Page - 333 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

Of Heroes and Cowards 333 when Infantry Regiment No. 97 (‘Triest’) displayed little willingness to fight, and sev- eral hundreds of soldiers were sent back ‘due to cowardice’, before being found guilty and distributed among Hungarian and Croatian regiments. However, this was regarded as an exception. Major General Franz von Rohr, who was given the task of securing the border with Italy, reported only 17 deserting soldiers from the Common Army at the beginning of 1915 : two Landwehr officers and 68 members of the Landwehr and the Landsturm of Italian origin who had fled. There were also 68 deserters and soldiers who had aban- doned their posts from the Trento (Trient) fortress command area. For a time, it was debated whether mandatory passport checks should be introduced for people travelling to and from the crown lands bordering Italy. However, due to the fear of negative effects on how such a measure would be perceived in Italy, the plan was dropped.777 At first, the deserters and soldiers who had abandoned their posts did not really make much difference. The Italians were in most cases used in the formation of the ‘Kaiserjäger’ Imperial Tyrolean Rifle Regiments Nos. 1, 2, 3 and 4, where they constituted around 40 per cent of the troops. Their share in the Tyrolean Standing Infantry Battalions II and III was similarly high. The rifle regiments and standing infantry battalions enjoyed a particularly high reputation for courage and bravado that was in no way undermined by the behaviour of the Italians. Only during April and May 1915 did it become nec- essary to monitor them more closely. A directory of deserters, soldiers who had escaped muster and ‘Welsch Tyroleans’ from the Italian South Tyrol region gave around 9,000 names, of which around half were deserters. Most of them came from the imperial rifle regiments and here a particularly large number came from the 4th Regiment. However, the Tyrolean territorial infantry battalions would later be included more frequently in the list. Among the soldiers abandoning their posts were a particularly large number of farmers.778 The fact that Damiano Chiesa, son of a member of the Tyrolean Landtag (regional diet) and finally the member of the Reichsrat (Imperial Assembly), Cesare Battisti, absconded to Italy, had a signal effect certainly on Italy, but least of all on Aus- tria-Hungary, and the change in the political situation and ultimately the entry of Italy into the war appeared to have almost no effect on the reliability of those troops with a higher share of Italians fighting in Russia, as well as those who were later deployed against Italy. There, it was of far greater importance that the reliability could be counted on of the 3,400 Standschützen (members of rifle companies) of Italian origin, and that young men from Trieste (Triest) who were loyal to the Emperor were joining a ‘Youth Rifle Battalion’.779 Far less predictable than the Romanians and Italians in Austria-Hungary was the behaviour of the Austrian Serbs. At the beginning of the war, they were in a most un- fortunate position, since being Serb and yet having to fight against Serbia amounted to a crucial test. During the weeks between the assassination in Sarajevo and the be-