Page - 237 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

The Death of General Wodniansky 237 hysteria, many cases were of such a nature that they were not to be traced back to the immediate experience of war, namely shell impacts, wounds or the impression of the mass death, but instead to the sudden realisation ‘that one did not have the stuff of he- roes in him after all’.576 This concession naturally collided with the professional image of the officer, the demand to be tested, the question of honour, career and many other things. To be thrown off the predetermined course and not through injury or death but instead through dismissal and forced retirement could undoubtedly elicit a shock. Added to the question of honour was that of the virility of the warrior.577 In the case of those generals for whom nervousness was attested as a reason for their dismissal, Freud would perhaps have concluded that they were neurotics, but it was not that simple. In the realm of the unconscious it may have been a combination of several things, and here in the self-image of the generals and soldiers there were also overlaps : ‘Ambition, self-respect, patriotism, habituation to obedience [and] the example of oth- ers’, as Freud then wrote four years later in an evaluation for the Commission for the Investigation of Military Dereliction of Duty in War regarding the therapeutic method of Wagner-Jauregg,578 allowed them to wage this war and frequently give their all. Soldiers who did not measure up, however, were not removed and shunted to the rear with a medical certificate. They remained at the front  – and this was a big difference. Soldiers who landed in psychiatric clinics as so-called shell-shock sufferers were treated there with electric shocks and, although this was state of the art science at the time, one can only describe the agonies felt as a result as inhuman. No general was treated this way and the only officer of whom it is known that ‘faradisation’ was envisaged for him was cured of his signs of paralysis after having to witness a procedure of this nature.579 However, one should not pass blanket judgement on soldiers, doctors and, above all, the Austro-Hungarian generals, of whom up to the end of 1914 four of six at the level of army commander, six of 17 at the level of corps commander, around ten divisional commanders and two dozen brigade commanders were removed from one day to the next for not measuring up and were branded as failures, at least in the eyes of their comrades. Some of them went to pieces at this moment, such as General Wodniansky, of whom it was said he had fallen in battle, though it was not known when or where.