Terror in the Balkans (72 page)

dreadful retaliation accordingly. Over six thousand French and Belgian

civilians were shot, bayoneted, or burned indiscriminately. This butch-

ery was synthesized with the mass destruction of buildings and prop-

erty. The most infamous instance was the destruction of large parts of

the Belgian university town of Louvain.11

That the Germans lashed out so frequently and ferociously during

the war’s opening weeks was due not just to their embedded hatred of

irregular warfare. It was due also to the fact that the Schlieffen Plan was

deeply fl awed, indeed—it has been widely argued—beyond the German

army’s capabilities.12 Any delay to its completion was bound to frustrate

and alarm both generals and troops. And no delay was bound to incense

them more than delay caused, supposedly or in fact, by civilian resistance.

The German General Staff did not try to clamp down on the troops’

brutality; unsurprisingly, given their traditional view of irregular warfare,

they encouraged it. They also believed it would help forge the obduracy

of spirit they were seeking to instill in their troops in anticipation of an

increasingly likely long war. And just as important to German counterin-

surgency warfare’s future development was the army’s prickly, defensive

reaction to worldwide criticism of the atrocities it had committed. Such

criticism only hardened the army’s already pronounced siege mentality

on the issue and fortifi ed its belief that its actions had been justifi ed.13

The violence also contained a perhaps even more ominous element.

For senior German commanders believed that the French and Belgian

francs-tireurs possessed important attributes in common with some of

the German Empire’s “enemies within.” They were Catholic, working

class, and, like the population of Alsace-Lorraine—provinces France

32
terror in the balk ans

had been forced to cede to Germany in 1871—pro-French.14 How far the

troops themselves were similarly motivated, given that many were them-

selves working class or Catholic, is an entirely different question.15 The

point, however, is that the senior offi cer corps was already advocating a

reprisal policy that fused “security” needs with ideological ones. Target-

ing such groups during the Great War therefore set a sinister precedent.

As with them, so with Communists, Jews, and Sinti and Roma—albeit to

a far more frightful extent—during World War II.

This does not mean that the German army’s brutality in the face of

irregular resistance during World War II was inevitably preprogrammed.

German ferocity towards Belgian and French civilians in 1914 may have

been part of an older tradition. But even with its ideological overtones, it

was still only one precedent for the conduct of later wars. Less uniformly

ferocious, as will be seen, were the Germans’ counterinsurgency oper-

ations in the Ukraine in 1918.16 But developments in later years would

ensure that the Franco-Belgian precedent, with its own roots in the Ger-

man military’s long-standing aversion to irregular warfare, would infl u-

ence the German military considerably during World War II.

It was not only Austrian and German troops who retaliated viciously

against subversion real or imagined. Russian forces horribly maltreated

civilians, particularly Jews, in those border regions of their empire they

deemed of suspect loyalty. They also subjected the population of such

regions to scorched earth actions and mass deportations.17 But the irregu-

lar warfare of 1914 to 1918 would have a signifi cant long-term effect upon the

Austrian and German militaries. For it would harden the equation between

combating insurgents and combating ideological enemies in both militar-

ies’ institutional mind-sets. The line that carried this equation through the

interwar years into the Third Reich would not be continuous, or ineluc-

table.18 But in German counterinsurgency campaigns during World War

II, the equation between armed civilians and ideological enemies would be

resurrected in many offi cers’ minds and shape their methods accordingly.

By autumn 1914 the war was deadlocked, as the combination of defensive

fi repower and mass mobilization checked all attempts to achieve rapid,

Forging a Wartime Mentality
33

decisive victory. Following this came four years of stalemate and slaugh-

ter on all major European battlefronts. The experience marked men in

fundamental ways for decades to come.

Of all the battlefronts on which men fought and died during the Great

War, it is of course the western front in Belgium and northern France

that fi gures most prominently in the Western imagination. Battles like

Verdun, the Somme, and the succession of clashes at Ypres have become

bywords for industrial-scale carnage. It was on the western front that

the greatest number of men perished, in ways refl ecting the new indus-

trialized warfare at its most destructive. Then there were the miserable,

sometimes fatal living conditions soldiers endured day to day.19

But different men responded to the horrors of the western front in dif-

ferent ways. Some, exemplifi ed by Erich Maria Remarque, author of the

best-selling 1929 antiwar novel
All Quiet on the Western Front
, went on to

embrace pacifi sm. But men like Ernst Jünger—whose bellicose memoir

of life as an assault troops offi cer,
Storm of Steel
, gained similar levels of

recognition—recalled the experience with a visceral thrill. In one pas-

sage Jünger described how:

the turmoil of our feelings was called forth by rage, alcohol and the

thirst for blood . . . As we advanced heavily but irresistibly toward

the enemy lines, I was boiling over with a fury which gripped me—it

gripped us all—in an inexplicable way. The overpowering desire to

kill gave me wings. Rage squeezed bitter tears from my eyes . . . Only

the spell of primeval instinct remained.20

One extract does not do justice to the complexity of Jünger’s many-

faceted character over the course of his life. But it does encapsulate the

way in which many young German offi cers imbibed the experience of the

western front. In time, many men of a similar outlook to Jünger would

become infused with the Social Darwinist belief that the western front

was the ultimate test of men’s ability to survive. And that, in surviving,

they had demonstrated such strength, endurance, and resourcefulness

that they constituted nothing less than a new, superior breed of man.

Wedded to this belief was their considerable lust for violence.

34
terror in the balk ans

Yet there was another counterpoint, more commonplace than

Remarque’s eloquent pacifi sm, to the fanaticism of Jünger and his ilk.

Most German soldiers may not have been turned against war in all its

forms by their experience of the western front, but there is ample evi-

dence that many failed to embrace war anything like as enthusiastically

as Jünger did.21 They also often regarded the enemy not through the

red mist of battle, but with a fraternal feeling for comrades-in-suffering.

Fraternization with the enemy on static sectors of the front alarmed high

commands in all armies. Never more so was this the case than when

fraternization took the form of “live and let live” arrangements, such as

reciprocal warning of impending artillery bombardments.22 In Novem-

ber 1915, for instance, I Bavarian Army Corps reported that “there have

lately been further cases of forbidden dealings with the enemy. The

guilty will be punished severely.”23

It should also be recognized that life on the western front was not one

of unremitting horror in any case. Had it been, it is doubtful that many

soldiers could have withstood it. Considerable time was spent out of the

trenches, be it for rest and refi tting or for rear area duties such as road-

clearing and requisitioning. None of this detracts from the hellish ordeal

which soldiers serving in the trenches endured. But it does demonstrate

that the western front was a many-sided experience.24 All told, then, it

would be too simple to assume that German army offi cers fi ghting in

World War II were irrevocably, brutalizingly scarred by what they had

experienced on the western front during the Great War.25

The experience of other fronts, and its brutalizing effect upon the men

involved, have received considerably less attention from Western his-

torians. Just as on the western front, that effect was not always as uni-

formly, durably malign as one might expect. Yet malign to a great extent

it certainly was, and the immediate and longer-term impact upon offi cers

could be profound indeed.

In the Balkans, all three Austro-Hungarian attempts to vanquish Ser-

bia in 1914—in August, September, and December—were humiliatingly

routed by the Serbian army. The spectacle was conveyed by the journal-

ist Egon Erwin Kisch: “the fl ight had begun and swept us further on. A

Forging a Wartime Mentality
35

routed army—no, an unrestrained horde ran in senseless fright back to

the border. Coach drivers whipped their horses, cannon drivers spurred

and hit theirs, offi cers and men pushed forward and slithered between

the wagon columns or trudged in road ditches.”26 The scapegoat for all

this was the army’s “disloyal” Czech troops. The immediate culprits,

however, were primarily General Conrad, whose plan to split his already

defi cient forces against Russia and Serbia was thoroughly unrealistic, and

theater commander General Potiorek, whose cack-handed performance

as commander of the Austro-Hungarian invasion guaranteed ignomini-

ous failure even more surely. More fundamentally, these disasters were

the legacy of decades of atrophy brought about by chronic underfund-

ing and stultifying institutional conservatism.27 In turn, the campaigns

heaped further humiliation upon the Habsburg Empire.

Only with substantial help from Germany, together with new ally

Bulgaria, did the Austrians fi nally crush Serbia in autumn 1915, before

carving up its territory with the Bulgarians. And even then, the escape of

the Serbian army through the mountains to the coast, taking with it tens

of thousands of Austro-Hungarian prisoners on a winter death march,

could only stoke Austrian hatred further. The conditions of the march,

culminating in an Allied naval evacuation to Italy, are described in a

letter from a captured Austro-Hungarian medical offi cer caught up in it:

(October 1915) . . . And so we marched two days to Prizrend [
sic
:

probably Prizren in Kosovo]. Here the conditions deteriorated; we

were assigned to the combat offi cer prisoners. Each of the offi cers

had to carry his own baggage, and we received something to eat plus

bread only once a day, and that only in principle, and it got worse.

From Prizren to Dobra we marched across Albania; the weather was

terrible: wind and rain, we were soaked every day, and were unable

to sleep for cold. Sometimes we stayed around the fi re to sleep in a

sitting position. Many offi cers’ boots wore out, and they had to con-

tinue walking barefoot. At Dobra there was nothing to buy but dried

chestnuts, which was all we had to eat one day.28

At Valona, their destination on the coast, they fi nally received enough

to eat. Even so, “you can imagine that if our offi cers suffered like this,

36
terror in the balk ans

how badly the poor soldier prisoners fared. The route was strewn with

the bodies of prisoners who died of cold and hunger . . . We have nothing

left, everything is ruined.”29

The fl ight, largely intact, of the Serbian army into Allied territory

soon created a focal point for deserters from the southern Slavic units

of the Austro-Hungarian army. Indeed, desertion would in time become

endemic among troops from all the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s subject

peoples, as the empire found itself mired in an increasingly unwinna-

ble struggle that devastated its economy and stoked its subject peoples’

desire for peace and independence. This desire, and the epidemic deser-

tion it increasingly spawned, would be exploited by Allied propaganda

to great effect.30 In September 1918, fi nally, the Serbian army would be

instrumental in breaking the Macedonian Front—the key military event

that heralded the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s complete collapse.31

All this—the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the atrocities of Ser-

bian irregulars, the military humiliations of 1914, the death march of

1915, the corrosive effect the Serbian army’s survival continued to have

upon morale within the Austro-Hungarian army, and the Serbian army’s

direct role in the empire’s disintegration in autumn 1918—made it pos-

sible for Wehrmacht commanders to stir Austrian hatred and resentment

of the Serbs during World War II.32

Yet here too, it would be wrong to imagine that there was an enduring

thread of continuity between the incubation of hatred in one war and

its murderous channeling in the next. Serbia suffered terrible privations