Page - 460 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

460 Factory War and Domestic Front, 1915 reported : ‘Mor to be cut down. It appears that it has been discovered that he informed Marterer regarding the autumn swine.’1097 The fact that the point of culmination of the battle in the east had passed was also underlined by the fact that the will to fight was decreasing rapidly. In the 4th Army, which was the most severely affected, almost 62 per cent of all losses were missing men, of whom the very large majority was most likely to have been taken captive.1098 In the German Army, by the end of 1915, an average of 5.2 per cent of officer losses were caused by men going missing or being taken prisoner. During the campaign in Rivne by the Imperial and Royal armies, this figure reached almost 30 per cent, and in the 4th Army, it had been almost 33 per cent. Among the Germans, the ratio of sick to wounded officers by the end of 1915 was 1 :2.4. In the Austro-Hungarian Army, it was noticeable that the number of sick officers was greater than the number of those wounded with a ratio of 1.6 :1.1099 Since the reports on losses had clearly only be very cursory, the ru- mours of conditions in the north-eastern theatre of war proliferated more intensely. The Emperor demanded clarification, and the Military Chancellery ordered detailed reports. However, as Major General Marterer noted on 26 September, the Army High Com- mand responded in a contemptuous tone that one should ‘not believe the irresponsible rumours’. The situation was presented as being highly favourable.1100 At the same time, no mention was made of the fact that, again, entire regiments had broken up in the same way as Infantry Regiment No. 36 had in its day. There had been eminent crises among the 19th Infantry Division, which comprised mainly Czech and Ruthenian troops, as well as by Light Infantry Battalion No. 22 (‘Eger’) and the Bosnian-Herzegovinian In- fantry Regiment No. 1 and other troop bodies. In some cases, they disappeared without trace and crossed over to the Russian side. The result of mass desertions in one troop body was that the threshold of inhibition was lowered for the others. Why should they be the ones to hold out, after all ? Even so, the front could be regarded as having been consolidated. The Russians were no longer able to launch a large-scale attack without completely reorganising and replenishing their armies. And the troops fighting for the Central Powers took up what was known as the ‘entrenched position’, in which they dug themselves in with the aim of limiting themselves to defence. The focus of the Central Powers shifted to the western front in the case of Germany, to the south-west in the case of Austria-Hungary and, finally, for both, to the Balkans. The Fourth Offensive against Serbia On 4 October 1915, the Chief of the General Staff of the Imperial and Royal Army wrote to the Head of the Military Chancellery of the Emperor that he would be de- parting from Cieszyn the following day in order to present information to the Emperor