Page - 782 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

782 The Pyrrhic Victory : The Breakthrough Battle of Flitsch-Tolmein sent back to the west as soon as possible. The overall situation would be most sustain- ably influenced by an offensive between Siret and the Prut River, he claimed, but an offensive at the Isonzo could also be considered. If the fighting in the Riga area and the season permitted it, then an offensive could indeed be conducted at the Isonzo. ‘You can be assured that it would be a cause of jubilation not only for my army, but throughout Germany, if it were to be possible for German troops together with your brave Isonzo fighters to deal the death blow to treacherous Italy. God grant that this day is approaching.’ This was followed by a snipe at Czernin : ‘I hope that the possible joint offensive by our allied armies will also lighten the mood of your Foreign Minister. On consideration of the overall situation, we have in my view no cause for any other mood than one of confidence. In loyal friendship  – Wilhelm.’1824 In order to convince Ludendorff of the advantage of sending German troops and to remove his misgivings that the Austrians were deliberately dramatising the situation, the commanding gen- eral of the German Alpine Corps, General Konrad Krafft von Dellmensingen, was sent to the Isonzo front. Krafft von Dellmensingen then presented a comprehensive report and made an emphatic case for a joint offensive. He also contradicted Ludendorff, since following long discussions with Generals Scotti and Goiginger, of whose competence and honest opinion he was firmly convinced, he felt that the situation for the Austrian armies at the Isonzo really was already dire, and to a certain degree that this was already the eleventh hour.1825 On 4 September 1917, German troops entered Riga. Thus the conditions were met that Kaiser Wilhelm had set out in his letter to Emperor Karl as a requirement for sending troops to the front in Italy. Russia had been crippled by domestic events and the resulting leadership crises, but militarily, it had still not been beaten entirely from the field. For this reason, the phrase ‘unconquered in the field’ applied first and fore- most to the collapsing Tsarist Empire. The impossibility of surviving the war econom- ically, of organising and conducting the ‘factory war’ in a similar way to the military one, had however led to the internal disintegration of Russia. The first to benefit from this collapse were the Central Powers. The one made to suffer was Italy, since without the collapse of Russia, the divisions that were then used as the German 14th Army against Italy would not have been available. They would in all likelihood also have been available for use against Romania, as Ludendorff had originally planned. In this way, however, their strategic impact would have dissipated, since the full occupation of Ro- mania would have remained of no consequence to the overall situation. Now, however, it was possible to make a surprise strike against Italy and  – once again  – to secure the gratitude of Austria-Hungary. This would then also make it easier to persuade Aus- tria-Hungary to agree to engage directly in a theatre of war that until then had been regarded as a ‘German’ one in just the same way that the Italian theatre had been ‘Aus- trian’, namely in the west. The use of German divisions against Italy would therefore