Page - 939 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

Four Million Heroes 939 Everything was subsumed under the term ‘gigantic heroic struggle’. There were, how- ever, more than just individual observations. And there was also another image of the soldiers. ‘In the opinion of most of our officers, an Austrian regiment is recruited from nothing but pigs and other critters’, can be read in the family and estate papers B/428 in the War Archives in Vienna. ‘The noble gentlemen turned out to be human beings who anxiously endeavoured not to die a hero’s death, since that’s what we’re here for’, as it was stated elsewhere.2263 This could be contrasted with the words of Second Lieu- tenant of the Reserve Josef Aschauer, who wrote in his diary that ‘the good soldier is a personality […] not behind the oven but in the wind, rain and snow, he sees himself confronted with problems that he must tackle with reflection and action. […] His body is able to cope with all exertions and hardships. Filled with exalted love for his people, and for his homeland, he foregoes comfort and dies in the field.’2264 All these types existed : the good soldiers, the pigs and the ‘critters’. Most of them were soldiers by duty. In order to make use of them for the military and war service, those who were tempo- rarily exempted from military service, eligible with restrictions or completely ineligible were repeatedly mustered anew. They were called before the inspection commissions up to five times. There were also repeatedly submissions from volunteers and the fear of joining the war too late and not being involved when the history of the twentieth century was being written. The veterans, however, had long since begun a fight for memory. They insisted on the erection of memorials, and took advantage of positional warfare to produce stone or metal clues that they had been there, that their headquarters had been located here or there and above all that they had lost comrades. In one place, for example, were the words : ‘To the fallen heroes of the Flitsch basin, 1915–1917’. Large and small cem- eteries assumed the quality of memorial sites and were designed to recall the Great War, which had to end sometime. Emperor Franz Joseph had hoped that the erection of memorials would be postponed until after the war. His wishes had not always been respected, and in the meantime the initiatives had accumulated. The desire for the construction of memorials was not always conformed with, however, and there was a struggle for memory here as well. The dispute over the erection for Imperial-Royal Rifle (previously Landwehr) Regiment No. 8 could be regarded as thoroughly repre- sentative : the replacement battalion of the regiment envisaged a spot in front of the barracks in Prague’s Castle Quarter, on Pohořelec square, for a memorial in honour of the fallen members of the regiment. The military command in Prague indicated a location on the grounds of the planned garrison cemetery in the district of Kobylisy. The officer corps of the regiment, however, insisted on the Castle Quarter. Once more, however, there was a strict rejection and the military command explained this with the ‘not faultless conduct’ of the regiment in the field as well as that of the replacement battalion at the beginning of the war, which did ‘not justify a privileged location for