Seite - 535 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

The Hindenburg Front 535 Now, for the first time, the consequences of only superficially successful personnel management manifested themselves very clearly. It seemed that it had been repeat- edly possible up till this point to offset the enormous loss of human life, but in real- ity nothing could be substituted entirely and nothing at all could be undone. Many high-ranking and senior officers continued to fail to measure up. Since 1914, tens of thousands of officers had attempted to lead their troops and spur them on through their personal example and tireless commitment. The result was that the loss of of- ficers was proportionally considerably higher than the losses of enlisted men, and that tens of thousands had fallen or were no longer fit for the front. It had never been possible to completely replace them. The soldiers had been overexploited, whether by being ruthlessly forced forward, as in the Balkans, or by being sent into severe fighting without appropriate familiarisation, where they were then decimated. Since late autumn 1914, desertions had increased, which was something that was abso- lutely unknown to the Germans in these proportions. Hundreds of thousands of Aus- tro-Hungarian soldiers had in the meantime crossed over to the enemy, above all to the Russians. If tested and reliable soldiers were to be deployed anywhere, they had to be positively scraped together. The Austrian and the Hungarian Prime Ministers levelled serious accusations at each other due to the insufficient exploitation of the military strength of the respective halves of the Empire. Both of them referred to privilege. Count Tisza claimed to be able to detect unauthorised exemptions in Austria and ‘that the process of the sub- ordinate official bodies, at least in some parts of Austria, allowed more room for the consideration of convenience, for economic interests and for shirking than is the case in Hungary’.1258 The Imperial and Royal Prime Minister, however, pointed for his part to the fact that the long occupation of Poland had meant an enormous loss of troops that could otherwise have been enlisted, namely around 60,000 men. Furthermore, the Russians had destroyed the military records during their retreat from Galicia and Bu- kovina, so that an overview could only gradually be gained again regarding who could be called up for military service. It could be established, furthermore, that Hungary tied an excessive number of men to agriculture who would otherwise have been eligi- ble for military service, namely more than 120,000 ; in Austria, the number was half as big. On the other hand, in the Austrian half of the Empire there were very many conscripts exempted from service at the front in order to work in industries vital to the war effort.1259 Finally, Count Tisza believed that he could end the dispute by observing that in Hungary, state and society had waged ‘the struggle for life and death […] in a more unified way, more energetically and more uncompromisingly than was the case in Austria’. Stürgkh did not want to leave this unopposed, either.1260 The Prime Ministers mutually made the case, however, for drastically reducing the exemptions and sending as many able-bodied men as possible to the replacement formations.