Page - 187 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

The Initial Campaigns 187 Army High Command and the delegate of the command of the Balkan forces ordered ‘a rush forward, without taking in to account the tactical situation’. ‘Order upon order was given, only to be followed by counter-orders. It was purest idiocy’, noted Brigadier Zanantoni on 13 August, who shortly afterwards was given command of the 29th In- fantry Division.443 The plan was to reach Valjevo by 18 August, since on this day, the corps of the 2nd Army that had deployed on the Sava and the Danube was due to depart. Aside from this, some commanders, and probably also Potiorek, had an eye on that date, since it was the Emperor’s birthday. And on this day, a first great success was to be laid at the feet of the Monarch. The soldiers were driven forward. Losses counted for nothing, and neither did the fact that provisions could not be delivered quickly enough, so that the soldiers remained without sufficient food for three or four days. Despite all the harshness, it was simply not possible to make progress, however. The Serbs began a counterattack at Šabac, as a result of which the IV Corps, which belonged to the 2nd Army, had to be brought in. Indeed, in the event of a defeat due to lack of support from the two other corps, the 5th Army had even, as a precautionary measure, assigned the blame to the very corps that was in fact already due to travel to Galicia.444 The orders from the army commanders and the commander of the Balkan forces contradicted each other. Individuals began to take action according to their own judgement. After several days of fighting, the 21st Landwehr Infantry Division of the VIII Corps appeared to be in disarray. Since this was the Prague (‘Praha’) Corps, suspicions quickly arose that the Czechs were failing in their duty. On 19 August, the withdrawal began. The failure of the 21st Landwehr Infantry Division led to an investigation and the imposition of martial law. Giesl was relieved of his duties two weeks later. Yet ultimately, he and his soldiers were the least to blame for the failures. From the first day onwards, losses among the Austro-Hungarian troops were very high. It is a characteristic of all beginnings of wars that the troops on both sides suffer particularly high losses. This only abates during the progress of a war, and then, once it is clear who is the victor and who the loser, increases again towards the end at the cost of the latter. The high losses were reflected in the lists of casualties that were posted up on the War Ministry building in Vienna and disclosed in the newspapers. These lists very often spoke a far clearer language than the reports issued by the War Press Bu- reau, whose sketchy communiqués presented failures as intentional operational meas- ures. Here, the War Press Bureau may have come rather too close to the truth now and then, since in November 1914, the War Surveillance Office, which was subordinate to the War Ministry, ordered that the newspaper editors would do well to make enquiries in the Surveillance Office even in cases when the War Press Bureau had already given its stamp of approval to a report.445 How on earth were they to know about such a requirement ?