Page - 234 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

234 Adjusting to a Longer War commanders and a further corps commander of the Balkan High Command were then dismissed. It was repeatedly attempted to conceal the true circumstances. The medical certif- icates cited generally harmless illnesses or accidents : fallen from horse, old ailments, coughing, sciatica, stomach catarrh, numbness in the upper right extremity […] and repeatedly neurasthenia or a ‘general nervous debility due to wartime exertions’, as the doctor Brigadier Panesch willingly certified.567 The removal of a couple of dozen generals during the first weeks and months of the war has various aspects to it : in many cases, they had indeed failed to measure up. As the generals of the Imperial and Royal Army were merely generals of manoeuvre, they naturally suffered from a lack of wartime experience. Many of them could not adapt to the new challenges and simply failed. Perhaps the manoeuvres and war games of the period from 1906 also played a role, i.e. those years in which Conrad was Chief of the General Staff, since, in contrast to the period before, hardly any withdrawal operations were practised, but rather almost exclusively attacks. With the removal of generals, the Army High Command and the subordinated sen- ior commands attempted to get rid of people who did not measure up. Many generals were too old. The Radetzky model still appeared to be at work here, or at least the pragmatism of service, which permitted officers to reach senior ranks only late in the day, if at all. Frequently, they were not equal to the physical strains and the tremendous stress of the war. Near Delatyn, for example, when following the victory at Komarów the calamity contracted around Auffenberg’s Imperial and Royal 4th Army, an old cav- alry general, General Micewski, stood next to the road,568 with the remainder of his 9th Cavalry Brigade. He had only 80 men and two pieces of artillery. That was everything that had survived from two regiments of cavalry, a mounted artillery detachment with four batteries and the cavalry bridge train.569 However, in the dismissals and the declarations of unfitness for service things played a role that had nothing to do with this or that necessity. A great deal of resentment took effect, ruthlessness and the attempt to conceal one’s own mistakes. Culprits were sought. Added to this was ‘envy, a craving for decorations, egotism, vainglory [and] pre- suppositionless criticism of the senior command in order to enhance one’s own achieve- ments’.570 It was also a question here of masking withdrawals by means of a sheer gung-ho attitude. However, by no means everyone acted in the same way. There were dismissals in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Armies as well as in the Balkans. In General Dankl’s 1st Army, for which there were also setbacks, there was only one single dismissal, which was very probably health-related, and the army commander in question was also not simply dismissed and sent home. If we look at the names from colonel upwards of those who fell in battle during the year 1914, then further details catch our eye : the most dead from the senior ranks