Page - 887 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

Mutiny 887 to the railway will the situation improve. […] Albania : problem child of the AOK [= Army High Command]. […] Absorbs a large number of workers by virtue of the medical conditions there […]. South-west : AOK takes the view that the Piave front is now the most decisive. […] Human material : whatever can be gathered will be sent to the army right down to the last man. […] We are living from hand to mouth. […] Now it might become law that all discharges of 19- to 25-years-olds are annulled. […] Food : Waldstätten says that it’s not possible to scream and apply the revolver than the AOK is already doing. The current situation is : the army in the field has on average 1-2 normal portions [and] 1 reserve portion : War Ministry in the hinterland 2 army days […]. These are starvation rations, we’re scraping through though ; but no reserves ; in 14 days we’re finished with the last that the AOK has at its disposal. […] Enormous difficulties in Austria. […] Food question cannot be solved because the stocks cannot be raised. […] Railways : Our various railways are not achieving even remotely what they did years ago due to a lack of coal, machines, poor rolling stock and substructure. […] Fatigue and undernourishment of the staff, lack of coal […]. Shortage of doctors : number of doctors dropped from 7,500 to 5,500.’ Finally, it was also mentioned that the factories were not keeping up with the production of decorations. This, however, was a more marginal problem. On 16 January, the War Ministry had requested front troops in order to reinforce the 40,000 men where were at the disposal of the Monarchy for assistance operations. They were also needed soon. Now the roundel of assistant operations began for the suppression of unrest, mutiny, flaring revolutionary movements and national protests, which was not to stop until the war ended. In February, there were riots in Poland, above all in Kraków. The agreement made first of all in Brest to cede Chełm territory to Ukraine had met with furious protest on the part of the nationalists in Poland. If it had been possible until then to assume in Galicia a feeling of belonging to the Habsburg Monarchy and to locate tangible pro-Austrian sympathies in the Government General, this had now ceased at a single stroke. Instead, anti-Austrian sentiments burst through.2123 Across the land, a ‘national day of mourning’ was held on 18 February. The reaction to this was the local proclamation of martial law. However, the Polish nobility visibly began to replace the double-headed eagle. The un- rest remained within limits and even if soldiers joined in the tumult here and there, the military fabric of the hinterland remained by and large intact. Elsewhere, it was seething in a very different way. On 1 February 1918, a revolution started almost overnight in Kotor, the war port of the heavy vessels of the Imperial and Royal Navy. Thoughts passed immediately to the parallels : mutiny in Petrograd and the role of the sailors in both phases of the Russian Revolution. Had it also reached this stage in Austria ? Like the Russian Baltic Sea Fleet, the Imperial and Royal Navy had also been rarely deployed. For the majority of the time, the squadrons and above all the battleship divi-