Seite - 587 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

The Nameless 587 Habsburg Monarchy continued to fight alone : Italy. It was precisely this theatre of war that had not played any role during the creation of the Joint Supreme War Command. The Imperial and Royal troops had lost only a little ground to Italy at the Isonzo River, and still controlled the Alpine front from the Gailtal Alps to the plateaus east of Trento (Trient), as well as the Ortler. The loss of Gorizia (Görz) had been painful, but the sub- sequent battles seven to nine on the Isonzo showed the well-known image of battles of attrition without notable highlights and without the Italians gaining any ground. The crises had been confined almost entirely to the east, where the serious setbacks of the Brusilov Offensive could not initially be made good and the new loss of part of Buk- ovina and of Czernivtsi (Czernowitz) in particular was very painful. Then Romania had entered the war on the side of the Entente powers, thus creating a completely new state of affairs. The situation could only be mastered with German help. The Austro-Hun- garian Monarchy had neither the political nor the military means to call Bulgaria into action against Romania and to commence an immediate offensive against Romania. This is what the German Empire could offer. And in view of the determination of the German leadership not to be deceived by Romanian tactics and to tackle the former ally together with the Imperial and Royal armies, Romania’s entry into the war became a military problem that was certainly manageable for the Central Powers. In order to even remotely be able to realistically assess the military situation, we have to look once more at the losses of the Imperial and Royal Army. If it had been possible before summer 1916 to point out that the Army of the Monarchy possessed more battalions than at the start of the war, three times as many machine guns and twice as many guns, this was dramatically put into perspective during the course of subsequent months. Alone on the north-eastern front against Russia, the Imperial and Royal ar- mies suffered in June and July 1916 a loss of 300,000 soldiers dead, wounded, missing or deserted. By the end of the Brusilov Offensive, the number had risen to around 475,000. The march battalions that had been over-hastily thrown into the battles since the beginning of the war, the XXII, XXIII and XXIV, were by no means sufficient ; in November the troop bodies, which could barely be filled any more, once more had to be assigned exceptional march battalions provided expressly for the purpose.1359 Particularly apparent were the considerable differences in the losses. For a period of time in the summer, the north-eastern front had suffered almost 60 per cent of its losses to desertion. By September, the number had increased to 226,000 men. On the south-western front in Italy, on the other hand, the most losses as a percentage were the dead. This front was meanwhile responsible for a third of the total losses. In absolute terms : the casualty lists for 1916 contained around 1.75 million Imperial and Royal soldiers. Since the eligible generations had already been mustered and re-mustered, and by now even the 18-year-olds had been called up, it could already be calculated when the stage of complete exhaustion would be reached.