Page - 226 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

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