Page - 427 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

The Army High Command and Domestic Policy 427 the home front was ruled with the help of partially identical regulations, a consonance with the exceptional initially emerged. Still, it was not only a question of ensuring the passable functioning of state institutions, economic life, public order and social fabric, whilst the armies carried out operations on the fronts. Fundamental factors were re- peatedly affected. And here and there frictions and setbacks were the result. The Army High Command let it be known from the outset that the setbacks could be traced back to the much too limited defence expenditures in peacetime. There was a reckoning with dualism, parliamentarianism and individual politicians. Admittedly, the Imperial and Royal Army revealed weaknesses that had been intrinsic for a long time : tactical and operational procedures no longer corresponded to the demands ; the introduction of new weapons and armaments had been delayed through their own personal fault ; and the man-management appeared to some commanders to be a foreign concept. Com- plaints were made about faltering supplies and a lack of ammunition, and ultimately the lamentations became more frequent regarding the limited reliability of the Czechs, Ruthenians and Italians, and an ever more rigorous crackdown on the part of the au- thorities was demanded. The soldiers noticed this distrust and became stubborn. They were, therefore, increas- ingly separated from their national replacement areas. The new garrison towns were not willing, however, to accommodate foreign national troops, so they let their rejection be felt and only made the situation even worse.1019 There were violations of duty by reserve officers, which led to the demand of the Army High Command to particularly check the reliability of reserve officer aspirants.1020 When a territory was re-conquered, this resulted in conclusions of very different sorts being drawn. In Galicia, during the course of the major withdrawal operations in autumn 1914, 70,000 km2 had been relinquished. Half a million people had fled to the interior of the Dual Monarchy. They could now be successively repatriated. However, seven million peasants were left for the time being with nothing, since their farms and fields had been destroyed and their livestock reduced to zero. During their retreat, the Russians had unscrupulously destroyed or sought to destroy the infrastructure of the land and bring about the largest possible damage. But this was only one side of the coin. Soon thereafter, the Austrians claimed to have identified those guilty for contributing to the lack of any notable civilian resistance to the Russians in Galicia : the Orthodox Church had, so it was claimed, exerted a devastating influence. Alone in East Galicia, around 30,000 Catholics had been forced to convert. Schools had been closed on a large scale, whilst the University of Lviv (Lemberg) had been Russified. It was regarded as particularly irritating that the remaining Austrian gendarmes  – part of the armed power, after all  – had attempted to ingratiate themselves with their new masters by cooperating with the Russian Secret Police and blacklisting thousands of people for anti-Russian sentiment and resistance, so that these were then deported to Siberia. Wild expropria-