Page - 827 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

On Ivans, Serbs and Wops 827 fact that prisoners of war were forcing their way through to Russia in order not to arrive too late and miss out on the distribution of goods.1963 In 1917, around 30,000 Russian prisoners of war had escaped from the rear areas of the north-eastern front alone. Some of them were captured again, but others were able to beat their way through. Those who were recaptured justified themselves not only by arguing that they hoped to receive something in the distribution of land, but also by pointing to the poor provisions and the miserable conditions in the camps and, above all, with the army in the field. The latter contributed significantly to the negative nature of memories of prisoner of war captivity, just as the use of prisoners of war by the field army was a contribut- ing factor in the lack of accuracy of the statistics. During the course of the war, ever more prisoners were demanded by the military authorities and the high commands in order to carry out work in the army rear areas. Increasingly, however, prisoners of war were frequently not sent to the rear but instead remained in the vicinity of the front. There, they not only eluded the prisoner count but also had to accept a type of legal defencelessness, since they could not be visited by the delegations of the protecting powers or charitable organisations. Their fate depended more or less on the conduct of the individual commanders. In autumn 1916, more than 80,000 prisoners of war were employed in the rear areas of the front in Russia alone.1964 In spring 1917, to take another date as an example, 295,000 prisoners of war were utilised by departments and commands of the Imperial and Royal Army. At the beginning of 1918, the number had risen to 362,000 people, two-thirds of them Russians.1965 They were deployed in the context of labour battalions and above all for the construction of roads, paths and cable cars. They carried ammunition, worked on field fortifications, searched for mines and cleared the battlefields after the fighting was over. Military and civilian departments occasionally engaged in furious exchanges, since it was not a question of statistics but rather, above all, of the manpower that everyone wanted  – and needed  – to deploy for their own benefit. There were often no alterna- tives any more. In the case of those who remained in the camps, a long-known picture manifested itself that was not dissimilar to the one that could be sketched in the con- text of the refugee camps. The civilian population had initially demonstrated sympathy towards the prisoners of war and had been happy to occasionally engage in trade. Bit by bit, however, the picture began to change. The provisioning of the prisoners seemed to be better and their existence more assured than that of the civilian population. The prisoners also appeared to have enough money in order to buy themselves food, tobacco products and commodities. The problem of security was addressed, since it bothered a local community counting only a few thousand people that there was a multitude of captured enemies in the neighbourhood. The 2,000 residents of Feldbach, for exam- ple, were confronted with 42,000 prisoners of war. They fought tooth and nail against a further increase of 20,000 people.1966 Nonetheless, the Serbian, Montenegrin and,