Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (29 page)

A ten-year-old boy named Yves Congar, who lived just inside the Franco-German border at Sedan, had written exuberantly on 29 July: ‘I can only think about war. I would like to be a soldier and fight.’ Instead, however, a few days later the first brutal manifestations of the reality of conflict descended upon his community: the vanguard of the German host crossed the frontier into France. Those who occupied Sedan pitilessly appropriated cars, horses, wine, food – even domestic telephones. Yves Congar’s father was among those seized as a hostage for the community’s obedience.

Gingerly toes dipped in the war’s inaugural trickles of blood. The first dead soldier seen by Florence Farmborough, an Englishwoman serving as a volunteer nurse in Russia, was a little officer’s groom named Vasily who expired in hospital after being kicked in the head by his master’s horse as he left for the front. She crept into the mortuary to look at a body ‘so small and thin and wizened that he looked more like a child than a grown man. His set face was grey-white, never had I seen that strange colour on a face before, and his cheeks had sunken into hollows.’ Sugarlumps had been placed on the man’s eyelids, to keep them closed. Henceforward, across the battlefields of Europe, the dead would be denied such refinements. The overture was ended. The fantasies of the first days of war were now overtaken by terrible realities.

4

Disaster on the Drina

The Western Front would become the cockpit of the war, but it was in the east that the killing began, when Conrad Hötzendorf’s Austro-Hungarian army launched its campaign of vengeance against Serbia. In the early hours of 29 July Belgrade’s citizens were awakened by gunfire from the direction of the riverside frontier fortress of Zemun. A few hours later Austrian shallow-draft naval monitors steamed down the Sava and the Danube and began shelling the Serb capital, hitting some buildings near the cathedral. The streets quickly emptied. There was a thunderous explosion as Serbian soldiers detonated charges which wrecked the river bridge linking their country with the Hapsburg Empire. To the engineers’ satisfaction, the rubble fell on an Austrian gunboat, most of whose crew drowned.

Crowds of would-be fugitives besieged three trains at Belgrade station, raising steam to depart eastwards. When at last they puffed forth, colourfully attired families and their portable possessions crowded even the carriage roofs. Panic broke out when the first train was bracketed by shells from Austrian warships on the river: ‘The sound of gunfire and explosions of shells mingled with terrible crying and screaming from terrified children and women,’ wrote Sveta Milutinović. ‘Luckily no one was hit, because the chief engineer dashed through the killing zone at full speed and then turned towards Topčider … [Meanwhile in Belgrade,] after the first barrage, many women started dressing up their male children in shawls and skirts, believing that enemy soldiers would not mistreat girls.’

Serb Foreign Office official Živan Živanović wrote: ‘The war that Austria-Hungary declared on Serbia in July 1914 came as suddenly and unexpectedly as any earthquake, fire or great inundation. Did not Serbia, after the Balkan wars, need peace more than ever?’ Such assertions were disingenuous: Živanonić was brother-in-law to ‘Apis’ – Dragutin Dimitrijević, sponsor of Franz Ferdinand’s assassins. Even if the Serbian
people did not deserve the cataclysm which descended upon their country following Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war, those privy to the Black Hand’s machinations could scarcely profess injured innocence. But that, of course, is what they did.

Serbia’s leaders knew they could not aspire to absolute military victory over Austria. If, however, their army could merely stay in the ring until their mighty allies triumphed on battlefields elsewhere, war would be worth something – indeed, everything. A pan-Slav state, Yugoslavia, could rise from the ashes of the Hapsburg Empire. In schools, children were taught the geography of former Serb lands – Macedonia, Dalmatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia, Banat and Bachka – as part of their own. The view across the Danube, wrote a sympathetic English visitor, ‘is dear to every Serbian, who looks longingly across at his old empire, and the homes of his compatriots dotted among the tender browns and blues and yellows of the plains’. For such things they were happy to fight: an ancient national poem proclaimed ‘I am a Serbian, born to be a soldier.’

Meanwhile on the other side, the Austrian ruling caste embarked upon its chosen war oblivious of the gulf between its army’s peacock self-image and the sclerotic reality. Alexander von-Brosch Aarenau was a prominent general who had served for years as an aide to Franz Ferdinand. He wrote exultantly on 29 July: ‘More than America, Austria is a country with boundless potential. It has suddenly passed from humiliation and exhaustion, indolence, frivolity and cowardice, into a mood of such iron calm, dynamism and gravity that one becomes very proud of one’s fatherland and its leaders! How impressive was the ultimatum [to Serbia]; how smoothly … mobilisation followed; and now, to render impossible any gratuitous interference despite the growling of the Russian bear, comes the declaration of war – surprising even to a soldier! Each stroke has followed the last in such a fashion that Bismarck and Moltke [the Elder] together would not have been able to conclude matters in a manner more worthy, energetic, and … skilful. Serbia has been caught totally off guard … and now stumbles along with the Great Powers which are completely stunned, and already realise that any intervention would be useless.’ Arenau’s remarks emphasise the complacency with which Austria’s commanders, Conrad foremost among them, viewed the continental catastrophe. Their mood infected ordinary citizens. Sigmund Freud wrote: ‘Perhaps for the first time in 30 years I feel an Austrian, and would like to try again with this Empire, for which there is so little hope. The mood is excellent everywhere. A valiant initiative has had a liberating effect.’

Austria had plunged Europe into a great war to punish – indeed, destroy – Serbia. But the Central Powers now faced much larger and more dangerous opponents. Close cooperation was essential, to deal with the allies on the battlefield. On 30 July Lt. Col. Karl von Kageneck, the German military attaché in Vienna, pleaded with Moltke’s deputy ‘to play with absolutely open cards in order not to repeat the [negative] experience of all coalition wars’. In absolute contradiction of this, however, nothing was done to make collaboration effective. Reason should have persuaded Conrad to dispatch only a small force to frustrate any initiative by the Serbs, while the overwhelming bulk of the Austrian army met the threat from the Russians, northwards in Polish Galicia. The Serbs should have been addressed only if and when the Russians were beaten.

The Kaiser wrote to Vienna on 31 July: ‘in this hard struggle it is of the highest importance that Austria should direct her principal strength against Russia and not divide it by launching a simultaneous offensive against Serbia. This is all the more important as a large part of my army will be tied down by France. In this gigantic struggle which we are embarking upon shoulder to shoulder, Serbia plays a quite subordinate role, which demands only the most absolutely necessary defensive measures.’ This was common sense, but Conrad ignored it. Passion and muddled thinking, in this as in much else, persuaded the Austrian chief of staff to divide his forces. He committed nineteen divisions to fight Serbia’s eleven, and sent another thirty to meet fifty Russian formations in Galicia. The Germans and Austrians shared blame for failure to coordinate a strategy; each nation merely did as seemed best to its own commanders. Conrad tasked two armies in Bosnia, initially separated by seventy miles, to invade Serbia and its junior ally Montenegro from the west. A third army in Hungary was made available for three August weeks only – as if for a limited theatre run – before it was redeployed to Galicia. This force was to strike south across the Sava river west of Belgrade.

Operations against Serbia were commanded by Gen. Oskar Potiorek, governor of Bosnia. The man who had bungled Franz Ferdinand’s security arrangements in Sarajevo was invited a month later to direct a crucial military operation. Potiorek was a bachelor who had devoted his life monastically to his profession, while remaining ignorant of every aspect of it that was either modern or important; he had never seen a day’s action. The Austrian army was poorly trained and equipped, and its Slav soldiers were disaffected. Commanders neglected such tiresome details as artillery ballistics; Potiorek was personally responsible for frustrating the purchase
of modern mountain guns, which would have been invaluable in Serbian terrain. Infantry–artillery coordination was non-existent. At a 1906 strategy conference, Potiorek cut short staff speculation about supply problems: ‘waging war means going hungry! If I start an operation today with 200,000 men, I know I can attain my objectives with just 100,000 of them.’

Any delusion that Conrad and his subordinates were chivalrous cavaliers, adorned with the graces of a Vienna ballroom, vanished in the face of their brutish conduct of the war. Even before invading Serbia, they opened a second front against their own minorities suspected of disloyalty: on 26 July military rule was imposed on Bosnia and Herzegovina. Hundreds of Serbs were arrested, including three members of the Austrian parliament. In Slovenia martial law was introduced, proclaimed by local officials borne from district to district in horse-drawn carriages. At each crossroads a little procession halted, a drummer beat a roll to summon attention, then a dignitary clad in black coat and top hat read the proclamation.

Passers-by scarcely heeded the ceremony because, in the words of Slovenian Valentin Oblak, ‘they did not realise the full implications’ of the decree, which were draconian indeed. Opposition newspapers were shut down; fifty executions were carried out in Dubrovnik and more elsewhere. In Austria some Czechs were badly beaten up – one such victim died in Linz – for allegedly shouting ‘Up with Serbia!’ A consequence of such actions was to provoke some thousands of the Empire’s two million Serb subjects to cross the border and enlist in Belgrade’s army.

The people of Serbia, meanwhile, were not merely fiercely nationalistic; they also knew the business of soldiering. In the recent Balkan wars, they had gained experience such as the Hapsburg armies lacked. They were unafraid of sacrifice: foreign visitors often remarked upon the popularity of
Coriolanus
, bloodiest of Shakespeare’s plays, with Serbian theatre audiences. They saw conflict with Austria as offering a unique opportunity to advance the pan-Slav cause. Out of a population of less than four million, they mobilised an astonishing half a million men, of whom four-fifths were now deployed on the western frontier, while their Montenegrin allies, 45,000 strong, took up positions further south.

They would be fighting in their own mountains, with aid from local partisans –
komitadji
, as they were known.
The Times
’s military correspondent wrote that the Serbian army was ‘not to be despised’, and would give the Austrians ‘much trouble’, which proved prescient. There was a classless comradeship among Serb soldiers, who acknowledged few
distinctions of rank: a private might salute an officer, then shake hands with him if they knew each other back at home, in a fashion implausible in any other warring army. ‘We are all peasants in Serbia – that is our pride,’ a Serbian colonel told an American correspondent. They were short of weapons, however – a third of the men mobilised in 1914 lacked rifles, and local ammunition production was sluggish. At the end of July, so desperate was the country’s need that police conducted a house-to-house search for rifles. Uniforms were threadbare leftovers from the Balkan wars; many conscripts could only be provided with tunics and hats –
šajkače
– and some did not even get those. The chief of staff told the War Ministry that new recruits should be instructed to bring from home their own clothing and boots, because ‘there would be no uniforms, at least initially’. But the Serbs liked fighting, and were good at it. At first, they approached the war as a romantic adventure: every regiment advanced towards the front led by two or three gypsies, playing bagpipes or their national style of fiddle, singing love songs, paeans to victory, epic chants.

Živan Živanović, brother-in-law of Apis, described the febrile optimism: ‘The people of Živkovci were saying: “We have beaten the Turks, we have seen off the Bulgarians, now it’s the [Austrians’] turn; if God wills we shall show them who are the better men.”’ Geologist Tadija Pejović marvelled at the spirit of soldiers whom he saw marching towards the front from the army’s rear base at Kragujevac, armed only with spades and mattocks. They joked exuberantly: ‘These are to bury all the dead Germans!’ – ‘
Schwaben
’, Serbs’ generic term alike for the subjects of Franz Joseph and Wilhelm II. And while the Austrians fielded only 10cm guns and lacked heavy artillery, the Serbs had modern 15cm howitzers, and soon showed that they knew how to use them.

Their chief of staff, Marshal Radomir Putnik, was a competent soldier, though sixty-seven years old; few Serbs were troubled by his close association with the Black Hand. The July crisis caught the tough veteran taking the waters at a Hungarian spa, having left his country’s war plans locked in a Belgrade safe to which only he had a key. Subordinates had to use guncotton to gain access to the documents; the Austrians, in the last courteous gesture of the war, allowed the general to return home across their territory. After a brief brush with pneumonia, by 5 August Putnik was at his post, directing operations.

The Serb government knew that Belgrade, on the country’s Danube frontier with Hungary, was immediately vulnerable, and evacuated east to Niš its archives and personnel, together with such key envoys as Russia’s
Vasily Strandman. Amid the chaos of mobilisation, the trains crawled, taking twice the normal time to complete the journey. Once ensconced in their new quarters, Serbian ministers besieged the Russian mission with demands for arms and equipment – their first request was for 200,000 uniforms and four wireless transmitters.