Page - 57 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

The ‘entire armed force’ 57 tionalities. And it could not be denied that the German Austrians tended to link their own personal fate with that of the Empire and its armed forces. The Germans within the Dual Monarchy made up around 24 per cent of the total population. Yet of the 98 generals and 17,811 officers in the Imperial and Royal Army in 1911, the last year for which exact statistics are available, 76.1 per cent were of German nationality. 10.7 per cent were Hungarians and 5.2 per cent Czechs. In statistical terms, Croats, Slovaks, Ruthenians, Poles, Romanians, Slovenes, Serbs and Italians, on the other hand, did not play a particularly important role in the Common Army. Among the reserve officers it was a similar story : 56.8 per cent were Germans, 24.5 per cent Hungarians and 10.6 Czechs. Only among the non-commissioned officers and the enlisted men did a proportion of 25 per cent Germans of all ranks correspond to their actual proportion of the population. Also worthy of noting is the proportion of Jews, who did not ac- tually constitute their own nationality but, with over 44,000 men or three per cent of all soldiers, constituted a considerably larger proportion of the armed forces than, for example, the Slovenes. Within the territorial armies things naturally looked different, as they reflected to a far greater degree than the Common Army the circumstances in the respective parts of the Empire and replacement districts.110 The German character of the army was also evident in another area, where it did not necessarily have to be the case, namely in the Imperial and Royal Ministry of War. Of the 614 civil servants who served in this ministry before the war, 419, i.e. 68 per cent, were Germans. They were followed by the Czechs as the next biggest nationality with 91 civil servants or 14 per cent. Even the Imperial and Royal War Minister in the years 1913 to 1917, Baron Alexander Krobatin, was regarded as Czech. The Hungarians were only in third place with 42 people or seven per cent.111 The disproportionately large proportion of Germans among the officers, but also among the reserve officers and in the military civil service, contributed to the other nationalities often being barely represented in command and other senior positions. A glance at the ‘Schematism for the Imperial and Royal Army and Navy’, for example for the year 1914, is admittedly in itself sufficient to demonstrate that neither the army nor the military administration can be confined to a single mould. It holds furthermore true for both soldiers and officers that they cultivated an ‘us’ feeling that no other pillar of state power possessed to a comparable extent. Never- theless, there were strict dividing lines. Officers associated with non-commissioned officers and enlisted men exclusively on official business. Any officer who offered his hand to a subordinate outside of work, discussed private matters with him or sat in a tavern with him, risked the loss of his reputation. Officers and non-officers embodied two social worlds that barely touched one another. And certainly many things required a lot of getting used to. Those soldiers on the periphery of the Empire sometimes came from imaginably primitive backgrounds and had to be socialised in the shortest time.