Seite - 446 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

446 Factory War and Domestic Front, 1915 in particular had in succession been coerced into working for their own army, then for the Russians and finally for the Imperial and Royal troops, and frequently had hardly any opportunity to cultivate their fields and carry out even the minimum work needed in order to ensure their own survival. Ludwig Hesshaimer, who belonged to the artists’ group of the War Press Bureau, described the scene in a few words : ‘In those areas of the eastern theatre of war, large parts of the rural population were formed into com- panies of workers in order to rebuild the roads ; due to the lack of men, their number included many strong women. […] In Miechów, they all wore white linen patches with numbers sewn on to their upper arms. They were also put to work in the fields.’ If the advance was slowed by boggy ground, simple road repairs were not enough ; in order to transport a mortar battery, for example, log roads were constructed for which up to 30,000 tree trunks were used. Companies of workers also cleared the horrific bat- tlefields, ‘buried the dead, collected many thousands of grenades, detonators, rifles, bay- onets and knapsacks that were lying about, as well as the chaos of all the other items’. In the middle of it all, farmers made attempts at rebuilding their huts. ‘Some walked in the deepest mud across the destroyed fields, from which the dead warriors had only just been removed. Rows of grave mounds lined the road, and right next to them, the plough was pulling its furrow’.1059 Following the conquest of Lviv, two armies under Mackensen’s command, the Im- perial and Royal 4th Army and the German 11th Army, were to veer towards the north and implement the large-scale strangulation of Russian Poland that had already been considered at the beginning of the war, and which had as yet failed to take place. The Imperial and Royal 2nd Army was left to continue marching eastwards. However, since the goals of the joint offensive had already been far exceeded, the notion of initiating the transport of German troops towards the west arose of its own accord. In that thea- tre of war, there had been defensive successes in the First Battle of Champagne against the French, as well as against the British near Lille. However, despite the use of poison gas for the first time in the arc of the front at Ypres (on 22 April 1915), positional warfare had continued.1060 It therefore stood to reason that Falkenhayn would wish to bring new forces to the west. However, Conrad did all he could in order to continue the offensive in the east. At an audience in Schönbrunn Palace, during which he was to in- form the Emperor regarding the situation in the Russian theatre of war, when Emperor Franz Joseph asked what would be done following the recapture of Lviv, Conrad had replied that the offensive must be continued in order to weaken the Russians further. Perhaps they would then be inclined to settle for peace after all.1061 However, in order to resume the push towards Russia, German troops were needed, which entailed once more discussing the next goals with Falkenhayn. On 28 June, the two chiefs of staff met in order to determine the basic tenet of the operations now to come. Conrad, who had been promoted to the newly-created rank of