Page - 930 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

930 An Empire Resigns not run the risk of being dismissed from his post due to temporary failure, an acute illness or age-related frailty (he was not yet 50 years old). In many respects, however, he no longer had any prospects. He gave up. Where was his homeland ? Was he Czech or German ? How were things to proceed ? Four years at the same hierarchical level was enough to discourage anyone. He no longer saw any purpose in his own life and per- haps no longer wanted to witness the dying on the Montello. It was out of the question for him to desert like many of his Czech compatriots. He chose another way of ending his dilemma. On the third day of the June offensive, Bolzano left his dugout and began during the late afternoon to approach upright the Italian lines. He passed the foremost Austrian sentries, was called to and warned. But he continued, apparently undeterred. Evidently, he was aiming for the Italian lines. Finally, he was shouted at : ‘General, Sir, if you go any further, I must shoot !’ Bolzano continued. He was called upon once more. The sentry was beside himself. But then he shot with his machine gun and killed his brigadier. Heinrich Bolzano Edler von Kronstätt lay dying between the lines.2240 This was a curiously tragic death and unparalleled. Had it really been an attempt to desert ? Had Brigadier Bolzano been hoping to find death ? Was he aware that he would not reach the Italian lines alive ? On 18 June, the 25th Rifle Brigade reported that the Brigadier ‘had suffered a confusion of the mind and, in this incompetent con- dition, been killed in an accident or fallen into enemy hands’. The Army High Com- mand summarised the incident briefly and erroneously : Bolzano had ‘succumbed to his grave wounds in Italian prisoner of war captivity’. The troops and the staff of Army Group Boroević knew better.2241 Since the first weeks of the war, there had been no further suicide on the part of a general. In the final analysis, it had been a suicide, even if the means of death had been different. Different, at least, to General Paukert, who had lain himself in front of a train in September 1914. From winter 1914/15, dismissals of generals had become rarer. The fighting in the Carpathians and the subsequent months of the war had led in individual cases to gen- erals being dismissed on the basis of the accusation that they had failed. Overall, how- ever, the command structures appeared to have been consolidated. This did not mean, of course, that the most senior commands did not repeatedly issue strong rebukes or positively lock horns, as in the case of the Army High Command on the one side and the Commander of the 5th Army, General Boroević on the other. Even before the assumption of command on the Isonzo, Boroević had occasionally caused havoc and, like the Army High Command, was hard to beat in his directness when it came to expressing himself. Thus, Boroević explained his demand following the dismissal of Major General Anton Lipošćak in mid-January 1915, for example, with the unsubtle formulation that the Major General ‘did not understand the situation and seems ac- cording to his reports still not to understand it even now’.2242 The Commander of the