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226 Adjusting to a Longer War
The dispatches about defeats, the dissolution of senior command posts and, above all, of
exorbitant losses, become more frequent. The XII Corps was said to have lost around 40
per cent of its officers, whilst one mountain unit had lost 32 of its 36 pieces of artillery.
From Lviv, taken by the Russians, it was heard that young girls had showered the Rus-
sians with flowers. Gródek was burning. Then it rained for days and at the beginning
of September it was already very cold. On 3 September the relocation of the Aus-
tro-Hungarian Army High Command started. It was to be transferred from Przemyśl
to Nowy Sącz (Neu Sandez) ; the wartime court household of the Archduke/Supreme
Commander was even to be moved as far as Nowy Targ (Neumarkt). It was now a case
of evading the enemy and becoming accustomed to setbacks. The army leadership had
to furthermore contend with a crisis of a particular kind among the generals. Among
the Imperial and Royal generals, the harvest reaped by death and by their superior au-
thorities was plentiful.
The Death of General Wodniansky
On 28 August 1914, when the Imperial and Royal 4th Army prepared to carry out the
operation that would become known as the Battle of Komarów, the Commander of
the VI Corps, General of Infantry Svetozar Boroević, sent from Tomaszów the orders
for the day to his 15th Infantry Division and added : ‘This is the decisive battle.’ On
the following day, 29 August, a map on a scale of 1 :75,000 was enclosed with the few
dockets, dispatches and orders that had been deposited by the 15th Infantry Division in
the operational files, on which the village of Pukarzów, located around seven kilometres
north of Horodok, is marked. Next to it, a small cross was added and ‘MG [= Major
General] Wodniansky’ written next to it. The cross was evidently supposed to mark the
spot where Major General Friedrich Wodniansky von Wildenfeld had met his death.
Boroević wrote on this day on a piece of paper : ‘Troops have fulfilled their task magnif-
icently.’542 Yet the divisional commander had killed himself.
The news of his suicide spread. The Deputy Chief of the Imperial Military Chan-
cellery Major General Marterer noted in his diary entry for 30 August : ‘MG Wod-
niansky, Commander of the 15th Infantry Troop Division, has shot himself.’ The sur-
rounding circumstances were not mentioned, but his death increasingly conformed
to the fate of many, who appeared to confirm what had initially been registered with
some disbelief : during the first weeks and months of the war, the Imperial and Royal
generals had suffered similarly high losses to the subalterns and the troops, though
for different reasons. The ‘senior leadership of the Habsburg armies’, in the words of
Rudolf Kiszling, one of the authors of the General Staff work that emerged after the
war, was relieved of its command, suspended and declared unfit for service one after
THE FIRST WORLD WAR
and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918
- Title
- THE FIRST WORLD WAR
- Subtitle
- and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918
- Author
- Manfried Rauchensteiner
- Publisher
- Böhlau Verlag
- Location
- Wien
- Date
- 2014
- Language
- English
- License
- CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
- ISBN
- 978-3-205-79588-9
- Size
- 17.0 x 24.0 cm
- Pages
- 1192
- Categories
- Geschichte Vor 1918
Table of contents
- 1 On the Eve 11
- 2 Two Million Men for the War 49
- 3 Bloody Sundays 81
- 4 Unleashing the War 117
- 5 ‘Thank God, this is the Great War!’ 157
- 6 Adjusting to a Longer War 197
- 7 The End of the Euphoria 239
- 8 The First Winter of the War 283
- 9 Under Surveillance 317
- 10 ‘The King of Italy has declared war on Me’ 355
- 11 The Third Front 383
- 12 Factory War and Domestic Front, 1915 413
- 13 Summer Battle and ‘Autumn Swine’ 441
- 14 War Aims and Central Europe 469
- 15 South Tyrol : The End of an Illusion (I) 497
- 16 Lutsk :The End of an Illusion (II) 521
- 17 How is a War Financed ? 555
- 18 The Nameless 583
- 19 The Death of the Old Emperor 607
- 20 Emperor Karl 641
- 21 The Writing on the Wall 657
- 22 The Consequences of the Russian February Revolution 691
- 23 Summer 1917 713
- 24 Kerensky Offensive and Peace Efforts 743
- 25 The Pyrrhic Victory : The Breakthrough Battle of Flitsch-Tolmein 769
- 26 Camps 803
- 27 Peace Feelers in the Shadow of Brest-Litovsk 845
- 28 The Inner Front 869
- 29 The June Battle in Veneto 895
- 30 An Empire Resigns 927
- 31 The Twilight Empire 955
- 32 The War becomes History 983
- Epilogue 1011
- Afterword 1013
- Acknowledgements and Dedication 1019
- Notes 1023
- Selected Printed Sources and Literature 1115
- Index of People and Places 1155