Abstract
Richard Lein’s PhD thesis sets out to destroy a curious myth (curious because it was propagated by both Czech and German nationalists during the years around 1918, and has been ever since): whether they were regarded as traitors or freedom fighters, Czech soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian army were supposed to have shown a marked tendency to cross the lines and join the enemy.
Lein analyses in detail two of the episodes regularly quoted in that context, the battles of Zboro (3 April 1915), when the Prague Infantry Regiment 28 was almost entirely captured by the Russians, and Zborow (2 July 1917), when the Czechoslovak Legion fought its first battle against an Austrian brigade mostly composed of Czech soldiers. The aftermath of both episodes is interesting in its own right. In the first instance – at a time when Austro-Hungarian troops were hard pressed and desperately trying to stave off Italian entry into the war by a big success on the Eastern Front – the commander of the army, Boroevic, simply asked for the regiment to be dissolved for dishonourable conduct; a few months later, however, when the remnant of the regiment performed well on the Italian front, they got their standards back. In 1917, with the Austrian parliament reopened, the alleged conspiracy between Czechs on both sides of the trenches got sucked into the maelstrom of domestic politics, with the Germans actually quoting Benes in parliament to prove the untrustworthiness of the Czechs.
Lein has gone through all the available records in the Vienna War Archives. In the first case, he points to the arrival, only a few hours before the Russian attack, of almost entirely untrained reserves who made up almost half of the fighting strength of the regiment; to a failure of communication that prevented a timely withdrawal; and to sundry other factors that explain the disaster without any recourse to treasonable activities. In 1915 there was as yet no high-tech trench warfare in the Carpathians. By 1917, fronts were covered by elaborate defensive structures. But in the east there were not enough men to fill all the positions, and after the (First) Russian Revolution the Austrians were over-confident. Maybe they were right to be confident, because the Russian attack was turned into a defeat within only two weeks. But in the meantime – within only 48 hours – the conduct of the Czech troops had become a political hot-button issue. Lein rightly concludes there must have been a leak at army high command – and tentatively points a finger at Edmund von Glaise-Horstenau as the culprit, later on chief historian and a minister of government between 1936 and 1938.
Lein concludes that in neither case is there any proof of widespread desertions. At Zborow the troops on the Austrian side did not even know they were fighting fellow Czechs, i.e. the Czechoslovak Legion. As with any retreating unit, the exact proportion of soldiers killed, wounded, and taken prisoner among missing personnel can no longer be ascertained. The Austrian authorities conducted investigations that led to a neither/nor result. As everybody tried to shift the blame onto somebody else, all these findings necessarily have to be taken with more than the customary pinch of salt. Public pronouncements were obviously coloured by political considerations. Propagandistically, highlighting the activities of the Czechoslovak Legion in 1917 was a double-edged sword, at best.
We may conclude that there was no massive politically inspired switching of sides, no ‘voting with their feet’ on the part of Czech soldiers. Lein has successfully demolished all such conspiracy theories. He has convincingly shown that most of this ‘discourse’ was due to the manipulative efforts of politicians on both sides and had little relation to what had actually happened on the front. Some nagging doubts do remain, however. In both cases, Lein admits there were individual cases of treason, e.g. deserters who pointed out the weaknesses of the Austrian positions to the Russians. Thus, he leaves us with the daunting task of finding ways to measure and compare the morale and the fighting spirit of units. Considerations of political correctness should not be allowed to interfere with that quest. One might just as well put the blame for the possibly lesser effectiveness of Czech units on the authorities who were unable to provide them with officers who actually spoke their language. But first we need to know more about their performance in general, not just in a few celebrated but isolated cases.