Page - 264 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

264 Adjusting to a Longer War yone who might have thought that these successes would increase the willingness of the Commander of the Fleet to take risks was to be proven wrong. Haus continued to regard his objective as being to protect the Croatian and Dalmatian coasts. He was also unmoved by the criticism of his activities in the Army High Command, and by the fact that precisely in times of severe setbacks for the Imperial and Royal armies, there were hopes of a success at sea in order to achieve a type of propagandistic counter-ef- fect. The Commander of the Fleet was also not minded to be blown off course by the increasingly impudent taunts from the German naval attaché in Vienna, Lieutenant Commander Albrecht von Freyberg.630 He was also not sufficiently impressed by events in Galicia, nor by those in the Serbian theatre of war, to begin an operation designed only for show. His business was the war at sea. In the Shadow of the Gallows During the first weeks of the war, the image of the troops marching out, the national enthusiasm, the coming into effect of emergency laws, the measures for psychological warfare and the adjustment of the Dual Monarchy to the needs of a war economy cre- ated a situation in which there was hardly any time to reflect on everything that was happening, or even to acknowledge all the individual events. In August 1914, the Army High Command had willingly attested to the political administration that its work was making excellent progress and that no tensions had arisen during mobilisation as a result of any domestic policies. With the implementation of the imperial decree on the authority of the Army High Command over domestic policy in certain areas, namely the north-eastern parts of Moravia, Bukovina and Galicia and by the Balkan High Command in the Bačka region, the southern counties of Hungary, in Croatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina and Dalmatia, the army took responsibility for the implementation of the emergency laws and did all it could to ensure that they were observed. The supreme commands also had no qualms about using this authorisation. The armies, corps and divisions then rigorously put the intended measures into practice. Hostages were con- scripted, fines and deposits were imposed, houses were destroyed and, finally, citing the ‘right to self-defence in war’, executions by firing squad were carried out under martial law.631 The fear of spies was ubiquitous, and even a hardened news reporter such as Maximilian Ronge wrote subsequently that the army had known no mercy, had acted ruthlessly and was mistrustful of more or less the entire population of Galicia. There was also no mercy shown when corpses were robbed ; if the perpetrators were caught in the act, they were executed.632 Any hostile tendencies that were displayed towards Austria during July and August 1914 were punished in a large number of different ways. Other events emerged of their