Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (32 page)

Austrian officers responded to defeat by imposing harsh, indeed savage, measures to improve discipline before the next battle. As a penalty for eating their emergency rations, some soldiers were bound to trees all day under the sun. Kisch found this dismayingly reminiscent of the treatment American ‘Red Indians’ administered to captured white men. Bored soldiers were marched out of their camps to exercise, allegedly to sustain morale, while their commanders planned a renewal of the campaign. Kisch wrote with heavy sarcasm that six to eight hours’ drill each day ‘is indeed the best way to make everybody feel jolly’.

On 28 August, the Serbs staged a modest incursion of their own into Hapsburg territory: troops crossed the Sava river west of Belgrade, and
occupied the Hungarian town of Zemun. The commander of the Austrians’ Danube flotilla reported that local people ‘welcomed Serbian troops with great enthusiasm, throwing flowers and waving flags’. Next day the Sava railway bridge between Belgrade and the enemy bank, which had been wrecked by the Serbs at the onset of hostilities, was sufficiently repaired to enable foot traffic. Jovan Žujović was one of those who crossed northwards, to view his battered city from the former Austrian gun positions, and to take some photographs. Many of the inhabitants of Hungarian Zemun, meanwhile, seized the opportunity to cross to Belgrade. Of Serb race and sympathies, they had no desire to be within reach of retribution when the Austrians returned. Meanwhile, further south, early in September, some forty Serb and Montenegrin battalions crossed into Bosnia, where desultory fighting took place during the weeks that followed.

The Serbian government, having gained a respite, struggled to procure aid of all kinds from its allies, which posed severe practical difficulties for a landlocked country with poor communications. On 7 September, Britain’s foreign secretary wrote with the elaborate formality of the times: ‘Sir E. Grey presents his compliments to the Serbian Minister and … has the honour to inform him that a telegram has been received from His Majesty’s
Chargé d’Affaires
at Cairo reporting that instructions have been given to allow the exportation of 3,000 sacks of rice to Serbia.’ But the hapless Serbs were in need of far more than a few days’ supply of rice. Their war, far from being won, had scarcely started.

Early in September, the Austrians launched a second invasion. Reinforcements arrived to fill the depleted ranks of Potiorek’s regiments. Every unit was provided with a Slovak guide. One battalion’s officers, unable to speak the language of their own appointed man, sought to explain to him by dumb show that he was now subject to military justice, and would face execution if he deserted. The wretched peasant misinterpreted this as a warning that he was to be hanged out of hand, and collapsed into a sobbing heap, shrieking his innocence.

As Egon Kisch marched back towards the Drina with his comrades, he tried to persuade himself that being shot at would be less disagreeable the second time. ‘Water doesn’t feel so cold once you are in it,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘It is surely the same with gunfire. But before you dive in, you shiver and your teeth chatter.’ Yet the Austrians’ renewed invasion of Serbia began as disastrously as the first. On 8 September near Velino Selo, men began to board assault boats to cross the Drina, under heavy small-arms fire. Of
Kisch’s platoon of twenty men, only ten were aboard when the boat pushed off, the others having prudently melted away. Their paddle seemed interminable as Serbian bullets whipped the water. When they reached the east bank, the boat was beset by men already wounded, desperate for a passage back to safety. Thousands of Austrians of three regiments milled around the bridgehead in confusion, unable to advance in the face of fire from the Serbians’ concrete emplacements.

Night fell. All through the hours of darkness the bedraggled Austrians huddled by the water. Early on the morning of 9 September, a withdrawal was ordered. Only twelve boats, each holding forty men, remained undamaged to carry back the survivors, and thus the evacuation continued for hours. Most men discarded their arms and equipment. As Austrians impatient for passage yelled in rage and despair at the boatmen, Serb infantry ran forward to the river bank and emptied their rifles into the fugitives. Some boats sank under artillery fire, while many men drowned because they could not swim, or were crippled by wounds. Fugitives mobbed the overloaded craft, and were repulsed with increasing ruthlessness by their crews. Egon Kisch escaped by crossing in the water, clinging unnoticed to the thwart of a boat being paddled to the Bosnian shore.

For a week after the disaster, Austrian corpses drifted in the Sava and Drina rivers. Elsewhere, some units advanced into Serbia with less initial difficulty, but for no greater military advantage. NCO Matija Malešič wrote despairingly on 16 September: ‘How hungry I am and full of thoughts about home and what life will be like when I return … There are lots of things I could write about but I must take care not to fill up too much paper, since God knows how long this struggle will continue, and paper is scarce. I must focus on the most important thing – and God knows who may get this diary if I fall. It is better if one keeps a lot to oneself. What will happen to me? … I am all sickness; I have no sensation in my feet due to frostbite, only where the skin has been broken; the hearing in my right ear has gone. I doubt that I am still the same human being that once I was.’

Even as this new disaster was unfolding, other Austrian forces renewed their assault across the Sava. In darkness on 14 September, troops forded the river just north of its junction with the Drina. Once established on the eastern bank, they repulsed a Serb counter-attack. But during the days that followed, they found it impossible to make further progress, and lay hemmed into a narrow perimeter. There were scores of cases of self-inflicted wounds. Potiorek contemptuously ordered his soldiers to try
harder, ‘without timidity about casualties’, but they proved unable to advance beyond the Paranica peninsula. After weeks of inconclusive fighting, once more the Austrians retired across the Drina into Bosnia.

Neither side was strong enough to force a decisive outcome. Further south, the Serbs and Montenegrins were forced to relinquish their footholds in Bosnia. After their withdrawal, in accordance with the spirit in which war was being waged in this region of liquid loyalties, the Austrians hanged or shot out of hand local people who had been rash enough to show sympathy for their temporary occupiers. Gen. Potiorek complained: ‘Our Serbs fight on Serbia’s side not only in Herzegovina but also at Visegrad, where the population worked covertly against our troops when they were withdrawing.’ A Bosnian priest named Vid Parežanin, hanged by the Austrians for allegedly signalling information to the enemy, shouted as the noose was put around his neck, ‘Long live Serbia. Long live the Serbian army. Long live great Russia!’

Austrian Dr Jochan Bachmann recorded several occasions on which ‘Serbian-sympathising Bosnian trash’ allegedly spied for the Serbian army. He mentioned an old peasant couple suspected of such behaviour: the husband was hanged, the wife shot, their home looted and burned. But even Bachmann was appalled by the fate of a Serbian prisoner wounded in the head. Having tended him overnight and laid him in a barn near the Visegrad road, the doctor looked for the man at daybreak, to change his dressings before the regiment marched out. He learned that the prisoner had been hanged, having earned the displeasure of the regiment’s colonel by shouting denunciations of Austria through the night. ‘Such an order was beyond my understanding, and reflected gross insensitivity,’ wrote Bachmann. ‘The poor wretch had contracted meningitis from his wound, and his ravings were the result of feverish delirium.’

The same fate was meted out to substantial numbers of Serb residents of the Hapsburg Empire who crossed the border to enlist in the Serbian army, wherever they fell into Austrian hands. This did not deter 452 of 70,000 Austro-Hungarian prisoners now held by Belgrade from joining the Serbian ranks. Vienna imposed a further spate of repressive measures in its Bosnian colony, designed to strengthen the inhabitants’ loyalties. The use of Cyrillic script in schools was banned. Austro-Hungarian troops were given draconian orders about the treatment of terrorist suspects. They were warned about Serb
komitadji
guerrillas, and instructed to fire at the slightest provocation, even at women and children, ‘because they too can throw bombs and grenades’. The struggle lapsed into a protracted
two-front war: almost a million Serbs and Austrians fought in the north on the Sava river, and in the mountains east of the Drina.

It was a minor grotesquerie of the time, that even as they did so, in neighbouring Bosnia the trial of the men whose actions had started it all dragged wretchedly on. An Austro-Hungarian officer posted to Sarajevo watched the twice-daily procession of the accused conspirators in the assassination of Franz Ferdinand between the barracks in which they were confined and the courthouse where proceedings were held: ‘first came a strong guard, then the felons, flanked by more guards, with a further detail bringing up the rear. All the criminals were bound by chains and chained to each other, so that escape was impossible. Princip was always at their centre. He looked pretty unimpressive, with his dark hair, pale features, and small, slight figure … The transfer was usually accompanied by booing and Tyrolean invective from watching soldiers, which Princip met with a cynical grin.’

Only slowly did the leaders of Serbia and Austria come to understand that they were locked in an embrace which was imposing disaster upon both. War reduced the former country to a wasteland and cost the lives of three-quarters of a million people – one in six Serbs, by far the highest proportion of the population of any belligerent nation to perish in the conflict. In this respect only, the Austrians achieved their purpose: Serbia suffered a dreadful punishment for the role of some of its people in the killing of the Archduke. Meanwhile, however, Conrad’s army endured humiliations such as no later success could erase. Here, the world heard the bell toll for the looming collapse of the Hapsburg Empire. But Balkan chimes were swiftly drowned out by vast, deafening concussions across other battlefields of both western and eastern Europe.

5

Death with Flags and Trumpets

1 THE EXECUTION OF PLAN XVII

Throughout the first fortnight of August, under brilliant skies the armies of France, Germany, Belgium and Britain marched from their detrainment points towards collisions with the enemy amid golden cornfields and wondering peasant spectators. Millions of men traversed many miles each day, some on foot, others on horses or carts, a few in primitive motor vehicles. ‘The dust clung to our hair, eyebrows and beards,’ wrote Paul Lintier on the 14th, ‘and by the time a column of Paris motor buses had gone by us, we were as white as the road itself,’ for relatively few of France’s highways were metalled. Each German corps, accompanied by 2,400 wagons and 14,000 horses, filled twelve miles of road.

While the German and British armies had adopted uniforms of grey-green and khaki respectively, the French and Belgians retained the brilliant hues of the nineteenth century. Fantastically, the soldiers of France advanced towards the enemy’s fire beneath regimental colours, to the music of drums and trumpets. More than a few French headstones of 1914 bear the succinct inscription after a man’s name, ‘
clarion
’ – ‘trumpeter’. Many units deployed in action full bands, and some officers affected white gloves. All the belligerents were led into action by commanders armed with swords and mounted on chargers.

From September onwards, the armies burrowed deep into the earth, but the dominant characteristic of the August battles in France and Belgium was that the motions of infantry, cavalry and artillery were alike readily visible. Masses of men advanced against devastatingly powerful modern armaments in the same fashion as warriors since ancient times. The consequences were unsurprising, save to some generals. On 22 August 1914 the French army suffered casualties on a scale never thereafter in the war surpassed by any nation in a single day. Its commander-in-chief, Gen.
Joseph Joffre, orchestrated a series of battles which, to a spectator, resembled those of the nineteenth century in all respects save the dearth of military genius. The conviction of French senior soldiers that spirit alone – ‘
cran
’ – could overcome firepower was responsible for rendering more than a quarter of a million of their young countrymen casualties inside three weeks. The Germans lost almost one-third as many – their own dying time came later.

One day in 1909, a tourist wandered through the streets of the great fortress of Liège, the gateway to Belgium astride the Meuse. A joyless figure, his jowly features set in a perpetual frown, he gazed keenly not upon architectural gems, but instead towards the ring of modern forts protecting the city’s approaches. This was Col. Erich Ludendorff, forty-four years old, an obsessive warrior deemed one of the most brilliant stars of the German army. He was inspecting its designated future battlefield, knowing that seizure of Liège and a subsequent sweep through neutral Belgium were crucial elements in Germany’s plan for the destruction of the French army. This had been conceived in the first years of the century by chief of staff Count Alfred von Schlieffen, who envisaged thrusting across Dutch territory. Moltke adopted instead a line of march through Liège, because it was decided that Holland should be quarantined as a neutral conduit to the outside world – a ‘windpipe’ for Germany – in which role it indeed proved serviceable.

No precisely ordered ‘Schlieffen plan’ ever existed, and it seems more appropriate to speak of an indisputable ‘Schlieffen concept’, which identified two fundamentals: the need quickly to smash France before turning on Russia, and the intent to do so through a vast outflanking movement, making the right wing the focus of German strength and hopes. In 1913, Ludendorff was removed from the post of chief of operations on the General Staff, allegedly because of his dogged, wearisome insistence that more manpower would be indispensable if Germany’s fabulous war vision was to be fulfilled. But a year later he found himself back before Liège, playing a prominent personal role amid the thunder and rattle of gunfire.