Page - 835 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

Siberian Clarity 835 them were brought to Niš and accommodated in the Turkish-built fortress there. Then a period began that one of the captive officers, Robert Salomon, described as the ‘bore- dom of a bleak life in captivity’. ‘It was not the Serbian rulers who particularly soured our lives here, either’, but the Czechs had a bad reputation, above all when they had devoted themselves ‘to the Russian or the Yugoslav cause’.1985 In October 1915, there was an abrupt change. With the progression of the Ger- man-Austro-Hungarian-Bulgarian offensive in autumn 1915, not only the Serbian King, the government and the remains of the army set off for Montenegro and Albania. They also took the prisoners of war with them. As many as 110,000 members of the Imperial and Royal Army had fallen into Serbian captivity in 1914 until the evacua- tion marches. Fewer than 100,000 of them were still alive, since typhus had also raged among the prisoners of war in winter 1914/15. Some of the prisoners, above all most of the 5,840 imperial Germans and 8,000 Bulgarians, were left behind, but the Serbs wanted to take the larger part of the Austrians with them. Thus began the great mor- tality. It can no longer be ascertained how many prisoners of war died. Figures fluctuate between around thirty per cent and half of those who set out on the evacuation marches. Their journey lasted 58 days, of which 29 days were spent marching. Around 7,000 kilometres were walked. Some of the soldiers no longer wore any shoes. Their uniforms were in tatters. The supply system collapsed, whilst diseases, especially typhus and chol- era, raged.1986 When the Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war reached the coast in Alba- nia and were transferred to the Italians, fewer than 20,000 prisoners were brought on to the ships of the evacuation fleet. That was only twenty per cent of those who had set out from former Serbian territory. But the odyssey was still not over. The Austrian prisoners of war were brought to the Italian prison island Asinara off the coast of Sicily. Those who were suffering from cholera were herded together with all the others. In addition, dysentery broke out. On one transport of the Duca di Genova alone, around 500 of the more than 3,000 prisoners contracted dysentery, of which 200 died.1987 After their arrival on Asinara, the dying continued on a massive scale. The Italian doctors were powerless. A Vatican dignitary, however, who visited the Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war, found no fault with the conditions and sent a reassuring letter back to Rome.1988 Finally, in summer 1916, around 12,000 survivors were brought to France.1989 To date, little attention has been paid to the prisoners of war of the Imperial and Royal Army who were in Serbian custody. The most plausible explanation for this is that this group was numerically much smaller than those who fell into Russian and Italian captivity. Therefore, after the war, the memories of the ‘Siberian clarity’, as Heimito von Doderer called it in his account of captivity, as well as those of the Pontine Marshes, were dominant. For the troops on the Russian front, prisoner of war captivity had also been a mental taboo. But from the first day of the campaign on, prisoners were exchanged. The Rus-