Page - 890 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

890 The Inner Front The strikes did not stop, either. The Bohemian and Moravian, the Hungarian, Sile- sian and Polish industries, pits and factories were repeatedly boycotted. The workers of the Manfred Weiss Works in Budapest demanded a daily wage of 36 kronen and an eight-hour day. In order to lend weight to their demands, they simply went home after fulfilling their allotted workload. The city commander, Major General Lukachich, deployed 15,000 men to end the strikes. The government imposed a news blackout,2132 but information of course very quickly trickled through. One request for assistance was followed by the next. There were repeated deaths.2133 In the Alpine countries, Carniola and Vienna  – everywhere was seething. Here it was the industrial workers, there the fixed-salaried low-income workers or also the women who rebelled. If 150,000 peo- ple queued up on one day in Vienna in order to get hold of a little meat, fat, eggs or vegetables, and more than 20,000 went away again empty-handed, then this meant a proportion of 15 per cent. The dramatically growing impoverishment of large sections of the population also led to plundering ; shops were demolished.2134 Hostility towards the military grew. Soldiers requisitioned, intervened in strikes and dispersed crowds. In the process, a fatal dependability of the troops was demonstrated : Hungarian troops showed no reluctance when they were deployed in Bohemia, and both Czech and Bos- nian units willingly allowed themselves to be used to suppress strikes and demonstra- tions in Hungary.2135 Agitators were arrested. Investigations were carried out against trade union functionaries. Trade unionists were arrested or called up to the military. The military was again deployed to quell unrest and strikes. Decorations were awarded to soldiers who willingly let themselves be deployed.2136 And then the next incident occurred. In this situation, heated up by strikes and assistance operations, the repatriation of the prisoners of war from Russia commenced.2137 The return of the prisoners of war initially began in an unregulated fashion. Many had already returned after the February Revolution of 1917. The Bolsheviks had simply released them. Most of the prisoners remained in the Russian camps, however, since they had in this way an orderly living. They rightly feared that, no sooner had they returned home, they would be sent straight back to the front. From December 1917 and, increasingly, from March 1918, a sys- tematic repatriation commenced. Nonetheless, by summer 1918 only a few hundred thousand men had been actually repatriated. For the vast majority of them, their return was a shock. The bureaucratic registration, the renewed oath to Emperor Karl, the ap- proximately three-week quarantine, and after that the assignment to the replacement troop bodies, the detailed questioning regarding the conditions in captivity, and many other things were so different to how most of them would have imagined their return to be, and generated a deep-seated resentment. Only when their captivity was acknowl- edged as justified did they receive a four-week holiday ; otherwise, the returnees were subjected to another examination or simply arrested on a charge of desertion.