Page - 270 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

270 Adjusting to a Longer War this command to the Prime Minister or the Emperor was ultimately supported and signed by the nominal Army Supreme Commander, Archduke Friedrich. With his extreme inclination to make life comfortable for himself, however, Archduke Friedrich as an individual who lacked both the ambition and the dynamism to make more of his position as Army Supreme Commander, where there was certainly room for im- provement. For this reason, he allowed himself to be used by Conrad for a long period of time. Friedrich also succumbed to self-delusion of a particular kind. If the Imperial and Royal armies gained victories, Conrad’s military genius was praised and the Army Su- preme Commander put up with the fact that he was not even mentioned. However, if the troops failed to achieve success and there were defeats, the Archduke came into the line of fire. And yet he remained supportive of the Chief of the General Staff and shielded him from his critics. At the beginning of November, it became necessary to draw the armies far back to the area south of Kraków in order to gain some degree of operational freedom. The Army High Command transferred to Cieszyn (Teschen) on 10 November, a location far behind the front that offered not least the advantage of containing a residence owned by Archduke Friedrich, a small palace with stables, a carriage house, greenhouses and gardens. The Archduke could feel at home. However, outward appearances suffered at least somewhat, since the Army Supreme Commander and the supreme command had left the Galician theatre of war. Once the Army High Command departments had been accommodated in the Albrecht gymnasium school, however, the military control centre could again be regarded as operational. At the front, a major shift of forces also began. The Imperial and Royal 2nd Army under Böhm-Ermolli gave up a part of its troops, who were taken far behind the front to the Kraków area. Larger sections of the 4th Army, which was deployed to the east of the 1st Army, were also to become effective in the Kraków area. This marked the start of an operation designed not only to give the 1st Army more space to breathe, but also to relieve the burden on the German troops, who had retreated to the Torún area. The Chief of the German General Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, paid full tribute to this action : ‘The Austro-Hungarian Army has suffered heavily. Nevertheless, the army command there is doing everything to lead the operations in a manner beneficial to the alliance. It has moved three armies to the left bank of the Vistula and has left only weak forces in Galicia. This amounts to an act of sacrifice.’651 Falkenhayn’s comments should be taken with caution, since this phase of the First World War is so strongly overridden by later ones, in which the impression was created by the German side that without German troops, success would have been impossible for the Central Powers. Here, it claimed, the actions taken by its alliance partner were no more than a fulfilment of its obligations.