly wounded, died lingering deaths because none of the fleeing men would spare a moment or a bullet to end their misery. Another soldier wrote: ‘The army is beaten and in headless, wild and chaotic flight … An unruly mob bolted in mad fear towards the frontier … Men were trampling over one another in their haste.’

Austrian teacher Itha J, a bellicose nationalist, wrote in her diary on 17 August: ‘We feel heartache, thinking of our soldiers out there in the fields. They perform their duties amid filth and mud, lying in swamps and trenches! We haven’t had a war for fifty years, and our men are not used to stresses like this.’ How right she was. By the evening of 24 August, no Austrian remained on Serbian soil save 4,500 prisoners in Serb hands. The Serbs had lost 16,000 dead and wounded, the Austrians more than twice as many, a toll that would have seemed very terrible save in the context of the slaughter which soon overtook all Europe. The Hapsburg Empire, served by incompetent officers and unwilling soldiers, had inflicted humiliation upon itself. A tiny Balkan country proved able to maul the invading Austrians to such effect that only a rabble fell back across the Drina.

Back at home, even as Franz Joseph’s army suffered disaster, the Austrian people were celebrating fantasy newspaper reports of its alleged triumphs. Itha J wrote in her diary on 22 August: ‘Wonderful! Wonderful! Our hearts overflow with exultation, we have won a glorious and valiant victory after a hard struggle against the gang of Serb fanatics, beating thirty Serb battalions … It is said that we have lost many, many of our brave men. But victory is ours … We stayed in the cafés far into the night, waiting upon every detail.’ Next day, however, her mood changed abruptly. Much sobered, she found herself asking why, after beating ‘thirty Serb battalions’, the Austrian victors had ‘moved back to their old positions’. She reflected uneasily: ‘it is said that “an orderly retreat was unimpeded by the enemy”. But why retreat if they have won? All kinds of rumour are rife in the town. Officers say we have far too few troops in Serbia … One said that 8,000 men of our beloved Viennese
Deutschmeister
[Regiment] have been so badly beaten by the Serbs that there are only four hundred survivors. Isn’t that appalling? And who is to blame?’

Men of the broken Austrian units now bivouacking behind the west bank of the Drina cursed their commanders: ‘our generals are inept old
donkeys … The people who started this thing are responsible for hundreds of thousands of tragedies.’ At Lanja, in Bosnia, one regiment held a mail parade. As name after name was called in vain, voices from the ranks shouted, ‘He’s dead!’ The first casualty lists were published. In a single week, Cpl. Kisch’s unit had lost sixty-nine officers, twenty-three of them killed, and a thousand men. This represented 71 per cent officer casualties, 25 per cent of other ranks. One battalion’s doctor wrote wretchedly home, saying that eight officers and two hundred men of his unit had been lost, ‘[our men] suffer terribly from hunger, and … fighting in Serbia is rendered very difficult by the fact that the entire population is engaged in the struggle’. Further south, even the tiny Montenegrin army proved able to evict its share of invaders.

By late August, all over the Hapsburg Empire it was known that Franz Joseph’s army had suffered terrible losses in Serbia; there were reports, which proved accurate, that the Sava river was full of floating Austrian corpses. Itha J wrote: ‘The heart stops, one wants to scream – and to erase this awful image from one’s imagination.’ The government produced a new version of events, announcing that the punitive expedition into Serbia was unimportant to the nation’s war effort, which fooled no one. ‘The impression made by this bulletin was appalling,’ wrote Slovenian priest Dr Eugen Lampe. ‘Everyone lapsed from triumphalism into melancholy. If we cannot cope with the Serbs, what will happen in Russia?’ What indeed? Austrian soldiers recoiled in disgust when newspapers rehearsing such statements reached their positions. They were told that with Russia’s entry into the war, the Serb front had become ‘a mere sideshow’; that movement into Serbia had been intended only as a raid. Following its success, units had ‘withdrawn to prepare for another incursion’. Egon Kisch and his comrades were infuriated by such ‘wholly dishonest and deceitful’ claims.