Seite - 218 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

218 Adjusting to a Longer War The transports of wounded, who had to be accommodated in the reserve infirmaries and in the hospitals claimed by the state, were  – alongside the list of casualties  – a most el- oquent testimony to the fact that the war did not only take place somewhere ‘out there’. It was literally omnipresent. Men with crutches, prosthetic limbs and mutilations in- creasingly became part of the streetscape. The establishment of orthopaedic infirmaries in Vienna and homes for invalids was designed to allow the war invalids to get used to having a life again under altered circumstances that could often hardly be coped with.521 Yet neither the physical nor the psychological damage could really be overcome. New operational techniques, more effective medicines and improved treatment could only help to alleviate part of the suffering. One of the biggest problems, however, was how one should heal the mental damage that the war called forth in a short space of time. The ‘war of nerves’ already had its own meaning. ‘Since it was no longer the rattling of a tram, a street blocked by traffic, reading an exciting book or late nights out’ that crumpled the nerves, but the infernal noise of one’s own artillery and the impact of enemy shells, the din and the screaming, the burning and the shooting and the sight of mutilated people and the dead. They were a shock and a horror for every individual. And not everyone could deal with them. The military surgeons close to the army and in the rear areas of the front were generally helpless. They only knew one thing : ‘Neu- ropathic soldiers were unusable ; an anxious, trembling hand on the trigger, a bundle of nerves plagued by tinnitus, paralysis and convulsions’ was no good at the front.522 These soldiers were shunted off and filled the sanatoria. Other features of the war also spread far and wide and across the home front. As early as autumn 1914 the so-called ‘army epidemics’ broke out : cholera, dysentery and other epidemic diseases.523 This occurred first of all in the north-eastern theatre of war and towards the end of the year in the Balkans too. In order to prevent a further spread, quarantine stations were set up in the base area. The ruthless crackdown by the Army High Command proved in this case to be something positive. The quarantine and observation stations fulfilled their purpose and prevented the army epidemics from spreading across the entire Dual Monarchy.524 They could also be relatively quickly contained at the front, always assuming that those at risk of infection did not behave stupidly and refuse to be vaccinated.525 If the wounded, the convalescents and the cripples very soon became part of every- day life in the hinterland, one came into contact with the dead far less a long way from the front. The fallen were generally buried on the spot. Those who died of their wounds as well as those who succumbed to epidemics and other diseases were buried at cem- eteries in the vicinity of the various medical hospitals. What had started as a response to an emergency situation ultimately developed into a real regime : officers were strictly to be buried in solitary graves ; soldiers who had distinguished themselves by particular and proven heroics were also to be buried in solitary or single row graves ; in all other