Page - 163 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

Deployment in Echelons and Packets 163 via Germany. However, the consequences of the betrayal could not entirely be made good. Redl had disclosed secret logbooks, mobilisation instructions, cover addresses and the documents relating to the strategic plans of the General Staff from 1910/11. To con- clude that because of this, the war was lost right from the beginning is of course absurd and borders on star-gazing. Naturally, the ‘Redl case’ was excellently suited to a curious interplay between not always adequate investigative and occasionally sensationalist jour- nalism and the arguments already presented in the autumn of 1914 by the Austro-Hun- garian army leaders and general staff members, for whom it was convenient to present the serious defeats of the Imperial and Royal Army in the initial campaigns as a result of Alfred Redl’s activities. In actual fact, much had changed by day X + 1, and what had been considered a state secret before the war was relativised during the course of the first hostile action. Equally, and probably far more convincingly, it could be argued that the Russians were finally defeated in the war because the cryptographs working for the Imperial and Royal Army had deciphered the Russian code, and were able to read the dispatches to the headquarters and staffs of the Russian Army almost from the first day of the war onwards. This amounted to around 10,000 orders and reports during the sec- ond half of 1916 alone. Despite this, even such an explanation, which does not take into account the political and operative processes, would be an impermissible simplification. The plans against Serbia were also characterised by a series of imponderabilities. As was the case with Russia, Serbia was ‘served’ by Redl. And in August 1914, everything suddenly changed. Since it was not anticipated in the Operations Bureau of the Im- perial and Royal General Staff that Serbia would begin an offensive across the Dan- ube, but would be likely to control Bosnia from Višegrad and Užice, considerations of massing Imperial and Royal troops on the Danube were definitively revised in favour of deploying in southern Croatia and in Bosnia. However, time and again, there were serious objections to the plan. For example at the Imperial and Royal Military Academy, the training establishment of the General Staff, studies were discussed in May 1913 regarding the ‘influence of the geographic conditions on an offensive against Serbia’. Here, the core argument was that in an offensive by the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy against Serbia, the conditions for rapid success would only be fulfilled via Belgrade. ‘Belgrade is the open gate to Serbia’, they claimed.379 This opinion was also voiced not least by Brigadier Alfred Krauss who would later be a successful military leader in the world war, and who at that time was the Commander of the Military Academy. However, Conrad and the regional commander of Bosnia and Herzegovina, General of Artillery Potiorek, had decided on a concentration south of the Sava from Mitrovica to Sarajevo. Here, the matter would have to be put to rest, and the railway deployment was also to be planned accordingly. The notion had already begun to be popular early on that preparations must be made for a rapid strike against Serbia, while no allowance should be made for an interven-