Internal Upheavals Before the War
In mid-summer 1914, following the mechanical logic of the international alliances then at play, the protracted conflict between the Habsburg monarchy and the southern Slavs expanded into an enormous conflagration. In the late nineteenth century, nationalistic movements within the Austro-Hungarian Empire had caught the imagination of many people. In the territories that would later become Yugoslavia, they erupted with force. Their aims were to end the Habsburg monarchy’s rule, to overcome the legacy of feudalism in the empire’s economic and social structures and to remove the fragmentation and subjugation of their national entities within the empire. Slovenia, Dalmatia, and the Banat and Bacska, were dominated by German-speaking, Italian and Hungarian elites. The same situation occurred with the Turkish Spahis in Serbia and the Mohammedan Begs in Bosnia. Croatia was hardly more than a Hungarian „Paschalik“, ruled with cynical corruption and brute force. The Croatians were united by their adamant opposition to the Hungarian Magyar ruling class as well as to the court in Vienna – a court which had sacrificed the Croatians’ national ambitions as part of a deal with Hungary after 1848. On December 7, 1914, the very day that the Austro-Hungarian army suffered a significant defeat by a supposedly much inferior opponent, the Serbian government at Niš declared its first war aim as the “liberation and unification of all our subjected brothers: Serbs, Croatians, and Slovenes”.
Austria’s Internal Repression of Soldiers and Civilians
During the war, within the territories ruled by the Habsburg dual monarchy there were powerful nationalist-revolutionary movements that were inspired by the agitation of the Czech nationalists. Thinking that the advance of Russian Czarist troops from Galicia seemed unstoppable, the Austro-Hungarian military reacted with fiercely repressive measures. In the autumn of 1914 in Moravia alone, more than five hundred trials for high treason were initiated, death sentences were pronounced and executions regularly took place. The Austro-Hungarian breakthrough at Gorlice-Tarnow in early May 1915 for the time being stalled the threat of another Russian invasion, yet the judicial machinery in the Czech hinterland acted even more furiously: loyalty and patriotism had to be forced on the people from above. On a daily basis the courts martial pronounced so-called blood judgments against soldiers and civilians alike. A tight network of spies was established and a veritable war of oppression and censorship was waged against Czech literature.
There was thus an aggressive battle against ‘internal enemies’ that ran parallel to the empire’s fight against its external enemies, whereby the monarchy waged war on its own citizens. In Czech territories as well as those of the Southern Slavs, each Slavic soldier or militiaman in the ranks of the Austro-Hungarian multi-national army was regarded by the Austrian and Hungarian officer corps as a potential traitor. Students, orthodox priests, teachers, intellectuals suspected of Yugoslav patriotism, as well as illiterate peasants, were accused and taken into custody or carried off to special internment camps.
Austro-Hungarian Military Debacles in 1914
The excessive brutality of these actions, and a hysteria about spies that bordered on the psychotic was mostly due to the unimaginable and dramatic military debacles suffered by the Austro-Hungarian army in the autumn of 1914. Trapped by pre-modern assumptions about warfare, Field Marshall Potiorek’s major offensives in Serbia as well as that against the Russians in Galicia broke down disastrously. After only a few months of fighting, the four Austro-Hungarian armies deployed at the North-Eastern Front had been reduced to the size and impact no better than a militia. Of the estimated 50,000 officers, about 22,000 had become casualties or prisoners of war. By the end of 1914, the same had applied to three quarters of all trained soldiers. Divisions had been reduced to battalions, whole regiments to companies, and individual units had in fact been wiped out. During the first year of the war, around 1.8 million soldiers were lost in Serbia, Galicia, and the Carpathians. Austria-Hungary’s old professional army had been shattered. There was not enough qualified personnel to completely replenish the army, especially the higher ranks, until the end of the war. Due to the shock of these losses, the initial enthusiasm for the war soon disappeared and gave way to a latently defeatist mood that took possession of the troops as well as of large parts of the population. Increasingly, the hopelessness of the Central powers’ war effort was recognized. Thus Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was closely connected with academic circles at Cambridge and was friends with two of the most important philosophers of his time, Bertrand Russell and George Edward Moore, memorably wrote in his encoded ‘secret’ diary on October 25, 1914: Today feeling more than ever the terrible sadness of our – the German – race’s situation! This is because I am quite certain that we cannot hold out against England. The English – the best race in the world – cannot lose! Yet we can lose and will lose, if not this year then in the year to come! The thought of our race being beaten depresses me immensely, for I am German through and through!
A Defeatist Mood in The Army
By the end of the war, the spirit that bound officers and men to the imperial war effort had vanished. After four years of fighting, the complete breakdown of military discipline precipitated the disintegration of the empire’s multi-national army, which had long been such a powerful instrument of imperial rule, and with it the demise of the monarchy itself. In spite of this, the army’s positions at the Piave on the border with Italy was held and large parts of Poland, the Ukraine, Serbia, Romania, Montenegro, and Albania remained occupied. However, the signs of growing exhaustion and attenuation increased. Like the loss of manpower, munition supplies had also been drained. Uniforms were in tatters. Hunger prevented efficient military actions, and desertion became a mass phenomenon. As late as June 1918, a major offensive was started in Italy. But with enormous casualties, its only result was to show that the Austro-Hungarian army was in fact disintegrating. Now, in the fifth autumn of the war, the collective acts of insubordination that occurred were virtually unprecedented in military history: disregarding orders troops left their positions in droves and deserted to their homelands. Defeat, demobilisation, and both social and national revolutions went hand in hand.
Flawed Assumptions of the High Command
Increasingly torn by the struggles of its many internal nations, the dual monarchy had hoped to solve its ongoing internal crisis by waging war. However, the army’s high command as well as the political elites had not really been prepared for the reality of the First World War. Quite obviously they had not grasped the nature of modern, mechanized mass warfare and were unable to adapt their strategy, tactics, and logistics. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were pointlessly sent to their deaths as the high command stubbornly clung to essentially pre-modern, textbook doctrines about conducting war. They gave far too little consideration to the devastating effects of advanced weapons technology. The hinterland was kept in check by severe measures. The initial enthusiasm for the war had quickly spent itself due to the suspension of the Constitution, continual breaches of the law, excessive censorship of information and opinions, the military regimentation of factories and, above all, the unimaginable horrors of the battlefields. In an essay written about six months after the beginning of the war, Sigmund Freud attested to The Disillusionment of the War. According to Freud, war in its blind fury was crushing whatever was in its way, as if there should be no future and no peace ever again. The belligerent nation was guilty of all injustice and all violence: We cannot but feel that no event has ever destroyed so much that is precious in the common possessions of humanity, confused so many of the clearest intelligences, or so thoroughly debased what is highest. The collectivities of mankind, the peoples and states, had demanded extreme obedience and the sacrifice of individuals, while at the same time abandoning all moral limitations in their dealings with one another. Injustice had been nationally legitimized and monopolized by the state. When, according to Freud, the civilizational achievements that resulted from the suppression and sublimation of primitive urges had become suspended (even if only temporarily), humans were prone to commit acts of cruelty, cunning, treachery and brutality that were completely at odds with their peacetime cultures. The great poet Rainer Maria Rilke summed this up in the most striking manner when he said that the world had fallen into the hands of man (Die Welt ist in die Hände der Menschen gefallen).
The Aftermath
After four years of the First World War’s mass murder, the shattered, horrified and traumatized masses would set about tearing down the established worldly and religious order; they would abolish or re-define empires, dynasties, social orders and values that had lasted for centuries. Mass warfare had resulted in a series of revolutions, technological, social and cultural, in politics as well as in economies, in the organization of production as well as in that of the masses. This released immense social and political energies and also signified an unprecedented intellectual and artistic departure from previous norms. However, as a result of Europe’s collective trauma other events would emerge: the militarization of politics, autocratic regimes and totalitarian dictatorships, genocide, and another global war of extermination.
Wolfgang Maderthaner