Free Terror in the Balkans by Ben Shepherd

men as early as October 1914.65 In January
    1915 Adalbert Lontschar’s 43d Austro-Hungarian Rifl e Division urged its
    troops to drink boiled water so as to avoid not just cholera, but typhus
    and dysentery also.66 Austro-Hungarian XVII Army Corps, which among
    its formations counted the 11th Field Artillery Brigade—with which Wal-
    ter Hinghofer, a future divisional commander in Yugoslavia, was serv-
    ing as a staff offi cer—was blighted by something approaching the Seven
    Plagues. Among other things, it faced a cholera alarm in August 1915,67
    Forging a Wartime Mentality 43
    put an entire settlement off-limits when it was hit by typhus in February
    1916,68 and was harried by a visitation of fl ies in April 1917.69
    German soldiers in particular often extended their disdain at the
    region’s backwardness to its Slavic population also.70 At the Great War’s
    start, the German government had some trouble stoking up anti-Russian
    sentiment among the troops; it had after all been a quarrel involving Rus-
    sia and Austria-Hungary, not Germany, that had precipitated the entire
    confl agration in the fi rst place. But Russia’s brief, unsuccessful invasion
    of eastern Prussia in August 1914 presented German propagandists with
    a great opportunity.71
    The Russians did not comport themselves like a barbarian horde dur-
    ing this short-lived onslaught. They did, however, plunder and destroy
    property, and sometimes kill civilians.72 This was nothing the Germans
    themselves were not doing in the West, and on a larger and more system-
    atic scale. And there are balanced contemporary German accounts of
    the invasion acknowledging that many Russian troops behaved correctly
    during its course.73 But for many German soldiers already weaned on a
    measure of anti-Slavism, such brutality as the Russians did deal out in
    eastern Prussia, together with German propaganda’s exploitation of it,
    seemed to confi rm age-old prejudices about the barbaric East. Thus, for
    instance, did Gottard Heinrici, who would go on to serve as a senior fi eld
    commander during World War II, accuse the Russians of perpetrating
    acts of “blind destruction and mindless annihilation of a kind we never
    would have thought possible.”74
    Perceptions of the “Wild East” became further embedded for German
    and Austrian troops as the war continued. On November 27, 1914, troops
    of the Austro-Hungarian III Army Corps, to which Karl Eglseer’s 87th
    Infantry Regiment was subordinate, stumbled upon the bodies of muti-
    lated Austro-Hungarian soldiers in a recently reoccupied village. The
    Russian troops they had been facing had been Kalmuks from Siberia.75
    In January 1915 the 43d Rifl e Division uncovered cases of captured or
    wounded Austro-Hungarian soldiers being “mutilated and murdered in
    a bestial manner by Russian soldiers.” This time the perpetrators com-
    prised Circassian and Siberian irregulars in part, but also regular Rus-
    sian troops. It was also alleged, on the basis of statements by Russian
    44 terror in the balk ans
    prisoners of war, that Habsburg offi cers in Russian captivity had been
    brutally mistreated.76
    Incidents like these, and the sentiments they engendered or strength-
    ened, were hardly going to improve relations between advancing Ger-
    man and Austro-Hungarian troops and the eastern Slavic peoples they
    were encountering. Nor was the fact that the troops detected “danger-
    ous” levels of Russophile sympathy amongst those peoples. Indeed, they
    detected it among peoples living within those easternmost reaches of the
    Habsburg Empire through which they marched, as well as those living
    within enemy territory.77
    Nevertheless, higher-level Habsburg formations did seek to avoid
    antagonizing the population without reason. They strove instead to
    ensure that their troops regard the population with a discriminating eye.
    Such, for instance, were commands issued by Lieutenant General Szur-
    may’s corps, to which Adalbert