Free Terror in the Balkans by Ben Shepherd Page A

Lontschar’s 24th Infantry Regiment was
    subordinate, in June 1915. Szurmay’s orders to tighten security included
    making village headmen responsible for order with their lives, but they
    did not include taking hostages. This, Szurmay believed, would be
    “pointless, and potentially harmful to the innocent.”78 Szurmay inter-
    vened against excessive harshness in a further directive around the same
    time: “Not cruelty, but fair and considerate strictness in the handling of
    penal and preventative measures, guarantees success without embitter-
    ing a population well-disposed towards the Crown.”79

Yet Szurmay’s moderation had its limits. For he was concerned here
    to restrain brutality against the empire’s own eastern Slavic subjects; he
    imposed fewer such restraints once his troops were in enemy territory
    proper. Here, fear of spies and saboteurs, and of the civilians who might
    be aiding and abetting them, increased markedly. In February 1916, Aus-
    tro-Hungarian XVII Corps reported sightings of explosives-armed Rus-
    sians seeking to destroy railway lines. These Russians, it alleged, had
    come from a school in Kiev that had been training men and women in
    explosives techniques before sending them into Austrian-occupied terri-
    tory.80 That same month, on the strength of a warning in Polish pinned
    to a telegraph pole, XVII Corps reported with alarm the presence of
    twenty-fi ve Cossacks, mostly dressed in Austro-Hungarian uniforms.
    These, it announced, had been roaming the villages, collecting bread,
    Forging a Wartime Mentality 45
    hay, and oats, together with information on Austrian troop dispositions,
    from the population.81 Of course, civilian subterfuge was something
    with which troops on other fronts had to contend also. But on the eastern
    front, it could exacerbate racial prejudice that was already there.
    Yet these cases remind one that, harsh though the Austro-Hungarian
    army’s conduct could be, it was not waging a racial war in the East any
    more than in the Balkans. The same could be said, broadly, of the Ger-
    man army. Indeed, many ordinary soldiers left more positive accounts
    of the peoples they encountered on the eastern front. They often, for
    instance, eulogized the colorful appearance, pretty girls, and idyllic
    peasant lifestyle of rural Poland and the Ukraine.82 But the harshness
    both armies nonetheless practiced was doubtless nourished further by
    embedded prejudice towards the Slavs, just as it was by the arduous con-
    ditions soldiers in the East had to endure.
    The Great War was also a war that, more than any other before, impacted
    directly upon civilians as well as combatants. Nowhere was this clearer
    than in the realms of economic procurement and production. On the
    side of the Central powers, so severe did the resource shortfall against
    the Allies become that labor, foodstuffs, and other economic materials
    from occupied Europe became increasingly crucial. Indeed, advancing
    German and Austro-Hungarian troops were expected to live off the land
    from the war’s fi rst weeks. In the West, for example, II Bavarian Army
    Corps ordered its troops at the end of September 1914 to “obtain sup-
    plies in enemy territory with all means.”83 In February 1915 I Bavarian
    Army Corps reminded its men that “mildness towards the inhabitants
    is harshness against our Fatherland.”84 Belgium and northern France
    would suffer dreadfully from German depredations, particularly when
    large tracts of their territory were laid to waste by withdrawing or retreat-
    ing German troops during 1917 and 1918.85
    In the occupied East, meanwhile, the Germans not only exploited
    labor and food, but also waged an ideological campaign to “civilize”
    these “backward” regions to German standards. This was not a blue-
    print for later Nazi schemes; it was, after all, accompanied by degrees
    of restraint and cultivation the Nazis never practiced.86 Even so, the
    46 terror in the balk ans
    German