SIX
Whoever is first in the field and awaits the coming of
the enemy, will be fresh for the fight.
SUN TZU
The superiority of the defensive (rightly understood)
is very great, and much greater than may appear at first sight.
CARL VON CLAUSEWITZ, On War (1832)
In the first days of May 1915, a battalion of the Austrian territorial militia detrained in a little town in the Puster valley, near the Italian border. One, two, three, four companies marched out of the station, complete with machine guns, horses, mules and muddy wagons, and formed a column. The officers stared at the road ahead. The men were not young or smart or well-equipped. The boys scampering around could not get a word out of them. The adults realised that the dreaded war with Italy must be very close. These men did not look up to much, yet they were better than nothing and surely others would follow, maybe with artillery.
The silent column marched westwards to the principal pass over the mountains into Italy. People lined the road to cheer, and the closer they drew to the border, the louder the cheers rang out. The soldiers halted at nightfall near the foot of the pass, without encamping. Under cover of darkness, they moved off again, quietly – not southwards to the border, but north. Early next day, four more companies climbed down from the train at Hermagor. ‘Look!’, people said, ‘we’re getting a whole army!’ The men fell in and marched off. At night they rested near the border before turning their backs on the border and disappearing northwards. Next day, the same happened again. The trainloads of arriving soldiers looked wearier and more unkempt as the days passed. Eventually some onlookers wondered if they were not the same men, marching more than 40 kilometres each day with full kit, then looping around to the next valley and arriving back in Hermagor each morning. A battalion of the damned, repeating their futile routine day after day, with no hope of release.
If they really were the same men, then the meaning of the deception was all too obvious. The empire had no more or better troops to spare. Italian spies were supposed to report a build-up on the border, so that Cadorna would expect to confront a great battle-hardened army. Whatever the truth about this particular story, it was true that Austria could ill afford a third front. In summer 1914 – spectacularly unpre pared for the war it was bent on fighting – Austria-Hungary had put 50 infantry divisions into the field against Russia’s 94 and Serbia’s 11 divisions. These divisions suffered early losses that almost beggar belief. The standing army’s peacetime strength had been around 450,000; this force took some 80 per cent casualties in the first few months. The winter operations against Russia led to 700,000 losses, reducing many infantry divisions to 3,000 or 5,000 rifles, instead of the standard strength of 12,000. The 1914 campaign against Serbia cost the lives of 600 officers and 22,000 men. In other words, the casualties between August 1914 and May 1915 equalled the size of the prewar army. The official history of the war would say that the old professional army ‘died in 1914’ and was replaced by something quite different, ‘a conscript and militia army’. The army that faced Italy in spring 1915 was a different force: ‘civilians in uniform’ for the most part, who were more easily moved by the nationalist currents washing through the empire.
Universal conscription had been introduced nearly fifty years before, but the army’s capacity to draft and train the annual intake was very limited. While the population increased by 40 per cent between 1870 and 1914, military strength grew by only 12 per cent. Lacking weapons and facilities, Austria-Hungary could mobilise fewer men than France, which had a smaller population. In the decades before 1914, military spending in the Habsburg empire had fallen behind that of the other great powers. When Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf became chief of the general staff in 1906, there was a new effort to modernise the armed forces and boost their share of the budget. But military spending, even at its zenith, represented only 21 per cent of the empire’s total budget. It was a quarter of Germany’s and Russia’s spending, less than half of France’s, and less even than Italy’s.
Still essentially pre-industrial, the empire produced less iron and steel than Belgium. While this lack of economic modernisation probably acted as a political preservative, it did the military no good, entailing permanent shortages. In 1914, Austria had the weakest firepower of any major army. Artillery support averaged only 42 light pieces per division (even the Russians had 48). Even so, they outgunned the Italians in the summer of 1915. Crucially, they had three times as many machine guns. The empire’s lack of industrial capacity only became crippling in the war’s later stages. Road and rail communications were also pre-modern – though it happened that Austrian rail links to the Italian front were far better than Italy’s to Friuli (six railheads compared with two).
The army mirrored the ethnic diversity of the empire. In 1914, a quarter of the infantry were Austro-German; 18 per cent were Magyar- speakers (Hungarians); 13 per cent were Czechs. The rest (some 45 per cent) were Poles, Croats, Slovenes, Serbs, Romanians, Slovaks, Ruthenes, Bosniaks (Muslims from Bosnia), Jews, and also – in the pro portion of one or two per cent – Italians. Elaborate procedures were in place to accommodate the multiethnic, polyglot intake. By 1914, the officer corps was still 72 per cent German-Austrian and the language of command remained German, but it comprised only 80 or 90 expressions. For the rest, regiments used whichever of nine other languages – most of them mutually unintelligible – that their men under stood. Fewer than half of the 330 regiments were more or less homogenous in ethnic and linguistic terms. Fully half of them used two languages routinely. Officers were expected to learn the language of the troops within three years of joining a regiment. (Reservists who replaced officers lost in the early campaigns were often unable to communicate with their men.)
The high command was gloomily aware that the military could not be immunised against the rise of nationalism. Early in 1914, Conrad – whose opinion of Italians and Serbs verged on racist – sent a memo to the Emperor, ranking the nationalities in terms of their likely loyalty to the army in a war. The only ‘completely reliable’ elements would be the German Austrians, Croats, Slovenes and Bosniaks. The Serbs and Czechs, by contrast, were ‘completely Russophile’. His forecast proved broadly accurate for the first two or three years of the war, until the bonds of loyalty frayed beyond repair for all nationalities. Many Serbs from Bosnia wanted Russia, not Austria, to win. There were summary executions of ‘unreliable’ Serb soldiers on the Eastern Front. All the Serbian-language newspapers in the Habsburg province of Vojvodina (now northern Serbia) were banned at the start of the war. As for the Czechs, when two infantry regiments surrendered to the Russians in the spring of 1915, they were officially disbanded. Over the course of the war, the Bohemian Germans, Slovenes and Bosnian Muslims suffered the highest casualty rates – a rough but valid indicator.
Against this background, the high command was astonished when the mobilisation in 1914 proceeded without problems, indeed with fervour. No sooner had the failures against Russia and Serbia burned away the initial enthusiasm than the Italians gave Austrian morale a desperately needed lift. The Emperor’s message to his people, announcing Italy’s declaration of war, was crafted to stir deep emotions. Italy, he said, had committed a betrayal unique in history. After more than thirty years of alliance, the kingdom had ‘abandoned us in the hour of danger’ and unfurled its banners on the field of our enemies. But the ‘great memories of Novara, Custoza and Lissa, which formed the pride of my youth, and the spirit of Radetzky, Archduke Albrecht and Tegethoff’, the Habsburg commanders who had won those famous victories, guaranteed that ‘we will also successfully defend the borders of the monarchy in the south’. They had always beaten the Italians in the past, and they would now do so again.
Anti-Italian propaganda pushed at an open door. The German Austrians had a set of prejudices about the uncivilised, unreliable, cowardly Italians that could easily be mobilised.1 As early as August 1914, Conrad believed that the likely struggle with Italy would hinge on successful appeals to ‘the good German and Slav peoples’ of the empire, ‘still loyal to the Emperor, and determined to fight valiantly for hearth and home’. The Slavic peoples could be encouraged to share the feeling that the Italians were perfidious, sly in the Latin way. This stereotype was a priceless asset; the high command’s hope that Slavic soldiers would fight valiantly proved well-founded from the first clashes.2 A few weeks into the war, the Papal nuncio in Vienna reported that hatred for the Italians was widespread. There were even mutterings that the Church in Austria might split away from Rome. The Archbishop of Vienna agreed that anti-Italian passions posed a grave danger to Catholic unity. The Italians, by contrast, had no such universal ‘enemy image’ to manipulate. Hatred of the Austro-Hungarians was a middle- class emotion, and smart talk about Prussian militarism or the Habsburg prison-house of peoples was for intellectuals only.
General Ludendorff, Germany’s First Quartermaster General but in reality the senior strategist, contrasted the Habsburg troops’ lacklustre record on the Eastern Front with their ardour against the ‘hereditary enemy’. Field Marshal Hindenburg, too, would write that they fought the Russians with their head but attacked the Italians with their whole soul. Czech and Slovak troops who had failed against Russia ‘did excellent work against Italy’. Even greater excellence was shown by the Slovenes, Dalmatians (meaning Croats and Serbs from Croatia), and Bosnians, for these peoples – who entered the Yugoslav state together in 1918 – stood to lose most from Italian expansion in the Balkans. The high command played the ethnic card against Italy from the outset. Regiments from Slovenia were deployed to the Italian border in 1914. Dalmatian and Bosnian regiments were later sent where the fighting was fiercest. The front-line troops were supported by reservists from Trieste and Istria. The last Habsburg census before the war showed that some 7 million ‘Yugoslavs’ (Slovenes, Croats, Serbs and Bosniaks) lived in the empire – around 14 per cent of the total population. In 1914, they formed 11.5 per cent of the armed forces, and 3.1 per cent of the officer corps. By 1917, these proportions rose to 17 per cent and 9 per cent respectively. On the Isonzo front, Yugoslavs were 42 per cent of the Habsburg forces.
With its population of Orthodox Serbs (44 per cent), Muslim Bosniaks (32 per cent) and Catholic Croats (22 per cent), Bosnia compacted the empire’s fractious diversity in a little space. The high command tried to ensure that the four Bosnian regiments all reflected the ethnic make-up of Bosnia as a whole. This was impossible to sustain when the purge of many Serbs early in the war reduced the strength of the Bosnian units by a third. Nevertheless, these regiments earned a reputation on the Italian front for supreme valour and toughness.
Conrad never trusted Italian neutrality. He placed the border units on alert in August 1914 and appointed General Franz Rohr to organise the defences so that Austria could resist the Italians ‘most resolutely’. With the Habsburg army fully stretched on other fronts, Rohr’s forces were a motley collection of training battalions, militia units, border guards and customs officers, armed with old rifles and no artillery to speak of. If they were attacked, they could be crushed in a few hours. (Falkenhayn wrote after the war that the Central Powers could ‘scarcely’ have held ‘another enemy at bay’ over the winter of 1914–15.) Rohr’s men would not be reinforced by regular units until early 1915, when they were also joined by Tyrolese Standschützen, volunteer riflemen with a proud local tradition. Around 20,000 of these ‘schoolboys and grandfathers’ were soon under arms. (The regular troops from the Tyrol were away in Galicia and Serbia.) Similar units were formed in Carinthia, Slovenia and Trieste.
Conrad realised that Austria could not win a third war. His strategic aim was twofold: to delay an Italian advance towards Vienna, and keep possession of the Tyrol. (He did not believe Trieste could be held.) His first idea was to draw the Italians over the mountains, cut them off, and smash them in the valleys of Carinthia and Slovenia. He reckoned that public opinion in Italy was so divided over the war that this would deal a terminal blow. But it would be very risky, and he needed 10 German divisions. When Falkenhayn refused to deplete German forces on the Western and Eastern Fronts, Conrad was compelled to adopt a purely defensive strategy. His relationship with Falkenhayn, never good, deteriorated.
Conrad announced on 21 April 1915 that no ground should be ceded without a fight. The Austrians faced a much stronger enemy, and neither the quantity nor the quality of their supplies and equipment was likely to improve. On the contrary, it would be a miracle if these did not decline. So they took their stand not at the border but further back on the first high ground. They had learned from their campaign against Serbia, where small units of irregulars who knew the ground well and were supported by the people had defeated a much stronger but poorly informed force. They fortified the western edge of the Carso plateau and the hills around Gorizia, aiming to prevent the Italians penetrating the valleys that led to the interior. Working around the clock, they entrenched the plateau rim, laying landmines and triple rows of barbed wire. Bunkers were prepared for machine guns and artillery. The Italians apparently discovered little about these preparations. By mid-May, the defences around the Tyrol were complete, with wire entanglements 6–12 metres deep, trenches and emplacements excavated and sometimes armoured, magazines prepared, telephone lines laid, and sight-lines cleared of vegetation. Further east, the work in Carnia was delayed by late snowfalls.
The situation on the Isonzo was less satisfactory. Work in some northern sectors was almost complete but further south the defences were still patchy. The positions around Gorizia were mostly ready, though the barbed wire and minefields were not. The Carso and Monfalcone sectors – guarding the route to Trieste – were still sketchy; the Austrians had taken too long deciding where their front line should run. On the coast, they fixed their rear defences near Duino, a few kilometres east of Monfalcone, where their position overlooked open marshes and a deep fast river, the Timavo.3 By 26 May, Rohr could report that the line on the Isonzo was ‘almost completely closed’, with two rows of barbed wire, increasing to four rows at decisive points. The first line would be ready by the end of the month, though the second, he warned, could not be finished in the near future.
Conrad reportedly said on 22 May that, if the Italians did not attack at once, it would show they were ‘stupid dogs’ as well as cowards. When the last Habsburg officials pulled out of Gorizia on 25 May, they told the head of the grammar school to hand over authority to the first Italian troops to enter the city. Two days later, General Erwin Zeidler led the 58th Division into the city. The Italians had missed a chance to capture Gorizia almost without firing a shot. He was soon joined by General Wenzel Wurm, arriving with his corps from Serbia and an order to ‘stop the Italians with all methods as early as possible and to slow down their advance by causing them as many casualties as possible’. On his own initiative, Wurm prepared a bridgehead around Gorizia. He and Zeidler, an outstanding engineer, would make a first-rate team. By 1 June, the Austrians realised they were in the fight after all. This is why a Hungarian historian recently described the Italian delay as ‘a gift from heaven’.
Conrad organised the five divisions on the Isonzo into a new formation, the Fifth Army, led by a Croatian general – the highest ranking ‘Yugoslav’ in the empire. On 27 May, the day he assumed command, Svetozar Boroević von Bojna issued a set of fundamental orders. All positions must be held to the last man. Commanders must allocate all manpower not needed in the front line to the sacred duty of adapting positions so that counter-offensives could be launched. Defences had to include at least five rows of barbed wire, with the first row camouflaged. If the troops stayed calm and only opened fire when the enemy was less than 100 paces away, they would hold the line. If the enemy broke through, the defenders must not panic but stay in their place while the reserves moved up to contain and reverse the breach. Prisoners should be taken whenever possible, to gain information.
Like Cadorna, Boroević had lived in uniform since the age of ten, had an unremarkable appearance and a reputation for ruthlessness. Unlike the other man, his career was based on achievements in war. First decorated for bravery during the capture of Sarajevo in 1878, he rose to become a corps commander fighting the Russians in 1914–15. Consistently impressive and effective, able to inspire devotion as well as respect, he proved an excellent choice to lead the defence. If the Italians had made all speed in May, they would have caught the Austrians before Boroević set his seal on his new command.
Cadorna’s opposite number across the border was Franz Conrad von Hötzen dorf (1852–1925), the Austrian chief of staff until March 1917. Near anagrams as well as near contemporaries, the two men were alike in several ways. Their direct experience of war was marginal and long ago (Cadorna at Rome in 1870, Conrad in the Balkans around 1880). Like Cadorna, Conrad ‘believed that infantry could advance without adequate artillery support against entrenched positions’. Both men over rated the capacity of their armies to carry out successful offensives, while underrating their enemies – a blindness that was accentuated by their remoteness from the troops and their almost unaccountable powers. Temperamentally, both were possessed by intense convictions and strong passions, and given to rhetorical boldness that wavered in front of real opportunity.
The differences, too, were striking. Conrad’s was a larger, more gifted and complex personality. He was popular and self-confident as well as ambitious, exercising a power to charm and disarm that Cadorna never had. A brilliant linguist who mastered half a dozen languages, he loved the process of ‘entering into the spirit of a language … coming closer to the mentality of the people’. He assured his Italian mistress that he much admired her people’s ‘racial characteristics’; he also keenly admired Japanese martial spirit, so much finer than the ‘softened whites’ of Europe. He shared the Victorian fascination with the laws of nature (without the Victorians’ softening faith in Christian morality), the Viennese obsession with imperial decline, and the conservative hatred of liberalism. He was a tactical innovator who came up with new ideas for combat training, mountain warfare and military mapping. He was an inspirational teacher at the War School. He was also, however, a slave to philosophical dogma. For he was a Social Darwinist, convinced that the struggle for existence was an almighty law, the great principle that rules all earthly events. His first sight of corpses on a Bosnian battlefield filled him with ‘the conviction of the relentlessness of the struggle for existence’. As we shall see in a later chapter, Social Darwinism was a common belief, but the intensity of Conrad’s conviction was exceptional. Believing that non-Germanic peoples belonged to lesser races, such as the Turks in Bosnia with their criminal physiognomies, or the primeval, bestial warriors he had faced in Herzegovina, he argued that nationalist threats to the empire should be confronted and whenever possible, eliminated.
In practice, he advocated preventive wars against the Serbs and Italians. As incoming chief of staff, he was keen to settle accounts with Italy at the first opportunity. (Kaiser Wilhelm sympathised: it would, he said, give ‘lively satisfaction’ to join Austria in teaching their nominal allies a ‘salutary lesson’.) Italy responded with bristling suspicion until Alberto Pollio became chief of staff in 1908, when military operations against Austria became almost unthinkable. Conrad was still convinced that a showdown was inevitable and had best be launched before nationalism eroded the armed forces beyond utility. In February 1910, he again urged a preventive war against ‘Austria’s congenital foe’. Franz Ferdinand, the Emperor’s heir, shared Conrad’s visceral hatred, but the Foreign Ministry and the Emperor did not. When Conrad repeated his call the following year – tempted by Italy’s distraction in Libya – he was sacked. This move was naturally welcomed in Rome, just as his recall the following year was deplored. It came at the behest of Franz Ferdinand, who resented Serbia’s success in the First Balkan War (1912) and wanted Conrad back at the helm.
Conrad loved the empire’s Italian holdings in the way that British colonialists loved India, with a delicious sense of entitlement. As a young man, on the train to Trieste, he suddenly saw – as one still does, approaching from the north or east – the Adriatic spread below. ‘The world lay open before me. I was filled with a sense of joy and freedom.’ He spent four and a half years there, commanding the 55th Infantry Brigade, followed by a stint as commander in the Tyrol, where, as in Trieste, he despised the Italian agitators who were drawn, as he observed, from ‘the intelligentsia, the propertied classes, the middle class, schoolboys, teachers, and a part of the clergy’. The Italian peasantry, on the other hand, were mostly still loyal. He was convinced that the south Tyrol would be an excellent base for attacking Italy.
Conrad’s pessimism turned his high-risk programme for imperial renewal into a suicidal drive. Contrasting a desire for victory with the will to win, he accepted that the Habsburg empire lacked this will, yet believed it was better to risk total defeat than try to adapt. As he wrote to his mistress at the end of 1913, ‘Our purpose ultimately will be only to go under honourably … like a sinking ship.’ His actions the following summer showed the same spirit. When Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, Conrad urged immediate war against Serbia; he wrote privately that it would ‘be a hopeless struggle, but it must be pursued, because such an ancient monarchy and such a glorious army cannot perish ingloriously’. For he was under no illusion about Austria’s ability to win on three fronts (or four, if Romania joined the Entente). When the short, victorious campaign of his public predictions did not come to pass, he blamed the politicians for dragging the empire into war before it was ready.
As for Italy, Conrad was the last person to show facile optimism in 1914 – especially after Pollio’s sudden death removed the only Italian general that he almost trusted. On 23 July, when the Austrian foreign minister voiced doubts about Italy, Conrad commented that ‘If we also have to fear Italy, then we should not mobilise.’ Why did he ignore his own warning? His biographer, Lawrence Sondhaus, suggests that Conrad’s carelessness was due to the impossibility of including another variable in his calculations, amid the tumult of July, without losing his mind. Yet there were other reasons why he omitted to reckon on Italy’s likely betrayal. He despised the Italians as soldiers; on the other hand, if Austria was doomed to lose in the end, what did it matter if they joined the Allies?
At the same time, Italy was intimately associated for Conrad with love and hope, not war and betrayal. For he was besotted with an Italian woman, the wife of an Austrian industrialist. They had met at a social occasion in Trieste, when Conrad was happily married, but he remembered her when they met in Vienna seven years later. Conrad was now a widower, and Virginia was the mother of six children. Fascinated by his ardour, she recovered from her shock at his avowal of love. Her husband was complaisant, and Conrad became a fixture at the family home, and ‘uncle’ to her children. He persisted in wanting marriage, despite Catholic morality, his own eminence, and Virginia’s horror at the prospect of losing her children, as would happen if she were the cause of a divorce. Conrad fantasised about returning from a triumphant campaign in the Balkans, bolstered with such prestige that he could sweep all obstacles aside and make Gina his wife. Amid the shattering events of September 1914 on the Eastern Front, with the old Habsburg army in tatters around him, he confided to an astonished fellow officer that failure in the field would mean losing Gina: ‘a horrifying thought … because I would be lonely for the rest of my life’.4 Rationally convinced that Austria was doomed, but unconsciously bent on engineering a conflagration that would let him smash the chains separating him from the woman he loved – what could be more Viennese, more human, banal and apocalyptic?
Source Notes
SIX A Gift from Heaven
1 this particular story: Weber, 11–13.
2 losses that almost beggar belief: Deák.
3 ‘civilians in uniform’: This is Deák’s phrase.
4 military spending, even at its zenith: Rothenberg [1985].
5 The only ‘completely reliable’ elements: Spence [1985].
6 at least one British Foreign Office mandarin: Rothwell, 30.
7 The last Habsburg census before the war: Spence [1985].
8 the purge of many Serbs early in the war: Spence [1992].
9 these ‘schoolboys and grandfathers’: Jung.
10 The Italians had missed a chance to capture: Del Bianco, vol. I, 402.
11 ‘stop the Italians with all methods’: As quoted on the webpage: http://www.austro-hungarian-army.co.uk/biog/wurm.htm, accessed in February 2008.
12 as ‘a gift from heaven’: Farkas’s phrase.
13 ‘the water gleamed as if covered with silver’: this was the description by Rilke’s hostess, the Princess of Thurn and Taxis.
14 Conrad ‘believed that infantry could advance’: Rothenberg [1985].
15 Conrad’s was a larger, more gifted and complex personality: Information about and quotations by Conrad are from Sondhaus’s excellent biographical study (Sondhaus, 2000).
16 ‘be a hopeless struggle, but it must be pursued’: Rothenberg [1985].
17 ‘If we also have to fear Italy, then’: Palumbo [1983].
18 ‘a horrifying thought’: Sondhaus [2000], 158–9
1 They had a slang word for Italian economic migrants: Katzelmacher, ‘kitten¬ maker’ or tomcat – sexually promiscuous, with a large family back home, typical of backward peoples. (The same fearful contempt can be heard today when Serbs talk about Albanians from Kosovo.)
2 This hope was also the fear of at least one British Foreign Office mandarin, who predicted in March 1915 that the Treaty of London ‘would drive Dalmatia and the Slav countries into the arms of Austria’.
3 This was the same Duino where the German poet Rilke spent the winter of 1911–12 as the guest of the noble family that still owns the castle. Walking on the battlements one stormy morning in January when ‘the water gleamed as if covered with silver’, Rilke seemed to hear a voice calling from the air: ‘Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?’ This became the first line in the sequence of poems called the Duino Elegies (1923).
4 They married in autumn 1915, after the husband sued for divorce and Gina accepted generous terms for access to her children.