Page - 324 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

324 Under Surveillance Almost even more conspicuous than the enormous losses in the infantry was the failure of the cavalry. At the beginning of the war, one cavalry troop division counted 2,400 riders and had a 24-km long supply convoy. The peacetime organisation and training were not appropriate to war. ‘Court influences had indeed caused damage in this re- spect’, claimed Theodor von Zeynek.757 However, it was not only the bulky nature of the cavalry formations that had forced the cavalry to dismount. Its weaponry and code of action were out of date. When during the fighting around Telatyn on 6 September the Russians were forced back and two squadrons of the 6th Cavalry Rifle Regiment were to be sent after them, it became clear that this was an impossible task. Of the 400 riders still counted during the previous days, only 40 now still had horses that were fit to march. ‘The horses had become unusable en masse due to saddle breakages, and the impossibility of tending to their hooves also led to countless casualties’, noted Con- stantin Schneider.758 The next item in the search for an explanation concerned the insufficient prepa- ration for the war, and the budget policies of the countries participating in the war were compared. It was clear that here, Austria fared badly, particularly badly for some weapons and branches of the military. However, this could not only be explained simply by drawing up a list of how little Austria-Hungary had spent in the pre-war years on its army (not the fleet !), how much stronger a Russian division was against an Aus- tro-Hungarian one, and how many more pieces of artillery it had, etc.759 The fact was that the artillery was frequently too weak to provide the infantry with effective cov- ering fire, that the Imperial and Royal divisions initially had too few guns, and that a proportion of these were out of date. In the interim, a different war standard had most certainly arisen in this area, too, and Austria-Hungary was catching up  – as indeed it must. The problem was that the first months had had such a devastating effect on the whole operation that they could no longer be made good. The technical troops, the telegraph and telephone departments, were regarded as being above any praise, and the same applied to the pioneers. Very little attention was usually paid to the supply convoy and the entire mechanism for supplying provisions, although it was precisely this that was frequently the nervus rerum. There are naturally many factors that make a comparison between branches of the military and troops far more problematic, since the major differences were due not only to the difficulty and length of the battles, but also the varying assessments of the troops by their commanders, and here the national composition naturally played a significant role, as did that of the officer corps in particular. Since, however, most officers were of German or Hungarian origin, or at least were counted among these nationalities, the suspicion of an unbalanced judgement cannot be dismissed. This would ultimately also be reflected in the written documents about the war, particularly in the work of the General Staff on Austria-Hungary’s final war, which was completed in 1938 and which