FOURTEEN
The Austrian defeat on the Piave was soon compounded by German disasters in France. Erich Ludendorff's spring offensives, Germany's final bid to win the war, had run their course by July. They demonstrated Germany's impressive staying power, as well as her army's awesome tactical prowess, but they had failed to win the war. Like so many German efforts, the "Peace Offensive" had proven tactically triumphant but strategically indecisive. The British and French, much helped by John J. Pershing's burgeoning American Army, were growing stronger by the day. By 1918, after four years of total war and a crippling Allied blockade, Germany, like her Austrian ally, could not hope to materially support a war-winning blow; and Emperor Wilhelm, like Karl, was rapidly running out of soldiers for his army.
The Allies survived the German spring offensives, losing many men but wearing away Ludendorff's armies all the same. By July, it was time for the Allies to attempt a massive counteroffensive, a first step to pushing the exhausted Germans out of France and Belgium. It began with the French, who had weathered the spring offensives somewhat better than their British allies. On July 18, the French Army attacked German defenses in the Marne sector, backed up by many guns and 300 tanks, the largest collection of armor yet on any battlefield. This effort, the first large-scale French push since Robert Nivelle's catastrophic offensive in April 1917, made early progress. Several German divisions began to give way before the fresh poilus and their fearsome tanks; many tired German soldiers were happy to surrender. By early August, the Aisne-Marne offensive, with some American help, had cracked the German defenses on the central part of the Western front. The war was far from over, but the formidable German Army began to show unmistakable signs of low morale, even defeatism.
Worse news for Ludendorff came on August 8, when the British launched their own offensive to complement the French effort on the Marne. The center of Douglas Haig's push was at Amiens, in the Somme sector, a front all too well known to the British Army. The British struck the German positions in the Amiens salient with twenty-seven divisions-including four Canadian and five Australian divisions, Haig's crack colonials-supported by 2,000 guns and 600 tanks. The tank was still a mechanically crude weapon, and tactics for its use were limited; all the same, the Germans had virtually no tanks of their own, and their infantry was profoundly unnerved by the appearance of hundreds of imposing steel beasts. The result was a debacle, as the German front line cracked at Amiens. On August 8, several shell-shocked German divisions fell to pieces and British infantry advanced as deep as nine miles past the German front lines. Ludendorff considered it the German Army's "black day" of the war.
By mid-August, Germany was visibly losing the war, and this was even before the American Army had really made its presence felt in France. Pershing was still waiting to employ his fresh divisions en masse on the battlefield. Ludendorff's once invincible armies were losing ground in the West, and there was no prospect of relief in sight; the war was not yet ended, but there was little the Germans, exhausted and running out of even the most basic war materiel, could do to stave off ultimate defeat. Germany's decline would quickly bring the Central Powers-including Austria-down with her. During the war, the Habsburgs had come to rely on the Hohenzollerns for battlefield survival, and a Prussian defeat would unavoidably cause the Austrian war effort to collapse.
The Austrian High Command was well aware of Berlin's rapid military decline and its implications for Vienna, but by the late summer it was, if anything, more worried about the empire's increasing domestic tumult. Discontent on the home front had reached dangerous levels, and nationalist insurrections-the dynasty's and the army's oldest worry-seemed imminent. Indeed, the Allies had begun to court the disgruntled nationalities, encouraging them to revolt against the Habsburgs. The dissolution of the Habsburg realm along ethnic lines was a recent addition to the list of Allied war aims, accepted more for tactical than for practical or moral reasons. The Italians were the most vocal supporters of the nationalities' rights, so long as they corresponded to Italy's territorial ambitions. In April 1918 the Congress of Oppressed Nationalities convened in Rome, a well publicized event at which Czech, Polish, Romanian, and South Slav representatives denounced the Habsburgs and demanded national states carved from the empire. This was followed in June by official Italian (and French) recognition of the American-based Czechoslovak Committee and its right of self-determination, although no one was exactly sure who the "Czechoslovaks" were, and precisely what "self-determination" meant.
In truth, these representatives of the nationalities spoke for very few Austrian subjects. They were politicians and academics living in exile, frequently with little idea of what was actually happening in Austria, but they received Allied backing for their perceived propaganda value. By 1918, the Allies were anxious to weaken the Austrian war effort by any means available. The Czech delegation in particular, the most belligerently anti-Habsburg, led by the Prague professor Tomas Masaryk, succeeded in portraying its cause as just and democratic, a legitimate beneficiary of liberal Allied largesse, even though many of their arguments were self-serving and dishonest. Although there can be no doubt that many Czechs living under the Habsburgs were deeply discontented by 1918, Masaryk and his educated clique spoke for very few of them.
Certainly the exiles had enjoyed little success recruiting armies to fight the Habsburgs. The Poles by mid-1918 had three divisions fighting in France, but most of the soldiers were Prussian and Russian, not Austrian, Poles; and the Polish national movement was relatively sympathetic to the Habsburgs. Even the Czechoslovaks, despite ample enticements, managed to recruit but a single division to fight against the Austrians in Italy. From the hundreds of thousands of Czech and Slovak prisoners in Allied captivity, Masaryk persuaded less than 10 percent to join the national struggle, even though he offered good pay and rations, as well as a way out of the filthy prisoner of war camps. The Slovene, Croatian, and Serbian nationalists-lately restyled as "Yugoslavs"-managed to persuade even fewer ex-Austrian soldiers to fight under their united banner.
Most Austrian soldiers, whatever their nationality, were determined to stay the course, to see the war through, even after the Piave defeat. Some deserted, of course, but few went so far as to take up arms against the Habsburgs. Many Allied leaders were skeptical of the nationalities. Italian politicians, and especially generals, were wary of exploiting the ethnic issue too much. The army was well aware that Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, and Bosnians in Habsburg uniform had been the backbone of the Austrian stand on the Isonzo. No less, Yugoslav territorial claims included the Littoral-including Gorizia and Triesteand all of Dalmatia, the very land of Italia irredenta that Italy had entered the war to liberate. Nevertheless, the Allies, and Italy in particular, desperate to win the war, were making far-reaching political promises to Austria's disgruntled minorities, writing postdated checks which they hoped would never be cashed.
The exploitation of the nationalities issue, though it did not raise many troops to fight on the Allied side, did succeed in terrifying Austria's political and military elites. The specter of Czechs or any other minority taking up arms against the empire sent chills down the backs of the Habsburg officer corps and bureaucracy. There had still been no widespread ethnic disturbances on either the home front or the fighting front, but the High Command was convinced that they were coming. Indeed, in mid-August, as the German Army was reeling from Allied blows in France, the Austrian chief of the General Staff, Arthur Arz von Straussenburg, informed Ludendorff that Austria had to leave the war by the end of 1918, and that its divisions in northern Italy would be required on the home front. Arz told his senior partner bluntly, "The army will be required for the maintenance of order and to help resolve different internal political questions." Ultimately the preservation of the ancient Habsburg realm and dynasty far outweighed the need to keep the Italians at bay. By August 1918, with final defeat drawing ominously near, the Germans were too absorbed with their own impending collapse to take much notice of Austria's internal dilemma.
While the High Command in Teschen was consumed with domestic political questions, the army in the field was busy preparing for the coming Italian offensive. Armando Diaz was cautious, the Austrians knew, but surely he would launch an all-out offensive on the Piave once the war appeared truly lost for the Central Powers. The Habsburg divisions in Italy spent the summer and autumn preparing to meet the expected Italian blow. Isonzo Army intelligence anticipated that the Italian drive across the Piave would be well supported by prodigious quantities of both artillery and aircraft. Aware of the depleted condition of all frontline divisions, the High Command believed that a prolonged defense of the Piave line would prove impossible; operational planning instead centered on a brief holding action, followed by a withdrawal to the Tagliamento. Perhaps there the Austrians could make their stand.
The Isonzo Army planned to fight a mobile defensive battle, with tactics reflecting the hard-learned lessons of the entire war. Colonel-General Wenzel Wurm's staff envisioned a defensive scheme reflecting late war German Army doctrine: a main line of resistance based upon machine gun positions, thinly held but supported by presighted artillery fires; and a second line, dedicated to brief, intense counterattacks to repulse Italian penetrations. These plans required a high degree of cooperation between infantry and artillery, as well as between ground and air units. A mobile defense, unlike the static defense that was the norm during the war, also placed considerable demands on the army's strained signals service. Communication between units would be difficult once the Italian offensive got under way.
Far more ominous in the Austrians' minds, though, was the threat of Allied tanks. The Austrians had no experience fighting tanks, and Italian armored units loomed large in Habsburg fears. The supply of a limited number of British and French tanks to the Italians during the summer of 1918 created a panic in Isonzo Army headquarters, particularly after the Germans suffered their "black day" at Amiens on August 8. The Austrian fear of Allied armor was especially acute because Habsburg forces had no tanks of their own, and few effective antitank weapons in their arsenal. The Isonzo Army's rapidly assembled antitank doctrine, borrowing heavily from German experience, emphasized both tank traps and antitank mines, as well as the use of antitank rifles and field guns firing over open sights to destroy Italian armored vehicles. However, antitank mines, rifle bullets, and armor-piercing shells were in short supply, like everything else, and Austrian frontline formations were forced to dig numerous antitank ditches across roads, in the hope of delaying advancing enemy tanks. The flat Venetian coastal plain offered few natural obstacles to tanks. The Austrians' only chance to stop an Italian armored thrust seemed to lie with bridges: the numerous spans across the Piave, Tagliamento, and other rivers were too weak to support British and French heavy tanks.
One of the more than two dozen Austrian divisions garrisoning the Piave line in the late summer was the 29th, a North Bohemian infantry division. Its defensive sector included Papadopoli island, a flat, marshy island in the Piave, four miles long and just over a mile wide. It was a strategically significant position, astride the most direct route to Friulia and the Isonzo, one of the most important sectors on the whole Austrian front. The 29th Division was a solid, battle-tested formation with an admirable fighting record. It was more than three-quarters German in composition, the remainder being mostly Czechs. Its regiments, recruited in the heavily industrialized towns and cities of the mountainous northern fringe of Bohemia, had proven themselves loyal and tenacious in battle; three were overwhelmingly German, and only one had a bare Czech majority. The Habsburg Army's regiments of Bohemian Germans enjoyed a combat record second to none. Nowhere in Austria did national, indeed racial, pride burn more brightly than in the solidly German districts of Bohemia. The Teutonic fringe of northern and western Bohemia, what would later be popularly known as the Sudetenland, had developed an early regional consciousness, after centuries of German settlement in the Czech lands. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, however, this distinctly bohmisch identity had been transformed into race-centered German nationalism. The result was the German Workers' Party, formed in 1904, a forerunner of Hitler's National Socialists. In the decade before the Great War, German nationalism grew increasingly popular and virulent in Bohemia among all classes, becoming a major political force as well as a significant obstruction to parliamentary rule in Vienna.
Yet, when war came, the Bohemian Germans responded with an enthusiasm they maintained throughout the struggle. Fighting against Slav enemies such as Russia and Serbia, a cause that repelled many of their Czech neighbors, invigorated German-Bohemian soldiers, anxious to defend Germandom. They fought with equal determination against the hated Italians in defense of German Alpine territory. No less important a motivator, however, was the Vienna-Berlin alliance. Waging war alongside Germany proved a very popular cause among the intensely nationalist Germans of North Bohemia. Hence the GermanBohemians fought with unparalleled vigor in the Imperial-and-Royal Army, sacrificing themselves in huge numbers on all fronts. Purely German areas of Bohemia had among the highest wartime loss rates in all the Habsburg Empire.' The 29th Division's infantrymen were tired but excellent fighters, among the best Austrian soldiers. They could be relied upon to resist the coming Italian offensive with all their strength.
The 29th Division's commander was equally determined to hold the Piave line as long as possible. Lieutenant General Otto von Berndt was a GermanBohemian himself, the son of a prosperous industrialist. The fifty-three-yearold Berndt, like his fellow Deutschbohnuer but unlike most Habsburg officers, was a convinced German nationalist. He had enjoyed a distinguished career in the emperor's service, beginning as a subaltern of dragoons and including service on the prestigious General Staff. His excellent war record included lengthy service in the East, commanding first a cavalry brigade, and then a division against the Russians. He reached the Italian front only in the summer of 1918, after the Piave offensive, to assume command of the 29th Division. Berndt was a talented tactician and inspiring leader of men in battle. The coming battle for the Piave promised to be the division's-and the army's-last, but it would be Berndt's first on the Italian front. Even so, he was an excellent choice to lead his homeland's division in its final struggles.
Berndt knew that a prolonged defense of the Piave line would be impossible in the face of a major Italian offensive. His defensive plan therefore intended to hold Papadopoli island long enough to permit an orderly withdrawal across Venetia to the Tagliamento. Three of the division's infantry regiments were in the front line, and a fourth was held back as a counterattack force. The 29th's infantry regiments were experienced, but short of men: each of Berndt's two brigades maintained a reserve of one sixty-man company, and the divisional reserve consisted of three 60-strong companies-300 reserve troops for the whole division. In the final analysis, the fate of the lsonzoannee, indeed of the entire Habsburg realm, depended on the quantity and quality of the soldiers of all nationalities who filled the understrength rifle companies of the last Habsburg army in the field.
No army can be sustained for long without a constant stream of fresh soldiers, but by the Great War's last season both the quantity and the quality of Austrian replacements were seriously deficient. The empire's manpower shortage, acute since the beginning of 1918, had approached a critical stage by the summer's end. Desertion and disease took a steady toll of the few fresh men available. Just as ominously, the level of training given to recruits was lower than ever. The months of tumult in the rear areas, including strikes in recruit depots and the use of so many battalions on internal security missions, had distracted training units from their vital task of preparing soldiers for combat. Many recruits arriving at the front were untrained in even the most rudimentary tactical skills. Line regiments now regularly accepted teenaged replacements who did not even know how to fire their rifles. In late September the Isonzo Army tried to counter this by instituting special divisional training depots to give conscripts the battle survival skills that rear area depots had failed to provide. It was a well intentioned attempt to remedy the increasing deficiencies of the military bureaucracy, but it came too late in the war to prove its benefits, or to notably improve the condition of the army in the field.
Nevertheless, the Austrian Army's gravest difficulties as the summer turned to autumn had nothing to do with its soldiers, but instead centered on the rapidly dwindling ability of the Habsburg Empire to stay in the war. A High Command report on material conditions in the field noted in late August, "The war has taken on the character of nothing less than an economic struggle for existence," one that Austria was losing. By the last months of fighting, the army was running out of everything required to sustain a force in the field, from the most modern weaponry to the most mundane items of clothing. The army could no longer even keep its fighting men in shoes, and many soldiers wore tattered shoes-even on the Alpine front-or, increasingly, no shoes at all. All items of clothing were in short supply, and in frontline units underwear and socks were rare. Field laundry units had been nearly forced to shut down due to a lack of soap. The Austrian Army in its last campaign was thus clothed in tattered, dirty, ill-fitting uniforms, a stark contrast with the smartly dressed regiments of 1914.
More detrimental to fighting power was the impending collapse of the army's medical system. The numbers of trained medical personnel declined ominously during the last two years of the war: there were 7,392 doctors serving in the field at the beginning of 1917, but only 5,399 a year later, and only 4,870 by the end of April 1918; by the onset of autumn the total had fallen to half the early 1917 figure. It was no longer possible to provide a doctor for each infantry battalion and field artillery and cavalry regiment, as prescribed in army regulations. The supply of medical instruments and medicines likewise declined, and a pervasive shortage of ambulances made casualty evacuation difficult. Compounding these lacks with grossly inadequate nutrition and the unsanitary conditions of frontline service caused the health of Austrian fighting men to continue to plummet, and there was little the army's medical service could do.
Disease, particularly malaria, became a crippling problem on the Italian front. The Piave line remained mostly quiet as autumn began, except for occasional Italian barrages, but Austrian losses rose steadily. During the tranquil month of September, the 29th Division lost 973 men (only six killed), of which fully 966 were due to illness, mostly malaria. Illness, much more than the Italians, was eroding the strength of the Isonzo Army. In early July, after the disaster on the Piave, the 29th Division could muster a rifle strength of 7,394, but after three peaceful months of disease and a dearth of replacements, the division boasted but 4,905 riflemen. None of its four infantry regiments could muster even 1,400 effectives, and one (the 94th) had been reduced to only 841 officers and men in the fighting line.
By October, the army's losses of men to nonbattle causes had outpaced even its material decline. Still, the paper strength of the Isonzo Army was impressive, mostly because infantry battalions that were desperately short of men managed to maintain a fair share of their crew-served weapons-machine guns and mortars-which were the basis of the defense. The same was true of the artillery, which kept its numbers of functioning guns-but not gunners-respectably high even during October. The problem was the supply of ammunition. Counting all possible stores and depots, the Isonzo Army could collect enough munitions of all calibers to keep its divisions fighting for only four days. After that, divisions like the 29th would be out of bullets and shells, and the war would have to end.
By October, Field Marshal Svetozar Boroevic, commander of the forces on the Piave, was deeply concerned about the fate of his armies and his soldiers. He was not as optimistic as many of his superiors in Vienna; he knew that an all-out Italian offensive, and with it final defeat, were imminent. But Boroevic had no doubt that the dynasty and the army would survive, and that the soldiers' sacrifices would therefore be justified. After more than four years of total war, Austria's-and his-struggle was nearly at an end. Boroevic's main concern now was getting his army out of Italy in good order. On October 17, the tired Croatian soldier exhorted his troops on the Piave to defend vigorously with a brief but powerful message: "This must be known by every single soldier. Our honor and the salvation of our fatherland demand that we preserve the foundations of an honorable peace."2
Sadly for Austria and her army, by mid-October the Central Powers were headed irrevocably for nothing less than total defeat. The German Army in France had begun to come apart at the seams. The process of final dissolution began with an American offensive in France on September 12. This was the Battle of St. Mihiel, the first large-scale American operation, undertaken by the 1st U.S. Army. The novice Americans encountered only sporadic German resistance; the Germans, like the Austrians aware that defeat was nigh, were now mostly interested in retreating or surrendering. Pershing's forces soon secured all their objectives and captured 15,000 prisoners. Greater still was the MeuseArgonne offensive, a massive Franco-American push that began on September 26. The Allies boasted 220 divisions, 160 of them in the line; to stop this awesome force, Germany had but 197 divisions (113 in the line), only 50 of them still battleworthy. The offensive began just west of Verdun, near the epic battlefields of 1916, and soon spread to the Argonne forest. Pershing added a newly raised American army, the 2nd, to the battle. Many German regiments resisted bitterly, but the cause was already lost. By mid-October, the French and Americans had broken the back of the German Army in France.
The British accomplished the same thing in Flanders. Haig's great offensive, timed to complement the Meuse-Argonne push, started September 27. Soon British, Canadian, and Australian divisions overran the once invincible German defenses, and the remnants of Ludendorff's armies were in headlong retreat. By late October, the British reached the fields of Flanders where their divisions had entered the war in the summer of 1914-but this time it was they, not the Germans, who were advancing victoriously. The long-anticipated final defeat of Imperial Germany was now at hand.
Austria's plight was worsened by the simultaneous defeat of her other allies. Bulgaria had spent the war keeping the French, British, and Serbs bottled up at Salonika, ensuring that Austria's southern flank was secure, but in late September, Sofia opted out of the war. Allied forces wasted no time advancing northward, toward south Hungary, and Vienna had no troops left to stop them. A further psychological blow came with the collapse of Turkey in October, under British pressure on several fronts. The final demise of the Ottoman Empire, for centuries Austria's greatest rival but in this war an ally, seemed an ominous portent for the Habsburgs and their ancient, ailing realm.
The time for Diaz to launch his long-awaited offensive had arrived. The Central Powers were on their knees, and weary Austria surely could not withstand a major Italian push on the Piave. Yet, even now Diaz and Pietro Badoglio were cautious, fearful of a debacle. In August, Ferdinand Foch had again pressured Diaz to launch an offensive as part of a combined Allied effort on all fronts. Diaz refused, claiming that he needed twenty-five American divisions to defeat the Austrians. Naturally Foch balked at this request, and Italy remained on the defensive while the French, British, and Americans were busy winning the war in the West.
The reluctance of the Cornando Supretno to attack the Austrians until absolute victory was assured was fully supported by the government and by Vittorio Emanuele. No one wanted to risk another Caporetto-style defeat, and no one wanted to sacrifice morefanti than absolutely necessary. Still, by mid-October it was obvious to even the most faint-hearted Italians that the Central Powers, in retreat on all fronts, were headed for imminent defeat. Indeed, some Italian politicians, observing the rapid demise of Germany, grew fearful that if Italy did not act soon, she might be deprived of the just fruits of an Allied victory. Foreign Minister Baron Sidney Sonnino, in particular, was worried that Italy's timidity was ultimately harmful to her war aims; he wanted the Allies to postpone any armistice until Diaz could arrange a last-minute offensive against the Austrians. The Allies of course refused, but Diaz and Badoglio acted quickly, preparing the army for the anticipated "victory offensive," its last battle of the war.
The army had had many months to ready itself to attack and evict the Austrians from Italy and win the war. By mid-October, its overall strength was impressive: fifty-one Italian divisions, three British, two French, and one CzechoSlovak, 700 battalions in all, supported by 7,700 guns with six million shells, and 569 aircraft. Allied superiority, both on the ground and in the air, was total. In addition, all the Allied divisions were at full strength in men and equipment and were well rested, wholly unlike the Austrian units they were to face. The army now also had almost fifty battalions of arditi to spearhead the offensive, many of them collected in a special Assault Army Corps, two arditi divisions strong. The victorious stand on the Piave had reinvigorated the Italian Army, and the infantry, its ranks fleshed out with the recently conscripted class of 1900, was ready for battle. Diaz overcame his caution and set the date of the long-awaited "victory offensive" for October 24, a year to the day after Austria had launched the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo.
While the Italians were busy preparing to attack on the Piave, the Habsburg Empire entered its terminal phase. By mid-October, well before Diaz's offensive, Austria had begun to disintegrate. The large numbers of combat troops on the home front-some seventy-five battalions, heavily concentrated in the Czech lands and in the Vienna area-although a drain on the empire's emptying manpower pool, proved remarkably successful at preventing domestic revolution. An abortive coup by Czech nationalists in Prague on October 14 was quickly and easily put down by the local garrison, and no Czech soldiers at the front revolted in sympathy. Indeed, the collapse of the Habsburg Empire was brought on not by the actions of nationalist agitators, much less by military disloyalty, but rather by disastrous political decisions made in Vienna.
Emperor Karl, desperate for peace since assuming the throne, and now aware that the war was lost, appealed for peace with the Allies on September 14 and again on October 4. The Allies might have welcomed a separate peace with Austria a full year earlier, but by the autumn of 1918, with complete victory at hand, the triumphant Allies were in no mood to negotiate. Again Karl's feeble attempts at diplomacy were rebuffed. Even worse was his last-ditch attempt to placate internal and external foes by federalizing the empire. On October 16, Karl unexpectedly issued an imperial manifesto that proclaimed the Austrian half of the monarchy a federal state with complete self-government for the nationalities. This did little but cause general confusion and undermine the remaining legitimacy of Habsburg rule. The manifesto, like Karl's peace feelers, might have helped save Austria a year earlier, but by October 1918 the ardent nationalists were preparing to leave Austria anyway. Karl was undeniably sincere in his desire for peace and the salvation of the Habsburg realm, but his actions in the last months of the war only served to hasten the defeat of his army and the demise of his empire.
The army in particular was left confused by the imperial manifesto. The emperor seemed to have dissolved the empire, and the High Command, facing an imminent Italian "victory offensive," did not know what to do. The Hungarian government, deciding its own fate because Hungary had been excluded from the imperial manifesto,3 began to take steps toward independence, the lost dream of 1848. All over the empire, nationalists stepped forward to begin as sembling national governments in Prague, Cracow, Zagreb, Ljubljana, and even Vienna; some Habsburg Romanians and Serbs prepared to join their conationals among the Allies. On October 21, nationalists declared Czecho-Slovak independence, and the Yugoslav National Council soon followed. What all this meant for the Imperial-and-Royal Army, no one seemed to know.
Major happenings on the home front could not be kept from the soldiers in the field for very long, despite the High Command's best efforts. Individual Austrian soldiers began to leave the Italian front soon after the October 16 manifesto, headed for home. Some Magyar troops started to march eastward toward now independent Hungary on October 22. They went as individuals or in small groups, not as units. Most of the deserters were from rear area or reserve units; very few abandoned the front line. The first mutinies on the Italian front occurred the next day, October 23. Three divisions held in strategic reserve in the Belluno area, at the northern end of Boroevic's army group, experienced serious problems that day. Two Croatian regiments of the 42nd Honved Division refused to enter the fighting line. Czech troops from three regiments of the 21st Rifle Division also refused to return to the front; some Czech infantrymen of the 25th Rifle Regiment opened fire on nearby Magyar troops. Even two veteran battalions of the 55th Division's crack 4th Bosniaken revolted, and had to be disarmed by comrades in arms of the Carinthian 7th Regiment. These initial mutinies reflected an omnipresent war weariness, exacerbated by the ill-timed imperial manifesto. The traditionally loyal 4th Bosniaken, the heroes of Caporetto and Cornino a year before, wanted to leave the war because Karl had "forgotten" them: the October 16 manifesto made no mention of their homeland, Bosnia-Hercegovina. The mutinies had not yet reached the front line, but without central authority in Vienna, the staying power of the field army was increasingly in doubt.
The Isonzo Army's divisions on the Piave remained essentially unaffected by civilian and rear area disturbances. In the 29th Division, the soldiers' morale was unquestionably low, due in large part to the appalling conditions of service. Desperately hungry, dressed in tattered uniforms, and ravaged by malaria, the troops of the 29th simply wanted the war to end so they could go home. Nevertheless, Berndt's men were almost without exception willing to hold out to the end. Even the division's Czech troops-one-quarter of overall strength-remained loyal; the abortive October 14 coup in Prague had no noticeable impact on the division's Czech soldiery.
Dug in on Papadopoli island, on the northern flank of the XVI Corps, the riflemen of the 29th Division awaited the coming Italian offensive. The division received its last replacements of the war on October 23, a company of the 74th Regiment. Dramatizing the collapse of the Austrian war economy and military bureaucracy, the half-strength company, filled with half-trained teenaged recruits, arrived at the front without a single round of ammunition.
The next morning the Habsburg Army on the Italian front experienced its first frontline mutiny of the war. Two neighboring Hungarian divisions of the 11th Army, holding the line in the mountainous Asiago region, abandoned their positions and headed for home. Soldiers of the Magyar-Slovak 27th Infantry and Magyar-Romanian 38th Honved Divisions mutinied, simply leaving their trenches and walking east, leaving a considerable gap in the Austrian front line. Units of many other nationalities would soon follow the Hungarians' example. Worse yet, the mutiny of the 27th and 38th divisions coincided with the beginning of Italy's much anticipated "victory offensive," the greatest Italian effort of the war.
On the morning of October 24, the troops facing the 29th Division across the Piave were not Italian, but British. The Italian 10th Army (under the command of the British General Lord Cavan) included two corps, the Italian XI and the British XIV. The latter was dispatched to Italy in the aftermath of Caporetto, and included two experienced, well equipped infantry divisions, the 7th and 23rd. Veterans of considerable fighting in France, they were better trained, equipped, and led than any Italian divisions, and were generously supported by eighty-three batteries of artillery, all amply stocked with ammunition. The British XIV Corps was a formidable and confident adversary, and its missionbreaking through on the central Piave, the shortest route back to the Isonzo- was suitably important.
Across the Piave, the Austrian XVI Corps had scant hope of holding off the British for very long. Berndt's 29th Division faced the 23rd Division, and a few miles south the mostly Magyar 7th Division opposed the British 7th Division. The corps's only reserve was the 201st Austrian Militia Brigade. Like the 29th Division, the 7th Division and the 201st Brigade were tired, hungry, understrength formations incapable of prolonged combat. Once the Piave line was breached, the XVI Corps would have no choice but to retreat to the Tagliamento as quickly as possible.
The great offensive began on the early morning of October 24, revenge for Caporetto a year before. The British attack on Papadopoli started with a tremendous artillery barrage that inflicted crippling losses on forward elements of the 29th and 7th Divisions, as well as on Habsburg batteries behind the front line. The efficient Royal Artillery delivered a heavier and more accurate bombardment than anything the Italian Army had ever achieved, killing and wounding many XVI Corps soldiers in exposed positions. The first British objective was the capture of Papadopoli island. It was held by forward detachments of both Austrian divisions. The defenders occupied two relatively shallow trenches running from the northwest to the southeast of the island; Papadopoli was flat, sandy, and marshy, crisscrossed by numerous small streams, offering little natural cover. The thunderous British shelling wrecked the Austrian entrenchments, so by midday on October 24, the XVI Corps was retreating eastward off the island. Austrian resistance was bitter but brief because of ammunition shortages. The loss of the island seriously weakened the Austrian line, as well as the 29th and 7th Divisions. The British captured 3,600 prisoners and fifty-four machine guns on Papadopoli island, most of them from the Magyar division.
Early on October 25, General Berndt decided to attempt a counterattack to retake Papadopoli, or at least to stall the British advance. All four of the 29th Division's regiments participated, led by their Sturnttruppen and backed up by all available batteries. The assault was effectively coordinated and bravely undertaken, but soon faltered in the face of massive British firepower superiority. Machine gun fire tore through advancing Austrian companies, the Royal Artillery silenced Berndt's batteries across the Piave, and Royal Air Force fighters strafed the division's rear areas. The 29th Division's last attack therefore gained nothing, and only weakened its rapidly dwindling supply of men and munitions.
By October 26, the fate of the Habsburg dynasty and its army had been decided, not on the Piave but in Vienna, Budapest, and numerous other cities throughout the empire. In general the Italian "victory offensive" was so far proving a disappointment to the Comando Supremo. The first three days of the attack produced few impressive advances, and unexpectedly heavy casualties. Many Austrian divisions continued to fight back effectively, and everywhere Italian units attacked sluggishly, some ineptly. Despite months of preparation, Italian tactics were still not as effective as the Austrian (and certainly not the British), and infantry-artillery coordination remained inadequate.4 The long-awaited offensive seemed to be evolving into a costly battle of attrition like those which had raged so long on the Isonzo.
While Austrian regiments in the field kept fighting, even if hopelessly, the centers of Habsburg legitimacy at home began to dissolve without serious opposition as national councils all over the empire asserted their newfound authority. Naturally some tired Frontkanipfer, confused by events on the home front and wanting out of the war, simply deserted. Formations of all nationalities experienced mutinies-whole platoons, companies, in some cases entire regiments opting out of the war and heading home. Still, many divisions continued to fight on, regardless of national composition. It was a scene even more complex and confusing than the chaos that had erupted in the retreating Italian armies after Caporetto a year before. In truth, there were numerous examples of both dereliction of duty and heroic sacrifice among all Austria's national groups. Among the regiments praised by the High Command for their early performance in resisting the Italians were German, Magyar, Polish, Romanian, and Croatian units. Effective officers proved able to keep their men fighting, regardless of nationality, whereas indecisive officers watched whole divisions disintegrate; the problem was one of leadership, not ethnicity, as it had always been.
Lieutenant General Berndt was one of those effective Austrian leaders who proved capable of keeping his exhausted division in the field and ready for battle. In recognition of this, he was appointed commander of the XVI Corps, one of the Habsburg Army's last battlefield promotions. Berndt was in command of the corps, with the remnants of the 7th and 29th Divisions and the 201st Militia Brigade, as well as the mostly Czech 26th Rifle Division, when the next Allied blow fell. In the late evening of October 26, all along the front, Italian, British, and French divisions renewed their offensive. It was Diaz's attempt to break the deadlock that had recently developed. The British XIV Corps in particular made notable progress against Berndt's troops. The Yorkshiremen of the 23rd Division assaulted the Piave's east bank early on the morning of October 27, crossing from Papadopoli. Their advance was lavishly supported by the Royal Artillery, but the Austrians resisted with determination, pouring machine gun and mortar fire into the ranks of British infantry fording the Piave, inflicting heavy losses on the 23rd Division's assault troops.5 Even so, Berndt's position was hopeless, and the 29th Division's right flank soon gave way. As the division's 57th Brigade retreated, a gap opened between the North Bohemians and the faltering 7th Division.
As darkness approached, the 57th Brigade launched a counterattack near the village of Tezze, on a tributary of the Piave, in an attempt to close the gap between the two Austrian divisions. The attack was barely supported by artillery (Berndt's batteries were running out of shells), and British gun and mortar fire broke up several Austrian assaults. Units of the 201st Militia Brigade were added to the attack, but to no avail. By the end of the evening, the 29th Division's right flank had been pushed more than two miles back from the Piave's banks, and one of its brigades had been shattered: between them, the 57th Brigade's 92nd and 137th Regiments could muster only six officers and 448 riflemen.
As October 28 began, Berndt, seeing the sorry state of his troops, had no choice but to withdraw his corps to the Tagliamento, to establish a new defensive line. The 29th Division's first objective was to retreat to the Livenza River, ten miles east; securing the Livenza line would give the division enough time to reach the Tagliamento in a more orderly manner. Berndt no longer had the 7th Division under his control. It had suffered badly on Papadopoli island and its remnants had scattered, many soldiers heading for home. Berndt's corps still contained the 26th Rifle Division and the 201st Brigade in addition to the 29th; these were tired and weak formations-together they constituted less than a complete division-but they remained in good order and willing to fight, even in retreat.
Elsewhere on the collapsing Italian front the condition of the retreating Austrian Army was less orderly. Most of Wenzel von Wurm's Isonzo Army was still in the field, under its own commanders, but numerous Austrian divisions in the Belluno and Asiago regions were dissolving, even without Allied pressure. Ev erywhere, however, Habsburg units of all nationalities continued to fight back, and the Allied advance was proceeding slowly. The Italians had just started to achieve a major breakthrough, near Vittorio Veneto, the city that would give its name to the great Italian victory. But the Austrian retreat had not yet deteriorated into a rout. Nevertherless, the High Command was fully aware that an armistice had to be achieved immediately, if the Habsburg dynasty and realm were to be saved from complete internal collapse. On October 28, Arz instructed General Weber to contact the Italians immediately. The High Command informed the unfortunate Weber, "Every stipulation would be acceptable that does not infringe upon the honor of the army or constitute an outright capitulation." But the High Command's overture was already too late.
The 29th Division spent October 29 retreating toward the Livenza. The 26th Rifle Division covered the 29th's retreat, fighting a series of vicious melees against the advancing British throughout the day. Austrian counterattacks failed, costing the 26th over 2,600 men, including 524 killed, but they bought invaluable time for the rest of Berndt's corps to reach the Livenza. Sappers slowed the Allied advance by blowing bridges, destroying water pumps, and felling trees across roads. The North Bohemians were retreating faster than the British could pursue them. Italian cavalry and armored cars were a major concern, but the most serious threat facing the division was air attack. RAF fighters and bombers, uncontested by the now nonexistent Austrian air service, freely strafed and bombed roads crowded with retreating Austrian units. In this manner the 29th lost much of its artillery and transport. Ironically, the merciless air attacks slowed the Allied offensive: many roads were so clogged with wrecked vehicles, wagons, and guns, and dead horses and men, that British forward units had to halt and clear them before resuming their advance.
The next day the 29th Division continued its retreat to the Livenza, covered by its few remaining machine guns and artillery pieces. The tired infantry kept marching eastward, and by the end of the day most of Berndt's foot soldiers had reached the Livenza's east bank. Yet this was not far enough. As the Austrian military situation deteriorated, the Isonzo Army lost its anticipated rest on the Livenza; instead, it had to withdraw as soon as possible to the Tagliamento. The 29th Division's last act on the Livenza was blowing the bridge at Brugnera, one of the main spans across the deep and swift thousand-foot-wide river. The Livenza could not be forded, so the destruction of the bridge before British reconnaissance patrols arrived in Brugnera late on October 31 bought the 29th a few more hours.
On the last day of October, the 29th Division could muster a rifle strength of only ninety officers and 1,285 men-one and a half battalions. The weakened 26th Rifle Division and 201st Brigade together added only 4,500 more infantrymen to Berndt's command, so the XVI Corps contained the rifle strength of a brigade. Berndt's battle group was still in the field, though, and he was deter mined to get his men home in orderly units, not as a rabble. His exhausted soldiers remained willing to follow orders; they were concerned with doing their duty and getting home, not the current chaos overwhelming their homeland. In one of the division's ethnically mixed regiments, "The Czechs as much as the Germans protested against the raising of the issue of the future political system" Few others in the dying Dual Monarchy were able to put aside the national question in the tumultuous days of late October.
Isonzo Army command was also busy on the last day of October. Field Marshal Boroevic, assisted by Wurm and his trusted chief of staff, Colonel Theodor von Korner, was attempting to save the Isonzo Army, the strongest element in his army group, by bringing it across the Tagliamento intact. The war was evidently lost, but the Isonzo Army's divisions would be needed to restore order at home. Boroevic, in faraway Friulia, was unaware how far the situation had deteriorated in Vienna and across the empire.
In the last week of October, the process of dissolution, begun in midmonth, followed its logical course. Throughout the Habsburg Empire, local nationalists were taking power with little or no resistance from military or civil authorities, who in many cases had disappeared. Local nationalists declared sovereignty in Bohemia and Galicia on October 28, and in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia a day later. Leading Slovene and Croatian politicians, fearing an Italian invasion of South Slav lands, petitioned victorious Serbia for help. On October 29, the Budapest garrison agreed to support Mihaly Karoly's provisional government, which promptly took Hungary out of the war. Two days later, Bela Linder, the new Hungarian war minister, ordered Hungarian troops under Imperial-and-Royal authority to lay down their arms and come home. From Trient to Czernowitz, the imperial eagle was hauled down, and the Dual Monarchy, the last manifestation of the ancient Habsburg realm, had effectively disappeared in a matter of days.
Army garrisons all over Austria, often out of contact with Vienna, were declaring their support for new leaderships. On October 26, the Budapest garrison counted 70,000 troops under arms; by October 31, none remained. The commander of the Budapest Military District observed, "There was not a single soldier . . . one could have used in a suppression of the movement." With the Habsburg realm in dissolution, soldiers began to follow new leaders, flags, and nations. The same happened to the Imperial-and-Royal Navy. The emergent Yugoslav National Council laid claim to the navy, harbored in Istria and Dalmatia. At sunset on October 31, the red-and-white Austrian naval ensign was lowered for the last time at Pola, headquarters of the k.u.k. Kriegsmarine, and the new Yugoslav flag was raised in its place. The defunct fleet's commander, Rear Admiral Nicholas Horthy von Nagybanya, took the Imperialand-Royal ensign under his arm and left Pola, headed for his native Hungary.
At the High Command, Arz tried to delay the total collapse of the state and army, but there was little he and his staff could do. On October 29, the chief of the General Staff was informed that the 3rd Edelweiss Division, perhaps the army's finest division, an elite formation of loyal Alpine Germans, had refused to reenter the line; Arz knew then that the cause was lost, and he informed Emperor Karl that the Italians could not be stopped. After several hours of delay, on October 31 the Italians agreed to let Weber's armistice commission cross their lines, but the fighting raged on, and the Allies continued to advance. At last, the Italians had broken through on both the Piave and the Asiago fronts, and nothing was going to stop them. Caporetto had to be avenged. In the last hours of October, as Arz tried to get Austria out of the war, and after the emperor had effectively abdicated, Field Marshal Boroevic was planning to save the dynasty. But like Luigi Cadorna a year earlier, he had to abandon his headquarters in Udine. The Italian Army was coming, and his staff feared attacks by armed Italian civilians. The old Croatian soldier took his staff and headed for the safer hills of Carinthia, where he set about preparing to restore collapsing Habsburg authority, as the legendary Field Marshal Joseph Radetzky had done seventy years before.
For Berndt and his men, as November began, Allied strafing and shelling still remained a more serious concern than the collapse of the home front. Berndt's corps marched toward the Tagliamento bridges, and safety, as quickly as possible during November 1. The 29th Division was outrunning Allied forward detachments, thanks to the destructive work of its sappers, but it could not so easily escape Allied air attacks, and divisional columns were strafed and bombed repeatedly during the day. Despite the inevitable losses and delays, the North Bohemians reached the river by nightfall, and did not pause to rest. Berndt's troops raced across the Tagliamento bridges under the cover of darkness; the last riflemen reached the east bank at 2 A.M. on November 3, and the last supply wagons crossed by 3:30 A.M. The soldiers were exhausted, having marched thirty miles under enemy attack in thirty-six hours. The 29th Division had outrun the Allies and had been saved from captivity by Berndt's energetic leadership; his men would be able to return home.
Berndt permitted his tired and hungry regiments a brief rest before resuming the march to the east. His message to his soldiers was typically blunt: "We still have long marches through the mountains before us" He ordered his units to abandon all but a very small number of horses, an unnecessary burden through the Alps. Unit commanders were instructed to streamline their organizations and supply columns, and to bring home only what was truly necessary: weapons, munitions, and supplies, in that order. Berndt explained lucidly that the 29th Division had to retain its discipline, structure, and weaponry in the coming days in order to carry out its new mission, "the reestablishment of the wickedly disturbed order at home."
While Berndt was rallying his regiments, General Weber and his armistice commission, meeting with Italian representatives at Villa Giusti, were trying to achieve an end to the fighting. In truth, the Italians did not want the fighting to end yet; after more than three years of setbacks and defeats, the Italian Army was finally winning an epic triumph, and the armed forces, king, government, and people alike demanded nothing less than total victory. Late on November 1, the Italian delegation provided an informal statement of Allied terms: an immediate cessation of hostilities, complete and immediate Austrian demobilization, prompt evacuation of all Italian territory (including, significantly, both the South Tyrol and the Littoral), Allied occupation rights in Austria, and a right of passage for Allied troops through the Austrian lands. The terms were those of a complete surrender, not an armistice. Karl, although desperate to end the war, refused to accept the Italian diktat. On November 2, the Italians delivered Weber an ultimatum, demanding acceptance of their terms within twenty-four hours. If any of the Habsburg realm were to be saved, peace with Italy had to be achieved at once, and the High Command reluctantly agreed to accept the terms. At 11:30 P.M. on November 2, Karl stepped down as commander in chief of the armed forces, leaving Arz to sign the humiliating armistice (as General Ludwig von Benedek had done for Franz Joseph in 1866, after the army was trounced by the Prussians in Bohemia). The Italians were informed of the acceptance of their terms, and Arz ordered all Austrian units on the Italian front to cease fighting at 3 P.M. on November 3. The Habsburgs' last war thus officially ended.
The war had not yet ended for hundreds of thousands of Austrian soldiers facing the advancing Allies. Many commanders, particularly in the Isonzo Army, had managed to preserve some of their divisions, and wanted to bring them home in good order. Berndt was by no means defeatist, as he expressed in his order of November 3 that military operations must progress. At three in the afternoon, there were no Allied units near the 29th Division, and the North Bohemians resumed their march back to their homeland. Berndt and his staff were already more concerned about the Slovenes than the Allies. The division had no real idea what was happening to the east, and was prepared to encounter armed resistance beyond the Isonzo. Berndt was determined to get his men home in time to restore domestic order, and was fully prepared to fight his way back to Bohemia, if necessary; that was why he had so strictly ordered his troops to keep their weapons.
Most Austrian soldiers on the Italian front were not as fortunate as those serving in Berndt's corps. At midafternoon on November 3, dozens of Austrian brigades and divisions all along the front laid down their arms, as ordered by the High Command. The Italians did not cease their advance, however, and proceeded to round up entire regiments as captives, a clear violation of the armistice terms. The Coniando Supremo disingenuously claimed that it required twenty-four extra hours to inform all its formations to cease fighting; of course, the Austrians had not been told this. Unarmed Habsburg units were rounded up en masse, often without resistance, and dispatched to Italian prisoner of war camps. By the time the Italians actually stopped their advance on November 4, almost 360,000 Austrian soldiers, a total of nineteen divisions and countless smaller units, had been taken into Italian captivity. Among the lost units were the headquarters of four corps, ten divisions, and twenty-one brigades, complete with their staffs and general officers. Every nationality was represented among the prisoners. There were 108,000 Germans, 83,000 Czechs and Slovaks, 61,000 South Slavs, 40,000 Poles, 32,000 Ukrainians, 25,000 Romanians, and even 7,000 Italians in Austrian uniform; ironically, the great majority of the captured men were considered "allies of the Entente" Sadly, more than 30,000 of these last captives would die in Italy due to poor treatment, disease, and malnutrition.
While the victorious Italians rounded up the remnants of the Austrian divisions at the front, Emperor Karl prepared to end centuries of Habsburg rule through abdication. He was, in fact, merely formalizing his realm's dissolution, the logical culmination of the process he had helped to begin. The military collapse was by now so total that the High Command grew concerned about the safety of Karl and his family. When Empress Zita asked Arz how many troops would be available to protect her husband, the chief of the General Staff reluctantly, but truthfully, responded, "Not a single battalion, Majesty" The High Command was forced to collect cadet companies from the Military Academy at Wiener Neustadt and the artillery school at Traiskirchen to guard the imperial palace at Schonbrunn from revolutionary mobs.
There was, however, a force prepared to protect the Imperial-and-Royal family and ready to restore the Habsburg monarchy. Field Marshal Boroevic and his staff were waiting in Klagenfurt for the order to arrive from Vienna calling them to bring the Isonzo Army to the capital to impose order. Boroevic had attempted to preserve the Isonzo Army, with some success, so that it could be used to save the empire from complete collapse. The divisions of the famed Isonzoarmee represented the last significant force under Imperial-and-Royal authority, depleted and tired but still loyal to Boroevic and the dynasty. They were certainly stronger than the forces of civil unrest on the home front. The ghosts of Radetzky, Alfred Windischgratz, and Josip Jellacic, the generals who had saved the empire seven decades before, were alive in the hearts of Boroevic and many other Habsburg officers. As in 1848, the monarchy had collapsed entirely, Hungary and many other crown lands were in revolt, and the emperor was preparing to leave Vienna. And, as seventy years earlier, only the ancient multinational army remained steadfastly loyal, the only guarantor of Habsburg survival. Again, a loyal army in northern Italy was waiting to save the House of Habsburg.
In 1848, the Viennese playwright Franz Grillparzer celebrated Radetzky's victories in Italy with a memorable poem dedicated to the eighty-two year-old Czech soldier, "Austria Is in Your Camp" ("In deinetn Lager ist Osterreich"). It included the following lines:
Seven decades later, a multinational Austrian army in northern Italy, led by another Slav field marshal, was preparing to restore the dynasty.
Boroevic repeatedly cabled his monarch in Vienna, informing him that the Isonzo Army was ready to march on the capital at the emperor's order. But Karl never responded. Never strong-willed, by early November he had lost any desire to use force to preserve his family's ancient empire. The Isonzo Army would never be used to restore the dynasty and the realm; Boroevic would never be a new Radetzky. The collapse in 1918 was more total than seven decades before, and the foreign threat was far greater. Most of all, Boroevic was unprepared to be either independent or insubordinate, like the heroes of 1848 who acted without (and in some cases actually against) imperial dictates to save the House of Habsburg. For several days the old field marshal waited in Klagenfurt for an imperial response that never arrived. By November 9, the dynasty, the monarchy, and its army belonged to history, and Boroevic reluctantly disbanded his headquarters.
While the staff of Army Group Boroevic was waiting in Klagenfurt for orders from Vienna, Berndt and his men continued their march eastward toward the former Austrian frontier and the Isonzo. During November 4, the 29th Division managed to outpace advancing Allied patrols, even though Italian cavalry and bicycle-mounted Bersaglieri were often within a quarter-mile of the division's rear guard. That day, the 42nd Regiment briefly exchanged fire with an Italian cavalry troop, the last shots fired by the North Bohemians in the war. Over the next two days the division reached former Austrian soil and passed through the Isonzo valley. The 29th's journey across numerous battlefields was unpleasant, even dangerous. In wrecked Gorizia, local Italian nationalists had taken over, and some natives taunted the retreating Germans and Czechs. Worse, Slovene deserters from the 2nd Mountain Rifle Regiment sniped at Berndt's men, their former comrades in arms, as they headed through the shellscarred Isonzo valley. The Littoral was filled with Austrian soldiers of all nationalities trying to get home. A senior staff officer recognized a former comrade marching past, a Croatian soldier of the much decorated Dalmatian 22nd Regiment, the "Lions of Podgora." The regiment that had fought so heroically on the Isonzo for so long was no more. The dirty and exhausted soldier told the staff officer, "Sir, we're not heroes anymore, just beggars," and kept marching back to distant Dalmatia.
The 29th Division also kept marching home. Berndt was anxious to prevent fighting with Yugoslavia, so he and his staff met with representatives of the Yugoslav National Council at Gorizia, where he explained that his men simply wanted to return home, emphasizing that his units were in good order and represented no threat to Slovene sovereignty. Throughout November the Slovene lands were inundated with retreating Austrian soldiers; in just two weeks more than 800,000 Austrian soldiers passed through Slovenia on their way home. Considering the unstable political climate, the journey across the Slovene lands was surprisingly tranquil. The 29th Division experienced no notable disturbances during its long march to Ljubljana.?
The division reached the Slovene capital on November 9, giving the tired soldiers their first rest in several days. Berndt soon realized that the Habsburg Empire no longer existed, and communication from Boroevic's disbanding headquarters made it clear that an imperial restoration was out of the question. Berndt's only remaining task was to get his weary soldiers home. The 29th Division remained intact, with just over 7,000 officers and men, but fewer than half of them were combat troops. Like the army as a whole, the division's multinational character persisted to the end: among the combatants there were 2,310 Germans, 571 Czechs, 103 Magyars, and 290 other Slavs, mostly Poles. The large number of Czechs and other nationalities that had recently revolted against Austrian rule indicated the power of effective leadership and comradeship forged in battle, even during the greatest hardships. As one soldier recalled, "Our Czech comrades also stayed with us obediently. We stuck together in ancient loyalty."8
Getting the troops home proved to be no simple task. There were so many units trying to leave Ljubljana by train that the 29th was forced to wait several days to board; even though, on average, thirty-two trains departed Ljubljana every day filled with demobilizing soldiers, there were still more troops than places in cars. On November 12, shortly after hearing that Germany, too, had quit the war, the first 29th Division units began to board trains for the long, slow ride home. At least they no longer had to march. Berndt and his staff reached Vienna on November 16. Seeing the extent of the collapse, the general quickly reboarded and headed for his North Bohemian home, now in the newly declared Czechoslovakia. He reached it the next day, delivered a final speech to his soldiers praising their efforts, and went home. Otto Berndt's long war had finally ended.
While General Berndt was demobilizing the division, its final contingents were still journeying home. The 94th Regiment was the last element of Berndt's command to leave Ljubljana, departing the Slovene capital on November 15. Its meandering five-day train ride took the remnants of the veteran regiment through Styria, Upper Austria, Bavaria, Saxony, and finally home to the Sudetenland, reaching Reichenberg, the now defunct divisional depot, at three in the afternoon on November 20.
Like all the hard-fighting Habsburg regiments that survived the Great War, the 94th received no final review, no Imperial-and-Royal march-past to commemorate its achievements, not even a telegram from Vienna thanking it for its service. Many veteran regiments marched home in good order, arriving to find disorder and chaos, receiving only the thanks and praise of the officers who had led them through the costliest, bloodiest war ever seen. The 94th was fortunate, for Berndt had saved his division from captivity, and had gotten his weary soldiers back to North Bohemia. Yet fewer than 200 soldiers of the 94th Regiment made it back to Reichenberg. The regiment's 1st Battalion, once a thousand strong, was represented by six officers, two sergeants, and thirty-eight other ranks; only two soldiers from its 1st Company came home. The proud 94th, which had seen so much fighting in the hills of Serbia, the peaks of the Carpathians, the plains of Galicia, and finally the valleys of Venetia, received kind words from its last commander and demobilized, stacking its arms and marching into history.
Long before the last Austrian troops made it home, however, the Italian Army had picked the fruits of a long-awaited victory. The Comando Supremo, elated by the victory at Vittorio Veneto and Austria's total military and civil collapse, ordered its divisions to occupy Italia irredenta immediately. Alpini seized the South Tyrol, entering Trient on November 4, and the Duke of Aosta's victorious 3rd Army raced across Friulia, crossing the Isonzo and reaching Gorizia a day later. For the second time in the war, the Italian Army entered Gorizia in triumph, and this time it would stay for good.
The real prize, though, was Trieste, as it always had been to Italian nationalists. The military wasted no time ensuring that Trieste was firmly in Italian hands; the generals were particularly afraid that armed Slovene irregulars would overrun the city before the 3rd Army could reach it. The Comando Supremo therefore took no chances. Local irredentists had raised the Italian flag over City Hall as early as October 30 (as well as, temporarily, the red flag of revolution), but the Italian military had to arrive for the city to be irrevocably and securely Italian territory. In midafternoon on November 3, the destroyer Audace appeared in Trieste harbor. On board were General Pettiti di Rosito and a landing party, arriving to officially annex Trieste to Italy. A crowd of ebullient nationalists, ecstatic that the long-delayed hour of victory had come at last, gathered at the pier to greet the liberators; among them was the normally mild-mannered writer Italo Svevo. At 4 P.M., the destroyer docked and the triumphant Bersaglieri came ashore and raised the Italian tricolor over the city. Three years, five months, and eleven days after Italy declared war on Austria to liberate Italia irredenta, after eleven failed offensives on the Isonzo, the Italian Army finally occupied Trieste.