Page - 321 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

Of Heroes and Cowards 321 only the bare number of losses could be processed, without having precise information about the original troop numbers. For this reason, it was hardest of all to make state- ments about the losses of the individual branches of the military, or even about indi- vidual armies. The problem was that the figures varied to an extremely high degree. At the end of June 1915, the Imperial and Royal 1st Army had 1,891 officers and 46,260 troops, while the 2nd Army counted 3,043 officers and 84,347 troops. At the same time, the 2nd Army had lost 28,957 men overall during the second half of May alone. All the losses of all armies on all the fronts totalled 93,192 men during the second half of May, around four times as much as during the first half of the same month.751 The total num- ber of deaths among Imperial and Royal troops in June 1915, in other words, during a month of major successes in the Russian theatre of war, a quiet Serbian-Montenegrin front and a situation in which the shooting war against Italy was only just beginning was 2,511 officers and 193,000 men. In the War Statistics Bureau and in the cCsualties Group of the War Ministry, new efforts were made not only to count the figures, but also to analyse them. It was calcu- lated that in the months until June 1915, the casualty losses among officers and cadets made up between 7.1 and 7.4 per cent of the total losses of officers ; over 50 per cent of the losses were caused by injury, and around 27-30 per cent were soldiers who had been taken prisoner or were missing  – with the figure tending to increase. The official comment made by the War Ministry was that ‘Losses among our officers remain very high’. ‘According to the absolute figures, they are likely to be lower than the losses in the army of our ally, the German Empire ; in relation to the total number of soldiers in both armies, however, our losses are almost double the level of theirs’. The figure most difficult to calculate was that relating to the number of prisoners and the missing, and here the picture changed dramatically, particularly among the troops. If the first weeks and months of the war, which were atypical in every way, are first set aside, then grad- ually, a type of normality emerged  – to the extent that such a thing was at all possible in a war. During the first months of 1915, between 8.4 and 8.6 per cent of the losses among the troops resulted from casualties and around 40 per cent were due to injury, while around half of all losses were accounted for by soldiers who had been taken prisoner or were missing. Of course, the statistics were unable to provide information on the reasons why soldiers were captured or went missing, but it was evident that the men fighting in the Imperial and Royal Army were far more willing to raise their hands in surrender or desert than the soldiers from any other power fighting in the war. And even if the number of fallen and wounded was interpreted as being somewhat higher, at the end of the day, it remained the case that around half of the Austro-Hungarian troop losses were due to captured and missing soldiers. The distribution of the losses among the individual sections of the army needed less interpretation. Around 65 per cent were sustained by the Imperial and Royal Army,