Page - 542 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

542 Lutsk : The End of an Illusion (II) Luigi Cadorna remained in his function, however, and prepared the next battle on the Isonzo front. Five battles had already been fought there. The objective of the Italians had remained the same : Trieste (Triest). They repeatedly attacked. The deployment of artillery had become more substantial each time, but apart from the fact that literally every metre struggled for in the region of the mid-Isonzo and, above all, on the Karst Plateau of Doberdó, not very much had changed. Positions were dug in and caverns were blasted in the mountains around Gorizia. At the beginning of a battle there was an artillery barrage lasting several hours, after which came the first assaults. Positions were lost and then won back again. The next assaults took place. After days or a few weeks, the firing subsided. The wounded were brought to the rear ; the dead were bur- ied. The losses were counted. The Fourth Battle of the Isonzo in November 1915 had cost 49,000 men on the Italian side and 25,000 on the Austro-Hungarian side. The Fifth Battle in March 1916 had been broken off due to the South Tyrol offensive and had therefore cost ‘only’ 2,000 men dead or wounded on each side. It was a relentless war of attrition. And the general staffs on either side were naturally occupied with the question as to how they could finally achieve the breakthrough and escape from the stalemate. The Italian answer was to deploy even more artillery and infantry. The Impe- rial and Royal Army High Command, however, wanted to employ a weapon that was no longer so new : poison gas. Since autumn 1914, irritants, so-called ‘stench agents’, had also been increasingly employed by the Imperial and Royal Army.1279 Experiments were carried out with stench mines, which were designed for the 9 cm mortars of the Imperial and Royal Army. In February 1915, the effect of xylyl bromide (T-stoff) was tested. It was then mixed with bromoacetone (B-stoff) and the irritant was shot using mines, artillery shells and hand grenades. The development of irritants continued : bromomethyl ke- tone, methyl formate, chloromethyl chloroformate. The intended impact was impair- ment of vision, inflammation of the airways, nausea and vomiting. Thus, irritants were not deadly, but since their impact could only be reduced and neutralised with the help of gas masks, they restricted an opponent’s radius of action. At a meeting of the general staff chiefs, General Falkenhayn informed Conrad von Hötzendorf on 27 April 1915 that the Germans had used a new ‘smoking device’ at Ypres on the Western Front, with sweeping success. Falkenhayn had meant the attack on 22 April, during which chlorine gas from 6,000 bottles had been dropped over the Allied Front in the form of a gas-cylinder attack. The attack bought the German Army a gain in territory of around 4 km, though not the hoped-for victorious end to the war. Conrad was highly interested. Captain Maximilian von Ow was sent from Krems in order to study the principles of deployment and the impact at the German Gas Pioneer Regiment 36. He participated in the first gas-cylinder attack by the Germans on the Eastern Front and was subsequently taken ill himself as a result of the gas. In