Page - 305 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

Death in the Carpathians 305 continuation of the offensive to Stanislau (now Ivano-Frankivsk). Perhaps the Russians would even withdraw troops from the Carpathian Mountains. The divisions for the second Carpathian offensive had barely been concentrated and stocked up, when they moved into their starting positions. Since the heavy artillery could not be brought forward due to the impassable paths, it had to remain where it was. The operation began on 27 February. The Russians again suffered heavy losses, but after a few days General Brusilov’s 8th Army commenced counterattacks. The Russians had sufficient forces to repeatedly remove their troops from the front and replace them with rested soldiers in dry clothes. Ultimately, however, even they advanced only slightly. On 12 March the temperatures sank anew to minus 20 degrees. A participating officer vividly described the situation : ‘In the entire offensive area [there were] no quarters, for days and weeks no man could change his clothes, on which in most cases hard crusts of ice form ; the ground, which was frozen hard as stone, prevents the attackers from digging themselves in against enemy fire ; losses increase enormously. The wounded, whose evacuation is extremely difficult, perish wretchedly in huge numbers ; the men, who are exhausted after weeks of fighting and privation, cannot even at night yield to sleep, which would mean an instant death from exposure to cold. […] without cover and unable to move, the infantry stands there in front of enemy obstacles ; the bulk of the artillery is still 3 or 4 days’ march behind the front. […] The fact that all the phys- ical misery also smooths the way for a moral demise is hardly surprising.’724 The report by the Commander of the 9th Infantry Division, Brigadier Josef Schön, to the Com- mander of the Imperial and Royal 2nd Army was much more immediate : his men cried, lay down on the ground during a snowstorm, pulled a tent cover over themselves,and let themselves get snowed in, in order to sleep and never wake up. Others exposed themselves in order to be killed. The number of suicides increased ; some people shot themselves. Many died at their posts from exhaustion.725 After the second Battle of the Carpathian Passes had finished, a third was ordered. This was a senseless act of desperation. Losses increased still further, and ultimately the number of dead, wounded and sick taken during the operations in the Carpathian win- ter of 1914/15 was higher than the entire garrison of Przemyśl. The relief of the fortress had not become more likely, however. To be added to the actual victims of the battles to relieve the fortress are the deserters, who must be judged as an alarm signal, because it was here that the men saw for the first time the images of the impending disintegration of the multinational state. The most desperate aspect of the situation is expressed only very remotely in the diary of the Adjutant of the Chief of the Austro-Hungarian General Staff, Lieuten- ant Colonel Kundmann : the Imperial and Royal 2nd Army reported on 14 March that from 95,000 men it had lost around 40,000, of which only 6,000 were losses in battle, whilst all others were from sickness and frostbite. ‘What can one do ? It’s no