Page - 191 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

The Initial Campaigns 191 in laying the blame for the failure of the first offensive on insufficient support from the 2nd Army and thus from the Army High Command. The Emperor believed him, and the General of Artillery therefore planned a second operation in the direction of Valjevo.453 He sought to gain Conrad’s agreement, who, after some hesitation, gave his approval to the offensive and only urgently advised that the error of the initial battles should not be repeated, and that the armies should not be left without the opportunity to back each other up. It was the last time before the year ended that Conrad intervened in the operational planning and command in the Balkans. However, just when the Aus- trians were midway through their preparations for attack, the Serbs first took offensive action, advancing in the Banat region at Pančevo (Pancsova) and crossing the Sava with their ‘Timok’ division. Even though they were forced back, Potiorek’s second offensive, which began shortly afterwards, was again to prove unsuccessful. Again, the Imperial and Royal 5th Army was unable to achieve the goals it had been set. From 12 September onwards, the bad news intensified. Potiorek reacted with dis- missals and by again imposing martial law on the 21st Landwehr infantry division. In the lowlands of the Mačva district, the divisions remained stuck in boggy ground after several days of rainfall, and the soldiers became exhausted in the pathless mountain ranges on the border of Bosnia, above all on the ridges of Jagodnja mountain. They were chased from one direction to another, and by degrees were decimated by the Serbs. ‘[…] one imagines a war like this to be such a jolly event, and now what trials and suffering’, wrote the shocked commander of Base Supply Platoon 13, Second Lieutenant of the Reserve Eduard Draxler to his father on 13 September.454 The Serbs had consolidated their positions well and fought for every metre of ground, while the Imperial and Royal formations relied on their superior artillery. However, then the ammunition ran out and the troops were finally forced to dig trenches in order to be able to hold their positions in at least this makeshift way. By the end of September, the second offensive in the Balkans had also definitively failed. Even so, Potiorek’s reputation had still not suffered significantly and, in Vienna, the blame was laid at the door of Conrad to a far greater extent, since he had done too little in the way of making provisions for the Balkans. Conrad and Berchtold, who were already antagonists in peacetime, were unable to agree about the strategic goals. Berchtold was accused of having no understanding of the situation as a whole. His critics claimed that he had neglected before the war to gain reliable alliance partners in the Balkans, had focussed his attention solely on Ser- bia, and had not the least idea of what the consequences would be if the Russians were to break through in Galicia. Those in the Conrad faction found it necessary to point in particular to Berchtold’s ignorance of military strategy. ‘The age of the old Thugut appears to have returned.’455 In the same way ‘as in those days, when politicians issued operational commands to the different armies in the individual theatres of war, so now apparently, politicians, who themselves have limped about down erroneous paths, are