TWO
On April 26, 1915, the day Italy signed the Treaty of London, the Austrian Army was near the end of its catastrophic winter in the Carpathian mountains. Virtually the entire strength of Austria's forces-five armies with fifty-three infantry and eight cavalry divisions-stood deep in the Carpathians, defending the vital mountain passes from Russian attacks. The late summer and autumn Habsburg debacle in Galicia brought the Tsar's armies to the gates of Cracow and deep into northern Hungary. Throughout the winter, Russian armies threatened to break through the frozen Carpathian passes and pour onto the Hungarian plain, endangering Budapest-indeed, the entire Habsburg war effort. The empire had lost almost all of Galicia, and although the army prevented the enemy from breaking out of the mountains, its repeated offensives in the depths of the harsh winter had failed to dislodge the Russians. The cost for both sides had been exorbitant. The Carpathian winter cost the Austrians at least 600,000-and perhaps as many as 800,000-soldiers killed, wounded, captured, or seriously ill. The casualties were so enormous that the army had lost effective count of its losses. It can be reliably estimated that the Habsburg Empire lost 6,600 soldiers every day during the winter on the Carpathian front. An appallingly high percentage of the casualties was due to illness, particularly frostbite and cholera. The frigid winter in the high mountains had taken its toll on the poorly equipped Austrian Army as surely as the Russians had. Thousands of Austrian infantrymen, including entire units lacking winter uniforms, froze to death in the mountain passes. Even more alarming for the Austrian High Command, the army's morale was crumbling. There were consistent re ports of units of certain Slav minorities-principally Czechs, Ukrainians, and Serbs-refusing to resist the Russians, in some cases of whole regiments going over to the "brother Slav" enemy. The Habsburg Army, after only nine months of war, appeared to be coming apart at the seams.
In truth, that the army had survived so long in the field was something of a surprise. Such longevity and durability in the face of repeated battlefield disasters had not been anticipated. In the decades before the First World War, the Habsburg Empire appeared to most outside observers, as well as to many of its subjects, to be a dying anachronism, a throwback to premodern Europe. In an age of nationalism and nation-states, when the rise of united Germany and Italy inspired smaller nations to follow suit, multinational, dynastic Austria seemed hopelessly out of date and probably doomed. Its ethnic diversity was breathtaking. According to the last census, taken just before the war, the Habsburg lands, with a population of nearly fifty-three million subjects, comprised 25 percent Germans, 17 percent Magyars (i.e., ethnic Hungarians), 13 percent Czechs, 11 percent Serbs and Croats, 9 percent Poles, 8 percent Ukrainians, 7 percent Romanians, 4 percent Slovaks, 3 percent Slovenes, and 2 percent Italians. The last decades of peace had been a period of rising ethnic tension and rivalry, particularly among the Slav minorities. Increasingly shrill political agitation led to seemingly unending crises in Vienna, and by the eve of the war, Austria's parliament had grown so unruly that it was suspended. The empire was effectively ruled by government ministers and the monarch. The Habsburg monarchy had existed for centuries, and had been a great power since the beginning of the modern age, a consistent feature of European geography, politics, and diplomacy. It had defended Christendom against the Ottomans for centuries, and had served as the bulwark of the coalition opposed to Napoleon. That the ancient and apparently interminable monarchy and empire would disappear was to many inconceivable. Still, by 1914 the fate of Austria seemed bleak, and numerous foreign and domestic observers anticipated its imminent demise. How much longer could the troubled multinational Habsburg Empire survive in a twentieth-century Europe of nation-states?
Much of the widespread pessimism about Austria's future was caused by the empire's internal disputes, not by foreign worries. Certainly Vienna's domestic concerns were serious enough on their own. In the last half-century of its existence, the Habsburg realm was divided into separate Austrian and Hungarian halves.' The Compromise (Ausg[eich) of 1867 split the empire into independent Austrian and Hungarian realms united by the monarchy itself. Vienna and Budapest, each with its own national parliament, had complete sovereignty in virtually all areas: finance, justice, internal commerce, education, transportation, and the like. Austria and Hungary were politically united only in the emperor himself, as well as in common defense and foreign ministries, and a joint finance ministry to fund them. As an attempt to purchase the loyalty of Hun gary's powerful and strongly nationalist Magyar political elite, the Ausgleich was largely successful; as a remedy for the empire's political ailments, it proved a disaster.
The essential problem with the compromise was that although it satisfied many of the demands of Hungarian nationalists, it ignored several other ethnic groups advancing claims to self-government, or at least greater autonomy within the empire. This was less of a problem in the Austrian half. There, although the German-Austrians, 36 percent of the population, unquestionably were dominant both politically and economically, the state was reasonably tolerant of regional diversity and ethnic rights. The Austrian half was not run as a specifically German state, relying instead on a degree of provincial autonomy; the Poles of Galicia and the Italians of the Littoral were as politically favored as the Germans were in their Alpine home provinces. The Austrian arrangement was by no means ideal-the Czechs in particular were dissatisfied with the German predominance in Bohemia-but on the whole it functioned well enough. Hungary, however, was another matter. The Magyar political ruling class, exhibiting a cultural arrogance equal to that of Trieste's Italian elite, ran Hungary as a Magyar nation-state, ignoring the half of the population that did not happen to be Magyar. The Romanians, Germans, Slovaks, Serbs, Croats, and Ukrainians who lived in Hungary were treated not as members of ethnic groups but as would-be Magyars. The state used every possible means, including the bureaucracy, the judiciary, and particularly the schools, to convert the minorities into Magyars. Through these coercive measures, Budapest expected to achieve its goal of a united Magyar Hungary, a state without minorities, within a few generations. It must be noted that these policies, although authoritarian and detested by Hungary's minorities, were not violent, and that Magyar nationalists were interested in language and culture, not race. Anyone who learned the Magyar tongue and entered Magyar society was considered a Magyar, regardless of ethnic or religious background. Indeed, Hungary's large Jewish population proved particularly susceptible to Magyarization, and new Jewish converts to the Magyar cause-like the numerous Triestine Jews, Slavs, and other non-Latins who "became" Italians-were among the most vocal Hungarian nationalists.
All the same, Budapest's internal policies were hated by most of Hungary's minorities. They also served as an endless irritant in Vienna. The Romanians, Slovaks, and other persecuted ethnic groups had little political recourse because Hungarian voting and electoral districts were gerrymandered to guarantee Magyar dominance in parliament; however, the fate of Hungary's minorities did not go unnoticed in Austria. The Czechs in particular took up the cause of their Slovak neighbors deprived of a voice in Hungary. Austrian Serbs and Croats similarly spoke out on behalf of their South Slav brethren living in Hungary. For many of the Habsburg Empire's Slavs, the Compromise of 1867 was an injustice that had to be overturned: Why should Hungary's ruling Magyars enjoy rights and privileges denied other ethnic groups'? Yet for the Magyar elite, the Ausgleich represented its minimum demands. There was to be no turning back, and no concessions to minorities; in fact, within a few years of the agreement, Budapest was clamoring for even more independence from Vienna. Therein lay the essence of the problem. Every ten years after 1868, the joint provisions of the compromise, military and foreign policy, were brought up for review, and any changes had to be approved by both Vienna and Budapest. Thus every ten years the defense of the empire was held hostage to Hungarian demands. As a result, nothing ever got done. Budapest's intransigence increased while military spending remained stagnant and the minorities grew increasingly frustrated with the political system. There seemed to be no way to remedy the obvious injustices of the compromise. Indeed, forcing Budapest to back down would have meant a civil war. By the early twentieth century, the Habsburg Empire's political problems appeared insoluble.
That said, the empire enjoyed several notable forces of unity to counter the increasing ethnic disharmony which tore at its political fabric. In the first place, the aged Emperor Franz Joseph, symbol of the dynasty and realm, was genuinely popular with his subjects of all nationalities, not least because of his astonishing longevity. He had come to the throne in 1848, at the age of eighteen, and his reign had seen generally increasing prosperity at home and, after 1866 at least, peace abroad. As the emperor grew older, the tumult of his early reign, including the suppression of the 1848 revolutions and the military defeats of 1859 and 1866, disappeared from memory. Franz Joseph was a man of decidedly unaristocratic tastes who understood his people, sharing their piety and delight in simple pleasures. His popularity increased every year, and by the turn of the century Franz Joseph was regarded sympathetically by most of his subjects, who knew of the emperor's numerous personal traumas. His marriage had not been a happy one, and he had endured a series of painful family deaths: the execution of his brother Maxmilian in Mexico; the mysterious death of Archduke Rudolf, his only son and heir to the throne, in a bizarre murder-suicide pact with his teenage mistress in 1889; and the assassination of his beloved if unstable wife, the Empress Elizabeth, by a deranged anarchist in 1898. The emperor's silver jubilee, celebrating a half-century of his reign, was an impressive spectacle, and by the eve of the First World War, after six and a half decades on the throne, Franz Joseph was the unchallenged grand old man of European royalty. His personal popularity could not erase his empire's numerous political problems, but he served as an invaluable symbol of unity in a dividing realm.
The Roman Catholic Church was another important force for cohesion in the Habsburg Empire. Although Austria had many religious minorities, including Orthodox Christians, Jews, and even Muslims, the vast majority of its citizens were adherents of the Church of Rome. A common faith helped bridge the deep ethnic divisions in the empire. Millions of pious peasants accepted the Church's teachings unquestioningly, and the Church helped inculcate a loyalty to the Habsburg throne in countless schools and sermons. For the Vatican, the empire was the last Catholic great power, the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, and the only remaining major secular defender of Catholicism. The church therefore consistently supported the Habsburgs both domestically and internationally, and Vienna reciprocated by defending the Vatican and its interests (Austria never recognized Italy's annexation of the Papal States in 1870), an especially sore point with Rome.
An even greater source of unity in the empire, perhaps even more significant than Franz Joseph himself, was the Austrian Army. The Habsburg standing army dated to the early seventeenth century, and enjoyed a reputation for steadfast loyalty to the dynasty. The army won many wars and lost others-it helped defeat the Turks at the gates of Vienna in 1683, bested Frederick the Great at Kolin in 1757, lost to Napoleon at Austerlitz in 1805, and helped defeat him at Leipzig eight years later-but it was first and foremost a dynastic instrument. As "the strongest pillar of the Habsburg fortification," it had defended Franz Joseph and his many predecessors against all foes, foreign and domestic, in the end always saving the dynasty and realm. Indeed, the army had sometimes been the only force for unity. In 1848, with most of the empire in revolt, it alone remained loyal (though some of its units joined the rebel Hungarians), in the end restoring the Habsburg throne by force of arms. Its officers and men swore allegiance not to governments in Vienna or Budapest, but to the Habsburg dynasty.
Unsurprisingly, the Habsburg Army was as complicated as the empire it served. In the first place, by 1914 there was technically not one army but three (nevertheless, for the sake of simplicity they will be referred to together as the Austrian or Habsburg Army). The main force, or "common" army, was the Imperial-and-Royal Army, the kaiserlich- and konigliche-hereafter, k.u.k. Anuee, the traditional force recruited from all regions of the empire. But the Compromise of 1867 created two national armies as well, a concession to Hungarian pride: the Austrian Landwehr and the Hungarian Honved. These smaller armies, controlled by Vienna and Budapest, were originally intended to be second-line reserve forces, but by the eve of the war they were equipped with artillery and other supporting services, and their field units were pretty much the equal of those of the common army.
The army's ethnic makeup was even more complex. Because the army conscripted young men from all regions of the empire for two years' service, it faithfully mirrored the wider society. Of every hundred soldiers, there were twenty-five Germans, twenty-three Magyars, thirteen Czechs, nine Serbs or Croats, eight each Polish and Ukrainians, seven Romanians, four Slovaks, two Slovenes, and one Italian. Such unparalleled ethnic diversity meant that the Habsburg Army could not function like the other, national armies of Europe. Unlike the Italians, the Austrians recruited their regiments regionally, from specific provinces and cities, so that each unit had a distinct ethnic character. Hence Vienna's 4th Infantry Regiment was almost entirely German; Prague's 28th was exclusively Czech; Trieste's 97th was almost half Slovene, a quarter Croatian, and a fifth Italian; and the 61st Regiment, recruited in the city of Temesvar in south Hungary, was a mix of Romanians, Germans, Magyars, and Serbs. German was the language of command and service (it was Magyar in the Honved), the language used by officers for parade ground drill and technical matters, and to communicate with each other. But otherwise officers had to use the soldiers' own languages. The army recognized ten "regimental languages" (those of the nationalities listed earlier): in each unit, a language was accorded official status if 20 percent of its soldiers spoke it as their native tongue, and all officers had to learn it. Taking the army as a whole, only 142 units had one regimental language; 163 had two; 24 had three, and a few had four or even five.
Despite this daunting degree of ethnic diversity, the Austrian Army on the whole functioned rather well, going to considerable lengths to accommodate the linguistic needs of its soldiers. It generally dealt with ethnic difficulties in a tactful and delicate manner, and as a result the army was much less plagued by national antagonism and inefficiency than most Habsburg institutions. Although the officer corps was disproportionately German-79 percent of the regular officer corps and about half of the reserve officer cadre-this was the result of tradition much more than prejudice. Ethnic and religious minorities were well represented in the officer ranks of the reserve, including many Jews. (Jews, just 5 percent of the empire's population, made up 17 percent of the reserve officer corps; there were, in fact, six Jewish officers for every Jewish rank-and-file soldier in the Austrian Army.)
Nationality or religion played no role in admission to the officer corps or in career advancement, and many senior officers were non-Germans, including numerous Magyars, Croats, Czechs, and Poles. Promotion was solely by merit, and the Habsburg officer corps was generally efficient and well accustomed to dealing with the complexities of the polyglot army. The elite General Staff, which ran the army, in particular was well trained and professionally competent. To be sure, the army had its share of deadwood in the officer corps, but the notable shortcomings of the Austrian military were found not in poor leadership, and still less in its ethnic diversity, but rather in the results of decades of inadequate funding.
As previously noted, any increases in the joint military budget had to be approved by both the Austrian and the Hungarian parliament. Getting increased appropriations through Vienna was relatively easy, but Budapest kept the military budget hostage to Hungarian political demands. The Hungarian political elite had no interest in increasing funding for the k.u.k. Armee, which it saw as a foreign army; if any greater military outlays were required, Budapest perhaps would be willing to make modest increases in its own home guard, the Honved, but it refused to provide more funds to the joint forces. Therefore, during the first decade of the twentieth century, while Europe turned into a armed camp and the international situation grew dangerously unstable, the Habsburg Empire's relative military potential decreased dramatically. In 1903, the citizens of Austria-Hungary actually spent three times as much on beer, wine, and tobacco as on national defense, and a decade later the ratio had hardly changed. Austria's military spending in 1911 was one-quarter that of Germany or Russia, and was even lower than Italy's. Aware that Austria's military was rapidly falling behind its potential adversaries, the generals grew pessimistic. When asked about Austrian participation in the Hague disarmament conference (Second International Peace Conference) of 1907, the chief of the General Staff replied, echoing a common sentiment in the officer corps, "The present condition of our army has already an appearance of permanent limitation of armament" The Hungarian government agreed to significant budget increases only during the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, on the eve of the world war, when it became obvious that the fighting on Austria's southern frontier represented a serious threat to the empire's security. By then it was too late.
The effects of decades of parsimonious funding for the army were all too evident. The army simply did not have enough soldiers. Although the joint defense ministry first requested more troops in 1898, Budapest refused to approve a greater annual conscript levy until 1912. Thus, while the empire's population rose from forty million in 1890 to fifty-two million in 1910, the number of conscripts essentially remained the same. Due to financial pressures, only one Austrian male in eight was drafted, a rate far lower than in any of the other European powers. Because the conscript levy was so small, Austria's reserve cadres also were inadequate, and the lack of funds meant that reservists received little annual training. When the Habsburg Army mobilized for war in 1914, calling up all classes of reservists as well as the militia, it fielded a force of 2,265,000 soldiers. Yet France, with ten million fewer citizens than Austria, mobilized an army of four million in August 1914.
The effect of low funding on the army's weaponry was equally alarming. Although Austria enjoyed a reasonably well developed arms industry, and was a recognized leader in artillery development, the field units went to war woefully ill-equipped. The army was short of virtually everything, including rifles and machine guns, but the lack of modern artillery represented the most serious defect. The majority of the army's artillery was outmoded, dating to the late nineteenth century. As a result, the army went to war badly outgunned by its adversaries. It counted its forces by divisions, the smallest self-contained force of all combat arms capable of acting independently on the battlefield. The Austrian infantry division of 1914 adhered to the standard continental European pattern: two infantry brigades, each of two regiments, with three battalions of a thousand men per regiment; a field artillery brigade; plus detachments of cavalry, engineers, signal troops, and logistical and medical units as required, a total of 12,000 to 18,000 soldiers at full strength. Cavalry divisions consisted of splendidly uniformed mounted, rather than infantry, regiments, and possessed lighter artillery and about 5,000 fewer soldiers. The standard Austrian infantry division boasted at most fifty-four guns and howitzers, and few divisions had anywhere near that many. In contrast, the German division had as many as seventy-two artillery pieces, and the Russian had sixty; of all the types of divisions to enter combat in 1914, the Habsburg contained the least firepower. The army had designed several new and promising field guns, howitzers, and mountain guns, but there had been no funding to put them into production. Further, the prewar training budgets were also inadequate, and the army entered the war with limited ammunition reserves, particularly for the artillery. In all, the Habsburg Army was sadly unprepared to fight a major war.
On mobilization in July 1914, the Habsburg Army, including Landwehr, Honved, and militia troops, fielded a force of forty-eight infantry and eleven cavalry divisions. Against the forty-eight Austrian infantry divisions, Russia and Serbia, Vienna's two opponents, mobilized ninety-three and eleven infantry divisions, respectively. On paper, the Habsburg war effort appeared doomed from the outset, a fact quietly acknowledged by the Austrian Army's leadership. Indeed, the Habsburg High Command entered the First World War with a profound and justified sense of pessimism. The army's professional head, General Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf, believed that victory was impossible even in August 1914. Chief of the General Staff since late 1906, Conrad was regarded as an intelligent, forward-looking officer with considerable staff experience; he enjoyed an excellent reputation and a considerable following in the officer corps. He was acutely aware of the empire's severe, and worsening, political vulnerabilities and military deficiencies. Indeed, he was perhaps too sensitive to the forces, both foreign and domestic, arrayed in opposition to the Habsburg throne. Imbued with a sense of impending disaster for Austria and an acceptance of the inevitability of conflict, Conrad believed passionately that the empire could survive only if it proved willing to wage aggressive wars for ostensibly defensive political purposes.
From his appointment as chief of the General Staff until the outbreak of the First World War eight years later, Conrad repeatedly urged Franz Joseph to launch preventive wars against neighboring states; Serbia and especially Italy were his bugbears. He considered the crushing of Italy or Serbia-particularly the former, but ideally both-to be the only way to save the dying empire from internal collapse. He desperately wanted to invade Serbia during the Bosnian annexation crisis of 1908-1909. Conrad likewise recommended an invasion of Italy during the 1911-1912 Libyan war, writing to Franz Joseph, "Austria's opportunity has come, and it would be suicidal not to use it." The old monarch, cautious in such matters after several serious military defeats early in his reign, dismissed Conrad, only to bring him back at the end of 1912. After the conclusion of the Balkan Wars in 1913, the reinstated Conrad grew increasingly pessimistic. He feared that Austria's military position had so deteriorated compared with her adversaries that it might be too late to stem the tide of collapse. In his "Summation of the Situation at the Beginning of the Year 1914," Conrad concluded that the time for preventive war had passed. After the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, he mobilized his army for battle according to well laid plans, but he faced the impending war with resignation, even fatalism. He wrote privately as the war began, "It will be a hopeless struggle, but nevertheless it must be, because such an ancient monarchy and such an ancient army cannot perish ingloriously."
To the astonishment of Conrad and the other senior generals, mobilization went smoothly; in particular, there were no incidents of ethnic disloyalty, even among suspect nationalities like the Czechs and Ukrainians. To the contrary, soldiers of all ethnic groups reported for duty punctually, in most cases with unexpected enthusiasm. In Austria, as in all Europe that summer, volunteers, conscripts, and reservists alike went to war not with foreboding but with eager anticipation. Austria soon had its outgunned and outnumbered army ready to march to war. Actually getting the troops into combat proved less successful than calling them to duty, however. The movement of units by rail, vital to all military operations, was a muddle, with divisions often arriving at the front behind schedule and sometimes in the wrong places. As a result, the start of Conrad's planned offensives against Serbia and Russia had to be delayed, giving Austria's enemies precious time to prepare for battle.
Habsburg arms first entered combat against Serbia. On August 12, General Oskar Potiorek, commander on the Balkan front, began his offensive, leading the Austrian 2nd, 5th, and 6th armies across the Drina and Danube rivers into Serbia. Potiorek, governor-general of Bosnia-Hercegovina when the heir to the throne was assassinated, was anxious to redeem his stained reputation with a quick victory. Unfortunately for Potiorek, the experienced and tough Serbian Army was determined to defend its homeland, and Austrian progress was slow due to the difficult terrain, the lack of good roads, and the stiffer than expected Serbian resistance. Worse, in the predawn hours of August 16, regiments of the Serbian 2nd Army, veterans of tough fighting in the recent Balkan Wars, struck the weak defenses of the untried Austrian VIII Corps, which had just crossed into Serbia. The Austrians' forward positions were soon overwhelmed by the enemy counteroffensive, forcing a retreat by the mostly Czech VIII Corps. The strategic situation was worsened by the planned withdrawal of the Austrian 2nd Army, Potiorek's strongest. Because Conrad simply did not have enough divisions to attack Serbia and Russia simultaneously, he intended to use the 2nd Army in the Balkans to inflict a rapid defeat on Serbia, and then send it by train across Austria to the Russian frontier, where it was needed for his other offensive. Thus Potiorek lost the 2nd Army on August 18, before it could play a major role in his plan. Its dispatch to Galicia decisively weakened the Austrian forces in the face of the Serbian counteroffensive. Potiorek's 5th Army was retreating to Bosnia, and he reluctantly had to order a general withdrawal from Serbian territory. By sunset on August 24, no Habsburg units remained on Serbian soil. Little Serbia had delivered the Entente its first victory of the war. The k.u.k. Arrnee's anticipated "brief autumn stroll" to Belgrade had ended disastrously. At a cost of 28,000 men, including 4,500 prisoners in Serbian hands, Potiorek and his forces had gained little but an appreciation of Serbian fighting prowess. In less than two weeks of fighting, the ancient army of the Habsburgs had been defeated by a Balkan peasant kingdom, an immense humiliation for Austria's military and dynasty.
The rapidly unfolding events in Galicia, however, would soon make Potiorek's failure seem a minor setback. Conrad was committed to attacking Russia, in support of Austria's German ally while the bulk of Berlin's forces were invading France and Belgium. The concept, laid out by the von Schlieffen plan, was for Austrian forces to inflict a temporary defeat on the slow-mobilizing Russians, buying the Germans six weeks to finish off France. Then the Austrians and Germans together would concentrate in the East, inflicting a decisive defeat on Russia. Unfortunately for Conrad, his armies were not strong enough to accomplish their mission, even temporarily: his thirty-two divisions marshaling in Galicia faced more than fifty Russian divisions. The bulk of Russia's field forces were deployed against Austria, and planned to invade East Galicia. When the great Habsburg offensive began in earnest on August 20, Conrad's 1st and 4th Armies were ready, but the 3rd-delayed by rail problems-had arrived late and was not yet in position, and the 2nd was still on the way to Galicia.
Conrad, unwilling to wait for the arrival of the 2nd Army, sent his forces into battle. The 1st and 4th armies initially made good progress into Russian Poland, defeating several Russian probes in a series of battles that lasted until the end of August. The 3rd Army, just arriving in East Galicia, was not so fortunate. On August 23, its divisions collided with the advancing Russians near Lemberg. Several days of ferocious fighting followed, and the 3rd Army's advance was stalled. Further Russian attacks forced the Austrians to retreat across Galicia, and Conrad did not have enough units to stem the tsarist tide; even the belated arrival of the 2nd Army could not save the situation. Conrad had to call off the 1st Army's successful drive into Poland and order a general retreat. By the time the great withdrawal halted, Austrian armies had retreated 150 miles across Galicia and were on the outskirts of Cracow. Except for a considerable garrison left besieged in the fortress city of Przemysl, nearly all of Galicia was in Russian hands. The cost of Conrad's dismally failed offensive had been appallingly high. In just three weeks of fighting in Galicia, his force lost 400,000 men, including 100,000 prisoners, a total of one-third of the Austrian Army's combat effectives. Fully half of the Habsburg force that attacked the Russians on August 20 was dead, wounded, captured, or missing.'- Russian casualties of 250,000 had also been excessive, but the Tsar's armies could replace their fallen and maimed soldiers relatively easily; Austria, lacking sufficient trained reserves, could not. The catastrophe in Galicia wiped out Austria's standing army, and there was nothing available to take its place in the field. It was a stunning blow from which the Habsburg Army would never fully recover.
The Austrian strategic situation deteriorated further throughout the autumn and into the winter. Efforts to evict the Russians from Galicia inevitably failed, even with German assistance. By the time the first snows fell, the Austrians had been forced to retreat even farther into the Carpathian Mountains, Hungary's natural frontier. A Russian offensive to breach the Carpathian passes and invade north Hungary in early December was thwarted, but at a heavy cost. Before 1914 ended, the Russians tried again to seize the mountain passes. The weak Austrian 3rd and 4th Armies were pushed deeper into the Carpathians by the enemy assault, but in the end they held their ground and repulsed a Russian breakout attempt. The war's first Christmas brought little peace to the Austrian armies holding the frozen Carpathian line; they could expect more of the same in the new year.
Habsburg troops on the Serbian frontier that Christmas were a bit more fortunate. A second offensive into Serbia in mid-September had gained more ground than the first, but it soon stalled, and the Serbian front remained quiet from late September to late October. In the last week of October, Potiorek ordered a breakout from his armies' footholds in Serbia. This time, the Austrians made considerable progress against the tired Serbian forces. By mid-November, the Serbs were in full retreat, and Potiorek's armies had finally advanced out of the mountains onto the Serbian plain. Habsburg divisions marched across northern and central Serbia, taking Belgrade on December 2. The depleted Serbian Army was in disarray, and the long-awaited Austrian defeat of the Balkan kingdom appeared at hand. But Potiorek's armies were tired and understrength from their six-week advance, and the winter weather made supply difficult. Radomir Putnik, Serbia's senior general, ordered a last-ditch counteroffensive with his few remaining reserves. The spirited surprise attack cut through weakened Austrian divisions like a scythe, and within days Potiorek had to order another general retreat from Serbian soil. By mid-December, Habsburg forces had abandoned Belgrade and all Austrian soldiers had left Serbia. The year ended on a dismal note for Austria's armies in the Balkans and for Potiorek, who was soon sacked for repeated failures in battle. His forces had suffered another humiliation. Still, they had destroyed the Serbian Army; in that highly limited sense Potiorek and his divisions had succeeded. The little kingdom could not replace its crippling losses of men and materiel. Putnik's small but fierce army had successfully defended its homeland, but it had been sacrificed in the process. It certainly no longer represented any threat to the Habsburgs. As 1914 drew to a close, therefore, Austria's southern frontier was quiet again.
The cost of the war's opening campaigns had been immense for Austria. In just four months of fighting, its army had lost 1,269,000 soldiers-a total greater than the entire army's rifle strength on mobilization in Augustthree-quarters of them on the Eastern front. The prewar army had been annihilated. Losses among officers had been especially heavy: 22,000 of the total of 50,000 active and reserve officers became casualties by the end of the year. The army was thus deprived of its vital cadre of trained leaders, particularly at the small unit level. Austria would never recover from this tremendous and unprecedented loss of men. During the winter of 1914-1915, the Austrian Army was rebuilt with whatever men were available. They included teenaged recruits, middle-aged recalled reservists, and masses of almost untrained militia, often without proper uniforms and armed with whatever obsolete weapons the army could scrape together. This improvised army, thrown haphazardly into the line, held the strategic Carpathian passes against repeated Russian offensives. The raw recruits, aging reservists, and untried militiamen made up in determination what they lacked in training and firepower.
This new, war-raised army's trials were just beginning. The Carpathian winter of 1915-the dreaded Karpathenwinter-would put it fully to the test. Despite his army's weakness, the winter conditions and the forbidding terrain, Conrad was determined to push the enemy out of the Carpathians to prevent a Russian advance onto the Hungarian plain. No less, he wanted to recapture Galicia and lift the siege of beleaguered Przemy§l, where 120,000 Austrian soldiers were trapped sixty miles behind Russian lines. He could muster only seventeen understrength divisions to execute his plan, but he began the first Carpathian offensive on January 23 anyway, in the middle of a harsh winter. The Austrian 3rd Army attacked vigorously despite the appalling weather but made little headway in the face of stiff Russian resistance, made worse by deep snow, ice storms, and fog- and snow-induced blindness. In retrospect, it is remarkable that the 3rd Army made any progress whatsoever. By the end of January, Conrad's offensive had petered out after suffering heavy casualties, attributable as much to the weather as to the enemy. The Russians launched an immediate counteroffensive to overturn the modest Austrian advances. By the second week of February, the Russians had regained their lost ground and pushed the 3rd Army even deeper into the frozen Carpathians.
For the next six weeks the Austrians and Russians dueled for the Carpathian passes, with no significant effect except heavy losses on both sides. Conrad's second Carpathian offensive in late February was no more successful than the first, but similarly costly and futile. And the Russian March offensives bled their armies badly, too, for no decisive return. On March 23, the isolated fortress of Przemysl, without hope of relief or reinforcement, capitulated to the Russians: a loss of nine generals, 2,500 officers, and 117,000 soldiers. Buoyed by this success, the Russians went on the offensive in the Carpathians in April, achieving notable local victories over the ailing Austrians. As was so often the case in the First World War, however, and particularly in the terrible Carpathian conditions, the Russians were unable to exploit their tactical advances to achieve strategic gains. The Habsburg Army survived because the Russians were by now equally battered, weakened, and exhausted.
Three months of tug-of-war in the Carpathians cost the Austrians between 600,000 and 800,000 soldiers. Barely recovered from the Galician disaster of 1914, the army had been subjected to another dreadful series of hopeless offensives; indeed, for the soldiers, freezing in the high Hungarian mountains in midwinter, the Karpatlienwinter was far worse than even the nightmarishly intense Galician maneuver battles of August and September 1914. It is therefore hardly surprising that the army began to display serious cohesion problems during the winter of 1915. Morale on the Eastern Front plummeted after Conrad's disastrous attacks, particularly in Slav units. Ethnic disharmony started to appear, especially in Czech, Ukrainian, and Serb units, as desertions increased and units fought with little spirit; Russian propaganda, urging Austria's Slav troops-half the army-to surrender to their "brother Slav" enemy, was having an effect. Almost an entire Czech regiment, Prague's 28th, surrendered to the Russians en masse without a fight in early April. The battered multinational army was starting to crumble. Conrad's failed Carpathian offensives finished off what little had remained of the Austria's trained prewar cadres, and dealt the army a further blow from which it could never fully recover.
In late April, while the bulk of the Austrian Army was starting to come apart in the Carpathians, the few units fortunate enough to be guarding the Italian frontier were preparing to greet the return of spring. Austria's long border with Italy had been tranquil since the outbreak of the war. On August 13, 1914, General Franz Rohr was appointed commander of the districts bordering Italy, but he had only a handful of units at his disposal. The army, fighting for its life in the Carpathians, had few battalions to spare, and defending a neutral border was a low priority. Hence Rohr's command consisted of an odd collection of training battalions, replacement and militia units, and gendarmerie detachments. His command had no first-line regiments, and was equipped with a strange mix of obsolete weaponry: his infantrymen were armed with five types of rifles, including captured Russian weapons and rifles built for export to Mexico. An actual defense of the Littoral or the Trentino against a determined Italian offensive was out of the question. Many Austrian officers, from Conrad down, considered an Italian attack on the beleaguered empire's virtually undefended "back door" a distinct possibility. The chief of staff concluded in August 1914 that such an opportunistic assault would be "completely in the spirit of the Italian mind-set." Conrad, like most Austrian officers-and a great many civiliansconsidered Rome's refusal to back her allies in July 1914 an act of unforgivable betrayal. He wanted revenge, to be sure, but now was a very inopportune time for Austria to tight a three-front war. Punishing Italy for her perfidy would have to wait.
The Isonzo valley had been quiet since Austria went to war the previous summer. The little villages and surrounding fields were even more tranquil than usual. There were few military-age men to be seen, only boys and old men: the army had sent those fit to fight to Galicia and the Carpathians, where many met an unenviable fate. The militia companies manning the nearly nonexistent frontier defenses had little to do except watch for sporadic movement by neighboring Italian frontier guard units. There had not been any shooting, much less real fighting. The only gunfire anyone could remember was the unfortunate killing of Countess Lucy Christalnigg. In the second week of August, just as the war was starting, the countess, a Red Cross official, was driving from Gorizia back to Carinthia along the main Isonzo road. She passed a checkpoint near Karfreit, failing to heed the sentries' order to stop. The two nervous Slovene guards, worried about permitting a possible enemy agent to drive past their checkpoint, opened fire. A well aimed rifle bullet struck the countess in the head, killing her instantly. A minor scandal ensued, and the two soldiers were court-martialed; they were acquitted, however, for after all, they were following orders. The death of Countess Lucy was the only noteworthy event in the valley since the war started.
Trieste was similarly quiet. There was much griping about the war, particularly the inflation and the rationing of foodstuffs. Still, Trieste, like Gorizia and the Isonzo valley, had not yet been directly touched by the war. Many native sons were dead or missing on unpronounceable Eastern battlefields, but Trieste had not endured the suffering of so many cities all across Europe-shelling, bombing, enemy occupation. There was unpleasantness, of course, notably when returning wounded soldiers of Trieste's 97th Regiment brought with them two horrors from the Carpathians: stories of appalling losses and a cholera epidemic. The city suffered a cholera outbreak that further irritated its citizens during the winter of 1915, but Trieste was comparatively fortunate. Some triestini looked enviously at nearby neutral Italy, spared the war's tumult and indignities; a few no doubt wanted to join Italy, but they were a minority. Most were pleased that the war had not yet touched Trieste and the Littoral directly. By late April, their happiness would be short-lived.
In the weeks before Italy formally declared war on Austria, there were clear signs of Italian military moves. Luigi Cadorna's early mobilization of eight corps on April 23, although secret, did not go unnoticed by Austrian intelligence. Even the border posts on the Isonzo observed increasing troop move ment across the frontier. Every day the possibility of war grew more likely, particularly after Rome abandoned the Triple Alliance. Still, there was little Conrad and his generals could do. Until Vienna was certain that an Italian invasion was imminent, the army could not afford to dispatch its emaciated reserves to the Isonzo; every available soldier was needed in the East. In early April, Conrad, growing increasingly suspicious of Italian intentions, had wanted to withdraw seven divisions from the Carpathians and deploy them on the Italian border. But General Erich Falkenhayn, Berlin's chief of staff and the senior partner in the German-Austrian alliance, refused Conrad's request. So the Austrians did the best they could, scraping together a few additional units for the Littoral, including replacement battalions sent from regimental depots without completing their training.- By mid-May, the entire Littoral was garrisoned by three understrength divisions, hastily cobbled together formations with little artillery. On May 23, when Italy declared war, the unfortified Isonzo line from Mt. Krn to the Adriatic, a distance of thirty-five miles, was held by just twenty-four Austrian battalions, 25,000 rifles supported by 100 guns. Most of these units were recently arrived replacement battalions, collections of half-trained teenagers, middle-aged family men, and wounded veterans returning to the front. These men would have to hold back the bulk of Italy's might, the reinforced 2nd and 3rd Armies. On paper, the odds looked hopeless. Admiral Anton Haus, commander in chief of the Habsburg Navy, fearing that the Isonzo line would soon collapse, prepared to move the navy's headquarters and fleet from the Istrian port of Pola to Cattaro, at the other end of Austria's Adriatic coastline. Cadorna's "walk to Vienna," and the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, appeared imminent.