Seite - 243 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

The Fortress on the San 243 centre of the fighting and was heavily embattled. In the Army High Command, there was  – as already mentioned  – much dissatisfaction with the leadership of this army. The Chief of the Army General Staff, Brigadier Rudolf Pfeffer, faced the prospect of dismissal. Conrad described him plainly as a ‘muddle-head’.586 General Brudermann himself was accused of ‘weakness, heedlessness and disobedience’. On 2 September, Lviv, the capital of Galicia, was lost ; the next day, the Russians entered the city. In the Army High Command in Przemyśl, the opinion was that all this could have been avoided, and that what had happened had resulted solely from the fact that the 3rd Army had withdrawn without a fight. To the west of Lviv, the next battle was fought at the Horodok (Grodeck) lakes. For the first time, there was a sense that now, only chaos ruled. The retreating supply convoys became wedged. On the orders of the command of the 3rd Army, the provisions depots were doused with petroleum and set alight. The troops who were retreating from the front were met by smouldering ruins instead of reinforcements and supplies. ‘We need men more than anything else. The old women and the neurasthenics in uniform will kill us’, wrote the Commander of the XII Corps, General Hermann von Kövess.587 Conrad quickly turned his 4th Army around, hoping to compensate for its numerical inferiority and overcome the crisis of the battle in the east by quickly relocating the brigades and divisions. The ‘Second Battle of Lviv’ fol- lowed, yet the Russian advance could only be slowed. The Austro-Hungarian soldiers were overstrained and in despair. Thousands, tens of thousands fell and died within the space of just a few days and weeks. They wandered about, at times with almost no form of leadership, and suffered one shock after another. The formations of the Imperial and Royal 3rd Army were decimated and were finally only half as strong in number as the attacking Russians of the 8th Army. On 5 September, the Commander of the 3rd Army was dismissed. Then, the 2nd Army, the reinforcements that had been withdrawn from the Balkans, finally arrived. In the meantime, the Russians also pressed against the Austro-Hungarian lines from the north and brought new troops forward, integrating them into their front. Now, where the northern strike by Dankl had at first been successful, the Russian 4th and 5th Armies prepared for a counterstrike. Quite clearly, Dankl’s first successes in the Battle of Kraśnik and those of Auffenberg in the Battle of Komarów had been overestimated. It was as though the dead had been resurrected. The gap in the Austro-Hungarian front at the seam between the 1st and 4th Armies became tangibly close. On 11 September, the Army High Command was forced to order a general retreat to behind the San River. This was certainly a bitter decision, which was not only unavoidable, however, but which was also only taken when all other operational options had been exhausted. The troops had reached the limit of their capacity. Of the 21 days they had been at the front, the soldiers of the 4th Army under General Auffenberg had by mid-Septem- ber spent 18 of them fighting in battle. And yet if the battles of August and September