Seite - 979 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

Front and Hinterland 979 However, the reactions also showed that at least the high commanders, who were con- sidered to be relatively well-informed, had suffered from a substantial loss of their sense of reality that was in fact inexplicable. They felt betrayed, and now no longer had either the will or the opportunity to shield the front from the news that was coming from the interior of the Dual Monarchy. For a long time, this shield had functioned well and through the filters established by military and civilian authorities, hardly any informa- tion at all had reached the soldiers with regard to events in the hinterland. However, gradually, a network had come into existence that anyway made it almost impossible to maintain the screen between front and hinterland. More and more members of the Landsturm (reserve forces) had been ordered to work in the enterprises that were essential to the war effort, and there supplemented those who had been discharged and the ‘war servers’ who had been forced to remain at their places of work for the duration of the war. The men from the Landsturm, who in many cases brought with them experiences from the front, naturally knew what was happening ‘outside’. And they also knew how to interpret the signs. Conversely, there was increasingly detailed information reaching the front, too, about what was happening at the base stations and in the hinterland. Deserters played a major role in this flow of information. The proceedings against deserters had become almost futile. Experiences from Hungary, where in some areas, martial law had been applied due to desertion, only made the dubiousness of this measure all too obvious. Nothing had changed, and even the extension of martial law to deserters in Budapest itself had no success. Nonetheless, in July 1918, Emperor Karl also proposed imposing martial law in Vienna. The War Ministry and the Ministry of National Defence violently disagreed with this notion.2393 Above all, the flow of news could no longer be stopped by threat- ening exemplary punishments. The fact that people were going hungry was common knowledge. However, there were some things that were still almost impossible to imagine, such as the fact that the hardships among the armies in Italy could extend so far that Bosniaks no longer wished to make an appearance in the occupied Italian territories, since they no longer had complete uniforms, that the soldiers were squatting apathetically in their positions in ragged and haphazardly thrown together pieces of uniform, that the military hos- pitals had no more clothing for the patients, and the people were lying naked in their beds. When, at the request of the 6th Army, Lieutenant Colonel Slavko Kvaternik, who would later become a well-known Croat leader, wrote a description of the state of this army, and substantiated it with photographs, the images they showed could barely be believed.2394 It also stood to reason that many officers and soldiers suspected that ‘the people at the back’ were faring far better, that incompetence was being combined with corruption and above all political manoeuvrings, the burden of which was borne entirely by the soldiers and the front. What did it matter that it was then announced in