Page - 235 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

The Death of General Wodniansky 235 were in the 4th Army during the course of the Battle of Komarów. Wild, headlong dashes, enthusiasm for war and recklessness formed a symbiosis. The same applied to the attempt to avert disaster with the courage of the desperate. The figures speak for themselves : during the course of the first months of the war until the end of December 1914, 40 Imperial and Royal officers of the rank of colonel and upwards fell in battle or succumbed to their wounds. During the entire rest of the war, i.e. in the next almost four years, it was only 30. Both officers and enlisted men were simply overburdened  – and they also overtaxed themselves. The consequences have been described many times. If we extract an image from the retreat of the initially victorious 4th Army : ‘Ever more people came from the engagement, passed us by  – even unwounded were among them, people who had thrown away their weapons, and then endless rows of wounded, people who had lost their mind from pain or shock, […] most of them with distorted features, their faces black with dust and earth, with wide open, bulging eyes and crazy expressions. Then the wagons : no longer pulled by the usual 6 horses, but only by 2 or 4. The limbers travelled alone, without the guns. […] Crowds of people clung to the limbers like refugees, hud- dled together and with the miserable expression of hopelessness. Many wore bandages, others bled without bandages ; they sat, their heads in their hands, from which the blood gushed out. There crouched a man rigidly, with hollow cheeks, sallow  – the dead had mingled with the living, they were taken along because there was no time to discard the unnecessary load. It was an endlessly sad train of death and misery.’571 They had barely come to rest before the personnel measures commenced. Emperor Franz Joseph regarded the dismissal of such and such a number of senior commanders, as mentioned above, with unease, perhaps even dismay. He sent the Deputy Director of his Military Chancellery to the Army High Command in order to put a stop to the sackings. But it was to no avail. Moreover, upon his return from Przemyśl Major Gen- eral Marterer reported to the Emperor : ‘Regarding the dismissals, I return as a convert and dare to most humbly request Your Majesty to make no further remarks to the AOK [Army High Command].’572 The Emperor adhered to this and attempted only in iso- lated cases to give comfort. The heir to the throne Archduke Karl Franz Josef, however, believed he had discovered the true cause of the dismissals, namely the lack of insight into human nature on the part of Chief of the General Staff Conrad von Hötzendorf, which had led to glaringly wrong choices being made.573 One must, however, come to Conrad’s defence against the heir to the throne, for although Conrad had admittedly been given the right to make suggestions, with so many personnel decisions his hands had been tied. And if one can talk of a lack of insight into human nature and ‘guilt’, then this is far more applicable to the immortalised Inspector General of the entire armed force, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. But Karl Franz Josef wanted to criticise him least of all. Conrad, however, was hell-bent on turning the General Corps inside out.