Page - 216 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

216 Adjusting to a Longer War The medical treatment of the army and the civilian population could barely be mastered in the two halves of the Empire. At the start of the war, in the Common Army and in the two territorial armies there had been a total of 1,500 military surgeons.511 Despite the almost immediate enlistment of most of the physicians from the reserves and the Landsturm conscripts, there was a shortage of doctors at the front. As a result of the considerable need for military surgeons, already at the beginning of the war a shortage of doctors had arisen on the home front. For this reason, the older doctors among the Landsturm conscripts and those who had been released from the army again had to remain at home so that the entire system of medical care did not collapse. The willingness of highly regarded doctors and professors who were in no way el- igible to be called up to promptly volunteer for the medical care system in the field army was ultimately just a drop in the ocean and in addition a more than two-edged sword, which could be explained not just by the Hippocratic Oath but far more so by the enthusiasm for the war on the one hand and a widespread basic attitude of Dar- winism, to which the doctors had a particularly close affinity, on the other. Now it was a question of selection. The doctors would also be given ample opportunity to extend their experiences and knowledge. The war was a ‘great, highly informative teacher’, as Surgeon General Paul Mydracz wrote ;512 from a scientific standpoint it was ‘an expe- rience that was genuinely creative for research purposes’ and ‘a highly interesting mass experiment’.513 ‘There were certainly enough subjects of study.’ Doctors were scarce, however. An infantry regiment was supposed to have five doctors, but it had generally only three, and at least temporarily there was often no doctor available at all.514 It was not only the case that the number of wounded soon exceeded the capacity of the dress- ing stations, the garrison infirmaries, the troop infirmaries and the reserve infirmaries ; the doctors themselves were also subject to injury and death or they ended up in war captivity.515 The war of movement repeatedly called the intricate system of the first and second ‘auxiliary line’ into question, where the wounded should be moved from the auxiliary stations in the immediate vicinity of the front via the dressing stations of the divisional medical hospitals in ramshackle field houses or in the case of serious injuries in field infirmaries, mobile reserve infirmaries and, ultimately, with ‘permanent sick transports’ to the ‘stables’ and the ‘voluntary medical hospitals’.516 Contrary to the Geneva Convention of 1906, it frequently happened that the medical hospitals were shelled. If serious setbacks occurred and the front was precipitously withdrawn, the provision of orderly medical services was out of the question.517 Furthermore, for the huge increase in the number of operations, ever more surgeons were required. There was no shortage of pharmacies and even the medical material that was passed on to the base command from the Imperial and Royal War Ministry definitely corresponded to the level of medical and pharmacology of the time. The amounts requested by the Military Medication Directorate in Vienna appeared even to the medical chiefs to be ‘abnormal’.