Seite - 172 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918
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172 ‘Thank God, this is the Great War!’
portation at all times, the trains had to travel at approximately the same speed. Even
transports on very well developed, double–track routes were in principle to travel no
differently to those on a narrow-gauge mountain railway. All transports had to adapt
their speed to that of the weakest locomotives and the oldest brake mechanisms.404 For
this reason, the trains were not permitted to travel even at the calculated speed of 25 km
per hour, but at just 18 km per hour – the speed of a bicycle ! By contrast, the German
railway deployment was conducted at an average speed of 30 km per hour.405 Further-
more, no train was permitted to have more than 100 axles (equalling fifty carriages),
even though on some routes, trains double that length could have travelled. Here, the
detraining facilities again played a role, which were not longer, and which were certainly
too short for a relocation to the rear. However, the delays to the transport were not
only due to the moderate speeds and short trains, as well as the separation of trains for
mountainous routes, but also to the ‘food and water provision stops’, which lasted six
hours on average, and which were mandatory. And this was the case even though the
field kitchens accompanied the troops and the ‘water provision’ would not have needed
to take so long. The military argument for the train lengths and low speed of travel was
that in this way, most of the routes could be travelled at an even speed, and a war-ready
infantry battalion, an artillery battery or cavalry squadron could be entrained in the fifty
carriages.406 ‘”For 40 men or 6 horses” was written on the carriage’407 wrote Egon Erwin
Kisch. However, the carriages with which the soldiers were transported had been la-
belled this way long before the war. ‘We laid our rifles, knapsacks,and bread bags under
the bench and closed our eyes.’
Norman Stone, who has studied the deployment of the Imperial and Royal Army in
1914 extensively, calculated from the example of the 3rd Army command under Gen-
eral of Cavalry Rudolf von Brudermann that the journey from Bratislava (Pressburg) to
Sambir in Galicia took a full five days – the same length of time that a healthy person
would have needed to cover the route on foot.
The Imperial and Royal 4th Army command (under General of Infantry Baron
Moritz von Auffenberg) required forty hours for the journey from Vienna to the Prze-
myśl region, three times as long as the trains travelling according to the peacetime
timetable.408 And the command of the IX Corps (‘Leitmeritz’), which was to muster in
the Ruma region in Syrmia, also travelled on well-developed tracks and needed three
days and three nights to cover the distance.409 ‘Wherever possible, we officers sought
the railway restaurant and left our meals from the field kitchen to our servants and
stablemen’, noted Brigadier Zanantoni. ‘Often, this was only possible with difficulty,
since the trains, which were mostly very long, frequently stopped far away from the
restaurant rooms […]’ In Kolín, Brno, Gänserndorf, Bratislava and Subotica, however,
the gentleman officers could ‘take our meals in the restaurant localities’. Even so, the
staff of the IX Corps arrived in Ruma in a ‘very sorry’ state.
THE FIRST WORLD WAR
and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918
- Titel
- THE FIRST WORLD WAR
- Untertitel
- and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918
- Autor
- Manfried Rauchensteiner
- Verlag
- Böhlau Verlag
- Ort
- Wien
- Datum
- 2014
- Sprache
- englisch
- Lizenz
- CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
- ISBN
- 978-3-205-79588-9
- Abmessungen
- 17.0 x 24.0 cm
- Seiten
- 1192
- Kategorien
- Geschichte Vor 1918
Inhaltsverzeichnis
- 1 On the Eve 11
- 2 Two Million Men for the War 49
- 3 Bloody Sundays 81
- 4 Unleashing the War 117
- 5 ‘Thank God, this is the Great War!’ 157
- 6 Adjusting to a Longer War 197
- 7 The End of the Euphoria 239
- 8 The First Winter of the War 283
- 9 Under Surveillance 317
- 10 ‘The King of Italy has declared war on Me’ 355
- 11 The Third Front 383
- 12 Factory War and Domestic Front, 1915 413
- 13 Summer Battle and ‘Autumn Swine’ 441
- 14 War Aims and Central Europe 469
- 15 South Tyrol : The End of an Illusion (I) 497
- 16 Lutsk :The End of an Illusion (II) 521
- 17 How is a War Financed ? 555
- 18 The Nameless 583
- 19 The Death of the Old Emperor 607
- 20 Emperor Karl 641
- 21 The Writing on the Wall 657
- 22 The Consequences of the Russian February Revolution 691
- 23 Summer 1917 713
- 24 Kerensky Offensive and Peace Efforts 743
- 25 The Pyrrhic Victory : The Breakthrough Battle of Flitsch-Tolmein 769
- 26 Camps 803
- 27 Peace Feelers in the Shadow of Brest-Litovsk 845
- 28 The Inner Front 869
- 29 The June Battle in Veneto 895
- 30 An Empire Resigns 927
- 31 The Twilight Empire 955
- 32 The War becomes History 983
- Epilogue 1011
- Afterword 1013
- Acknowledgements and Dedication 1019
- Notes 1023
- Selected Printed Sources and Literature 1115
- Index of People and Places 1155