Seite - 328 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

328 Under Surveillance Tens of thousands of copies were disseminated as a handbill, in which he released the Russian Orthodox members of the Imperial and Royal Army from their ‘involuntary oath taken to the Austrian Emperor’ and demanded that they join the army of the true believers.766 Without doubt, the advance of the Russians in Galicia presented opportu- nities for them to do so. Even so, the Ruthenian troops initially behaved in an exemplary manner, and there was no failure to do their duty. However, the situation changed after the first heavy losses. East Galicia had to be given up, and for the Ruthenian regiments, the bond to their homeland was severed. They also received no more replacements from their rein- forcement districts, since these were now occupied. In September 1914, the relocation of the Russophile Landsturm Infantry Regiment No. 19 from Przemyśl to Vienna was ordered, ‘since this regiment [has shown itself] to be entirely unreliable’. At the beginning of December, the commander of the army group named after him, General of Cavalry Pflanzer-Baltin, made an application for the successive replacement of between 6,000 and 7,000 men ‘of Ruthenian, less reliable troops on the southern wing of the eastern front through other regiments’.767 The effects of the situation in East Galicia and above all the impossibility of re- plenishing the troop bodies that were being reinforced there even extended as far as Hungary. On 20 February 1915, the Honvéd (Hungarian standing army) Minister, Baron Hazai, attempted to obtain the agreement of the Hungarian Cabinet to distrib- ute 48,000 soldiers who had been medically examined for military service in Hungary among the two Galician corps. In principle, he said, it was a matter for the Austrians to compensate for the loss of replacement reservists and recruits from Galicia, but there was currently no opportunity to do so in Cisleithania. As a result of the emergency situation, Magyar assistance was needed. The Council of Ministers agreed to distribute the medically examined soldiers among Infantry Regiments 10, 40, 45, 89 and 90 (all from X Corps) and Infantry Regiments 24 and 41 and Light Infantry Battalion 27. They were expressly to be identified as ‘auxiliary troops’.768 However, the troubles with the Ruthenians were only partly related to the soldiers. The problem was the civilian population, from whom military movements were already to be concealed as far as possible at the end of August. It had to be acknowledged that the Austro-Hungarian troops were shot at from the houses of civilians during their retreat. The command of the III Corps (‘Graz’) became convinced that the area around Horodok (‘Grodeck’) ‘is almost solely Russophile’, as the commanding general Emil Colerus-Geldern reported. The reaction to this and similar incidents was to hang or shoot the suspects. The reference to the large number of collaborators was a highly welcome explanation for the defeats suffered. And when an information brochure describing the Russophilia among part of the Galician population and intended for Russian troops fell into the