Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (72 page)

British military attaché Alfred Knox, who was following the Russian advance, one night witnessed the interrogation of some Austrian PoWs. He was fascinated by their captors’ lingering attachment to chivalry: ‘It was an unforgettable scene, the room crowded with officers, a single flickering candle, and the prisoners. Only NCOs and a few of the men are questioned … the Russian theory being that the officer is a man of honour and must not be insulted by being pressed to give information against his own country.’ In the same spirit later, when the Russians were obliged to withdraw behind the Dunajec river, an Austrian divisional staff took over a castle at Radłów previously occupied by a Russian corps commander. The new occupants were undisturbed by gunfire, because the Russian general promised the castle’s owner, Count Henryk Dolański, that in recognition of his own month’s tenancy, he would spare it from the attentions of his artillery.

The Austrian line of retreat was strewn with abandoned weapons, vehicles and equipment, together with the usual dead and dying horses. Stragglers crowded into the fortress of Przemyśl, where the garrison was strengthening the fortifications in readiness for another siege. On 12 September, traffic in Przemyśl ground to a halt amid the chaos. By the 17th, the Russians had moved within artillery range, and began firing into the city. Fears grew in Vienna that the enemy might break through to the Danube: 30,000 workers were dispatched to build defences, though in some sectors the only available artillery dated from 1875 and even 1861.

There was a striking contrast between the condition of officers and men in the Austrian ranks. Inside Przemyśl, Dr Richard Stenitzer wrote in his diary on 24 September: ‘We pass the time by playing cards, eating and sleeping! In the evening we had a feast in Lieutenant Karara’s dugout with several wines and champagne.’ He described himself, without irony, as having little work save the care of cholera cases, some of whom later carried the disease to Vienna. Yet during the same period, the war diary of an infantry regiment recorded its ghastly three-week retreat, with the men utterly exhausted, and an order issued: ‘Keep marching heedless of stragglers and without halts.’ The unit was obliged to cover painful extra miles to bypass Przemyśl, to avoid worsening its chaos of broken units and wrecked vehicles.

The city was very late in starting to stock provisions against a siege. Almost half its 714 guns were nineteenth-century black-powder pieces; when these were fired, many stockpiled shells were found to be duds.
Hasty preparations for defence were made, including construction of new outworks, erection of a million yards of barbed wire, clearance of fields of fire. But nearby trees remained unfelled, so that when the Russians closed in, they were able to exploit the woodland to screen their advance. It was all very Hapsburg: the Austrians had always been determined to hold Przemyśl, but their accustomed lethargy precluded the adoption of active steps to achieve this until the enemy was at the gates. The fortress was besieged for the first time from 26 September to 10 October, when it fell to the Russians, whose occupation lasted several weeks before they were obliged once more to fall back.

Under the stress of defeats, Conrad’s discordant, multi-ethnic army became ever more fragmented. Units recruited from the east proved especially unreliable. The 19th
Landsturm
Infantry, for instance, was composed of so-called Ruthenes, mostly Ukrainian. The regiment collapsed during one of the August battles, its men throwing away their weapons and equipment as they fled. In September, the rump of this regiment was expelled from Przemyśl’s garrison, deemed too unreliable to defend a sector.

Ludwig Wittgenstein was among the crew of the Austrian picket boat
Goplana
on the Vistula, who abandoned their vessel in the face of the headlong enemy advance. ‘The Russians are right at our heels,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘… Haven’t slept for 30 hours.’ Next day, the crew reboarded the boat, but only in order to retire to Cracow by way of the Dunajec river. Behind Przemyśl, Austrian discipline and morale revived a little as Conrad’s troops fell back across their own territory, having broken contact with the enemy. Constantin Schneider noted: ‘Men’s behaviour improves from one day to the next. They shoulder their weapons according to orders and don’t drag them along the ground or carry them like sportsmen. Marauding along the roadside has stopped, and even horses are not herded mindlessly together.’

By mid-September the Austrians had retreated to the rivers east of Cracow, having lost more than 350,000 men. The Russians had suffered a quarter of a million casualties, but could draw upon much deeper reserves of manpower. Among vast quantities of war matériel left behind by the Austrians were a thousand rail locomotives and 15,000 wagons. They were woefully short of tractors and horses, so that some 120mm gun batteries now relied on oxen for mobility. Yet Constantin Schneider observed wonderingly that the campaign had demonstrated an undreamt-of technological revolution in war-making, ‘more profound than in the entire period between Napoleon and Moltke’.

Conrad’s only course now was to dig in where he stood, and await German assistance. From France, Henry Wilson wrote to his wife Cessie on 19 September: ‘the campaign [in the west] will be over in the spring, that is to say if the Russians do moderately well, and I know of no reason why they shouldn’t’. His remarks emphasised persistent British and French faith in Russian might, even after the disasters at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes, the scale of which was imperfectly grasped in London and Paris. In the conflict of 1914–18, as later in that of 1941–45, it was a source of dismay and frustration to the Western allies that the Russians were obsessively secretive about their operations, and especially about their defeats. Britain’s
New Statesman
on 17 October acknowledged the shroud of mystery enfolding events in the east, as far as the outside world was concerned. It conceded that ‘the battle which is now in progress may last a very long time, possibly even for weeks … We shall be wise to discount for the present any news of “great victories”, from whichever side it comes.’

In the Hapsburg camp, Conrad confessed dryly to his staff that if the Archduke Franz Ferdinand were still alive, he would have had the architect of this appalling military disaster – himself – taken out and shot. ‘The Austrians’ predicament looks pretty bad,’ German colonel Max Hoffmann wrote in his diary on 26 September, ‘which shows the dire consequences of neglecting to spend any money on the army for 20 years.’ Around a third of Conrad’s formations were shattered. But the laggardly Russian pursuit spared the Austrians from conclusive catastrophe. Ivanov elected for a pause, to enable his armies to regroup and resupply, and to fortify Lemberg against a counter-attack.

It was characteristic of the war on the Eastern Front that logistics halted each side’s advances in turn. The Russian and Austrian commissariats were alike feeble, and the descent of autumn rain churned unmetalled roads into quagmires. The Russians had much larger armies in Galicia than they could properly supply, in a region of few railways. Everything was short save men: soldiers wandered battlefields with sacks, collecting shoes from dead horses. Sergei Kondurashkin heard a soldier under fire shout to all and sundry from a peasant cottage, ‘Come and eat! I’ve boiled some potatoes, and God knows when our proper rations will turn up.’ A trickle of men risked the Austrian shelling to make a dash for the cottage to share the bounty.

The wretched lot of the Tsar’s soldiers was only slightly alleviated by deliveries of comforts sent from St Petersburg – cigarettes, bagels and
cakes in small pink bags adorned with lace. In some units it became necessary to provide with rifles only men in the forward trenches. Those in the second line had to wait for weapons to become available when their comrades were killed: Vasily Mishnin, a former furniture salesman from central Russia, recoiled in horror when handed a rifle matted with dried blood. Inside Lublin post office in mid-October rose a mountain of mail sacks, thirty-two tons of them, letters for hundreds of thousands of soldiers desperate for news from home. They could not be delivered because the chief postal officer lacked carts to take them forward.

At Austrian headquarters, Alexander Pallavicini sought to look on the bright side, consoling himself with the thought that the army had escaped terminal disaster: ‘No news except of small encounters along the front … Looking at the different war theatres there is no reason to get depressed: the French, British and indeed Russians have suffered considerable setbacks, not to mention Belgium. And for the present we have halted
die Russische Dampfwalze
– the Russian steamroller. But because nowhere has anything happened to our decisive advantage, this killing and destruction will last for a long time before the angel of peace descends.’

If death was equally terrible in every theatre, the plight of wounded men was even worse in eastern conditions than in the west. Rocking, creaking country carts pulled by broken-down horses crept from the battlefield towards the rear, laden with broken and often dying men, prostrate on beds of bloody straw; of the three customarily carried in each vehicle, it was unusual for two to reach dressing stations alive; fewer still survived further. Alexei Ksyunin listened to a Russian casualty conversing entirely amicably to a Hapsburg prisoner, also wounded, on the same cart.

‘Hungarian?’

‘No – Slovak.’

‘Have a lot of you surrendered?’

‘Oh yes, a lot, and a lot are killed … We had fun in the first days, but after that not at all. There was no food … Bread had run out and tins as well, they only gave us coffee twice.’

The Slovak told the Russian that he had left a wife and two children in the Carpathians. In the usual placatory fashion of prisoners, he praised the Russians and called them a kind, good people.

‘Tell me, sirs, what have we been fighting for? I don’t know why they sent us to fight our own people.’

Lublin hospital presented a ghastly spectacle – more than 2,500 wounded crammed into three hundred bedspaces. Men lay on floors, in
halls and corridors and kitchens, many of them untended because medical supplies were temporarily exhausted, as were doctors and nurses. One man shrieked an agonised protest about a passer-by: ‘Take him away! He is stepping on us, putting his boots on us!’ A soldier hit in the head, now stone-blind, groped down a corridor, touching the wall. Another man with a head wound clung to a stove, his eyes bleary and lifeless, until an officer passed. Reflexively, he struggled to his feet to salute.

A warehouse by Lublin station became an overflow for casualties denied space in the hospital. Polish nurses stepped gingerly among the prostrate, bloody, groaning throng, distributing cigarettes. A Russian gestured to his Austrian neighbour and said to a girl, ‘Give him one. He’s one of us. Speaks our language. He could be a Ukrainian.’ The anecdote is credible, because in Galicia more than any other theatre of war, the subjects of the two warring emperors felt a bond of kinship in their shared predicament, shackled to a conflict beyond their comprehension or sympathy, under the orders of rival gold-braided buffoons. At a hospital in Warsaw, correspondent Sergei Kondurashkin asked a wounded soldier why so many of the inmates had been hit in the arms. The man replied with bitter sarcasm: because those hit in the head had been obliged to remain on the battlefield. The journalist wrote: ‘One hears dozens of stories but they are all the same, just as the soldiers themselves are the same, and the circumstances in which thousands and tens of thousands of men have found themselves in battle.’

As Aleksei Tolstoy travelled from Moscow towards the front, at first he marvelled at the continuing normalcy of rural life behind the war zone, observing from his train: ‘There were the same idle people at the stations, the unaltered tranquillity of villages and farmsteads … a peasant driving his oxen along the railway, herds raising clouds of dust at sunset …’ But much bleaker sights and sounds shattered this idyllic view as he approached the battlefield. Southbound rail traffic, including Tolstoy’s own train, was constantly interrupted to allow the passage in the opposite direction of Russian wounded being taken to Moscow, in open wagons exposed to the elements. Tolstoy noticed that many were wearing Austrian blue serge tunics and boots – of better quality than anything issued by the Tsar’s army.

Almost every soldier taken prisoner experiences a surge of shock and confusion, the realisation that this is a life-changing moment, together with the onset of bottomless uncertainty about the future. Ivan Kuznetsov
described his sentiments as he found himself in Austrian hands: ‘I thought of my village Lipyagi, my parents, my young wife and child. They are going to have a hard time without me. What is going to happen to me?’ Many PoWs died on both sides of the Eastern Front. Russian prisoners transported across Hungary in freight cars were attacked at wayside stations by local people throwing stones and banging sticks against the cars’ sides to show their hostility.

Several thousand Russian prisoners were held in appalling conditions at a camp near the Hungarian town of Estergom, where many died from starvation. Ivan Kuznetsov recorded:

We awoke to see dead men lying here and there, who had to be buried at once. Several times … we assembled to demand food … approaching the guards and shouting:
‘Khleba! Khle – ba!’
[Bread! Bread!] The guards hit us with their rifle butts and drove us back into the barracks … Some fifteen corpses remained lying on the ground. Sometimes bosses would come to the camp and give us a strict warning, and for a few days we got more bread and they made potato soup for us. But then the food went downhill again. Prisoners stuck together in regional groups, me with others from the Penza area … Two were relations … Our greatcoats had been taken away, so we slept on the ground wearing our tunics and trousers. They gave us 200–300 grams of bread every three or four days. Food was cooked once a day, boiled water with a little wheat flour and red ground pepper added, one bucket for every twenty men. Autumn came with its cold, damp and mud. We started digging ourselves into the earth like moles. The soil was sandy, soft, so we were able to dig a hole quickly, and then to make a niche so that several men could lie there. There were three men in our group, and we crawled into the hole and lay there under the arching sandy ceiling. We got up in the morning all covered in sand, shook it off ourselves, washed and walked around the camp all day, and in the night we got back into the hole. It became even colder in October, and our improvised bunkers collapsed.