Page - 347 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

The Prague ‘House Regiment’ 347 clear in advance that the proposal would be rejected. Another approach was therefore attempted : if troops were reported to be unreliable, they were to be assigned particu- larly well-performing adjacent formations. However, this was not always possible, since the troops were not available, and the integration of good officers who spoke Czech proved a failure since there were too few of them. In order to prevent the incidents in the reinforcement districts that had already long been regarded with suspicion, at- tempts were then made to call up the replacement troops at the earliest possible point in time, to assign them to formations and to make them ready for departure as quickly as possible. This generated a new imbalance. The prohibitive formation assignments were then interpreted to the extent that more Czechs were called up than Germans, which again gave rise to resentment and unrest. In March, the governor, Prince Franz von Thun-Hohenstein, who had pleaded for calm, finally resigned, and was replaced by Count Maximilian Coudenhove-Kalergi. This could by no means be regarded by the Czechs as an affront. To a far greater degree, it was a victory of the moderates in Vi- enna and ultimately also of the Foreign Ministry, since the Army High Command had vehemently, and in vain, pleaded for the appointment of a military governor. Now, it wanted to achieve at least one aim : the Army High Command made an application to the Imperial and Royal War Ministry that the families of soldiers who had been proven to have surrendered voluntarily and who had deserted should be denied their dues, and that this should also be made public. Their argument was that the families of ‘traitors to the fatherland’ should not be allowed to live off the state. Here, the attitude of the Cabinet in Vienna, which was keen to make conciliations, again prevailed. This did not prevent the Army High Command from furiously forwarding a message according to which on the day on which Przemyśl fell (22 March), 1,200 Czechs had apparently sworn an oath of allegiance to the Tsar.813 Finally, however, the desertion of the Czechs reached such a high level that there was no longer anything to be gained from attempting to ignore it. The most spectacular case in which the Czech troops were the focus of attention was that of Infantry Regi- ment No. 28, in which on 3 April 1915 near Zboriv (Zborow) to the south of the Dukla Pass, a type of mass flight occurred.814 The capture of a part of the regiment by Russians gave cause for investigations, attempts at justification and disciplinary measures. The case stood out not least because the neighbouring troop bodies of the III Corps, the ‘Feldjäger’ Light Infantry Battalion No. 20 and Infantry Regiment No. 87, as well as the ‘Kaiserjäger’ Imperial Rifle Regiment No. 4, Slovenes, Italians and Germans, had held their ground very well. The failure and the mass desertion of parts of the Prague ‘House Regiment’ was, as it were, the straw that broke the camel’s back. The Commander of the 3rd Army, General Boroević, decreed that the regiment be disbanded as punishment. The case created a huge stir and was seen above all as a confirmation of what had long been known already. The results of the investigation, while they were at least made